I was staring at Edwige, whose immoderate vice was apparent to every woman and scarcely to any man, except, perhaps, her poor bedeviled fiancé, Ernest, now longing after her in public, with fine, loyal eyes. When I turned my head aside to get a light, Bill van Week, petting Edwige, saw I needed a match and got me one. Smiling through the smoke, with the little usual jokes, I turned back and saw that Edwige had already captured my escort, Aleck, who looked at her with a fixed, empty smile. Meanwhile, Jacky, sitting in the corner like little Jack Horner, was looking at Edwige.
“Have you known Edwige long?” I asked Van Week.
“Did I wish you Merry Christmas, dear,” said he, “it’s a bit late, but since I laid eyes on you, I want to be your Christmas tree: come, hang yourself round my neck.”
I did so, but pressed him, “Don’t avoid the question: how did you get to know a dame like that? A man’s judged by the company he keeps.”
“Eddie and I go round a bit in Hollywood, dear.”
“I know how to interpret that.”
“Me-owch!”
“What did you do in Hollywood, honey-chile; are you a director?”
“I worked in a restaurant: also was a soda-jerker.”
“Then why did Edwige waste her time on the likes of you?” “Well, dear, a good wine needs no bush, and she has taste.”
“Pooh!”
“I’m a millionaire, also, though I never mention it; it loses me friends. The fact is, dear, I went out there to start a drama school; I used up all my money, or rather my parents’ money, and I wouldn’t ask them for any more, also no more was forthcoming, unless I would promise to go home and attend church every Sunday. The conditions were too hard. I said, Am I a man or a deacon? Thus, like every well-found male in the U.S.A., I have ridden the rods, been a lumber-jack in Wisconsin, and sung suitable lyrics in the House of the Rising Sun.”
“You interest me, as they say in the gangster movies.”
“Eddie never mentioned her lovely cousins; kiss Cousin Bill, dear. What a woman—” he flung himself on my neck. I disengaged myself after a while (Gondych was twinkling at us too, too paternally).
“You’re fun, Bill.” But at this moment I turned my eyes to Edwige. Aleck wore his most foolish expression. I crossed the floor in three strides, plucked Aleck by the sleeve, “Aleck, come play with us.”
Edwige smiled slyly. “He seems to like being with me, don’t you, Aleck?” and she nestled up to him. With her high heels and ridiculous topknot hairdo, she barely reached to his mid-arm. I turned red and tapped my heel.
“He’s mine. I brought him here. This is my beat, dearie.”
“Letty—” shrieked my mother.
“Stick to the three or four dopes you’ve got already.” Jacky turned pale. Andrea burst out laughing. The others looked vaguely about. I marched Aleck back with me, while Edwige, I am glad to say, reclaimed her fiancé. But Gondych, after staring, had an eager little smile, and Bill van Week waited for my return with a grin, “What-ho, my little tiger-cat; a woman of action, no?” I burst out laughing, “Direct action is the only way with Edwige; Eddie’s a female pup, why mince words.” I pounced round him angrily.
“I love you, Letty,” said Bill, “the girl with the volcanic hips— how’s that for a sobriquet?”
“Don’t use bad words.”
“You’re an educated woman, dear. You know about life.”
“About life? Shame! So who you are talking to, eh, tsoo whom?”
“I know all about complexes, but I do not know about life, wept the young New York virgin.”
“It ain’t what you know, it’s who,” said I.
During this flip interchange, Aleck had wandered back to his Edwige. Bill put his arm round me and kissed me, “Don’t think about the cad, Emmy-Lou. He’s too good for you. Let me try.”
We had some more of Mother’s modest cocktails, and went to sit in a corner where Bill, with his hand round my breast and kissing in between, told me the story of his life. It was interesting as fantasy. He said that he was the only son of multi-millionaires and he quarreled with them because they were church-goers. They wanted him to be at home on Sundays and give up the Radical Party. From time to time they gave him a hand-out (twenty or thirty thousand dollars) for his projects: plays, drama schools, ballets. He had tried to start the Van Week Ballet Company. Of course, he knew not only the top-flight society figures, the debutantes who got in the papers, and top-name writers, but all the richissimi of Hollywood and Broadway success. It was the fairy Winchell world! I listened with pleasure. Rarely do you meet a man with simple daring in his lies. It was like being a child again and hearing the boys brag.
