Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  I fancy he prepared his speeches and only used what was long tried and tested.

  “I’d like to go away with you for a week, Luke, to your shack.”

  In the dark I saw his flattered smile. Then he said, “I’ve loved so often and I’ll love again; life is never done with us; you love better the more you love.”

  I said, “Yes, but I’m a woman; it’s different.”

  I was haunted by the thought of Jacky taking perhaps this same walk with Luke and hearing these things. He said, “But, Letty, don’t you love this boy of yours—Clays—eh? Or is it Bobby Thompson?”

  “I love them and love you too—I don’t know how it can be; but it is.”

  “Yes, I suppose it can be. Ye-es—”

  “You are not the same, you’re kind of impersonal—you’re Adam.”

  “Adam? Adams—oh, I see.”

  “No, Adam, the first man. You make me Eve.”

  He laughed, “Adam!”

  “Hello, Adam.”

  He laughed, wonderingly, “Adam!”

  The hat sign opposite said Adam Hats. He laughed: “Adam Hats, says the sign, Adam Hats.”

  He bent down and kissed me. After a while he said, “Now I am very sleepy.”

  “Oh,” I cried, offended.

  “I am sleepy.”

  I cried, “Oh,” again, but in a different tone and pressed myself to him.

  “We ought to continue this discussion somewhere else—in bed,” he said.

  “What discussion? I think we agree.”

  But the rigmarole flowed out of him, “Men and women—” he said softly.

  “There’s my place.”

  He said: “There are hotels too—everywhere; no one would know—that night your father came in—not nice, Letty. You must think about your father.”

  The signs said, Rooms, $1; Smoor, $1.

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Of course,” he said, in a low, considerate tone, “I couldn’t take a girl like you there.”

  “But I’ve got a place.”

  “Well, you see, Letty dear, I’m known about there; my friends live in that house on the top floor and I wouldn’t want my wife— and going out with you is just a holiday—you know, for me you’re a dangerous girl—” gutturally he rolled the endearing word girl, “a dangerous pretty girl.”

  “Oh, damn, I’ll forget you, that’s what I’ll do,” I cried out. He looked surprised.

  I said, “It’s the old tease; you don’t care for anyone outside the thrill. I’m just marijuana to you. See what you said, ‘A holiday.’ This is blind man’s buff and no clinch. I’m looking for a man, and I tried you out because I’m wild about you. I’ll tell you now,” I said madly, losing all discretion, “but if you don’t say the word, I don’t care, I’ll take anyone, even David Bench—I won’t stay chastely waiting for you, like a good little girl. I suffer too much. Let’s go in here,” I said, pointing to a café in a side street, by now quite famous, a smoky little den, with paintings by local artists on the walls; “I’ve got to settle this.”

  He willingly went in, put me before him, opened the door, treated me with deference and with what I would have sworn (if I hadn’t known him) was love in every intonation. I said: “You can’t give me the runaround.”

  He said, appearing to be much troubled, “You see, little Letty, I’m a married man, dear, and you’re such a sweet youngster, and the sort of girl who always gets me, and if Elsie weren’t a mother—”

  And again the fascinating guttural. He shook his head sadly. “But these things are real, Letty, motherhood, family life—We don’t think so. I believed in free love at your age. Practiced it too. You don’t want to be bound down either. Not at your age. And then, think of Clays!”

  I swallowed my cocktail in a gulp, and raising my voice, bawled him out.

  “Faker,” I said. “Social fraud! ‘It will be better for us in another world.’ I won’t stand for that song. Motherhood.”

  And under this head I reproached him with the stories about him that everyone knew, the women seduced, the homes broken; and even with her children which I had held on my lap and longed for. I said, “Love’s free, but children aren’t free; men get all there is to free love and women are robbed of their children.”

  And for the moment, hot and lusty-tongued as I was, it seemed to me I wanted and desired nothing so much as a hearth and home. He raised his eyes presently, saying: “Why, Letty, you’re quite a strongminded girl, aren’t you?”

  The woman who was at the cash desk near me frowned at me. She hated me from the first, and she said: “Ssh!” I turned upon her and said, “Is this a free place or isn’t it? I’ve heard enough family brawls here to know. I pay for my drinks. You shut up. This place is for public entertainment or it isn’t; and I’m entertaining the public.”

