This went on for some time, during which I, of course, was too absorbed with Cornelis de Groot to pay any attention to anyone at home; and then Mother came to me again to say there was really something the matter with Andrea; she was again out at night, and made terrible scenes if threatened, saying she would run away and live in a flat with five or six girls she knew who had good times with men. I called for Andrea at work and saw Anita waiting there. There was something very strange about Anita, at any rate. When I brought my sister home, I observed in Mother’s presence that Anita looked very peculiar for a young girl and Andrea at once said, Yes, she had had to leave work on account of a glandular disturbance. She would not see a doctor on account of the expense, but was going to get a job in the loft where Andrea worked; and when she had the money would look after her health. Anita had quarreled with her family, she said. Mother invited the girl to the house and had meanwhile arranged for a doctor to come; but it leaked out too early and not only did Anita make good her escape, but Andrea ran out and stayed away from home the entire afternoon and night, only coming home during the next afternoon. She had missed the day at work (where we had enquired) but was prepared to return, if we would stop persecuting her adored Anita. I went to see my father, who seemed to think we were a hen-coop making the feathers fly about nothing. He said, “You must not harass a child at this age; you must remember her sensitivity, and treat her with delicacy.”
Cornelis de Groot was away two months during which I was able to visit my family, and it then became apparent to me, certainly, and to any woman at all, I should have thought, that our now constant visitor Anita was going to have a baby. I spoke to Andrea and told her I myself had been in a jam like that, and I told Mother the same, “You did not know, but it is true; let me handle this,” and I muffled her laments so.
Andrea listened to my story with great interest and seemed to warm up to me, but she smiled at my idea and said Anita had had nothing to do with a man; she had no real boy friend. She had kissed a boy once; and could you get a baby from kissing a man? I felt I must be mistaken. However, I said, “But, Andrea, you know she does look funny, and you can’t blame people for thinking such-and-such, and you ought to get her to go to a doctor just for our sake.”
“She went to the doctor at work,” said Andrea, “and he said it’s just a combination of her age and the hard work, with some glandular disturbances like you said, but that she mustn’t take anything, it wouldn’t be safe.”
Anita, too, when questioned, was so innocent and composed that the evidence of our senses was as nothing, and we were all defeated. She could not have a baby; her stories about her relations with men were childish. It was clear that she had not had to do with one: her corruption was only superficial.
Meanwhile, Cornelis returned, and when we met, on the first evening after my work, I, full of emotion and relief, and he, full of his trip away and the prospects for his advancement, and of kind words, though not of love (that was not his style), we went out together, as if to spend the night together, for that had been the way of it. But after dinner Cornelis refused to go to the theater, although I had bought the tickets, and said he had something to say to me, and I, although angered, because I had to pay for the tickets myself, stayed with him, in expectation. He then told me that I had broken our contract myself by becoming fond of him; as for himself, he had come to look on me as a comrade, friend, so we must never spend nights together again. He owed life and love already, he said, to the woman in London and his wife, and perhaps another woman whose affections he had engaged; he was an honorable man, and realized he was playing with fire. He would not lead me on and then let me down; better to stop now. I burst out crying. We were in a big café in the Village. There were dozens of people and I detested scenes, but I felt my heart was broken.
“Oh, how can you leave me, Cornelis? You mustn’t leave me; I love you, Cornelis. It is too late for me.”
“You’ll get over it, dear, and you see I am justified; your attitude shows that.”
This went on for about an hour, when he said abruptly, “I am going; come with me, if you like. I am very, very glad I broke tonight, before we went any farther.”
As he was leaving, I got up and followed him, weeping. He went out, quite soldierly in bearing, and with a frightening composure. Even I, bowed, crying, well aware of their looks but unable to stop myself, had a flash of perception, “Is he very used to this scene? What a dangerous man! And I am in deep with him. I have nothing to live for now.”
As he was getting his coat I broke out in a loud voice again, like a little girl, “Oh, Cornelis, you should have written this to me while you were away, and prepared me.”
He said, “I am not so cruel. I tell my bad news in person.”
I said, “Oh, Cornelis, this other woman; you met her while you were away just now. I’m not a woman. I’m only a girl; they’re women, they can bear it better”; and by that I meant all of them, his wife included. His bearing was perfectly easy. He liked the attention he was attracting, and I thought, What a fool I am, putting the limelight on him, this way; this is how he gets his women; but I was too unwomaned to stop crying.
We went along the streets this way, he with his arm round my waist, wiping my tears away, but perfectly firm. He took me to my gate and there left me. I flung myself on his chest and kissed him, kissed him, and he held me, but remained chaste and cool as ever.
At the office the next day I could see they had heard part of my misfortune, and Charmian told me that that morning Cornelis had asked one of them for the address of another girl, “but, out of the office.” I was grateful for this; I supposed he did it to spare me. To my surprise he waited for me after work in the evening as if nothing had happened, and when I made to pass by him, he said, “Letty, aren’t we friends? It was only agreed that we should stop making love, but not that we should not be friends; why did you stick your chin out, Letty? We talked about it before; everything was fair and square. Why, I thought you were on the up and up.”
