Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  Why am I answering your letter like this, Letty? Am I trying to sell myself to you or another? But then, where is independence? The commodity is sold, acquired. And this is a salesman’s world. Things seen, seen things done, done; all acquired; independence lost. Yes, try to hold off. Necessity to write. Life is not an independence. Try to go back, by writing. Try to triumph. That is my mood. Do you like it, Letty? I don’t care. I should be back around the end of the month and I’ll see you; telephone you, we’ll go somewhere together. Yes, I’ll say, for god’s sake, let us talk but not about independence.

  BOBBY T.

  I was thrilled by this letter which showed such tenderness, for Bobby, and looked forward to his arrival back in town with as much longing, love, and hope as a child. It seemed to me that this man who was so reticent, so repressed and suffocated by his parents, and yet who could pour out his feelings to me this way, was coming closer to me than any boy I had known till then. He arrived in town suddenly, telephoned the same evening. I made a rendezvous at a favorite bar of ours, and met him there full of excitement. He looked well, was well dressed, and as I approached him through the crowded alleys of the smoke-filled bar I thought to myself that he was one of the handsomest men I had ever seen—his only weakness was that he was too popular. We kissed passionately, he seemed as glad to see me as I was to see him; and in the first few words, I could see he had missed me; he did not ask what I had been doing, which was just as well, but plunged into an account of his life with his parents—he could not object, he sympathized with them, he realized he was all in all to them; yet what a bore for him: his mother did not realize that he was a man, especially that he had any moral, mental, or sexual life. We had several drinks and came very close to each other: we both admitted that the pretense we had made (and gallantly made) of holding the platonic pose was plus plat que tonique (more flat than tonic) and that the attempt at being disinterested friends didn’t work; but he proceeded to tell me again that the future was for him a closed book and no attempts should be made by us to read it; we must just read his life page by page. I accepted this, since, somehow, the thought of not being in some way concerned with him, or hearing from him (which was to be my punishment if I turned sibyl and tried to look into his future), or seeing him, filled me with so much gloom and even despair that I could not face it and I quite honestly confessed as much to him. “Let’s face the present as well as we can,” I said, then, and I refused to cringe or worry too much, getting a little older perhaps. At that moment, while putting on a brave front, I felt sad that the whole episode was not transferred some four, five, or six years later, so that he felt six years older. As things stood then, he was an obsession of mine and yet, too young for me; I understood perfectly what mood of youth and even ignorance prompted that kind of letter—the one about “independence”—he shied off it and yet he needed it; he was too young to look at marriage with anything but fear: that is the trouble with these mother-jailed boys. He was subject to so many fetishisms—of family, of youthful ideals, of the idea of youth itself and as a character—I knew he was a Frédéric Moreau—and when does the Education Sentimentale end for a Frédéric Moreau? And yet it is a charming type of man; a dangerous one for me, for this sweet, moody self-involvement aroused that warning signal in me—the sympathetic, pitying mother feeling; I felt myself yielding and yet felt that he was sensitive and needed protection. How well I knew the signs! And with all that, this hesitating and naïve youth made me feel most alive, vibrant, anything I wanted to feel, I sparkled darkly; and I had the same effect on him. This was no silly affair, I felt, like those of the past year, and no puzzlement and flirting with a Lovelace, as the affair with Luke was; it was something decisive, which, however, masked itself (for the sake of our youth) under the figure of indecision. And, true to my pattern, I too whirled around, unable quite to make up my mind about him. But how real this was compared with the plotting and comparing of notes at Amy’s. I could not bear it; I made up my mind at that moment, in that bar, to move at once. And, of course, the boy was behind it.

