Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  In all this world of tumble and fun, we did not at first see that there was trouble in our family. Jacky first saw it and I scoffed. Then I saw it, and we turned the trouble into another hilarious project; we became “Clark Gable and Joan Crawford” in a hog-calling scene imitated from movie (and Reno) ideas of marital dialogue.

  3

  Solander had seen his wife Mathilde first as a somber girl, and he had let her feel him near her for years while she was struggling to make something of herself. She became used to his loyalty, which she rewarded by a hasty lunch near his office, a walk at nightfall near her home, an arm for his arm when she needed an escort. She confided things to him and listened to his interminable explanations. She lived in the heart of things, and the rest of the world, through him, spun round her. When she was lovesick over one boy actor or another, he saw, knew, grew anxious, ran them down a little, hoped for the worst. Once he saw her in a socialist procession, wearing low-heeled shoes and a skating skirt, black on top, red underneath. She walked stoutly along, shouting when they shouted, like a brave child. Her loose hair framed her pale face, without lipstick or powder; it was the lonely face of a pretty woman who cannot understand why she suffers so much, but who knows already that she must.

  Solander never looked at any other women, though he liked them and talked to them; he would think to himself that he was rather lonely at times, but “I am a one-woman man,” he said to himself. He supposed he would get her at last; and when she agreed, hesitating, to marry him, after her last miserable love affair with the faun-boy, he thought naturally, “When she knows what the love of a man is, she will forget all this and love me; experiment is always unsatisfactory.”

  She began serious family life by keeping her baby when it started, even though they were not sure they wanted it. She thought, “This will let us see where we stand; and if it doesn’t work out, one child’s nothing; I’ll get a divorce. Oh, to get out of the worry of the world. He loves me, he will keep me.” They married. She felt a new joy and thought that now for the first time she had some reason for living. “I tried to be someone; now I see that real happiness is in being no one, in effacing yourself according to the rules of society.” She had all kinds of sayings; but as no learned roles fit experiences, she wished sometimes that she had met the right man. She had no idea how much she depended on Solander, for it seemed to her she was full of ideas, when she repeated his. The art she really knew, that she was born for, by which, with unaffected, persistent work, day and night, asleep and awake, she was able to form her plastic soul to take on the shape of another’s, or even force a playwright’s imaginings to be reborn in the flavor of her own mind, this she neglected, as being unreal, not the real world. She threw away all she really knew and repeated political and economic phrases, correctly and credulously, but without inner understanding.

  The poor apartment was now hung with children’s clothes. She heard her husband air the opinions of various smart young men with whom he was infatuated (for he was an ardent lover of his friends, as well), and she wondered if he had any ability. He, meanwhile, asked himself if he were not, like many men, laughing and talking, even making love, in a mirror. Timidly each looked for another mate; such cowardly and inoffensive glances attract no one. But each said, it cannot last; and though there were tender reconciliations and moments when it was clear that they could understand each other as acquaintances, or as people living in the same city understand each other, there was nothing else between them but the children— myself a noisy, showy child, and slow-mooded, tender Jacky—and a gloomy feeling of years lost together.

  Convinced that in the familiarity of the marital bed she had cheapened herself, Mathilde now tried to keep the marriage together by spending months away from her husband with the children. He slaved away in the city, attended his meetings, visited his friends, came to a house cleaned once a week, lived through the cold, the heat, and made money to keep them. Mathilde, living unhappily with the noisy, greedy, money-loving Morgans in Green Acres Inn or in Long Beach, and even up in Lydnam Lodge, the Morgan place near Clinton, New Jersey, hoped that Solander would call her back, or even take a mistress, so that she could have a complaint against him—any real misdemeanor would force a solution. All this was a vague, almost incoherent dream. She lived from day to day and listened to the advice poured upon her. Presently her relatives began to neglect her, and between themselves said, “She’ll lose him.” Grandmother Morgan began introducing her to well-situated businessmen. “I like Sol, but businessmen are the best providers and they need a real home, they’ve got to have a place their bank manager and their boss can recognize. A bank manager likes a nice home. When you’re looking for credit you mustn’t have ideas. People with ideas have no bank account. For every idea you have you lose a dollar. I want to see my girls comfortable. A man with ideas can’t be a good provider, and an idea is a thing you can change overnight. Now, you can’t lose a good credit balance overnight.”

