Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  She paused. After a long moment she looked at my mother, who had stretched herself out on the sofa, with her eyes closed. In a gentle voice she enquired, “Yes, but now I remember, Mathilde; never, never did you care for it, did you?”

  My mother said at last, “For what?”

  “For chicken; yes,” said Grandmother Fox, fumbling with her fingers, her face downcast, “now I remember everything. I’m getting old. I forget things “

  My mother made no reply.

  “You see,” said Grandmother Fox, “that English girl is young, that Edie, from Swan and Goose; she can eat anything. What has she in the icebox? A cold sardine. Ugh! Not in my condition. And Lily—that idiot—I don’t know where she eats. Well, I’m better off at my age eating oatmeal, that’s the truth. What do I want with chicken? A breast is very nice, tasty; and if you have a wing, you can make soup, too, which is very good.” Grandmother became excited, “If you know how to, and I do. But where in the world is one to get a breast of chicken? They want those things for themselves. People don’t give away gold nuggets, either. No, no. It’s a good thing I can’t eat such things any more. That piece Lily brought me now, that her mother-in-law—”

  My mother sprang up, and said, “Mother, I’ll kill myself if I hear another word about chicken. I’ll get you one. God save us! You’ll drive me mad. Why don’t you come out in the clear and ask for it.”

  “I ask?” said Grandmother, gently. “And why should I ask when I can’t eat such a thing, at least, generally? You see, my dear, I am old now—”

  But the talk dragged on and on. Grandmother went away grievously disappointed, and looking as if she were eating her heart out. Mother was remorseful too, afterwards, and sent me to the house the next day with a fine broiler which had come that morning from Grandmother Morgan’s. Grandmother Morgan sent chickens, cream, eggs, and other things every week, to her numerous sons and daughters, and even to those divorced from her sons and daughters.

  Grandmother Fox was fussed, pleased.

  “Oh, dear,” cried she, “and you came all the way in such dusty weather to bring a chicken to your grandmother? I know who loves her grandmother! Ha-ha! Perhaps better than her daddy; perhaps better than her mummy; perhaps better than Grandmother Morgan, eh? Ha-ha! Never mind, don’t answer it. I know what I know. We mustn’t be inquisitive with young hearts. No, no. It isn’t right. I ask no questions ever. That is my rule. And now, darling, my own precious, did you hear from Papa? I—nothing! Not a letter. God knows what he is doing. Is he well or sick? Is he alive or dead? I don’t know. Here I am all alone and he doesn’t ask about me. Do you write to him, my darling?”

  We went out to the kitchen and when Grandmother had hacked a leg off the chicken (she was not strong enough to cut it and had at last to get my help), she became herself again, years younger; and said, “Here it is, much ado about nothing, as Shakespeare said! Well, and what does he say? Soviet Russia’s in a bad way, isn’t she? What does Papa say? They will make war on Soviet Russia, you will see. I know—I’ve been over there. They’re no good. Tyrants. They don’t like socialism at all. They’re afraid. The people might find out something. And Hitler! Ugh! What a monster! Look,” she continued thoughtfully, “see what I do, you have this, carrots and this, a meatball, and a bit of tomato soup—will you eat, my darling? … What time do you get up? I get up at seven. They— young and sleep so late. Pooh! Look at my self-baster. Ah! that is something they have special in America. But in France I got this chopper. It’s the best in the world. Well, each place has good and bad. But Hitler—there’s something altogether bad—well, well—you are my angel. But you must work, Tootsy.”

  Grandmother, plump and young, in the possession of her chicken, was no longer the dusty hag of Audubon Avenue, but had become the self-respecting old lady of our London apartment.

  22

  Once or twice out of kindness I went and stayed with Grandmother, when Lily Spontini was absent. Lily often spent nights with her girl friends. I shared the sitting room with Edie and slept on Lily’s iron cot. It wore out my patience to stay in the dirty, wretched place, into which vermin crept and which was covered with street dust. It was hot in the heat, cold in the cold. Shouts and cries entered it on both sides. The bathroom and kitchen were not more than compartments in a dark passageway. These compartments, into which hardly any light came, were full of women’s old dingy clothing, half wet or rough dry. The drains were clogged. Boys and men living in the house knew the trick of the broken door lock and could push it open. At night the girls pushed the bolt which hardly held in the eaten wood. Yet these apartments were considered of quite good rank, and there were even women who thought Grandmother well off having an apartment to herself which she could rent out.

