Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  We went at the solution of the Spanish jigsaw piecemeal, but a mental fog had already begun to settle; and most people, at least in our crowd, were beginning to argue in circles. I did myself. I really didn’t know anything about politics, I just had good instincts; but most people didn’t even have that. If they were bright and egotistical, they drifted off into cranky Bohemia, and some, of course, joined the Government or the police; if they were goodhearted and felt a duty to society, they thought they ought to adhere unquestioningly to some party policy or another in the spirit of, “Who are we to question—here be issues greater than our small quibbles.”

  But I had seen at least a bit of European political life and knew you have to keep on fighting for liberty, even in a revolution when you’re on the right side. This is more than most people can bear, I suppose, especially if they belong to our soft set. New Yorkers are goodhearted, but frightfully soft, and they’re afraid to come out in the open with an ideal, and they’d rather die than be Daniel in the lions’ den. It doesn’t show a sense of humor. Fortunately, a rough-tempered girl like I am doesn’t mind looking ridiculous at times, but only when I can get away with it. That is my weakness, too. I’m well aware that after the blow, I’m only too anxious to belong, again.

  Well, I knew that the triumph of reaction in Spain would encourage all the fascists in England, on the Continent, and elsewhere. Who didn’t know that? The future looked sinister. And what would become of Clays and his like? As for Clays, I trusted that his Whitehall connections would pull him out of the fiery furnace. He had hinted that he might get through and back home; but I was not prepared for the letter which I received in April, from Clays. He told me that I was a wonderful girl, the best he had ever met, except for another; and he went on at this rate for a while, not too long a while. Then, with the Englishman’s irresponsible love of brevity, he told me he had simply married another woman. It was not an accident, he really thought her a splendid woman who would suit him, and he hoped that I would not get too hard a blow, but would remember that in love you’ve got to play for high stakes and put all your eggs in one basket; but that I was too young and naïve a girl to have done this really, as he had, for a real young girl has, after all, not really invested in love. He concluded, “You may suffer, and I feel ashamed when I think of it. But what is a little suffering which may be got over, to such an experience! Would you have been without it? Love is a great experience anyhow; people are eternally grateful (you may not believe this at the moment) to those who gave them love. You and I have something in common. For the rest, my dear little Hebe, you are too beautiful to lack a man long; and it would never have done for us to marry and repent!”

  I will not enlarge upon my feelings. I sent Clays a stinging reply. I thought of sending it to his wife, but I thought of the unprincipled cruelty and self-sufficiency of the British society woman and did not so expose myself. The woman was The Honourable Fyshe.

  I was now in a solitude, more or less deserved, no doubt; but I suffered as much as any farm girl kissed under the blossom and deserted in the fall of the leaf. I made up my mind to marry as quickly as possible.

  37

  More bad luck struck me. As soon as she heard my International Brigadier had wed another, Susannah piled on me and accused me of meddling with her men. Things were very cool, and then very hot, until I resolved to get out of Jane Street.

  At one of Grandma’s pinochle parties, I met Mrs. Betty Looper, who was still Grandma’s crony. They had lived through thirty years of quarrels together. Mrs. Looper sent me to see a girl who worked in a model agency. Hundreds of girls, making their way, drifted in and out, and most were trying to pair up for a room, one of those rooms with pillows and lampshades I mentioned before. This girl was about twenty-five and lived at home, being the daughter of the owner, but she introduced me to Amy and Lorna, two girls a bit older than I was. They had a well-furnished railroad flat in Sixtysixth Street. It had two entrances and four rooms, three of which could be used as bedrooms. The rent was high, although it was in a street of stables, because it was near the Park. The girls suited me, and as they offered to give me the front room with a separate entrance, I took it. It was properly heated and had a real kitchen.

  I went at once and broke with Susannah. To my surprise, she wanted me to take Leon, Luke Adams’s ward; she pretended that she had only taken the boy because I was in the house, to help me out. Of course, I was obliged to write Luke Adams about this and visited his home, where I met his wife, Elsie. Elsie had dropped the subject of Leon as soon as the unlucky boy had left her house and seemed put out to find that he was still in town. Luke, too, was put out. He had thought that Susannah had a heart as big as a whale, and now he found out that she was scatty, unreliable. For the time being, Leon would have to go back and sleep behind the watch-repairer’s shop. Naturally, everyone thought that Leon was Luke’s unacknowledged son, and made no move to help him; they just laughed. In the end Luke encouraged someone to start a children’s colony only, I believe, for the sake of placing Leon there.

