Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  Solander waited till Mathilde arrived in Paris, showed her the flat, which she disliked, installed us all in it, taking us away from Mme. Gouraud, and then left for Antwerp. My mother cried at this, but Solander said that Persia was leaving for Switzerland, where she would get a job in the League of Nations, and that we would hear no more of her. Nevertheless, he had to return to Antwerp where he was now situated in business, and would only visit us in the week ends. Mathilde would not live in a town so dismal, old-fashioned, and strange. She had managed to pick up some French, but could not make another attempt at outlandish speech. Mathilde refused also to live with Grandmother Fox; “How will we ever make a go of it with two small children, a mother-in-law? You’ve been very thoughtless of my comfort, Solander,” she said; “it is easy to send money to transport people back and forth, but the fact is you are just following your whims. It is easier to send money than to think, and it is I who have the burdens of looking after the house, arranging meals, and trying to fit in a cranky old woman and two restive, spoiled girls. I cannot look after all these people and the best thing you can do is to hire a maid for me, or else to send for your mother’s niece, Lily Spontini. She could live with us, and look after the children—”

  My father would not agree to this; and his mother, who was happy at the idea of living with her daughter-in-law and with us, would not hear of it. Two weeks of this life was enough. Grandmother, who seemed much younger, nevertheless had bad habits. She murmured to herself, walked about at night, and was always timidly appearing, with her eyes larger and more inquisitive in her pale little face, asking questions that angered my mother. When my father visited us for his week ends, the old woman went to her room and sat there, so as not to be in the way, and we would see her white head, small and low, like that of an aged child, looking timidly around her door. She was afraid and muttered doubtfully, “He is nervous. She, the poor woman, is nervous! No wonder. Who would blame her? It isn’t right. They don’t lead a regular life. It’s not right to be living in a strange city. Children should be brought up at home. Poor woman, no wonder she’s nervous.”

  She always said this when my mother scolded her, and would run with her head down, her eyes darting to one side, to the kitchen or bathroom. Sometimes she lost her temper, and shut her door with a bang. My mother complained that at night the old woman walked about on tiptoe in her nightgown, listening—to what? We did not know. My father found board and lodging for his mother in a place run for Americans in the Boulevard Raspail, and he would take us out with her once a week during his visits from Antwerp. When my mother asked him if she had gone to Geneva, my father answered that she had. We were unhappy! We had wild moments when Jacky and I, who by now both spoke French easily, ran away from home for a couple of hours to see some monument, or some actor, or telephoned numbers we found in the telephone book and announced that a husband or wife had left town for good; or telephoned famous stores, where we bought things on our mother’s account, and the rest of it. At other times we quarreled. Our games fell to pieces. Jacky criticized my mother’s taste in apartment decoration. I slapped Jacky for this treason. I stole letters from my mother’s drawers, and Jacky called me a spy and sneak. Then we would come together again to imagine ourselves nuns in a convent, and get up at night to pray. We began two diaries which we never worked on afterwards. We invented a play from school (we were now in a French primary school) called The Happy Crusader. A happy crusader, returning full of honors and riches after ten years, is met by a smiling wife and eight children.

  “I see you have been faithful to me,” says the Crusader.

  “Yes, these are our eight beautiful boys,” says the wife.

  This play, produced before Dora Dunn, Uncle Philip, Grandmother, and our parents, had such an instantaneous, unwarranted, and suspicious success that we could not be induced to give it in public again. We heard Uncle Philip and my father retelling it for months afterwards. My mother found it silly. But upon our next visit to Mme. Gouraud, who had become a close friend of the family, we boasted of it, recited it, and received a blow, “What childishness! Don’t you know that a wife can have only one baby when her husband is away so long? Only one, and even then—”

  I said, “Mother is having another baby and Papa was away a long time.” All heads turned at this kind of talk.

