At one time, Grandfather had worked in the White-Brooks department store as manager. He was a tall, handsome, alert man that most women found attractive. He began to cough and use his handkerchief too much and say that the department store was full of dust. After he came back from Williams, he did not go to work again, but stayed at home, in the Green Acres Inn, to help his wife, who was then about forty and just coming out of her shell. Feeling his new lethargy, Grandmother then jumped into the saddle, began to open out the business and look for other properties, and a few years later had become the woman we all now knew. Grandfather Morgan liked to tell the story of that change, and others had a curious spittling and pleasure when listening to it, for none of them thought it decent that he now lived upon his wife. Solander, my father, saw nothing wrong in it, and was fond of the old gentleman; and Grandmother listened complacently to the old story and would help with it, though meanwhile her eyes shining so softly showed that she was thinking other things, that could not be told at all.
“A few years ago, a long time ago, Bernie thought he had lung trouble,” would say Grandmother, “and he went to the White-Brooks doctor—”
And Grandfather would break in, allowing her thoughts to wander, “I was going to all their doctors, they thought I was tubercular, something like that” (nodding), “the bacillus of Koch, they called it; I went to Dr. Fawsitt—”
“Ha-ha,” someone would say, “Dr. Faucet, ha-ha, now it’s Dr. Faucet, Dr. Faucet and not Dr. Wasserman? And the bacillus of Koch?”
“Dr. Wasserman was it?”
Then Grandfather, insulted, would look into his plate. “All right, Philip, all right—” And Grandmother, “All right, Bernard, all right.”
“Let me give you my version of the story,” said Grandfather. Grandmother said, “You don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for—now!”
Quietly, Bernard said, “I was going to all the doctors and I went to someone outside White-Brooks, Dr. Taylor—”
“And not Schneider? Ha-ha!”
“He’s a good fella; he told me I had lung trouble, I’d be all right if I spent six months in Arizona.”
“So you put two and two together,” said Philip, “and thought you ought to go to Arizona!”
Grandfather composedly said, “Mother was staying for a few weeks in town for a change, at the Bedfordshire Hotel, and naturally, of course, I was at Green Acres. I was calling upon her to see how she was getting on, a few times a week; she needed rest, I just called upon her in the afternoon.”
After a pause, Grandmother would say, “Just like that. He did that. He called on me. He enquired after my health. He’s a fine fellow.”
Undisturbed, Bernard continued, “The company doctors and this doctor Fawsitt had me running round for six months and it was then I went to Dr. Taylor, a friend of mine, very fine doctor. He said I must take the train to Arizona for six months.”
“So naturally,” said Grandmother, laughing heartily, “that quick head at figures got to work and you decided you should spend six months in Arizona.”
“And I said to Mother,” said Bernard calmly, “I had better go to Arizona.”
“What do you think of that?” enquired Grandmother.
Bernard exclaimed, “In the trial, they said someone told me I should go to Arizona!”
Grandmother took a faint interest, as always at mention of the law courts and lawyers, and said, “The funny thing is he actually said to him that he must go to Arizona, and in the trial the opposing lawyer suggested that someone had told him to go to Arizona and he had taken the advice. That was a good hit in the dark they made.”
Bernard, looking insulted, looked away from all of them, “All right, all right; no, no!”
“All right, go on, Bernie,” said Grandmother, with spirit. “I’m just explaining to them what relation—for what’s coming afterwards! You’ve got to explain what all this means.”
“I’m explaining,” said Bernard, coming back to them, “let me tell the story. I haven’t told my story yet. So I went to the White-Brooks doctors and said—”
“Oh, Lord,” said Philip, “you’re not in Arizona yet?” And Dora Dunn screamed horsily, “He’s not in Arizona yet!” and raised loud laughter. Grandmother Morgan looked at her and laughed.
Grandfather said coolly, “No, I’m not in Arizona yet. I went back to the store and told Dr. Fawsitt” (ha-ha) “that I’d seen a specialist and he said I should go to Arizona.”
