On the fourteenth, in the morning, Cornelis told me that he was leaving for England soon. He had business there, and he was worried about his mistress. She had used all his money, swindled others for money, and he believed she had been absurd enough to get in touch with a spy ring; of course, “innocently,” and no doubt, through the influence of some man, “for if a woman’s bad, some man’s behind it.”
I choked with disillusion and rage, but my thoughts and the injustices I had suffered bubbled up in me during the day. I kept my eyes glued on my work and got through a mass of it, out of pure rage, but in the evening, when he met me, calm as usual, I let go.
“Damn you ambitious men and whoregoers!” I said to him, crying out in the middle of the street, “to whom one woman is a pastime and another a grand passion; is she better than I am? No. Not even you would say so, but because she’s a criminal, a thief, a harlot, a spy, you’re after her—that’s a schoolboy’s ideal. You aren’t the only one I know: a sensible man, who can knock everybody else into a cocked hat, and yet who crawls on his hands and knees after the worst female in sight. If we’re good, we can be beautiful; it still is no good. But if we’re bad, and very, very bad, what a hold is there, oh, my countrymen. Sink your eyes, Cornelis,” I cried out, “of all the goddamn bloody lives—I could be a hundred times worse than that blonde spy of yours, but I’ve got ambition and looks and I’m a good scout, and I try to get along in the world; I work my legs off for you and the likes of you, my worthy bosses, and I know as much as the likes of you; and I’m even your friend and sleep with you, and give you every goddamn thing you ask for, and you know I’m as good as you, I’ve proven it a hundred times, never clinging or howling, standing up to it and taking it, and what happens? You run after an embezzler and a pavement-pounder; that’s all she is. And you run after a lazy, worthless, shiftless woman who’s tied to you because she’s got your name. You’ve got to work for them, but me you can’t even be a friend of. Why? You might get entangled. You ducky, little tender thing. Who has to suffer? I have to suffer! I’m your pinch-hitter, a stand-in, so you don’t have to suffer the twinges of insomnia, maybe, and so you can get up in the morning, fresh and bright, and carry on with your sainted, bloody, hell of an ambition. Oh, god damn you,” I cried out, without letting up at all, “I’m supposed to be able to take anything, but you not. You’re a man, you can wallow all over me, and I’m not even to get love out of it; not even a memory.”
I burst out crying in the street, and he didn’t say a word. Just walked along beside me with his head down and a twisted look on his face, partly shame, I suppose. I cried a bit, and then in a fresh gust of passion said, “Cornelis, it’s you make women bad. If you didn’t pay for her, she wouldn’t get into debt, and if you made your wife work, she’d work, and wouldn’t be shiftless; and you see, you take it out of me, a working-stiff, just because I’m not a louse and I’m not a married wife. If I were either, I’d get all kinds of consideration. I could stick you for blackmail on the one hand, and alimony on the other. Oh, the world’s a rotten place and a woman’s a fool to stick in it. I loved you, Cornelis, I really did; I lost my head, I guess. What’s the use of saying, ‘We’ll go to bed, but we won’t love’? You know love isn’t something mystic; it’s a bloody real thing, there’s nothing realer; and it grows out of all that madness at night, that growing together in the night, that thing without eyes, but with legs, that fit of convulsions, all that we had—you know what love is. But my love you can avoid with your mystic relations and your contracts, even though it’s as real as any other; it’s as real in the world as any other, I can’t let you pretend it isn’t. I’ll admit you can wriggle out of it, just because I can’t keep you, but for no other reason. You know damn well it was love,” I said, turning to him, my hair loose, and my eyes streaming with tears, and I reached up and kissed him on the mouth. “My dear, darling Cornelis, you men make us bad, for we are not trying to be bad, we are trying to live, find someone to love, that’s all. I always wanted to love someone. Proof is, I imagine I love each man I make love with. It’s harlotry, the system invented by man alone, that makes us bad. Women couldn’t invent harlotry. You are just trying to push me off with one foot, like a man followed by a dog, and I have to be, because, god damn it all, after all, I know I can get another man, and is that a reason for making a floozy out of a woman like me?”