  It was intolerable to me. It was weeks since Edie had spoken a word to my grandmother, and after one night of it, I felt that way myself. Only a weakling would put up with it, I thought, despising Edie. I scolded Grandmother and told her to move out at once and send the news to my father. She must live decently.

  Grandmother was broken with disappointment, and with the idea that “there were no more stops on the line; she was almost at her terminus.” I asked the English girl why she treated Grandmother so badly, and then she told me strange tales about the old lady, which I was unable to believe.

  “She’s a liar, a hypocrite, a cadger, and sly as a fox,” said Edie. “She gets letters from her son every week and saves his money by sweating us. And that Lily is loose—gone to the bad.”

  This unlikely description of my dear little grandmother, and Cousin Lily, who were both merely poor strugglers, worried me. I thought, Am I mad, is she mad, or is Grandmother mad? Then the poor girl went on to tell me of her own troubles. She began to speak glowingly of the home she had left. She told about the home Grandmother had promised her in America. I think poor Jenny Fox had been dreaming of living with Grandmother Morgan.

  “And I, who lived in luxury at home, was not satisfied,” said Edie; “well, for instance, she told me that for a dollar here, only four shillings, you could be dressed like a princess, and at the same time wages were so high that every girl could save money and get a husband. Working girls went on world tours or to the Bahamas or to Paris. And, of course, I’ve seen them myself.”

  I said, “How could you believe such things? You must know if wages are high, prices are high. I thought your sisters were socialists. One of your sisters is even a communist. I know. I’ve seen her selling the Daily Worker in Baker Street, London.”

  She said, “I never troubled my head with such rubbish and I didn’t think they should have. Attracting attention; making us look queer.”

  “I’m a communist,” I said.

  “You,” she answered sharply, “what difference does it make to you? You’ve got two rich grandmothers and a wagonload of other relations. It’s real selfish of my sisters to bring that trouble to the house. The police came once.” She continued, “If you saw what we had at home. Axminsters, Chippendale furniture, and Wedgwood. We’ve an Adams door, and it’s on one of those quiet, lovely squares—”

  She went on with her dreamy description, breaking into it with her sharp notes, which made it very real.

  “How long have you been living there?” I asked, in surprise.

  “For years and years. My youngest sister was born there. I went away and lived with my married sister, but I came back to it. They were too selfish.”

  “Yes,” I said, smirking.

  “You see, married people get very small-minded. The least thing they flare up. To pieces, they go to pieces like an old chair; the dust flies. Any little thing that goes wrong and they want to throw you out and it’s all over. A fine friendship—finished. She’s the same, your grandmother. It’s the petty life. Just to go out and pick in other people’s plates. That’s not much of an aim in life, is it? That was theirs. And never took me. Out of the money I gave them for the rent, I got nothing, a bare roof over my head. Nothing like I had at home.
They must have thought I was cracked. The village goose; born to be plucked. I always remember your father telling me, in London, you can fool the people the one time, but you can’t fool them all of the time. Have you heard him say that? It is true. It is true. It is true. Isn’t it?”

  “That’s not quite it, but—yes.”

  “I’ve often thought—”

  “But the sentiment is more or less right. It’s this way—”

  “True, right you are,” said Edie, “not a truer word. Like I said to my brother-in-law, I am not as green as I am cabbage looking. I thought my society would suit them. What a nice compact you have. Is that real? Things are expensive here … And there’s no hot water here most of the time. I can’t stand it, I tell you!”

  “I’m darned if I would.”

  “You don’t have to. Anyhow, I’m fed up with this gold coast. I’m going home. I’ve got things better at home. And no strange men coming in. I don’t think it’s right, if your grandmother does. A young man sleeping in the kitchen, with two young women here.”

  “What?”

  “She says it’s her nephew, Bert Hart. And a policeman on the opposite side of the street, all day, two days now, watching for him, because he did something. A nice young man, sweet she says; because he brought the old fool a cream cake.”

