“Why do you do this, Grandma?” I asked her. “Is it because Jape started to go tippling and saying you kept your husband in the outhouse; and played around with Sid and Muron and so on? Aunt Phyllis has just become one of your own crowd and she attracts men to the hotel, you know that. I know myself that Joseph Montrose is making a play for her to this very day. But we don’t do this; we’re your poor relatives.”
I reproached her and, by proxy, Aunt Phyllis, for being warbrides and profiteers and exhibiting their true selves in the minks, skunks, cross-foxes, and heavy-hearted stones nothing could make a dent in. I said, “They’ll be sending coureurs de bois down to Green Acres yet; aren’t you crazy putting on this show and letting everyone see your crazy war-money. I think diamonds are a disgrace.” I continued, “Are we all queens in the Morgan family? It’s simply a means of shrieking to high heaven that you’re not an honest worker.”
I had tried to encourage Mother and Andrea to send back their stockings, but, with the humble life-plan which was theirs, of a dime here, a dime there, they refused, although sore.
I was sweating over the injustice reigning in the family, and the boredom of my holiday; I could hardly entertain Wicklow. I was pining for the end of the week. I thought, Good Gosh! I might be a real bride and having a baby with this man. What a prospect!
I wanted to quit a few days before, but he did not want to. I sulked and found him uncivil at night, picked faults in him, invisible before; and would not say a word to him all the way back in the train. He came to the apartment with me ( Jacky was at home for the week) and coaxed me back into a good humor. The notion that I was free of him was enough. However, as he owed me money, he felt free to criticize me. He told me I had no sex-appeal, that I ought to see a psychoanalyst for it; and he recommended one, to whom his mistress also went. This friend was a celebrated practitioner with a swank address, who had created a halo round himself because he treated poor patients free in public hospitals. Wicklow himself arranged an appointment with this man, who turned out to be one of his best friends. Wicklow was not in the army because he was doing war work in some studio of engineering design near Rockefeller Center.
His medical friend was excused because he was a doctor, and doing some very valuable work in new treatments of mental disease by a combination of psychoanalysis and physical violence; this is the way I prefer to describe it. He attacked his madmen physically, either by violent drugs, or by dropping them on the floor, out of bed, or by imposing upon them slight wounds, which cured them temporarily (of course). Some of the patients screamed with fear when they saw him coming, or knew their day for treatment had arrived. He hoped to liberate some of his young male patients for the draft. This is what I heard upon inquiry from Solander, and knowing my father’s style of merry hooliganism in discourse, it’s possible he garbled it a bit.
This practitioner turned out to be a silky wolf who lived in a lovely house in one of the best streets in the Village, those that most resemble Mayfair. He had a white door, brass knocker, a maid, the latest furnishings, a piano painted white, silk hangings; all that, and himself, were remarkably handsome.
I was very happy to see him, because he suggested understanding and even love. He begged me to stretch myself on a padded Récamier couch, and tell him all about myself.
There were some peculiar paintings on the walls, perhaps done by some of his mad patients, all of which suggested sex in some way, although they were pictures of the sea, ships, a vineyard, and a medieval battle for a bridgehead.
The lights were low, his voice too; and after hearing the details of my life—some of them—he placed his head in his large fine hand, to think. He emerged from his trance to announce that I, unquestionably, had a father fixation, and that I must be liberated from this before I would feel free with men. This Solander-fixation was the reason I did not keep men and did not get married. I asked him if he did not think the war had anything to do with it. He said I was resisting him, which was a good sign, because it meant I was beginning already to transfer from my father to him. He said he would treat me twice a week, for as long as necessary, at the rate of twenty dollars a visit.
My heart sank, for I believed that Wicklow had meant me to just have a little preparatory talk with the great physician of bodies and souls. I said I could not afford twenty dollars a visit, that is forty dollars a week.
He said, “Don’t you want to be cured? Don’t you want to marry?”
I said, “Yes, I do; but I don’t want to be put in jail for debt either.”
