All through the night I was kept awake by the fire in my veins and the kisses I had given Luke. Morning could not come too soon. I made up my mind to look for a job the next day, for in idleness I could not live. The life I enjoyed at that time was too fierce. Besides, it was clear I needed a place to myself. I was nearly eighteen, and was more than mature; I even began to feel weary of the wandering life; oddly enough, a young woman in her parents’ home feels a wayfarer, a stray, even while she is glad of the services given to her.
Luke Adams telephoned me the next morning at my mother’s house, to ask if my mother would be willing to take in the orphan Leon. I said she would not, but I would do my best to place him that very day. We had thousands of relatives and friends. He was very cheerful, and his self-deprecating, sweet baritone made everything between us seem a sign of intimacy. He said he must see me soon, and always with the doubt in his voice, as if, on a moral issue, I might lose him. He might experience qualms. As for me, I felt none.
His wife had come from the Jersey flats, an easygoing consummately arrogant small-town daughter, a greasy-chopped slob, with unwashed hair and a continual smile. I had held her child on my knees when he was a fat good-natured baby. Now, starved and filthy, neglected and put upon, he was a wretched, peaked lad, a gutter urchin. He slept in filthy shirts, and his mother dressed in rags, but always with the same calm air; she believed herself to be a queen among women. I had no feelings of shame toward her, nor had any of his women, I suppose, but not till now had real rage filled me about Elsie Adams.
Before, we had laughed at her and deplored her housekeeping; only now did this bitterness gnaw at me. He was mine. That was his fatal charm, he gave himself at once to a woman; he was always hers.
The next day he telephoned me again about Leon, and now, in his troubled voice, said he’d like to see me, when would I be alone in the house; and I thought he wanted to avoid Jacky, for he was certainly the “L.A.” of her summer letter. I gave him a time; but just before the hour, my mother whisked me away. The next day I made an appointment (he telephoned again) and this time it was my father who took me out for cocktails.
I had been paying visits all over town, and through Dora Morgan had heard of a woman, Susannah Ford, married to a second husband, with a boy, eight, who had a house in Jane Street, and an extra bed. She was a “real radical” as they said, and would certainly take in an adoptee of Luke Adams, for the glory of it, and because she was always a friend of men. She had some money and threw it about, to husbands, radicals; and wasted it in parties. I went to see Susannah Ford, let her know of our family’s connection with Luke Adams. She agreed to take the boy. I almost ran out of her house in Jane Street to telephone to my dear one. I could hear him throw his hat on the floor and tramp on it, in his glee, “Three cheers for you,” and then the strolling, teasing tone, “Mrs. Fix-it, eh?”
“I can always fix it, Luke.”
“Oh, yes, you are a fixer,” and with his interest picking up, he asked for the address and circumstances of the woman in Jane Street. He would take the boy there that night. I said, “Susannah’s got an eight-year-old boy, and he’s a louse. ‘Little School Barn’; he’s got a gilt-edged certificate he got last June that he can make zebras in striped wax; he’s a piece of cheese.”
Luke trilled his trullmaker into the phone,
“Don’t be acid, Letty; you’re a real cat; I never knew.”
I had so much to disturb me that I could not sleep. My father’s scoldings upset me. He was unnaturally good to me, not, I am sure, because he had been like me, but just because he had not been like me. He did not want to distort a nature so different from his own. When he reprimanded me I thought about it far into the night and knew I needed a guide, and that I should follow his advice. I am not immoral. I suffer too much from what I do, and from the smears of others, to be that. I am not hard, crass. I am soft-hearted, foolish, willful, even, in a way, too moral; I suffer very much from the imagined consequences of my acts. Very often nothing at all happens; all my sweats and tears have been for nothing. Then, indeed, I feel like a fool. No one knows what I go through.
On this occasion, I had my black hours, not of course, for that long-jowled wife of Luke’s, but for my lost youth—for Luke was forty and I knew we could not make a go of it. He was far too old; I felt disgraced at times to be so much in love with a man of that age, and yet, it was love. I thought, will I ever feel that burning, aphrodisiac kiss again? I’ll marry, but it’ll be a queer thing to marry a man and live with him when he can’t kiss like that. That, too, will be a compromise; and this is where my struggles came in—why should one compromise? If you’ve compromised you can’t give an absolutely clear look at people, that look that is a knock-out blow.
