All the property we had, between us, Jacky and I, was this, in expectations—but she and I felt rich and intended to go to Europe. Everyone went to Europe then. It was 1928. Even Mrs. Dr. Goodsir hoped that when her child was old enough she’d get a position as traveling companion, or else get a good tip from a rich bachelor and make money in the stock market and go abroad. She often talked about gay Paree; it consoled her for washing the dishes and scrubbing the wooden floors, and was knit into her dreams of her child. She was full of hope for the child, thought it would bring Dr. Goodsir back to her. When the child was born in The Wreck, Dr. Goodsir came, a tall, good-looking, grave man, with black hair. He and Uncle Perce quarreled, and he went away. We never saw him again. The poor mother was never able to understand why the father did not stay with her baby. In a few years she was calling herself a doctor’s widow, and got jobs in that character.
After our experience with Mrs. Goodsir’s childbirth, we added a new game, the one called Confinement. The teacher at the school, a woman who seemed old and worn but was probably about thirty, screamed at the youngsters and beat them on the knuckles with her stick. We would look across at each other and think of the way she would be tried and punished later on that afternoon, in our Court. We cursed her, hoped she died in agony, wished a can cer in her, or heart disease; now we wished she would have a baby and never be able to get rid of it, “scream all the time.” This was a very satisfactory game: we would lie on our backs at the side of the orchard, in the long grass, smelling the blossomy air, scratch our legs against the insects, watch the blue sky and think of this interesting and even quite probable torture for the teacher. She was married; it could happen to her. We wished it on our wicked Aunt Stella; we wished it on numerous women. Serious at the thought, though, we added, “I’ll have my children with anaesthetics.” Jacky thought we should begin to practice then, to endure pain. I said, “Why, by the time we’re that old, they will have invented something.” Jacky tried to endure pain, though, for years after that. She tried to make a game out of it, but I would not enter into it. Why should we endure pain? She could not tell me. At another time, we became religious and kept beads and crosses we fabricated out of matchbook wood under our pillows. We prayed to Jesus. All this was in the hope of wearing white dresses for First Communion. I visited several Sunday Schools in turn in the hope of getting to several Sunday School picnics. But generally this required more regular attendance than I could give. We had to keep this secret from Uncle Perce, a rabid unbeliever; and our games and secret life, which we lived entirely in common at this time, became more secret; our games were wicked.
7
Uncle Percival had four or five men friends, who were attracted by his peculiarities and talent. P. Hogg sometimes quarreled with the scientific institutions, societies, or men for whom he worked, and he then became a salesman, traveling the country and placing optical lenses, microscopes, field glasses, observatory lenses, and even arranging for observatories and planetaria. The same man who was hated by his poor neighbors, who gave the Mussolini salute for a joke, fought against the farmers in the district; the man who thought it weakened the poor to pay them unemployment insurance and hated trades unions, also fought for trades unions when the time came; the man who gave the fascist salute walked in a May Day procession. He was an ardent patriot and knew the ways to hang up the flag on July Fourth, and at the same time he opposed war and was imprisoned during World War I as a conscientious objector. He oppressed his womenfolk by making them scrub floors and fetch water from a well, and yet he was for the education, full citizenship, full emancipation of women; he thought a pregnant woman was the better for toting water and yet he agitated for Twilight Sleep and approved of the Soviet Union because they took proper care of children, and inducted them early into community life. This disagreeable man had devoted friends. One was my father, Solander, one Uncle Philip Morgan, one Dr. Goodsir himself—he had been, that is, until Mr. Hogg forced Goodsir to a wedding.
