Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  My mother thought deeply about the Mannings’ divorce. It fascinated her. This was a piping hot subject at that moment in the Morgan family. Not only were Philip and Percival Hogg still in jail for alimony (Hogg was still in jail, and Philip was again in jail, there was a difference), but Aunt Phyllis was bedeviled in a sad way. She had remarried a man named Bosper, who had been divorced. Aunt Phyllis had now a baby boy and was being sued by Bosper’s former wife. The suit was a complicated one. Bosper was sued for bigamy, Aunt Phyllis for false pretenses (calling herself Mrs. Bosper), and an attempt was being made to call Aunt Phyllis’s child a bastard. Bosper was resident in New York State; his first wife had obtained a Reno divorce, alleging that she was a Nevada resident. The first wife had already remarried, and had a child of this remarriage. The second marriage was a runaway marriage. The second Mrs. Bosper had been a married woman. After divorcing her husband, a New York women’s magazine editor, she had run away to Florida (during her vacation) with Bosper and being offered the alternative by her first husband, divorce, or be divorced, had divorced her husband, a resident in New York State, and she resident in Nevada, and had remarried in New Jersey. Six weeks after the marriage she had left her second husband, charging intolerable cruelty, and had gone to Reno for a second divorce, there receiving a liberal allowance in alimony. She asserted she was a real Nevada resident, anxious to establish herself there as a magazine correspondent, and report the doings of the fashionable divorce colony.

  However, Mr. Bosper began to make big money after this (in the fur business), for the war in Europe was not only making the shipment of furs difficult, but also raising the (unavowed) prices. This money he put into a home, diamond rings, and furniture for Phyllis and her baby, paid for in one-dollar bills, which he carried in a valise.

  The first husband of the second Mrs. Bosper (Mr. X) had now remarried in Connecticut, but this marriage was at present illegal in New York State, for he had been the guilty party.

  The second Mrs. Bosper, now twice a divorcée, once Mrs. X and then Mrs. Bosper, saw an excellent business in dresses and coats opening up; everyone now thought war was coming. She needed money to start the business. The remarriage had brought her in a good yield, but she needed more. She asked Mr. Bosper for additional alimony. This was refused. She sued for it, but at this moment the judges seemed hardhearted and she was turned down. The second Mrs. Bosper (once Mrs. X) now sued Mr. Bosper, alleging bigamy. She said Mr. Bosper had married the first Mrs. Bosper (Anne) and, somehow illegally, had obtained a divorce in Reno; he had not really been a resident of Nevada, but a New York resident, and the divorce, of which his wife was not notified, was obtained under false pretenses, and was not acceptable in New York State. He had then married her, Mrs. X, who was legally divorced and they were legally married.

  He had obtained an illegal divorce from her, and was in arrears of alimony, for which she now sued in New York. But she further claimed that he was not divorced at all, and had married, illegally, Phyllis Morgan, who, therefore, used her (Mrs. Bosper’s) name and obtained money and credit under it, and filched away the real Mrs. Bosper’s friends by misrepresentation, while, of course, their child (Phyllis’s and Mr. Bosper’s) was a bastard, and could not normally inherit Mr. Bosper’s money.

  Mrs. Bosper II (formerly Mrs. X) hoped to collect a small sum from Mrs. Bosper I, from Mr. X, and from Mr. Bosper II. She was suddenly warned, however, that if she won her suit for back alimony (which she was about to do), she would be unable to obtain a decision in her other suit alleging misrepresentations in divorce proceedings, thus losing her basis for blackmail. She illegally agreed to drop her charges, however, upon payment of a round sum of ten thousand dollars, although she had previously alleged a felony. This was arranged.