He told me, with some asperity, that the draining of my purse would be far better for me than the draining of my heart’s blood, and that if I were serious, I would get some night work, or borrow from my relatives to pay him; this financial pain would cure me of my erotic preoccupations. I informed him that I did not mind my erotic preoccupations at all; I only wanted to know how to keep a man and, in fact, how to fall in love with him, and stay in love. The doctor said this was easy; I had only to be rid of my father-fixation. I told him that I had not lived with my father most of my life, and he said, “Good grounds for a fixation.”
“But,” said I, in great confusion, much troubled by the prospect of the forty dollars weekly, “I thought girls who lived with their fathers had father-fixations.”
“They do, too,” said the great doctor.
“Is there no way out?” I asked.
“Only by analysis,” said the eminent prognosticator.
But before I left him, he had poured balm over my painful doubts, with his charming, loving manner, and he wrote down on his calendar the date of my next appointment.
I went out, torn between pleasure at the man’s appearance and doubt about his understanding. It was an honor to be his patient and, indeed, I felt at once that I could love him; and that perhaps, up till now, I had not met the right type of man. My father had always told me I would be better off with professional men. Then there was the other thing—the money. I went to my father and told him he must give me the money for the treatments which might last a year or so, because my whole future depended on it. Didn’t he want to see me married?
“What,” cried my father, starting to his feet, as soon as the facts of the high-priced visits reached his ears, “are you crazy?” and I had much trouble keeping him away from the fire department, the police, the homicide squad, and other emergency outfits, for he shouted that it was blackmail and highway robbery.
“Pickpockets,” he shouted, “matricides, embezzlers are nothing to this—nothing—imposing on a fool of a girl looking for a boy friend—nothing doing,” and he continued to shout and stare at me with incredulity in his eyes.
Persia said, “You’d do better, Letty, to go to a fortune-teller. It’s only a dollar, I think, and you can get tea-leaves read for a quarter or thirty-five cents.”
I laughed, and it seemed to me that this was rather good advice, the best I’d ever heard on the subject. I myself trembled so much at the idea of the outlay that I wrote to the great doctor and also to Wicklow the very next day.
Though the doctor attempted to make me pay for the visit had, and the visit proposed, I did not, and nothing came of it. I scolded Wicklow when he came to see me. He grinned, sat down on a stool, took off his hat, and remarked, “You’re more fascinating as a termagant, Letty, than as a sweet little wife.”
I relented toward him for a while, and regretted it afterwards. I reproached him with the whole story of the mistress and his pretense of passion for me. He only said, “Letty, you know how to take care of yourself, don’t you?”
It took him four weeks to pay me back the cost of his vacation with me at Christmas; he did eventually. The next I heard of him he was almost living at Susannah Ford’s house and no one heard a word about the mistress.
The very next day, after my father’s fit of temper, when I had posted the two letters, with a sigh of relief at seeing all this money saved, I went upstairs to a gypsy tea-leaf reader in Fourteenth Street and had a v
ery amusing fortune told. The woman especially impressed me by saying that I would have some affair with a man whose initials were T. or B. The amazing thing was that I did know a man with both these—T.B., Tom Bratt.
When I went out for a walk that evening, I was in such good spirits, in spite of my misadventures, that I walked down Bank Street and rang the doorbell of the Bratts’ flat. Tom Bratt had a wife called Bronte. Everyone knew Bronte for the fuss she kicked up round herself at parties. Tom was quite a rounder, and I don’t suppose Bronte would have stayed with him if she could have got another man. She was a big-hipped, chesty girl, with black, bright eyes, and a white skin; she looked like a half-breed Indian, to my mind; but some people thought she was handsome.
We had a good, long chin about political affairs on which we were absolutely agreed, and Tom told me all about Hollywood, where he had been a thousand-dollar-a-week man at one time. At present he was on his uppers. They were living badly at the back of a divided railroad flat. The wife had put in a lot of Woolworth rayon goods to brighten it up a bit, as she imagined. It looked very tawdry.