On another count, I had trouble. Jacky had come to life and caused me much trouble by wanting to argue with me about doctrines. I had always had a lot to say, but did not care for arguments in my own home. Jacky approached the social question through art. Was art better or worse before, during, after the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and so on? She did not read pamphlets and books like me, at express speed, tossing them off, and able to repeat their arguments word for word. She devoured them fiercely, but halted at every second word—“I don’t agree with this.” It bored me. I was supposed to chew the fat with her through the long winter nights in the isba; that was her idea. It went against the grain. I refused. She now wanted to confide in me.
I had received an invitation from Lucy Headlong for the week end right at hand, for the finishing of my picture. I wrote to her that I could not; I was drawing up suggestions for selling town outfits to out-of-towners, to be sent out in attractive leaflet form to wealthy women in Peoria, Washington, St. Louis, Dallas, and such places, and, to pursue my higher ideals, was planning a novel upon a rebel hero—John Brown, Robespierre, Lincoln (too much written about, but autodidact, the most interesting for a woman), Saint-Just, Byron, Dimitrov—yes, The Hero. The objection, that a woman should not write about a male hero (for she loves him too much), seemed of no account, now that I had loved several men; and I must admit that at this moment my experiences appeared to me in a new light, as the most valuable experiences of all. It was by them alone that I had begun to appraise men.
There was my grandfather—but he was so much the old, effete man—Percival Hogg, Uncle Philip (whom I had never understood till now), and my father. For the rest, the world had been filled with storming, mouth-opening males of whose acts I had understood nothing. Now, it was becoming clear to me. There are puzzles you get, as a child, out of stockings. You rub water on a piece of paper and pictures appear. My picture of the universe was now appearing to me like that. Now were appearing the Luke-Philip parts, the Amos parts. I had never yet met another man like my father and perhaps it was lucky I had him for a father, for he wasn’t the kind of man I met in daily life, nor was ever likely to meet. I saw quite well the path I was setting out upon, “the path of libertinage,” said my father; and this was one of the rare moments when I caught hold of my own tail and saw what I looked like to others. But for persons of my sort, it isn’t a thing one can do. We proceed from great folly to giant error and hope for a great stroke of luck. Also, we sometimes get it. We are not the kind to toe the line and keep our distances. One day, it’s a famine; the next, a feast. We see little difference, we suffer in the one, and enjoy the other in a great boisterousness. I prefer it! Do me something, as they say.
Jacky turned my hair gray with her nagging at one word and another in some simple pamphlet. She had no notion of joviality. She peered at concepts.
I was working on a leaflet with my new boss, Mrs. Patrice, one of the heads at the Tweed and Silk Shop, Madison Avenue, and sketching out a novel on Robespierre. I asked Mrs. Headlong could not my sister Jacky take up her option now, for she looked fagged after the summer spent as counselor at a camp. I had alternatives, too; one job offered in a foreign-language bureau, but I could not see myself as a clerk or translator, a
nd one, promised to me in Hollywood as a junior writer, if I got something published in the New Yorker. Mrs. Patrice was one of Grandmother Morgan’s clients at Green Acres, and at her more elegant hotel in Long Island; but really I had got the introduction through the Second Mrs. Bosper, Aunt Phyllis’s hated rival. The Second Mrs. Bosper was a young, handsome, shining, and amusing girl; and as I happened, when I met her, to make some derogatory remarks about Aunt Phyllis (“she was now settled down into middle-aged lard like any mamma on the cake-flour ads”), the Second Mrs. Bosper took to me, and offered to get me a place in business. It was she who took me to Mrs. Patrice. My several rough drafts for an advertising campaign pleased this dashing lady well enough. My titles I thought fetching:
Consult your home engineer; he built the streamlined model —he’ll like the streamlined You.
