Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  My father, very coldly, told me that I had never shown any ability to take care of money; that I threw it about like water and was like my mother, grandmother, and all the Morgans in that. I then told my father that I owed $362 already, and I had to have money to take care of that. One of the accounts was outstanding a year.

  “I don’t care about your debts. I didn’t authorize them,” said he, without even asking who had, for I suppose he knew that, as usual, it was Grandmother Morgan, who had ruined her entire family by allowing them to run accounts in her name at the big midtown stores. It was really $262 that I owed. I hoped to get the extra one hundred dollars for myself. I needed this badly. I flashed out at my father, “I am obliged to get into debt because you give me nothing like the proper pocket money. I have no dress allowance; Jacky has nothing. Grandmother said nothing about your keeping it till my majority. If you want my idea, you haven’t got it at all. You’ve spent it all. That’s just what Grandma said—you’d lost all her money.”

  I began to cry that I was broke, had spent everything on parties, taxis, and the like (but it was so little!), and that I loved this man and would do anything to attract him. Couldn’t Father understand that, and couldn’t Persia understand it? I went into the bedroom to powder my face, and heard Persia say, “Oh, heavens, I’d give it to her, and have done with it!”

  I came back with a cheerful expression. He said, “Letty, I’ll give you a little allowance. I suppose you’ll only learn how to manage money by having some!”

  I looked at my father with emotion.

  “Papa, I’m a beast and a brute, but you’ve no idea—I can’t always depend on men to pay my bills; I do the best I can—I do as well as anyone.”

  “Gold-digger!” said Solander.

  “But if you don’t give me any pocket money, I have to gold-dig,” I said.

  They laughed indulgently. I was softened. I immediately thought of all I had secretly gone in for—piano lessons from the young pianist now fashionable in the Village, subscription concerts, for which I had borrowed money; and then I thought, not of paying these debts, but of what I must take on.

  My father set a date, two days later, when he would give me my first money. We met in a little French restaurant on Lexington Avenue. At the table he handed over the bills with a secret flourish, and at the same time I saw his face and his big eyes, rather drawn. He looked seedy. His shoes were dusty, the trouser cuffs were frayed. His hair was turning gray. I felt a twinge of pain, and dropped my eyes. But the first thing I did was to buy two heavy gold-washed bracelets, in quite poor taste, which I had seen in a little shop near Thirty-fourth Street and for which I paid too much.

  27

  Young, healthy, and handsome—there is nothing of which a ten-dollar bill cannot cure you, thought I to myself, the next day, as I saw the blue eyes of Mr. Clays Manning fix themselves on me in twinkling speculation.

  “My grandmother left me twenty-five hundred dollars,” said I. (I did not mention the money she had left to Jacky.) “She was afraid to see the Angel of Death standing at the bottom of her bed, and kept a night light on. She slept in the daytime. Then, you know, her room was full of old fruits and vegetables and other things that people brought her, even coffee and soup—why? Because she said she was starved and thirsty at home; and what was that? That was Death starving her, don’t you see? And you know at the end she said people were waiting to beat her with broomsticks. And what was that really? That was the scythe-handle of Death waiting to mow her down. She said my father stole her money but it was Death who was waiting to steal it from her. I see it all now: at that time we thought she told lies. But it was all the truth. Her inward eye saw everything. Death came, and took first away her sense, then her outward eye, then her hearing, and left only an old vegetable in place of all that. When she died, everything had gone; worn out like an old clock you can’t repair. It was the one-hoss shay. It was because she saved. I, on the contrary, will throw away.”

  Hilda laughed and Clays said, “And did you get the money— but no, I suppose you’ve got to wait for the crock of gold!”

  “Oh, no,” I said airily. “You know this isn’t Europe where girls are in leading strings; no; I have it now. I can get it when I want it.”

  With this, I opened my purse, and showed a fistful of bills.

  “My God! It’s enough to make a man a gold-digger,” said Clays thoughtfully. “The fact is, my darling, your old man needs twenty dollars. Lend it to me, do.”