“Well, so I am, Cornelis,” I said, turning my face away and taking his arm; “let’s go somewhere and have a drink; I’m just tired out; I’m worried about my little sister more than you.”
During the next few months this strange man, this man dangerous to me, kept me company most days in the week, and was, as before, a generous friend; but his spending was a little less lavish and he told me, as man to man, about his needs for the women abroad. I could hardly swallow it, but did not want him to know that he had my number, so I grinned and bore it. Other times I roared at him like a fish-wife—I trust not so much to his advantage as the first time. He would never visit my parents’ house, but he opined that Anita was going to have a baby; she was a sly one and had got Andrea to stand by her. One day when we walked by her loft, and he saw the girls by accident, he said, “Well, apparently they can argue away anything; that kid’s long gone.”
One summer night, after twelve o’clock, when I was not sleeping, with the heat and mosquitoes, I had a telephone call from my mother who asked me to come over and help her with Andrea and Anita, “terrible trouble,” said Mother. I found a taxi and got there in about half an hour. Andrea and Anita had gone to bed in the room used by them, before my mother’s arrival. Andrea was asleep when she had come in, but Anita was lying there with bright eyes and pale face, which twitched occasionally. As Mother looked at her, she groaned. I now looked in. She was very bloated, and she put a hand on her belly, twisting toward the wall. Andrea said something in her sleep. “Wake her,” I said to Mother; “this’ll be a terrible shock to her,” I continued. “Anita! You’re having a baby, aren’t you?”
“No, no. I ate some lobster and it was bad for me; just get me an aspirin.”
Mother looked at me. I said, “Let’s get the doctor at once—it’s obvious—”
Mother said, “But she said, she says—she denies absolutely—”
I rang up a doctor I knew in the Village, a good-natured middle-aged man, an
d told him, “There’s a young friend of ours here having a baby; she’s a young girl and the pains are quite close together; please come at once.”
“It must be,” said my mother, suddenly collecting herself. “Of course, it’s a baby. How can you—?”
“Anita’s mother or sister must come; I can’t take the responsibility,” said my mother, and went to the telephone. My sister had got up and was standing, sleepy and confused, in the middle of the floor, saying, “Is Anita sick?”
“Andrea, you’re just a baby,” said I. “Anita’s having a baby too. We don’t mind; it’s wonderful—but you’ll have to help, and don’t be frightened.”
“A baby,” said my sister, looking pleased. She went to speak to Anita. She was already suffering, terribly. As soon as she could speak, however, she said, “It’s not a baby; it’s just something I ate.”
I helped her next time she suffered, then she looked up at me with darkened eyes, and said, “I don’t understand, but I’m feeling so bad, Letty.”
“Every woman does—but it’ll pass; it’ll be bad again soon, but when you have the baby—”
“No, no; I’m not having a baby; it isn’t a—”
She suffered. Andrea, in doubt, brought a chair to the bed and began to cry when next she heard the girl cry.
Fortunately for all, the labor was not long, but it was not till about four in the morning that the girl, in pain and confusion, suddenly cried out, “Mummy, Mummy! I’m frightened. I’m going to have a baby.”
She was delivered about eight o’clock in the morning. I did not go to work that day, but sat with her; and all that day I did not once think of my own petty troubles, but thought of Andrea and her friend and would not let anyone bother them. As she had denied the baby to the end, I expected her to hate it; just the contrary. Anita was delighted with it, and looked at it in ecstasy. Andrea, ravished and with an expression both childish and maternal, looked beautiful, and I saw she was the handsomest of the three of us, or, perhaps, I thought with a pang, that is just innocence and love of maternity; and a hot, sad feeling went through me: I wish I were a mother too, I thought. Cornelis and all the men I had played round with seemed far away. This was the reality, and this was, truth to tell, what I, in my blind ignorant way, was fighting for, trying to make shift with one and all of them. But what chance has a smart, forward girl to be innocent or maternal? That’s a dream.
Presently, I left Andrea to Mother and went back home. I felt converted, saved. It was hard to go back to the office next day. Presently, in my slipshod way, I had told them all, and was back in my old intrigues. Such is life! But what a life! I hated it.
Anita refused to tell the name of the father, though I fancy Andrea knew it by now. Andrea only admitted, after we had brought up all the science, medicine, probabilities and the like, that there had been a father. But she pretended it was no one they knew—as if she really thought that possible. She had the extraordinary naïveté to say that “sometimes in the subway men do things to you,” and this little boy was the result of a pinch, or a gliding finger!
The Andersons refused to have anything to do with their daughter. They were very poor and glad enough, no doubt, to see Anita fallen into a middle-class family and one so shiftless, nonchalant as to receive her. My mother could think of nothing better than to get money from my father for the baby and mother; and complained that at her time of life she was saddled with a newborn child; but to tell the truth, she was very pleasant for once, and being essentially a vigorous woman, she seemed delighted to have someone to work for. She cleaned the apartment from top to bottom and even reproached Jacky and me for not having given her the present joy that Anita had provided. This state of things could not go on. Anita declared that she would go back to work at once.