  “Say,” I said, “don’t talk about Grandma that way. She’s old, but not a fool. What’s this about a cop?”

  It turned out that Bert, Lily Spontini’s cousin, had climbed in at their front window in this apartment, nearly killed Grandmother with fright, and had slept on the floor of Grandmother’s room until morning. They had come knocking at the door saying that a man had been seen climbing in at the window. Grandmother said no, and looked such a frightened thing in her crumpled white flannel nightgown and her little white pigtails, that they just gave an appreciative grin at the two girls in bed, and went out again.

  But both the girls were wide awake with fear. They believed that Grandmother was harboring a criminal intentionally. He hid in the flat and slept in the kitchen. He was a pretty boy, seventeen, darkeyed, cowardly. He said he had taken some pictures from someone’s apartment. “They asked me to have them valued and now they say I stole; perhaps I misunderstood them.”

  He told Grandmother she had plenty of room and that he would move in till he found a job. He had a pretty girl, with a ten-thousand-dollar dowry, on a string, just round the corner and would bring her to see Grandmother any day now. He left the apartment by the back window at nightfall to go and visit his girl, and came back after the movies were out.

  Grandmother sullenly hated Bert’s elder brother, aged thirty-five, who was “a loafer and was pulling twenty dollars out of the air, on relief, just like that and would not have his young brother with him.” This man had had the misfortune to visit poor Grandmother, without a cream cake.

  This was not all. A foreign woman, old, but younger than Grandmother, was persecuting her every day, trying to get space in the flat. This woman was a White Russian. She had been a revolutionary, she told Grandmother (when she discovered that Grandmother was an old-time socialist), and had run away from home as a girl and gone to Moscow to learn what to do. Later on, a worker in a district council, she had met her husband, who had become a general under Denikin-

  “Don’t tell me another Russian General,” I cried.

  But Edie, in perfect good faith, went through to the end.

  They had one son, aged ten, who sat all day on the toilet seat and read. No one could get in; but the boy was “brilliant and it was the only place he had to himself!” They were being dispossessed this week; the sidewalk was their next address. My grandmother must, must share her home with them. The woman elbowed her fiercely, “What right have you to a roof when others have none— think—an old man, a young child! Throw these boarders out. They have money! Make your son get you a larger place. You say he had a palace in London!”

  Mrs. (General) Rode was a woman of great force, a terrible pest; she would not go. Everything she wanted was not only her right, but part of a Bill of Rights for Mankind. The husband, a bent, mean creature, came for her sometimes. She spent the day in the flat, browbeating Grandmother, and eating her poor victuals. When she went, Grandmother had not the strength to eat anything, but sat with dark circles under her eyes, a face of stone; and she became troubled in her mind.

  The accusations that Mrs. Rode invented against Solander took body before her. Thus she sometimes thought Solander was a libertine and wastrel who laughed at her and spent her hard-earned money. This was nothing to what Mrs. Rode said, for Mrs. Rode could begin at nine in the morning (when she came with her husband for her morning tea), in the tone of a prosecuting attorney, and timed herself so well that her peroration would wind up exactly at six, when she was obliged to go and cook lentils for her husband. They went to bed without tea at night and without bread or light, simply because Grandmother refused to have them there. Jenny Fox was even glad of her nephew’s presence in the flat. Mrs. Rode had been a little easier to get away. But she told Mrs. Fox that her nephew was a scoundrel, and would be in the jug in two weeks. She laughed to scorn the story about the ten-thousand-dollar dowry.

  “He wants your money! Old women are afraid of burglars, and it is always their nephews who kill them.”

  Grandmother lived in horror. But Mrs. Rode was not a vampire. All she had in mind was to get a little bit of Grandmother’s floor space for herself.

  Grandmother was flattered because the woman next door often knocked on the wall to know if she could come in and talk to her. She was a lovely, young wife, Grandmother thought, with two beautiful children; “a pleasure to look at them.” But what did she really want? She wanted to keep the children’s clothes in one of the two unpainted wooden closets the girls had put in; “I have so many children and there is no closet space in these miserable apartments.”

