Letty Fox

by Christina Stead

  Solander kept laughing agreeably, and as he had never been in this situation before, he said his lines in a very crude, funny way, “So you have nothing to keep my daughter on, Bingham—Bingham what? Letty told me your name, of course, but I forget.”

  Bingham now became gloomy and said, “We don’t have to get married; there’s no rush; we just mentioned it, vaguely—but we’re not in a position to.”

  I now lost my head, “Oh, Bingham, but I do want to get married. I’m tired of hanging around; I’m a normal woman.”

  He seemed puzzled, but he regarded Grandmother Morgan with speculative eyes.

  My mother said heavily, “It seems a most impractical idea.”

  “Yes, doesn’t it,” said Bingham, looking at her eagerly.

  My dear father at once said, and laughed, “Yes, but they’re youngsters; to them it’s the most practical thing going, Mattie.”

  Bingham looked at him, without hostility, “It isn’t for me. I don’t know where Letty got the idea I was so crazy about getting married. We ought to get ourselves settled, we’re young yet, and I ought to get myself a job, and I think Letty ought to go back to college.”

  I said, “Oh, Lord! I’m sick of kid-stuff. All the rest was just playtime, experiment. I’m ready to be a woman now. No more political whirlpools, no more slogans and shibboleths. I ask them for bread and they give me a banner. I want to take in Good Housekeeping and wear a smock in five months.”

  My father ordered some more drinks, frowning a little when I chose the most expensive drink on the list (but it was a habit with me and I felt that men at least owed me this). Grandmother Morgan was studying Bingham sharply, as if to find his weakest spot. Mathilde sighed, “I don’t think Bingham wants to get married; I think it’s all a misunderstanding, and I don’t think Letty should. She has no sense. I don’t want her to make a mistake—”

  My father looking across at her, Mother ceased. Bingham said, “Yes, it’s a misunderstanding—of some sort—”

  I said, “But I understand myself very well Bingham and I want to settle down. All we want is a start in life.”

  Father said, “I don’t want you to give up work, and I think you ought to learn something, Letty,” but he laughed good-naturedly. “However, I know what kids are—”

  Bingham had been frowning, and turned to me, saying in a different tone of voice, “Letty, did you know your folks were coming here?”

  My father at once said, “Oh, no, it was just an accident. We just filed in like this, family style, the dear old Jumble, it’s our hang-out in the Village, and it is yours, I suppose—who doesn’t? It isn’t like old Montparnasse where there are dozens of cafés and everyone has his pet; here there are practically no places to go—” and he kept on like this until the others had found their way to composure.

  Shortly after, my mother, much annoyed with me, as I could see, left with her mother, and Solander, after paying for the drinks, left by himself.

  Bingham said, “Well, it was a trap. Why did you do that?”

  I simpered away, saying,There is such a thing as an understanding and these are modern times, aren’t they; don’t tell me I have to sit round making tea-cozies until you go down on bended knee.

  Bingham showed some firmness, which let me see I had not been wrong about him. We had a few more drinks and then left on our separate ways. He realized at the end that it was a compliment to him, that I liked him well enough to do this for him.

  But the truth is, when I got home to my lonely pillow, to what was little more than a couple of hall bedrooms thrown together, and when I thought of the humiliation and what I had thrown away, family, the easy support of Grandmother Morgan and her clan, my mother’s kindness, and what I had been through with men, one and another, from Amos to Bingham, I wondered what prospects there could be for me in life. Could I live through the degradation? Wouldn’t it be better to commit suicide, than to put up with this a day longer?

  I went deeper. I asked myself, What is the matter with me? Am I corrupt, stupid, wanton, unlucky, somehow unattractive? Much more ordinary girls than I am are getting married, and I even know one kid who’s going to have a baby next month—and here am I, Letty Fox, without luck. I’m nineteen. I no longer feel fresh. What will happen to me? There must be some way out—but is there? I can’t pick up a man on the street and marry some poor workman and live all my life in Chelsea and go to the free clinic to have my babies. I’m not out of the slums, to be glad to wash floors for a wretched clerk or bartender or butcher’s assistant in order to have a position in the world; I’m not déclassée; I’m not mad with ambition or talent. I’m an ordinary girl, gay, hard-working, good-natured and pleasant. Men like me. Heads turn when I go into a restaurant. Men look after me, in fact, a bit too much, as if I were a planked steak. Then, what is it—what is it—why am I just as much a failure as a Bowery bum?