  This Leon affair caused some heartburning in the Ford and Adams households. I felt obliged to tell Luke that Leon had caught some very bad habits from Blaise, Susannah’s son, indolent and spoiled; and had heard corrupt conversation in Susannah’s house. Easygoing Luke only smiled at me, and said the poor youngster had to knock about the world; he’d find himself in tighter places than that.

  But my heart burned at all that went on in the Ford house. I don’t mind a woman living with two husbands if she wants to and they want to. What angered me was the way Susannah played one against the other, pretending that she was going to take back, and reject, month after month; and, all the time, going to her psychoanalyst, to transfer to him. It was simple polygamy, but not the honest kind. When I left, I made some social criticism, not about her men, but about the way she tortured the children mentally and morally. She told me the pot shouldn’t call the kettle black; I said, I’ve never done anything to children. She considered herself an admirable mother simply because she discussed Blaise’s schools, intelligence quotient, sexual habits, and alleged neuroses in public. She was a reasonably rich woman and considered herself ideal from every point of view because she gave some of her money to radical causes, spent a lot on Blaise, and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

  The night before I left, I went up to say good-bye; and as things turned that way, I told her some of the more flagrant absurdities in her behavior. I said, “Blaise is about the worst-educated brat I’ve ever met; you’re just a flabby bourgeois, Sue, and you’re only radical because that’s a kind of luxury too; everything is gilt-edged. Your brat can’t hear dirty stories in the gutter; you have to pay a lot of money for him to hear dirty stories at the psychoanalyst’s. You think you’re a radical because you pay an awful lot of money for your radicalism. It’s as plain as a pikestaff—”

  “Why can’t we part friends?” said Brock pathetically. “Poor Sue can’t see herself the way we can see her, no one can.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Susannah, flaring up, “I know what I’m doing. I want Blaise to have a full life with no repressions.”

  “You don’t get the point; you’ve got gold-leaf all over your rose-colored specs,” said I. “You’re just a sucker, Sue. They’ll let you go along with your head in space, thinking you’re a rebel and all that, till they’re ready to clamp down. Radicalism is the opium of the middle class. Meanwhile, they’re stealing your shirt.”

  She looked at me as if I were mad, “Who are stealing my shirt?”

  “Why,” I said, “you all kid yourselves your children are too sensitive to go to the public schools, even though every well-heeled man in this generation came from the public schools—and in those days they just had ordinary Irish and Jewish teachers who weren’t respected very highly; there wasn’t the to-do about education there is nowadays. But the products are all right. But your kids are too talented to go there. Private schools are just the means of enco
uraging the middle class to strip itself, don’t you see. If you were really rich, you’d be real old-fashioned freethinkers and radicals and a danger to the State; but you are all crazy with money troubles, because Blaise and the other tots can’t mix with hoi polloi, and so you can’t think straight. You have stings of conscience, so you have, as an ointment for that, high-priced radicalism. Just the same, you can’t train your kids to be radicals, not real ones, because they’ve got to pay you back some time and to make a living as nice bourgeois; they’ve got to enter the professional and government world, and for that you can’t be a nay-sayer; no, ma’am. There’s a very simple way of freeing little Blaise’s mind and talents, and that’s by saying every day, ‘Be free, think free, don’t kowtow to anything, Fuehrer or Dogma.’ But, you know yourself freedom’s just a howling wilderness to you. You don’t want freedom. Heaven’s Connecticut to you, and you just want a cozy little place there, in the end. You don’t want freedom; it might be uncomfortable. And you don’t want Blaise to be uncomfortable, or free; you want him to conform.”

  “You must be crazy,” said Susannah, staring at me in her hard, bright way. “What is eating you? I’ll bet anything you like that when you get married and get a kid you’ll do just the same as me.”

  “Does that disprove it? I can go loony too.”

  I lighted a cigarette and said impatiently: “I’m sick of fake radicalism and fake education. You’ve got no theory at all for one or the other.”

  “Well, what do you know about that,” she said, laughing, “so I have no theory in radicalism!”

