Letty Fox (24 page)

“Letty will be a success and is, in fact, unable to endure defeat. Jacky is a romantic and will live for a great passion even when she hasn't one. Neither of these girls is suitable for American life, for Letty's good looks are not dollar-beauty, and Jacky's ideas are not dollar-talent. You would both become, down there, just ordinary neurotics, but, of course, that's a bit of an ideal over there, isn't it? The neurotic is fashionable.”

The bills she ran up for our sober, decorous clothes, were sent to my father, as were the debts Pauline encouraged my mother to incur, for house linens, house silver, and the like. As my father had often said: “If I had had a real home with you, Mathilde, I would not have left you and the girls—” Pauline reasoned that my mother would be doing best for herself and us if she spent a good deal of money. My father had deposited twenty thousand francs out of his salary, to provide funds in emergencies, and to make my mother feel more secure in Paris. Pauline's view was that he intended her to spend this for the establishment of a home. She also borrowed some for the wants of Phyllis and herself. Only my mother held back, out of timidity, “I'd look so stupid waiting there with a house full of furniture and two children and a French servant, and no man. What would the servant and the concierge think of me?”

“My God!” said Pauline, holding her hands in a French manner. “My God! Is that what they teach you women in America?”

“Listen, Pauline,” said my mother, “you've been in America. Don't do that. I wish I were back home and had no responsibility. That's the unfairness of it; all this responsibility with no one to help me, and everyone suspects at once what is wrong, the French are so quick.”

She wrote some of this to my father, even about the silver and linen she was going to buy; for my mother was one of the feeble, and Pauline was gradually getting her way. My father at once wrote back to say that he was indeed moving to Paris, that he was bringing his mother to live with us, he thought, and perhaps something could be arranged, and he begged my mother to make a home for us all. He said that he could not bear the expense any more; even his personal happiness was as nothing compared with this awful burden. He added that he had sent the money to Uncle Philip and that he wanted my mother to find them a cheap lodging, and to look for a midwife who would get an abortion for the woman. “At least do this for me, Mathilde, if you have any interest in me.”

My mother became distracted, “My Heavens! He makes conditions for returning to me. I must look after Philip's women, and have that old woman here giving advice.”

And she was very forthright about Philip's behavior. He must have doubts of his sexual powers, she said, if he had to prove his charms so often to himself. He must fear he was impotent if he had to get up the bellies of so many women. However, with much grumbling, she went out and found a place for the couple, but this time, together; for, she said, she certainly would not look after the woman in her false confinement, and Solander would no doubt expect this of her; “I hate that copperheaded frow, she elbowed her way into my confidence.”

Certainly, Dora Dunn, when she reappeared, seemed to have lost all her looks and assurance. Pale, pimply, fat and anxious, she sat on café terraces with my mother and Pauline; her blue eyes and red eyelashes were wet all the time. She said she was going to England to have her trouble or her baby. She had not made up her mind, and she did not want Philip to be forced to marry her, although he had promised to do so. She refused to go to medical friends of Pauline and left for London before my father arrived. Philip hoped every day to hear of the miscarriage and, meantime, held hands with American girls he met in the cafés. A good many of these were stranded, or had lived beyond their allowances, and expected him to help them pay their rent. One lived in the hotel in which Mother lived in the Rue St. Benoit, a reddish blonde, handsome, thin, well-dressed girl of about twenty-five who looked very prudish, the kind who is driven mad by this very look and is very raw in her ways of getting men.

Philip was, of course, taken in by all women, and as well by this kind. He paid her month's rent out of the money Father sent him for Dora Dunn. Mother was angry, but at length promised not to tell my father, if Philip would reform. Philip, meanwhile, was carrying on a fervent love affair by letter with Dora Dunn, whom he imagined as being in agony, spiritual and physical, through loss of her child. She wrote to him saying that she would spend a few months in England with the uncle who had brought her up, Mr. McRae, and who, she thought, was going to name her as sole heir of his business and lands in the Midlands. “The old gentleman looks older than I remember him, acts as if he already had a stroke, and I think I had better stay with the man who was more than a father to me.”

