I read this letter to Jacky in one of the long, quiet evenings when Mathilde and Solander had gone to the movies. She listened to it in utter silence. At the end, she asked, trembling, “But if Papa stays with us, he need not go to jail?”
For a few days however, we shook the dust from the chandeliers with our shrieks of laughter. Make him pay or clap him in jail! we shouted apropos of everything. Off with his head and clap him in jail!
“What’s the matter with you giggling idiots?”
The frenzied pair skipped out of this room into that, with “Clap him in jail!”
Our cautionary tales ended with this punishment. I now systematically searched my mother’s drawers for these conspiratorial letters, and read them with my sister. We lived in an agreeable fever of excitement. The adult world was more interesting than we had ever supposed, and as to marriage and babies, these things began to make sense to us at last. When my father next came, it was I who searched his pockets as Dora had suggested, and to my intense surprise found the following letter from that active young woman:
MY DEAREST SOLANDER,
Please, dear, can you send me our month’s money, 500 francs. I am supposed to get some from England from Mr. McRae, and Philip from New York, but dear Mother Morgan is coming over here so there will be an interval, and we have not received the last promised, as yet, so please, dear, send it to me as soon as you can. I really wish you could let me have 750 francs or 800 and then I could get us out of here, and we could get off to New York, for home is the best place. We can both work. I wrote to Joseph Montrose, whom I met in London and found very friendly, to write to you about this, and they are supposed to write to you from Green Acres, to help me out, in case we are in difficulties, but I do not know if they have. Anyway, send me the month’s money AT ONCE, dear Sol. If you are not in Paris, then send from Antwerp as soon as possible, and send to me, as I am more reliable in money matters than Phil, who is wasteful. Hope you are well, also Persia, and please answer me soon, Sol, as I need the money. With lots of love and greetings and not forgetting Persia, and dear Mother Fox. Affectionately,
YOUR SISTER-IN-LAW, DORA.
P.S. Dear Mother Morgan is coming over here to take Phyllis back which is a good thing. She is running wild. Also she has a good husband for her, she says. Ten thousand a year.
I do not know whether my father sent this money. Presently the honeymooners returned from Corsica, very poor, and put up at our flat. Philip was a good cook. Dora said that soon she would have another dear little baby. Solander, quite distracted and tender, said his roof could cover one more, he supposed.
Grandmother Morgan arrived like a thunderbolt in Paris. Cables flashed between Paris and Alexandria. Money was sent to the enterprising cabaret team (which was admittedly penniless and living off men by this), and Pauline and Phyllis were soon back in Paris. Pauline looked a little rakish, but brighter than ever, while Phyllis, tranquil, radiant, was no longer a music student. She had the self-possession of a woman. She sat calmly in our dining room, saying little about her surprising adventures, except, “We met nice men everywhere. In Marseilles a rich man was very nice to me, but he was too old. I like the East very much, but it was not clean enough; every morning Pauline gave me a prairie oyster”; and she declared to her mother and sister, in our presence, “I must marry. I’m not a real singer, and I don’t want to work hard. I can’t hold out, Mamma. I’ll go crazy.”
Grandmother had just the right man for her, a young, good-looking man, with business ability: “I guarantee him,” said Grandmother. She took her peachflower home on the next boat, and only a few weeks had passed when we received photographs of a lawn wedding, and Grandmother’s ecstatic letter: “Phyllis, all in white satin, with her sweet innocent face, looked like a madonna at the altar. We all cried for joy—”
Phyllis, at the altar, had her head swathed in a turban of lace which would have ruined any but a beauty of the first order. But we pored over the face. “How pretty is Aunt Phyllis?”
Mother sounded tired, “Mr. Montrose says she is one of the prettiest women in the world, and I suppose he knows.”
“Oh! Oh!”
We spent days in dreams of her and our beauty. The inconsistencies, plots around us, were forgotten. If Clark Gable had seen Aunt Phyllis would he have married her? We pored over cosmetic advertisements. Finding myself too small, I sent for a brochure, “How to Have a Lovely Figure in 16 Days.”
17
Then down came the house that Jack built. There was a series of extraordinary events. We lived in mystery and doubt. We did not know from one day to the next whether we were to stay in the flat or leave it. Mathilde could not make up her mind, or did not know. For a week my father had been in Paris to settle affairs with my mother. Each night my mother said he could go, and then said he could not. He looked very ill. She cried; they stayed up all night; he hurried off to work. We went to school and came home, or went to Grandmother’s when we were told. One night my father flung out of the house, and did not return.
