I discussed the trivia of daily existence with the office crowd, and important theoretical questions with those that remained of the old group; with my friends too, and of course, domestic questions with Jacky. I sometimes visited my father or mother; but now I had one other to whom I could talk about more serious problems—well, slightly more serious, they seemed. I had met a Man. I breathed not, stir I dared not, lest something should happen: the usual misstep or mistake. As the cow in State Fair thought, looking at the hog hero, “She was not sure whether Blue Boy was a hog or an illusion.” When you find everything you want, you hold your breath. I had created like—who was it?—created a man in my image, or the hope of one, and then, whenever I saw man or boy with the appearances of my ideal—unworthy confession, but the basis of real love I suppose—I fancied myself in love. I had never, till now, been in love. Every time, disillusioned, I said to myself, Am I never going to be in love? I don’t fancy myself as a quester, but I’m a human being; I’m frail, I have to quest. And so on! But now—a man of twenty-seven, the ideal age, the perfect American, completely blond, blue-eyed, handsome, beautiful in every respect, and with an expression on his face, when he was not thinking of anything in particular (which seemed to be often), which was a mixture of natural dignity with goodness. A miracle! Well, in short, all I needed. He had been an actor, but only as a student. He had been an engineer and an economic analyst for a foreign government. Now, he was working for a big uptown firm and I met him through the newspaper. He used to cast his eye over technical articles for us. I had the job of taking the articles to him. Romantically—pretty girl enters office and finds the man; thus, I found him. Better, he came from a very old New England family, and his general sophistication and political views were the best possible for me. All this is just a description of externals, things that can be described.
As for the rest, what you see but can’t describe in round figures or on a chart—he was a man, not just half a human couple, like so many men I have met. He was a man with all the sensibilities and experiences, and even the craft of a real man; and my attitude toward him was extraordinary; that is, for me. I felt at once that I couldn’t bear a cheap episode with him. I thought, if he tries to make me, it’s all over, I won’t see him again. But anyone could see he was not the type to go into love affairs like that; he was too serious—perhaps if not serious enough for marriage, for the great and sober emotions. When I know someone who seems fun, but doesn’t really get me excited, I telephone him if I want to see him. But this time I could not. I didn’t want to start things from my side; I wanted nature to take a hand. We contacted psychically, you could say, at once, at first sight; got to know each other in the first few words. It was steady, delightful, and there was the flash of lightning. We knew each other, and yet not altogether; there was an element of wildness and speed in the air, exhilaration, as if we were on the Loop-the-Loop. Then, each time I saw him, I lost my breath in this way. Curious, for me. I wasn’t excessive. I couldn’t be, with my new method.
I saw him once or twice a week; but, between, I didn’t stay at home bad-tempered, smoking and drinking nervously as usual; I was sweetly calm. I smiled even, the whole day long, which was a mystery for my companions. The rub was—there was one naturally—that he had a mistress of years’ standing, whom he could not drop in a minute. He frankly declared himself fond of this woman, although not enough to marry. Things were ambling along in this style, he told me, when he met me. At once he knew the world had turned upside-down. Now, he had something to think about.
Well, I had enough experience not to build too much upon it. Each time I saw him it was an evening like nothing I had ever passed. Each time, I was completely happy, and each time he told me more about himself. I learned to know him better and in detail; his past, character, ideas, even his affairs with women; and I plunged myself into his personality. We were suited in all respects.
I spent his birthday with him. We went home and mixed drinks for ourselves and Jacky. Then we went out together. What a delicious day! We spent the evening at a party of Bill van Week’s, and then I went to his flat. Everything was so different with him, that I found myself passing the whole evening until late at night, thus, with him, in his room, without anything indelicate having been suggested. He kissed me, and then—said I must go; I gave him a feeling of real passion, and he respected me too much. Then, charmingly, he apologized for this (for both aspects of this), and we stayed still, talking, kissing, and coming to an even better understanding; and it ended without any indelicacy whatever.