  I listened to this, lying on my back, with my eyes on the ceiling. I could not let Edie see my feelings. I was puzzled, too. I knew now Edie was a liar. She must have forgotten that I had once been with Grandmother to the place she lived in, in London. It was in a black street, one block long, off Wardour Street. On one side was a brick wall, enclosing a yard. On the other were narrow tenement houses in very bad condition. It was one of those slums, rich in returns to ducal owners. In the basement of one of these, completely below groundlevel, was a two-room flat running back and front. In the front room, Edie’s respectable and honorable family had attempted to arrange a friendly sitting room. It was clean; a fire was generally necessary in the grate on account of the damp and cold; and two little china vases stood on the mantelpiece. The sisters grouped themselves round the mantelpiece and people looked at the vases. On a bookstand were the usual English classics: Bunyan, Shakespeare, the Bible, one volume from the International Scientific Series (this was Hummingbirds), something on the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, a novel about the Indian Mutiny, some Dickens, and some socialist classics. On the mantelpiece were communist pamphlets and standard works. A red cloth covered the table. Apart from tables and chairs this was all they owned.

  The father was dying of tuberculosis, and one of the daughters had it. The mother was dead. The girls filled the room with life and one was quite plump, but Edie had sat mournfully to one side, dark, slender, and dissatisfied with everything; ashamed, as I now knew. As for me, I despised them all. I never could stand anything poor, wretched and ugly. If I am a socialist, it is just because of that.

  I came home to tell my mother about all these would-be boarders. We both wrote very indignant letters to my father. Why should Grandma live in this misery? Where was her money? He must come back and get her a better apartment.

  23

  Here is the last letter I received from Jacky before she rejoined us. She had now left the aunt and come home to Green Acres to live with Grandma Morgan. Grandma was holding another pow-wow there, because she had received a marriage proposal, by air mail, from an aged physician
in California. My belief is that Grandma never intended to marry, at her age, but used these romances as a means of keeping her by now middle-aged and married family round her in her declining years. Jacky’s letter ran:

  GREEN ACRES INN, NEW CANAAN

  OCT. 20, 1936

  DEAR LETTY,

  Here I am! Merry Hallowe’en! I am sending you a parcel (an Indian doll) and wish you the best, as, to become the secretary of an American Stalin. If I haven’t written to you, here’s the reason. Aunt Phyllis and her latest husband, Bob, were here at our place, Green Acres, for the week end. When your letter came, everyone wanted to read it. “Letty is so cute.” If you recall the text—it wasn’t showable! Pretending to hand it to Aunt Phyllis, I dropped it in the frog pond by accident—only, by the same accident, the letter became quite smeary and I forgot where you would be for Hallowe’en, and Mother only just got here. Here is the rea son for my silence. Mother’s visit is dull and of course they discuss family affairs. They ask, “How are we to live?” Grandma paid up at Santa Fe! We only have the money Papa sends us and he is not a moneymaker. Mother has money from Grandfather’s estate, but cannot get it from Grandma Morgan’s brothers, as they want it for the business. We have so many expenses and poor Mother, as you know, spends up to the hilt. And yet we do not live like princes and do not throw it around and Mother just dresses in that black and white and is absolutely white-haired. I myself don’t see why she doesn’t dye it, as they all say, but she thinks it would look as if she wished to marry again, which, of course, would be shocking. They say she had a dreadful life; Grandma and Grandpa were so busy making money they had not a mo ment and Grandma lived twenty-three hours a day, only not for the children. Mother says when she wanted money for a new dress, at eight years old, she used to go to the pinochle room and pull Grandma’s dress: Grandma always just an swered, “I meld,” or something. We are supposed to be going to Mexico with Dora and Uncle Philip next year in spring. It is very high (Mexico City). Philip chose this because we will all be rich with the exchanges. Mamma says it is be cause the girls are so pretty. Philip says he wants to help Papa; he is fond of Papa and says Papa is a very good, kind man. He told me privately he knows Die Konkubine! He has known her since the beginning, but Mamma does not know this! Philip says she (D.K.) is nice! But I know now he sees everything from the standpoint of his own moral weakness. Consider this!