Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  At length, with all the extra expenses, and the high fees charged by doctors and dentists to children at such a school, Solander had to withdraw me. My mother, hearing of this, asked for me to be sent back to the States.

  I traveled by myself, under the special care of the Captain, the Purser, and a stewardess on a liner, and reaching New York in summer at the age of thirteen, felt myself a woman of experience.

  Jacky was at the wharf to meet me. I hardly recognized her. I was far developed, with promises of good looks, and a turbulent, gay, ambitious face, bad manners, no doubt, restive, overbearing. With my mother was a pretty girl, with long hair, well-shaped eyes and mouth, a vain, nervous face, clouded with shifting notions, whims; a face delicate, but uneasy with temperament. It was, I saw with shock, my sister Jacky. It was not the same person. I had no confidence in her. No doubt the disappointment and jealousy of this moment affected me profoundly, and formed one of the reasons for my becoming so bold, arrogant, and coarse in the following years. I saw that the world of things I had learned abroad would not do; I dropped it from my shoulders and set to work to learn whatever would make me a success here. I knew I was sharper than Jacky; experience did not hurt me and it stunned her; it would not alter my looks, while she would droop. I did not fear Jacky’s competition in popularity, but it seemed to me another person had been substituted for the girl I knew. She looked sly and I saw a sort of plausible charm, partly acquired from the local slick fable of women. She swung her curls, was a pretty, feminine dresser, coquettish, snobbish, looked sideways at all the young men and laughed. When I boasted that the young Duke had kissed me, and lain by my side on a cot, she stared at me with well-bred astonishment. “I would never do that!”

  It was humiliating. I answered this with bounce and invention. I said he had proposed to me. She accused me of vulgarity and lying. I said she was a parrot, a pet, an actress, and in French, “What a comedy!”

  She had not forgotten her French. We quarreled; I called her prig and man-mad. But I set to work to shine in school, for I had always had the best reputation for scholarship in the family—the only reputation. Most of my cousins were soft, satisfied materialists. They already went to dances, had beaux, were leaving school and having a good time. The family, inspired by Grandmother Morgan, spoiled them and smiled fondly at their misdemeanors. There wasn’t a serious face in the family. But as I also had reasonable good looks, I hoped to do as well as they—indeed something better than that.

  Solander, who had left me, as my mother and aunts said, had always talked to me as man to man; his rapid, ribald hurricane of humor, his merry exaggeration and explosion of honest anger, his kindness of heart, always took me by storm.

  An obscure but general ambition had been implanted in me by him, or was there to begin with. There was nothing to hold me back. Grandmother Morgan did not know one grandchild from another. My mother, though still young and sweet, was pale and uninteresting, and whenever any subject was mentioned which referred in the least to love, marriage, divorce, children, and the like, she had a sick, beaten, or dull and bitter look, and seemed to turn her back, not only on those who had injured her, but on the world. It was true that no one but my father had ever been very kind to her; and this had gone too.

  Grandmother Fox, to whom I wrote sometimes (I must admit, generally before my birthday, and in time for Christmas), adored me more than Jacky because I resembled my father in the face. My father’s nature, recklessly generous and unprejudiced, was made to spoil me. While trying to give me serious instruction and to make me honest, in a broad strain, reminding one of folklore, he invented so much, and so often revealed to me the seamy side of things, though always in a cheerful way, that I was more likely to become a satirist, or comedy playwright, or buffoon, or scandal-columnist than anything else in the world. I think at this age, before their daughters become serious-minded frumps of sixteen, or giggling flirts, with their stout bosoms and childish romances, all fathers expand genially and try to do their best for their daughters. Afterwards, at about fifteen and onwards, the relation is better forgotten.

  I never was a puritan, and the wild, high spirits I had, which were only touched off by company, and the opportunity of showing off, made me the life of any party if I had no proper competition. But a fiber of Mathilde was in me, too. If any girl were present, bolder and richer than I, quicker with men, I became dull; I drooped. I was often defeated because I would not fight. If I did fight, it was out in the open, fiercely, with brawling and shouts; never in a sly manner, or with slow conspiracy, or with silence. These are methods I despise. They are cold-blooded. Yet, of course, with some, as Persia, they work. I am simply too impatient. There are all kinds of methods.

