Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  There are some people in the world who do not harden as they are the more often and the more cruelly deceived. She vacillated for years, understudied, went on the road, kept Solander in the background, and only at the age of twenty-three married her faithful lover. These were my parents, in their youth. I now took my cue and started my entrance upon the stage of life, not without the usual hesitations and regrets from my poor mother. A year after my birth, my sister Jacqueline came on the scene, and this was all our family for some years. We were quite poor, even though the Morgans lived in the grand manner. Grandmother Morgan, who was just beginning to feel her energies, and beginning to take over the business, had too much to do to trouble about us. The Morgan family was gay, preoccupied, elderly. Grandmother Fox was an old, timid, dependent lady, although then only in her early fifties.

  We were as if on an island, but my mother took her maternal duties very seriously. There was a cool apartment in Sixteenth Street, which the young Foxes had taken at a high rent, to be near Stuyvesant Park. My mother, whose psyche had resembled the disturbing cavern of the empty theater before, now resembled a delicious but twotoned madonna, drawn partly from baby magazines and partly from modern painters. Her face was mealy and childlike, her eyes were gay and tender. Her heart was a newborn lamb, her curling long hair suggested cherubs, nothing in her jarred; a sepia shadow hung over her. Even when she raised her hands to her ears and cried out, the attitude and pang were perfect; now she had no doubt of herself. In this role, written for her many centuries before, she felt at ease, and she combined all the charm of an innocent young girl and of innocent motherhood.

  My father poured out his love upon her, yet he was unhappy; he was an embarrassed and dubious spectator of this miracle play. When his lovely Mathilde was not worshiping her baby-in-arms, or portraying a female defending her young, or walking up and down with the child in her arms, representing to herself an unhappy and loveless woman, she was sitting in a chair behind the lowered but open blinds, looking out into the small dirty back yards, through the leaves of the Chinese plantain, and thinking distrustfully of their future. Would they have more children? Would it always be like that, looking into the balconies of a flophouse off Third Avenue? How could she make such a terrible decision as to give a child life? Now she must live for it alone. But how could she educate it? She knew nothing. How unhappy she was!

  Then she was delicate and sensitive and could not accustom herself to the roughness of the housework and the nights and days without sleep. She had shut a door in herself, though, and now had forgotten forever the theater—the strange nights of acting there before the peopled cavern, all that she knew of real joy on this earth—and the blue-haired boy and all the boys before and after, not her lovers, but her friends. She had turned her back on that world of illusions, but she was fevered, empty. She must find something to do. She felt “exposed”—the child would soon see through her; the endless vigils and the battling with a rough-tempered healthy child wore her out.

  She tried a few jobs, but came back to the house and her child whenever I caught a cold or fever. “I must give up everything, even reality, for the little girls,” she said. “If it’s a struggle for you, Sol, it is too late to think of that; we gave life and now must pay for it.” At other times, she would think more cheerfully—they were a young, lucky couple; but most of the words came from others, from friends and from the foolish magazines which she read eagerly, looking for set conventional phrases which would describe her situation satisfactorily. These magazines had articles which minutely discussed her life and day, and therefore what they had to say she accepted. She began to rely upon them, while all the time, at the back of her mind, was her old experience as an ambitious, shy but gallant young girl, which had taught her very different notions. Solander humbly accepted what she had to say on my subject until it came to education, and there they began to dispute, for Mathilde stickled for the magazine and the educational cult-books, while my father wanted us to be prodigiously well-educated, well-disciplined, and, likewise, socialists from our beginnings.

  On my second birthday, my grandmother was buying and selling property on Long Island. She got home late, but turned up at my party, without presents, but with her youngest daughter, my Aunt Phyllis, a ravishing doll in her middle teens. Grandmother took Aunt Phyllis whenever she went out to meet new friends, and was rewarded by meeting at our house the two partners in the business in which my father was then engaged.