Even when we caught up in the street with a friend of his, who turned and listened to us before he joined us, a certain Dutch friend of his, I went on, and they walked street after street with me, through all the Village, while I raved; and both went by my side, one on each side, with their heads drooping, and both looked ashamed.
In the end, we went into a café and had drinks. The other man came with us to my door. Cornelis kissed me, said, “I can’t say anything, Letty; what you say is true, but I can’t do anything, either; I didn’t invent all that, either”; and they went away. I didn’t see them say a word until they reached the corner, and then one of them just pointed the way.
Naturally, the next day, I felt very low indeed, and didn’t want to go to the office, but I did, and went out to lunch with Charmian, the poor old roustabout, to whom I could at least outline this kind of tale. The others were misses and pretties and boarding-school girls who were still in the giggling and “I stayed out all night in a car with a man” stage.
Charmian soothed me, and took me to see a fortune-teller. She said I was going to tin-horn fortune-tellers; what I needed was a gold-plated fortune-teller. She met me after work and we went up to Madame Tara, uptown just off Fifth Avenue. It was a fashionable restaurant with a late-dining crowd, one to which I had been occasionally. Madame Tara was a vulture, with dyed hair, a red skin, mascara, rings, and a print dress, to look folksy perhaps. Her expression was that of an unreliable police captain who indulges in everything indulgeable.
We crossed the palm while having cocktails, and Madame Tara predicted for me a change in the immediate future, work and a marriage in a foreign country, a sea trip, old women cackling over my fate while some one or other took a plunge, probably me, and an exit from the apparent impasse in which I found myself. This cheered me up. I went upstairs to make up, and found three very young tarts sitting in the powder room, dressed respectably, but with that rubbed, startled expression of the trade. They looked at me with fright and calculation.
“Madame Tara’s little crew is on the top deck,” I told Charmian before the ogress had sailed out of hearing. Nevertheless, I went back to her from time to time; she was a smart animal and could tell fortunes more, I suppose, from hands, dress, face and type than from any scrawlings in the hand, and, after all, I did not have to join her crew.
Later that evening I had to go to a party at Grandmother Morgan’s. It was one of her big affairs to which the public was admitted—that meant, at present, Mother and me; not of course, Solander, and not, any more, little Andrea. I don’t think Andrea knew Grandmother Morgan was alive.
Grandmother had been in hospital for a long time, but was up again, smartly dressed, winning big money at cards, and taking care of her health in the usual style by giving parties, staying up all night, dancing and looking for charming men. She was nearly seventy. She now felt that she had been making a mistake since Grandfather Morgan died, and what she needed was a man, like the ship-charterer, Joseph Montrose. She moaned over all the years she had let slip by since she had first met him. Without inviting my father, she therefore invited his partner Joseph Montrose, promising that lovely Aunt Phyllis would be there, and she coaxed me to come and meet a nice young man—this was to salve my father’s feelings and make up for Andrea’s folly.
When I got home to dress for the party, I found Lily Spontini there. It had been a year or two now since she had visited, poor woman. She was dressed in cocoa-brown, an old hat and coat like a janitress, black shoes and stockings. She was not much more than a janitress. Her kind-hearted visiting had brought her a couple of legacies from the family. Now she
part-owned a couple of brownstone houses, which she had to look after herself, in wartime. She had become the downtrodden boarding-house keeper. Her husband, who had been a hard-working man, had gone queer with fear of the draft (to which he was still liable), and with the idea of his wife’s wealth had threatened the boarders and Lily.
I was in haste and frightened Lily half to death by calling up everything I could think of from the Bellevue psychiatric ward to the local fire department, and then packed off to her murderous husband my chastened and intimidated relative.
