My mother tried to unpin her hat, but my father stopped her.
“Don’t do that now! I don’t care whether your hat’s on or off. I know you, Mattie. I know what you look like without anything on; what does your hat matter to me? And I know what you were like as a girl in that little skirt in that socialist procession. Do you think I care about all that? I suppose Pauline and Phyllis got to work on you—” He laughed gently. “Look, Mattie, what’s your idea of our future? If you expect to live with me again, you must have thought out something. I wish you’d guide me. I am very unhappy. I don’t like to spoil your life, and I know you have the girls to bring up.”
My mother at once began to cry, “How can I have a plan for the future? Pauline wanted me to get furniture and we even went to Christofle and bought some silver as I told you, but why should I interrupt the girls’ schooling till I was sure? You don’t seem sure. You didn’t break your relation with that woman. You let your mother live in London while you’re living with a mistress. I don’t see why I should make plans when I have nothing to look forward to. This will happen again and again. Mother said to take you back and let you have women on the side. My pride doesn’t allow me to do that. I want love, or nothing. I don’t want all this compromise and sly glances. I don’t want my old school friends to laugh at me. Why must I be the only one to suffer? Oh, God! Nothing ever went right with me. I have no luck. I wish I were hard and self-sufficient like Letty. She’ll always get what she wants. She feels quite secure though she has no father, no family life, nothing; no money, no decent schooling. She’s forced to move about from one country to another, for I’m not able to look after them, feeling the way I do, and living here without a husband or a home, but Letty doesn’t mind at all. She’s made to survive, that girl. As for Jacky, Jacky’s a dreamer. Nothing means anything to her. I don’t know what that child thinks about. I envy her. She finds compensation for everything. Both your daughters are like you; they can find compensation in life, but I’m not so lucky. I know I’ve been beaten. And why? It’s just bad luck. Everyone says, ‘What a pretty woman,’ and I can’t get a single man after me—”
“Well, thank you,” said my father, smiling dourly. “I just asked you if you wanted me back.”
“Oh, what’s that? That’s a sense of duty. You’re just too much of a coward not to say it,” said my mother, weeping and touching her large eyes with her handkerchief. “You’d really rather live with that woman and have no responsibilities at all. You pretend to be a socialist, but it is only to escape your responsibilities. Once you have had children, life is all over for you. It is time for you to think of them. But you want to be a child forever; you are looking for a mother. I cannot be your mother. That is why you left me—”
This conversation went on for a long time, but in the end my father returned to England, and Mathilde was glad she had not taken the apartment with all the rooms and all the silver.
Dora Dunn was somewhere in England, writing letters which made no mention of the child. Philip spoke of going back to the U.S.A. alone, but he was unhappy. The winter had come, very severe in the U.S.A. and everyone was downhearted. People were hungry, futureless, there were suicides and miseries. France and England really looked better.
My father came to Paris from time to time, and we often did not see him. In the spring he was going to Antwerp to work for a correspondent of Montrose. Montrose came to Paris to see Phyllis and Pauline, and Mathilde thought that Montrose had even made advances to her, late one evening, but I am not sure that my mother knew what were advances and what gallantries. When my father complained of the expenses, my mother said she would send the children over to London to him; we could live with our grandmother. But, instead, my father sent my Grandmother Fox to Paris. The cold weather and uncertain heating of London had given her pains in arms and legs. She came to Paris and stayed with us in the pension of Mme. Gouraud.
She was much changed, older, complaining, almost demented. She stayed in her room much of the day, resting, fumbling with clothes, sleeping. At all times of the day and night we heard papers crackling; there were little packets in newspaper and string everywhere. Whenever anyone came, Grandmother would run up to them with an open, childish smile, ask after their health, and then beg for stamps to write to her son who was far away and neglected her. Her niece also, she said, Lily Spontini, who had returned to the U.S.A., did not write to her; God knew what she was doing. She was a lazy, stupid girl and—Grandmother would apparently forget what she was saying. My mother was frightened by her and would not come to see her except when she was urged to do so by a letter from Solander. Grandmother Fox continually asked after her and had many anxious conversations with Mme. Gouraud. “Who ever heard of a mother not living with her children?”