I left feeling radiant. I saw that I had not sold my birthright for a mess of pottage. I could love and purely, sweetly, like any young girl. All my snifter-taking could stop short, and I could be clean and devoted. I had often seen it before. It was not that I did not love him materially—this, too; indeed, more than others. I could not sit still when he was there. It was fantastic! I was on wires; but the promise for the future, a real relation, a serious love, was so dear to me that I knew there were more important things than making sure of the night’s happiness.
I naturally bored poor Jacky half the night on the subject of my new love; I told her what it was to be in love. How considerate! This time, too, I had patience and bore without a murmur the doubting smiles of all my friends. I knew I had been an idiot often enough. Even this thought kept me in hand; I waited to see what would happen. How difficult it was for me to be sensible! I loved, I, the foolish virgin, loved truly, almost greatly. I knew then that if it should happen, I’d acquire an incredible serenity; nothing would be able to touch me. I have not given the name of this love of mine, because it seemed unimportant when I recall my strong feelings; but it was Wicklow.
Once more, I was merely duped. This attractive man stayed with me for months, and we were not, unfortunately for my self-respect, always so sober; but not once did he really think of letting his mistress go. Of course, now I wonder whether he really had such a mistress at all, and whether I was not the stick-woman on which he built this touching fiction.
As I had imposed a regime on myself, however, I had more time on my hands and now went out very often with other girls. I often took Jacky, who worked too hard and was miserable about Gondych; and she told me several distressing episodes in her past which showed me she was not as childish as I had imagined. I was glad to have her to look after, and began to see that I had a good side to my nature, which I sometimes doubted.
The war came. My friends fell away, most married and soon were showing their young bodies much swollen in parks, and, later on, were sitting with their fair and dark hairs pinned up, in new cotton Mother Hubbards, playing watch-dog to baby carriages. They looked very youthful, more than I did, and very vapid, as if they had never been to school and never read a book. They looked like themselves at the age of four; and soon—after that—but I’m advancing the clock a bit—they had with them replicas of themselves at the age of four; and by that time had aged, looked careworn, a bit thinner, and were urging me to go back to Mother, get married, think of the older values. They kept asking me if I believed in those ideological salves; if ideology itself was not the soporific of the people and whether women especially ought not to go back to the old race-ways. Later on, this emptiness of head gave them heartaches. They became unhappy with their husbands. If their husbands were away at war, needing something to think about, they became the most serious possible little nuns of the progressive school movement and worried about diet, and should you spank Junior! But where were the lively, smart girls of my adolescence—where are the snows of yesterday?
Although sorry I had no husband and baby, I could no longer rub shoulders with these thwarted and miraculously stunted youngsters who had become middle-aged women, dull, smug, neurotic. One of the things I noticed about them was that they chafed themselves sore about the smallest household irritations, and the natural failings of the men they had yoked themselves to. I thought to myself, I shan’t be like that; I’ve seen enough men to know t
hey aren’t perfect. I’ll make a model wife. But my experience of men and the common-sense view I had of their lives made it difficult for me to marry those gossoons who were now marrying to escape the draft. I was sick when I looked at the beautiful babies that came out of these war marriages, and knew I should be glad to have one; but all that went along with it did not suit me.
Yet the men got better as the women got worse. Many a time I saw one of my male schoolmates married who was ten times better than before marriage, and with whom I could talk easier than his wife. His wife retained usually, some of her college habits: wise talk, solemn face, vague tags of modernism (slowly growing whiskers), an attachment to the more serious programs on the radio, at least at parties; I still clung to real life. It was to me, it seemed, the men turned. I did not trust myself enough to think, either, that if I were married, I would be different from these kids. True, I was fairly smart, but I always had that mad urge to sink myself in the heaving sweaty mass of humanity and be one of the girls (or boys). I would try to be a cave-wife, just as they did, in order to prove I was a good guy and not a prune and a prissy.
