Well!
The morning had been rife with unanswered questions. Mysteries, even. “Good thing old Felix ain’t here.” What did that mean? And Mr. Russell—why had he gotten so angry when we said Father was away? And just who was this new boarder who worked for the government? Mysteries abounded, and the biggest one was why hadn’t Jottie told me about any of them.
I’d been duped.
I’d thought I was Jottie’s trusted adviser, the repository of her innermost thoughts. But I wasn’t. I’d been fooled. Kept in the dark. Lulled and diverted. But no longer! I resolved to change. Then and there, I made a vow to pay attention, to find out, to learn those truths that the grown-ups tried to hide. I will know things, I promised myself. I will get to the bottom of everything. Starting now.
I was just clenching my jaw with resolve when I felt a tug on my sleeve. There was Bird, her curls stuck to her head with sweat. “That Trudy Kane is going to dance again. I want to see and Mae says she’s going to have a stroke if she has to watch Trudy Kane one more time, so you got to come with me.” Bird was trying to learn how to tap dance by watching Miss Trudy Kane. She could already shuffle off to Buffalo on a washtub. She yanked my arm. “Come on.”
I looked do-I-have-to at Jottie. She nodded.
“I don’t see how I’m supposed to keep my ear to the ground when I have to spend every blessed moment of my life following Bird around,” I said bitterly.
Jottie was peering into the windows of Krohn’s Department Store, but she turned to grin at me. “What you need is some of that Macedonian virtue,” she said. “You just summon up a little ferocity and devotion, and you’ll find out more than you ever wanted to know.” She turned back to the windows.
Bird yanked on me again, but I stood stock-still. Jottie was right. Macedonian virtue was exactly what I needed.
2
May 17, 1938
Rosy,
Please forgive—can’t come to luncheon. Father on warpath: Nelson, sloth, poorhouse, et cetera. Speaks ominously of work. Must stay home and knit socks to make good impression.
Layla
Ben,
Layla needs a job. Can I send her to you?
Affectly,
Gray
May 19, 1938
Senator Grayson Beck
Senate Office Bldg.
Washington, D.C.
Dear Gray,
No.
Sincerely,
Ben
May 20, 1938
Mr. Benjamin Beck
WPA/Federal Writers’ Project
1734 New York Ave. NW
Washington, D.C.
Dear Ben,
I am disappointed by your answer. It reveals a lack of brotherly feeling, and a poor memory to boot. Think back, Ben. Think back to 1924. I did not think that it would be necessary to remind you of the time, the money, and the reputation I expended for your sake and without question during that summer, but evidently I was mistaken. Perhaps the jail cell has become hallowed in your memory, or perhaps you believe that the judge was inspired to lenience by your worthy ideals. Don’t fool yourself. You owe me.
What time shall I send her up? Tuesday at 2:00?
Gray
May 21, 1938
Senator Grayson Beck
S.O.B.
Washington, D.C.
Dear Gray,
Tuesday at 2 is fine. What job do you want me to give her?
Ben
5/23/38
Ben,
I don’t give a good goddamn what job you give her. I want her out of the house and off my dime.
Affectly,
Gray
[Telegram]
May 23, 1938
Charles: Please meet 11:32 tonight. Must talk. Situation dire. One solution possible. Love. Layla
May 25, 1938
Layla—
I’m sorry you were crying when I saw you off. It disfigures you to give way to tears. Not your face—I consider your beauty your least significant attribute—but your mind and your soul. You dread work; you fear it, but this terror is the delusion of your class. Work is noble. It dignifies; it elevates the spirit. I can imagine no better fate for you than to learn firsthand the transcendent effects of labor; you, who sucked the platitudes and superficialities of your class with your mother’s milk, can only exterminate the false consciousness that permeates your existence by making common cause with the laboring men and women of this country. Throw yourself on the mercies of work, Layla. A period of shock is to be expected, but in due time, you’ll find true companionship in the hearty clasp of callused hands; in labor, you’ll find nourishment for your underused mind and deserving objects for your uncontrolled emotions. As you rise from the ashes of your degenerate life, you’ll see your banal nuptial dreams for what they truly are: a bourgeois charade, a tinsel ritual that has no place in the Workers’ Future.
On the chance that you, with your talent for willful misinterpretation, find me unclear: I mean no. And good-bye.
Charles
May 27, 1938
Mr. Benjamin Beck
WPA/Federal Writers’ Project
1734 New York Ave. NW
Washington, D.C.
Dear Ben,
Let’s pause for a moment and discuss this calmly, just the two of us, without Father’s lash of fire cracking over our heads. Now, Ben, I don’t know what Father’s got on you, but it must be something pretty awful to bring you to the point of hiring me—and for the WPA, too. Have you killed someone? Even if you have, there must be a better way to expiate your crimes than putting me on the Writers’ Project, which is nearly a crime in itself. I certainly understand that if Father’s twisting your arm, you have to give me some kind of job. I understand and I sympathize. But consider: Father will be perfectly satisfied if you put me in a dainty little secretarial position, and so will I. Simply by offering me a temporary place in your office, you’ll meet Father’s requirements, and your arm will be your own again. There’s no need to go to extremes. I refer to West Virginia. Sending me to West Virginia is extreme.