  “Excellent,” said Grandma to Mother, rubbing her hands over the new silk stockings her latest admirer had given her, “fine: I kill two birds with one stone; you see, this is my system: I see the family and I show off my little queen,” for one never knew, she said, where she would meet the right man. New clothes for Phyllis had emptied Grandmother’s purse on that day, and all I received was a bottle of sour wine, but Grandmother and Aunt Phyllis met at the house Joseph Montrose, the young merchant, who had just married, and Mr. McLaren, an elderly admirer of my father’s talents, a wealthy socialist, and my Uncle Perce Hogg’s friend, come to give me ten shares of Standard Oil. Said he, “A child starts off with the right idea of society if she has a little of her own; and I’m sorry you let the first two years pass without her owning something. Thus, two years have passed during which she belonged to the underdogs, and I’m sorry to observe that this has a bad effect on the character and temper in our class society.”

  My father remarked that he had thought of putting twenty dollars in the bank for me. Mr. McLaren said, “Do it at once, my boy; it is never too early to make a start in life, and the earliest impressions are the forming and forcing ones; let me have a child during the first seven dollars and I can guarantee its success afterwards. The lassie,” said he, gazing upon my two-year-old self, “has now a small equity, and I guarantee she will be a sensible matter-of-fact young lady. Although,” he continued sagely, “I will not commit myself; I’m speaking without sufficient data, no doubt.”

  No one hastened to add to my fortune at this moment, however, and I think Mr. McLaren felt he had committed himself rashly in this respect. He said he would counsel my father on my education, later on, to see that the effects of the ten shares of Standard Oil were felt.

  When my mother wanted to send me to a privately run kindergarten, not very well known nor much respected, she found out it would cost four hundred dollars yearly, and she wanted to sell the shares to help pay for it. Mr. McLaren paid her a short visit and bore her down; he destroyed for the time being all her ideas about bringing me up lavishly. “You’ll make a hothouse plant of a sturdy piece of heather or a flourishing vegetable.” My mother hated him for being so plain about me. She became inconsolable at the thought of our poverty. Other mothers sent their children to expensive private schools, and made many sacrifices to do so, starving themselves and their husbands, dressing badly and having no amusement. Mother thought this the correct thing. There was no private play school to be had under four hundred dollars yearly. My father gave in and I went to “The Bairns.” I had red cheeks, sparkling brown eyes, thick curly hair, heavy active limbs, and wore out my clothes, the carpets, and the furniture with my climbing and jumping. I was loud-voiced and rude, as I saw other children of my age were, and went into a screaming fit to get my way. I was uncommonly bright when it came to my own interests, and understood things relating to them, long before I could speak properly; but I spoke early too, filling the house with a rattle, a drooling and buzzing from early dawn. There was now no sign of the inherently feeble child who had made its entrance on the stage of life and received my name. Adults were obliged to bear with my roughness and selfishness and call it energy, health, animal spirits, self-expression, and so forth. I became wilder and more cruel each day as I saw them more miserable, being obliged to go through the martyrdom of me and beginning to look old, drooping and sulking, but swallowing all this that was repugnant to them. I loved shoving garbage down their withered necks, punching their fat stomachs, and treading on their to
es. Mother thought I would become timid and a failure if I was scolded, I would be repressed!

  The friends I had chosen at school, two or three healthy, loud-voiced girls and boys, had parents who thought the same. In our own minds we were already mature. The teachers and friends were almost dead, to us they smelled and looked dead. Even lovely Aunt Phyllis seemed to me at that time gross, idiotic, and elderly, and she was too busy with “love” to bother exercising any influence over me. To me, besides, she was only partly pretty; I was prettier, so were others at school. I had never, at that time, seen a pretty woman, and did not know what they meant by it—at least, I could not pick out a pretty woman as readily as I could an ugly one. But I was very fond of men, would run up to them, lead them by the hand, kiss them and ask them for things, for I soon found out that they were either charmed or obliged to appear charmed.

  When I had been at this school some time, Mr. McLaren came to the house and saw me, I should say, apprehended me. He spoke severely to me, the first grown person who had ever done that. My mother took me from the room with a frown on her face; at the door she turned back and said gently that he did not understand, I was a sensitive child and might have bad dreams, caused by his repressive behavior.