Her writing was open, ornamented, loose, her spelling bad. Her manner was confidential to all.

My father now paid a flying visit to Paris and stayed with my mother at the Hotel St. Benoit. Pauline, who kept Mme. Gouraud up-to-date in this affair, told her that, according to Pauline's instructions, my mother “made every effort to show she could love him and even went too far, to such a degree that on the Monday morning Solander got up out of bed and said, Mathilde, you care nothing for me, only yourself. I must go back to London, I have business to do”; and my mother, clinging to his neck and begging him not to leave her, did not succeed in making him stay. Pauline did not speak of her own failure which I heard from my mother. Pauline had said, “Don't let him see you looking such a frump, and the regulation woman with a grudge. Get a new hat and suit and silk stockings, and cross your knees high. Smoke a cigarette, order cocktails and let him see you're a very attractive woman.”

My mother weakly let herself be persuaded and went off to a coiffeur called Rodolphe, who had his own ideas about how to dress the hair of American women. He regarded them as flotsam among his customers, never expected to see them again, in fact, despised them as no ladies; and Mother came back looking very ordinary indeed. He had turned her into a Middle Western wife summering in Paris. Yet my mother was, as Solander said, “of all countries and ages and could as well have been a Japanese beauty or a Spaniard.”

My mother then went to an address in the Rue St. Honore recommended by a businesslike American friend, one of the sort who fancies herself a buyer and likes to get commissions. She bought a blue suit of striped woolens, which made her slender and tall figure look fat and broad. It was not a regular French house at all, but one run only for Americans and English people. My mother did not know this, and her commission friends did not, either. At any rate, the whole thing, the coiffeur, the stockings, the shoes, the gloves, and the striped suit cost a lot of money, looked expensive, and made my mother out to be quite a different woman. We were young then; we were surprised and impressed; but we felt strange with this thickset young woman. No doubt my father felt the same. Furthermore, since he footed the bill, he made a criticism. “Why do you come to see your husband in this feather and fancy blouse? Do you think I can be brought back, Mathilde, by an expensive hat and a blouse with a frill?”

My mother was embarrassed.

“I'm not a lover,” said my father, “to be brought back by a new hat. That's an idea women have, but it isn't the kind of idea you usually have; and I think you have been listening to the usual female advice, or reading some magazines: How to Retain Your Husband's Affection!”

My mother tried to unpin her hat, but my father stopped her.

“Don't do that now! I don't care whether your hat's on or off. I know you, Mattie. I know what you look like without anything on; what does your hat matter to me? And I know what you were like as a girl in that little skirt in that socialist procession. Do you think I care about all that? I suppose Pauline and Phyllis got to work on you—” He laughed gently. “Look, Mattie, what's your idea of our future? If you expect to live with me again, you must have thought out something. I wish you'd guide me. I am very unhappy. I don't like to spoil your life, and I know you have the girls to bring up.”

My mother at once began to cry, “How can I have a plan for the future? Pauline wanted me to get furniture and we even went to Christofle and bought some silver as I told you, but why should I interrupt the girls' schooling till I was sure? You don't seem sure. You didn't break your relation with that woman. You let your mother live in London while you're living with a mistress. I don't see why I should make plans when I have nothing to look forward to. This will happen again and again. Mother said to take you back and let you have women on the side. My pride doesn't allow me to do that. I want love, or nothing. I don't want all this compromise and sly glances. I don't want my old school friends to laugh at me. Why must I be the only one to suffer? Oh, God! Nothing ever went right with me. I have no luck. I wish I were hard and self-sufficient like Letty. She'll always get what she wants. She feels quite secure though she has no father, no family life, nothing; no money, no decent schooling. She's forced to move about from one country to another, for I'm not able to look after them, feeling the way I do, and living here without a husband or a home, but Letty doesn't mind at all. She's made to survive, that girl. As for Jacky, Jacky's a dreamer. Nothing means anything to her. I don't know what that child thinks about. I envy her. She finds compensation for everything. Both your daughters are like you; they can find compensation in life, but I'm not so lucky. I know I've been beaten. And why? It's just bad luck. Everyone says, ‘What a pretty woman,' and I can't get a single man after me—”

“Well, thank you,” said my father, smiling dourly. “I just asked you if you wanted me back.”

