Read an Excerpt

A Time to be Born

Steerforth Press

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.

2

The house was number twenty-nine all right, and it was East not West but the young lady in the Checker Cab refused to be convinced. There was a mistake somewhere. Of course everyone knew that Amanda had done very well for herself in New York, finally landing no less a prize than Julian Evans himself, but somehow this graystone mansion off Fifth Avenue was far grander than one had imagined. The young lady in the taxi couldn't quite picture Amanda in such a fabulous setting and, what was more, she didn't want to picture Amanda there. As an old friend from way back she naturally wanted Amanda to get ahead but not out of sight.

"She would!" Ethel thought grimly. "Trust Amanda."

All the way to New York, Ethel had been thinking benevolently of her old school friend's success, flattering herself on her great-hearted lack of envy, but this elegant monument to Amanda's shrewdness threw her right back into her old bitterness. Still, it wasn't exactly bitterness, call it rather a normal sense of justice. Why did Amanda Keeler get everything out of life and Ethel Carey? The mood lasted but a moment, for Ethel hated to do anyone the favor of being jealous. After all, it wasn't such a palace as all that, this Evans house. And fortunately Ethel was not the sort of person to be overawed by a little material splendor, for the simple reason that the Careys were all bankers back in Lakeville and could hold their own socially or financially with anybody. Another thing, Amanda had not won all the prizes in school; Ethel had had her share. It was not Amanda who was voted "Most Likely to Succeed" but Ethel. Amanda would certainly be fair enough to admit that. Indeed, Ethel felt sure that Amanda would give respectful ear to her old friend's unfavorable reaction to The Book, regardless of the critical raves and the big sale. Amanda knew well enough that Ethel had as good a mind as she had. The book, Ethel was going to say quite frankly, is twice as long as it should have been and — you wouldn't want me to lie to you — perfectly lousy. If it hadn't been for Julian Evans' sixteen newspapers it would never have been such a sensation. And if it hadn't been for Amanda snatching Julian from under his first wife's nose — Ethel pulled herself together sternly. This was no frame of mind in which to ask favors. A few more such animadversions and she'd be ringing the bell and challenging Amanda with, "So you think you're smart, eh?"

Ethel paid the driver and got out of the cab. Facing the imposing five-story house with its gargoyles, its twin stone sphinxes guarding the iron-grilled doorway, a fresh wave of uncertainty came over her. What in heaven's name made her so sure Amanda would not snub her as she was said to snub all her old Middle Western friends? How could she ever restore her self-confidence if Amanda sent word, "Not in'? If it were not for the imperative necessity of doing something about Vicky Haven and her own brilliant plan to make Amanda the means of working Vicky's salvation, Ethel would have given up that very minute and dashed back to the St. Regis. But it was for Vicky she had come to New York, it was for Vicky's sake she was undergoing this severe test of good nature, it was for Vicky she must risk a butler's lifted eyebrow. Dear, dear Vicky, Ethel reminded herself, who had not the faintest notion of the good angels soon to bear her off to felicity and avenge her wrongs for her. Dear Vicky, the most unlucky girl in Lakeville just as Amanda had been the most lucky. Ethel braced herself with these reminders, thoroughly annoyed with herself at her fluttering heart and quaking knees. Here she was, as well dressed as any woman in New York (she was a fanatic about good clothes), money in her pocket, boat acquaintances with the best names in the traveling universe, a cosmopolitan woman in spite of the provincial roots; yet the meresight of the mansion that Amanda Keeler's carefully milked fame and shrewd marriage had won made her stand there gawking and trembling like any World's Fair tourist. Her head swam with the doubts she tried to deny. Supposing Amanda said, "Ethel Who? Oh, but I meet so many people, and of course I haven't been back in Lakeville for years. You say you want me to do something about Vicky? Vicky Who? Oh, the little thing that had the crush on me in boarding-school? But, my dear Ethel, or is it Edna, you can't expect busy important me to give my time to a little sentimental duty like this Vicky what's-her-name when my days are filled with my war committees and my refugee children and my radio talks? Who would print my picture, I ask you, merely as someone who helped out an old friend? And why do you assume I would take up any suggestion of yours anyway? Really, my dear Edna, or Ella, or —"

These morbid anticipations were no whit dispelled by seeing two gentlemen emerge from Twenty-nine, one of them the celebrated liberal Senator — (the leonine, snow-white head and black loose tie were too often cartooned not to be easily recognized) — and the other a square-jawed young man whose face at the head of a political column was syndicated all over America. Yes, these were the people who were entitled to Amanda's time, these distinguished gentlemen now getting into a fine black towncar with grave faces as if they had just listened to the President himself instead of to nobody but Ethel's old friend Amanda who would never have made the best sorority if Ethel hadn't sponsored her. (The Keelers were nobody in Lakeville!) The door was open, the butler stood there waiting for her to utter her business and there was no retreat now.

"Mrs. Evans," she demanded in a ringing voice, for she had just recalled that her own father had been president of the Lakeville Third National when Amanda Keeler's father was clerk in a haberdashery. Little things like that did bring reassurance, and so she was able to enter the reception hall with head high, her handsome foxes tossed proudly over her left shoulder.

The marble-floored, marble-benched foyer was as darkly reassuring as Grant's Tomb. A little appalled, Ethel's eyes, accustoming themselves to the dim light, saw grim Roman tapestries on the walls (or was that horn of plenty a Flemish trick?) and urns of enormous chrysanthemums at the foot of the broad staircase. From the hush of this place it might have been a small hospital. Perhaps, Ethel decided, if you were a public institution your home eventually came to look like one.

Of course, in all fairness, you couldn't blame Amanda for this pompous austerity since the house had been Julian Evans' home during his former marriage. Still, after two years, the new wife, if she wanted or knew how, could certainly have altered the style and set her own stamp upon it.

"She still has no taste, thank God," Ethel thought, comfortingly, but the truth was that Amanda was too successful, too arrogantly on top, to even need good taste. Good taste was the consolation of people who had nothing else, people like her own self, Ethel thought, inferiority feelings leaping back at her like great barn dogs trying to be pets.

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Excerpted from A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell. Copyright © 1999 Steerforth Press Edition. Excerpted by permission of Steerforth Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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