  Mathilde was bitter in lament over the wickedness of the world, but the rest of the women were openly discussing the profit of the alimony game, which now took on complications that they, in their simple, old world ways, had never suspected. They had simply divorced men and lived modestly on men’s labors during their respectable lifetimes; but here were brilliant female gamesters unmarrying and remarrying, seizing parts and profits. The women were as shocked as huggermugger sidewalk traders are at the bold feats of speculators and profiteers on the exchanges.

  Mrs. Looper said it was better than poker. Mrs. Morgan said she hoped the women didn’t get too clever, because Green Acres, most of the year, was kept running on the weekly board of middle-aged women who were put out of the way by their husbands on neat little alimonies; it was one of America’s own particular Asia Minors, a relative of London’s Lancaster Gate and South Kensington, and the refuge of similar superstitions, race-superiorities, palmistry, and flag-wagging. If all these became conspirators and monsters (well, if pigs could fly) of fraud, said Grandmother (though she was not opposed to self-protection as such), the men would become irritated, arise in their might, and cut down the juicy little game. Then, “We girls should remember our place,” said Grandmother Morgan solemnly to her two married daughters and several of her friends. “The men marry us, keep us and our children; give us allowances, buy life insurance, and leave us their money and even hand us alimony! But all for one reason, and one reason alone. To buy us off! They don’t want us running the world; they are willing to pay a lot, so they can run it themselves. It’s insurance, as I see it. Now, if we start plundering the men, if we burden the trade with more than it can bear, it stands to reason that Congress or the Supreme Court, or whoever does these things, don’t you see, will start to go over the situation and we will get either no alimony at all, or else no divorce (which would be awful, girls, after all), or else a uniform law; and there are no pickings when there is a uniform law. You see what we women have now, in the U.S.A., is an arbitrage business; we make pickings, even a fat living out of the differences between state laws, an excellent business, considering there are forty-eight states and not only a difference in the laws, but a confusion in the minds of judges, lawyers and divorcees.”

  “In my opinion,” said Mathilde, gloomily, “there should be no divorce. What good does it do anyone? You marry a man anyhow.”

  “You have no divorce,” jeered my grandmother cheerfully, “and look where it’s landed you. That is no solution. We girls can only go on getting freer. But not by gangsterism, don’t you see? I know there are a few pioneers who will get away with it, like this bird, Mrs. X, but you’ll see, there’ll be a moral wave and we’ll be swept up.

  “And,” said Grandmother, pulling out another stop, with her great sang-froid and good faith in the world, “there’s my poor, darling Phyllis, my little beauty; she should never have had a cloud in her blue sky, a woman men should kiss the feet of, a natty dresser, smart, a good wife and mother, and she gets herself into all this trouble; and how she has cried, my darling. We must also, don’t you see, stand together, for our daughters. We must not let these harpies and speculators—these women out for what they can get—” My grandmother coughed.

  “Where did you get those openwork stockings, Ada? They certainly slim the leg. Do you think if I went there I could get some? You see, I have no hair on my legs, and I wear the sheerest of sheer, but I could do with a pair of openwork, too, for Muron says my legs are one of the most beautiful things about me.”

  Grandmother simpered. Muron, a broker, was her latest beau and wished to marry her. Grandmother broke off all thought of alimony to plunge into a rose-and-honey account of her romance.

  “I would go right off with him tomorrow to City Hall but the boys are so harsh to me, and Stella says it’s ridiculous at my age. I want you to come out to Green Acres. I’ll throw a big party. We’ll have a big get-together; and,” she continued gleefully, “Muron’s a real good-time-Charlie; that is when I’m there. But other times he likes to sit home—maybe too much. I don’t understand what is the matter with the men; they all show their age. But Muron is real nice, good-looking,” said Grandmother; “and perhaps this time I’ll throw my cap over
the windmills. A woman can’t live alone forever. It isn’t natural.”

  Thus ended Grandmother’s instructions on alimony. Grandmother was delighted with my own prospects, and lectured Mathilde. I must get married; I was a lively young girl, and girls knew everything these days. I better get married before it was too late, she told my depressed mother.

