Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  We took to each other at once. We merely glanced at each other across the room and something sparked. I was delighted to have such a desirable escort, and I soon whipped him into open admiration with my sparkling wit and common sense. I had the art of being myself, or rather, of always seeming to be myself.

  We had not been out more than three times before he told me quite plainly what he wanted in me, beside companionship; and I had no hesitation in granting it to him. I had known from the beginning that this was part of the unwritten bargain.

  Meanwhile, he had much money to spend and he spent it all on me, with savoir-faire, choosing a dress or bracelet for me, which smelled of the Kalver-straat and the Rue de la Paix, and a lifetime of experience with girls. He was an excellent friend and lover.

  However, in a quaint European way, before we entered upon the carnal part of our friendship, he made me a little speech to this effect: That our love relation was not to be love, but necessity, a respectable partnership without emotion, and that if we showed any signs of becoming “involved,” both agreed to break it up.

  I might have not liked this in another man! But in Cornelis, while it injured my pride, I thought it showed yet another of his greatly strange qualities. Cornelis was the man most suited to me that ever I met; not inscrutable, for it was always his will that was in question, and his will came first and his will was all turned to his career. He was making his way toward the Governorship of Curaçao, hence the Government of the Dutch West Indies, and though quite young, only forty-one, he was likely to get it after the war. There was the possibility of Surinam, Celebes! And later, much later, he had his eye on Java, but his head was not clouded by any dreams; he had planned each step in his intended rise in the Civil Service.

  It was for this reason that he now made this unflattering proposal to me, but he carefully explained this to me, and nothing, to my mind, could have been fairer. I accepted. He explained to me that he was married, though not much to his satisfaction, and without children; but that he would not leave his wife unless a great occasion came his way. Naturally, I did not look upon myself as a great occasion, and I had good reason to fear that by that he meant title, money, a career-building woman. How bitterly now I thought of the girls I knew without ability, but with families behind them and plenty of money. When we passed one of these in the street, De Groot, while properly attentive, would observe her; it was clear enough that she was the possible great occasion, and not I.

  Being hardy, enterprising, and optimistic, I yet hoped that something would happen to change his mind about me—it could not be wealth or title—it could only be love. I did not think of this all in the twinkle of the eye; but gradually, as I became accustomed to him, and to our connubial relationship, I longed to be with him in the Caribbean and saw for the first time how tired I was of my relatively successful career in the great Metropolis of Get-By. I suddenly saw the attraction of Gondych and Europe for Jacky. She had been offended by her ill success here, and probably was led by her library years to imagine that in Europe things would be different—chastity, beauty, romance, idealism, self-sacrifice, might have some spiritual value there. I doubted it, for the world is a rough and self-centered world, but in a material sense, I saw the beauties of distance; the tropic seas—Atlantic or Pacific—began to flash through my mind’s eyes. Life might become a rapturous travelogue, and I knew myself well suited to entertain, to fit my place as governor’s lady, to make a drawing room politically and socially brilliant.

  This was the chance that I longed for and I saw it—through the looking glass. Cornelis had to go and come on various missions, and sometimes went as far away as the West Indies. He conducted himself according to his contract, with good breeding, decorum, but too much coolness. I was getting into deep water. I loved him and in a more serious way than ever before. He was too old for me, too clever, too cold, too ambitious. Naturally, I wanted him particularly.

  The first of my troubles came on a night in spring, in 1943. Cornelis appeared truly romantic, as only Dutchmen are, douce, poetic, with drawn-thread silences, a languorous way of walking. How sweet he was. I would have turned to water had I dared to let myself sigh. The love affair of the past night had most to do with the good footing we were then on. Such things are rare accidents. I was serene, thinking that we were well-knit. Cornelis, at some such moment, began to tell me of his greatest love affair, a woman now in London. He had met her through a fur coat merchant. She was an ex-model who needed men and who helped the furrier to business. Cornelis had not liked her at first sight. Is this a prerequisite for the great affair of passion? He had taken her away in the taxicab from his friend’s house, out of courtesy. In the cab, he noticed some of her good points, a firm, fleshy, and handsome face, a clear skin with fine, natural color. She was a blonde. She was badly dressed and her hair straggled. She was ill cared for, and seemed hungry.

  Nevertheless, he became enslaved to her. Why? He told this, too—“Honey in the comb.”

  I suffered to hear all this. In dreamy accents he described all of his slavery. He knew her weaknesses; she was an adventuress; ugly in those subdued orchid restaurant lights, lazy, suspicious, grasping. He had come away from London, where he had been last, leaving a great deal of money, all he had to spare, in her name. She could draw it all, and undoubtedly would. My feelings were rising up and choking me, but I contained myself for a moment more.

  “Are you going back to her, Cornelis?”

  “Yes; and I have my wife. I’ve had other affairs and every time I was on the brink of love, I drew back. I already have responsibilities to too many women.”