  This was the first night I ever thought seriously of suicide. Another thing that depressed me was the way the others went more or less smugly on their nondescript ways, my mother, Solander, Grandmother Morgan, now at her sixth or eighth beau; and what was I to them? What they to me? What a world and what a life! I had started out with the best intentions and did not wish to scheme. I wanted a clean, vigorous life. I then had the usual fantasies. I’ll be a nurse, sacrifice myself, organize something or other, become known as a woman superior to human follies; but what was the use? I was born to live with all the ardor of my blood and to mate and breed, and laugh at my grandchildren. These monastic notions were not for me.

  38

  I was discouraged and had no hope. Why work? I threw up my job at the Tweed and Silk, where I had quarreled with Mrs. Patrice and where I saw too much of Bingham, spent a few weeks scraping the bottom of my pocket and getting credit at the grocer’s (an easy thing for me), wearing slippers with holes and turned heels, as my habit was when I was down on my luck. Papa became anxious, fearing he would now have to set to work to support me again, so he prodded me until I got a job, this time on a journal working for racial equality. I always enjoyed a new job. It made me forget my troubles outside. There were times when I worked till two in the morning at the office, merely not to have to face my flat, where the wraiths of my follies were installed. I missed telephone calls, left letters unanswered. This was my cure.

  Meanwhile, I became furiously engrossed in my new job and not only started to write a novel called Intolerance, which began in a little town in New Jersey, where a crazed religious printer, a nasty young boy, and an impure old maid started trouble, but took up the question of Zion and Liberia, ideas I had not come across before.

  I met a young Jew named Salo, slender, slick-haired, elegant, an idealist; and a young Negro, in color like bronze, tall, smooth; and I got from them, as well as from torrents of reading, all I could about the Zionist and Liberian movements. The British supported Palestine, and Abraham Lincoln himself had thought that the Negroes should have a black state, preferably in Africa. This was what we had to go on. I was against both these ideas at the beginning, but the joy I felt in my regeneration gave me a false enthusiasm for them. I liked both these boys and created no little jealousy and race prejudice by my impartial friendship. Encouraged by Salo, I wrote a pro-Zionist short story of quite sickly sentiment; and nearly went to the length of becoming an explorer, colonizer or the like, when it came to Liberia. I decided that I had found my walk in life. I would become an expert upon things African.

  I started digging on Liberia, and unearthed tracts, broadsides, muck-raking, government puffs. I got up a theory which I wrote out and intended to print in a pamphlet. I suppose the theory was obvious as hell to most educated people. Briefly, it was this. Africa, more than any other unexplored continent or country, is in for a tremendous industrialization. The tse-tse fly will not stop capital from flowing there. Once capital discovers that not only is there immediate money to be made there, i.e., gold, which comes out of the mines daily, or palm oil which oozes out of every uncultivated
bit of land, but a tremendous and constant productivity, unimaginable raw materials (contrary to the remarks of several scholarly debunkers), the largest hydro-electric potential in the world (scarcely harnessed, save in spots), and a great labor potential, which has to be concentrated to be effective, but which, divorced from its surroundings, will have only work to fall back upon, there will be a rush for investment and development. If the world picture moves faster than we think, and things start humming in Europe, given a war with a short, snappy, undemocratic end, and reinvestment after it, all over the world, Africa will soon be industrialized. Whatever the picture in Europe, they’ll want colonies, dependencies, or (if socialist) friendly recipients of their goods. Then, in the latter case, it won’t be for the benefit of the few, but for the African people. The Soviet Union managed to make folk cultures flourish and at the same time industry was born, and grew a thousand-fold. After all, the Sahara desert is a small part of Africa, and even that is being bridged, if the leisurely French ever get that Trans-Saharan railroad finished.