  “If only her father took some interest in her,” cried Mathilde; “and where will they live? Letty can’t live all alone in an apartment.”

  But she was unheard, for the ladies were all over me, wanting to hear about the rich Englishman.

  Grandmother left. She had a date with Muron. The ladies seeped away in her wake and I was left alone with Mother, who indulged as usual, in Poësque visions of my future and hers, not to mention Jacky’s, my father’s, and so forth.

  On me she bent a profound, cold eye, for when Mathilde had tried out the line, “She is too young to know the realities of adult life,” Grandmother had hawked, laughed, sneezed, and said, “She’s getting too restive. You’d better let her have her head. I know, I remember—”

  Grandmother said no more and became grave. It was now no longer admitted that Phyllis, the matron and wronged woman, had once gadded about Europe; and if anyone mentioned Vichy or Cairo, Phyllis preferred to be as ignorant as any woman in the cornbelt, as we conceive it. Mathilde, too, had reached that stage and age when a lazy woman finds it more seemly to forget she ever had a desire or want. Still the thought was there, and not only was I before her eyes, but my cryptic sister Jacky, who was not taking sex in her stride. Mother was even morbid about Jacky, who was doing well enough in the usual subjects for the punch-drunk, history and English, but knew nothing of the modern world or of her contemporaries; who never went to the theater unless the family took us; despised politics; who repeated all the gossip about the male teachers. She criticized them, and satirized them. I tried to make Mother take her away from Hunter, which seemed to me unhealthy, because all girls together, but Mother said it was I who was unnatural and unhealthy.

  My final argument to Mother was (about Clays) that she knew I was too young to have the experience of college. This, simply because a professor she had admired at college had said youths ought to go out in the world and get a job and know something about mankind, before they started learning the higher arts and sciences.

  I said to her, Why couldn’t I take a few months off, try married life, wander about a bit with Clays, and return to college in the autumn, a young, married woman. My mother made an outcry at this, saying I had no idea of how a married woman was shut out of the lives of young girls, despised and treated as a pariah. Indeed, all married women were pariahs from life itself, said my mother, unless they consented to behave like Grandmother Morgan, members of a joyous, ribald camarilla, hardly women, more like men. Where was a place for a married woman in the world today, groaned my mother, wringing her hands. She wanted me to have my playtime. And what about children? Did I realize that they might come—too soon? Why not, was my argument. It would be fun to have them, and get them over; then, by, say, twenty-four, I would be a settled woman and have a career. My mother said, little did I know what I was letting myself in for. Why, this carefree, but far from heart-free man I was marrying did not even stoop to make the promises her children’s father (that meant Solander) had made to her; in fact, he practically proclaimed himself a rogue with women.

  Perhaps, my mother enquired with a sad sneer, I intended to be like my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother (for Mother could not blink the fact that Grandma Morgan was not entirely chaste), my Uncle Philip, and various other relatives, not to mention my own father. Yes, it was a nice pattern they had in marital relations today, and perhaps it suited a girl like me; although, thank goodness, Jacky showed more of her mother in her, and Andrea was an innocent child.

  Mother felt she had not acted well toward me in letting me run wild all over the world in free-love schools, and in not insisting upon my going to Hunter, too, where I might have thought of studies for a few years at least, and seen that all the girls in the world, of my age, were not engrossed with dances and sex.

  At this, I spoke up and remarked that I did about twice as well as Jacky in studies; that I also had a social life, and was all that a young girl should be, pretty, agreeable, safe with men, and not wasting my time over the poetry of a strange vegetable like Peter Varick, the professor with whom all the girls at Jacky’s college were involved. Involved by hate or love, what difference did it make? What sort of a man is a man who gives lessons to young ladies, said I, mimicking young ladies. Peter wore pants, but he was a vegetable, a yam or clam, or something; quite close to the vegetable kingdom, at any rate.