“Oh, what's that? That's a sense of duty. You're just too much of a coward not to say it,” said my mother, weeping and touching her large eyes with her handkerchief. “You'd really rather live with that woman and have no responsibilities at all. You pretend to be a socialist, but it is only to escape your responsibilities. Once you have had children, life is all over for you. It is time for you to think of them. But you want to be a child forever; you are looking for a mother. I cannot be your mother. That is why you left me—”

This conversation went on for a long time, but in the end my father returned to England, and Mathilde was glad she had not taken the apartment with all the rooms and all the silver.

Dora Dunn was somewhere in England, writing letters which made no mention of the child. Philip spoke of going back to the U.S.A. alone, but he was unhappy. The winter had come, very severe in the U.S.A. and everyone was downhearted. People were hungry, futureless, there were suicides and miseries. France and England really looked better.

My father came to Paris from time to time, and we often did not see him. In the spring he was going to Antwerp to work for a correspondent of Montrose. Montrose came to Paris to see Phyllis and Pauline, and Mathilde thought that Montrose had even made advances to her, late one evening, but I am not sure that my mother knew what were advances and what gallantries. When my father complained of the expenses, my mother said she would send the children over to London to him; we could live with our grandmother. But, instead, my father sent my Grandmother Fox to Paris. The cold weather and uncertain heating of London had given her pains in arms and legs. She came to Paris and stayed with us in the pension of Mme. Gouraud.

She was much changed, older, complaining, almost demented. She stayed in her room much of the day, resting, fumbling with clothes, sleeping. At all times of the day and night we heard papers crackling; there were little packets in newspaper and string everywhere. Whenever anyone came, Grandmother would run up to them with an open, childish smile, ask after their health, and then beg for stamps to write to her son who was far away and neglected her. Her niece also, she said, Lily Spontini, who had returned to the U.S.A., did not write to her; God knew what she was doing. She was a lazy, stupid girl and—Grandmother would apparently forget what she was saying. My mother was frightened by her and would not come to see her except when she was urged to do so by a letter from Solander. Grandmother Fox continually asked after her and had many anxious conversations with Mme. Gouraud. “Who ever heard of a mother not living with her children?”

Mme. Gouraud consoled her impatiently, agreeing with all sides. When my mother came, the courageous old peasant reproached my mother gently for not making a home for us, “What must your husband think? He pays out the money and he sees no home.”

And when my father visited us, she reproached him, too, but in another way, “Poor Mme. Fox is quite distracted, just a young girl, and needs guidance, and your mother would be happier with you both than here. She deteriorates. It is all moral suffering, not physical.”

But Mme. Gouraud was anxious to keep us with her, while the household was being reestablished. Meanwhile, Mme. Gouraud hinted, he would do well to glance at the Pauline-Phyllis menage. “Mme. Pauline is charming, but too continental for this young American girl. My opinion is that she should go home and marry very soon.”

At other times she proposed husbands for Phyllis: an architect, just come into prominence, who had seen Phyllis at Mme. Gouraud's house; a young lieutenant (“but it isn't practical, just a love affair”); others, amorous but unsuitable. “She is handsome enough to marry a very rich man, but she must content herself with one of another generation, rather mature so to speak. This is only natural. If she had a home to which to invite them, as, for example, if you and your wife were living here together (I am making no suggestions, it is a thought which occurred to me), she ought to find a husband very soon. Furthermore, I recommend it. She is receiving too much undesirable attention, will have her head turned, and who knows— young girls are very foolish—rich men expect to marry virgins.”