  Sometimes my mother left us in the country places and with families in the city while she lived with my father alone, to patch it up. I always had a great adaptability, was a regular chameleon; I was a country girl in the country, very pert and up-to-date in the city; I did my best to be ignorant and coarse in a rural one-room school, and head of the class in town; but I was always off on some fresh tack, learning, imitating, acting something new. I hated equals. I lied about gifted, traveled, or propertied children, fought rivals as well as I could, despised those who obeyed me. As for those who seemed to ignore me, I flattered myself they did not exist. Jacky accepted all change with a reasoning gaiety. Green Acres Inn, New Canaan, and Lydnam Lodge in northern New Jersey were our occasional refuges in those early years.

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  Green Acres Inn was a white-painted house, New England style, with deep porches, gabled ends, and many windows opening on lawns and gardens. It was set back from the road but not too far back, for the visitors to the Inn were all of one sort—a sort that lives in the bustle made by others; that is to say, old people who would fret if they missed an automobile on the road, and who looked lugubriously and even desperately into their plates at lunch if they heard the other women calling across the softaired dining room, “It was a Pierce-Arrow, wasn’t it?” “Yes, blue, with pale blue initials.” My grandmother knew these old women well enough. At such a moment, a hostess, a young woman of thirty or so, would come into the room and ask after their health or the meals. A short grumble about the soup, and the old creatures would begin to cheer up. But they were ill-natured and spoiled, living on someone else’s money for the most part, and they looked upon young women as encumbrances. They were intent upon their secret cocktail parties in bedrooms (from which they emerged with red faces for lunch), their favorite records on the Inn phonograph (Geraldine Farrar, Schumann-Heink, Caruso), their card games which started at eleven in the morning, their discussions of George Sand’s love life and of the Bluebeard of the day. All their discussions ended in the condemnation of women. They were steel-ribbed ladies of fifty to eighty; to them my mother, and even their own sons and daughters, seemed inexperienced, sexless. To these avid old people, only themselves were alive and burning with sex; the rest of mankind had all to learn. There were two or three old men at the Inn. The only struggles these old women knew were for the attentions of the men, or to be invited to bedroom parties where palms were read and fortunes told. Of course, this was in the days of prohibition when every man was devoted to breaking the law.

  The house belonging to the Morgans in northern Jersey, was on a hillside steep, facing the setting sun and the blue ridges of Pennsylvania. Uncle Percival Hogg called it the old name of the hill, Lydnam Hill, and then changed the name to Lydnam Lodge, to the great annoyance of Aunt Angela who thought a poor man was putting on frills. It was really half a house, built by Grandfather Morgan in a moment of romance, and it looked like a grand-ducal hunting-lodge. Aunt Angela had been a Morgan girl.

  Grandfather Morgan had a motto for hi
s family: “First have a roof over your heads, the rest will follow.” He bought property and houses and looked for years for a large farm, not costing much, on which he could build roofs for his family. Before his powers failed, his family was large, but by that time also he had made some money.

  At length he pitched on Lydnam Hill, and bought the entire hill, a small stony knoll with steep sides, in area about two hundred acres. On it he found three farms with farmhouses, an old forge from revolutionary times, some stony cornfields, a tall wood, a small wood, some moist bottoms near a river, and The Corners, a T-shaped junction of roads at which stood some ruins covered with poison ivy and an old stone cottage. Below the stone cottage was an orchard dipping north.

  Two of the farms were in good repair. On a southeastern slope he built Morgan’s Folly, now called Lydnam Lodge. He poured a fortune into it. It was a museum of modern house designing. He could not get anyone to live in it. It was too far from town and it was really only one room, though that room was the size of the Metropolitan Opera House stage, so that it required a servant.

