Letty Fox (11 page)

“Don't you think about the others?” said Hogg.

“That's another thing you learn—to live for the day. When you've caught a big fish, you live for that day.” Philip Morgan laughed.

“I mean, your other girl friends. Your life hasn't been a desert up to now, in spite of that story you tell them.”

Philip sounded flustered, “What story?”

“Your formula: ‘Life was a desert but you are my oasis.' ”

Philip laughed like the winding of Roland's trumpet distant in Roncesvalles; then he murmured, “Who told you that?”

“Eleanor Blackfield.”

“She was a nice girl,” said Philip, in a lower voice.

“Don't you think of the trouble you made?” asked Hogg.

“They're all neurotics, they'd get into trouble anyhow.”

“Perhaps they love you,” said my father.

“No, I only love one woman.”

“But—Eleanor Blackfield, for instance,” said Solander.

“That's neurosis. They're repressed and then— But now I'm married. Do you know what Amabel said to me this morning? She's a superb woman. You know what Casanova said to his illegitimate fourteen-year-old son? His son was reticent, sulky, critical, wouldn't be free with Casanova. Casanova wasn't pleased, took him out and gave him a shaking-up. ‘Look here, this is the sign of a mean spirit,' he said. ‘That's a lesson to any young man. Give yourself away.' What does it matter, if there's plenty of yourself left? That's the school of life.”

“Well, you do that,” said my father. “You give yourself, that's all right with you.”

“Of course,” said Philip, “you get it in the neck, mind.”

“My girl,” said Solander—he went on to tell about the black-haired girl, Persia. We looked at each other, lying hidden in the grass. Grandmother Fox called her
Die Konkubine
, and Hogg had taken to the name—one of his sour jokes. He did not say it now, but lectured both of the men on normal family life.

“Society is built on the normal family, on normal community life of which the monogamous family is the basis at present. We cannot talk about the future societies of this world. Only whoremasters do that when persuading to bed.” This was a stab at Uncle Philip, no doubt.

My father laughed and said quickly, “Don't tell me, Hogg, that you think we live in a monogamous, one-family society here in the U.S.A.? I don't think Morgan, I mean Lewis H. Morgan, not you, Philip, would see it the way you do. Now, why don't you look at your society, Hogg, the way you'd look at the Aruntas or the Iroquois. Now, Hogg, if you saw a bunch of Iroquois or Sioux with our organization, you'd say they were polygamous.

“ ‘Now trouble brioux

Among the Sioux

Because each year

A dear they chioux
.'

“I don't mean wife and mistress-in-state, that's just old-fashioned French conservatism; why, I mean what they say, ‘It's unlucky to be the seventh husband of a seventh wife.' Do you call that state of affairs monogamy? And to think we sent out U.S. troops to slaughter the poor old disciples of Joe Smith. It's the old story in anthropology: the conquered conquers the conqueror! Now we are all Mormons. And don't tell me you think we're going back to the one-woman convent and the emasculated man, or One Million Abelard-and-Heloises, after this carnival of jazz. ‘I want to be castrated! Oh, dear, dear, I meant circumcised—that was the word! But it's too late now.' No, it's too late now to go back to being castrated.”

Cheerfully, he kept it up. Both were embarrassed, Hogg, the moralist, and Philip, the many-marrier. Philip spoke very morally. My father, a decent-living, attached, affectionate man, was a pocket Rabelais.

