Letty Fox (12 page)

During this whole first week of May, Uncle Philip stayed away. In the meantime; the sulky, stooping girl from the village had come to Uncle Hogg and gone away; Aunt Bette told us there was something wrong with her and that she had said awful things about Uncle Philip—
a girl like that
. One afternoon a storm blew up, as it often does over those hills and bottoms, and Uncle Hogg sent me down to keep Mrs. Morgan company. It would grow awfully dark in these sudden storms. There was always a great noise and sometimes the wires came down. The Lodge was safe under the old wood. The rain pelted in so that it was hard to get down from the road to the Lodge, and the farmers were too busy counting their chickens and shutting doors to be able to look to the Lodge. I loved storms and liked to go and watch over Aunt Amabel. The sky was clear, high, wide, and then the dark poured over it and rains hit the house.

Inside, in the middle of the high-roofed room, it was still, but outside it seemed as if the porch would be torn away; big branches from the trees brushed the house, bushes struck the back windows, the water rushed against the house and down the hill. Uncle Philip had then been away a week and I prattled about him, while Amabel was very cheerful, and told me also about the baby coming. Night came. I was to stay there the night. About ten o'clock the telephone rang and I heard Aunt Amabel talking quietly on it. I crept in—it was Uncle Philip, in New York. She was saying:

“I am all right, my darling, but it is lonely here, there is a storm out here, the boughs are brushing against the house—” She came in, running, full of joy. “Philip is coming tonight! It's an awful trip here now so late. Poor boy!”

He came about three in the morning and she flung herself into his arms like a young girl. After this I said nothing more to Jacky about them, nor made up stories. I could not stand it. I wanted to be loved.

Uncle Philip had seemed very sweet that night, boyish, kneeling at her feet and kissing her knees and feet and hands. I tossed about thinking about it all. The next day, too, Uncle Philip was not himself and took me back to The Wreck without a word, although I babbled as usual. I became pettish and struck him.

He looked down at me, and said, “I'm a bad man, Letty dear, I'm afraid, and I'm having an attack of conscience.”

“What did you do?”

“I don't think I'll ever be able to be a good man.”

“Why not?”

“It's my nature.”

“What have you done?”

He sighed and handed me in the gate. Then he went in to P.Hogg and seemed to have lost all shame, for he asked Hogg to please take care of the girl called Blackfleld, Eleanor Blackfield. He had not stayed at his sister's (my mother's) place, as he had promised to do; he had stayed the whole week with his old sweetheart, Eleanor, in her flat in the Village; and he had been with her when he telephoned that stormy night. He was afraid she would come after him to The Wreck. “Please don't tell her I live down the road, but send her away to town,” he asked Hogg. “Tell her I've gone back. You see, she thinks I live here.”

Hogg flushed and he stared at Philip with fury. “Do your own dirty work. How can you bring a girl out where your wife is? I won't put my hands in the pitch. You can't touch pitch without being blacked.”

But Philip persuaded him and called us in and told us to do our best for him, we were sensible little girls. “This is a lady I was going to marry. I didn't marry her and now she wants me to.”

“You jilted her?” enquired Jacky, fascinated.

“He stood her up,” said I.

“You've got it exactly,” said Philip, taking a hand in each hand, and looking earnestly at us. “Now dear Aunt Amabel is going to be sick and have a baby and she mustn't be worried and you mustn't tell Eleanor about anything at all. Now, Eleanor is a nice girl, too, remember.”

Hogg could scarcely stand the thought of it. He stood staring down at Philip. “She's coming here to see your wife?”

“She thinks my wife's gone back to Chicago!”

“You liar.”

“I am a liar,” said Philip. “I am a bad husband to Amabel; but I must say one thing, the girls do hunt you, you know; you must never give them a chance. Give them a chance and you'll find out.”

“The girls hunt you!” said Hogg, and he told Philip about the scandals in the district: a girl three-quarters of a mile away, living with her father, was going to have a baby. He said it was Philip's.

“Now every baby in the township will be mine!” he frowned.

We stood staring ourselves out of countenance, having no idea what it could all be about. When Philip went, we spent all our time talking about Eleanor, the girl who was hunting Philip, and this was how we first saw any one of what Hogg called “his women.”