Tom and I had always got on like a house on fire, and we kept chiming in with new bright ideas, while she sat there smiling like a Cheshire cat, and thinking nothing, I suppose, in the way of wives. She gave parties for Chinese relief, anything that was the fashion at the time, and the real reason was that she thought she could pass as Chinese herself. I understood why a bright little boy like Tom left her so often for transients; and everyone knew about their many and various rifts. Naturally, in front of me, she kept up the turtle-dove comedy.
Tom went out with me when I left, to get beer, rye bread and sausage for their supper, as they had had nothing to eat since lunch. Bronte did not cook very much. She stabbed at painting a bit, some of her amateur decorative efforts being exhibited on the walls and mantelpiece, like some bright progressive child’s. It all made me feel quite out of sorts, and I was glad when Tom and I got into the streets. It was just as the gypsy said—everything ticked. I felt the spark when he looked at me. He held my hand at once, and as soon as we got round the corner, bent down to kiss me. “Lovely Letty,” he said, “I wish we could go some place.”
“I have a place; come up and see me some time.”
I told him Jacky was leaving soon for England, to join her Faust, and he told me Bronte had to go to Washington for some cause or other. She dabbled quite a bit in radical politics and would go anywhere where she could cut a figure. This was lucky for Tom and me. I went home, walking on air, very pleased with the gypsy and resolved to go back the next day.
I had left the publishing office some weeks back, for the usual reason. The head of the office had started fooling round with one of the other girls, and I couldn’t stand this indignity. I seized the first honorable occasion, this time a question of falsifying news, to quit. Now, however, what with Tom and a general feeling I had, I got a new spurt on, and soon got a job with the United Nations information offices at Rockefeller Center.
I had quarreled sharply with Bill van Week. He was playing with Edwige. I had seen them one night through the window in the café of the Lafayette, and had gone in and made quite a scene, hoping we all would be thrown out. They are far too patient at the Lafayette and too humane, like all the French, as my father, that incurable Gallophile, will persist in saying.
Since then, Bill and I had been on the outs. I heard vaguely that he was madly in love with Edwige, who was no better than a harlot. She went in for cute little things like cocktail napkins whose motif was a coozy with skirts or drawers you could lift up, and cocktail glasses with a similar sort of design. The girl was dressed on the outside of the glass; when the drink went down, inside you saw her naked back. She had stacks of obscene books, the lowest kind, and everything the undressed girl can still wear. My wretched cousin had a crowd of young lechers in her wake, and made use of them, as she made use of her loving husband who was now in the Pacific. They were writing an indecent novel intended to be a bestseller. They intended to process it in what they considered the new scientific way. First they would make it as improper as possible, with a going-to-bed on every second page, then they would have it multigraphed and sent to as many producers, publishers, and agents as possible. At the first bite they would send out Edwige and others of her bagnio (she had already set up as a flesh-peddler, masquerading as a movie agency). The name of the modern (and worser) Fanny Hill was to be, “If I Had the Time and Space—”
The book was written and was now going the rounds. Bill said it was very bad but he thought it could be placed, since book publishing had entered monopoly capitalism with the movies and best-book clubs. They were crazy to get the book that would net them millions, no matter what the subject matter. The taxes—one could whistle them away, one way or other. He said Edwige and her suitors, or consorts, had a brilliant idea there; one of the best he had ever heard of. He had been all his life on the track of bright ideas, just to show his family he could make good too, and that the Van Week blood ran good and strong in him. Bill was pulling all the strings he had to put the book across.
I told Bill and Edwige a good many home-truths. It was only too easy to do this, and I felt like a fool. Furthermore, it had not the faintest effect on them. Bill said tartly, “I’m a socialist; don’t you think I know the society we’re living in? The common-sense thing to do is to make use of capitalists, not let them make use of you.”
“Pander to the profiteers,” said I. “You’re a stinking social-democrat. Why don’t you join the honest millionaires like your old folks? It isn’t that you’re too modern to go to church, it’s that they wouldn’t let you in even to have a look around. As for Edwige, she’s just a—”
And I said everything that I could think of that she was, which was a lot and none of it complimentary. Edwige’s sweet face hardened to a flint and I could see the tigress in her. She will go far, I thought.
