Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  Miss Oaker looked much puzzled at this medieval romance, until Mr. Stack whispered in her ear, when she blushed and burst out into the immoderate laughter of reticent women.

  “Did you hear,” shouted Gideon Bowles, “of the woman so thin that when she swallowed an olive three men left town?”

  Then followed some olive stories (the things around which legends and stories collect are unexpected); and then Gallant Stack, who was rather drunk but in a Tom Jones fashion, said, “And I am always fond of fairy tales. Do you know the one,” he asked Miss Oaker, “of the young princess playing with the golden ball by the fountain?”

  “I’m not sure—”

  “She dropped it in, wept; it was returned by the frog, who said she could have it if she promised to take him home and put him in her little bed. She said yes; but forgot. But at midnight he came, flip-flop, and reminding her of her promise, and of noblesse oblige, he obliged her to take him in. On the stroke of twelve, precisely, he changed into a handsome prince. You’d be surprised at the difficulty she had, in the morning, in convincing the queen, her mother, about the frog and the ball.”

  This went on for hours; they told the original Shaggy Dog, the original Little Audrey, the dog, horse, pigeon, and zany cycles, as far as they knew them; and hundreds of others, and not all of this order, zany or indecent, but long local romances sung out of his own experience by the green-acres troubadour, and some surprising incidents related by two young sculptors, young giants, who ran a studio together in Maine and owned a station wagon which they drove about. They could not get themselves or their works into anything smaller. One of these sculptors told true, horse, dog, and pigeon stories which had happened to him, like, “A taxi driver could not find the address and drove me round for hours, till in despair he put me out in a blind alley and there at the end was a dead horse, all blown up, with a red flag stuck in it.”

  The other one told true adventures, long and fascinating, excruciatingly convincing, except that each account ended by his saying nonchalantly, “Well, that isn’t true, you know, I haven’t really a brother at all,” and so forth.

  The party was a great success. Persia still retained some youthful looks and had a fondness for men.

  Gallant Stack, who was married, was preparing the conquest of Miss Oaker; it was not difficult. He bragged with pretty boyish frankness about his success with ladies and its simple cause. The medieval legend was just a curtain-raiser to more naked stories of his own prowess. He was obliged in his business as wine salesman and publicity agent to roam the country. He did good business visiting college towns where the professors liked to think of themselves as sherry-tasters; and while he got the men drunk with samples, he raised a flush on the ladies’ faces and a luster in their eyes by his stories. His accounts of their behavior were quite improper. The women present at Persia’s party themselves rustled and tried to keep their eyes from starting.

  Sometimes, he would break off and tell about the beauty of his wife, a strange little wanton with beautiful breasts, which she talked about as much as he talked about his particular beauties; and at other times he would give the impression, by his accounts, that their home life, in the humble flat that they occupied near Gramercy Park, was a good-natured saturnalia. He went on and on, trying to get himself pictured by the women as Don Juan, and when one of them remarked, “My husband is going away to Chicago this week end—” he stood up, turned to her with bright eyes and said, “Then I’ll come and visit you,” and laughed, turning his fair plump face to the company coolly and continuing, “And I will make good, and so I would tell your husband if he were here! If he objected, of course I would not come, except by the fire escape.”

  He departed with Miss Oaker on these words, leaving the other woman staring after him, flattered, startled, and on her face the beautiful mantle of the loved one.

  I went away with Gideon Bowles and his sawney girl. Gideon Bowles, from his post far above me in the night air, belittled Gallant Stack, telling sneaky tales about him. Gideon left the sawney at her place, promising to come back in half an hour and spend the night with her, after he dropped me at my mother’s.

  “I want to see Mathilde,” he said, slapping his lips together greedily. “She and I have been very good friends and I haven’t seen her for months.” But at the door he stopped, held my shoulders hard, kissed me on the lips, and then laughing boldly he strode away, saying, “Give my love to Mathilde, dear,” and the whole thing was an imitation of Gallant Stack.