Nothing could equal my surprise when I went over to Ernest, Edwige’s fiancé, sitting quietly in his corner, to check up, and found out that every word of this story was true. Ernest even added new details, quite to the credit of Bill. I stared at Bill. He was unquestionably a good-looking man, and his strange outfit merely marked the moment of his last stormy exit from his parents’ home on Fifth Avenue. He had returned from his morning ride and was still in riding breeches, when words were interchanged. The top part of his costume went with his own breeches; the pants now in presence were got from the land outfit of a friend in the Merchant Marine. Bill actually owned a theater near Third Avenue and Twenty-third Street, which he offered free to neglected talents. They had to rustle up the cast and most of the personnel. He was a big shareholder in several radical enterprises. Everything was to his credit. He had parted from two wives on the most friendly terms; they both worked for a living and so did he.
Having made up my mind about Bill van Week, who had taken a fancy to me, and observing that I had nothing to fear from Edwige, that he was through with her, I went over to talk to my sisters. Andrea wanted to show me her fan photographs. Jacky was in a melting mood. She wanted me to go into her room and listen to some poems she had written; it turned out to be nothing less than an epic. She would not bring it into the company. Standing at the door, where I could survey everything, I ran my eye down the lines. The poem was even now fifteen pages long, and all in blank verse. This is how it began:
OPUS NO. 1
Overture.
FAUST. A high sea-crag. Faust is looking back at the distant lights of a fishing-town. His rose-colored hair flies in the gale.
What is time? The lamps go out after midnight. Tomorrow the sun rises, a smoking, sputtering lamp, or dies—but the universe goes on creating suns, only to die, as it created me, only to die. I will speak to the sun, in a loud voice; perhaps I can stretch over the abyss to where it hurries. Daystar, plunged in night, rush forth to me, press your great lips to mine, re-create with me the spark that flashed from the skies when I stood at the gates of life. Few are brave enough to talk with the sun, but I am of a great race. The sun gave me life, poured through my cells a fluid, flashing and tumbling light, glazing and dizzying light; some men and some women know the secret of my birth, the open riddle they read on my flesh. Yes, but now—kindle, star of morning, in my heart, a deeper fire, deeper, for, 0 horrible, my fires smoke now; in me are ashes, the lamp is burning lower. Or spill here a rain of stars, bind me in thickets of flowers, fill my blood with new small creatures darting through the short flood of time, and make me a great vein of the earth, painlessly, without death. Turn this cup of darkness, this sea, into blue-black wine and let me drink it all at once. I am capable of that and more! Who knows what I am capable of but myself; who knows me but myself? No one can measure himself with me, but myself. I am man concentrate, all man, and on me the curse of man has come; I am old, old, old—I never thought I would get old; let others age! Old! Faust! But why did I have this irrepressible flame, if it was only to lose it, like the weak, pale man who crawls like worms? And in the very same span as other men? Why this, waste, waste, dust, misery—oh, what horror tears me—to die! And before, dances the thought, it will get worse. Love, sweetbreathing young women, in whose great eyes I see the knowledge of what I am
suddenly flash, in the moment of loving me, they will not look at me after this. For I, born a king, a sun, must go in the ridiculous garments of age, with the dragging gait, the faded suit, the rags and spots of the poor scholar, ridiculous to the fat middle-aged woman flaunting the disgrace of her flesh, ridiculous to the empty-faced boy whom no passion will ever make mad, ridiculous to the monkey, the thief, the dog, the peanut vendor, the sot, the servant. I come to this? But must I die? I will not.
And the First Scene was a great room filled with moonlight. The only novelty was that Faust and Mephistopheles were one.
I said, “But you know what they say in college. It’s very good, you know—but why don’t you write something about your daily life? No one will ever publish this.”
Jacky looked at me.