Impossible in a family like ours, full of court scandal, to keep the various sexual knots and hitches from our sight. Uncle Philip nearly had a baby by Eleanor Blackfield, and it was only shipped out of life when he hastily married the pregnant Amabel. Eleanor was a Vassar girl who wrote poetry, came from a high-toned family, knew only girls called Butterfield, Trowbridge, van Dorp, and danced with Mary Wigman. Our Hogg and Morgan fold had not such fine white-fleeced lambs; but eligible men always are admitted among the silvertails, and Philip had become Eleanor's great love. She danced and taught dancing and helped Philip out with the rent for a long time. She was odd-looking, freakish, with transparent black voile sleeves, a long-waisted figure and long well-shaped legs, long, faunish-arched feet, long hands. Her color was putty and her straight black hair flopped over her shoulders. She had big eyes, she painted her mouth purple. She and Philip had a frenzied affair, very
fin de siècle
they thought it (in 1928). She was older than Philip by about five years. She had a devil of a temper and kept him on the jump; naturally, he needed a mother after that, and Amabel was the earth-goddess he got. But one spring, in the beginning of their affair, Philip on a river took a boat beneath a willow left afloat, incredible as it sounds, and ran away with Eleanor; and I suppose they had a loaf of bread and a flask of wine; I know they had a book of verse. How young Philip was then! He was a great fleshy romantic boy, quoted poets all day long, was always in love, and was a socialist. He was probably presentable enough too. Even when we first knew him, when he was twenty-one and married, and full-grown, he looked as if he could get women, heavy white blossomy flesh, a squarish face with blue eyes and curly brown hair loose round it, a thick strong neck, a ready smile, and a manner both consoling and appealing; and all kinds of airs he had picked up from the men he admired. He admired dozens of men, imitating them all: two he imitated were Hogg and my father.

Amabel Winslow was the subject of talk in the family, but the children did not know she was a name in society. She expected her baby in June, now dragged her heavy load in or near the Lodge. In the evenings, long before the winter snows had gone, Philip would be seen on the roads, up and down, from our high place, would be in our house with Uncle Perce, or would come up out of the distance, talking to men, women, and children. He was restless. He said he was out on his chicken and egg run; it was hard to make money. Amabel needed town and they would not turn the child into a hick; as soon as the child was born, they would turn back the farm and make off. He was constantly reading newspapers, looking for jobs, answering advertisements, and writing letters to people who might buy the farm. The mail addressed to him he arranged to receive at our house, “Care of Hogg, The Wreck” (as Hogg insisted on calling it), for he did not want to make the expectant mother anxious, but would tell her when all was ready. He received mail every day and often walked down to the post office with his answers. He now neglected the farm, after months of patient work.

“New broom sweeps clean,” said Hogg; the farmer with the bull laughed fatly, said, “First he worked like a steer and now he rears at work, like a crazy horse.”

The woods were full of lost hen eggs. One afternoon, in late April, looking for treasures, we came upon one nest, then another; soon we were risking our legs and even our necks in the treasure hunt. We brought back about ten dozen eggs to the Lodge; some must have been abandoned there since the last year. We then spied on the fowls and when one or other began picking her way studiously out of some glade, we marked the spot with our eyes and went for it; in this way we often found warm new eggs and stole some of these to take home. Hogg said nothing about this eggtheft, though he made an uproar about some wild birds' eggs we brought back and he was the terror of the birds'-nesting boys. He honestly thought of them as assassins. As for the hen eggs, we were poor and needed them.

This Lydnam Lodge was a folly and could never pay for itself. “Every egg cost a dollar,” said Grandmother Morgan; but the Lodge was a convenient place to quarantine her children as each one reaped a wild oat; and it was a senseless delight, a pleasance which she felt she would allow them. She did not care for it herself. Grandmother Morgan, once she found she could not in any way turn the place into a boarding house, stayed away from it. She missed the clink of china and glass, the endless brushings of brooms, the glimmer of clean windows, the smells of rooms over-furnished with bedspreads, toilet covers, and women. She missed the bottles hidden in boot boxes, the crystal sets, the card games—especially perhaps the big poker game at which she herself was such a hand. She liked the complaints, the bills, the quarrels in the kitchen; she liked the cutting of lawns, the consultations with plumbers and plasterers, the quantities of goods in drawers and cupboards, the bustle of company, the thieving and picking, lashing of competitors, the brawling, the fight for life. Where can you feel it more than in a hotel or in a money game? She never objected even to what went on in the rooms, if these human frailties were kept out of sight. For that was life to her, like the secret bustle of red blood, a woman who longs and fornicates and a man who thirsts and sucks. What was there out in the country, among the chickens and plants?