“Good!” said Grandmother.
“So they examined me again and said perhaps Arizona would be all right. Mother was living in the Bedfordshire Hotel; I came to her several times a week and told her every word then, at that time. After a while she went home, back to the Inn. I examined the rules of the benefit society and concluded that if Arizona was what was required to cure me, I must go to Arizona; so I said to myself, ‘You take six months off and—’ ”
Dora Dunn yelled out, “No! Go to Arizona!”
Someone said curiously, “Did you ever go to Arizona, tell me?”
Bernard said, “Yes, I’m back.” He paused as if recalling that time, and continued, “Dr. Taylor said I should go and I thought I had the right to go. So I told them I was going to spend six weeks (mark!) in Arizona.”
Philip said, “Oh, my aunt; he hasn’t gone yet.”
Bernard said slowly, stroking his beard and looking down it, “They told me, that was all right, if I had to go to Arizona—”
Dora and one of the women began repeating, one after the other, “I just had to go to Arizona.”
Bernard said, “So I got leave of absence and I took the train to Arizona.”
“Are you really going to Arizona?” said Philip. “I can’t believe it.” “Are you off?” said Solander, laughing madly.
“Yes, I went to Arizona all right. When I got there—”
Dora Dunn cackled, “He found he was in Arizona.”
Everyone, by this, was laughing hysterically. Bernard would now look around, first at Grandmother, then at Philip.
“What are you behaving like that for? I’m disgusted with you, Philip. Look at that woman” (Dora). “You’re all behaving like idiots. Mother isn’t laughing. I’ll only talk to Mathilde, she listens to me. You others don’t listen to me; you don’t listen to my story. Mathilde listens to me; she’s sensible.”
Solander said, “Mother Morgan isn’t laughing, she doesn’t like us laughing at Bernard.”
Grandmother said, “I don’t like to see him making a fool of himself,” and for a moment her voice sounded a little like Grandfather’s own, as if she imitated him, to take his side; she had some of his slippery elisions, speaking low and softer, “I don’t like to see him making people laugh at him—keep on repeating—”
“Mother,” said Philip, “we’re not laughing at him, but with him—”
“We’re not laughing at him, Mother,” said Mathilde.
Solander, enjoying himself, chuckling with his Buddha expression, entreated him, “Go on, Bernard; so you got to Arizona.”
“And while I was there I didn’t see any doctor; and I didn’t stay—”
Solander (who knew the story) said, “You made a mistake; so they wouldn’t allow your claim.”
“Don’t rush to conclusions, Fox,” said Grandfather.
Solander said, “I was just going to get to the point.”
Dora called out, “He just wants us to know the point of all this.”
“I’ll get to the point,” said Bernard. “You let me tell the story and you’ll get to the point.”
Coarsely, someone else cried, “So he’s still in Arizona.” But the word by now had lost its magic, and everyone calmed down, while he explained the rest of it, his return to New York, his taking a holiday instead at Sheepshead Bay, the fishing. Then Grandmother would take it up again, and the two of them, sending it back and forth, went through again the dismissal, the suits, the moral victory (“You call two weeks’ extra pay a moral victory?” Grandmoth
er said), first costs, appeal costs, influencing the jury by making them give a decision before lunch, and so on.
“But I made history,” said Bernard at the conclusion, and this was the point, “they changed the by-laws, and they wouldn’t have if we hadn’t fought them through to appeal. It wasn’t worth it then.”
Since then Bernard had probably not gone to any doctor, and the coughing that kept him and others awake at night they put down to nervousness, faking, and advancing age; at times he collected spit in a bottle, and then threw it away again. Because he coughed so much, and read at night with a coat round his shoulders, and a little lamp, and because he walked about, and listened and peered, and made noises in the kitchen, Bernard had at last been asked to take a room in the great barn where the servants slept. He had slept there for years. He did not make friends with the servants, though some of them came back year after year (only going away for summer camp jobs), but with a gardener called Jape. If he knew Jape’s surname, he didn’t say it; no one knew it. Jape never got a letter. He said that many years before he and his father used to make a good living at the vegetable and flower gardens around there and had their own nursery, out of town.