  It was so patent to me that Bobby was in love with me—though he wouldn’t admit it, and in fact went out of his way elaborately to disclaim it. But I was afraid that this refusal to admit his love might eventually lead him completely out of touch with me, and that he might thoughtlessly fall first to a Lorna and then to any number of mother-substitutes. I thought it all over as we sat face to face, laughing with each other, and I asked myself whether I was willing to wait the few years—depending on his family’s decisions about him and the vacillations of his own mind, about his profession—the few years he would need to bring him to better ways of thinking. For what he now proposed to me was just what the others proposed, to live with him on a day-to-day basis; here in my bed today and gone away tomorrow with scarcely an “I’ll be seeing you”; and I of course with no claim whatever upon him. We walked about a bit and I went home, the question still unanswered; but I had such a feeling of revulsion when I entered the flat where the girls were—Lorna lying back on the couch in her favorite reflective mood, her long, fine silken legs swinging, asking for the fiftieth time how the Attaché could possibly like to do what he did like to do—that was to drink one of the strangest fluids on earth—when I saw this scene, I felt so much disgust at this sexless, dull, littered world of wishing, pettifogging girls that I gave them notice at once and I put it in terms they could understand, “I am going to live with Bobby; he wants us to have a place to ourselves.”

  The girls made no objection, perhaps had felt the overcrowding that I felt too; they were even very pleased that I was making a settled connection, they thought it very suitable; and Lorna promised to help me look, the next day. I told Mother nothing of all this, for every new move of mine seemed to her an inexplicable wickedness, a brainless escapade.

  I took a small flat up three flights of stairs in an old house in Chelsea, only on account of the cheap rent; the house was seedy and the staircarpet filthy, and the place full of rats and other vermin, the flooring half gone, and the ceiling not painted but patched. Yet it was opposite a college garden, full of sweet air in summer and not so far from the shops. Moreover, it is a home district, with children thick in the streets, a clear view toward the docks, very often sea-skies, and an unworldliness, a suburban air. I liked it very much and felt as if in a cleaner world. Lorna, who always believed in the new, made an offer to come there and stay with me, saying she would not be in the way and would absent herself whenever Bobby came. She was a good housewife, would look after the cleaning and house-keeping for me, and pay her share—but this I firmly turned down. I was glad to be alone again, and realize the strain put on my temper by the past few months of bivouacking with my own sex. I took the flat at once, making few comments about the appearance of it, made arrangements to move in what furniture I had stored, and asked for a telephone. This done, I leaned over the crumbling window sill, breathed in the dusty air, and looked friendly upon the round-limbed, dirty children in the street. I liked children and now wished to have some of my own, partly to have my own share of woman’s life and partly for the parade. A young girl, newly married and expecting her baby, is simply the center of life to everyone that knows her. I was keenly jealous of the young married women in their dragging, dragged waistbands and heavy bodies. “Look, my coming child, my baby”; this is the best of possessions for a young woman.

  My things came in, I worked nights, and over the weekend got the place straight, allowed Lorna to hang some curtains for me, and then put away my sackcloth and ashes, my young girl’s weeds in the attic closet, and took out my Penelope’s spider web, refusing to give myself the time to brood over anything or doubt. Of course, the first time he visited me, it was all over, we became lovers, officially; and (whether it was the season, the day, or the man) I realized that he was the man I really wanted. He was very constant to me for some time, which surprised me; I had not thought he had it in him; and then he left me alone for a week without even
a telephone call. I was depressed, of course, but followed a new plan I had thought out, during these days—for I knew I was playing a dangerous game with this man that I wanted to marry. I telephoned Luke Adams, told him I was alone, and asked him to come to see me. I felt weary at the idea of taking up this old unhappy affair, but it was no longer dangerous; and the whole thing was an antidote to Bobby’s not unnatural unkindness. I thought, this is my line, this is the only form of solace I know; I’d rather contemplate my navel than think of suicide, and I know well enough that Bobby will visit me again when it suits him. But I had to wait some evenings for Luke to visit me; I waited in the lamplight. Hardly anyone yet knew my telephone number, and I had time to think over every aspect of my present life. It was not that I felt I had gone astray; it was just that seeing married people passing below me in the street, thinking of Aunt Phyllis, Aunt Amabel, Aunt Dora, hearing the couples come home from work and light the stoves and rattle the iceboxes, I sometimes wondered at the infinite distance between the state of not being married—and whatever the gradation of not being married, it made no difference—and the state of being married. How did people bridge the gap? It seemed to happen to others—most others; never to me; and I thought it very peculiar. I couldn’t figure it out; perhaps I was too young, anyway; but it savored to me of magic, and I felt very miserable that in this modern world something so primary, this first of all things to a woman, smacked so strongly of the tribal priest, the smoky cult, the tom-tom, the blood sacrifice, the hidden mystery. It didn’t seem fair. We should have abolished all that with enlightenment.