  Within a month after the return from Grasse, Dora Dunn and Uncle Philip were married in the Mairie of the Eighth Arrondissement, the Pamples, American painters, coming up for the ceremony; and after a few weeks of whispered conversations, we heard that we had a young cousin named Bernard at nurse in England, the son of Philip and Dora. This, with the episode of The Happy Crusader, and some gossip we had heard about Die Konkubine (that is, by listening in corridors) and the advice long ago given to our mother and her new pregnancy, had given us a strange idea of marriage and cradle days, and we produced some odd, dramatic sequences which we found in the end began to bore our friends. Our French friends, especially, were not at all amused and began to give my mother advice, “Letty, especially, is quite a precocious little girl—”

  I thought this referred to my school talents. I was book-smart, as Grandmother said proudly. Jacky did poorly in school. But she had taken to hanging round the color and brush merchants. She, for the first time, began to know things that I did not: charcoal, aquarelle, sanguine. We learned dancing now; she danced better than I. I was heavier then, and had a fair promise of broad, powerful loins. I called myself Spanish; evidently I was not, as a thickset little girl, a graceful dancer. I became turbulent, jealous, and cruel. They thought I hated her. No one could understand the change that had come over me: “Growing up,” they said.

  For the first time I saw that I might not be forever the best, and that people could go their own road without paying attention to me. I found this cruelly hard to bear. It had never seemed to me that Father, Mother, or others could have reason to look at any other than me. I had always thought of them as my father, my mother, my grandmothers, and my sister, and never thought that I was only their daughter, her sister. Once, at about this time, I saw Jacky run across the street. I could not see why, being even then shortsighted. I crossed over too, and saw that she had run into a dark and deep shop full of canvases, frames, and brushes. The name on the shop was Bastien. She was speaking freely, breathlessly, using her hands, to the shopkeeper and his wife:

  “Yes, Miss Jacqueline!”

  She turned round and saw me standing in the long ray of light that thrust into the shop, dusty, heavy, and yellow as a beam of newsawn wood.

  “That is my sister, Letty,” said she.

  How inferior I felt! I retaliated in the evening by saying she visited strangers and annoyed people in all the shops: she spoke to men on the streets. Enquiry was made and this passed over, but we received a solemn talk about not talking to men on the street and not visiting strange people. Our eager, mystified conversations about this wiped out the hurt.

  Dora Dunn and Uncle Philip were now Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, but this had not conferred upon them money for the rent. They had moved away from Paris after the wedding, for a honeymoon to Corsica, with some money that my father advanced to Philip (upon a verbal assurance that Grandmother Morgan would repay him). My mother begged my father to do this for Philip. She believed that Dora was solid and would make him work. The best thing was to give him this last fling, and then send him back to work. She pointed out that Pauline, about whom some strange stories had circulated, had proved a good influence for Phyllis, who was now earning money for herself instead of taking it from men, and that things were on the upcurve. Although we had to pay for Grandmother Fox in the “American Courts” on the Boulevard Raspail, we had saved the money that would have been spent on Lily Spontini’s trip and on her toyshop fiancé, who was still writing hopeful letters.

  “A little more such saving,” said Solander, “and we’ll be in the poorhouse.”

  “And we are saving the money we spent on board, lodging, and tuition
at Mme. Gouraud’s.”

  “Tell me how rich I am,” said my father, laughing.

  “And,” continued my mother, “you must be saving money in Antwerp.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “The girl! Has she gone to Geneva?”

  “We lived in one room. I live in one room,” said my father gloomily, “there is no change. It is the same room. There’s little difference in rent.”

  This was an unfortunate remark, for my father became serious for the rest of the evening, although, as usual, he came in to wish us good night, and tell us one of his long, extempore tales, baroque, worldly, extravagant—improvised Mark Twainery.

  They drove us to go to see Grandmother Fox. She had a small room, with a pale blue wallpaper and almost entirely occupied by a country wardrobe, a bed, a chair, a washstand, and her worn-out valises. On her window sill stood two pot plants in colored paper.

  “Who brought those? Aren’t they lovely!”

  “A lady,” she muttered, “a lady, a nice friend. She likes to visit me. A very kind lady, an American lady.”

  “Aunt Dora?”

  “Aunt Dora,” said Grandmother, with respect, “no, poor woman, never mind, she did quite right, say nothing about her. She’s a good woman, she’s a mother, never mind—”

  “Mme. Gouraud?”

  “Mme. Gouraud! She wouldn’t spend that much, not that much,” said Grandmother spitefully, her face twisted with greed, very bright and pink, “she came here with her dinner in a bag; an old lettuce; she goes shopping for bargains. Give me the oldest and cheapest, I’ll make soup, she says, and carries it all the way home. Trust the French for such pennysaving—pooh!”

  “What lady brought the plants, Grandma?”

  “I don’t know her name. She didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t think it polite. If they don’t tell me, I don’t ask.”

