They Think of the Moment

In Burbank, Calif., Mrs. Jane O'Gorman, mother of a two-year-old son, bought a small cottage on a quiet street. It was not unlike all the other small cottages on the same shaded street, but to Jane O'Gorman it was salvation.

Jane's life was like millions of others: she married a soldier, trekked from camp to camp, had her baby, watched her husband go overseas. Then the lonely days set in. After a year of aimless waiting and aimless worrying, Jane bought the house. Now the hours once spent in nervous frustration go into the small but absorbing tasks of making the house a home.

Unlike the women in contemporary war fiction, Jane faces V-day without trepidation. Said she: "Adjustments to make? Certainly. John and I are leading different lives now than we did when we were together. But if there was anything basically there to begin with, it won't be so hard to take up normal living again."

How are the wives and sweethearts of U.S. servicemen meeting the cruel test of war? To touch more widely a story that can never be fully told, TIME correspondents in 30 U.S. cities surveyed their communities to see how U.S. women are living away from their men. Last week they sent in their reports.

The results are generally reassuring. American women by & large are O.K. There has been no great moral collapse. There are some infidelities--on all levels of society. But mostly they are the kind that end up in police court, the tawdry cases of the Victory Girls--many of whom seem to have married.

U.S. women have changed. They are more widely traveled; hardly a woman under 40 has not seen new sections of America while visiting a husband, sweetheart or brother. They are more self-reliant. New work in factories and more work at home has given them new responsibilities, and they have met them.

But above all, U.S. women are lonely. Some hide it behind cheerfulness or a bright, hard face, but the loneliness is there. The women want their men to come home. With a unanimity which would startle oldtime feminists, they want to quit their jobs, settle down and have children. Three years of war, much of it spent in furnished rooms or with in-laws or in trailers or small hotels or at embarkation points, has put a lonely light around the little white cottage.

The wives of the soldiers & sailors want to get back to the kitchen--if possible, the bright, new kitchens of the alluring advertisements, but, anyway, the kitchen. They want all the gadgets. They want a better, freer, easier world. But they want to leave the blueprinting of it to their husbands.

Meanwhile, they wait.

The Dimming Image. In Boston, Mrs. William Walter Phelps Jr., graduate of the exclusive Brimmer and May School, laughed wryly at a letter and a picture from Captain Phelps.

Like many another service wife, Mrs. Phelps doesn't know her husband well. She met him when her brother brought him home from Fort Monmouth; they decided to get married when he was transferred to communications school at Harvard. In his 30 months' absence, Mrs. Phelp's conception of her tall (6 ft. 3 1/2 in.) and handsome husband grew. The sweater she was knitting grew in proportion. When she got the picture of him, she saw what she had done: the sweater came halfway to his knees.

Across snow-covered Boston, at the window of her office in the Statler Building, stood Bette Davidson, 23, secretary. As she looked out over Boston Common and the grey dome of the venerable State House, she said to herself: "This damned war!" Bette, too, had met her man at Harvard. She rushed to San Diego to marry him, but his orders were changed unexpectedly, and he sailed a bachelor. Now, fingering the diamond solitaire on her third finger, Bette said: "We have our house all planned. It's to be sort of brick and stone Tudor, with four bedrooms and not too close to the neighbors." Lunch hours she spends window-shopping, filling her imaginary house with imaginary furniture and knickknacks.

The Subtle Anxiety. For some, the waiting is anxious and filled, perhaps, with a few misgivings. After all, how can one remember everything about a man who has been gone so long? In Manhattan a young wife prepared to welcome her husband home on furlough. The apartment was all shipshape, with flowers on the mantel. The dinner would be perfect, down to the dry martinis. But the first thing the husband said was: "Darling, don't you remember I never drink martinis?"

For others, the anxiety would concern matters less subtle and trivial. The picture of a trim, slim brunette with a baby in her arms appeared on the front pages of Miami newspapers not long ago. Ada Forren, the girl in the picture, is 18. She had married her Navy husband just four months before the baby was born; she had no assurance that she would ever see him again. In a childish fit of despair, Ada had given her baby away for adoption. Now she had to go to court to get the baby back. She did. But how would she ever tell her husband?

Even for those whose husbands are still in the U.S. there is endless waiting. Said the wife of a flyer at Wisconsin's Truax Field: "I hope this war gets over with so my husband and I can be together for good. I'm sick of living in a hole in the wall and seeing him only once a week. I want to have some fun."

Most of them sit and wait. But the fun is there, even now, if a woman wants to take it. Some have.