This was 1928. My Uncle Philip Morgan, who had first married at nineteen and was now twenty-four, had just married his second wife, a divorcée with a twelve-year-old son. This new wife of his was a healthy, active, tall blonde woman, a revolutionary with many lovers; she loved frankly, truly, often; her affairs were passions with her. Jacky and I wondered about this old woman who had men wild for her; and we were hiding in the long grass chewing stalks, when we heard Uncle Philip in the orchard making a confession about her to Solander and Uncle Perce:
Philip said about his old wife, “Amabel is going to have a child. I was a wastrel. I never wanted a child. But Amabel showed me the truth. I must not live for myself, but for others. It isn’t a question of living for our child, but just for the rest of the world … I was in New York on Tuesday, Sol, and walking up Fifth Avenue, where I used to walk to see those big, golden huskies our girls’ finishing schools turn out, the gorgeous girls with the imperial contraltos— but the only face in my mind was Amabel’s, her brilliant, ugly face full of soul and intellect. She’s ugly, you might say, but beautiful. The others looked like stale blotters with nothing legible on them, not even their own names; they were like orchids that have been through too much night-clubbing and cheek-to-cheek dancing. Love affairs didn’t wither Amabel: each one gave her a bloom and richer color. You know the joke about George Sand, ‘My heart’s a tomb!’ ‘A cemetery, Madame.’ In Paris last year I had a studio duplex, you know, overlooking the Cimetière Montparnasse. It was that Mrs. Landler paid for it. At that time I was living with her, you know: she paid my way at Paris—she was very good to me. I wanted to study art, and she was going to pay for me. The studio was easy for us to get because some people, especially Americans, are superstitious about looking at a graveyard all day. I was not. It’s a charming spot, full of trees and delicate winds, not many tall stones there, not those ugly things like cromlechs you see elsewhere; and this particular apartment was closer to the Jewish section where there were no tall stones to disfigure the landscape. It was delicious. It was a kind of eternal gentle life as you see in old pictures, like Corot’s pictures.
“Naturally, at that time I did not care for Corot; he was old hat to me; and Mrs. Landler was very modern, always rue Campagne Première and so on. I loved it.
“When Amabel gets very old, perhaps she’ll have that many tombs—my dear boys, I don’t care if she does. A great woman’s a great woman; you can’t make her into a super-aerated, dehusked, vitamin-enriched, thick-waisted, white-haired mom of some subway ad. She’s a great woman. What do I care if she loved before or loved again? She loves me now. Those titivated debs, with banana legs and long bobs, just go through life sighing for their empty life. You know the couplet, ‘Our hearts in glad surprise to higher levels rise’? That’s my life with Amabel. What do I care what people think about our ages? I must learn from life, and she is life; she will never be old, for the great are never either old or young. ‘Age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety,’ said Shakespeare about Cleopatra. How do I know Cleo did not look like Amabel? To hear her speak! When she speaks in a hall, to men, to women, their sex does not matter, they rise from their seats, their souls go out of their mouths and chests to her; instead of people I see there in the hall laurel wreaths and bouquets of flowers, something tossed by God to her; they are not men and women, they are the flowers of God. Yet people wound her noble heart, they gossip about her looks, her age, and her affairs! If I am born in this world only to protect her noble heart from pain, you see! I am a happy man.
“I am not madly in love at all. I know this woman and I just compare her with others. What is the use of trying to convince you? It isn’t sex, you know. Sex—any couple can mate—what of it? Dogs can mate. It is something to live for. There’s nothing wrong with my desires physically. But my heart thirsts so. Yet people laugh—”
“It’s another frame of reference,” said Solander.
“Can you imagine a woman that at her age is grandly ardent, simple and yie
lding?” continued Uncle Philip. “She is proud and fiery, and yet she has a sweet, modest, reluctant yielding, a shamefacedness. She says she was not always like that; her husband, that schoolteacher she was married to, made her like that. That is what she says because she’s generous. She had to fight as a young girl. Such natures are not welcomed and people make game of them, or tread on them. They learn to be tough. It takes years to give them back their rich, generous simplicity. You see, she says he did that for her; and she doesn’t hate him, she loves him; but he does not understand her now. He thinks she’s foolish, childish. He says to her it’s a sign of age because she goes with a man younger than herself. As if age counted in these things! There are tragedies, of course, between people of different generations when they love. However, people don’t care to talk about the happy affairs in such cases. They only talk about the tragedies. Because it shocks them, I don’t know why.”