  A week or two later I had a moral inspiration. I would visit Grandmother without being forced to, poor lonely old woman! She ought to live with her own, some said, and she herself quoted long conversations with legendary persons she knew, as follows, “The Spanish woman, a nice woman, said to me, ‘Oh, Mrs. Fox, I can’t understand such a nice woman as you, so thoughtful, living all alone, and your son and daughter-in-law and two grandchildren living so near to you—”

  She reported this sentiment as echoed by most of her legendary figures, in words appropriate to their characters.

  On this Saturday afternoon, just after Solander had arrived in the house, we set out and were about to go into the American Courts when I saw someone I knew in front of me, and held Jacky tightly by the arm.

  The person, a young woman, walked into the American Courts with a package in pink paper, in her hand. She wore a pink coat and skirt, had a straw hat, and carried an umbrella.

  “See that girl—woman! Look quick, you dope!”

  Jacky stared.

  “It’s Die Konkubine!”

  How Jacky stared! Then her face came around to me, transfixed. It was like the annunciation.

  “Oh, I wish I could look at her. Where’s she going?”

  “To see Grandma,” I shrugged.

  “How do you know? Perhaps she lives there.”

  After a minute, Jacky stared at me again.

  “Grandma doesn’t know her!”

  “Of course she does. Everyone knows her.”

  “Then let us go in,” said Jacky, pulling away and starting to run toward the door.

  “Quick, before she goes.”

  But I had more savoir-faire than my sister. I was intrigued.

  “Can we wait here till she comes out, Letty?”

  “No, come along.”

  Persia knew me. Persia was not in Geneva. Grandmother knew she was not in Geneva, yet Grandmother continued to hold conversations with my mother, of this sort, “Have you heard anything about—the other one?”

  “Why should I have? I don’t ask questions about her. It doesn’t interest me.”

  “Did she get a job there—wherever it was?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know, Mother.”

  “It surprises me that she got a job so quickly, and in French. She must be smart.”

  “She’s smart enough. I wouldn’t worry myself about a girl like that.”

  I now realized that Grandmother Fox, who had seemed to me a simple, silly woman, just an old woman, was an evasive diplomat. But why didn’t she tell Mother what she knew? How interesting intrigue was! I didn’t tell Mother what I knew, for I was too busy fitting things together. I got Jacky away from the American Courts by saying we would both go to the canvas and paint shop. It was quite safe for us to go together. I said, “You must never tell Mother or Papa that you saw Persia.”

  “Oh, no,” said my sister, clasping her hands together, and shining at me. “Oh, thank you for showing her to me.”

  She skipped along the street, dropping my hand, her long, loose, fair curls dancing on her shoulders. She was singing softly to herself. She sang, “I saw Die Konkubine, the pretty Konkubine, the darling Konkubine …”

  We did not know what this word meant. It had a foreign, interesting sound to us. The following day we all went to see Grandmother. Jacky did not make a false step. My father seemed quite as usual. A box of chocolates with a pink paper underneath it was on the table. Grandmother offered it to us and to Mother. Mother ate a lot of them. At this I laughed, and my father laughed back without knowing why. After we had got outside, I pretended I had forgotten to kiss Grandmother and ran back.

  “Always some new trick,” said Mathilde, who had been disagreeable all the week end.

  “Grandma,” I said, running in and bussing Grandmother fiercely on both cheeks, “Grandma,” I cried, climbing up on her and tussling with her in a way that frightened her, “Granny, Granny, I saw her yesterday—she came here—”

  “Get down and behave yourself,” said Grandmother with surprising command.

  “And she brought you those chocolates.”

  Grandmother looked at me for some time vaguely; she didn’t seem to know I was there. Then she muttered, “Yes, a nice American woman. I don’t know her name, she doesn’t tell, can I ask? Perhaps there’s some secret behind it all. I don’t ask people’s secrets; it isn’t right, I think. Perhaps some tragedy; one never knows. There are lots of tragedies in lives. It is not right to ask—”

  I stepped forward, looking excitedly at her—I was already the same height as this small, old woman, “Grandma, Persia, she came here, I saw her—”

  Grandmother Fox seemed deaf, “What? What do you say? She talks, but I don’t understand a word! Getting old, that’s what it is. I hear nothing. Perhaps people come, and I don’t know their names. They don’t tell me or else I don’t hear. I like chocolate. I said yesterday, Miss Elsie, when you go out would you mind stepping into the candy shop, la confiserie, and getting me some chocolates? A nice woman, a schoolteacher who is studying here. A respectable woman, but not like the other one, she is a very good woman—”

  I watched Grandmother for a few minutes with sparkling eyes, but she turned her back and busied herself with some of her little parcels. She forgot me.