Eleanor was easily persuaded that Philip had gone back to town, and she herself, seeing The Wreck, threw her purple lipstick and silver pencil back into her handbag and took the same taxi back to the station. Philip had already telegraphed from the farmer's kitchen to his sister Mathilde to fix up a story for him when Eleanor called upon her. We had behaved admirably, Jacky saying little and I pushing myself forward with a long line of interesting talk in which I skillfully wrapped up all the proper lies about Uncle Philip. I invented quite a lot; it was a tiptop performance. I was very much hurt when Uncle Percival sent me to bed without dinner, forbade me to talk to Jacky for the whole evening, and called us together before this punishment to give us a sharp talk about lies. Said he,

“ ‘Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.' ”

This attracted me. I skipped up to bed. Downstairs Uncle Perce and Aunt Bette indulged in that form of psychological unraveling which consists of, “She is really to blame for; he is really to blame for”; and “the parents are really to blame for—”

T
he scandals broke round them before June; the Philip Morgans fled from the Lodge to town. At first they put up with Mathilde, and when she and my father at last objected, they moved to a hotel. While the woman was in the hospital, her husband was looking for a flat, and took one in the Village among all his old friends.

My mother, who heard Philip's full confession, during his new loneliness, went to Farmington, packed our clothes, and brought us back to town. She telephoned Mrs. Hogg, who was getting a divorce, and Templeton and Cecily were brought back to town. My mother was unhappier than ever, but had a single hope—my father was to go to England, on a shipping job with Joseph Montrose for a year or so. In that time he would be separated from
Die Konkubine
and would forget her.

“But I suppose,” sighed my mother, “that now it will be another one.”

“There is safety in numbers,” said Grandmother; “one is romance, two is adventure, and three is a shame.”

The flat in Bleecker Street was an interesting nest of marital intrigue; its purpose, the recapture of my father for mother and us. Grandmother Morgan was chief of staff, although she had little time to waste on her older daughters and little enough even for Phyllis, now sixteen.

“Stella is an old maid, Mathilde has no sense, and Phyllis will get married; don't worry,” said Grandmother Morgan to her cronies over the cards. She had no sympathy even for young married women; she waited for women to lose their illusions. But she was not easygoing: she wanted each woman to have a husband and children, which is nature's way. She thought even Stella would marry in time; “she'll hook some weak sister,” said Grandmother.

Only three men came to the flat—Grandfather Morgan on his way to the Rice Progressive Chess Club in Fourteenth Street, Uncle Philip on his way to and from unknown places, my father. Grandfather Morgan, now too old, was a bearded, blue-eyed gentleman who spoke softly and looked like Jesus. But he walked crabwise and smiled slightly in his blue-green eyes.

“Now, I am going to Evensong,” he would say softly, between red firm lips; that meant he was going to the Chess Club, we believed. He asked about my father, and nodded at the answer whatever it was, but he gave no advice; he never tried to patch up any family breaks.

While Amabel was still in the hospital, Philip brought a new friend to see us. She was Dora Dunn, a stout young woman, with red hair drawn back in a knot. Her skin was pale and freckled, her eyes green. She was smartly dressed, broad before and behind, with a soft neck in folds and small feet on high heels. She played the naïve, sweet friend, quietly admired my mother's good looks and our fine eyes, and seemed to take it for granted that she was my mother's friend.

“One of his women, I suppose,” sighed Mathilde; but she liked her. Dora Dunn told her troubles and discussed her business. She engaged designers from abroad and sold costume jewelry and gew-gaws in a Village shop which she owned. She had passed up from lamps, button collections, and second-hand articles with a few books on the side, to this flourishing business, invented by her, financed by friends, and patronized by girl friends who had attached themselves to wealthy men. She had a swarm of friends, of whom she remembered every particular; but she had the grace and art not to crowd our flat and my mother's sad life with these others. She always made it seem that she came to see my mother only, and to talk over family affairs. She had gathered a lot of information about the family and used it discreetly; yet her avidity was shocking. My mother, to save her solitude, had learned to rebuff people, but no one could rebuff Dora Dunn; she was overpoweringly diplomatic. She was about thirty, and for a while my mother wondered if she were not simply worming herself into the Morgan family to get orders from their clientele of hotel guests.

