“It may simply become a necessity,” I murmured.
“Yes, a credo too simple. Overshadowed—impotent—when we know what we must do to ourselves and—and the threat to our homes, our lives, and I admit—our part in the straightening out of things. But who tangled them?”
“The crooks and the lethargic.”
“The last generation,” he said, leaning his head on his hand as he plucked up a collop with his fork; “I wish we need have nothing to do with each other: the last generation and us. We all wish that.”
“Well, it’s up to us; I’m taking a hand in my own life.”
“You won’t get anywhere unless you conform to them; where have you got? You’re trying to get through the jungle alone, when there’s a highroad being laid down by tractors and masses of men, right beside you—but only by men in uniforms. What’s the answer? There isn’t any? You see, Letty, you’re a girl, you just want to get married and that settles things for you, doesn’t it?”
“I guess so—more or less.”
“Yes,” he sighed; “and you’re healthy too; it’s like having only one eye, or trying to look through glass eyes. Besides, it’s the fate of women to lose their identity, enter the herd as Mrs. X or Y, isn’t it? Do you mind that?”
“No.”
“Yes, yes; but we too! We’ll be numbered, called up, registered, branded like cattle, entrained and shipped into slavery more or less long—years for some, eternity for others. Think of it! No life of our own.”
“Look—but—well, isn’t there such a thing as mass-feeling, Bobby? I mean, I thought men liked to be with other men; I thought that was a kind of bracing experience; and then you’ll see other countries perhaps—well, other sorts of people anyway, and rub shoulders with all kinds of men; you know, I sometimes feel it’s a bit mean the way we live, seeing absolutely no one but each other; we just live in a narrow lane, it’s as bad as a bookworm burrowing through a library: we’re men-worms, we just burrow through men, blind to all but our own set. I know I want to marry and that’ll tie me up a bit tighter than I am tied now, but if they offered me a job overseas, in Buenos Aires or Kamchatka, I wouldn’t mind “
He said gloomily, picking up the lumps of sugar and throwing them back into the sugar bowl, “That’s what you think; that’s because you expect a man to emerge from behind a rock or tree and take you out for a good time: that’s a girl’s view of things.”
“But there are John Reeds and, well, Pancho Villas—and things—” I said lamely—“and Lenins, and practically everyone seems to have had a heroic grandpa in the Civil War; well, you see what I mean—”
He put his hand to his side, and coughed painfully, “It’s this damn spot; I’m afraid I’m not of the stuff that heroes are made of; I don’t believe there is anyone but an ordinary punk under anyone’s skin.”
“Well, don’t think I’m flag-wagging,” I said, “or that I’m not a realist.”
He coughed desperately, drank his glass of wine to the bottom, and beckoned the waiter. He complained about the wine and ordered some more for himself. “Pasteur said wine is a disinfectant for the stomach and bowels, and I suppose if I help one part of my anatomy, I help the other parts.” He was in a terrible state and filled me with pity. When we walked out, it was nearly dark, and I put my arm through his, and soothed him with friendly words; he probably wouldn’t be accepted, he was studying for medicine; I’d heard that would help. But he said they were shoveling the lads in, you couldn’t get exemptions like last time. His attention was only distracted from his discourse from time to time by things written on fences and walls. His eye would dart aside, and every block or two he would point out something interesting. “Say, haven’t you got over toilet-literature?” I asked him. He said seriously that it was one of the oldest forms of literature in the world and you could still find personal remarks about men and women two thousand years dead in the excavations of Greece and Italy. “It makes you think,” he muttered, “when you think of dying yourself; it makes you want to scribble on all the walls, Jake Jones, so that maybe something, just a wall-scrawl, will last after you. Maybe two thousand years. Who knows?”
“Not in New York,” said I.
“That’s what those smart guys thought in Herculaneum, too,” he said; “it’s just, you see, Letty, that I’ve joined the ages.”
“Well, wait till they call you, Bobby, for God’s sake.”
