This Lydnam Lodge was a folly and could never pay for itself. “Every egg cost a dollar,” said Grandmother Morgan; but the Lodge was a convenient place to quarantine her children as each one reaped a wild oat; and it was a senseless delight, a pleasance which she felt she would allow them. She did not care for it herself. Grandmother Morgan, once she found she could not in any way turn the place into a boarding house, stayed away from it. She missed the clink of china and glass, the endless brushings of brooms, the glimmer of clean windows, the smells of rooms over-furnished with bedspreads, toilet covers, and women. She missed the bottles hidden in boot boxes, the crystal sets, the card games—especially perhaps the big poker game at which she herself was such a hand. She liked the complaints, the bills, the quarrels in the kitchen; she liked the cutting of lawns, the consultations with plumbers and plasterers, the quantities of goods in drawers and cupboards, the bustle of company, the thieving and picking, lashing of competitors, the brawling, the fight for life. Where can you feel it more than in a hotel or in a money game? She never objected even to what went on in the rooms, if these human frailties were kept out of sight. For that was life to her, like the secret bustle of red blood, a woman who longs and fornicates and a man who thirsts and sucks. What was there out in the country, among the chickens and plants?
Philip made trips to town almost every week, and he decided to go in for a few days around May Day. A sulky girl with a stoop came up every day from the end of the lane, to help Mrs. Morgan, Philip’s wife, with the house. Mrs. Morgan did not like housework, but was good at stews and pastries. When Philip came from town, he brought us cakes, candies, and hairbows and books. We often went to the Lodge now that we had got used to the strange woman, and had digested all the story about her. Few people visited her. She was a short-tempered woman, and if fretful or tired would stare in angry silence at unwelcome visitors, or walk up and down, spurting odd remarks, as to Mrs. Dr. Goodsir. When Dollie Goodsir was born, we came to call Mrs. Goodsir Aunt Bette. Aunt Bette wheeled the precious child down to Mrs. Morgan’s every afternoon that Philip was absent, for women’s chat, but women’s chat displeased Amabel. She had been a fighter for women’s rights, but on the outside of real woman-talk, their simple preoccupation with their sex, the other sex, and their superstitions. As Aunt Bette frothed away gaily, sure that this defender of women would sympathize with her, the face of Philip’s wife darkened. She would brusquely ask Aunt Bette about her work down in The Wreck, an endless job. Aunt Bette was paid a little, both by Hogg and by my father, for looking after us and the house. She never talked about the work, did it singing and dancing, as well as she could, with her tired legs, and she looked pretty and young when she took her baby for its walk. We heard her singing to the baby in the house, “O darling, O darling, O darling, O darling, O darling!” Sometimes she made up songs, “O darling, O darling, you’re so sweet; my dear little baby I’ll eat, eat, eat,” and so she invented all the afternoon; “You’ve got a cruel mother, a berry cruel mother, a wicked cruel mother, a mother who hates its own little angel, its precious, a mother who is going to give it a silk dress and a satin dress and a velvet dress, all so white, all so white—tum-tum-tum—all so white—”
Her talk with Aunt Amabel was a bit more sensible, not much. “Do you think that prenatal impressions—?” “A woman I know stayed in bed eight months to have a baby—”
We loved all this. Aunt Amabel did not care whether we were there or not; but presently she would get up, stretch herself with a slow, sure muscular motion, like a lion after sleep, and begin thoughtfully to walk about.
“Has Dr. Goodsir a specialty in medicine?”
Aunt Bette never liked to answer. She felt Dr. Goodsir should not be admitted as truly living, until he came back to his child.
“Something about the glands—the ductless glands!” She had a good memory and rattled off all she could remember from his instruction in the days when they were going together.
“You have a good memory, Bette; you could have studied medicine, or bacteriology—you could have helped him in the laboratory. What can be done?”
“I—I,” Aunt Bette would say laughing, with her hand over her mouth at the ridiculous idea. Then she’d straighten up, pull down her lawn and lace blouse, “I dare say I could do something if I had the chance; but now I have Baby.”