  That summer, I was simply a tomboy, hurling myself about the town, when in town with Mother; and about the garden at Green Acres or at Long Island, to the annoyance of the guests. They did not care for me. Jacky sat on a stool or the bench and read books. The ladies did not like this either, but said she would ruin her eyes. She would simply get up, seriously, and walk with her book to another place.

  A male schoolteacher, about thirty, from a preparatory school, took an interest in her when he saw her reading epic poetry, and they went for walks and talks round the garden.

  When my cousin, Edwige Lantar, came to the place for three weeks, all this changed. I left off amusing and instructing the old ladies with my chatter; Jacky gave up her books and her thirty-year-old schoolteacher. Edwige was going on for twelve, but seemed to be fifteen, though small, and with a bird voice. She was a reddish blonde, with a spotless, fair, firm skin, and of a pronounced, delicate plumpness, with unusual proportions, small waist, wrists, hands and feet. Though I was jealous of her, the whole family talked of Edwige. I had never seen her. She walked on high heels, with her small pointed nose turned away from us, although she had seen us; she had a slender neck. When she had finished her walk, she came toward us and looked at us with a little smile. I spoke to her in my usual bubbling style, showing no concern nor respect, but I felt uneasy. Her eyes stared at and into me; they shone exceptionally, like polished glass, and were of an impenetrable light blue. She laughed continuously, like a mechanism; pouted her small, red mouth and smiled affectedly, while vapors passed over her face, but not expressions. There were no expressions in her voice, either; she tinkled up and down. She behaved like a doll and watched us all the time. She looked at us sweetly, lifting her face in childish appeal, and at the same moment, her voice would take on a metallic ring; and, as she watched us, trying to make out what we thought, her eyes showed something beneath. They flicked back for a moment, showing behind a burning heart, almost mad with selfishness, dangerously alert.

  I don’t mean we saw this all at once. Jacky merely disliked her, but something in me was astonished and afraid. After she went to the house, I stood looking at her back going away, and gulped. She was not really very bright, but shrewd and more immoral, as it turned out, than any other person I ever met. She understood she was immoral, and she said, one must be. The world was like that, it was the only way to get on. Everyone was, she said. She instanced everyone we knew, grandmothers, nearest relatives, friends, she showed them to be relentlessly but mindlessly wicked monsters living a predatory life of self, and turning a pious, smiling face to us. This did not shock her. It was so, she said. She said she intended to do what she pleased in life. In the meantime, she played the part of a charming, pretty little girl to all the older women, and became their favorite. They were no more able to discern a wretch and criminal than children are; yet children and good women are supposed to sense everything. Dogs, too; and of course dogs like only their foodgivers. From same conditions spring same results.

  Edwige had this unnatural soul, and had learned all the tricks of her sex in her profession; she had one. She was a model for young girls’ clothes. She played the innocent under the apple bough for magazines, and held straw hats, by ribbons, in advertisements. She had photographs of herself, which she
carried about with her, all these ones of charm and flutter, and some secret ones which she showed only to us; in these she was naked. With burning cheeks we stared at them.

  “You must have them to get on with men,” she said, “and all women’s careers are from men. Only pretty women have any careers and although I am not a woman yet, I soon will be, and my figure is good enough already, as you see. You’re too fat, Letty, but you will whittle it down, I suppose; you ought to diet, though, or no boy will look at you. No one wants a piggish lump of suet—”

  She never spared our feelings, but spoke direct, out of cruelty. “And you, Jacky,” she said, “are almost plain. That way you screw up your face to look sweet, and all that bunk, will never get you anywhere with men; perhaps with some high-school boy who’ll want you to go out in his car, or buy a soda—you have no glamour, you don’t look like anything. You could be all right. You’re the grave wide-eyed type, but not photogenic.