  “You know the headlines of the day,” said I, smoking furiously, and through my cigarette.

  Susannah said, “But all the radicals send their children to those schools; it’s the best thing, they get all the newest ideas.”

  “It’s all empiricism and parent-flattery, there’s no theory,” said I. “But a system can’t exist without some thought behind it. The thought is just what I say, you’ve got to strip yourself of every cent you have, to immolate yourself before capitalism. It’s a frenzy they’ve got you into. You’re really adoring and worshiping capitalism. Because, if you were serious, wouldn’t you all be starting up free progressive schools for the poor, for the slum kids? But it’s only for your little doctors, artists, and teachers in embryo. So you’re not serious. You’re just trying to force the kids so they’ll bring in big money later on.”

  “Let’s have another drink,” said Aleck, with his sweet atony. He brought one over, but did not kiss me, because the eye of his mistress was on him.

  “Letty’s always boiling over.”

  “Why not?” said I. “If I’m crazy, I like to know it, at any rate.” “Well, why don’t you get out of the middle classes,” said Susannah, bitterly, “if they’re so bad.”

  “Go back to where I came from, do you mean? Listen, Sue, your Blaise when he grows up—will he be in an itsy-bitsy world with fifteen fancy bosses trying to bring out his individualism, or will he be in a world where he’s got to get a job in the Metropolitan Life, or Ford’s assembly-plant, or U.S. Steel, or something? The Blaise-world’s a fantasy-world. And to be sure he’ll go crazy, you send him to witch doctors too, who make him think there’s something divine in his innermost I. There’ll never be anything in his eye, but the kind of twinkle you know. And I’m damned if you’re not cultivating his sex, too, so that his sex acts will be super-duper and he’ll have a good time seducing all kinds of poor youngsters who work in Woolworth basements and innocents like Jacky and me who think that you ought to learn something about Aristotle and Pascal. You’re just training him to be a complete rotter. And he’s got there already.”

  We went at it hammer and tongs. Susannah would not have done defending her son’s genius. Of course, he was just an ordinary pup like a million others, who would end up as a bridge-playing knight of Pythias, or something.

  Well, this was my exit. I went away quite sick of them all and angry with myself. I was sick of the brainless corruption, and thought, “Business is a thousand times cleaner.”

  I was a ship at sea, without a port. I was no hulk nor ghostship, but a good freighter made to carry bread and Bibles about the world; I was a good, deep draft, built on dependable old-fashioned lines, no victory ship, no canal boat, and no ship of the line. But a freighter doesn’t particularly care for the heaving billow; a freighter has a destination; and as Grandma Fox would have said, also: “A worker, I say, a worker must work, or have money.” I couldn’t float around for very long. I was in a bad state of mind. I could analyze anything right under my nose, and was not in want of theory—but about my personal life, I had no theory. I often wondered who and what I was. If people ran me down, I half believed it; if they praised me, I believed it, more than half. It was easy for me to come under the influence of an amoral, ignorant, but brilliant and unflinching sex-careerist like my new friend Amy Bourne.

  Amy lived on a bit of income from Australia, which was her birthplace; and Lorna did odd jobs: she wrote society notes, or took photographs, or handled a gardening column, or worked in an advertising agency, or sang new songs in a record-ingle in a smart store, or took old men out dancing and necking, or sold chocolates, or designed wallpaper, or drew baby angels for stork events, or was hostess in Schraffts’, or did the night clubs with a wealthy male, or mistressed it a bit, just as she could. She was a hefty, handsome brunette, who could have played lady to a nicety, but she lost her men through clumsy promiscuities; and Amy was the only natural man-hunter I’ve ever met. I felt like a gawking schoolchild with her. She was a short, dark chip of a girl, with almost a boy’s figure; her face, the perfect, pointed oval. She was one of the few abstracted human beings alive. She regarded moralizing as a natural haltingtime for some (not for her) to catch up on imperfections. She was veritably keen and penetrating, with flawless manners, an excellent heart; she made a good companion for women and men. While in pursuit, your game was no concern of hers: she did not man-steal until she saw something suitable, delectable in your grasp. At times I was less delicate. I stole out of jealousy, ambition, sulkiness.