“You’re twenty-three.”
“Dr. Goodsir would not like it, if it got about that his wife was working.”
In answer to Aunt Amabel’s silence, she would say timidly, “My father was too old to get big orders any more when I was growing up and I wanted to go on the stage, I wouldn’t have heard of college anyhow. Besides, it ruined them putting my three brothers through college; but look at Percival—he’s worth it.”
“You don’t complain enough,” said Amabel.
“Everyone’s very kind to me, very good indeed,” said Bette. “I like to come into a room gay and bright, and leave a good impression. A querulous woman—what’s worse!”
“Even a dog yelps when it’s trod on, but not you—” Mrs. Morgan would look out the window, and the brown in her eyes glow like ruby.
“Of course, it’s hard work, but I eat and I’ve got Baby.”
Mrs. Morgan was not so happy. Philip was often away for the whole day or the whole afternoon, talking to the farmers, and would come home healthy, brown, fat and cheerful, but tired. He was known for a mile in every direction, a favorite of kitchens and barns. He knew the small flower gardens near the house, the barn and house-cats, the bulls, woodchuck colonies, tall woods full of birds, and yards sheltered by trained vines, the tool sheds and the back lots where no one ever came. A cat in the chicken farm was famous. She turned down the local toms and walked three miles to her beloved, and this, year after year. The dogs knew Philip; the boys whom others despised; the girls knew him too. He became sick of the district; scandals sprang up, but in what seemed to us a hypocritical way he was devoted to his wife. We came once upon a curious scene. Uncle Philip was sitting on the corner of the daybed which stood in the great room, his arm on the fanciful book table by its side. Mrs. Morgan was bent toward him and with her hands had tilted his face up to her: she was gently kissing every part of his face, while smiling, and he had his eyes fixed on her, quite ravished away. After a moment, one of them heard us and they turned to us, laughing, both laughing. We ran away; I, at least, felt jealous.
During this whole first week of May, Uncle Philip stayed away. In the meantime; the sulky, stooping girl from the village had come to Uncle Hogg and gone away; Aunt Bette told us there was something wrong with her and that she had said awful things about Uncle Philip—a girl like that. One afternoon a storm blew up, as it often does over those hills and bottoms, and Uncle Hogg sent me down to keep Mrs. Morgan company. It would grow awfully dark in these sudden storms. There was always a great noise and sometimes the wires came down. The Lodge was safe under the old wood. The rain pelted in so that it was hard to get down from the road to the Lodge, and the farmers were too busy counting their chickens and shutting doors to be able to look to the Lodge. I loved storms and liked to go and watch over Aunt Amabel. The sky was clear, high, wide, and then the dark poured over it and rains hit the house.
Inside, in the middle of the high-roofed room, it was still, but outside it seemed as if the porch would be torn away; big branches from the trees brushed the house, bushes struck the back windows, the water rushed against the house and down the hill. Uncle Philip had then been away a week and I prattled about him, while Amabel was very cheerful, and told me also about the baby coming. Night came. I was to stay there the night. About ten o’clock the telephone rang and I heard Aunt Amabel talking quietly on it. I crept in—it was Uncle Philip, in New York. She was saying:
“I am all right, my darling, but it is lonely here, there is a storm out here, the boughs are brushing against the house—” She came in, running, full of joy. “Philip is coming tonight! It’s an awful trip here now so late. Poo
r boy!”
He came about three in the morning and she flung herself into his arms like a young girl. After this I said nothing more to Jacky about them, nor made up stories. I could not stand it. I wanted to be loved.
Uncle Philip had seemed very sweet that night, boyish, kneeling at her feet and kissing her knees and feet and hands. I tossed about thinking about it all. The next day, too, Uncle Philip was not himself and took me back to The Wreck without a word, although I babbled as usual. I became pettish and struck him.
He looked down at me, and said, “I’m a bad man, Letty dear, I’m afraid, and I’m having an attack of conscience.”
“What did you do?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to be a good man.”
“Why not?”
“It’s my nature.”