P.S. We are dressing—
I’d rather be lovely than President—
Personalizing you—
Make every entrance a personal appearance, but don’t make your dress the life of the party—
No wish fulfillments in dress—
Dress—the melting pot of the arts—
The shape of things to come—
Don’t oversell your best points, but consult them—
Don’t flatter yourself, and others will flatter you—
Dress, the first of the lively arts—
Build your dress on the bare essentials—
With this went snappy, modern paragraphs into which I poured all my practical imagination, experience of France and French women and knowledge of women. Indeed, it suddenly occurred to me, I had met thousands of women in my life and I was the kind that criticized every one of them, hence most fitted to be their marriage broker; for that’s what dress selling is, in the heart of every woman, marriage broking.
I was astonished at first at my facility in this line; but then I realized I was a well-set-up and a well-oiled machine suited to any of the lively arts of the day. Hadn’t I tried the epic poem at school, the detective novel, when the radical journals started to consider them a people’s art (or the opium of the people—they didn’t make up their minds), a French satiric and indecorous play (Les Loups-Phoques), imitations of Verlaine, Baudelaire, and Laforgue, when it suited me; and could I not turn my pen to anything, editorials, pageants, and arguments full of slogans as a plum pudding of raisins! Yes, I was much fitted to live in my own age; a great gift. I felt, as I sketched out a scheme for the Robespierre novel, or considered my conquests in love (I had won Luke Adams and Clays Manning), strewed my sketches from Headlong’s school, good, vivid things in charcoal, on the carpet, or wrote a one-acter against Intolerance—as I did this, it came to me that I was born to make money and would probably end with my name on a door in the plushy sections of M.G.M. I’m a realist. Yet, I was not so blind and deaf to the finer things of life. I had serious struggles with myself and consider that any failures I endured came from this struggle with myself, for at the same time I felt energy and talent superior to the paying of super-taxes. But whatever I took up, I must shine at it, that was the principal thing— always to be the best!
I had much to worry me. I was nearly eighteen and my life was confused. It was October. The struggle round Madrid kept me anxious and I was in the thick of the fight for intervention on the loyalist side in Spain. Stories were coming through on the life of the Madrileños—Clays was in the heart of it. I had his articles and letters. I felt a heroine, once removed, yet humbly too, knew my part was feeble. I still loved him bravely, best, as a woman should her husband. At the same time, I had now loved Amos and been through troubles with him, but—why this doubt? With doubts one never gets anywhere at all. Go into it and then see! And then came this lightning flash with Luke. One not only felt that, in love, this dangerous man consulted his own pleasure and had no morals, but with him, all altruism vanished like smoke. He was the moonlight wraith, the demon-lover, the eternal Adam, the faun with his oaten pipe.
When I did not hear from him over the telephone, I bit myself and ran round in circles like a wounded centipede, and every bite was poison. I could not, in fact, endure my home, where those three females, my mother, Jacky, and Andrea, lived in the age-old female way, apparently contented with their sex’s condition. I understood only too well my Uncle Philip, who must run out in the streets, with tears in his eyes, hoping for the dear lip, knee, eye, hand, and floating hair. Luke had a curious quality. Everyone knew of his affairs stretching back, as far as I was concerned, into the mists of pre-history. This, with his inordinate genius for passion, made him impersonal, or disembodied, yet the miraculously united lip, eye, knee, palm, which the thirsting lover seeks. Luke was a Stromboli; with him alternately came silence, then the spurt of fire in the legendary air. As to Amos—a poor, wretched thing, a stand-in; he only got women because there are too many hungry lovers.
I had enough trouble at this time, with my incontinence and my shame for it, my father’s exhortations, my mother’s lamentations, fear for dear Clays, my passion for Luke, and letters from Mrs. Headlong; and Amos. Amos now began to dun me again for the money he had lent me; he needed it, and I had met at a party at Susannah Ford’s house in Jane Street, a young girl, who said that her mother was marrying Amos in the fall. I suspected that Amos needed the money from me to make some show in the new apartment. This woman was rich and could set Amos up in his own place with plenty of furniture, silver, and linen; she had been a chaste divorcée for many years and had fallen madly in love with him; but, I suppose, Amos had a few debts, or needed a wedding suit. Although I felt enraged that Amos should still apply to me under the circumstances, I did my best for him, going to my father again and asking for the money, but telling him for whom I needed it. My father flew into a passion and threatened to write to Amos. I said, “Don’t do that; I prefer to cut a loss, Papa.”