I said, “You know the old crack—only minor poets use great themes.”
“As for that,” said Jacky, with extraordinary boldness, “great poets also use great themes you know; and this is my daily life.”
I laughed, “Really? Well, you’d do better with Bill van Week. Or Aleck. You’re really passable, Jacky, but you don’t seem to know it.”
I now felt bored with the place and thought I would take a walk with Van Week. As I looked at him across the room and caught his eye, there was a flash like a short-circuit. It was the sign, the real thing. I rushed out, put my arm through Bill’s, and said, “Let’s go, Bill; I need a cocktail. I said a cocktail.”
“I am already with you in spirit, to coin a phrase,” said he; “my hat, my New Masses, and a low salaam to your charming mamma. I’m lucky to meet you. I’m in one of those moods. I’m sick of juggling these soap bubbles of mine. It’s not good for art; it’s not good for family life, and it’s not good for my peace of mind. And I need plenty. My life isn’t all leather medals. But I have to keep going until one of the damn bubbles breaks and some gold trickles through. Look at the bum metaphors—just like my life.”
“Why don’t you put up with the family portraits and family prayers?”
“Damn my family—”
“For shame—come, let’s go, while the going’s good.”
“You’re a man-stealer,” he said, laughing; and went off for his trinkets.
I said good-bye to Mother, Andrea, Gondych. I said to Jacky, “I didn’t know Mother was so pally with the Ancient of Days—Father Gondych.”
Jacky looked pained and shot a look at Mathilde, “But Mother isn’t divorced, Letty.”
“Oh, when she’s a couple of years older, she’ll be giving us yearly beanfeasts like Grandma Morgan and asking our young advice about men. I hope so, at any rate.”
Jacky was not pleased. We went out. Aleck started to come after me, but frankly, I was so angry with him that I was delighted to leave him behind. I said to Bill, “And now, tell me how you met that indescribable little witch, my cousin Edwige.”
“You’re an indescribable little witch yourself,” he said.
I fox-trotted along the street. I was already madly in love. I could not believe my luck that I had really found the perfect man, the man, most eligible of all eligibles, and that he liked me and that we were going to spend the evening together. How would it end up? I didn’t care how—I even hoped for the worst, so that he would know more about me and like me better. He hadn’t a smirch on his record; his politics were like mine word for word, and I approved heartily of his manly attempt to make a name for himself apart from his family’s millions. For even this was true, the existence of the millions, the marble palace on Fifth Avenue (only it was a skyscraper), and all. Moreover, as he went along, he confessed his faults and adventures to me, like an old friend, and I even told some of mine.
“I love you, Letty!”
Why shouldn’t love be like this? Perhaps I had dreamed of moonlight and roses like other people, but this way is better. He said, “You’re the essence of the feminine and yet you’ve almost no womanishness, or just enough to make a shrew, which is all right by me”; and I said, “I didn’t know men could be like this, Bill, a comrade and a friend; of course, as a schoolgirl I thought of it.”
It was impossible to separate. He took me to my home and for a long time we sat talking in the long room, really a salon, in which I lived. We consoled each other for the various frauds of life; and we thought much alike on this, too—the same hopes, the same disappointments, the same frankness and lack of hypocrisy.
It came to the point where I burst out crying in his plaid waistcoat, and told him almost all my story, even relating the details of these last few weeks, Luke Adams and Lucy Headlong. He made sensible remarks without taking either of these affairs as seriously as I had done. He had the kindness to stay with me until morning; and by then I knew that he, too, was in a fix. He had paid for a room in a Forty-fourth Street hotel, an old place where theatrical people often went. After a week he would be in debt and had nowhere to go. I offered him the use of my room, and at first he was tempted to take it.
“I could sweep for you, dust, cook, wash, iron, and save you the cost of a maid,” he said thoughtfully, but after a while he added, “But the fact is, I have no source of income; if I could pay my way I’d gladly live with you, Letty, but I can’t live on you—you’re working.”