  “You should be careful of your attitude toward children, and not introduce foreign elements into their surroundings, you see,” said Mother, “because even a moment’s conflict, a casual acquaintance with an adult person, even a child, may alter a child’s whole life. They are so impressionable, so ready to learn.” She added that she selected her weekly floorwasher very carefully with my feelings in view and was always in the room when the window-washer was there. At this, I jubilantly burst back into the room with a loud yell, and rushing up to Mr. McLaren, squirted a mouthful of water between his plump and yawning thighs. Mr. McLaren observed that he would fan my little tail so red that the baboon in the zoo wouldn’t be in it. My mother burst into tears, seeing him pick me up; but Mr. McLaren only took me in his arms, set me on his damp knee, and after saying, “One squirm out of you and you’ll get the cat” (at which my mother looked very sulky indeed), began to tell me a story. It was a fascinating old-style tale about Br’er Bullfrog, told in the seductive dialect of a certain Uncle Remus. No sooner had the first dulcet sounds broken on my delighted ear, however, than Mother indignantly came over and raised me from the old gentleman’s knee.

  “We never tell any dialect stories here,” she said, most shocked. “They only teach race prejudice; the child must not know that other people are different from us.”

  Mr. McLaren turned red, his gray eyes flashed; but after looking at her for a long moment, he bowed his head and said in a trembling but mild voice that it was God’s own mercy I had the brains and brawn to survive such flub-dub, for any other child would be turned into a Simple Simon by such methods and why didn’t they leave children now primeval jellies when they would be safe from any influence.

  I burst into shrieks. My mother went out, followed by my father. When my father returned he did not argue with Mr. McLaren, to my disappointment.

  They went into a discussion of systems of education, the Scottish style, old-style, and the French style, which he believed in, and the University of Hard Knocks, against the present fad for spoon-feeding and the bedevilment of parents which, it seemed, was the one I was going through. My father appeared to agree with Mr. McLaren. My mother could scarcely control herself, and put me into bed with a good many bumps, jerks, and frowns. Then she hurried out to take part, and began repeating a great deal of the stuff she and the ladies talked over when they came to visit.

  “That’s an undisciplined and unlettered little monkey,” said Mr. McLaren. “She’s been to school for nearly two years and can she so much as read or write?”

  My father passed the sherry. My mother said a delicate and talented child would not receive proper attention in the public schools. They had forty, fifty, sixty, seventy in a class; it had been estimated that the teachers in a certain school had not one minute of time per day to give to each child in individual attention; and what of general health? Then, what about conservative, no reactionary ideas, brought subtly or with a shillelagh into the brains of innocent children in the public schools?

  “You knock ’em out again,” said McLaren calmly. “What are you here for? If you can’t take care of your own children, give up the family system and go in for communal living! Can she add two and two? No.”

  “She has not felt the urge,” said Mother; “they do not force the children; they learn the play way, they learn by co-operation; there is no urging of the individual, it leads to the competitive spirit. Education isn’t a treadmill and it isn’t the star system. And then we must wait for the child’s need to unfold itself.”

  “Holy Methusalem,” said old McLaren, “and has she got to wait for the urge for everything her whole life long? Then she’ll know no more than her A B C when she’s a hundred, for that baby will more likely be a female wrestler.”

  My father laughed, and McLaren told them, in their circumstances, they ought to take advantage of the free schools. But Mother spoke up for me, saying that I never would be a member of the community of dirty little foreign children, that I belonged to one sort of people and to one kind of society and their object was to push me up to better things than they had ever known, not to drag me down to the level of dirty little slum children, whose heads were as full of gangster ideas as of lice. Did McLaren even know what words those children used in the street, right outside the house? Letty had brought home two or three of them already.