Having a Hell of a Time. In a Scollay Square grill in Boston, where a sailor can always find a dame, the frilly young redhead paused in her gadding about. She looked only 17, but she said she had an eight-year-old son. Her husband is overseas and she wants him back home more than anything in the world.

"And what are you doing meanwhile?"

"Dancing like hell and having a hell of a good time."

At Babe's nightclub in Des Moines, the center of Iowa night life, the waitress said: "For two or three nights there won't be any women in here. Then a flight of planes will be grounded at the airport. Honestly, I believe the place fills up with women before the wheels touch ground. Or maybe they listen to the weather reports and flock in when it's ceiling zero."

Having a Hard Time . . . But also at Babe's a pretty brunette sat alone at a table. A handsome soldier joined her.

"Are you," he asked, "the kind of girl who wants to settle down in a little white cottage with a picket fence around it?"

"Yes."

"Then you're not the kind I want for tonight."

And in Los Angeles, a Navy wife sat down to write a letter to the editor:

"I am a married woman with two children and I believe I am still young and good looking. . . . I have gone to parties whenever I could just to make the time go faster. And more often than not the evening fits this pattern:

"We will be sitting at a table or in a booth having a highball. Before long, he mentions his wife or sweetheart in New Jersey or someplace. He misses her very much. He doesn't know what to do. And then, before you know it, he says, 'We're all human, aren't we?' And when you refuse, he becomes bitter and abusive. . . . Well, it's getting to the point where I won't go out any more. . . ."

Not all have reached that point. There is hardly a newspaper society editor who does not conceal some adulteries among the women she writes about. There is hardly a police captain who hasn't talked to, admonished, and reluctantly sent to jail some of the confused little girls caught in raids on cheap hotels. For the chances are there. Said the pert little sprite in San Antonio: "Manless? Are you kidding? As for the girls in my crowd, it's a major one night, a captain another, and cadets and sergeants and corporals and, O Lord, whoever asked that question wasn't thinking about San Antonio."

Just Talk. Some women have decided they don't have to go out-- not where there are any men, anyhow. Said the young girl in Iowa: "Honestly, I must travel with the wrong bunch. I know 18 wives and sweethearts of servicemen and I don't know of anyone stepping out. Maybe the environment has something to do with it. We all live at home with our folks. Maybe it would be a lot tougher if we were just rooming somewhere."

And in Chattanooga, on Lookout Mountain-- as in many another city--there is a club of war wives. On Lookout Mountain most of the members have a background of adequate means. Once a week they leave the children with grandmother or a maid, catch the cable car into town, and go to a movie.

"First thing we talk about," one Look-outer said, "is our husbands. Then we talk of the wash, the children, some more about our husbands and then about the wash again. We also talk about cooking. It was mighty hard having your husband and your cook torn away at the same time."

Just Living. But for most U.S. service wives it was hard enough just having their husbands torn away. In Atlanta, a young war wife, mother of a two-year-old daughter, said:

"I work half a day in a bank, while my in-laws take care of my daughter. Herb's letters are full of our little girl: 'How is she? Has she stopped wetting the bed? Does she talk about me?' I have to fill my letters with fake stories about her, for when I come home from the bank I find that if she wants to play outside without her sweater on, or if she wants candy, Herb's parents let her. I know Herb will notice the difference.

"I have my own troubles, too. I have to explain when I'm half an hour late from the movie. But when I stay home we fight. So I'm just living until the day Herb comes back. We used to gripe about our house: the roof leaked, we needed new screens, and all that. Well, just give me any old house now. Anything, anything. . . ."

The anything which most wives and sweethearts want is assurance that their waiting, their nightly letter writing, their valiant dreaming will not be in vain. The precious years are rushing past. Said the women:

P: In Amarillo: "Give me any kind of night work. It's the evenings that get me. I want to work till I'm so tired I'll just drop off."

P: In St. Paul: "I want to talk to a man so bad I could scream."

P: In Chicago: "Bill sent me a picture from the Pacific. He had a new hard look in his eyes. They all have it. It's something you can't quite describe."

P: In Denver: "Will I ever have a baby?"

Meanwhile, they carry on, keeping the homes, making the weapons, doing in an infinite number of ways what the women of warriors have always done: prepare for the day of peace, when the world will go on again.

In Seattle, Mrs. Marjorie Howe, the mother of two, whose husband survived the Northampton sinking, summed it up:

"I had a letter the other day. He wrote it New Year's Eve and he was thinking how it was four years since we'd seen a New Year in together, and he still can't think of anybody he'd rather celebrate with than me. We've been lucky, I suppose, because we know what we've had, and what we want. The trouble with a lot of girls is that they have that awful feeling that their men won't get home. So they touch wood, and just think of what they're doing at the moment."

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