  So, I was convinced that that continent would witness the next great development of imperialism (with the vague possibility that it would only be industrialization with socialism) and that a mighty struggle would result. The natural education for the people, breakup of the tribes, concentration into large settlements, etc., would follow, and more; so that there is in Africa a tribal disintegration by force, by chicane, by associations for profit or force between chieftains and so on.

  Not that I was absorbed by it, but I was reborn. Everyone forgot, in a moment, my troubles, and we all began to discuss, in the family, the African problem.

  I went to Harlem and to a couple of Leftist shows with this Negro boy, Jeff Mossop. It turned out that he didn’t believe in Liberia at all, but was a skeptic, a radical, and a poet; but he had a fine appearance, spoke musically and with singular dignity, and was an asset to the sheet; they felt that they had to have at least one Negro as an editor. Jeff, of course, became sentimentally fond of me, even more, quite attached to me; and as he had spent some time in the West Indies (which he disliked) and had easily picked up French—for he had about the finest ear I ever came across—we spoke quite a lot in this language. He knew enough to know that the well-educated Frenchman and Englishman of color speak a fine Parisian French and was anxious to practice as much as he could with me; this was, naturally, partly an excuse. Perhaps it was partly policy, for the dark-skinned French and English feel that they have a better social position in the U. S. A. than the native Negro. Jeff was extremely handsome, tall, with an oval face and large sparkling eyes, framed in curly hair and with a small, sparse, curly beard. He was not a native New Yorker, although a Northerner. It is hard for a stranger to know where he can dine and where not, if he is a Negro, and so I piloted him round town a little. I did not think about this one way or another, as I was brought up with absolutely no race prejudice (although Mark Twain says that every one of us has one, without knowing it—but what was mine?). But Jeff Mossop liked it in me, and being a true sentimental, took an ardent interest in me; pretty soon we were thee-ing and thou-ing in French. When he left for a trip to the South, in order to get some local knowledge on racial antagonism, and when he experienced for the first time the true bitterness and shame and fright of the people of his skin, I received a number of letters from him, of such a loving and devoted nature that I made up my mind to cut off relations with him, for I saw when he returned he would propose to me. He was single, very idealistic, and a poet, and I was a beautiful young woman; this was enough. He had some wonderful vision of the future where no hate would exist, only love between peoples and races; this was fine enough, but I live too much in the here and now; this is my great weakness. It happened that I received the first of his letters in the same mail with one of Bobby Thompson’s. I was longing to hear from my dear Bobby and yet the difference in tone impressed me; and for the first time, perhaps, I saw this selfish, weak, spoiled lad in his true light; and yet with insight into his nature came the desire to marry him. Of course, I opened the letter from my old sweetheart, Bobby, first, even though I knew quite well beforehand the type of disappointing, self-centered garrulity that would greet me. This is what Bobby had written the morning before, from the country house where he was summering with his adoring mamma. His tone had changed somewhat since we had gone together seriously; he now thought of me as being madly engrossed with him.

  DEAR LETTY,

  Subtlety is not one of my dominant characteristics; but nevertheless I can’t get myself to call you a no-good-bitch for not writing. There are so many variables, besides your natural arbitrariness, that reservation of condemnation, castigation, and plain complaint will wait until I definitely don’t hear from you for three, count them, months. Then, with the aid of a dictionary which I don’t have now, your hide will burn. (It’ll be Farmer and Henley’s good book of bad slang.)