No sooner had she gone than I received a telegram from Cornelis, asking me to forgive him and wait for him, he could promise nothing, but things might right themselves eventually. On the receipt of this I shouted, “To Borneo with all philanderers, I’m through”; and tore up the telegram. I spent the next fifteen minutes putting the pieces together again. After this, before I was half-dressed, Brock Ford, Susannah’s ex-husband, dropped in to see me and tell me about his disastrous love affair with a woman of Lesbian inclinations; and I had to listen to his declarations of love for another before I could at last get off.
Grandmother’s party was uptown, above One Hundredth Street, in a ballroom, as usual. Uncle Philip greeted me, as soon as I came in, with unusual love, and after I had circulated a bit, came back to me, and, taking me into a corner, told me, with his great eyes wide open, that I was the only woman he always saw with pleasure. He said the tragedy of his life was that we were uncle and niece, and hence could not love each other; I was the woman built for him. He declared that he was going out of his mind with the shrewish tricks of Aunt Dora and that God had punished him for his youth; Aunt Dora was God’s scourge.
Aunt Dora, who looked much older, now came up, and after a quite reasonable beginning, raved at me, saying I was trying to steal her husband, and had probably seduced him already, for nothing was impossible in this family. Grandmother came and calmed her, as she always could, by promising her things for the family; Philip and I stood there as if no hurricane had blown us apart. Philip said,
“She gave me the jaundice; it was wretchedly painful, and if this goes on, I’ll put a rope around my neck.”
“I can well imagine,” said I, restlessly, tapping my foot and looking for a cigarette.
“Here’s a light,” said Philip; “you don’t believe me, Letty honey, but I’m through. I haven’t anything to live for. It’s mad to say it, but I could love again—I haven’t a chance with that witch after me. If I can’t love and can’t even look forward to an old age like other men, why don’t I put a rope round my throat?”
“You’ll find a way out,” I said, “there always is. I’ve thought of skipping out, too, Phil, but one just can’t. I don’t know why; but it seems weak.”
“You haven’t been through what I have.”
“That’s true.”
I wandered off. They were playing cards in part of the room, and I played for a bit. After I won two dollars at quarter-cent a point, I became restless again and walked round the room.
Templeton Hogg was there, being adored by two or three of the girls; I elbowed them away on the ground of seniority of acquaintance; but he had become foppish, shallow.
I left him, too, and walked round tapping with my heels and trying not to think about Cornelis. I had a bad headache, and its refrain was: What did he mean? “A schoolgirl complexion on my mind forever,” I said to myself, bitterly.
One of my relatives, puffed up in war-profits, was wearing a diamond ring, and showing off his wife’s amethysts; another was telling where he got black-market gasoline, meat and cigarettes. According to them, the land was bursting with meat, wine, butter and anything needed, but most of it was underground, going moldy in warehouses and camps, often on account of bad management and bad calculation; they all proclaimed they didn’t see why they shouldn’t eat when it was going to waste anyhow.
I heard amazing stories of underground ice rooms gorged with carcasses; huge sums paid in auction rooms for out-of-date old masters by war-pigs, and so on, and so on. It was their talk. They shone like satin with it, their big bodies luscious and their eyes like stars. They were in heaven. What more would anyone have to offer them?
Philip roamed the room like a hankering ghost and ran into me when he could without attracting too much attention. Aunt Dora was telling the long story of his crimes to various sympathetic old women. Men were telling sordid and obscene stories; the women were talking about their furniture and summer vacations.
“This is my life from now on, you understand,” said Philip, at one of our encounters.
“Get out of it, Philip.”
“How? You remember I’ve been in jail quite a few times and she says she’ll kill me if I leave her. She would!”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Then what’s your answer?”
“There isn’t any.”
“There’s one. A rope round the neck.”
“Philip! You’re not funny any more.”
I explained to him some of my miseries, and how I had as much to bear now as he had had at his age. He could give me no advice for he had been one of the very dandies and Don Juans who were now giving me so much trouble. He could only groan and say he was being punished, which, with all my sympathy for him, sickened me somewhat. I said, “How about the girls?”
He wandered away again. This went on all the evening, and I couldn’t help thinking what a weakling he was; he couldn’t take his medicine, strong as it was. The one wrong woman, eh? Il ne faut pas badiner avec l’amour, eh?