  One night, unexpectedly, as was his custom, Luke Adams came to me. I saw him first, stooping lazily along, up the street and almost suffocated with joy, a kind of terror, and a kind of indignation; but, feeling as I did, I threw myself very hungrily into the business of the moment, and enjoyed the pleasure with him more than before. Perhaps it was Bobby, and I had matured a little.

  It was hard for me to look back, even two hours afterwards, and think that it had taken place, and it is hard for me now to remember it; but this victory of each over each filled us with bliss. Leaving me, he became moral, “Now, work hard, Letty; you’re all alone, don’t go to pieces; young girls—you know—all alone—Jesus—this life—this Village life—”

  And smiling in his dark, demoniac face, sweetly, mildly, he shrugged on his clothes. I said, “Luke, I know that omnis homo post coitum castus est, but why must you be such a fraud?”

  He laughed and promised to come back to see me some time. At first I did not mind, and for some days afterwards when I walked in the streets, I floated on a cloud; I did not look at anyone else; I almost forgot Bobby. In the office not only was I an angel of good humor, but accomplished three times the work of anyone else. After three or four days, however, I was surprised not to receive their telephone calls and gradually sank into depression and became agitated.

  It happened that I went out once or twice in the following week to studio parties, and fat-chewing political groups where I exhibited a foul bad temper, and hardly recognized myself; I really seemed to have Luke’s spirit in me, I said what I thought he would say when tired or bored. I would come out into the streets, into the new June night, still floating with bud scales, once more bitterly unhappy, my anger raging in me like a fire. Is not his seed like a fire? All about him, his word, his smile, his hypocrisy, his darkness, was like a fire; and I burned because I could not tell people, I have Luke. I came home once in the morning and saw two street lovers getting together on the steps of a church; the little cigarette glows jigged in the dark and described, in arcs, their weavings and embraces. Another time, a man groaned in an areaway. I did not care. I could have passed murderers, not only men with the blue devils. I was possessed with this man. One night, about two, I walked over to the slum he lived in and, taking a hand mirror out of my purse, threw it into the window of their room on the second floor. The window was open; they were in bed inside; I heard it tinkle on the floor. There were voices. I looked up. He came to the window and looked down. He saw a woman But what woman? He had so many women. He only knew it was one of his women because of the smashed mirror from a lady’s handbag, and so did she, of course. I went back home and cried in fresh agony, thinking of the scene, the conjugal bed, the open window on the summer night, the jag of glass flying through the air, smashing on the floor, the delicate tinkle, and him leaping from bed. If only it could have planted itself in her eye, her cheek, her breast! But it just sang its little note like a mosquito and lay there on the floor of their room.

  I recognized that Luke was poison to me, and tried to forget him by going out with other boys from college days and others met at parties. These weakling boys, looking for an easy girl, who thought they had so much of me, had nothing, and I did not see them again, very often, when I had once had them for the night. I forgot them, I forget their names. It would seem to me that I had forgotten Luke for a few days, a week, even more; and then it would all come back. I wrote to him to ask him to come to me. He would turn up, in his desultory, regretful way, with his cracker-barrel philosophy; and so it went on for nearly the whole of that year. I struggled fiercely, perhaps stupidly, to make him break with his wife whom I now hated; but he only spoke of her motherhood. This was the bitterest thing of all for me, “What about my motherhood?”

