She heaved a sigh, “Thank goodness one thing is not a lie. Simon is pleased enough, but a bit dubious about sanitary arrangements, hot water, cooking, cleanliness, and I don’t know what else.” She laughed nervously, but happily. “Well, it’s all arranged; I can’t do much, can I?”
“No. It’s madly harebrained, and what can Simon be thinking of?” Jacky said solemnly, “You know what I say to myself, Letty? I’m telling you so that you won’t tell on me. Don’t ruin it for me! Perhaps this is my only love; you don’t know. When I’m alone, I throw myself on my bed or in a chair, or wherever I am, and I feel mad with bliss, just bliss. And I say, I have been touched by the mighty wing—as it swooped nearer earth than usual—”
I said nothing, sitting there, smoking one cigarette after another, and myself almost in a trance. After a silence, Jacky said, “The wing of a great thing—death or love, or Lucifer; that is just the feeling I have. Can you imagine the wing, an immense, dark wing, as broad as the sky almost, dusk-colored, and soft but strong with a surge of power such as—” she got up—“such as you and I never felt—” she walked up and down—“such as—” she stopped in front of me with tears in her eyes and her hands wrenched together—“such as anyone, with any heart or spirit, would die just to feel? For what is the good of living otherwise? There’s nothing else in our lives—this gin-milling and lechery and selling-out. We think every fraud and crime is life, reality. I don’t want to sound despairing—no one could feel that—the flight of the wing and despair. You know what I say to myself when I go out at night and I wish I was with Simon, I say, ‘Now I’m going out with the Angel of Death,’ and when I sit in a movie by myself, the seat next to me, which is for the Angel of Death, is always empty.”
“You crazy kid,” I said. “You’re imagining that, at any rate.”
“Oh, I assure you, it’s quite true. And I feel safe; absolutely safe. And I think, if I am friends with the Angel of Death, he’ll not lay hands on Simon.”
“Look, Jacky,” I said, spilling everything all over the floor, and looking cheerfully at the litter on my floor, “it wouldn’t do you any harm to have a drink. Why don’t you come out with me? I think you’re alone too much. I realize Mother isn’t quite the type you can rave to, and Andrea—of course—but why don’t we go out and sit in a café? I don’t want to corrupt youth or anything, but I think you ought to try first to get another boy friend.”
Jacky burst out laughing, “Oh, that kind of advice everyone gives me. I have boy friends. One wanted to marry me. He wrote Mother a letter. He asked her in the same letter if the twenty-five hundred dollars would be paid at once and if Mother’s piano would go along with me.” She went on, laughing reasonably, “Simon isn’t a next-best.”
“You mean you really love him.”
She gave a shout of laughter, “Oh, that fiery bean, that mind of flame; you do catch on quickly”; she cried out, and in the next hilarious few moments, she insulted me and I could see her flinging me off, my dull influence, paying me out for my anecdotes about Gondych, like a big terrier, throwing the pond water off his hide. We went out and I came to the conclusion, within myself, that I must tell my father the whole thing next morning. He would know what to do. He would go and see Gondych. I thought the whole thing a disgrace. Gondych was no doubt pleased to have a hideaway in a quiet place while he worked out all his plans for his sabbatical year. He was not certain of his future, whether it was to be here, or in England, or on the Continent. They were to live as friends and lovers and her youth was a guarantee to him; they would separate when the summer was over.
“But if you love him, why don’t you try to marry him?”
“I will try,” she said, laughing sideways at me. “Imagine how simply perfect—oh, I’d say, ‘Life, you don’t owe me anything.’ ”
I laughed, “Oh, yes, we always say that; but at the next toothache we’re not so sure; and the next man who turns us down, we’re asking Life for the nipple all over again.”
Jacky left me; but on the way home I met Bill van Week coming from my place, where he had been to get me. We went out, drank too much, wrangled, told each other too many home-truths; and as he was stronger and nastier than I, this went on all the way home. When I got home, I cried and then telephoned Bill to ask him to console me. He told me he meant every word. I was this, that, and the other.
The next morning I had too much to think about to even call Jacky to mind. I was then at low ebb and I was on the slide. Would I really end badly, just a slut, a rolling stone?
The unusual pair thus went off to Cape Cod without my having put in my oar; and, after all, I was not sorry. My fate is that when I interfere, all the troubles of both parties spill out over onto me. But by the next week, thinking they were well established and she ruined, so to speak, I went to my father and told him the story. By that time I felt very guilty indeed, and called myself the most selfish woman alive. Jacky wrote, telling of the northern lights, the cold water, and the eddying darkness of their dunes, and her extravagant nature seemed here to be developing out of bounds; “I wonder if I am not fated to found a love-cult or a religion; those are the ideas that now possess me; it is not only that I love such a man as this, but the climate here—”
Soon my father had set off after her, to rescue her from her infatuation under the twanging and wavering night curtains of the northern lights.