  “I hear nothing; I don’t know names either,” said Grandmother. “Good-bye, Grandma,” I said, remembering them waiting for me.

  “Yes, yes, good-bye, good-bye,” said Grandmother, without turning, “always good-bye.”

  16

  Father and Mother quarreled each week end, made up, and went to a café and a movie. My father said, “You said you would try to adjust yourself; you said you didn’t want a child.”

  “It wasn’t a trick, but I have too much to worry me, nowhere to turn.”

  “How long are we going to live in such uncertainty? It’s terribly serious.”

  “I suppose you think you have made a sacrifice? I don’t think so.”

  My father would say nothing to this. Mathilde would suddenly cry, “Oh, give me a little more time. I can’t make up my mind. I
t’ll be too late soon.”

  “Perhaps that would be better.”

  At other times she said that he owed her compensation because he had taken her out of the labor market as a young girl, and that now she was not only old and unacceptable, but knew nothing. She gave him a letter she had received from her sister Phyllis, marked Alexandria, Egypt, with a postscript for Solander, “How can you be so heartless, Sol, as to leave poor Tootsy and Jacky without a home, or even bread to eat? What is to be their future?”

  Solander said, “What on earth are they doing in Alexandria? Do you know what that town is like? I am going to get Montrose to send them a cable at once,” and he sent off two cables, one to Egypt and one to Grandmother Morgan.

  There was a lot of mail. My mother would read a page or two of these letters, all from women friends, and then throw them in the drawer of her dressing table. She had lost interest in life. She visited no one, sat for hours taking the sun on café terraces, and rarely visited Grandmother, who had retreated into a great silence of anxiety. Grandmother, for some reason, feared this new child.

  To get the information they all withheld, I now read everything I could lay my hands on, and all my mother’s mail. Dora Dunn, now Aunt Dora, had written from Corsica:

  MY DEAR SISTER MATHILDE,

  … You must keep him up to the mark, and tell him so. My advice is, never to release him and make him pay you all he can. He won’t like her so well when he has to pay through the nose for her, and as you know, it is mere carnal feeling and money with men, not as with us, where we have a social duty and our children. You see, my dear, she has been getting everything, his company, his money, and you sit here abandoned and lost, without any security. How do you know he will not desert you and go off to the ends of the earth with that woman, and leave you and the darling children starving? Do not let him think you will let him go without a struggle. Men have more pride when they see we value them. My dear, we must be practical, we women. Do you think Philip would have married me if I had not been firm? Now I have my family to think of and nothing would induce me to let him go. It would not be fair to him. Now, Mattie, don’t be an idealist. Tell him you’re pregnant. Sol is a great sentimentalist and has some sense of duty, and also of what is practical. He is not going to keep you and three children and that woman. If I were you I would say nothing about the woman. Let him have her! Men always do this. Make him live with you and let her be the one to suffer. Nothing is too good for you. You are a wife and a mother. You have given life. Nothing is too good for us, once we are doing our duty to the state. We are not girls! We are society! Men are nothing compared with us, when we are mothers. We must protect our young. Your husband is obliged to keep you, and if he will not, go to a lawyer, and the lawyer will see to it that he pays, and if he will not, don’t be soft, Mathilde, clap him into jail! We have our children to think of. I have had my eyes opened. I found letters in Philip’s pockets. I recommend you to go through Sol’s pockets too, so that you can keep track of everything. We are always deceived. We must stop at nothing. We women must stand together. Would you believe it that while I was away having my baby in England, Philip was writing love letters to a wh—— of his in New York. He invited her over here to meet him—Eleanor Blackfield. I find he is still corresponding with this ——— and using such expressions! He intended to use her for his own satisfaction and then me and perhaps others. How do you know Sol isn’t like that? Do not trust anyone, any man! They are all beneath contempt. There are no words for what they do. All we can do is to protect ourselves. So never divorce him, dear, you are doing him no favor and do not let him out of your sight. As soon as he is out of sight, be sure he goes to her! I would get a detective if I were you. You are entitled to do anything to protect your home. Marriage is sacred. It is a bond. A decent man does not go back on his bond. You are holding him to his word, that is all. Do not be a fool, Mathilde …