  “Letty, dear, you are so young—you’ll marry.” He caressed me vaguely, smiled affectionately. He was not only born for love, to trap women, make them love him and make them faithful even when he betrayed them, but he had studied his art, and when making love was obedient to my whims, delicious as a boy. He was slight, formed like a Hawaiian adolescent, hairless, a bluish-bronze, smooth and muscular in all his parts and always with the feral, simple grace of a native swimmer, and a face that seemed ages old, though boyish. His straight black hair and the dark eye in yellowish eyeball seemed darker, stranger, when he was naked. He was a poor dancer, but made graceful gestures, and when he made these motions, the childish uncouthness was also charming.

  I did not know what to do. He was too old for me, but I would have done anything to get him; and I had the feeling that he could have been bought, if I had had a little more money. He would have gone with me—not to marry, certainly, but perhaps for life, depending on the money, if I had money. I had not the money, and I tried to console myself with others.

  I fell very low. My friends were getting married, and I could not understand why I did not, for some of them, without question, were duller and plainer than me. At this time I went out a few times with a handsome, stupid boy called Bingham. I had met him at the Tweed and Silk Shop, where he went shopping with a wealthy aunt. I had been to the opera with him a few times, standing up in the top gallery. I had had a few love passages with Bingham, who was, to look at, almost our American ideal, a blond stripling, combination of collar-ad and halfback, a little etiolated, perhaps, in the atmosphere of college and elegant aunts; I now decided to get married to him. I thought, Grandfather Morgan was no great shakes, no doubt, as a youth, but Cissie not-yet Morgan looked ahead. I have never yet had the vision to see a good husband in a college boy, or fat aunt’s effete hanger-on, but I will do so this time. If he isn’t good material, he’s as good as another, and his relatives are rich. He seemed madly in love with me, called me every name under the sun, pretty, beautiful, charming, fit to be a princess, his ideal and the rest of it (though, no doubt, under special conditions), until I not only looked upon him as someone I could manage, but began to have the old romantic dreams about him. I truly saw once more the dancing firelight by the Christmas tree, the charming young mother in a soft dress, the charming but already grave young father, the one, or two children, beautiful, blond, photogenic. When he said, “We could live together, forever,” I thought, He means it; and though he is of a weak, yielding nature, he only needs me to turn into a reasonably good businessman. I went out with him several times with the single idea of having him commit himself to this idea of marriage,
a happy life together; and when it seemed to me that he could be gentled into it, and only held back because of the fear all young men have of marriage, I made an appointment with him in the Jumble Shop in the Village, and there invited my father and mother and Grandmother Morgan. They were already installed, as I had directed, before we got there, and we all sat down together, as it were, accidentally. After the first courtesies and the drinks, Solander said, “Well, young man, I hear that you want to marry my daughter.” Bingham was of the nature I had supposed, for he answered, after hesitation, “We haven’t put it in such concrete terms; what do you say, Letty?”

  I said, “As for me, I would like to be a housewife for a year or more; or forever. I’m afraid, under my modern veneer, I’m a cave-woman.”

  There was a pause, and then my mother said, “Letty said something about your getting married right away; surely you are both too young to take up such responsibilities.”

  Bingham said, “But there’s no talk of that. If we are married, I’m sure we would both work. The truth is that, at present, Letty is the only one of us that really works. Of course, she has no intentions— even if we were thinking of it—of quitting work.”

  Grandmother Morgan said absently, rolling her eyes round the café, “When you get married, but good and tight, legally, I’ll give you a suit of bedroom furniture, Letty.”

  “Bingham can get a job at any time in such-and-such,” I said, referring to a theatrical agency, “through his family. We could set up housekeeping very cheaply. And my idea isn’t to work. It’s to settle down and become a real wife. I haven’t learned that yet, and it’s something I’d like to learn.”