My letters from Clays filled me with girlish love and at the same time I became fretful when I found he was not above telling me that he was now in correspondence with The Honourable Fyshe and Caroline, “Mrs. Clays”! The men are so weak on these scores—one can never trust them. Last of all, I had a syrupy letter from Lucy Headlong, which I flung aside, when half-read.
O MY LETTY,
I’m all agog to read your love letter to Robespierre—for what else is it? Won’t you, young girl, tell the truth and say you admire great men? But no, I make no interpretations for you—what you will do will be right; you will know how to be austerely revolutionary. Besides, we can overcome the inclinations of the flesh when we want to; and if not, why should we, women—by what law indeed—?
Oh, do go to California, child, if you can—Yankee lust for life—the frontier still—the Barbary Coast and Eldorado—hot blood, high adventure—(etc. etc.) And, oh, what hope in Spain—the bloodfed—pridefed fires of Spain—if you should go there—rub shoulders with the real type of woman to which you belong—(etc. etc.).
And your home, the charming drooping dove, Mathilde—and if another place, where? Will you furnish it?
Dear pretty Jacqueline, we have brusqued each other, and now are as it was in the beginning, and she, too, must come next time and you will feel more at ease, for you love your sisters dearly—(blah-blah). One of these days when you’re tippling alone at the Lafayette, telephone me in my town house, where I am often, to be with Adrian—(blah-blah).
Do you remember your Goya dream, little Letty, the baldheaded men and the lovely Spanish girl with skirts gathered round her hips—yourself, of course, but, why— (etc. etc.) and through the brouhaha (as you said) you heard—(etc. etc.).
Good luck to Clays. He’s a good man and good men are hard to find, as you remarked. Yes, good luck to him
LUCY.
In annoyance I threw it on the carpet and then picked it up with a pair of tongs and put it back in the bottom drawer of my desk, which I dragged up with my toe on the handle. What possessed the old woman to write in that strain? “Almost like a love letter,” I muttered. “
I wish men would write love letters.”
34
Susannah Ford was—she is—a square-shouldered, finishing-school, natural blonde, with sharp features and several fur coats. She wears hair jewels, diamond bracelets, and puts her money in ventures she thinks radical. Every day at that time she was taken up by her radical activities, her eight-year-old son, Blaise, her lawyer, her hairdresser, shopping, and her psychoanalyst. Her psychoanalyst had the newer part of her day; she went every morning at ten. Her son, Blaise, went to a psychoanalyst for children twice a week. He had been a sensitive child, it was said, nurtured in progressive schools; he needed now an expensive witch doctor, by which I mean his psychoanalyst, to initiate him, as early as possible, into the sexual troubles and social discontents of the tribe. Blaise was an unbearable infant. He had been given to understand that the whole of society revolved round his reactions. When I came to know Blaise better, I saw he was a lazy, good-natured boy without much drive, greedy rather than sensual. He had no sexual troubles at all; he was just a wastrel. It had all begun with his mother’s pretending that he was deprived of something or other because his father had “left him.” This was current jargon in the Village. Since so many women were divorced, there was an entire new philosophy to fit the case of these pensioned young women, too idle to seek new husbands.
I found myself a furnished room at Susannah’s. My mother was glad enough to disgorge me. She felt I was a bad influence with my sisters. I now had a steady job with the Tweed and Silk Shop. I moved some time in November, in wintry weather, to the Fords’ house in Jane Street. By good luck, they had the first floor front free.
It was a small house with a large front room and a small back room on every floor, a corridor running between them outside. I now occupied the first floor front, which had a fireplace at the back, an archway in the center, and a bay window with lozenge panes. I put my new small typewriter on a solid table right at the front window, and the very first afternoon sat down between the heavy curtains to work at my novel of Robespierre. I had a notebook at my side in which I jotted down, from time to time, the gag lines and ideas that occurred to me for my feature-writing work. I wrote, so:
Letty Fox Page 47