“And naturally, a man like me has no future; I was right not to try to read it. I had a forewarning.”
He coughed and put his hand to his chest, then he spat in the gutter. I could not help but feel that he was overacting it a bit, but did not dare to say anything. He pointed out an arrow, with a little design in chalk on the brick wall we were passing. Farther down he read a series of chalk-declarations, saying, “Emmeline stinks,” “Izzie stinks,” “Bobby stinks.” “Prophetic,” he said, shaking his head.
I seemed to cheer him up, though, for he called for me every night for a week or so, and even after that we went out a lot, eating, drinking, and rolling home in the early morning hours, which did not seem very good for his health, but he had turned reckless. I began to weary of his “spot” story, for instead of brushing it aside for the gruesomely unmentionable topic it was, he improved it every day and reveled in physical details and prophecies of corruption in which he outdid the joyous, black masters of groaning in English literature. For all I know, he looked them up; I never thought of that then, but became tired of a long tirade against everything which never mentioned me; I should have been glad even of a good stout denunciation; but he treated my character as negligible. I was born a woman, hence a cipher. I was convinced that he was a dependent who especially needed a woman of his own, but I could say nothing to convince him of that. I asked him why we shouldn’t get married, in view of our close friendship and physical liking for each other. He would only ask hollowly if such a thing would be fair—to me, to him? He could not take on responsibilities. I said honestly, “Bobby, I admit I always meant to take up housekeeping when I married; for I am tired with knocking round the world; I’ve pounded the sidewalks for jobs and hurt my shins against every obstacle, and heard all the naughty words and seen the seamy side of quite a lot of men; but if it’s the responsibility that’s worrying you, then I’ll forget it. I’ll keep on working. What the hell—we’re supposed to anyhow now; it’s not good for the birth rate, but at least a woman has some sort of thing to live for, she’s got an address she’s proud of, not some hole in a wall. I like to be decent; and in the table of decency, a husband comes before anything else. So, if it’s that alone that’s bothering you, I’ll work for you while you’re making your way, going through college, or sitting in a sanitarium, or going to the wars, or whatever it is.”
He groaned and said, in the state he was in, it was all out of the question. This was how it stood between us until Christmas. I was really fond of the guy, and would have done what I said, although the prospect of it made me tired; I said to myself, “I’m rather selfish and perhaps what I need is just this, a rather charming selfish grouch, who needs a nurse and mother; perhaps this will reform me; it will take my mind off myself and keep me away from other men—and that’s a first-rate consideration; and perhaps I’ll really be happy at last.” I was very sweet to Bobby and he showed his gratitude in his peculiar way; I hoped he was transferring this inward, sick love from his mother to me. Whatever influence he had he used, and he received a deferment; and he was at last admitted for limited service. From then on my dear coward made use of every device for keeping himself not only safe from the danger he saw too clearly, but even for keeping himself near New York. Yet months passed when I did not see him and he began to go out of my mind. When he did write, he emphasized the mental old age which was coming over him. When he came to town, for a while the old flame and pleasure would be renewed. But I was also looking elsewhere.
With the passing of conscription, marriages came amongst us thick and fast; the tow
n was gay and the girls hopeful. Sad dalliances ended happily overnight, and not only these college girls and unhappy flirts, but middle-aged women started to have babies, thick as buds in May. The men did not want to work at professions, believing they would all be in the army soon and would be getting good pay in the more romantic and professional services; and that intriguing and planning began which we are all so familiar with now: the learning of special trades, the using of influence, the taking of courses, all with a view toward avoiding the greatest danger, receiving higher pay and better grades. No woman can possibly see anything wrong in this; we do not start wars and we don’t like killing. However patriotic we may be, we can’t inwardly understand the madness of a nation which does its best to kill off all its healthy males.
Jacky received several proposals, but could not bring herself to cut herself off forever from Simon, who was charming to her, spoke tenderly about her, but appeared to be merely annotating it before he filed it for reference, at a yet greater age. The thought of having children tempted her; we, of course, kept urging her to marry, while she kept saying, “But he was so kind to me; no one else ever understood me; and no one understands him as I do.”