Mme. Gouraud consoled her impatiently, agreeing with all sides. When my mother came, the courageous old peasant reproached my mother gently for not making a home for us, “What must your husband think? He pays out the money and he sees no home.”
And when my father visited us, she reproached him, too, but in another way, “Poor Mme. Fox is quite distracted, just a young girl, and needs guidance, and your mother would be happier with you both than here. She deteriorates. It is all moral suffering, not physical.”
But Mme. Gouraud was anxious to keep us with her, while the household was being reestablished. Meanwhile, Mme. Gouraud hinted, he would do well to glance at the Pauline-Phyllis menage. “Mme. Pauline is charming, but too continental for this young American girl. My opinion is that she should go home and marry very soon.”
At other times she proposed husbands for Phyllis: an architect, just come into prominence, who had seen Phyllis at Mme. Gouraud’s house; a young lieutenant (“but it isn’t practical, just a love affair”); others, amorous but unsuitable. “She is handsome enough to marry a very rich man, but she must content herself with one of another generation, rather mature so to speak. This is only natural. If she had a home to which to invite them, as, for example, if you and your wife were living here together (I am making no suggestions, it is a thought which occurred to me), she ought to find a husband very soon. Furthermore, I recommend it. She is receiving too much undesirable attention, will have her head turned, and who knows— young girls are very foolish—rich men expect to marry virgins.”
My father told Mathilde to write to Grandmother Morgan and let her know that Phyllis was in danger. A certain man hanging around Phyllis, both Montrose and my mother thought to be a white-slaver. She attracted the attention of a very peculiar old woman in a cabaret. Phyllis herself said wildly, that she could not hold out much longer, she had to get a man, so she’d get married if they’d find her a rich man. She didn’t mind an old man if he liked company and would take her about.
My mother had many friends who visited her and met her in cafés and these offered her different advice about my father; in general, they plotted feebly to reunite the couple.
“Persia’s really stupid not to have a baby by him,” said many of them, “but, after all, my dear, that’s your chance,” and each word was a stab to my mother.
Things were all very simple to these philosophers. They ate with my mother; my mother bought them drinks in the café; her pocket money dwindled, vanished. Mathilde lent money to Phyllis and Pauline, always in trouble. Pauline occasionally got jobs in cabarets which paid poorly in order to use Phyllis as bait there. Pauline was twenty-five, tired and corrupt; Phyllis still shone with her lovely youth, an apparently voluptuous virginity and unsatisfied longing for men. She had learned a lot from Pauline. They had parties at their flat near the Avenue Mozart, lasting sometimes three days, and most of the guests were men; sometimes Pauline packed Phyllis off to Mathilde while she had her own parties.
It was the corrupt Pauline who prevented Phyllis from becoming the prey of these men, some of them being very Parisian, elegant and delightful. “I must watch your sister, Mathilde,” she said; “American women—look, I don’t want to insult you, but it’s
the truth—set up to be sex-careerists, but the plain truth is they fall the first time they get drunk or their senses are tickled; the sugary appetites of children. I don’t let Phyllis get too drunk, and I watch her like a hawk. I’ve saved her virtue several times already. I’m a different type; I’m passionate. Her only danger will be when I fall for someone suddenly. I might disappear. Things come along which are irresistible. I think, Oh! God, this might be it, the grand passion. Then I throw up everything—and then your sister would be in danger, for pretty young girls in the U.S.A. are brought up without the faintest ideology—simply this: Get a home, get a husband who is liable for alimony. That’s no way to start a marriage. Here they are more professional. But, my dear, the fact is that if I disappeared one day you must at once take Phyllis under your wing. She’s as safe as a barnyard chick with vultures.”
Pauline wrote to my father in the same strain when asking him for money, and talked sentimentally of my mother’s virtues and of us. “Poor children, they are quite out of hand and Mme. Gouraud, good soul, is a bit grotesque.”
Then she would write about Grandmother. Once Aunt Phyllis wrote my father a headstrong letter accusing him of living only for pleasure and neglecting his children’s futures. Things happened to be tight that week in the garçonnière. Phyllis said Solander must send more money for his wife and neglected children.