  A man beside me, quite drunk, with two floozies, laughed, “Some temper.”

  The waiter said, “Take it easy!”

  Luke shuffled his feet, but he finished his drink.

  “Take it easy, Letty! Let’s get out of here.”

  I said to the woman who was still staring at me, “If you don’t like the way I behave, I’ll get some friends of mine in the N.M.U. to come in and louse up your place for you.”

  “Heh, Letty,” said Luke, laughing frankly; “you devil, come on, let’s go home.”

  I tried to read his eyes, my desperate love rushing back into me, but no sooner were we out in the damp river air than he, buttoning my coat at the throat and kissing me on the lips, said, “Letty, don’t you think you’re getting a bit wild? Maybe you ought to go back and live with Mathilde, eh? You’re too young. Life’s hard. I don’t think you can take it, Letty.”

  “I can,” I cried, dashing my hand to my eyes so that I wouldn’t cry, but I did cry. He piloted me toward my home. He came in with me, and I clung to him, “Oh, stay, dear Luke, oh, don’t tease me so much,” but he kept murmuring, “But it was only a holiday from morality, Letty, last time; we couldn’t overstep the bounds, we’d both get into trouble. I’ve got to go, dear.”

  I threw myself on the studio couch, face downwards, and sobbed loudly into the coverlet. I heard all sound cease in the little Ford apartment upstairs and with renewed energy gave out heartrending sobs. Luke stood by, helpless, saying, “What do you want me to do, Letty, what can I do? I can’t help it, dear; it’s the way things are.”

  When I had cried myself out, I sat up, with my pink, fluffy face, and looked at him. But he picked up a brush, brushed my hair which was loose on my shoulders, took a little packet out of his pocket and said, clearing his throat, “Here’s a bracelet, Letty, that I won in a lottery up at the Union; it’s for the sick benefit society, I won it—here, it would look just right on you—like all young girls you’ve got such a pretty round wrist—”

  I took it, but said, “It was for Elsie?”

  “Oh, no. I told Elsie how you helped me with Leon and she said I must give it to you.”

  I took it, trying it on and looking at myself in the mirror. All the old passion rose between us. I flung myself into his arms and felt my legs turn to fire. My eyes were filled with tears, “Oh, Luke, how wonderful you are.”

  “How wonderful you are, Letty.”

  He edged away. When he was in the street, I opened the window and flung the bracelet at him. I didn’t want him to think he had tricked me. This was a cruel night that I spent, and in it was only one consoling thought, that I had been so treated because, after all, I myself was a fraud, I had intended only to make love to Luke as an experience, to perfect my technique. And sometimes at this thought, between agonies, I would laugh slightly, “Two heels, one slightly worn.”

  In the morning I replied to Lucy Headlong’s sticky Christmas letter with a yes. It had occurred to me that this Luke affair began after the return from Arnhem. Superstitiously I attached some spiritual power to her ancient company of ghosts, to the love potion that the air of the mysterious region was for me. I could
spend three sleepless nights like the last ones there. I wondered if, on my return, another love affair as exciting would await me, for like all lovecareerists I was a great believer in amulets, luck-bearers, and the evil eye. I added to my letter one lie, “Jacky cannot come.”

  I did not ask Jacky. I wanted all the love-luck for myself. This suited me in every way. I hoped either to forget Luke or to substitute for him upon my return from Arnhem.

  I confess I was shocked at the appearance of Lucy Headlong at the station.

  The snow was hard and no more fell. The square melon-lighted houses were set among leafless woods and could be seen unnaturally near, without benefit of perspective. There was this thing, the lifelessness of Arnhem’s neighborhood, perhaps Death by the hand of the unwarmed North that has neither sun nor sustenance nor spring; it was the spidery weather that floated. How miserable is the northern winter where even at sunlit midday, and certainly at nightfall, a vigorous, invisible yet very sensible creature of death goes striding past over the snow, leaving faint footprints like the marks of leaves, multitudinously treading in the bare forests. The snow spread like a dinner cloth on the shallow rim we climbed before reaching the mound of Arnhem. Slate-colored Juncos pecked in the snow beneath shriveled grapevines. There were wreaths in all the houses, from holly and seedling pines. Cherry ribbons and berries were hung up and there came the smell of baking and the sight of piled wood. By the roads, on the banks of snow, in less frequented ways, there were deer tracks; and small furred paws had pocked the snow hedges into clearings.