  “Oh, yes,” I cried joyfully, for Hilda did not have even twenty dollars on her.

  “And now, Letty,” said Clays, “buy us all some drinks. Come on, I want to see you throw it away. Can you do it? I don’t want you to be a tightwad.”

  I did not pay any of my debts; I contracted others, for I saw the possibility of paying them all at some time or other. In all, I lent about eighty dollars to Clays, and was very happy to do so. He became attracted to me. He thought my stories smart and quaint; we agreed on politics, almost, and I was fascinated by his patter. He was a born raconteur.

  As soon as I could, I dragged him along to the prize exhibit in my family, that was Solander, after all, and to my regret, the two almost fell into each other’s arms; I tried to break in with my political truisms but might just as well never have been born.

  Well, time passed. My marks were not good by Christmas. I was madly in love with Clays, and, incredible as it all seemed, he was in love with me. He rarely mentioned it, for he always had too much to say, and I always had too much to say—about literature, the world, the weather, his stories, but we were in love, and I had a feeling when I was with him that I never had had before.

  I scarcely saw my sister Jacky or Mother, and Clays was rather surprised to learn that I had two sisters. I kept Jacky out of sight. She was still at Hunter College, high-minded, full of poetry, her studies, and her teachers, behaving in a silly way about the one or two men teachers they had visiting, and brothers of her friends. She was at the awkward age in everything. But even I had to admit that she was attractive. She had a queer face, but a dazzling skin, large eyes, a longish full turbulent mouth, full even at the corners, and her loins from behind made a sculptural rounded hexagon, of the greatest voluptuousness, which we all admired. She could have had a “reputation for beauty,” but she was robust and her expression was rather sulky. She did not know how to please a man, but sat opposite to him, drilling him with her serious eyes and crisply shooting her ambitions at him. They laughed at first and called her “girly” or “baby,” or something; they got nervous at last, but invited her out for a ride; she was only at first duped by their sudden affection or abrupt insulted silences.

  I did not trust her with Clays, for Clays was an eclectic; and many Europeans expect young girls to be serious. They do not expect them to be the enslavers of Mamma and the ruin of Papa, which is pretty much our ideal. I was a realist and did my best to live up to the local ideal while retaining what common sense I could. I loved Papa; I often regretted my weakness toward him; I rarely upbraided him for not making things easier for me. The truth is, I am weak. I love people and I am not sure enough of my own virtue to criticize others; this is the best fruit of vice! The moral person should never govern a family or a state; but I trust in the future, the belief in abnegations will have passed away and we will have no more of these dry-skinned governors.

  I was a social type; Jacky was prim. We quarreled a good deal at this time. She did not understand me. She rejected all political ideas and social movements, and went in for metaphysics. I did not understand her, either. I thought she was confused and slow; but I admitted she had quality. Something might come of it. She was not really a rival of mine, but one can never be sure with a pretty girl. You never know when she’s going to see sexual truth; when she sees this, she knows as much as you, practically, overnight. Why do I say, pretty girl? The ugly girls, too. I’m not sure they don’t know more than we do, they often get more men. It sharpens their wits, they h
ave to know more and it becomes a kind of Aunt Sally contest with them—how many did you score?

  I kept Clays from home, where he would meet Mother (who told uncouth anecdotes about my youth) and Jacky (who had $2,500).

  It happened that about this time, Christmas, Hilda had to go home to Saratoga, N.Y., for she was out of a job, and her parents were old-fashioned and rather well-off, wanted to have her with them. She left, with many tears, and after some heart-rending scenes with Clays. He liked her well enough. As far as I know—I could not face it at the time—they spent a second honeymoon, a very tragic one, at her flat. I should have liked to have taken over her flat, but could not persuade either Father or Mother to let me live on my own. They thought I wanted to be “accessible” and my father cautioned me against my own tendencies, “You know I don’t want you to suffer, but I don’t want to see you a wanton.”

  This sobered me a little, but they did not know how I was suffering, and I could not tell them. I had already been through as much as Mother, it seemed to me, during the days of Hilda’s farewell to Clays.