Philip made trips to town almost every week, and he decided to go in for a few days around May Day. A sulky girl with a stoop came up every day from the end of the lane, to help Mrs. Morgan, Philip's wife, with the house. Mrs. Morgan did not like housework, but was good at stews and pastries. When Philip came from town, he brought us cakes, candies, and hairbows and books. We often went to the Lodge now that we had got used to the strange woman, and had digested all the story about her. Few people visited her. She was a short-tempered woman, and if fretful or tired would stare in angry silence at unwelcome visitors, or walk up and down, spurting odd remarks, as to Mrs. Dr. Goodsir. When Dollie Goodsir was born, we came to call Mrs. Goodsir Aunt Bette. Aunt Bette wheeled the precious child down to Mrs. Morgan's every afternoon that Philip was absent, for women's chat, but women's chat displeased Amabel. She had been a fighter for women's rights, but on the outside of real woman-talk, their simple preoccupation with their sex, the other sex, and their superstitions. As Aunt Bette frothed away gaily, sure that this defender of women would sympathize with her, the face of Philip's wife darkened. She would brusquely ask Aunt Bette about her work down in The Wreck, an endless job. Aunt Bette was paid a little, both by Hogg and by my father, for looking after us and the house. She never talked about the work, did it singing and dancing, as well as she could, with her tired legs, and she looked pretty and young when she took her baby for its walk. We heard her singing to the baby in the house, “O darling, O darling, O darling, O darling, O darling!” Sometimes she made up songs, “O darling, O darling, you're so sweet; my dear little baby I'll eat, eat, eat,” and so she invented all the afternoon; “You've got a cruel mother, a berry cruel mother, a wicked cruel mother, a mother who hates its own little angel, its precious, a mother who is going to give it a silk dress and a satin dress and a velvet dress, all so white, all so white—tum-tum-tum—all so white—”

Her talk with Aunt Amabel was a bit more sensible, not much. “Do you think that prenatal impressions—?” “A woman I know stayed in bed eight months to have a baby—”

We loved all this. Aunt Amabel did not care whether we were there or not; but presently she would get up, stretch herself with a slow, sure muscular motion, like a lion after sleep, and begin thoughtfully to walk about.

“Has Dr. Goodsir a specialty in medicine?”

Aunt Bette never liked to answer. She felt Dr. Goodsir should not be admitted as truly living, until he came back to his child.

“Something about the glands—the ductless glands!” She had a good memory and rattled off all she could remember from his instruction in the days when they were going together.

“You have a good memory, Bette; you could have studied medicine, or bacteriology—you could have helped him in the laboratory. What can be done?”

“I—I,” Aunt Bette would say laughing, with her hand over her mouth at the ridiculous idea. Then she'd straighten up, pull down her lawn and lace blouse, “I dare say I could do something if I had the chance; but now I have Baby.”

“You're twenty-three.”

“Dr. Goodsir would not like it, if it got about that his wife was working.”

In answer to Aunt Amabel's silence, she would say timidly, “My father was too old to get big orders any more when I was growing up and I wanted to go on the stage, I wouldn't have heard of college anyhow. Besides, it ruined them putting my three brothers through college; but look at Percival—he's worth it.”

“You don't complain enough,” said Amabel.

“Everyone's very kind to me, very good indeed,” said Bette. “I like to come into a room gay and bright, and leave a good impression. A querulous woman—what's worse!”

“Even a dog yelps when it's trod on, but not you—” Mrs. Morgan would look out the window, and the brown in her eyes glow like ruby.

“Of course, it's hard work, but I eat and I've got Baby.”

Mrs. Morgan was not so happy. Philip was often away for the whole day or the whole afternoon, talking to the farmers, and would come home healthy, brown, fat and cheerful, but tired. He was known for a mile in every direction, a favorite of kitchens and barns. He knew the small flower gardens near the house, the barn and house-cats, the bulls, woodchuck colonies, tall woods full of birds, and yards sheltered by trained vines, the tool sheds and the back lots where no one ever came. A cat in the chicken farm was famous. She turned down the local toms and walked three miles to her beloved, and this, year after year. The dogs knew Philip; the boys whom others despised; the girls knew him too. He became sick of the district; scandals sprang up, but in what seemed to us a hypocritical way he was devoted to his wife. We came once upon a curious scene. Uncle Philip was sitting on the corner of the daybed which stood in the great room, his arm on the fanciful book table by its side. Mrs. Morgan was bent toward him and with her hands had tilted his face up to her: she was gently kissing every part of his face, while smiling, and he had his eyes fixed on her, quite ravished away. After a moment, one of them heard us and they turned to us, laughing, both laughing. We ran away; I, at least, felt jealous.