This was no time to cry over one broken heart. It was no time to worry about Vicky Haven or indeed any other young lady crossed in love, for now the universe, nothing less, was your problem. You woke in the morning with the weight of doom on your head. You lay with eyes shut wondering why you dreaded the day; was it a debt, was it a lost love?—and then you remembered the nightmare. It was a dream, you said, nothing but a dream, and the covers were thrown aside, the dream was over, now for the day. Then, fully awake, you remembered that it was no dream. Paris was gone, London was under fire, the Atlantic was now a drop of water between the flame on one side and the waiting dynamite on the other. This was a time of waiting, of marking time till ready, of not knowing what to expect or what to want either for yourself or for the world, private triumph or failure lost in the world’s failure. The longed-for letter, the telephone ringing at last, the familiar knock at the door—very well, but there was still something to await—something unknown, something fantastic, perhaps the stone statue from Don Giovanni marching in or the gods of the mountain. Day’s duties were performed to the metronome of Extras, radio broadcasts, committee conferences on war orphans, benefits for Britain, send a telegram to your congressman, watch your neighbor for free speech, vote for Willkie or for Roosevelt and banish care from the land.
This was certainly no time for Vicky Haven to engage your thoughts, for you were concerned with great nations, with war itself. This was a time when the true signs of war were the lavish plumage of the women; Fifth Avenue dress-shops and the finer restaurants were filled with these vanguards of war. Look at the jewels, the rare pelts, the gaudy birds on elaborate hairdress, and know that the war was here; already the women had inherited the earth. The ominous smell of gunpowder was matched by a rising cloud of Schiaparelli’s Shocking. The women were once more armed, and their happy voices sang of destruction to come. Off to the relief offices they rode in their beautiful new cars, off to knit, to sew, to take part in the charade, anything to help Lady Bertrand’s cause; off they rode in the new car, the new mink, the new emerald bracelet, the new electrically treated complexion, presented by or extorted from the loving-hearted gentlemen who make both women and wars possible. Off to the front with a new permanent and enough specially blended night creams to last three months dashed the intrepid girl reporters. Unable to cope with competition on the home field, failing with the rhumbas and screen tests of peacetime, they quiver for the easy drama of the trenches; they can at least play lead in these amateur theatricals.
This was a time when the artists, the intellectuals, sat in cafés and in country homes and accused each other over their brandies or their California vintages of traitorous tendencies. This was a time for them to band together in mutual antagonism, a time to bury the professional hatchet, if possible in each other, a time to stare at their flower arrangements, children bathing, and privately to weep, “What good is it? Who cares now?” The poet, disgusted with the flight of skylarks in perfect sonnet form, declaimed the power of song against brutality and raised hollow voice in feeble proof. This was no time for beauty, for love, or private future; this was the time for ideals and quick profits on them before the world returned to reality and the drabber opportunities. What good for new sopranos to sing “Vici d’arte, vice d’amore,” what good for eager young students to make their bows? There was no future; every one waited, marked time, waited. For what? On Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fifth Street hundreds waited for a man on a hotel window ledge to jump; hundreds waited with craning necks and thirsty faces as if this single person’s final gesture would solve the riddle of the world. Civilization stood on a ledge, and in the tension of waiting it was a relief to have one little man jump.
This was a time when writers dared not write of Vicky Haven or of simple young women like her. They wrote with shut eyes and deaf ears of other days, wise days they boasted, of horse-and-buggy men and covered-wagon Cinderellas; they glorified the necessities of their ancestors who had laid ground for the present confusion; they made ignorance shine as native wit, the barrenness of other years and other simpler men was made a talent, their austerity and the bold compulsions of their avarice a glorious virtue. In the Gold Rush to the past they left no record of the present. Drowning men, they remembered words their grandmothers told them, forgot today and tomorrow in the drug of memories. A curtain of stars and stripes was hung over today and tomorrow and over the awful lessons of other days. It was a sucker age, an age for any propaganda, any cause, any lie, any gadget, and scorning this susceptibility chroniclers sang the stubborn cynicism of past heroes who would not believe the earth was round. It was an age of explosions, hurricanes, wrecks, strikes, lies, corruption, and unbridled female exploitation. Unable to find reason for this madness people looked to historical figures and ancient events for the pat answers. Amanda Keeler’s Such Is the Legend swept the bookstores as if this sword-and-lace romance could comfort a public about to be bombed. Such fabulous profits from this confection piled up for the pretty author that her random thoughts on economics and military strategy became automatically incontrovertible. Broadcasting companies read her income tax figures and at once begged her to prophesy the future of France; editors saw audiences sob over little Missy Lulu’s death scene in the movie version of the romance and immediately ordered definitive articles from the gifted author on What’s Wrong with England, What’s Wrong with Russia, What is the Future of America. Ladies’ clubs saw the label on her coat and the quality of her bracelet and at once begged her to instruct them in politics.
This was an age for Amanda Keelers to spring up by the dozen, level-eyed handsome young women with nothing to lose, least of all a heart, so there they were holding it aloft with spotlights playing on it from all corners of the world, a beautiful heart bleeding for war and woe at tremendous financial advantage. No international disaster was too small to receive endorsed photographs and publicity releases from Miss Keeler or her imitators, no microphone too obscure to scatter her clarion call to arms. Presented with a mind the very moment her annual income hit a hundred thousand dollars, the pretty creature was urged to pass her counterfeit perceptions at full face value, and being as grimly ambitious as the age was gullible, she made a heyday of the world’s confusion.
This was the time Vicky Haven had elected to sniffle into her pillow for six months solid merely over her own unfortunate love life, in contrast to her old friend, Amanda Keeler, who rode the world’s debacle as if it was her own yacht and saved her tears for Finland and the photographers.
This was certainly no time for a provincial young woman from Lakeville, Ohio, a certain Ethel Carey, to venture into Amanda Keeler’s celebrated presence with pleas for Vicky Haven’s salvation. Yet, the good-hearted emissary from Lakeville had the effrontery to justify her call on the grounds that there were thousands and thousands of Vickys all over the country, deserted by their lovers, and unable to find the crash of governments as fit a cause for tears as their own selfish little heartbreak. The good-hearted emissary, pondering all these matters on the train to New York, decided that even in this educated age there are little people who cannot ride the wars or if they do are only humble coach passengers, not the leaders or the float-riders; there are the little people who can only think that they are hungry, they haven’t eaten, they have no money, they have lost their babies, their loves, their homes, and their sons mock them from prisons and insane asylums, so that rain or sun or snow or battles cannot stir their selfish personal absorption. If their picture was to be taken with their little woe seated on their lap like Morgan’s midget it would not matter to them. These little people had no news value and therein was their crime. In their little wars there were no promotions, no parades, no dress uniforms, no regimental dances—no radio speeches, no interviews, no splendid conferences. What unimportant people they were, certainly, in this important age! In a time of oratory how inarticulate they were, in an age where every cause had its own beautiful blonde figurehead, how plain these little individual women were! The good-hearted emissary, Miss Carey, taking Vicky’s unimportant sorrow to Amanda, thought about these things hard all the way from Grand Central to her hotel, and finally solved her indecision by having a facial at Arden’s to gird her for the fray.
Copyright © 2026 by Dawn Powell. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
