Mr. Manners’s dull, well-bred voice said, “Isn’t Mrs. Harkness playing today?”
Jacky said, “Grandmother, can I have a lemonade?”
“Go away, don’t bother me,” came Grandmother’s rich voice, automatically.
“Your grandmother’s playing cards,” said Mother, bitterly, her eyes still fixed across the lawn. On a birdcage porch upstairs, two ladies had come out and were having tea under a red and white awning. Starlings hopped on the lawn.
“Big, ugly blackbirds,” said Mathilde.
A car came into the drive, doors slammed, and a loud voice was heard.
“That’s Looper,” said Grandmother in the dining room, slapping down her cards. “She must have mail.” She got up and rushed out of the dining room, calling, “Betty! Is that Betty Looper?”
There was a row of voices outside. Some new women surged into the dining room, and one with a reinforced Georgia brag, cried, “I just got one dozen pairs; they don’t know what bargains they’ve got there. Two old maids. I saw them there yesterday and just thought! Hello there, Mr. Manners, come and see what I got and see if you don’t want to buy me some more,” and she thrust out her leg.
I laughed aloud and went into the dining room to see the Georgia belle, an old, fat woman, with an artificial complexion and white hair. With her were her two toadies, New York women who lived in a residential hotel and went to her room for secret drinking; she took them driving and to tea.
It was nearly five. The other women were waking out of their siestas. One came downstairs laughing and calling, “Mrs. Mason!” to the Southern belle, and two others strolling out on the veranda pretended not to notice her return, but kept their eyes stretched toward her, hoping for an invitation.
“Mr. Manners thinks I’m a wicked, wasteful woman, don’t you, honey?” she said to the man “But you know how women love to spend—though Mr. Manners is a bachelor!”
Mr. Manners smiled and cut his speed coquettishly, as he approached the women. They all looked at him. There were only two male residents at present in this half-deserted hotel and one was an old fellow in Palm Beach suits and a panama, who mumbled shamefacedly in a white mustache and otherwise spoke to none. Mr. Manners was, for them, quite a young man, not more than forty-five, tall, mule-faced, half bald, with a slow, monotonous delivery. He was a kind-hearted, stupid man, polite to the women, modest and cautious—an anxious liberal because an assimilating, atheist Jew. The women, mostly New Englanders, tough, fierce “liberals,” were anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Mexican, anti-Italian, but they excepted their Mr. Manners: “He is not a Jew; such gentlemen are Hebrews,” said even the most ill-natured of them.
Mrs. Morgan, with her love affairs, had no more than friendly good-days for him. Mathilde, with her eyes far away, did not notice him at all; but the others, rabid, Republican, selfish, coddled this only eligible man.
Mrs. Mason, the Southern belle, made a great noise about asking Mr. Manners to sit at her table, not his own, that night. Mrs. Polk, the brittle, dismantled New Yorker, lifted her voice to say that he had never sat with her, but her voice was lost in the brass band which surrounded Mrs. Mason. Rudely she swept the women out of Mr. Manners’s precincts and onto the porch, where she waved airily to my mother, “Mrs. Fox! All alone on this lovely day, honey? You want to go out for a run; you don’t want to sit and brood. Your hubby will soon be back.”
My mother raised her large, dark blue eyes, let them settle on Mrs. Mason, said nothing.
Mrs. Mason went to a group of wicker chairs around a table and sat down with her brass band. She shouted, “I was just saying, dearie, that you ought to go out and get yourself some of these stockings. I drove over all the way to get them. I guess it cost me more in gas than it saved, and then we went to a cunning little place for tea, out of town. We had cocktails in fact, but no one must tell Mrs. Morgan what naughty girls we were. Some time you must come with me, Mrs. Fox, honey!”
“Thanks,” said Mother.
Now Mrs. Looper came stumping onto the porch. Before she was well through the dining room, she cried in her virile voice, “Mrs. Fox! Are you there?”
Mrs. Mason at once stood up and bustled off, wagging her hips through the thin voile.