  This was the worst year of my life, perhaps, this and the one succeeding. I won’t go into the numerous temporary affairs, disappointments, things unworthy of me, one-night stands; the disillusions and shames that I went through. On my twentieth birthday I would be able to say: “En l’an vingtième de mon age quand toutes mes hontes j’ai bues,” with an apostrophe to François Villon, “Mon semblable, mon frère, quel escargot que tu fus!—Brother and kin! What a slowcoach you were!”

  It was the plague year for me, as if Clays had been all my luck. All the same, in the first few months when I was rooming with my pillow girls, Amy and Lorna, I had some sober entertainment. I was not free to go to the deuce, as I liked; I was obliged to take lessons from the indomitable Amy. I was thirsty for hints on the love affair and I did not despise any laboratory techniques of the Casanovas, male and female. I had suffered too much, composing messages, reproaches, declarations, speeches, most of which brought simply failure and insult, not to be glad to learn the standbys, which save the self-respect and soul of the chain-lover who might otherwise commit suicide. All the love speeches invented by sixteen-year-olds, however banal, are an effort of the heart; and the heart is wounded when they evoke laughter. Later on, with much more experience, one suffers in the same way, and one feels less rejected if the words one proffers as the bouquet of oneself are simply a formula, part of the classic drama. They have two uses—You comfort yourself by saying, “I didn’t really mean it”; and clear your conscience of crime by saying, “He must have known it was just a formula of politeness.”

  I listened eagerly to all the tales, trying to pick up the bestworn, most celebrated lines of whoremongers, seducers, Love-laces, Don Juans, for the words of this song are the same for both sexes, it’s a sexless game, indeed. Thus, “I love you, you are wonderful to me, I was so worried because you didn’t telephone me, I sat all day waiting for your
call, I couldn’t sleep last night thinking of you, all last week I was dreaming of you,” and the whole juke-box story, may be blighting sentences leading to suicides in the beginning of a career; but, after a few years, these are slugs passed about at will, and leading only to a pleasant feeling. Sometimes, of course, one hands these slugs to the wrong person; likewise, when one wishes to believe, one believes, alas, these well-worn stories, and again suffers. But this peculiar usage, common with the sex-careerist and criminal, is intended to save him from pain, not others.

  Amy had a unique idea of sex, beautiful as the finished workmanship of any born craftsman. She admitted everything— the troubles of youth, the difficulties of the world, the necessity of marriage, love of children and husband, woman’s traditional place in the scheme of things, philandering, passion, love-crime and lovesanctity. She was a kind of Prioress, and not only had her rule and loved to guide other women, but loved to adjudicate on each separate case. She trained us for the profession of love.

  I won’t discuss, at this moment, her other pupil, Lorna—a girl able to win scholarships, but abysmally stupid; a beautiful girl, awkward and backward; a girl with society manners who had not the penetration of an ox. Besides Lorna, Amy had me. She said I was just a finer Lorna, but educable. She took no notice of my foul temper; she was sharp and cruel, pointing out all my physical defects and laughing at my strategy. This baby Chesterfield tried to make me take lessons in dramatic art and in voice, said I must learn to ride again, play golf, and dance elegantly. I must gesture, thus and thus; I must not tickle my nose, scratch my head, take off my shoes; I must make the best of this line, subdue that line, and watch out for this other line. I must smile without mincing it, and learn all the proper tones of voice; know how to sound comradely, languishing, angry, passionate. Nothing must be left to chance, until chance was long past and it was a settled thing. Walk properly, relax properly, she said; and there is the whole of physical culture. She was a thin, wiry creature. Do not jig and stretch and put your arms akimbo, she said; this annoys a man very much, and don’t keep flirting your cigarette, spilling your ashes, jingling your ice, pulling out strands of hair, dancing on your toes. As to what walk to cultivate, she made us cultivate the one that suited us; Lorna was tall and hippy, I was the short, Spanish type, but without déhanchement. It is useless trying to cultivate the French slippy hip roll if you haven’t it; much better the panther-stride or the athletic chop-chop, if it is your type. She had us walking up and down the room, lifting our feet, dragging our feet, going brittle, going languid, passing through a door looking our hostess up and down, leaving a lingering glance behind us, leaving a jolly brisk thank-you behind us; we walked in a long dress and with the brisk flirt-flirt of a tailored suit.