  I spoke of the snow. From the aged woman in her yellow turban and yellow dress under the old fur coat, this other Lucy Headlong, came a bitter, crazy laugh.

  “It reminds me of a Christmas when I was a child— My cousin had a little hatchet and was attacking a block of wood when he fell and cut his chin. The blood dripped from his chin and dug a hole in the snow. They all rushed out and picked him up, but I stood there laughing, and in me I felt something glorious I had never felt before. I felt no regret; and a strange wonder, a beauty in life, that this little boy that I so hated and despised—such an eanling, such a woolly lamb, such a mamma’s boy—had created such a brilliant, if pathetic scene—the snow. See it, Letty, the boy’s new blue coat, the scarlet blood, the sun, the bright hatchet, and my own yellow wool coat—I got my sense of color then and got it straight from Christmas Day. For the first time I felt victory and knowledge. I was superior.

  “They brought me in. Father beat me with both bare hands. I bowed my head and shoulders and was secretly laughing. I was shut up in my room and thought of the wickedness of the world; but every time I calmed down I would begin to recall the scene and then a low chuckle ending in a snigger, or a loud childish laugh, would break from me. Again, suddenly, I would see his tooth showing through his lower lip, the blood-on-snow, and his silly face convulsed with howling. And I never did lose the humor of that scene! When I see snow, I still exult. Yes, how mild and stupid everyone is. He never came to any good. I knew it, I could see him as he was.”

  Lucy Headlong embroidered this anecdote. She exclaimed with the same note, “All the people that I’m not supposed to see, that Adrian hates, are back, of course, for Christmas. They would be calling in, but he forbids it; and I am glad to have you, at least, my lady Letty.”

  I looked at her through lowered lids. Her face had darkened and was clenched like a fist. She twitched and yanked at the wheel, and all the time had a desperate air. I said, “You seem tense; has something upset you?”

  This time I was without fear. I had come to the country for myself and would put up with no flightiness in Mrs. Headlong. She tossed her head, “Nothing upsets me!”

  I looked straight ahead. Presently I saw her biting her lips and making an effort to control herself. She spoke feverishly of the people in her class, dismissing all the male students with a tart word. “And you,” she said, pouncing upon me, “you are too servile!”

  I looked at her sidelong.

  “Yes, the turbulency, detail, the sensitive line, all show you think with your fingers, like a typist, not with your eyes; they aren’t connected! Then you’re afraid to do something ugly. What has art to do with beauty, morality, its convention of idea? And you want to set down the model, that is servilely and vulgarly copy, like a cheap little middle-class advertising punk—”

  “What is art if not something to do with beauty?” I was about to open the door and jump out of the car.

  “What a sentimental idea for one so strong and practical as yourself!”

  She began to laugh and I could feel her poise returning. I said, “In some cases in your class, there’s a real soul-tussle going on! The students are trying to tear themselves away from what they have incarnated, as beauty in their own eyes. They try to please you, but honestly, not just to please; to see what you see.”

  And to annoy her, I said (having perceived before how much she despised the mediocre male students), “Now Parker is most conscientious, and he has vigor.”

  She jarred the brakes, but came to herself, and sent the car speeding along as before. It seemed a slight smile twisted her mouth. She answered me presently in a soft voice, “Letty, I have been ill for years, a nervous illness; some days, like today, I suffer. With you, the first, was I able to trust myself—the first time you came to the class. And I thought with little Jacky. You have seen me in quite a bad moment, but you have calmed me down.” She went on hastily, “And now tell me about the flat in Jane Street and your Susannah, and about your Robespierre and all the Hollywood plans “

  We slid easily into the narrow opening of Arnhem, past the tall weatherboard dwelling which stood there as a decoy. The rich, always fearing local risings and those movie riots with spades and scythes, often have these decoy houses, with tenants in them to protect their wood-hidden mansions. Now, however, in full winter, glittering with all its panes, on the snowy slope, Arnhem could be seen for some hundred yards along the road. It was the true Christmas house. Its noble proportions, beauty and gaiety, promised all joy. We drew up to the small Norman door. Adrian Headlong said, “Hello, here’s Baby-face again.”