Grandmother Fox, who had just come down from her room, so hastily arranged that one stocking hung down round her ankle, twinkled through the long room after Mrs. Looper, her little face quite smooth, young, and large-eyed with anticipation; “Yes, yes,” she piped.
Mrs. Looper was pleased to see her.
“I have a message for you both,” she said. “Come in here, Mrs. Fox,” and she beckoned my mother into the dining room; “I thought I would tell you, for it concerns you more than the others—”
She looked maliciously in the direction of the front veranda from which came Grandmother Morgan’s strong voice, raised to laugh down the outrageous Georgia belle, who had bounced upon her veranda.
Mother, with a languishing weariness, came to the small table, and Grandmother Fox set herself on the other side, so that each of them had her back to the veranda. The midsummer light came in over their heads and shone on their soft eyes. I have not mentioned Grandmother Fox’s eyes. She had sometimes the face of a child, now smooth and white, now brown and wrinkled, changing from one to the other in a moment; but her eyes were always the same, very large and brown, sweet and tender, under curved dark brows and thick, white hair. She looked like a little girl, or a sweet and naive old maid.
“The children,” said Betty Looper, looking firmly in our direction. “The children!” But Mother took no notice of her, and let her arms rest lightly on our shoulders. Our hair blew over her thin arms.
“My daughter, Emily Blake, who married one of the Blakes of Waterfall, Illinois,” said Betty Looper, “is in London and writes to me from there. She’s having the time of her life, and she is a good daughter. Before she left, I said to her, Emily, write to me every single week. The boys and girls have never disobeyed me. That is how I happen to have this letter, the fifth I have had from her. Her husband has business in Paris and they’re going to be there when I next hear. They’re going to stay at the Meurice. Do you hear from your husband in London?”
“Yes,” said Mathilde Fox.
“Ah! And what do you hear from him?”
“The usual thing, the weather, business, how are the children,” said Mother wearily.
“He doesn’t ask you to come over and join him?”
“He’s coming back so soon.”
“Coming back so soon,” said Mrs. Looper emphatically; “and are you getting a divorce then?”
“A divorce?” said my mother, quivering and staring at Mrs. Looper; “of course not!”
“Well, my dear, you must either give him a divorce, or go over to him.”
My mother softly, trembling, and without thought of her dignity, asked why she said that; was there something she had to tell her?
“Yes, I have something to tell you, and to you, Mrs. Fox Senior. My daughter writes to me, I will read you the exact passage:
“ ‘I met them walking hand in hand in Piccadilly and looking ridiculously like young lovers. They seemed quite carefree and never to have heard of his wife. I spoke to them. They were friendly and asked me to their place. They are living together openly. They don’t seem ashamed. Perhaps it is because they are in love, or perhaps the divorce is going through. I didn’t ask.’ ”
My mother moaned. Mrs. Looper’s brilliant, small, blue eyes were fixed on her without triumph, but in mastery. “All you can do now is to cable for information, or take the next boat. Why don’t you go with your sister? I will speak to Mrs. Morgan about it at once. Unless,” she turned as she was leaving the table, “you want to leave it like that? Unless you are going to Reno?”
My mother, livid, her eyes almost black, seemed speechless. Grandmother Fox said, “I knew; too clever by half. Very fishy, I said.”
My mother, finding her voice, said faintly, “Mother! Let me talk t
o Mother, Mrs. Looper! I am not sure—at all. Mother is so headstrong, she just arranges things—” She got up; “Jacky, Letty, go out and play right away, do you hear?”
We did not move. After she had nervously commanded us to go several times, Jacky went and I was obliged to follow her. But I could see from the far edge of the lawn, where we kept in view the house with its east and front verandas, the great slow swirl of fuss and the sultry pleasure of the plump, lazy women in this drama. By now, what with Mrs. Looper’s voice and my grandmother’s exclamations, everyone knew.
Grandmother Fox, humiliated, sat with tight lips in a rocking chair at one end of the veranda, saying merely yes, no, and I don’t know, which was very unlike her. My mother had called to her mother to come to her upstairs, but Grandmother Morgan, collecting information, had not yet gone, while the loud voices of her confidantes rang over the lawn.