She wept at all references to age; she gave money to old men in streets and stood, stony, when she had turned to look after some bent old fellow trudging through the streets between dinner and bedtime, all alone, muttering to himself. It dismayed people. They could not say what upset them so. They said, “He’ll never be like that.” She would not answer this.
The war came and during the first days after Pearl Harbor, people went about with a holy expression, both dumb and secretly shocked and yet radiant. Some young men were terrified; the girls began enrolling themselves for war service; the oppression of the last few months fell away. The nation was glad to be at war, and yet in a trance. Marriages fell off; when people heard that babies conceived after Pearl Harbor would not count for deferments, marriages fell off even more. As for myself, I had not been lucky enough to find the right man at the right time, in the panic, and so had to look round in the same old hit-and-miss way. The town was bright at this time, however; and the middle classes and those beginning to see money in the war were in a spendthrift, hopeful mood. A young girl like me could have a very good time, and there were still a lot of men in their twenties to take as escorts. The town was jammed with wealthy refugees from Europe, and war profiteers on the upgrade. Among the refugees we met some recent wives who had once been mistresses and café loafers in our time in Paris and London—friends of Aunt Phyllis, Mother, Pauline, and ourselves. Aunt Phyllis avoided all these, having forgotten this world and having by now deeply embedded herself in a fat, rich, middle-class, card-playing set, where nothing was spoken of but the prices of furs and apartments and the vices of servants. With some malice, though, I talked quite freely about them when I went to see Aunt Phyllis, mentioning the names she had known them under and the ones they now wore. Most of them had done so much better than she had, poor smug suburban wife. As for me, I made the rounds. Their husbands, who had been their lovers, had nearly all kept in touch with Solander, who was a merry good-natured man, with a wonderful talent for business, though not for moneymaking. The new couples, most of whom were past middle age, remembered me as a handsome, shrewd, impudent Paris child, and so enquired after me. When they saw me, they were delighted at my appearance and clever conversation; and while the husbands went about their new businesses, the wives set about inviting me out and running up lists of eligible bachelors for me; I was offered, tentatively, a colonel from North Africa, a rich young Jew from Oxford, a young psychoanalyst. I spoiled these chances, if chances they were, by my impatience and by having too many other irons in the fire. I could not play the role of interesting young girl for more than an hour or two; my hard knowledge of the business and social world, my sense of the comic, and that fierce, almost brutal energy that took hold of me when I saw a new man, and turned me into termagant and seducer, soon ripped the veil from the eyes of these women who were, after all, no such sentimental fools as they pretended to be. These women of the world made me quite sick when they played at the maternal, and toward me; “Oh, sisters, drop those masks,” I wanted to say. Were they not like me, I like them? I was no more a young eligible girl than they, yet I had as much chance of success as they, if I went about, as they had, with my eyes open. I do not want to give the wrong impression about these women; some of them had paid their own expenses during their long liaisons, many were rich women; one I know for certain had bought a house, an automobile, and furniture for the wealthy man whose mistress she had been and whose wife she now was. Not only that, but she now worked day and night with him, in his business, like any proper French wife, and in all good faith did not understand libertinage or impurity in speech.
These women, who were mostly of good bourgeois families, had excellent manners and expected European manners from me. This was the turn of the screw; I had to forget them. Also, I had other fish to fry. But if I dropped them, it was not out of hypocrisy or necessity, as it was with Aunt Phyllis and Mother. Mother was ashamed before them, that was her trouble. She was a deserted wife and poor, and they were now wives moving in good café society, living in uptown hotels, wearing expensive clothes, with much forward-looking toward war speculation. All had active and quite tender husbands. Months passed for me, in this way, months of excitement and fever, alternating with dull, fretful months in which I worried about my future.