Jape really did not like Green Acres Inn. He was scornful of these broken-down families, newcomers, and commercial enterprises. He did not like Mrs. Cissie Morgan.
Now, this inn, which had once been a family house, was backed by several acres of long grass and weeds. The potting sheds and the glasshouse were ruined. Birds got inside the glasshouse and battered themselves against the half-painted glass. Jape grew a few tomatoes there for his own use. Beetles and other insects grew fat and thick on the hedge flowers near the barn. It was all Jape could do to keep up the gardens near the house, and roll the lawns where the guests sat. To the glasshouse, the spiders, and the long field no one ventured. There were barn cats there that no one saw, and sometimes the little scuffling and laughter of quite a community out of the upper story of the barn. On the other side of the garden was the small partitioned shed where Jape had his sleeping quarters. It was unpainted outside, but whitewashed within, and had a brick mantelpiece, two small garage windows, an iron bedstead, and a lot of junk. No one but Mr. Morgan had had a glimpse of it, in over twenty years; and even the Morgans doubted that he had been inside. Yet sometimes Morgan disappeared altogether; perhaps he was there.
The entrance to this area was protected on one side by clotheslines with towels and aprons, and on the other by a couple of large fat black spiders with, on the back of each, a skull and crossbones. When annoyed, these spiders shook their webs madly. Jape protected them, as they protected the back yard, for he said they brought good luck and if annoyed would roll up their webs and carry them off somewhere else. But the visitors, who were mostly businessmen, teachers of English and history, and fat, spoiled wives, knew nothing about spiders and thought they were all Black Widows. At any rate, the hideous things lived in peace, with their friend Jape bobbing about in their neighborhood.
No one knew what was the state of Grandfather’s health. Jape perhaps knew, but he too was an aging man, with his rheumatics, his back, his teeth, his smoker’s cough. When Grandfather caught a chill, he took to his bed and coddled himself for a few days, with food sent down for him, and whatever else he asked for; and no other notice was taken of him. Rarely did Grandmother have time for him, overworked as she was, sitting up till nearly morning sometimes with her card games and then going straight on with the work of the house, and going to New York and back, all without sleep. At one time, she had been able to take one hour’s sleep in twenty-four, for days together. Now she needed a little more; but caught in the floodtide of her life, running here, there, she had only a few minutes for anyone.
“My children I neglected too, and I’m a good mother,” she said.
One day Jape sent one of the maids to say that a doctor must come to see Mr. Morgan. No sooner had the doctor seen him than he said to send the old man to the hospital, and no sooner did they get him to the hospital than they tried extreme measures. Grandmother had only time to see him once, with Mathilde and myself, when he died. He died suddenly, in the morning, at sunrise of a beautiful summer day, and all he said was, “I said to him—”
The whole family went to the funeral and even Aunt Amabel, though now separated from Uncle Philip, came down, in a black dress, and held Philip’s arm. Grandmother had bought a blanket of roses for her husband. They recited the Lord’s Prayer; a second cousin, Reverend Poote, made a beautiful speech about the old gentle man, saying things about him which sounded so true, so touching at the moment, that everyone burst out crying. I flung myself into my mother’s legs, crying as loudly as I could. My father was there and went off with us.
At the funeral, standing in the background, we had also seen Jape in his best brown suit, lanky, with a black band on his arm. He looked oddly old, poor and cross, in his best clothes. It was only in his old faded blues that he seemed a nice man. Jape walked away after saying hello to several people, and took the bus home. They thought it was funny but degrading afterwards, that Jape had taken a drink or two on the way home and told everyone at length about the beautiful funeral, how fine it was, and what a fine man my grandfather was.