I continued roaming; our paths crossed again.
“To think, Letty,” he said quietly, one time, “that all those words, Shakespeare’s sonnets, love songs, the weakest, worse lyrics in juke boxes, to die for love, star-crossed lovers, all that, mean something to me; they are enough to give me heartache. I am still looking for love, after all my bitter experience. Experience so black and cruel, it is enough to kill a man, and yet, I long to be loved. If only you and I could go away and love—I don’t mean it, I mean if only—if still—at my age, with what I know; you can’t kill love in a man. That, too, is driving me mad. Not that wicked, coarse old woman, Dora; but this agony and hunger for love is driving me mad. I’ll never have it again. I had so much. I know what it is. I’ll kill myself, Letty.”
I took his hand, looking up at him, and thinking I had known him since I was a little girl. He had said then, “Then I’m afraid I’m not a good man, Letty.”
Poor fellow. I talked to him for a long time, in a low voice, consoling him. He at last bent down and kissed me, “I love you, love you, Letty; we could have been happy, and see—we can’t be. That’s what’s killing me. I see hundreds of women, and I have this one—” I turned away,
“Oh, as to that, the ones you see, if you’re going to die for that, we could all die every day, for the ones we see, we can’t have.”
He kept turning round me, whispering his sorrows at me, harrying me with his great lovelorn eyes on me, till Aunt Dora came at us again, giving us great blows of words in the face, racking us, tearing us apart, even though we were just uncle and niece.
“I know his pretty ways, the so-and-so—” and the women approved her. Everything the vixen did was approved of; she called on the sacred wicked names of the family gods. Presently, Uncle Philip could not stand it and left the room. I was sorry for the poor soul, but glad that he had gone, for my own troubles were nosing out, from the black lock where they had been crowded in this day of troubles, and I knew I should be with them all night. I thought I would go. There were no fish for my fry here. What a life I lead, I thought. I’m mad. I’ll end up like Uncle Philip. But I hung round, talking like they were talking, telling filthy jokes, too, showing how bright I was, till a general move was made; then Aunt Dora set up a cry for Philip to bring her wraps and wake the boy, who was lying down on two chairs. Philip had locked himself in the bathroom. Aunt Dora thought he was acting up; he did that so often, at home.
/> Well, they called and pounded, eventually broke in, and though the window was open he was nowhere to be seen. There was a lean-to roof just underneath; not a sign of him. After a while, one of the men saw a linen towel hanging out of the window and pulled at it. It hung taut. It was at the end of a couple of linen towels that they found him. He had gone out just like that, on some sort of impulse, surrounded by that company. A fine end.
I went home to Mother’s, quite unable to spend the night alone with the thought of that body dangling, without thought or feeling, outside my window. It would be outside my window, he would be dangling, trying to get me to understand some more, I felt. He died for love. But I don’t want to.
46
Unable to bear my place after this, for I always had the sensation that Uncle Philip was outside my window, I moved to a hotel. Then, finding it too lonely and expensive, went looking for a place, until I came across the one in Eleventh Street, as I have described in the beginning.
I had been there some little time, trying to break myself of the habit of loving men, which is just a vice like taking a snifter too often, knowing well enough I could cure myself of it if I had only the grit, when Bill van Week drifted back into my life.
He had quarreled at last with Edwige, even though her book had been quite a success, and she had enough money to go into a Hollywood agency with some of the fellows back on the Coast who knew the seamy side of the game. Edwige could only stand the seamy side of things. Edwige had made the grand play for Bill and thought him hooked. She had managed to get the affection of his parents, who, for all their worldly wisdom, knew nothing about simple little crooks of her sort. Bill, whose pastime in life was splitting with his parents, could not endure the idea of a dovecote balanced up there on the twentieth story of their skyscraper, in the hanging garden they had built for themselves and him; and it was because of this alone that my Edwige, too clever by half, had lost the Van Week air castle.
Letty Fox Page 67