41
JACKY was indisposed for the old family life when she returned. The family was scandalized; and she, being very unhappy, had no stomach for their sermons and questions. She came to live with me. We both had to suffer reproaches for living away from our mother.
Jacky went back to college, where she slaved away to forget her disappointment over Gondych, in work. They had been very happy; so much so that Gondych had done no work, spending each fine day in her company, bathing, riding, walking, and visiting the more disreputable of the neighbors. Gondych declared that no work, especially not bio-chemistry, compared with the happiness of a summer spent with a lovely young creature; and Jacky believed in this idyll.
Solander visited them, saw nothing he could do in the strange situation, and left them on their sand dunes. At the end of the summer, however, Gondych became much irritated with the letters he was receiving, not because he felt guilty, but because he had a hot temper. He had work to do; he could not waste his hot but diminishing suns at a schoolgirl’s side. She found him sitting hunched, in black moods; he talked wildly; he hurried up and down the sandy roads talking to himself; he flung his fist at the starry sky, one summer evening; he hated the worn flooring, the squeaking doors, the sand, wind, rains, birds, ticks, and gorse. He hated the place eventually, and dragged Jacky back to town. He was kind and tender, but said, “Can we live together forever, my dear? And I am an old man. I cannot be your husband; I cannot give you a child; I am more like a father. Think; it’s all right now, but in a few years, five, six, how many, I will be more than old. Perhaps dead! Don’t let people see you living with me. You go back to your young girl’s life and we will always be friends, lovers, always love each other. Isn’t that better?”
Jacky was in such dense misery that she spoke of it little, and appeared tranquil, cold. If asked about Gondych, she answered almost severely. But she began to work in this unusual way.
Conscription fell like an iron rain on our young men; they ran to cover, they hid in cellars and workshops. The hardier at once began pouring into special courses and mushroom workshops all over the greater city; the idle, squatters upon their parents’ property, college boys, bore the glamour of grease and overalls. The men had something male to do and sprouted eaglets’ wings; the girls at first had an inspired look—the country had something to do. But a good many, also, saw what it meant in flesh and blood. Bobby, for instance, rang me up in a frenzied way and begged me to meet him at once in a bar, to leave work in the middle of the afternoon and come to discuss his future with him. It was nearly four; I said I had a headache. I told the girls it
was a man who was going to be called and an old friend. He was sitting at the bar with a Scotch-and-soda in front of him; he said irritably, “I didn’t know when you’d be here; I’ve been waiting half an hour.”
“I got away from work as soon as I could.”
I had wondered, coming along, if he was going to propose marriage, for it looked like the quick way out to a lot of men I knew. He kept looking at himself in the mirror, his face dark and lengthy, and occasionally coughed hollowly.
“You have caught a cold, Bobby.”
He hunched over his drink and waved to me to drink mine. After he had ordered another he said, “I want your advice; you know me pretty well. This damn war has got me worried; they’ll rake me in.”
Well, I thought, no choice is offered us, we’re just pushed into everything and so life is all dreary aimlessness to the Bobbies. Why should they like the war? Of course, Bobby is not exactly a hero, but his parents worked hard nineteen or twenty years to make him like this. He isn’t the ideal husband, but he’s a nice enough boy. It’s no use crying over spilt milk, I said, to myself; I’ll seize the occasion by the forelock, if I can; all I need is a footing—from then on, I’ll know what to do. Thus, I was very happy, comradely, gentle with Bobby and knowing him so well, I thought we would soon be man and wife. A married woman is doing her duty to the state and is happy, glad not to have to worry about the moral and financial problems of each new day. I admit it would be better if the state did it for us, but there is no state but just a man; that is our system. I thought my troubles were at an end, in short. Bobby was perspiring, sitting at the bar, tearing his hair and looking tragically into the bar mirror when I got there. He wrung my hand and pulled me onto the stool beside him.
“It’s come,” he said, looking at me wildly, slantwise under his low, neat, clever forehead, his eyes darting to the mirror and to me. “What’ll we do now? They’ve got us.”
“Who do you mean?”
“The tribal gods, the things of wood and stone—” he said, fiercely. “Let’s get a table! I’ve got to talk this thing out.”
“Maybe they’ll reject you.”
“They’ll take me, I’ve got one year medical training; they’ll take me to mop up blood and pus in their hospitals.”
“You could get a worse berth than that!”
He took no notice of me, drinking his Scotch-and-soda in gulps and snapping his fingers, and sourly ordering more.
“We’re in it; not you—you’re a girl!—but even you girls, a whole swag of you’ll live to be old maids.” He stared at the floor, drenched with bile; “another lost generation! They’re all lost nowadays. What do we have them for?”