This gifted woman made a friend also of Grandmother Fox, who had nothing to offer to Dora, spiritually or materially; and now my mother began to fear that Dora was after my father. Dora was unmarried; she confessed she was a virgin. She had a few thousand dollars in the bank, she said, although she needed it at hand for expenses. My mother thought my father was a weak man and that such a managing woman might get him. She watched Dora suspiciously, but it looked as if she laughed and flirted with Grandmother Fox merely to keep her hand in.

“Perhaps she really has a good heart,” said my mother. Dora used to come to the flat in Bleecker Street twice a week then; each time she left she took something, a handkerchief, book, or caramel.

No doubt she was looking for a husband in her businesslike way, but she fooled Mathilde. Mathilde had met Eleanor Blackfield and others of Philip's girls who poured out their loves and hates without reticence; but Dora coolly discussed Philip's habits and looks, praised his attention to his wife, and praised his wife. It was during the summer when Amabel was nursing her baby, out in the Morgan house, Green Acres, that Philip came to Mathilde about Dora on one of those hot summer nights when people sit with their windows open but the lights out. Our windows, on the second floor, overlooked the street, still hot; noisy children played underneath. I was in bed, but not asleep.

“I want to be good,” said Philip, “and I haven't been with another woman more than three or four times since I married Amabel, that's a year; you know how I feel about Amabel. But I never loved the child, Mattie, and he doesn't seem very bright to me. The trouble is, Mattie, that one of the women was Dora Dunn and I was her first man; she's in love with me, I'm afraid,” and down went his voice to his boots; he sounded as if pouting.

“You can't expect sympathy from me. I have troubles of my own,” said my mother.

“I don't know what to do, you see, Mattie; I've had so much trouble with girls, and you get so tangled—you don't know which way to turn. Now, this very evening, do you know there are three girls expecting me; what shall I do? Dora is one, Eleanor is another—”

“You don't count Amabel, do you?” said my mother.

“No, three girls,” his voice rolled gutturally over the word, reluctant, clinging. “I had better not go to any of them, eh?”

“I don't know anything about it,” and I heard my mother move her chair.

“But I promised Dora to—” his voice trailed off. After a while he murmured, “Got to get a shave.”

“I haven't seen Solander this week; it's all he can do to ring me up,” said my mother's thin, young voice; “I am not crying on anyone's shoulder, am I? What's the matter with me? What do I lack? If I could only see anything—but she's got no personality either: she's just a girl, like I am. I don't see it. Are there some differences to you between all these girls? Are you attracted by some characteristic—?” After a slight pause, she went on angrily, “Or is it just any kind of woman?”

“I often get women when I don't want them at all; they seem to come after me. I wouldn't say I chose them, myself.”

“I suppose she chose him. I have no will power; I never accomplished anything. If I set out to get something, that's a proof I won't get it.”

He sighed and got up. “I hate to stand two of them up; I don't like that. But today Dora—”

He soon went away. I heard my mother crying, but I stayed in bed. I knew I ought to feel angry that my father had abandoned me for another female, and I did my best to feel sulky; I fancied myself as an orphan; and then there was Jacky—the Two Orphans. As I saw the tragic scene of our orphaned lives, I cheered up and laughed to myself.

Mother's friends and relatives tumbled in and out of the house, tossing off advice, endeavoring to scheme with their self-centered feeble wits, shooting off their private venoms. Everyone liked my father; my mother had to put up with much mischief; those came who flatly told her she deserved it. Close friends asserted themselves and fastened themselves upon my mother like parasites. Some shared her rooms, others ate her food. She got advice on how to bring up children, how to dress, and how to keep husbands. Often when they went she would turn from the door with a piteous howl, thrusting her hands into her hair; their disturbing words ate into her mind: she nearly went mad. It was enough to have lost her husband; it was too much for her to bear these gossips and pocket Machiavellis; but Jacky and I saw it for what it was, a grotesque game, played round her, not for her, with stakes high and low, ageless, immoral, and amusing as a circus.