The truth was, though we made a great noise about it, being a very sentimental family, we had all thought Grandfather slightly in the way for years. The old women at the Inn spoke about the old man for a few days, though no one had known him, but had only seen him sneaking merrily along the old carriage drive behind the laurel bush, and many had not known who he was at all.
They were interested in Grandmother, now a widow; it was almost a fete. Within a week Grandmother had a proposal from a fashionable grocer in the town who had been her acquaintance for years. In four months, just before my father sailed for England, this propertied grocer, a stout, short, strong man, some years younger than Grandmother, had Grandmother in a flutter. He wanted to marry her at once; it was not only a good business proposition, but he loved her. Grandmother’s hair was by now white as snow, but her eyes were black, sparkling, and though generally brutal or even hard, could turn tender and sweet. Grandmother at once forgot everything else in hand and asked advice from all her friends and relatives. Her children were indignant. Phyllis was not yet married, Mathilde was in trouble, Philip was getting a divorce, two or three other uncles of mine, unimportant, sedate men, were scandalized; all of them feared the influence of the new husband. For Grandmother was a gay sentimental creature who, if she threw over the Inn (which kept some of the family working and occasionally cast a spray of furs and diamonds over the family), might travel the country or the world and throw all that was hers, not into the Inn where it belonged, but to her husband.
“You have earned a rest, retire,” said the willing fiancé.
“For shame, Mamma, you are old,” said the children.
Grandmother was as glorious, timid, and vain as a young girl. She dashed into town almost every day to see people, buy clothes, and ask advice. At last, she felt quite distracted and announced a great family party, to celebrate her birthday, and consult all her dear friends. My father was asked to come, and while he was there they could also, she said as an afterthought, give him a send-off. Joseph Montrose, who was leaving on the same boat as my father, was asked, so that he might see Phyllis, “my little queen,” said Grandmother; and many other distant relatives and friends came. Grandmother, they said, was celebrating her freedom, but she was too modest an old sinner to admit anything improper.
Two days before the party, Jape was taken to the hospital from the Inn, and without regret, for Jape’s work had dwindled and now Grandmother felt he was only an expense. There were difficulties at the hospital: no one knew Jape’s surname, nor where he came from. He left the hospital the day after the great party, and for a few months disappeared. His room was then opened, and in the room they found just his best suit of clothes, an old lawn mower, and an enlargement of an old photograph of my grandfather taken twe
nty years before and showing that he had been a remarkably handsome, gentle-looking man, with a sweet, sad smile and a face that looked spiritual. Nevertheless, there is no doubt he was far from spiritual.
10
As the women had all advised my mother, at this great party of the family, to make peace with my father long enough to beget, and as they had given her prescriptions for having a son, and as she was so harried and hunted by them that she had no more conscience of her own, my mother sent us away the very next day to Grandmother Fox’s, so that she and my father would have the last few days together.
She was anxious about the step she was now taking and thought it was for us she was doing it, and though she was almost desperate with doubt about whether it was dishonorable or not, and whether, too, this trick would bring my father back at the end of his visit, she decided to try it. She could not understand this shoddy, shameful, cruel life she was leading. It was not chosen; it was some magic by which she was trapped. She had acquired all the advertised products, love, a husband, a home, children, but she had not the advertised results—she recognized nothing in the landscape.
Her mind was torn up by advice from casual visitors and sermons that were almost rough insults. What she underwent when we were away was more like the trial for witchcraft of a helpless, gossip-ridden girl in the bad Puritan days. The relatives tried her. If she failed she was proved a worthless woman.
While this nocturnal magic was going on, and my father was receiving this love drink, Jacky and I were with my Grandmother Fox, who lived in a small apartment on the fifth floor in East Eighty-fifth Street, with her niece, Lily Spontini. Lily Spontini’s maiden name was Hart, like Grandmother Fox. She was the youngest daughter of Grandmother’s eldest brother, and at sixteen had come to New York to try her luck, and to live with her aunt, Jenny Fox, who was my grandmother. Grandmother Fox, who never had a daughter, remembered Lily as she was at that time:
Letty Fox Page 11