  Not liking to miss the fun, I raced into the room and joyously heaved a slipper over the electric light. I at once gave vent to these juicy words from my listening post. Mr. McLaren gave me an awful look which caused me to run behind my father’s chair, upon which I then climbed with loud shrieks of victory. My mother was explaining to Mr. McLaren that if she now whipped me or washed my mouth out with soap (the old Scottish method apparently), I would be repressed, these words would be repressed in me for the rest of my life, and I would either take to filthy pictures years later or would become a nervous pale girl who would attract no one and never would succeed; my real personality would never emerge because they would have imposed their old-world behavior patterns upon me. “She is not over-protected,” she said dolefully; “we have not the money for that, for I realize that is your objection.”

  Mr. McLaren listened, frowning, to this careful student-mother’s recitation, and said, “It’s some form of Voodoo—it’s a secret society”; with my father saying, “Mac, I suppose there’s a lot of Jean-Jacques in the idea, but on the financial side I agree with you”; McLaren saying, “All education should be free and every child will be spoiled till it is”; my father saying, “Middle-class radicals have a curious urge to prove they’re the genteelest of all people”; and McLaren saying, “Point to one gentleman or genius!” and my father saying, “But Mathilde feels she is trying to give Letty the very best education,” it all ended by my mother saying, “If you had suffered as a child, as I did, you would understand everything”; the men both looked at her and said not another word.

  “I suppose you think that too is just compensation,” said my mother, using one of the women’s favorite words; “Letty shall want for nothing, she will have nothing to compensate for, and perhaps, when she grows up, her children can go to a free school. Perhaps we’ll be in a different system then”; and the words dragged coldly, childishly, out of her mouth, like a distasteful formula.

  Probably, however, the price of the school was too high, for immediately after I was sent to a public school, where I learned at once to read and write. I liked the school. I never tired of my tricks and of making the girls laugh and jump out of their desks, in fact, do what pleased me. But those girls were too intimidated, or too poor, I don’t know what; they could never be got into the rapture of badness which overcame us so often at The Bairns. I was a great trial to my teachers, contradicting them and eve
n quoting to them bits of doctrine about education from the talk of my mother and father. I made enemies. Many of the girls had become disciplined by this time (I was about six) and even had some ambitions. They disliked me, I upset the lessons. The ugly, ill-dressed ones admitted me, and laughed when I made a noise, though not always with good nature. For them I represented freedom, money, and privilege, and they hoped to see me punished. I let them see I didn’t give a darn for the rules. These poor and ugly girls were always getting punished for lateness and dirt, and were suspected of any thefts. I suppose our mutual dislike helped them into jail, or onto a picket line.

  At home I returned to my progressive school ways and in fact made such a noise around myself (my father calling me “his three-ring-circus”) that I felt stouter, smarter, better every day, and felt sure I would knock the world down later on just by strutting in upon it. So many a fat and loud child feels.

  In all this, I had cronies, followers, and a sidekick, in my father’s words, who was my sister Jacqueline, born a year after me. Jacqueline ( Jacky) wanted to be great, not famous, just great, she explained. She was a lively girl also, with yellow elf-locks, large oval eyes, and straight features, a small nose and a medium red mouth. She was thin at first, with long, thin arms, but when she grew up became like me, middle-sized and plump. She was not always as pretty as I, being graver; but she had a trait I did not have.

  Her gravity threw a shadow over her face and mind, and this shadow was interesting; people even found her charming. When I was nearly seven, we had a world of our own, joky, mad, bad, selfish, scandalous, indecent, alert. We rifled drawers, read and stole letters, faked telephone calls, spied and informed. We became pious or godless together, full of parental respect or odiously unloving together. The beginning of each of these moods was simply the words, “What will we do?” Whatever we did, we did with unflagging energy for three, four, or five days. The mood would disappear in some minute of some day and we would once more sit blankly or stand jigging vacantly round a chair and repeat, “What will we do?” Many projects were presented, reviewed, rejected, before the next project—religion, mother love, slander, theft—was decided upon. Some projects were shabby imitations of the wickedness of other young desperadoes we heard or read about in children’s books.