  Now Clays and I were left alone. Clays was at first depressed by Hilda’s departure and her natural sorrow and affection. She said she loved him and he seemed to believe it. He didn’t know it was just the escapade of a wild young girl. Naturally, no man can admit that to himself. But he had an elastic nature, and next time he was on a visit here from Washington (his new job was there), he came to me, simply telephoning and expecting me to go at once to meet him, just as if it had all been arranged between us. It was so unaffected that I hadn’t a twinge. He was using Amos’s flat. We saw a lot of each other. I behaved with natural joy and may even have been a bit weak and feverish at first, because I had had grippe over the holidays. Also I felt that now I faced a decisive year and could not play round with my studies any longer. I wanted to go away to college and at the same time wanted to get married. The holidays had been quieter than I had expected. Clays was away. Amos had made a few passes at me, but I was having none of him then. (Although, later—but that’ll be bad enough when I get to it.) I saw three plays in the holidays: Idiot’s Delight; Reflected Glory, a little doodad whose chief merit seemed to be that Tallulah Bankhead was in it. And last, through no fault of my own (Amos took me), Promise, a new play adapted from that worthy masterpiece (by the masterpiece-maker) M. Henry Bernstein’s L’Espoir. Oh, what a lousy play; but in it Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Frank Lawton, Jean Forbes-Robertson. The acting was all right, but it was New Year’s Eve, and you couldn’t hear because of the tooting of the horns outside. An enjoyable three hours! And Amos trying to hold my hand and snuggling up against me. I went out with Selma, Linda, and Celeste, who were together in the audience, just to get away from the cuddlesome Amos. I began to think about him what Hilda used to say. He not only imitated Clays, but nature had made him a kind of loathsome copy of Clays. He was like a transparency of Clays, through which you could look at another man. We all went to Childs, then to my house, and we had a good time there, because (I don’t quite mean it this way) Mother did not get in till 6:30; but I was through with going out with other men. The two boys who joined Linda and Selma were only nineteen and no use to me after Clays. Of course, we all kissed and necked and said things we didn’t mean, but I knew it for what it was. Then, Clays returned. I saw no more of Amos, though he must have been somewhere in the offing all the time. I met Clays that night by accident, but how fatefully, at the Madison Square meeting for Spain. Ralph Bates was there, and said he was going back to fight soon. When he sat down, they applauded, especially the trades unionists, and some Y.P.S.’s behind me snickered, “Oh, that’s the C.P. line.”

  I got into a heated argument, so that I missed the next speaker. People were shishing. I should have known that our American comrades of the Socialist Party had not learned the lesson of their European friends; and could not even understand the idea of a people’s front. They were just in it for the hell of it, or to meet the boys, or to feel soft and warm, wrapped up in old, acceptable ideas, such that even the F.B.I. novice wouldn’t give them a second thought.

  The main speaker of the evening was the ambassador to the U.S., Senor de los Rios, formerly Minister of Education to the new government. Alas, there was a song about him, a bit anti-popular front, “de los Rios, socialist with the white gloves.” He spoke for a solid hour in Spanish.

  Afterwards, I saw dear Clays, head and shoulders above (most of ) the crowd. We went away somewhere together to have some coffee, and he not only talked madly in his usual style, calling everything, in his delicious way, “preposterous”—“preposterous little man,” which meant everything from a very small man in a loud check suit, to a social-democrat puffed up with his services to the working class—but told me the news from Washington. He sang his songs, “Socialist in White Gloves” and “Four Generals,” all in Spanish, though I can’t guarantee the accent, and asked me to lend him some money. I was delighted to do so, but had so little in my purse that I blushed for myself and my family.

  For Christmas I had got twenty-five dollars from Grandma Morgan and Mother and Aunt Dora between them, and still had this in my purse when I went out with Clays. I daresay he thought I was made of money and he didn’t think it strange for, by now, he knew how everyone threw their money round in the U.S.A. and how everything was for the children and youth.