“Have generations you mean?” I laughed in a sultry style for I was feeling the day rich in possibilities.
“Yes; you wouldn’t have kids just to get them blown to hell; no woman would.”
“The way things are, I’d say, if I can’t have anything else, I’ll have kids; at least that is something I got out of living.”
“Yes, a woman’s view,” he said darkly; “the old biological urge; that’s living on the instinctive level.”
“If you’re not instinctive why this cringing on the part of all you guys; if you all refused to march, they couldn’t march you. But you’re afraid of criticism.”
“Afraid of dungeons dark and deep and the firing squad, you mean,” he said; “you don’t know what they can do to us. I’ve thought about war a lot. I guess it was fear of blood made me a medical student.”
“Hooey!” I cried, peevishly; “you went in because your father and uncles can grease the slipways for you, when you leave drydock.” He hunched over the table, put his hand to his chest and coughed, without answering me or raising his eyes.
“Drink went the wrong way?”
“It’s my lungs,” he murmured presently, “I’m afraid it’s a goner.” “Which one?”
The liquor had worked in him, and now, as usual, inspiration visited him.
“A little perforation,” said he, mournfully, “gives one more penetration. I would have made a good medico, but now I don’t know whether I’ll be able to finish the course, even if those mass-murderers don’t take me. The passion of the sick, the fever of the man who’s spitting up his guts. Do you know what that is? No, you’re too healthy. To us, so much health seems a kind of deformity, as if you were born all in one piece.”
“Is it serious, Bobby?” I asked, with a note of alarm, feeling ashamed that I had secretly thought him weak, trifling, spoiled.
“Passion sweated out into bloody handkerchiefs and sputum bottles,” he said, taking fresh energy from his glass, “man spewing death, the moribund preternaturally like superman, fire in his blood and his entrails torn by his own breath knifing through— symbolizing, solemnizing our fated and ominous mission—man to make man perish from the earth. Death everywhere. They won’t let me die of my sickness. No, by the awful hose spewing fire. We make a show: the vaudeville act between the risen curtains has gripped us all. War! ‘Come in, you yellow dogs, and put on a uniform.’ The bands play. The audience of mothers and sweethearts claps with frenzy. ‘Come on, sucker, show those lousy jerks, those subhuman apes across the Rhine.’ Thus, the common invectives, slinking in and out of bars, watching for the detective, ‘Have you registered? Where’s your selective service card? What’s your name? What’s your nation? What’s your destination?’ To the last, we’ll answer, ‘Hell,’ no matter where they give us a boat ticket to.”
“But, Bobby, maybe they won’t send you across; it’s just preparedness. And besides, if you’ve got tuberculosis, why anyone— they wouldn’t even take you for hospital orderly.”
He tapped his chest and said hollowly, “That’s the trouble; I know what I feel, but there’s just the shadow there, on the plate; it’s a spot there—or two cicatrices—just a spot they would hardly call a vacuole—they’re taking men who oughtn’t to be in at all. Let’s eat something; I may as well eat in a restaurant, while I can; I’ll probably be in a sanitarium soon.”
“What? You will,” I cried.
“Yes,” he continued, reading the menu and his mouth full of bread. “My family’ll do what it can to get me into a rest home, I suppose; that ought to convince them. And if not—Ravioli, Scallopini with mushrooms and two glasses of red ink—Well, if not, I’ll be in the craphouse too. The laundries of the U.S. army must be one bad smell; think of the mountains of tainted drawers when the news comes through daily; for it isn’t rag-chewing any more, or the dear old rag, but another sort of rag the boys are interested in. People dead, killed in action, kids you went to class with and swapped smut and shortcuts with, men missing, what does that mean? Concentration camps, the dirthole, some chap my age and sort lying on the dirt with festering wounds and yelling for water and dying of starvation; men with skulls for heads and long useless bones that can’t walk because there’s nothing to hold the bones together, heaps, men with all the skin charred off them, like steaks, in oil baths—that means us, me, Letty—!” and his voice had a faint shriek—“and I must fight. God! When will the strength come to us to fight, to maim, to kill—for no reason, for no guy believes you’ve got to do that for your mother and sister; no, just for butchery, cruel, heartless savagery!”
“Gee, it’s awful,” I murmured, not knowing where to look, and feeling very miserable. “But it’s awful for everyone, I mean; and they’re burning up the civilian populations too now; they say this is probably the last war with armies.”
“It’s not fear so much,” he went on, emptying his glass of water. “I’m compassionate for others because I’ve compassion for myself too. The spirit of the Nazi and the goon is, Be tough yourself and slug the other guy. All good doctors suffer themselves. It makes you think. Bloodshed is not moral.”
Letty Fox Page 60