“Is he in the river?” cried my mother. “I am a horrible woman, selfish; what will happen to us all? I made a terrible mistake.”
We cried. At daylight she put on her hat and went somewhere. She came back very somber. In the evening Solander came home and there was dull but agitated talking. “It is too late,” Mother repeated, “but I didn’t mean it this way, Sol.” In agitated words she somehow explained her impression that life was a sordid intrigue into which she had been forced.
Looking out of the window of the salon, I saw a miracle. “Jacky, Jacky!” I called softly. There was Persia in the street. It was incredible. She walked into the house. Someone came to the door and rang. We put our heads into the broad passage and saw my mother opening the door, my father some paces behind her, and the girl there.
“Good evening!”
“Good evening! Come in,” said my mother. “I expected you.” We were shut into the salon.
“Perhaps we are all going to live together,” said Jacky. “It is against the law,” I explained to her.
I bit my nails, not understanding why Mother had not dressed up to meet her rival. Persia had on a pretty, blue-gray coat with a fur collar, wore white violets and new shoes. Her eyes seemed very clear and large. She was calm and radiant. My mother wore an old pinafore and blouse with canvas sandals, and her face had that washed-out look that you see in young actresses on the street in the daytime. The fatal three sat talking, and one heard nothing but a murmur. Soon Persia went. The door was unlocked, and we set the table for dinner. At dinner my mother suddenly said, “Your father is leaving us in a week; he does not love us.”
“That is not true. I love you all.” My father sighed.
“But you’re a slave of this woman.”
“A slave? Perhaps I am.”
“I ought to drown myself and the children,” my mother cried, wringing her hands. “Or if you did, it would solve everything.”
After this, there was much noisy trouble in the night; my mother wanted to go to the river, “because she was like a girl who had got into trouble.”
“God damn it,” said my father; “you’d rather I took a street-girl, so you could be safe.”
“So I would,” wailed my mother. At the end of the week, my father walked out of the house at four in the afternoon, taking nothing with him, so that we were in doubt about his intention. He did not return. In the morning, he came back with a taxi, for his bag, and then went off after kissing us, with tears in his eyes, and taking my mother by the hand. His face was set, however; and he said, “There has to be an end to this.”
“You’re in her power,” said my mother. “I’ll kill her; we’ll have a home.”
But Mathilde and we went to Mme. Gouraud’s. My father, whose work in Antwerp was then over, returned to London, taking with him Grandmother Fox and, doubtless, Persia.
Grandmother Morgan, who had taken a great taste for Paris, once more returned, and took back with her her d
aughter Mathilde and Jacky.
We were thus separated; Pauline put me on the train and I came to London by myself. It was understood that I was to live with Grandmother Fox. There, however, I found my father living in a regular householding with Persia and Grandmother, who looked a little strange, but much younger. It was a fine apartment on the top floor of an American-style apartment house, with a long corridor like a gangway and as many windows as a yacht cabin. There were three bedrooms, the ceilings sloped; the flat looked out all over London. The kitchen was furnished with every conceivable thing, and Grandmother Fox, though whispering and wandering as usual, had this one happiness. She sat in the large, splendidly furnished kitchen all day, or visited the bath arrangements which were extensive and in separate quarters. Merely to tour this part of the house delighted her. We were all out most of the day and she had this undreamed-of place to herself.
I had a surprise in the shape of a letter from Jacky. She told me that although she missed me, she felt it was a good thing. “Do not write me in detail about all that is important, experiences with the other sex—your emotional life; I can understand you, for I also know about this now; and as you know my letters are supposed to be handed round to everyone. I feel well. I am pretty. (But they say I am not very well, it is my chest.) A boy sent me a love letter. Mother is going to write to Papa about sending me to Santa Fe. Of course, you know about the baby, our sister, Andrea. I cannot understand Papa. Now Andrea has no father. I no longer admire you know whom (D. of K.). I am getting to understand things. It is settled for me to be on my own; they speak to me as if I were grown up.” Grandmother Morgan might bring her to Paris in the summer. In the meantime, she was to go to a private school in New York, where children learned art and had special instruction; and later she might go on to the Music and Art.
I wrote Jacky a nasty reply, in which I boasted of my London school, of how good I was in French (better than the English children), and that I, too, was going to a special school, down in the country, run by a Lord and philosopher. This was not true. I had just heard it mentioned. I told her about a play that I had written; I was in the school quarterly with a poem.