I told him I was not rich, although I had a few hundred dollars I could draw upon in need, but that Susannah Ford did not need the rent badly. I was earning enough to keep both of us for a while. As to dress, I would sting my grandmother; she’d put up with it. He thanked me and seemed very touched, saying I was one of the best pals he had ever had; and indeed, I was beginning to regret very much the Christmas party at Arnhem. I could have met Bill several days before. However, Bill, after breakfast, which he cooked, told me that he had thought it over, and that if he was too proud to live on his parents, he also was too proud to live on my earnings; and that it must all wait till he got a position himself. He told me that people in the city owed him at least fifteen thousand dollars, partnerships, debts, in his various enterprises which they had not paid up; and that some of the people concerned were the best-known people in New York. He had been so hunted for debt that he had had to leave town, thus giving them a breathing space; but at present he had the matter in hand and expected, any day now, to get some of these thousands. He then told me that he was not really a beggar; he owned several properties on Fifty-seventh Street and one on Fifty-eighth Street which was a gold mine; but he had refused the rents from these places for several years, and this money was accumulating at the lawyers’. Nevertheless, out of pride, he wished to show his family that he could become a millionaire on his own hook.
I had to yield to these honest arguments, though I could just as well have dispensed with them and been glad to see Bill use my place while he was out looking for a place and trying to get the debts reimbursed. Meanwhile, I sent him to Banks, my father’s old associate, the lawyer, now well-known, and promised him that Banks would get his money for him and not ask for a share; he had now become a lawyer of the highest class. He was rich and charged small fees to any friends.
“However, I don’t say that a Van Week can pay it in peanuts,” I said to Bill.
Bill smiled, told me we’d make the best team he’d ever heard of, and went off at once to see this lawyer. I expected him back in the evening and came home from work in a very cheerful frame of mind. I had worked at top speed that day and accomplished wonders. I was, to begin with, the shockworker of the place, and although a socialist and a believer in unions, the momentum of work and my interest in it kept me working fifteen or sixteen hours a day when in a good frame of mind. I had already caused many jealousies. The others feared I aimed at the top positions. They were right. I did. Why not? I was surely capable of them and had an overruling talent. Everything I laid my hand to, in business, was done not only well, but with that good-natured vigor which knows when and how to wink, when to lambast and when to flatter. But when I was loved and had a man in my home, I was a regular Don Quixote, conquering a flower
bed.
I came home, and no Bill! Presently, he telephoned me; and we went out to eat in a steak restaurant then à la mode on Ninth Avenue. Butchers, theatrical people, brokers, and other good eaters were beginning to know it. We then went to Café Society and to a real night club and after that to a party. We rolled home at four in the morning; and I, of course, had to be at work at nine. I left Bill sleeping. Nevertheless, my satisfaction at being settled was such that I again worked all through the day and took a taxi home, preparing to go out for cocktails and dinner as usual. I had bought a dinner dress, costing $110, in Fifty-eighth Street, a rather matronly, but clearly expensive affair. I had to borrow on my salary for this; but I thought, Perhaps I will soon be a Van Week getting my stuff at a discount there, for the publicity of it.
Bill was nowhere to be seen. After I had waited an hour, he telephoned, with his dear and his honey-love to say that he had decided to become reconciled with his parents as Sunday was approaching, and he felt it a shame to deprive them of the innocent pleasure of going to church with them. He did not know how long he could last with the family butler and plate, and the alleged El Grecos, but he had been promised some money by Banks, the lawyer, and felt justified now in facing his parents. He told me that when his parents went to the country he would take me over the mansion. This mansion in the skies was on the twentieth story, and built and furnished exclusively for them.
I sat in the dress disconsolately and wondered where to eat. I hadn’t a bean. At length I wound up at my father’s and borrowed some money from him. I now had to get a stand-in to go with the dress; Bobby Thompson would have to do. While at my father’s, I began to discount my new hopes as fantasy; how often does one meet a millionaire radical in circulation? I was astonished that with our love and good comradeship, he could have floated away so easily, and was only partly comforted by the memory of something he had said to me, “I don’t visit girls; I live with them, once I have money in my pocket. But you see, I must pay the rent.”
Letty Fox Page 51