  Mortified by the persistent looks during the evening and the casual touches and kisses of these dull devils, I went to bed in great misery, and resolved never to go to my father’s again. My father was a good-natured man who never restrained his company. I said to myself, “I am the same myself, I don’t know the limit either. I hope it’s really a sign of good nature and not of weakness; at least in me. In a woman it might just get to be weakness, and I don’t want to get into loose ways.” I thought of Persia sitting there, surrounded by men, taking it all in, saying nothing indecent and amusing herself so slyly. “I prefer,” I thought then, “to be a generous fool.” No doubt, the fairy heard me, for it was granted.

  29

  I will try to tell the wretched episode with Amos, a friend of Clays, as it was then to me, and not as I see it now. I thought myself in love with this man. What is worse is that I always think myself in love. I have had relations with men I did not much care for, but only for one night or two. These men, afterwards, meant nothing to me; they were total strangers, or less; I thought very meanly of them. I cannot tell if I have ever been in love. It seems to me, at times, I never have been; perhaps only once. I am not counting as this once my affair with Clays, because that was the fruit of girlish ideas about marriage, which were given to me by the family and society. I don’t know if I loved Clays. I loved one man, I believe. We’ll get to him later.

  Amos, whose second name I leave out, for the sake of his various brides, was then about thirty, a weedy, insinuating blond who wrote very badly but was quite a rabble-rouser when he spoke, and easy with women; at once, full of soulful regrets, common sense, and simple lewdness. I don’t know whether he was born this way, or learned it. His own story was that he had suffered a lot with women as an adolescent, and had been kept in the background by his mother, a woman who went after men. But he was nothing repressed when I met him, although he still had about him this shadowy sorrowfulness, and apparent reticence, while telling all, which is so dangerous for women. Women have lots of secrets, because there are all kinds of women; but they are, after all, foolish, because they must become mothers, and any man who finds this out and uses it is a dangerous man. This is what I mean about Amos. Of course I did not know it at first. Another point is, I suppose, that no man is dangerous till you take an interest in him.

  He was a professor, as they call these ignorant men with freshwater degrees, in a small college outside New York. In this same college there were also brilliant and original men, who were either too idiosyncratic to conform or who were struggling for a footing. The one most smiled-upon in the academic world of his small town was Amos, a rawboned hick (I hate to write it) from Illinois, who flattered himself about Lincoln and his own hard struggle. He had a couple of degrees, and the favor of the faculty. He found a faint radicalism judicious and supported the Labor Party for the time being.

  During the summer of this year (after I was seventeen), I easily persuaded my mother and father to let me go away to summer school, not only to help me out in the coming year at college, but because I felt so lonely without Clays. Clays had written me one letter from a town, or village, in northern Spain, in fact on the French frontier, and then had got to Madrid—and then nothing but his reports which I read, under a nom-de-guerre, in the newspapers. I read the papers frantically, feared that all the time the telephone and press building would be blown to atoms, and fretted myself so much that my marks came out very badly. I was unable to keep the whole story to myself, and let my man
y friends know that I had a fiancé, in Spain. I was quite grown up now, much more mature than the boys around me, but I knew their world from top to bottom, I had all the local talk down pat, and (perhaps my contretemps with Clays helping) had developed the proper manner with the boys, a sidling, caressing, flattering attitude, with upturned face, baby voice and charming pettishness (carefully practiced by us all), and a friendly smile for all lewd gestures which was so successful an act that I had many boy friends.

  “For,” I said to myself, said I, “these young divorcees are enough to make you sick: they lose their husbands through knowing no other men, and I will never be like that. I will know men to keep my husband when I get him.”