“They don’t talk much about love at all, that’s the simple truth,” said my father.
“I have never loved,” said P. Hogg.
“And so it doesn’t exist,” Solander laughed.
“I don’t say that; no, evidently it exists,” said P. Hogg.
“I can testify that it exists,” said my father.
The whole truth about my father was out by this, for Uncle Philip had put himself out to let us know: he considered it beautiful, even though he liked my mother. My father loved a young dark serious girl, with large eyes, called Persia. My grandmothers were thrown off balance by this happening—such a well-conducted man as my father! But Grandmother Morgan was too busy with her properties, her love affairs, and the dangerous beauty of her youngest daughter Phyllis, to bother about her daughter Mathilde; and Grandmother Fox was a timid lady who could scarcely admit that even childbirth existed, let alone divorce, sexual vagrancy. She never dared ask her son about his behavior. All she could do was to look at me and sigh, pull big eyes when she was with her son and sigh. How dared she ask questions about sexual matters? The mere thought, in private, made her blush.
“Don’t you think about the others?” said Hogg.
“That’s another thing you learn—to live for the day. When you’ve caught a big fish, you live for that day.” Philip Morgan laughed.
“I mean, your other girl friends. Your life hasn’t been a desert up to now, in spite of that story you tell them.”
Philip sounded flustered, “What story?”
“Your formula: ‘Life was a desert but you are my oasis.’ ”
Philip laughed like the winding of Roland’s trumpet distant in Roncesvalles; then he murmured, “Who told you that?”
“Eleanor Blackfield.”
“She was a nice girl,” said Philip, in a lower voice.
“Don’t you think of the trouble you made?” asked Hogg.
“They’re all neurotics, they’d get into trouble anyhow.”
“Perhaps they love you,” said my father.
“No, I only love one woman.”
“But—Eleanor Blackfield, for instance,” said Solander.
“That’s neurosis. They’re repressed and then— But now I’m married. Do you know what Amabel said to me this morning? She’s a superb woman. You know what Casanova said to his illegitimate fourteen-year-old son? His son was reticent, sulky, critical, wouldn’t be free with Casanova. Casanova wasn’t pleased, took him out and gave him a shaking-up. ‘Look here, this is the sign of a mean spirit,’ he said. ‘That’s a lesson to any young man. Give yourself away.’ What does it matter, if there’s plenty of yourself left? That’s the school of life.”
“Well, you do that,” said my father. “You give yourself, that’s all right with you.”
“Of course,” said Philip, “you get it in the neck, mind.”
“My girl,” said Solander—he went on to tell about the black-haired girl, Persia. We looked at each other, lying hidden in the grass. Grandmother Fox called her Die Konkubine, and Hogg had taken to the name—one of his sour jokes. He did not say it now, but lectured both of the men on normal family life.
“Society is built on the normal family, on normal community life of which the monogamous family is the basis at present. We cannot talk about the future societies of this world. Only whoremasters do that when persuading to bed.” This was a stab at Uncle Philip, no doubt.
My father laughed and said quickly, “Don’t tell me, Hogg, that you think we live in a monogamous, one-family society here in the U.S.A.? I don’t think Morgan, I mean Lewis H. Morgan, not you, Philip, would see it the way you do. Now, why don’t you look at your society, Hogg, the way you’d look at the Aruntas or the Iroquois. Now, Hogg, if you saw a bunch of Iroquois or Sioux with our organization, you’d say they were polygamous.
“ ‘Now trouble brioux
Among the Sioux
Because each year
A dear they chioux.’
“I don’t mean wife and mistress-in-state, that’s just old-fashioned French conservatism; why, I mean what they say, ‘It’s unlucky to be the seventh husband of a seventh wife.’ Do you call that state of affairs monogamy? And to think we sent out U.S. troops to slaughter the poor old disciples of Joe Smith. It’s the old story in anthropology: the conquered conquers the conqueror! Now we are all Mormons. And don’t tell me you think we’re going back to the one-woman convent and the emasculated man, or One Million Abelard-and-Heloises, after this carnival of jazz. ‘I want to be castrated! Oh, dear, dear, I meant circumcised—that was the word! But it’s too late now.’ No, it’s too late now to go back to being castrated.”