Lily wrote a gentle, sad letter saying that Solander had never given her pocket money while in London, otherwise she would have stayed. She reminded him, allusively, of the nice young fellow with the toy business who had failed her since Solander had only got him a credit of one hundred pounds, not enough. Now he wanted Solander to guarantee him as an immigrant to the U.S.A.
Everyone wrote to Solander. He had many sympathizers; and as, at the same time, they managed to convey as an afterthought, or in a postscript, that they understood his troubles, that my mother was rather prosy, and that they themselves were ashamed to ask him for the small check which was nevertheless the only thing they would have to live on for the next week, my father spent all of his money and went into debt. This was good for him, said the adherents to my mother’s cause when she heard of it. It would reunite him to my mother, and all they did was calculated to bring us all together.
In the spring my father moved to Antwerp. Grandmother Fox had developed the persistent dry cough of the aged. Solander offered to send her to Switzerland to be treated, and she accepted, while saying she was too ill to take the journey alone. He himself accompanied her to Zurich for examination, left her there, and returned to Antwerp where he was living in the old town, in a single room at the Metropole Hotel with Die Konkubine, who also worked in the office with him.
My mother also began thinking of medicine. She went at once to stay with some American friends in the south of France, near Grasse; and these friends, named Pample, now wrote to my father saying my mother was seriously ill, probably tubercular, and needed care. They thought that it was not pulmonary tuberculosis, but something worse, some bone decay; and in the letter was a note from my mother, saying she must have money to pay board to her friends, and for X-ray photographs.
Uncle Philip, who lingered on in Paris trying to pick up an acquaintance with artists, and to pick up some artists, also wrote to say that Mathilde was very ill and that he must make the journey south to see her. He added that Dora Dunn had inherited a little money from her Uncle McRae, who had just died; that a son had been born to them; that Dora Dunn was coming back to Paris leaving the child with a nurse, and they were to be married. Philip could not return to the U.S.A. because his first wife wished to jail him for arrears of alimony. What could he do? His mother was not at present in a position to support him at home, or to pay his back alimony. He felt it would be cheapest for all concerned if he went and stayed with the Pamples at Grasse. My father paid for the return ticket for Philip to Grasse, writing, “I cannot go, Phil; please let me know your own opinion. Mathilde is unhappy, but I do not like to be blackjacked.”
Dora Dunn arrived in Paris during Philip’s absence, came to see us, took us out, pleased us, and quarreled with Pauline, who felt that her rights were being invaded. After several quarrels, Pauline and the wife-to-be made peace and had serious talks about reuniting our father and mother. “As for the young woman, Persia, we’ll find someone for her; she isn’t fussy. Evidently she believes in free love,” Pauline said; and went on, “I could do something for her, but you see I have just arranged for a concert tour for Phyllis and myself— Vichy, Aix, Marseilles, Alexandria, Constantinople. If this works out we will be starred in cabarets in Dresden, Munich and Berlin! It’s a great opportunity. Phyllis is not a wonderful singer, but really magnificent physically. I have a small voice but am an accomplished cabaret singer, and we can get by on that. I am glad to go, also. I am on the point of losing my head about a French vaudevillist here; that’s not in my schedule at all, my dear, and I know myself; I’m a perfect fool. My God! And Phyllis, that raving beauty, will never know love. She won’t even know whether her sables are genuine or not, but she’ll get them genuine, I don’t doubt.” She added, “What luck you have, you American women! Men who pay for everything and don’t ask for accounts. Yes, it’s Protestantism. The men believe they’ve done their wives insult and injury by sleeping with them. They must pay forever! They must pay their mothers because their mothers suffered to have them. And as for the women, my child,” she said to Dora, “they want to get married, naturally. But they behave as if they are disabled for life as soon as they’re married. They go in for man-sweating. Every man, legally related to them, must pay through the nose. The law allows it. Oh, Golconda of women! And then one’s not obliged to stay with one man. Not at all! A woman can try one man after another and each one’s obliged to pay her for the privilege of sleeping with her, but only, of course, after he has stopped sleeping with her: it is, sleep with, or go to jail for alimony. It’s incredible,” she declared excitedly. “Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined a country where men went into such sacred frenzies of self-abnegation. All the same, they don’t know love in the U.S.A. No, they are all miserable—the men, the women. They marry without dowries, so they think they marry for love. But afterwards—I’m not a philosopher, I can’t explain all that. But I know I am happy. Comparatively, I am a bad woman. So some people say, but I have passions; men love me. It’s the reason for living, don’t you think?”