  This was so typically Dutch, said I to myself, that I couldn’t argue with it, but I began to flush and felt my eyes spark. I burst out, “You drive me half mad with your theosophy, psychology, mystic speculations of all sorts, the soul, the mind, the spirit, and you don’t know the first thing about women, which is, that when you live with them, they begin to love you. This is because they are more earthy and also more honest than you are. When they give their body, they give their heart and soul, too. Isn’t that honest? It is men who whore! What are agreements? Agreements aren’t written in flesh and blood. That’s the only sort that can hold. With your pen on my papyrus, you see, you wrote something, you can’t wash that out; you can’t reason it away with your dry, feathery, insane Dutch reason.”

  He stroked me down, but I could see him become wary, and he left me for that night. I had only to go home and cry at my folly. I can never hold my tongue. But what is the use of a man if one can’t be forthright with him? I would never hedge and plot with a man, thought I. It was dull living alone, but I would never live with a woman again, either.

  44

  It happened that he was obliged to go away just then, and our effusions of the previous nights had been a temporary farewell. I made up my mind to pick up some of my old friends while he was away; but it was rather dubiously that I spoke to Luke Adams whom I met shambling down Eighth Street one evening in June. He was in one of his Eldridge Street bargains as to suit, a snuff-colored, second-hand thing, and himself in it, older, darker, thinner, looked like a bit of ambulating pemmican, or a lost red herring.

  At first I thought his charm had passed and I managed to spend the evening with him, at the back of a delicatessen, without any sentiment; but no sooner had I reached home than a black wave of hate rushed through me and I sat clenching my fists, thinking of how he had said good-bye to me in his dulcet, casual way. I did not know what to do. He ground and squeezed my heart. I knew he was miserable, poor, even hungry; he had lost his job and his wife could not forgive him; he was poor among the poor. I dreamed of him—I dreamed I was in a shack, with only rags for partitions and his wife, a blonde slut, leaning over the stove, while some thin children, like crabs, like scorpions writhed about. I went to get the dinner for them from the stove and saw only old rags and little shoes boiling there. I woke up full of remorse and crying bitterly, for his life and the life of men and wo
men. All burned for him, with this black and sour rage. When this had gone on for a week, and I was alone one evening in my flat, sitting at my secretary, with my typewriter, wishing I could write a short story, but unable to think up a good idea, a temptation flashed across my brain. I nearly fainted with the temptation and the thought of it, but as I recoiled from it, the frightful joy of it grew keener. Instead of composing a short story, I composed a low, insulting letter, stupid, coarse, dull-witted, talking about Luke Adams and his wretchedness now, about how he was walking the streets looking for employment and could not find any, how his home was ragged, his children hungry, and how the winter was coming on, how he was faced with real starvation. I put all this into the letter and signed it at the end, “A Friend.” I pretended to give him advice about what he must do—leave the woman, take to the road, bum his way. I copied this letter out again, improving it, as I felt, making it more in character, and the next day, on my way to work, horrible to relate, I posted it, in an out-of-the-way mailbox. I felt pleasure while doing it and rejoiced openly all the day, thinking of how this letter would insult her, who was his curse. Nothing came of it that I know; what could come? I did not blush, I am not sorry now. It was perhaps for Luke alone I felt the true criminal passion; but he is too old now, I no longer fear him.

  In my agony I did not know what to do. All my sorrows I called down on his head. Yet he reminded me, in a way, of a younger, healthier world I had once been in, the savage joys of my youth, when everyone had believed in something in this world and not in the spiderwebs of Cornelis and the other men I was now meeting. For these men, while talking about the age of calculation and science, the men in their thirties and forties that I was now meeting, and all that I met in night clubs, were now religion-mad and I had many a boring hour arguing the soul up and down, Cornelis being one of the chief offenders.

  Each of these men was in some measure a fraud—of course, practical and successful men, who had kept out of the war or got themselves ribbons or stripes without a shot for their country, and they also had now nominated themselves not only war chiefs, but shamans and soothsayers.

  Luke Adams belonged to the girlish world I had now left. To tell the truth, I was feeling old. Everyone I went with was too old. There were girls ready for marriage and married younger than I; many younger than I had children. Even my smallest sister, Andrea, now thirteen, was as precocious as all the youngsters of both sexes, at this time. The boys she knew swaggered down the streets, tossing their clipped, slicked hair like dogs or cocks, and many of them at the ages of fourteen and fifteen were going about with that smooth, sly, sweet air of the successful libertine.

  They all knew more than I had known at that age. I felt my infant endeavors to be corrupt, ludicrous. Besides, Andrea, a girly girl, had been boy-mad since eight; in fact, she knew the soft men, the seduceable, at four. She had quite a correspondence with her boys. She had never had anything else in her shallow, pretty head. As I heard her babble her confidences, and felt myself stiffen, my tolerant, easygoing laugh sounded positively like that of a plump maiden aunt.