  The house stood in a wood of elms, beeches, and tulip trees. A place had been cleared under them for a further extension of the Lodge, and the cleared ground was now cluttered up with vines and shrubs, a haunting and hunting place of birds, insects, snakes, and frogs. A little fountain stood beside the flight of steps down to the winding approach. By this approach were stumps of trees intended as bird roosts and bird baths, but which had become ant-skyscrapers and which contained galleries, shoots, liftwells, staircases and apartments under the bark. At the door was a slab of granite with a knocker, on which could be imitated the woodpecker or sapsucker. Down the drive had been planted about one hundred conifers, Douglas fir, white fir, and blue spruce, eastern red cedar, most of which had increased and were now about eight feet high. A runnel about three feet wide ran down the sharp hillside; there many frogs were found and there the chickens came to roost. The undergrowth was full of stumps, fungi, and small and soft plants, many of them medicinal. The farmer’s hens had laid eggs all over the wood. It was not safe to venture there without tall boots and gloves, on account of the copperheads, poison ivy, and other probable dangers; but it was a lovely wood, with mushrooms, mandrakes, lilies, and full of birds.

  The Lodge was a splendid building. The original house had been built on a basement and surrounded by three walls of heavy stone taken from the revolutionary forge, and above and round these stones, heavy planks and beams of cedar, and giant old riveted beams bought out of some old house, with the roof rising above the immense rafters like the upturned hull of a boat. Beneath this hull was a polished floor and a fireplace with a stone apron stretching toward the middle of the floor.

  Many logs had been cut down in the wood but all had rotted and were full of ants and termites. The piles of the veranda were termiteridden. The great fireplace on a cool day burned a pile of branches, and even sections of large logs. Old trees shadowed the place; before and during rains the old stones streamed with water and the beams sweated. The fog and moisture settled on the highly polished floor and on the waxed antiques and on the windows, whose fittings were covered with verdigris. The house linens were never quite dry, except in midsummer, and even then the high treetops and the soft woods sent down a soft, rotting damp.

  Yet it was a beautiful house. Plants waved outside every set of windows except southerly, and all life was rich and prolific. Except for storms from the south, the house was folded into the hill and had no buffeting, but when storms came from the south, as they did in summer, generally in the afternoon, one could see them stalking across the near valley, up the neglected fields of tall grass, and cramping the trees. The trees were old and dangerous and should have been attended to by a forester; but after the death of old Bernard Morgan nothing was done there. My grandfather’s bones later were built into one pillar of the roofed gate which was to make an entrance to the long drive edged with conifers. The rains flung themselves upon the house like a storm of light and music, sending the clouds so fast across the sky that the sun poured through; the thick crown of the wood parted and was filled with fragments of sky, and the fields all the way down the hill and the low tops at its foot and the smoky patterned fields and hills for mile upon mile tossed and shone, as the gusts poured north in a shining ocean. The house creaked and fluttered, but nothing moved, so solidly was it built. My Uncle Hogg, who lived there with my Aunt Angela, would go about crowing, “What is the matter? It fills your lungs, it clears the air.” Mother visited us there, but only when she must. Both women hated it. One feared rheumatism, the other thought a tree would uproot itself clumsily trying to move in the ocean of wind, and would stumble over the house. At night too they feared. But then would come my father who, looking out when the fresh winds blew the new leaves in the sunlight, felt romantic, strong, and full of promise; and my mother silently sat on the top step of the porch, just outside the screen door, saw the great circle which had been cut in the trees for the moon to shine through, into this sculptured and furnished wood, but which was just the same—beautiful, enchanted, a treasure house; and saw perhaps the boy with the blue hair, in his coolie dancing suit, walking lightly up the hill, or wandering, with his back to her, in the smoky moonlight of the wood. My father sat by her with his arm round her waist. She sat motionless in her impatience.

  Her mind was full of dreams now. For a few years before she had married, after she had begun to fail as an actress and when the blue-haired boy was leaving her, she had been walking barefoot, hideously, it seemed to her, in a bustling world, confused, hoarse-voiced, which hated her, or had no use for her. Now that she was married, even though she was unhappy, she had gone back to the dreams she had had up to her sixteenth or seventeenth year. My father did not figure in them; he was merely the one who threw the dark tent of his love around her so that she could rest away from life. She did not know this. She thought she was a naturally unhappy woman.