Well, apart from this, with everyone turning into a model citizen with accepted values, life on the old home front crept along, progressed sadly and sometimes gaily, when there were farewell parties to boys I knew, or weddings. The radicals I knew had fallen into line with an ungraceful bump and there was no more official iconoclasm. Some of the radicals were delighted at this, they had always felt gawky and out in the cold. Others, the hot-blooded ones, felt very mad indeed, but they could not do much. I was betwixt and between; I had enough red blood not to like a lot of things I saw passing under the name of patriotism and the war effort, but I hadn’t the guts, folly, or lunacy to go out on my own hook. I had to belong to society.
New York was now the deadest place imaginable. Everyone was in the army, married, out of school, or following war courses. No one was a radical! Everyone, therefore, though they would not admit it, was slightly discouraged. Their life principle was hit. For no one, after all, can consider war, even against a hated enemy, an aim in life. No one can consider the death of your nearest and dearest as a good thing; and any woman, even unmarried, thinks, Well, do I after all bring up my boy to die like that, horribly, and unwillingly? We still have that weakness about having boys.
As to the radicals—it was finally hitting all the prize dodos (dodo, a fabulous and antediluvian bird existing in Wonderland— and that’s what New York was then) that, (a) If this was a people’s war, it was up to the people to make it so, and not a time for the people to retreat on all fronts; and (b) Capitalism, draped in the well-known Star and Stripes, British Union Jack, and so on, a handsome and imposing figure, supported by all that is fair, strong, young in the nation, was pulling some awfully funny stunts, for an ally of Soviet Russia; thus, refundable corporate taxes, delayed second front, mad income taxes, hitting kids like me; and other signs reminiscent of the detested Britisher, etc., etc., ad imperialauseam; and (c) That wars are pretty grim things and the people fight them, even when it’s for someone else’s glory and profit.
I really think the only thing that carried me through this moral bottom, which always comes in a profit-taking hour, is that I worked for the United Nations out of hours, daily talked with all and sundry about guerrilla warfare, militant action after the war, the rise of the oppressed peoples of Europe, the hope of a Republic in Britain, and the future of the world; the future in the future tense, not in the past tense.
I had, thank goodness, a very decent job with good pay; I worked mad hours for the fun of getting my back into something, all purely voluntary, without extra pay. The work came so thick and fast that it didn’t get done, even with respites of gabbing and sly cokes and cocktails in between, and reduced lunch hours. I liked to see the work, so that I could sail into it, and yet I got tired, and I did not like that hurt look that bosses so easily acquire when someone (the secretary, or other inferior type of human) “lets them down.” But since it was, after all, for a cause, the war—and it was wonderfully encouraging to believe in this—we did it, and liked it. It also gave me the feeling that my adventures after hours were purified by all the work. I believe they were. I had a right to them. I was beginning to feel all the oats I had eaten all my life. I wondered why we couldn’t have a war-effort all the time, only without any war; a peace-effort. That’s asking too much. In peace, they let you drop—with a short, sharp shock! I got into the way of nosing out journalistic scoops and wondered if I couldn’t make a career in radio. I thought I saw in myself a combination of Dorothy Thompson, Anne O’Hare McCormick, and Genevieve Tabouis rolled into one. I was young, and a voice, and a talent.
To drift out of these high altitudes and down to what was earth to me: I was still scratching round to make up the few hundred dollars I owed. My father eventually advanced me the one hundred dollars for Bill van Week, on the principle, I suppose, that millionaires should be paid first, a law of nature. I had rent coming up, thirty-five dollars in cleaner’s bills, and I paid more than half in the household expenses for myself and Jacky. In short, Tillie the Toiler. My mother, as usual, had ten dollars in the bank. Grandmother Morgan, as usual, was several thousand dollars in the red. She was the one who lent me most of my needed money. She had real financial power; for this it is to be able to live entirely off debts. I have not this.