  If you only realized how secluded we are, how vacuous our existence is, how lonely. It is away from everything, your pity alone would prompt you to at least let me know how lousy your place is, where you saw Luke Adams and your other suckers last, how the others are doing and especially, what’s noo along the wires and especially “line” but not plainly, abstrusely. Haven’t seen a decent newspaper, pamphlet, or spoken to a knowing soul. If you know any good people living near here, please let me live again; being confined here for the summer with a bunch of morons certainly does not result in any moral or mental stimulation. The town library is all the way over the other side of the place and almost a physical impossibility for me to get to from here. If you want to be especially kind, you could send me a couple of the latest books, doesn’t your papa get them for review? Considered intellectual that is; I promise to read them. Don’t know what struck me; rotten climate. In 1934 the War Dept. did away with the use of saltpeter in the food; however, maybe they use it round here, subversively, my manhood is gone, dormant, or wasting. I wake up, I am alive, but what’s most interesting in me (probably) is dead: just is represented by his absence. All day lying, reading, sunning, swimming, presence of girls in sunsuits—and what then? The father of all living is dead. God have mercy on my soul if this is actually so because of my physical state. But they say the opposite; this was one thing I counted on, if I turned into a real lunger. I do not choose to live and yet be—pardon all this garbage, but am tired, have had no exercise worth a centimeter of the party Casanova you said I would turn into. Some garbage! not to say worse. What a life.

  AS EVER, B.

  P.S. I wrote another communication which I tore up and bloody nearly well tore up this one: the fact is I do nothing but crossword puzzles (hate them) or tell dirty stories (don’t like them either—both too much effort) or write to you what I think of you, and tear that up. Tell me what I can do? Don’t. I know it only too well.—B.

  It took me a long time to really absorb this stricken note from my poor friend and it was midday before I read, without real sympathy, the sweet letter from my living bronze, Jeff Mossop.

  (ABOUT TO LEAVE NEW YORK.)

  LETTY,

  I make a gift to thee, back again, of an image of thine own; “my life is too vivid when my eyes are shut, my heart beats too much at night.” Why did it have to be, Letty, that always since I can remember my life is nothing, Letty, but an immense desire stretched toward a very little thing, a very delicate, weightless thing called Happiness? All the stages of my life, Letty—since this childhood, too bled by tears, too regulated by severity, too fevered with silence, my infancy without infancy, my infancy which flowed away to the rhythm of dull days which were crushed by the inexorable severity of a man, my father, whom I cannot hate and for which I therefore hate myself: from then, up to the man I am now, nourished on repressions, this repression, Letty, that is nothing, in short, but a great ungratified desire.

  But why do I hesitate to speak of myself? Perhaps the day will come—close, it may be, Letty, close, dost thou desire it as I do?—where we will make
an exchange of our lives. Then wilt thou not give me, in thy voice with its tranquil inflections, this little girl again which thou wast, the girl with the long imp’s curls, where floated an extravagant forbidden sequin butterfly, gift of Mme. Pauline, and who sang in the country around dear, far Paris, Meunier, tu dors! and Auprès de ma blonde! And I will give thee a boy drunk with the country air and the leaves and grasses of his birthplace, who runs after the bearded goat and the glittering insects, in the loud insobriety of a free day, a day of unchecked childhood, on my family’s farms. But now that the memory of minutes too brief come down upon me from the obscured stars of Harlem, now that the night swells with all that which was “the hope of a tomorrow of dream,” why must it be that there sings in my ear now the vibrant note of burning sorrows to come? From the closet of the night, orchestrates itself the symphony of beautiful dreams poignarded—it’s an obscure theme, a de profundis of the living who sing with unrecorded voices, who are the voice of all the desires that one thought, perhaps, soon to be attained, married, possessed, and loved by the method of the heart. They drag along now in the silence and in the night, their funeral procession of mourning crape. Good night, Letty. I will tell thee what follows in my sleep, which the thought of thee will fill with a great population of fair Lettys. Good night, Letty.

  JEFF.

  I did not even show this letter around, for I did not know the temper of my family when it came to a man of this kind. But I felt the pleasure of being loved again and resolving to organize my life better from now on, I made up my mind to write a novel during the evenings when I was alone.

  For my novel (on Intolerance) I had begun at the beginning, and made some notes for myself.

  I must know different social sets. I am confined to one only, i.e., understand emotions only on faces of my class.

  Must study anthropology, ethnology.