  The world in the early twenties seemed to my father full of hope and opportunity, however. He was young. He had made connections abroad such that he hoped some day or other to realize a great dream of his, which was to go and live in Europe. At the present time, however, he agreed to do anything to please my mother and her family; and he continued with the partners, McLaren and Montrose.

  Uncle Percival Hogg, who had married Angela Morgan, a very handsome but cold woman, was quite an original. They had several children, of whom one was my cousin Templeton, a handsome boy who later went into the movies. We had been visiting at Lydnam Lodge for several years, quite accustomed to the obvious disunion of the Hogg household, and were surprised and cast down when the news came to New York that Angela and Percival Hogg had separated. Aunt Angela had gone out to Long Beach, but Uncle Perce, the day Angela left him, thumbed his nose at the Morgan “palace,” as he called it, and moved his things and his children into a weatherbeaten house on the other side of the Morgan hilltop. This house he called “The Wreck.” He did not neglect us either. He immediately wrote to our parents to say that things must be as they had been and he wanted to see Jacky and me there, in The Wreck, every summer.

  The Wreck was a weather-board house three stories high, with a dugout basement in stone; it was Hogg’s storehouse, workshop, play house. Some distance away was a new garage, with living quarters to one side. This was rented to artists in the summer. The Wreck and its garage stood on the first shoulder of the hill, with an uncut field below them and an unpruned orchard lower still. They faced a wide and distant view, with roads, houses, and home woods between. A road ran down beside the house to the main road, beside which was Farmington, the farm prison. Opposite The Wreck and the garage in the lane were tall stone ruins. Trees grew from the center of the ruins. Lower down the hill was a fine stone house with some story of scandal attached to the upper apartment; I forget it now, but a nice boy named Carl lived there; and down the lane was an old family house, with dormer windows and attics, not to mention the Morgan farms, and
the well-run profitable farm beyond the hill where lived the man with bull-charm, a city accountant who had come to the country to recuperate and discovered a country talent, bull-charm. The black monster lay red-eyed and suspicious in his compound, horrible to look at, approachable only by the city accountant.

  Uncle Perce feared horses, cattle, and rams as much as we did, but loved meek undomesticated nature. He sometimes worked in the Natural History Museum, gave scientific lectures, or sold microscopes, according to his fortunes. His fortunes depended on official opinions, particularly those on war and reaction, for he was a reformer, a crank, an original; he called himself The Evangelist and The Vox Humana. When a piece of paper blew his way he picked it up and studied it; he said it had a message for him; he said the printed word was sacred; at the same time he sacrilegiously denounced the writings of all his rivals in botany.

  He took strays into The Wreck like ourselves and an unfortunate young woman, his sister, who called herself Mrs. Dr. Goodsir. His house was managed by Mrs. Dr. Goodsir, now far advanced in a pregnancy, and his daughter Cecily Hogg, a twelve-year-old girl, a breasted, heavy-limbed child, very blonde, with a pretty mouth, but stupid and sulky. She never played with us or with her own family, that I remember, but sat looking over the orchard or the view when not working, or stood at the broken fence staring at the ivies, the things in bloom, a little dead swallow that hung from the telegraph wire, or at the boys passing. She was love-mad. We heard her talking to herself and singing, between the irregular rows of stunted corn in the Lodge cornfield, pulling out weeds, chasing small animals, and making a sort of chant of romance, sorrow, triumph. When we burst out shouting and hooraying from the far edge, where we had run behind her back, bending below the corn, her skin flushed dark red; the stain seemed to spread all over her. She said nothing, but turned and walked to the shade-knot in the center of the field. From there, too, from everywhere on the Morgan farm, you could look into a distance of miles, with blue ridges and fields. It was hard to get her to come into the house, even at night. Then, when she had jobs waiting for her, she would still be out under the stars or stormclouds, singing and talking to herself. We pretended to think she was mad, tapped our heads, and burst out laughing. We knew better than she did, however, that it all came from her longing to lie down with a man; to us all these antics were still ridiculous.