The example of Jacky, my father’s good advice, and the general restlessness put me to work again. I looked at my love letters, my unfinished novels, poems, and plays, and began to think: Time’s fever is all in their bloods, and I think I won’t beat it by neglect. Time does not respond either to affection or neglect; and I can’t close my eyes to the fact that I, Letty Fox, am now just on twenty-one years old.
In a fit of petulance, I resigned from my publishing office, but through Erskine, I got a job in the editorial office of a weekly political magazine, with smart circulation and flip vocabulary. I was forced to it, too, by my debts, which were outstanding from the previous Christmas. I learned the journalist’s technique, had practice in writing, learned cable writing, read the provincial press for clippings, and wrote stories, as well, about certain things that I was supposed to know, such as modern personalities in art and music, on the radical side, economics (because I had once been such a hard-working Communist), and things of that sort, that I had honestly come by. I was on the editorial side of the fence, and was now uptown, near Rockefeller Center. As I had joined this crowd of cynical radicals—they thought of themselves as radicals, though they were completely corrupt, worked like mad for the success of the paper, and cared not a jot about the poor—I was obliged at last to give up my true political views, at least officially.
For a long time now I had been working with people with the same underlying political philosophy, the same esthetic creed, the same over-all interests in life, the same love-lives, almost; the same advanced, sophisticated views on things like psychoanalysis, divorce, writing, new trends in the movies. I had been with people who took in the same magazines, went to the same coffee shops and dances, and I had been (for all my doubts and troubles) very happy. I had felt a great compatibility with all these people, of whom some were Susannah Ford, Bill van Week, and even most of my other men; and this compatibility of views, and pure, deep-spirited New Yorkism had made me friendly even with men who had loved and left me. The sting was there, sometimes; sometimes it hurt very much; but, also, I could live with them and not feel shipwrecked, just because society or this social group had not abandoned me. I had no need of great personal passions. I had no need of being exceptional. What I had in me that gave me the most joy were two things: the capacity for an enormous output of work, and the ability to enjoy myself regardless of expense, regardless of others; a healthy trait, if a bit barbaric.
There were no delicates in this new job; all were New York born. I had no secrets. In my m
oments of suffering I told most of my troubles to everyone, men, women, and bosses. They were like me, sympathized. People are generally kind; some take advantage, but even they can be kind. The person who gives himself away as I do is more likely to receive kindness than the timid soul hiding his wounds—so said I; and it seemed to work out for me. To keep up my mental life, I began to keep a diary for myself, full of quite silly political speculation, and I found, if I didn’t want to repeat editorials, that I had a few and very feeble economic concepts, nothing to enable me to solve the problems that every turn of patriotic feeling and every necessitated change of political line brought up. One of the questions was pretty common those days: “In the face of extreme restriction, what was the incentive for capital to go on capitalizing?”
That is the way I put it to myself. We mulled these things over, but I found no one knew any more than I did, for the answer wasn’t, “They do it out of patriotism.” It’s a fairly safe estimate that no one does anything from noble motives, until you strike the exceptions like Jacky and Gondych; and Gondych, query. I am not, we are not, as they. Society itself must change; you cannot depend on individual nobility. That is what I think. We have no measures of morality and motive—someone said something like that. Alas! I copy; but the sentiment is true. And this is why, with such heartiness, I have always sunk myself in my group. There are great movements of the group to which no one can be superior. I am not wiser than my fellow; and especially, I doubt my wisdom to be smarter than the massed forward pressure of the vanguard. I would not dare to stand alone. I might be mad and not know it.
Now, inspirited by this lively work on this snappy magazine weekly, I shook myself out of a long sleep. I had been in a cocoon, it seemed to me. For instance, while loafing, I worried about my misadventures with men; but, at work, I took them in my stride. I had spent a year, no, eighteen months in a protective envelope of routine and vice and occasional moods, without producing anything. I was rewarded for this outburst of work and new adult stand by meeting, it seemed to me, the ideal man for me. One can’t help these feelings of rewards and punishments.
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