  My mother stretched out her hand! A fog came over her fine, blue eyes with their clear blue-whites. She cried, “What can I do if the father is so negligent?”

  I would cut up as a wanton, end up living with the man, she knew—with my father’s encouragement, I would certainly do that.

  “And apparently your father approves of this semi-vagabond?”

  I jumped up, and threw my arms round her neck; “Oh, Mother, thank you ever so much. I’ll never forget it,” for this was Mathilde’s peculiar way of saying yes.

  “I think I have some rights,” said my mother, at once, “and that is that your marriage must be secret, or nearly so. If you knew what you’re letting yourself in for. Going to college next fall, a married woman. They’ll laugh at you; you’ll be out of everything. There isn’t a mother alive will let you talk to her daughters.”

  I stared at her.

  “I know, I know—too much,” said Mother in the exact words of poor Grandmother Fox.

  “All right. We’ll only tell a few friends.”

  My mother said sarcastically: “You forget he’s not divorced yet.”

  This was so. My father and Clays, very much the same in ideas, of course, thought it quite simple that I should marry, and I was mad with enthusiasm at having this side of my life so neatly settled.

  I threw myself into my work with such energy that I bewildered teachers and secretaries of societies. I sprang to the top in everything, realizing that I could not keep Clays unless I showed a great ardor in politico-social life (I say this now, but at that time I did not know there were any other kinds), and determined to make a splash, if possible, later on, on the Continent, or in England; nothing was too much for me.

  There were many nights when I slept only three hours—homework, meetings, chewing the rag after meetings, accidental conversations on street corners, restaurants, bars, and Greenwich Village cellars where young people lived; giving out leaflets and rushing to bookshops to get new publications; work on the school magazine, selling the Daily Worker, or leaflets, organizing rallies. I had time for it all, and school, too. That was the effect of love and expectation upon me. I suppose it would be upon everyone. Fulfillment is the secret of energy, not self-sacrifice; at least for my type.

  Clays and I had seen, as in a vision, Clays an attaché, or secretary to some embassy abroad. I started out, not to fit myself for this so much, as to already take part in it.

  I turned out to be the most brilliant girl in the class in economics according to the teacher, but did not get the very highest marks, alas, on account of these outside activities—but I did not regret that then, and I do not now. I then felt for the first time (with Clays, and my marks not so bad) that I had something to do, what some people would call a destiny. That was not my view then, and if it is now, it is because I have become more sentimental, because older. At twenty-four I have noticed people start to become sentimental; they forget all they have learned and congeal, not into any essence of themselves, but into some requisite atom of the social group.

  Last year I was at a reunion with some alumnae of the high school, and after, we went to a bar, all in red plush, to have a talk. Some of the girls were married, two already divorced, and all sorry.

  “Are you beat?” they
asked me.

  “Not yet.”

  “You will be soon,” they said. “We’ve given in. You’ve got to live the way people do. You can’t hold out.”

  I did hold out; I will hold out. But why shouldn’t those who are weak hold out, too? That’s the question. This world is made of ex-chimpanzees, not ex-champs, after all! What is the plural of Joe Louis? There isn’t any. That just shows.

  I wrote about this to my darling Clays, then in Washington. As well as my other works, I had time to write him every two days, at least. My letters were full of my active life and indignation—for the most part, indignation. Why? I was a hotpot, forever bubbling, said Clays. But this fever and ferment was my life at its best. Fever to others, life to me. Never did I wish to be past this fitful fever. I lived for the day, for the hour, only to enjoy it better. For thinking back (like my mother) or ahead (like the philosophers) makes you languid and lazy.

  Of course, perhaps, I was just a pocket edition of Grandmother Morgan, with some higher education! This was how she lived. In her later years she picked men younger and younger; in their mirror she saw that she had more years to go. How clear it is!

  I wrote to Clays (whom, for fun, I called Sir Clays, he was the parfit knight),