Not to mention ostentatious.
Toadying.
And mean.
Yesterday afternoon, after I had got over my first shock at your letter, I betook myself to the library to read up on the Writers’ Project (You see? I do know where the library is) and discovered that your arguments in favor of West Virginia (state flower: the rhododendron) are completely erroneous. Yes, I was born in Washington, D.C., but it’s ridiculous to say that I’m obliged to work in the state closest to my birthplace. You made that up, you know you did.
Do you know the motto of West Virginia? It’s Montani semper liberi: Mountaineers are always free. Need I say more? Do you and Father think that by packing me off to the Mountain State, you will turn me into a fresh-faced, wholesome girl in ankle socks, bounding over the rocky heights? You’re mad. You’ll drive me to drink, and in West Virginia the drink is probably moonshine, which will rot my entrails and make me blind.
Not only will I be miserable, I’ll be terrible. I’ll be the worst researcher in the history of the Writers’ Project, and that includes the seventy-year-old Stalinist morphine addict you told me about. Can you picture me interviewing the farmers’ wives and coal miners? Asking tactful questions about baths and head lice? Counting pigs and dogs and babies? Honestly, Ben, they’ll shoot me, and I won’t blame them if they do.
Please reconsider. You’re my uncle. You’re supposed to dote on me, and I’m supposed to be the sunshine of your lonely bachelorhood. Perhaps I haven’t lived up to my end recently, but give me a chance. Indulge me just this one last time: Take me off the West Virginia project and give me a job in your office, and I swear to you that I’ll be the best secretary you ever saw. I’ll arrive at your office by 8 (in the morning!). I’ll type my fingers to the bone. I’ll be lovely on the telephone. I’ll contemplate serious topics. I’ll be a credit to you.
Just don’t send me to West Virginia.
Pleas
e.
Your loving and usually obedient niece,
Layla
May 28
Layla,
Do you realize that nearly one-quarter of the employable citizens of this country are out of work? Do you realize that I receive dozens of letters each week from diligent, well-educated men and women imploring me for a job, any job, on the project? These people are desperate, Layla. They’ve been unemployed for so long they’ve forgotten what it’s like to work, they’ve sold everything they had for pennies, they go to bed hungry—inside if they’re lucky, outside if they’re not—and they wake up hungry. They’ve been wearing the same suit of clothes for years, sponged off each night because if they scrub it on a washboard, the cloth will shred to rags. Their children are sick because they don’t get enough to eat, and they’re dirty because there’s no place to wash. These are people who never thought they’d have to beg, and yet here they are, begging me for a job that won’t pay them enough to keep food in their stomachs.
There’s an opening on the West Virginia Writers’ Project. I have, against my better judgment, given you that position. Be grateful or be damned.
Ben
May 30, 1938
Miss Layla Beck
c/o Mr. Lance Beck
Department of Chemistry
Princeton University
Princeton, New Jersey
Dearest Layla,
I must say, it’s very inconsiderate of you to run off to cry on Lance’s shoulder and leave me here to cope with Papa in the state he’s in, and I certainly hope you’re not having a rendezvous with that awful Charles Antonin, because Papa will find out, and he’ll be even more furious than he is right now. Nothing I say moves him even the tiniest bit, and I can’t help it but you simply have to take Ben’s tatty old job. I know what you think—and imagine my feelings at the thought of you among grubby coal miners—but I’m afraid Papa won’t budge, darling. He says if you won’t marry Nelson—I’m not lecturing, I’m only repeating what Papa says—then you have to face stark reality. I wept and said I was sure you’d get ringworm, but that just made Papa fuss the more. He said it was time you understood what you were throwing away and if it took worms to make you understand it, that was fine by him (I didn’t tell Papa, but I don’t believe there are real worms in ringworm).
I never thought my own daughter would be on relief. I could just strangle Ben.
Your loving,
Mother
P.S. Lucille saw Nelson at Bick’s Saturday. She says he looks terrible, absolutely heartbroken and thin as a rail. You can’t call a man insincere when he’s lost weight like that. You just think about that, young lady.
June 6, 1938
Miss Rose Bremen
“The Waves”
Gurney Street
Cape May, New Jersey
Dearest Rose,
Your letter came like the King’s Pardon, just after the severed head thumped into the straw. Thanks for the kind offer, but the die is cast, and I’m to arrive in Macedonia, West Virginia, next Tuesday to begin work for the Federal Writers’ Project. I took the Pauper’s Oath yesterday, and I am officially on relief.