  It was the old Eve, I suppose. I had to live. I was nearly eighteen. My father was no longer obliged to support me at eighteen; I could be in the university at eighteen. Why be a baby in anything? But I had the Old Scratch in me and felt obligated to try to get every boy who came under my notice; friends of girl friends, boys with poses, boys with peroxide bleaches, boys who pretended to be aesthetes, and even ambivalent boys who had a yearning interest in girls and reminded me of lapdogs. The most dangerous boys for me were the political-faction chiefs, for I could often beat them on their own ground, and when they would go away in a huff, I would feel desperately that I had lost them and would run after them. At the very next meeting, I would roll my eyes, go peek-a-boo and amen all they had to say. Besides, to me, they had the most prestige.

  A good many of the girls, by now, had secretly had their photographs taken naked, to show to their male friends. This had shocked me long ago with Edwige: I did not think the world could keep going another day if such corruption were known. But now I, of course, had these photographs in my possession too; and several boys, the ones who dabbled in art, had painted my picture or used me as a model for charcoal or pencil sketches, sometimes nude. I had a fine head, powerful and sensual, with oval eyes, thick hair, and the kind of skin that gives back the light, but it was my figure that they hankered after. I nearly was seduced by one or other, when I became his model, allowing him to sketch me as I lay or stood, languidly, heavily, a naked virgin (no one knew this) on some hot afternoon, or in some overheated flat, or even in some cold flat, that the poor aspirant had tried to make richly depraved with a couple of cushions and pictures. The pictures (etchings, oils, drypoints) were often of other nudes, and sometimes the work of the talentless artist himself. They belonged to cheap art classes for the pleasure of seeing the naked model, but the models were real models and had their points. I was jealous of them, but when I observed that none of them was as I was in my particular beauty, after all, I took it more philosophically and began to tease the boys themselves, with their lank pale faces, so longing and so stupid. For they had really run through every experience, they thought—and once you think that, of course, you know nothing and you are done. Now, there’s a feeling I never have had.

  One, Ken, said, “I’m a hedonist, you know, Letty”; and I, knowing quite well all the girls who had preceded me, and having even seen his bad sketches of them, making them ugly, too thin, or too fat, or droopy, or sprawling, in his portfolios, sighed and felt pain.

  “I don’t expect you to marry me,” I said, laughing with difficulty, “for standing, sitting, or lying. This is Art for Art’s sake.”

  “No, no, that—” he waved his lank hand and turned his teased blond face from me, “at our age—we can only enjoy. Have you any other object than full experience? Later on, the libido is confined. Let joy be unconfined.” He continued languidly, giving a few inexpert dabs at his line-drawing of my breasts. “My last subject had a curious shelf-form here, she was a Negro of course. She was quite perfect for her type.”

  “You are so detached, you dog, that I really don’t feel naked at all; that’s no compliment to you!” I laughed with some hardihood, for I had just made up my mind to leave him. He was shilly-shallying, but he put the shilly-shally on my conscience.

  “Women are always naked before men,” he said in an exhausted tone; “their thoughts meet through their clothes, you know; it is really no surprise when a woman undresses before you.”

  “Good, but Renoir didn’t think so.”

  “He was an old man,” he said contemptuously; “you see, he had no chance to see women but professionally. Frankly, look at one of his paintings with an unprejudiced eye and you’ll find them all the same. One feels he became enamored, through the eye, of one model—that’s so common with old men. It is much better to prostitute the eye as a youth, you see, for that forms the artistic sense, breaks up the lines; you know the theory that art is based really on the feminine form.”

  “Ah,” said I, obscurely stung, “and woman’s art—”

  “Feminine art,” he sighed, “is there any?” He added a last disfiguring stroke to the academy for which I had so obligingly sat to him, without a rag on. “Women’s art is limited by their timidity. And then they scurry too much, too much interested in the drapery—in a different society of course, where they would have contact with the flesh—more frequently—”

  I sat down, pulling my little pink shirt over my head disconsolately, and after a while (the dark was coming) I said timidly, “Ken, what is to be with us?”

  He yawned, got up, put away his pencil, and looked critically at some sketches of me he had made the day before. “I don’t seem to get you at all, you’ve a difficult figure, it’s really out of drawing.”