  My mother was now anxious about Andrea, who, during this summer, did what a lot of New York kids do, and stayed out all night, roaming the streets with boys and girls on the nights when it is too hot to sleep. Andrea and her crony Anita (“the two A’s”), a girl of fifteen, were inseparables, often spending the night together at the home of one or the other. Anita’s father was a war worker, gone to another city, and her elder sister, a good-looking girl and said to be a genius in precision work, was at a war plant in New Jersey: the mother meanwhile, worked in a five-and-ten. Mother did not like the Andersons, Anita’s family, but could do nothing against Andrea’s girlish devotion and was obliged to put up with their sleeping arrangements and with Anita herself. The plump, strong, high-colored Anita used pretty strong, cutting language and knew the seamy side of her worker’s life; not only that, she insisted upon opening Andrea’s eyes to the dangerous time in which she was growing up, “putting her wise,” as she constantly said. She looked upon Mother and me as old women! Anita (whom I detested) was growing taller and plumper and had a magnificent skin that work and nights in the streets could not alter. She used either a thick layer of cosmetics to show that she was “in the groove,” or no cosmetics at all, to triumph over the other girls with her natural looks. What she did, Andrea did. We could do nothing about this either. Naturally, the girls in the factory thought a lot about their appearance, nothing at all about the labor movement or the war; they wanted to be glamour girls, marry a rich feller; they made up, talked outright filth (that would have made even Erskine blush—or would it?), felt each other’s breasts to see how far they still were from full womanhood, bragged about their good times, and exchanged addresses of transient hotels, little bars, and accommodating druggists. There was quite a lot of going together, sapphism that is, necessitated by their early awakened sex and the absence of men; but it wasn’t rotten, as it had been amongst us at the aristocratic, progressive school; it was just the madness and headiness of poor youth which for a moment held the purse-strings and knew, sure enough, that this time would soon end. They were oppressed by the future, hurried forward into this riot by the worker’s fear of the future and the girl’s fear of men and of pregnancy. All their lives had to be pressed into this wartime, a shoddy contraption like the valises they brought for week ends, into which all kinds of shoddy finery had to be pressed.

  It was a brief saturnalia and dangerous; but Andrea’s was such a young spring, she had such a good home, that we never thought she would be in it at all, nor understand what Anita told her. She was with those girls when they came out of work, but she could never be one of them. Of course, Mother had her melancholy spells and blamed my father, Jacky in her absorption, and me, for leaving Andrea on her own. There were plenty of girls, twelve, thirteen, all over the country going out whoring, and plenty even younger than Andrea, who had made up their little call-houses, or went out boldly in children’s socks and without girdles, with their childish obesity, to pull in young men from the services, at railroad stations, bus stations, parks and other public spots.

  Mother was afraid now, on account of her dreaminess and her irregular hours, that my thirteen-year-old sister was meeting boys or men, and receiving love letters, and asked me what they should do. I said, “Have you looked in her purse?”

  I looked in her purse and found some prescriptions from an out-of-town doctor.

  “What are they for?”

  “For headache,” she said. “They’re Anita’s.”

  At the factory they used chemicals which gave the girls headaches. They had gags or respirators, but the girls still got headaches.

  I took the prescriptions to David Bench, Luke Adams’s buddy, and found that they were prescriptions for emmenagogues. But don’t worry, said David Bench, who was the man who had helped me through my own trouble, pharmacists don’t usually make them up in proper strength for young girls, who are usually scared about nothing. However, he came to visit us and see Andrea. Andrea, fraternally questioned by him and us, and bullied by Mother, and investigated by Father and Grandmother Morgan, still laughed at us and said, “Yes, it was not quite a headache powder,” that she knew; but what it was, she didn’t know. She thought it was some drug. The girls at work took drugs, some of them, and Anita was a bit of an addict; she didn’t want her parents to see. Her mother spied on her, and so she had given it to Andrea to keep.

  Mother and David Bench explained what the “headache powder” was for, to see if Andrea would change countenance, but she did not, merely laughed, and said, Perhaps the girl was frightened; she knew she had a boy friend and sometimes stayed with him overnight. In fact, said Andrea, at times this girl friend of hers was supposed to have stayed with Mother and Andrea in their Eighth Street flat.

  “Oh, God,” said Mother, “whatever will I say to the parents if they come? You mustn’t land yourself in such lies, Andrea.”

  Andrea said sh
e would not if she could help it, but all the girls helped each other, and it was the right thing to do. My mother worried endlessly about the immoral and lying life; and Papa said that Andrea must leave Anita and her crowd and Mother must keep her company at night. Thus Andrea stayed at home and scowled. She pretended to go to school, but we soon found, through inquiries from her teacher, that she had got herself a job not many streets away, where it was advertised on a loft building—

  LIGHT WORK FOR WOMEN AND GIRLS, PLEASANT CONDITIONS, GOOD LIGHTING, REST ROOMS,

  and so on.

  As was common, the too-young applicant had forged the necessary certificates. When caught, she said, “I am used to company; I can’t stay home any more, Mother.” And she went off again, quite pleased to be with the girls again and have her twenty-five dollars a week. She was still such a child at this time that she had not shaken off her pubescent embonpoint; yet she was half a woman. More than that, she showed signs of being a very large woman, a “Spanish beauty,” as I said about myself, when her age. Mother wrung her hands, as mothers always appear to do, not able to resign herself to the idea of her daughter’s growing up.