This was a disgraceful scene and had made more than one of my days morbid. What was I coming to? First, so sentimental that every tear-jerker did business with me; and then, brawling and bawling like a fish-wife. What sort of girl am I, I asked myself madly, eating my heart out. Good Gosh, what will become of me?
It’s easy to imagine that in these rages and agonies I let Jacky’s departure creep up upon me, almost unnoticed, though I cried honestly enough on the last day, and told her many things, quite untrue, but which seemed honest to me at the time, as, that she was the best of us all, and I loved her more than anyone else, and never could love anyone as I did her, and so forth. In a way, too, they were true; and they did no harm, for she was quite exalted and for weeks past had been in a state where every old bent man on the street with hazel eyes had reminded her of Gondych.
43
I had been in this particular information office of the United Nations organizations for some weeks, and had made a lot of friends of both sexes, and become very friendly with the chiefs, mostly because of my hard work and real ability, I may say, with honest pride. I was an excellent office manager, not drawing back from show-downs and not pussy-footing when the hard and sharp word was needed; but also, in spite of my rather wild and selfish behavior, which I freely admit, I was at times a good friend of the girls and confided in them most of my troubles. This is one of the secrets of success in human relationships. He has much who can give himself away frequently and lavishly.
I worked without question, also, nights, week ends, at all times; and was no clock-watcher, overtime grouser, pennypincher. I was good at accounts, could do anything in an office, and also by this time had so much worldly experience that in a pinch or quandary I was worth ten ordinary girls. I knew where the dog lay buried; it seemed like instinct; it was just old campaigning. I got on very fast. This rapid rise which was, of course, partly due to my friendship with the chiefs in the office, and even to some night-clubbing and friendship with the wives, did not get me much in the way of salary, but I was once more in clover. I went out frequently, always had
someone to pay my bills, and was able to spend most of my pay on my own marginal needs. I never lived in a small way, never could live inside my income, and indeed felt small, unhappy and mean-spirited when obliged to scrape.
I was in the midst of these hearty, improvident joys, but pretty much without a man. Tom Bratt and I had quarreled as he had turned out to be a shocking philanderer of the one-night-stand variety. I tried to shut my eyes to it, but I thought, Why should I put myself in the class of Bronte? I am not his wife.
Bill and I had not seen each other for weeks. Edwige’s book, “If I Had the Time and Space—,” had actually been placed and was now being combed against the indecency laws; Bill was in high feather. He had seen it, he had predicted it, and so on.
Edwige was trying to find a way of divorcing her husband, who was in the service. She could not at the moment, and hoped for the end of the war, for like many a bright lady before her, she had her eyes on the Van Week millions. Only my knowledge of Bill’s history gave me courage. Bill could not stick. Bill loved all women!
Into my office came Cornelis de Groot, a tall, handsome Dutchman of good family, blue-eyed, blond, of slim elegance. Before the war he had flown his private plane to the Cape, had a factory of his own, owned race horses, and had a wife or two. He made a ripple when he entered the office the first morning on business; the men started to laugh at and after him. It turned out that his first question had been, “Where can I get me a pretty girl?”
He had been showered with replies, but my name had been mentioned. They told him I knew the way of the world, was accommodating, intelligent, pretty, witty, and knew all there was to know about night-life in New York. My best office friend, Charmian, a swarthy, tough woman, unmarried, but not an old maid, told me this in one of her good moods. With us, Charmian and me, it was off-again, on-again, most days of the week. She was a girl a bit like me, or had been, but was now coarsened, toughened, who would sleep with strangers, and was getting desperate about her chances. She was thirty-six and looked more, being one of those fleshy, hang-cheek stubs with wiry hair and a heavy bust. Charmian, however, was the one who designated me as the companion for Cornelis, for she had the sense to feel at once that he would never take her. She preferred, therefore, to have him pick her lieutenant. There were plenty of other passable girls in the office, and some, even, were well-bred enough and knew a few languages. He might have chosen one of them. I thought it a good choice. They were too babyish, or too babyishly corrupt for such a man.
Letty Fox Page 64