Most of the women were so old now that they could not be deserted for others. Many had lost their men through the divorce courts, and some had never had any. In any case, it took only half an hour for the bubbling to die down, for cocktail hour was coming and already they were impatient with the scandal which kept them away from the room heavy with draperies, toilet soaps, and gin and whisky smells. Soon the cards would come out again, and with only a brief moment for dinner would go on till late at night, till early morning. These old women did not need much sleep.
Mrs. Looper, however, a natural governor, kept her court about her for another half hour. She left Grandmother Fox bitterly rocking in the lengthening shadows, and took those she had intimidated into the cretonne-dressed lounge. None loved her, but most would have voted for her. She was a usurper, also. This lounge belonged to the local potentate, Mrs. Morgan. A lot of people have rascally impulses.
In the conflict between these two well-matched rivals, many smaller natures had been crushed. Mrs. Looper was the daughter of an old-time farmer who made his own corn whisky. She had a gift for distilling, herself, so that she could turn potato peelings, prunes, and any debris from the kitchen and which she collected from neighbors, into liquor. She took a husband into the business and bought a seedy, downtown overnight hotel with a bar. Their son was a pharmacist, and a good bootlegger; and his daughter was studying medicine. They met good people; one son was a labor leader with a good salary, and a grandson a radical intellectual, very poor. It was a lively, gifted family.
After the death of her husband, Mrs. Looper, who had had several lovers in what she felt to be a mean-spirited hole-and-corner way, was liberated. She gradually gathered a flock of middle-aged, gambling women and ran a big card game, either in her own place or at the house of one friend or another, or in a suite of rooms in a small hotel in Chelsea. She was a gifted player, a hardy, courageous gambler and shameless double-dealer; and had even, out of the goodness of her heart, out of respect for their old rivalry, taught Mrs. Morgan a few tricks, so that she could watch out for combines in her own hotel. For, once or twice, suspicious incidents had occurred; and these hotel women were prey for the easy-lipped swindler.
Mrs. Looper’s friends were women who had been free as girls or become discontented with husbands and flat life, who never read and who hated the theater. Some gambled from one year’s end to the other. She had ruined some. They got money somewhere for her games. She had encouraged others to get divorced, so that their alimony would come to them regularly as their housekeeping money did not. She was not only imperturbable in face of other people’s disasters, but had courage in her own. She had had a stroke and could scarcely move one arm and leg. Nevertheless, she went up and down stairs all day long, took charge of chance gatherings of people, fiercely questioned them, advised them, forbade any reference to her condition by a straight, intelligent look; and when she sat down, worked on enormous tasks of embroidery, crochet, or knitting. She made men’s socks of fanciful, tartan designs, carried about with her a bedspread heavy as lead made out of innumerable squares, and was at work on a tablecloth composed of three hundred and eighty-three complicated squares of crochet cotton.
As she talked and questioned, she knitted or hooked away rapidly, working with one hand and holding the materials and needle with the stiff hand. She was scarcely still for ten minutes at a time and appeared to have excellent control of her high and hard temper. Mrs. Morgan did not like to have her at the Inn, however, for she feared she was nosing out her victims. Some of these flabby and confused women had ended up in her apartments, and some had even given up their yearly visits to Mrs. Morgan’s in order to stay in town at Mrs. Looper’s table, under her electric lights, to finger, with rising desperation, burning flush, and ever graying hair, Mrs. Looper’s cards.
Mrs. Looper’s daughters and sons were scattered far and wide over the country. She did not miss them. She merely used them as listening posts and boasted about them. She had no interest in us, nor in my mother, nor in Solander Fox.
This whole incident, which was ruin for my mother, and in which Grandmother Fox seemed to shrivel to the size of a peachstone, was nothing more to Mrs. Looper than a pebble flung for a joke at her old enemy and colleague, Mrs. Morgan.
She already, sitting there in the lounge, discouraged questions, for her knowledge was her own, and she did not give it out too freely to the wretched suitors sitting round her. She changed the subject, spoke about the weather, politics, the rage for adopted children, pedigree, and the treatment of mothers-in-law. She was against mothers-in-law, “Meddling old carcasses, with their noses in other women’s pots. Here in New England each house has a mother-in-law house to keep the old woman in—a good idea.”