  “You must get some photographs,” she continued to me. “You must take dancing lessons; but not dancing for a career, that makes everybody ridiculous, they get to have wooden faces and muscular legs.”

  “What will you do with those photographs?” I asked, trembling.

  “I give them to people I know, to show in Hollywood. Someone or other will be attracted and try to do something for me. I am not quite formed yet,” she said, looking critically at her picture, “and I won’t be perfect till I’m about seventeen, because this is the age you put on weight, but I will do. The thing to watch is your hips; if they are right, everything is right. You must have a very small waist now-a-days, just like a boy of ten’s; then you must be their type—it changes every year. You soon feel yourself on the dump heap.”

  She told us what she had picked up in the studios in which she worked, though undoubtedly not all. She treated us as children. My foreign learning, my hoydenish romping and loud, gay talking, my qualities of leadership, made no impression on her. One day when she saw Jacky reading, she picked up the book inquisitively, as if she had never seen one before, and asked what it was; was it a bestseller? Then she asked if Jacky was going to imitate it, “change the names, bitch up the situations a little, if it is a best-seller, then send your version to the slick mags,” she said. She could not understand that there was any pleasure in creation. In her intense, limited, keen idea, everyone was always working consciously for their own ends, all of them either marriage, or moneymaking. “I’m going to be a success,” she declared several times. “I’ll get everything I want.”

  Beside the frog pond, watching us but not listening to us, letting expressions scurry over her face which were not for us, but to be used on others later on, perhaps tonight, perhaps in ten years, Edwige calmly told us abominable things about adult life. Jacky and I had just entered it, and Edwige, not yet; but she knew what crimes and terrors it had, just as marine biologists can know about deep-sea things with tentacles which they have never encountered. She explained everything to us. One afternoon I happened to think of The Happy Crusader, Muns and Nuncs, and the Torture Chamber plays of our childhood. I felt ashamed Edwige, two years younger than I, would have stared to hear about them. They seemed to have no meaning. I thought, how could I have been so stupid, stupid without meaning, so inexcusably childish? It seemed to me as if my childhood had been one long parade of vanity. Then I remembered how unhappy I had been at times, suffering from the insults and well-meant stupid advice of adults, the shock I had had when I had seen Jacky on the wharf, the pleasure at the idea of marrying the young duke, surprise at Persia’s strange ways, and all the rest of it, how I had won debates at school, and received prizes in school concerts, how popular I had been on shipboard coming over, sitting at the Captain’s table and reciting French and English—I had a record too. Of course, I was older. I had lived, also. But when I thought again of my sharp, heartless, brassy rival, Edwige, who was two years younger, and of whom my grandmother was quite fond, I again felt stunned with defeat. Everyone was charmed with Edwige; with our elders she behaved like a saucy sweet baby; we did not know how to give her away.

  People who are very corrupt always fall lower and lower; they have no backbone, for they are afraid of making fools of themselves, or being taken in by some fine-sounding words. “Yes, I know all about that,” they think. Then they always engage in the vilest schemes, supposing them to be the most amusing.

  It’s necessary to be moral and have principles, even in a really evil setting. It is the only thing to pull one through. When temptation comes, one can’t resist it; but one needs moral stiffening in the inevitable disappointments. Who can face his own truth? At the first glimpse of this truth one must fly to the Ten Commandments, or the Thirty-nine Articles, or whatever is your pet Voodoo. Most people are so weak, however, or so deformed by training that they can never take a chance. I take my bearings and then steer for land, but I don’t read the Bible in a storm. Bibles are for the camp fire. I adopted some cynicisms myself, but always for one reason, because I hoped to please someone, especially a man. It is not part of my nature. When the usual misery comes in a love affair, that I call the heart’s-death, I am able to resume my life just because I believe both in the “inevitability of accident” and the “recurrence of the normal.” Life goes on!