  “Ken, I asked you—”

  “You must decide, you know.”

  “You are not exactly the great lover, are you?”

  “Love is just excess baggage for moderns,” he said, most carefully attentive to his chin, which he observed in a mirror. “Of course we agree on that. I know you’re a girl with experience. Naturally, with an ordinary virgin—”

  “You know, Ken, I must confess something; I am a virgin—” He smiled, “Oh, I know about everything—I’m broadminded.” But he smiled at himself in the mirror, not at me.

  “Ken, I am really a virgin. Don’t be so broadminded.”

  He turned stiffly. “That’s the craziest story I’ve ever heard.” “Well,” I said, stubbing my bare toes on his dirty old imitation Persian rug, “it just happens that it’s true.”

  He sat down in an old chair that he had painted white, and stuck a bit of red silk on, and looked at me profoundly, through the gathering dark.

  “So that’s that,” I said, dismally.

  “I guess so,” he said quietly; oh, the practiced little calm and cold, in the dark. He was used to farewells. I was crying quietly, and brushed my hand over my eyes. He must have heard my sniffs, but he did not move. I finished dressing.

  “Well, so long, Ken,” I said, standing in front of him and hoping for some kind move.

  “Well, thanks for everything,” he said, getting to his feet and going to the door with me. He bent and kissed me with cold lips.

  I had to see him at N.Y.U., where I took evening courses, in the cafeteria, in the bookshops; I saw him that week and the next going round with other girls, who had that silly vain expression that I suppose I had had. I sat at tables in the cafeteria with crowds of girls, among whom were five or six, whose so-far-virgin bodies he had drawn; that was his simple technique. He sat at a table apart, with some other girl, looking at us vaguely, or above our heads— always dim, remote, and somehow unreal. Perhaps he did not look at us and scarcely thought of us, all pretty girls (for he was an artist) that with his dull contempt he had made to feel like a dusty crowd of hens. I wanted to leave the university and get a job somewhere where no one would know my shame, to make it simple. For, as usual, I had told everyone the whole story and everyone supposed that he was (at least) my second great experience.

  Thus, when summer came and I had the chance of going to this summer adult camp where classes in politics, economics, and literature were being organized, I was very glad to go. Some of the serious girls from college were going, including Isabel Car
twright, the ugly girl who was still my best friend, and I even agreed to let Papa take the money for it out of my grandmother’s money, although I did not think it fair—for Clays and I would need it all. I resolved to make him give it to me back later on. Perhaps he would do better, or Mother would get a divorce and another husband, so that she wouldn’t be such a burden on him. I knew that Grandmother Morgan was always hunting for a husband for Mother; not very energetically perhaps, for she always told people her daughter Mathilde was “pretty but slow.” “She likes to be a back number,” she would cry cheerfully. “She takes a pleasure in being a pill.” I had little hope of Mother’s remarrying. The only hope was that Persia and Solander between them would make a financial go of it.

  It was called Camp Lookout, in the Ramapos. The arrival day was tremendous fun. I forgot all my troubles and found myself with a totally different crowd, most older than myself but not better informed, men and girls who had been to this camp for years. Most of them were radicals and New Yorkers, interested in all that interested me. I had quite a good outfit of clothes. I found myself one of the prettiest girls there and in demand at once.

  I could have had a bunkhouse with three others, two girls of my age and a woman, but I had not been there more than two hours when I met Amos, Clays’s friend who had been a worker for the Farm Labor Party. He was one of the lecturers at the camp, and quite a figure. It seemed he had been there for years and everyone knew him. He created a simmer of excitement, not only because he was well known, but because he was supposed to be a heartbreaker and had appeared this summer without his third wife, a woman of twenty-two, who had actually been in my high school when I was there. He was separated from her already, it was rumored at once, because of his wandering eye (to be polite), and was only waiting for his divorce to marry another girl, still younger. This devourer of young women was himself only thirty, as I said, and not good-looking, but with canny sweet ways that made you feel sultry at once.