  I was, meantime, torn about the idea of college, Antioch, Cornell—N.Y.U.—and what profession: medicine, sciences, literature, languages? If languages, I had to take up Greek, Latin, German, Spanish. All I knew was French. I started Greek and Latin with Clays helping me, but this did not get very far, for he was always here and then there. We had very little time together. He could not tell me when he was coming, and I am afraid that this term I did very badly in school.

  This allowed me to discuss my future with Clays, however. He wanted me to go in for foreign languages, so that I could get a job abroad in the embassies or foreign economic services, or as a journalist. Then he said, “And if you’re smart, you can help me, don’t you see!”

  One thing led to another. He said his divorce was nearly cleared up. His poor wife, the crime-story writer, had gone through another divorce, just to free them both, and she was not asking for any alimony. There really are some decent women in the world. Their romance was all a mistake, but dramatic enough. She was one of two sisters from a New Orleans family, and supposed to be very pretty. I didn’t think her so pretty, actually. She was upstage and conceited, but she was tall, well-formed, and had an air that would impose on some men.

  She had met Clays by accident in Washington. They took a plane trip to the Coast together, and stopped off somewhere to get married. A few months later she was sorry, and he was sorry, too. They fought like wildcats. This always made me anxious, for I had seen flashes of temper in Clays. He was Lord High-and-mighty at times, and would begin to speak in a totally incomprehensible English society manner. I was afraid of him, then. Out at the Coast, she had got herself a job writing crime stories. She was good-looking enough, even in that town, to interest the cops, so that they gave her first chance when some murder or horror story broke. Clays and she had bought a fast car, and she now purred and whizzed through Los Angeles and out into the San Bernardino with her husband-to-be at the wheel to protect her. Naturally, Los Angeles (and, in fact, all Southern California) is a Yukon for crime-story writers. Nevertheless, the competition is keen, because there are plenty of disgruntled film writers there. It’s a hard life, and this girl went in for it. But she was making out pretty well, and had decided she preferred this to Clays. Of course, she was twenty-two, and, I suppose, life had lost its gilt-edge to her.

  I asked Clays about The Honourable Fyshe and about Caroline. At this, he grinned, “Do you want to marry a virgin, Letty?”

  And this was how he asked me to marry him. I rushed home to Mother.

  “Mother, my life story only has two lines in it: She met an Englishman named Clays Manning, who asked her to marry him.
”

  “And then she dropped dead from joy,” said my mother, grimly, “God forbid! So you think your life is over now, you poor child. At sixteen.”

  “I’ll be seventeen next February. Clays will get a court order and we’ll be married in Connecticut. Or he won’t, and we’ll be married in Jersey. Or with a court order, he can even be married here, but only after a year—I think it is. But you don’t know about all that. We ought to go to a lawyer.”

  “At your age!” said my mother, grimly. “Who was his other wife?”

  For as Mother was very sharp about divorces, I had never mentioned Manning’s previous marriage. I told her the story and that I was quite innocent, but my tongue slipped, and it came out about Caroline, for she was the co-respondent.

  “What are you letting yourself in for?” asked Mathilde; and was set against Clays from that time forward. At any rate, I had set a date for bringing him to the house and Mother could not refuse to meet him, nor would she battle him; but she set it all down on my father’s account and said that it was because of his life that I was already set on the same path. And then she spoke gloomily about what she would do, if my father was so mad as to let me marry. What would she do for an apartment? She could not bear to live in a small place with the other girls; yet she would lose the money given for my keep. She did not suppose Clays would want to live with her, an old woman (she was forty); but perhaps I could remain with her and Jacky while Clays was away. By this she had cheered up somewhat, for she realized that I would have to go through college, even if I were married; that Clays would be most of the time in Washington and even in London. He was obliged to return to his source at times, both to see his chiefs and to see his family—and, I don’t doubt, to see more secret connections. For almost every Englishman is a working patriot, though his politics are not those of the Government in power. I didn’t then ask myself what would happen to me if I were such a patriot as Clays. What a situation! Under Two Flags!