  When I went back to school in New York in September, I was ready for adventure, social, political, amorous, any kind. Members of the Morgan family were always coming to town, and when Mother would not go to the theater, I would; so that I saw a show almost every week, sometimes more than once a week. I was fourteen. My memory seemed to have no limits I knew quotations about almost everything ever mentioned in conversation, so that I was a prodigy to myself and to my teachers. I planned a career for myself as a professor, or a writer, or headline journalist. I was no schoolma’am. I was getting to know life and thought myself very advanced, put on airs, hinting that I knew things I did not.

  I wrote to Grandmother Fox, who loved me feverishly, and who wrote to Mother very querulously, about home-coming. My French words were no affectation. I was not yet quite at home in American:

  DEAR GRANNIE,

  I am writing to you on my new typewriter. Mother bought it for me.

  We are now living in a furnished appartement and will stay here until the end of June. It seems that it is very hard to get an appartement now, so Mother is waiting till the summer. I go to a very nice school. It’s tremendous. There are more than seven thousand girls. I take a lot of crazy subjects, but only a few decent ones, such as English, French, and a few others.

  Write to me about London. What is it like now? I don’t feel so homesick for Europe, any more. But I do hope you come here.

  I am making a whole lot of new friends. I have some boy friends, too. And, I’m taking ballroom dancing lessons. I got mad the other day, because someone would have taken me to a dance, if I had known how. So now, I’m learning.

  I’m quite active over here. We are having a nation-wide student antiwar strike, and I’m helping with it. I went to a meeting, “Against War and Fascism” at Madison Sq. Garden, and I had a good time, because it was very interesting. My address now is Riverside Drive. Later on I will give you my summer address. I myself do not know it yet. Mother wants me to go to camp, but I don’t like the idea much. Wouldn’t I look cute, in a middy blouse, playing football? You remember my figure? But they have a different idea here of what young girls should look like. They should look like bread sauce. They like them to look what Papa would call “galumphish.” Of course, Jacky could not look galumphish, but I could. Jacky, too, is not anxious to go to camp. She hates the idea of living ten to a room; it is something like that. Then, she has a weak chest. Seven thousand in school, and ten, fifteen, twenty in a bunkroom. This is a mass-life, but I am accommodating myself to it. It is fun, too.

  I’ve changed a lot since I left England. I’m a lady (or think I am), now. I wear lipstick, high heels. I even have a pair of blue shoes, especially for a new spring gray suit. Tell Papa
I’m a Communist, but a Bad Communist. I use a lipstick made by a Russian nobleman, Prince Matchabelli. (It sounds Italian though.) That’s where his hard-earned money goes. Alas, as they say in Shakespeare, it must go elsewhere, too, and it is a shame, but how am I to live? Also, Jacky must go to a dry place for her cough. I think it would be nice to see you here.

  There is a very good play in New York, called Waiting for Lefty. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s about a taxi strike. With it is another play about Nazi Germany, and it is very good.

  You’ll forgive me, I hope, for not making this letter longer, but I also want to write to Pauline who is again in Paris, and to Mme. Gouraud.

  With lots of love,

  LETTY.

  P.S. Grandma Morgan is going over to Paris some day soon. Phyllis is getting a divorce in Reno. I suppose you know Mr. Montrose is in town. Love to Mrs. Montrose.

  Mother waited bleakly for letters from my father to “tell her his plans” and scarcely ever wrote except for money for her three girls. I got as used to her wretched story as a nurse in a drunk ward, I suppose, gets used to the awful stories of drug and drink addicts. That doesn’t mean they don’t suffer. It just means you have to live, too, in your own way, and harden yourself. Mathilde always asked why she was ever born and why no luck had ever come her way. I felt, in my rather strident way, that my life was my luck. I could make the best of it.

  At school I shifted from group to group—there seemed to be hundreds, and as many social strata as shelves of hell in the Inferno. I had no guide, but I was too young to want one. I don’t know what the young want; I only know what I wanted. I wanted, in a way, to be truthful, to find the truth about myself. It’s hard indeed for youth to be truthful; revelations never seem moral. Adults lie in order to be moral.