  The guests made much of me. I almost had a love affair with a drunken young bachelor of extreme elegance, who looked like an old family portrait; a blond, sweet libertine, who called me cinquecento and told me the most improper jokes I ever heard.

  It was the best Christmas Day of my life, and not only did Lucy Headlong treat me as a guest of honor (which I was at a loss to explain), but Adrian appeared to take a great fancy to me. By the next morning they had all vanished. Adrian was obliged to go to another city for a Christmas party which his wife refused to attend; and once more we were left alone in the house. Although I no longer felt uneasy at receiving so much loving friendship from the eccentric woman, and, in fact, was thinking of asking her to introduce me to her friends—for the Tweed and Silk Shop—the curse of the place got the better of me; and I was flying back to town in Lucy Headlong’s car before the third night came.

  No sooner had I reached home, than as before, and almost as I had hoped, the same cruel fever shook my body. I was alone. The empty room, now my only true home, was bitterly cold and I asked myself in misery if anyone in this world cared for me. Others were loving, marrying, dancing, drinking, with hordes of friends, and if I was in this solitude, it was because I had been hunted by a foolish dread from a palace in the woods, lovelier than I would ever see again. I had made up my mind not to return to it. I believed Lucy Headlong was a mad woman, and my impression was that, in a diseased moment, she had been going to strangle me. She had come in the night, strangely bundled, though in silk sleeping clothes, her hair in two plaits of mixed gray, and leaned over me. She would never know how ashy and cadaverous she looked in the night. When I cried out, she moved gently away, down the staircase. There I lay in a sweat until I heard her move in bed, and then had hurried through to the guest rooms empty below, where I stayed the whole night.

  The winter
pressed round me. I was unable to go and sit in company in merrymaking New York as I was then, so I stayed in the room without food or fire the whole night. I tore my arms and legs in the unendurable spasms of desire, and wondered, in a superstitious moment, what there was at Arnhem—it was like a sacred mount, a haunted grove. I thought of the things in legend, the shirt burning like fire, the potions, the brews, the love-draughts, and some words came into my mind rather tardily—cantharides, a poison. The Headlong woman thought me mediocre, vulgar, without fantasy; and had she chosen this method to show me hellfire and heaven-glint? Did she know what I was suffering at this moment; and did she too, suffer it? But why? But at this moment an unspeakable idea came to me, which helped me through the hours and days I still must suffer; for I thought, as Grandma Fox would say, “Without money there is no honey.” Once more I had fancied I was admired for my wit and girlhood’s pride, when it was really a lawless, unnameable, shameful possession of me she had wanted. I promised myself, at least, after this sordid episode, to look every gift horse in the mouth. But I did not. Betrayed again, but no wiser— Poor Letty-Marmalade! I hope this will be my epitaph—just a schlemihl, not a heel.

  35

  The next day I went to my mother’s for something to eat, and I took along Aleck, who was disconsolate, during a reconciliation between Susannah and Brock, upstairs. Aleck made a creditable show. He was blond, naïve, and impressionable, and I wondered if he were not the man destined to me, anyhow.

  At my mother’s I found Jacky, Andrea, Mother, my cousin Edwige Lantar with her fiancé Ernest, anxious, and always on his toes, the born husband. Jacky had brought a very presentable man, Bill van Week, a chestnut blond, about thirty, dressed in English sporting clothes, with a British mustache; tall, with a small shapely head. We just looked at each other across the room and it was like the Bishop of Exeter, only that we made the sign of sex at each other; it was invisible, but sure. This instantaneous recognition of someone you’ve never seen before is very thrilling. There was also there Simon Gondych, a distant relative of the Foxes and the family offering to the Hall of Fame: a Nobel Prizeman. Gondych was now about fifty-nine. His thick, frizzled hair was clean, bright brown; his merry hazel eyes were clear and large. Perhaps his face was a little too red, his chin a little heavy; there he was, bright as a spark from the fire, dancing attendance on Edwige, a child not yet seventeen.