“I was never so bored in my life as when I was lying on my back,” she said; and in ten days she was up, walking about painfully, and making plans for going back to the factory. “I can’t live without friends and some fun. Do you think I could live at home?”
I wondered if her boy, the father of the child, was not at work; and whether she did not miss him. No man telephoned and she would never give us any indication about him. Mother said, “But don’t you want a father for your child? Don’t you want to get married? Think of this beautiful baby boy without someone to look after him!”
Andrea at once said, “I’ll look after him when Anita is at work.”
“You mustn’t count upon me,” said Mother, ignoring Andrea. “The best thing is to come upon the father for support, for you can’t pay for a nurse.”
“No, I won’t tell him about the baby.”
This was actually the first time she had mentioned the father so much as to say even “him.” Andrea said, “We want the baby.” Anita continued firmly, standing up straight, plump, and more voluptuous than ever, “He is mine; if it hadn’t been for me, he wouldn’t be here. I don’t want anyone to share him.”
She was nursing the child as she spoke, bosom naked, her breasts full of milk, like two white gourds. Andrea stared at her with admiration, with violent desire. When the baby had finished and fallen asleep, she took the child from Anita and sat on the edge of her cot with it. We went on trying to persuade the young mother to start a suit against the father. Mother turned round, I saw her blush deeply; I turned too and saw that my little sister had unbuttoned her blouse and was pressing a small nipple between the sleeping baby’s lips. The baby gave a suck or two.
“Andrea!” I thought my mother looked quite giddy. Andrea started and put the baby away from her.
“Someone’s got to work for him,” continued my mother mechanically.
“I’ll work for him,” cried Andrea, “I don’t want him to go away.”
She spent hours with him, crooning over his bed when he was asleep, prophesying his moods, delicate, fussy and accurate. She sang all the time she was with him, spoke to him, told him her affairs. He smiled at her first, that was a great event; she called me on the telephone at the office to tell me about it.
Meanwhile, Aunt Phyllis had heard about the whole thing and had interested a friend of hers, a lawyer, in the affair. This lawyer at once set about persuading everyone to start a paternity suit against the father and himself underwent the expense of tracking down and locating the young man. He turned out to be a very young man, handsome, disagreeable, spoiled by many affairs, but only a poor factory worker and living meanly in one room. He denied all knowledge of the affair. We had all grown sick of the idea and Anita firmly refused to prosecute. It was done for her by others at first. When she went to look for work, she found it the same day because of the war shortages. She called the baby Alex (and this was the father’s name, it turned out), Alex Anderson. She could not be brought to see that this was odd.
“I’m a young girl,” she said placidly; “I’ll get married later on. Not now. Wait till he gets a bit bigger.”
I was very curious about this independence, greater than any I had had; and I pressed her, when she was quite well and I saw how cool she was.
“Why didn’t you tell us? You weren’t afraid of us.”
“No. But it was embarrassing; I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“But how could you let it go on like that? A baby is a real thing; it has to be prepared for.”
“I know, I just let it go on, day after day; that was the way it happened. I didn’t want to think.”
“But—the father, Anita—”
“It was a love affair; I thought he meant it; and when he didn’t answer my letters and told me on the phone that it must have been someone else—when there never was anyone else—I didn’t have the heart. I didn’t write or phone any more.”
“You don’t want to marry him?”
“No, not now. He didn’t mean it. It was a shock to me.”
Anita was now a grand, calm, splendid woman with a great rose-flush, with large, thoughtful eyes. She ate a lot, laughing and taking things easy, and when home from work love
d to lounge in a wrapper and slippers. Queer it was to see her so, turned into the plump, sensual slattern. When she went out on her Friday nights (she took them off just like any other working girl, just as if she had no baby in the house), she dressed up in dazzling bad taste, in sequins and black satin, with velvet roses in her hair, and high heels; and a brilliant, sordid, shrewd flash came into her eyes, while her looks became sensual and quick, antagonistic, and almost wild. I have seen plenty of girls with that look tear a dance floor to pieces. I wilted before her myself, though keeping my looks well in hand, and felt myself weak before the woman in her. Andrea worshiped and imitated as before, but neither could now be called a bobby-soxer. They were the true sisters. They lived a secret life of their own in our midst.
The family went on in the same old way after this scandal and I began to see that was what the family and society were for—to scatter during bombshells and then calmly cultivate the back yard. Even the individual lives much on that plan. Letty next door to a fancy-girl; Jacky gone off into the blue beyond after an old philosopher; Andrea doting on an illegitimate baby; and the Family plodded along as if nothing had happened.
When next Cornelis went off, on one of his long commissions, I was left to consider my situation; twenty-four or nearly, unmarried, no lovers to speak of, nothing but debts and no family. The family had closed round Andrea, almost excluding Jacky and me. I was just at this point when I thought of taking a new and better apartment. The old place was getting on my nerves, and, finally, was the scene of so much bad luck that I had to get out of it.
45
This all happened on the fourteenth and fifteenth of March, 1945, apparently an unlucky date, although none of the soothsayers, tea-leaf readers, followers of God and Freudians, had mentioned it to me. Probably they saw it, and found it too bad, like Max Beerbohm’s palmist, or Hitler’s necromancers.
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