“What have you done?”
He sighed and handed me in the gate. Then he went in to P.Hogg and seemed to have lost all shame, for he asked Hogg to please take care of the girl called Blackfleld, Eleanor Blackfield. He had not stayed at his sister’s (my mother’s) place, as he had promised to do; he had stayed the whole week with his old sweetheart, Eleanor, in her flat in the Village; and he had been with her when he telephoned that stormy night. He was afraid she would come after him to The Wreck. “Please don’t tell her I live down the road, but send her away to town,” he asked Hogg. “Tell her I’ve gone back. You see, she thinks I live here.”
Hogg flushed and he stared at Philip with fury. “Do your own dirty work. How can you bring a girl out where your wife is? I won’t put my hands in the pitch. You can’t touch pitch without being blacked.”
But Philip persuaded him and called us in and told us to do our best for him, we were sensible little girls. “This is a lady I was going to marry. I didn’t marry her and now she wants me to.”
“You jilted her?” enquired Jacky, fascinated.
“He stood her up,” said I.
“You’ve got it exactly,” said Philip, taking a hand in each hand, and looking earnestly at us. “Now dear Aunt Amabel is going to be sick and have a baby and she mustn’t be worried and you mustn’t tell Eleanor about anything at all. Now, Eleanor is a nice girl, too, remember.”
Hogg could scarcely stand the thought of it. He stood staring down at Philip. “She’s coming here to see your wife?”
“She thinks my wife’s gone back to Chicago!”
“You liar.”
“I am a liar,” said Philip. “I am a bad husband to Amabel; but I must say one thing, the girls do hunt you, you know; you must never give them a chance. Give them a chance and you’ll find out.”
“The girls hunt you!” said Hogg, and he told Philip about the scandals in the district: a girl three-quarters of a mile away, living with her father, was going to have a baby. He said it was Philip’s.
“Now every baby in the township will be mine!” he frowned.
We stood staring ourselves out of countenance, having no idea what it could all be about. When Philip went, we spent all our time talking about Eleanor, the girl who was hunting Philip, and this was how we first saw any one of what Hogg called “his women.”
Eleanor was easily persuaded that Philip had gone back to town, and she herself, seeing The Wreck, threw her purple lipstick and silver pencil back into her handbag and took the same taxi back to the station. Philip had already telegraphed from the farmer’s kitchen to his sister Mathilde to fix up a story for him when Eleanor called upon her. We had behaved admirably, Jacky saying little and I pushing myself forward with a long line of interesting talk in which I skillfully wrapped up all the proper lies about Uncle Philip. I invented quite a lot; it was a tiptop performance. I was very much hurt when Uncle Percival sent me to bed without dinner, forbade me to talk to Jacky for the whole evening, and called us together before this punishment to give us a sharp talk about lies. Said he,
“ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.’ ”
This attracted me. I skipped up to bed. Downstairs Uncle Perce and Aunt Bette indulged in that form of psychological unraveling which consists of, “She is really to blame for; he is really to blame for”; and “the parents are really to blame for—”
8
The scandals broke round them before June; the Philip Morgans fled from the Lodge to town. At first they put up with Mathilde, and when she and my father at last objected, they moved to a hotel. While the woman was in the hospital, her husband was looking for a flat, and took one in the Village among all his old friends.
My mother, who heard Philip’s full confession, during his new loneliness, went to Farmington, packed our clothes, and brought us back to town. She telephoned Mrs. Hogg, who was getting a divorce, and Templeton and Cecily were brought back to town. My mother was unhappier than ever, but had a single hope—my father was to go to England, on a shipping job with Joseph Montrose for a year or so. In that time he would be separated from Die Konkubine and would forget her.
“But I suppose,” sighed my mother, “that now it will be another one.”
“There is safety in numbers,” said Grandmother; “one is romance, two is adventure, and three is a shame.”
The flat in Bleecker Street was an interesting nest of marital intrigue; its purpose, the recapture of my father for mother and us. Grandmother Morgan was chief of staff, although she had little time to waste on her older daughters and little enough even for Phyllis, now sixteen.