Solander went to work in the City, and seemed happy, if quiet. He took me out a good deal and had a good effect upon me. I was a spoiled child, and no one had taught me manners but Pauline. In Paris I had become an elegant child, and now knew how to behave, but in London I had to drop some of these manners, which were there artificial in a girl of ten or so. I was supposed to be simple, frank, and not too clever. I easily picked up these ways. In Paris, on the one hand, they had sternly repressed any fantasy, exaggeration, or show in my composition. I was supposed to describe what I saw like a scientist, an anatomist; whereas, here in England, all that they required was “an original note”; that meant something you perceived that no one else had perceived. I easily changed my ways in this, too. Once more I had the pleasure of being a novelty, a prize pupil.
My mother wrote to Solander frequently from the United States now—she had not done so before. She seemed confident that he was coming home to her soon, and I believe his letters told her so. Die Konkubine behaved in her usual casual style and even brought an admirer to the house, a young Welshman, of blue-black coloring, something like herself. Grandmother Fox encouraged the budding infidelity; but I heard my father and Persia laughing about Grandmother Fox’s schemings. Grandmother Fox was outraged and complained to everyone about her son and his paramour. “What do they do?” people enquired. “They laugh,” she said; “they laugh,” she wailed; “all day, all night, jokes, fun. Is that what life is for?” “They laugh at what?” “God in His Heaven knows what they can find to laugh at all day and night.”
Mother told my father that the separation was doing my sister a lot of good. There was no one to compete with and she was encouraged to bring out her individual talents. The price of the private school, about six hundred dollars yearly, was nothing when you realized how well Jacky was getting on. The simple fact that she did not have to compete with me was enough; she now had no sense of inferiority. On the other hand, my mother said, English education was so far behind American, that she thought my father ought to give me some special tuition, too, to make up for what I lost in home influence. “If the child feels she is getting special treatment, that some fuss is being made over her, she will not feel so humiliated at living with an old woman, and being apparently abandoned by father and mother.”
My father replied that the taxes in the City of New York paid for tuition for children in the public schools. He received some indignant letters from various members of the family, and even Grandmother spoke to him anxiously, knotting her old fingers round a letter she had just received from America about “the poor children, who need love.” I had a sense of injustice and behaved badly, doing just what pleased me; but I sided with no one, being equally insulted by all.
Presently, Mathilde said that she was coming over with Grandmother Morgan in the spring to London to see me, show me my little sister, and probably to take me home, and she felt I was being neglected. “An old woman can do nothing for her, and Letty was always spoiled and headstrong.”
Grandmother became very excited. She had a letter from Mathilde. She said the household must be broken up, for she and I must not be found living with Solander and Persia. My father put off the separation from day to day. Grandmother slept badly, pleaded with him, and wept to herself. “What will I say?” she kept asking. “I’m too old for this. It is madness to speak of happiness. Happiness comes too late; there is no happiness. Oh, what will we all do?”
Though I was in good health and well treated, I was once more becoming a wild, thoughtless little girl.
Meanwhile, Grandmother prepared the way as best she could, at home. Grandmother, lively and talkative in streets and parks, soon picked up friends. We began to hear accounts of her conversations with them, and the incidents of their lives which always fascinated and surprised her.
“Miss Slattery, you know my friend, the old maid, whose brother is a policeman on Ludgate Hill, a policeman, pooh! I don’t care about that—” “What do you think? Today, my friend Edie, you know Edie, she works in Swan and Edgar’s. Swan and Edgar’s, what a name! I always say to her, Swan and Goose. She laughs.”
Grandmother invented excuses for giving them tea in the kitchen, but her secret reason was that she felt the rest of the house belonged to the grand people, that was to Father, Persia, and me. But, poor thing, when Persia’s young male friend visited them, she showed him into the best room, and was so youthful, pink, happy, imagining she was saving the family, and that we would all soon be reunited, that she forgot who Persia was (perhaps she sympathized with her—who knows this?), called her “My dear,” and told him how clever Persia was about the house. She told everyone that her young companion, Persia, had a nice young man paying attention to her. Naturally, this fascinated our visitors; they asked her about “her friends.” Persia grinned. Grandmother at once became inextricably tangled in a web of conflicting romances. She was so proud of the Morgans that she loved to brag about their social life, money, properties, and grand connections, like the Hoggs. People asked me about my mother. My answers did not match hers, no doubt, and I, too, was a prudent liar. I had too much to think of to brood over the little indecisions of my parents. I was glad to be free of Jacky for a while and I was so busy trying to argue my father into sending me to the exclusive experimental school, run by a famous Lord and philosopher, that I let things run their own way.
Letty Fox Page 21