“Yes, yes,” said Dora Dunn, “but Americans love! Philip loves me madly, and to think I might never have met him! It was quite by accident. When I first saw him I thought, I wondered, Who is that hulking boy, sitting there drinking too much, he looks like a Greenwich Village bum from the Middle West. I went and sat by him, and he started to talk to me. I was surprised at how agreeable he was to me, smiling at me, charming, you know. We were together from then on. It was—you know. I still get cold sweats at night when I think I might never have gone to that party. I only went to please my friends and backers, the Gropers. He was a friend of theirs, and at first I didn’t think he’d suit me at all. I didn’t like his record. And then he seemed weak. But he says he needed me.”
“That’s obvious,” said Pauline, pleasantly, “and tell me about your darling son, Bernard.”
“I called him Bernard, after Philip’s father of course; but he looks like Philip—”
“I can’t conceive why Philip wasn’t here to meet you. Of course, he had to go to Mathilde, who is sick.”
“I wrote to him that I hope we’ll get Solander and Mathilde together again now: we must protect the marriage. I arrived earlier than I expected, though. I made arrangements with the nurse in England—”
“And are you satisfied? One has to be careful with these nurses. You know, these baby farmers—unscrupulous, murderous, avaricious—”
“Oh, this one was recommended to me by my uncle, Mr. McRae. It was a friend of his. My uncle will bring me news of dear Bernard. He adores him.”
Pauline said curiously, “They a
re very level-headed, the English and Scots. For example, he didn’t mind your going there without a husband and having a baby? But—good gracious, isn’t he dead?”
Dora said, “Not yet. Someone telephoned me—it was a practical joke. They said, ‘Is that the McRae Heiress?’ I was so relieved to find out dear Uncle McRae was alive. We were always like father and daughter.”
“The world’s mad nowadays, anyhow! No one can ever be surprised at what happens,” sighed Pauline; “but I am very, very happy for you. And since the parents of these children, Letty and Jacky, are such infants, and I am obliged to leave in a few days for my concert tour with Phyllis, I am delighted that some relative of theirs is here. Frankly, no one knows if the old lady will return and she is quite senile; and as for Mme. Gouraud—a peasant, my dear, and an old maid. And you are so intelligent and a mother. That makes all the difference.”
Dora looked at us uneasily. She was plumper, but had much of the girl-about-town in her, still: “If no one comes, I’ll ship them to their father.”
And looking anxiously at us, that evening (she stayed in the pension with us) she sat down to write a letter to my father, asking what should be done for us.
It will be seen that we did not lack for friends and intimates, and that everyone was concerned for us. We never at any time felt lonely or neglected, but, of course, we soon learned that we were to be pitied, and I, especially, would complain about the absence of my parents. I understood everything, I thought. My father was selfish, my mother lazy. Mme. Gouraud once or twice called us in her brisk voice, Mes Orphelines. We felt cheerfully that all women lived in a pension of tears in a whirligig of infinite possibilities as to husbands.
15
This was 1930. I was nine years of age, my sister Jacky, eight. Solander went to Zurich to bring back Grandmother, and I heard it said that during this time Persia, his mistress, was lying in bed in the Antwerp hotel, and had miscarried, with intent, of another child. My father did not go to her, but came straight to us with Grandmother; and leaving Grandmother with us, set about looking for a flat for all of us. Mathilde was on her way home from Grasse with her brother. Pauline and Phyllis had already left Paris, and were playing in a small hall at Vichy. We had a brief cryptic note from Pauline: “Phyllis has so many admirers and is keeping her head.”
Letty Fox Page 19