I can’t tell you how it happened because I don’t understand it myself, really I don’t. I’ve been a frivolous person for years now, and Father’s never been bothered by it in the least. If anything, he seemed pleased by my success: Once, I overheard him bragging that I had been invited to every house party from the Adirondacks to the Appalachians. Everything was fine until Nelson appeared on the scene, and then the worm turned with a vengeance. They wanted me to marry him in the worst way, both Mother and Father did. I thought they were joking. He was so obviously, completely awful—and they knew it. They knew it and they didn’t care. Nelson! He’s the Citronella Scion and hugely rich, but he’s also vain and tedious and shallow as a dewdrop. That whinny laugh, that tiny mustache—I’d rather kiss an eel. His most cherished ambition is to be mistaken for Errol Flynn. Within ten minutes of meeting Nelson, I despised him, and if Nelson ever had a thought about anyone but himself, the feeling would have been mutual. I thought Mother and Father knew what a disaster he was, and when he proposed, I thought we’d all laugh about it. How wrong I was. They wanted me to be a good girl and say yes. Father was blinded by the glint of Citronella (he’s running again next year), and Mother was blinded by Father, and Lance refused to concern himself with such trivialities. I didn’t know what to do, and when Father demanded an explanation, I panicked and made a fatal error: I said I could never respect a man who didn’t work. The moment I said it I wished I could take it back. Father’s face turned perfectly purple—I thought he was going into apoplexy—and they probably heard him on Capitol Hill. On and on he went about people in glass houses and the walking definition of sloth and wastrels who bring nothing but anguish and shame to their parents. And that was just warming up. Once he hit his stride, he included bootstraps and paperboys in the snow and Abraham Lincoln and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and Oklahoma and migrant workers in Model T’s, until I lost my head and shrieked that I was going to take a job and become an independent woman and make Father eat his hat.
Oh, it gets worse. After Father stormed out of the house, I decided that if I laid low, he would forget about it, just as he always had before. So, like an idiot, I went to New York, and when I sashayed back into the house two days later, expecting an affectionate paternal greeting, Father growled, “You have an interview with Ben at two.” You remember Ben, don’t you? Father’s possibly Socialist younger brother who is some kind of muckety-muck at the Federal Writers’ Project. Evidently, what I had viewed as a cease-fire, Father had viewed as an opportunity to oil his musket, and before I knew it, I was down at Ben’s office, demonstrating my literacy by reading the newspaper aloud to a bored assistant. I realize now that I should have muffed it, but I didn’t, and, as you know, I am a fiend on the typewriter. By the end of the afternoon, I was feeling pretty smug. Fine, I thought. I’ll show them. I’ll be Ben’s secretary. I could just see it—I’d be one of those ornamental secretaries, you know the ones, clad in an elegant black dress with crisp white organdy cuffs falling around my perfectly manicured fingers as I riffled through the mail, a picture of competence. “I don’t know what I did without her,” Ben would say fondly to Father, who would likewise say fondly, “How could I have ever thought she should marry that despicable cur Nelson? She was right and I was wrong.”
You know the rest. I had no choice, Rose. I had to accept the job. Father really has cut me off, and there really is a Depression going on. Work is scarce and I have exactly $26 to my name. What was I to do? Mother says he’ll relent by Christmas, but that’s months away. I don’t know how I’ll bear it—trudging around Macedonia, West Virginia, in the blazing heat, taking down the reminiscences of a town full of toothless old hicks. I can hear it now: “Along about ’95 or ’96, the cows died o’ the worm and we din’t have a lick o’ meat for ten year and all the chirren got rickets…” I don’t know why the federal government wants a record of those people, I really don’t.
And the worst of it is, Father is still so furious that I have to live on my salary, which means that I have to board in a poky little room in a house belonging to “a respectable family of Macedonia.” The house and the respectable family are probably encrusted in coal dust, and I will probably die of starvation or lice within weeks. You may read this letter at my funeral—from beyond the grave, I’ll watch as Father writhes, which means, I suppose, that I’ll be in hell. I’ll feel right at home there after Macedonia.
There’s one last thing I haven’t told you: Everything with Charles is finished. Please don’t send me a sympathetic letter. I can’t bear it.
Love,
Layla
P.S. In the heat of that first argument, Father called me a “canker on the social body.” Have you ever heard of anything so unjust? All this spring, I have been hemming washrags for the deserving poor and reading uplifting literature to Relicts of the Confeder
acy on the last Thursday of the month. How can I be a canker?
June 13, 1938
Dear Charles,
Now that I’m one of the proletariat, don’t you think you could
June 13, 1938
Charles dear,
Last week I took the Pauper’s Oath—without lying, too. Briefly, Father cut me off in a rage, I haven’t a penny to my name, and tomorrow I begin working for the WPA Writers’ Project. I’m to interview villagers in West Virginia. Now that I’m a member of your beloved proletariat (at least I think I am), perhaps you’ll reconsider the terms of my banishment the quarantine perhaps you’ll be willing to see me perhaps you’ll reconsider perhaps we could
June 13, 1938
Dear Nelson,
I just have to tell you about a funny little incident: You know our maid, Mattie? This morning she was dusting your portrait—I keep it on my bureau—and she said, “I don’t know what he sees in that scrawny Olivia de Havilland.” I was utterly baffled—until I realized she had mistaken you for Errol Flynn! Isn’t that darling?
The Truth According to Us Page 2