Cheerfully, he kept it up. Both were embarrassed, Hogg, the moralist, and Philip, the many-marrier. Philip spoke very morally. My father, a decent-living, attached, affectionate man, was a pocket Rabelais.
Impossible in a family like ours, full of court scandal, to keep the various sexual knots and hitches from our sight. Uncle Philip nearly had a baby by Eleanor Blackfield, and it was only shipped out of life when he hastily married the pregnant Amabel. Eleanor was a Vassar girl who wrote poetry, came from a high-toned family, knew only girls called Butterfield, Trowbridge, van Dorp, and danced with Mary Wigman. Our Hogg and Morgan fold had not such fine white-fleeced lambs; but eligible men always are admitted among the silvertails, and Philip had become Eleanor’s great love. She danced and taught dancing and helped Philip out with the rent for a long time. She was odd-looking, freakish, with transparent black voile sleeves, a long-waisted figure and long well-shaped legs, long, faunish-arched feet, long hands. Her color was putty and her straight black hair flopped over her shoulders. She had big eyes, she painted her mouth purple. She and Philip had a frenzied affair, very fin de siècle they thought it (in 1928). She was older than Philip by about five years. She had a devil of a temper and kept him on the jump; naturally, he needed a mother after that, and Amabel was the earth-goddess he got. But one spring, in the beginning of their affair, Philip on a river took a boat beneath a willow left afloat, incredible as it sounds, and ran away with Eleanor; and I suppose they had a loaf of bread and a flask of wine; I know they had a book of verse. How young Philip was then! He was a great fleshy romantic boy, quoted poets all day long, was always in love, and was a socialist. He was probably presentable enough too. Even when we first knew him, when he was twenty-one and married, and full-grown, he looked as if he could get women, heavy white blossomy flesh, a squarish face with blue eyes and curly brown hair loose round it, a thick strong neck, a ready smile, and a manner both consoling and appealing; and all kinds of airs he had picked up from the men he admired. He admired dozens of men, imitating them all: two he imitated were Hogg and my father.
Amabel Winslow was the subject of talk in the family, but the children did not know she was a name in society. She expected her baby in June, now dragged her heavy load in or near the Lodge. In the evenings, long before the winter snows had gone, Philip would be seen on the roads, up and down, from our high place, would be in our house with Uncle Perce, or would come up out of the d
istance, talking to men, women, and children. He was restless. He said he was out on his chicken and egg run; it was hard to make money. Amabel needed town and they would not turn the child into a hick; as soon as the child was born, they would turn back the farm and make off. He was constantly reading newspapers, looking for jobs, answering advertisements, and writing letters to people who might buy the farm. The mail addressed to him he arranged to receive at our house, “Care of Hogg, The Wreck” (as Hogg insisted on calling it), for he did not want to make the expectant mother anxious, but would tell her when all was ready. He received mail every day and often walked down to the post office with his answers. He now neglected the farm, after months of patient work.
“New broom sweeps clean,” said Hogg; the farmer with the bull laughed fatly, said, “First he worked like a steer and now he rears at work, like a crazy horse.”
The woods were full of lost hen eggs. One afternoon, in late April, looking for treasures, we came upon one nest, then another; soon we were risking our legs and even our necks in the treasure hunt. We brought back about ten dozen eggs to the Lodge; some must have been abandoned there since the last year. We then spied on the fowls and when one or other began picking her way studiously out of some glade, we marked the spot with our eyes and went for it; in this way we often found warm new eggs and stole some of these to take home. Hogg said nothing about this eggtheft, though he made an uproar about some wild birds’ eggs we brought back and he was the terror of the birds’-nesting boys. He honestly thought of them as assassins. As for the hen eggs, we were poor and needed them.
Letty Fox Page 8