“Stella is an old maid, Mathilde has no sense, and Phyllis will get married; don’t worry,” said Grandmother Morgan to her cronies over the cards. She had no sympathy even for young married women; she waited for women to lose their illusions. But she was not easygoing: she wanted each woman to have a husband and children, which is nature’s way. She thought even Stella would marry in time; “she’ll hook some weak sister,” said Grandmother.
Only three men came to the flat—Grandfather Morgan on his way to the Rice Progressive Chess Club in Fourteenth Street, Uncle Philip on his way to and from unknown places, my father. Grandfather Morgan, now too old, was a bearded, blue-eyed gentleman who spoke softly and looked like Jesus. But he walked crabwise and smiled slightly in his blue-green eyes.
“Now, I am going to Evensong,” he would say softly, between red firm lips; that meant he was going to the Chess Club, we believed. He asked about my father, and nodded at the answer whatever it was, but he gave no advice; he never tried to patch up any family breaks.
While Amabel was still in the hospital, Philip brought a new friend to see us. She was Dora Dunn, a stout young woman, with red hair drawn back in a knot. Her skin was pale and freckled, her eyes green. She was smartly dressed, broad before and behind, with a soft neck in folds and small feet on high heels. She played the naïve, sweet friend, quietly admired my mother’s good looks and our fine eyes, and seemed to take it for granted that she was my mother’s friend.
“One of his women, I suppose,” sighed Mathilde; but she liked her. Dora Dunn told her troubles and discussed her business. She engaged designers from abroad and sold costume jewelry and gew-gaws in a Village shop which she owned. She had passed up from lamps, button collections, and second-hand articles with a few books on the side, to this flourishing business, invented by her, financed by friends, and patronized by girl friends who had attached themselves to wealthy men. She had a swarm of friends, of whom she remembered every particular; but she had the grace and art not to crowd our flat and my mother’s sad life with these others. She always made it seem that she came to see my mother only, and to talk over family affairs. She had gathered a lot of information about the family and used it discreetly; yet her avidity was shocking. My mother, to save her solitude, had learned to rebuff people, but no one could rebuff Dora Dunn; she was overpoweringly diplomatic. She was about thirty, and for a while my mother wondered if she were not simply worming herself into the Morgan family to get orders from their clientele of hotel guests.
This gifted woman made a friend also of Grand
mother Fox, who had nothing to offer to Dora, spiritually or materially; and now my mother began to fear that Dora was after my father. Dora was unmarried; she confessed she was a virgin. She had a few thousand dollars in the bank, she said, although she needed it at hand for expenses. My mother thought my father was a weak man and that such a managing woman might get him. She watched Dora suspiciously, but it looked as if she laughed and flirted with Grandmother Fox merely to keep her hand in.
“Perhaps she really has a good heart,” said my mother. Dora used to come to the flat in Bleecker Street twice a week then; each time she left she took something, a handkerchief, book, or caramel.
No doubt she was looking for a husband in her businesslike way, but she fooled Mathilde. Mathilde had met Eleanor Blackfield and others of Philip’s girls who poured out their loves and hates without reticence; but Dora coolly discussed Philip’s habits and looks, praised his attention to his wife, and praised his wife. It was during the summer when Amabel was nursing her baby, out in the Morgan house, Green Acres, that Philip came to Mathilde about Dora on one of those hot summer nights when people sit with their windows open but the lights out. Our windows, on the second floor, overlooked the street, still hot; noisy children played underneath. I was in bed, but not asleep.
“I want to be good,” said Philip, “and I haven’t been with another woman more than three or four times since I married Amabel, that’s a year; you know how I feel about Amabel. But I never loved the child, Mattie, and he doesn’t seem very bright to me. The trouble is, Mattie, that one of the women was Dora Dunn and I was her first man; she’s in love with me, I’m afraid,” and down went his voice to his boots; he sounded as if pouting.
“You can’t expect sympathy from me. I have troubles of my own,” said my mother.
Letty Fox Page 9