To keep up what they used to call (blissful days of Academe) “extra-curricular activities” (funny word for fun), I scrounged and sponged, worked hard and saved, labored and starved to go to concerts. I paid fortunes for my seats and usually reduced my avoirdupois by force majeure for two or three days before and after. With work, I returned also to the mind. The fact is, when I loaf I can do nothing, and don’t even get men; and when I work, I can do everything; learn too, and get men too. But I’m such a little elephant of work that I need these periods of incubation. The worst is—if I marry will I just silt down into primeval mud like the rest of the girls? I’d hate it; but a woman as strong as I am can also be strongly, wickedly lazy, and forever; and take it out as a common scold. The weak worry about losing their souls, minds, or education. I could just be a beast, a partybeast, a kitchen-beast, a nursery-beast. I’m afraid of myself.
Well, the example of Jacky, too, helped me. I was ashamed to see her, sitting piously at the feet of Academe, goddess of dust, confinement, and bread-eating. Jacky was getting lectures with a veneer of objectivity about economic determinism, Buckle, Hegel, Marx, Mumford, food-determinists, geography-determinists, and so on (implying a restricted and rigid kind of determinism, a teacherish sort) all in one three-quarter hour. Pretty swift work even for America, where “Alles geht auf dampf.”
Jacky became madly enamored, even really in love with Benedetto Croce, and was stumped, indignant, she flew into a passion, when I dared to raise the query, “What does that unsainted resident of the Naples slums think of matter?” I made her agree that there was a good deal of Platonic ideology there. Teacher told Jacky, Hegel and Marx were impossible to read. I told Jacky I could read both at the rate, say, of about six pages an hour, not guaranteeing to understand every word. I had a mission; life at home became a riot, but I was back in my stride. I thought I was doing Jacky good by coaxing her, rather forcibly, at the end of a leash, out of her Cave of Adullam. Jacky did not like Marx or Hegel because she could not fall in love with them. She was wild about Spinoza, Melanchthon, Shelley, and Bertrand Russell. Why? No need to give the answer. I never saw such a girl for marrying immortals. I don’t say I understood all the rot I talked, but I had poor Jacky backed off the map every time, and only raised flushes and tears in her.
It proved one thing to myself, which was the object of the whole rousing tussle in me; that, at least, theories to me meant theories; they meant fighting and some resolution, while to the purely feminine girl they were just dreams, poems, a kind of religion.
At each new brawl with Jacky, or with others more fit for my fighting, I felt the
world ought to be organized differently, so that I could keep this kind of life up forever. My marshal’s baton was once more peeping up out of my knapsack and sprouting. I thought that Napoleon, too, had his lazy, worthless years, and wrote reams of vaporings. He got nowhere until he was placed somewhere by the chances of war. If only I could get in touch with a great man of action, if only I could work together with men of energy and intelligence, modern men who think the way I do. I couldn’t do anything with the compatible groups in which I was happy but lazy, just chewing the rag, and I couldn’t dream after stardust and live on nectar; and I couldn’t do much as a stenographer, a special article-writer, or a messenger girl; and I couldn’t do much, truth to tell, bringing more larval human beings into the daylight and worrying about diapers and cute little sayings and lisping geniuses for years, at least, not at my age. I felt the world was too small for me. I sprouted. Was this all due to my good plumpness, my fat, in short?
With all my other work, I found time again to begin work on a new novel, a new idea. It came about through a fluke. I was at Susannah Ford’s home, where I met some refugees who were doing quite well here in the start-up of an engineering, ship-building and ship-reconditioning business. A young woman was there, very much on the outs with her young, ambitious husband. I made quite an impression on him, claiming also to be a French refugee, and out of a job. My French, which I had always kept up with Jacky, was so very good (to him, at least, a German-born Swiss) that he at last believed me and slipped ten dollars into Susannah’s hand as he was leaving, for her to give to me, to secure an appointment with him, the next day. An appointment for a job, he said. But was it?
Letty Fox Page 62