She always controlled and routed by her surprise opinions.
Grandmother Fox, deserted and humiliated on the veranda, sat in the wind till she could bear it no longer, and then crept through the lounge and up the stairs, not daring to use the elevator, so as not to attract notice. She was one of the unlucky ones. Two maids coming to set the tables and Mrs. Looper observed her, “Are you going to lie down, Mrs. Fox? That’s right!” And an audible, “Poor little thing.”
Meanwhile, Mrs. Looper was impatient to know what was going on upstairs. She rolled up her knitting, rudely left her retinue sitting there, and got into the elevator. She got out at the wrong floor, patrolled Mathilde Fox’s room, and when she found the voices were too low, philosophically went to the room she had been given for the night and changed her dress. Then she manicured her nails and put rings on her hands for dinner.
Poor Grandmother Fox, who was invited to Green Acres once a year for three or four weeks in the dead season, crept out next morning to her usual post, but seemed crushed, and for once had no questions to put to the ladies staying there. However, in the afternoon about two, I heard her voice rising softly, like a breeze getting up, “Five rooms, you say? You mean, with the kitchen? Is it a modern bathroom? Oh, I can’t stand—”
But Grandmother Morgan, Mother and we went into town that afternoon in the car, and Mrs. Looper kept us company along the way.
12
Cissie morgan found that things were not turning out so badly, though it was a pity her child had husband-trouble. The mortgage on the Inn had been large and the interest rates high, and there were several large bills outstanding when Bernard Morgan died. She had paid some attention to his mild complainings in his decline, even when he was lodged in the old barn with the house servants; but now that she had a free hand she had undertaken retrenchments, changes, repayments and new loans, a complete reorganization of the financial structure of her business; and she was contemplating the buying of a large hotel in the Adirondacks or the building of one at Lake George, where she saw new business coming up.
She was short of money as usual, and had been glad to accept Joseph Montrose’s offer for Phyllis. Montrose said that a business friend of his, interested in the Metropolitan Opera, had offered to pay the fares abroad of Phyllis and a companion; and said that he himself would have the girls at his large house in St. John’s Wood for a week or
two while they looked for suitable lodgings. Mrs. Morgan would pay all this back when she could. Montrose would present a bill in proper time. Mrs. Morgan told Mathilde and Phyllis that she thought Montrose was attracted to Phyllis and would pay the money himself for the sake of a few kisses.
“But see that you give nothing for it but kisses, my girl,” said Grandmother Morgan to Phyllis; “I want you to look round in London and if you can’t see anyone there, we’ll perhaps let you go to Paris for a couple of months. You might meet a rich American businessman, or even a South American. But do nothing until you have cabled me and I have looked them up. I have connections who can do all that for me.”
Grandmother cabled my father, in Mathilde’s name, peremptorily asking him to send the money for boat fares for Mathilde and the two little girls who were coming to him.
“In this case the surprise attack is the only thing,” she told Mathilde. “That girl, Persia, had the sense to follow him. You can have at least the same sense. He’s a man with a gentle nature. You’ll see the money will come.”
When Grandmother had sent a second cable in her own name, saying the money was put down already and she wanted to be reimbursed, my father did, in fact, cable the money to us. It was barely enough.
Grandmother was busy meanwhile, buying an elaborate travel trousseau for Phyllis, rings, a fur coat, evening dresses, swimming suits, diamond clips, shoes and stockings, and luggage.
Mathilde had scarcely the energy to get our own clothes together, and was in tears much of the time, although all her selfelected bosom friends came in to help and to lecture her.
“How do I know he won’t disgrace us when I’m there?” she asked piteously, many times. She never had much hope of anything. She refused to follow the advice that was showered on her, and to buy new clothes for us on one or the other of her mother’s accounts. “What will he think of me if he sees I’ve put in the time on a spending spree? He’ll think I’m mad, just a gold-digger.”
Letty Fox Page 13
