Letty Fox (29 page)

Joseph Montrose, Pauline, all the old crowd visited my mother and me, and one day Montrose brought with him a young nephew of his who had just started to practice medicine. He declared that Mathilde needed medical care, and at once. With the help of everyone, my mother sat down to write a fatal letter to my father. He had said he would return at the end of a week, but this was a lie, he too was feeble. Everyone was feeble. My mother sent four closewritten pages. The words were more Dora's than hers, and she, on Dora's advice, addressed it to Persia. It said, “You cannot kill me as you tried to kill my child,” and so on. We thought it very dramatic and expected this letter to do the trick.

Persia and Solander did not return for two months. Later I found out from this Edie what had happened. With Grandmother running anxiously up and down the corridor (she, of course, knew all about the letter), Persia read the letter, gave it to my father, who read it, handed it back, and looked to the young girl, waiting for his future to be pronounced, so to speak. Persia took the letter without a word and enclosed it in her hairpin drawer. After a long silence, my father said, “You must answer her.”

“Why?” asked Persia. “I don't answer letters.”

Later in the day my grandmother heard her ridiculing Mathilde in an airy way. “She says, one who gives life is sacred—well, well, so every hen and sow is sacred.” She laughed. My father agreed, “Of course, it's a ridiculous way of talking. You, too, could have had a child by this, but you stood by me.”

Apparently Persia said not a word about his having betrayed her with Mathilde, during Mathilde's stay in Paris. She only laughed, “Children, ha-ha. We can all have one once a month. How can they be sacred? Plums aren't sacred to the plumtree.”

We all waited for some time; no one had doubted the outcome. This was Mother's last card. It was all quite hopeless. She had lost. My mother, desperate, sent a message to Persia that she would shoot her. Persia sent back, “Tell her I will shoot her too!”

“Did you tell her you would go back to the United States with her?” asked Persia.

“Yes,” said my father dispiritedly.

“Well,” said the girl, “I know; your mother told me.” She laughed. “Never mind; it's all over.”

It was all over. My mother returned with Dora Morgan to the U.S.A. and took up her place in the ranks of unhappy, futureless, abandoned women. Her role was one more written out for her, slicked over, acceptable. Once this agony was over, she became quieter. She never tried to do anything again, except demand support, which also was an honest employment for women.

Meanwhile, Dora Morgan went to Mexico to have her new baby, because her uncle, Mr. McRae, had gone there for a visit. Everyone now knew he wasn't dead after all; but no one had seen him, or her son. McRae was an oil finder, and made a lot of money prospecting in California and Texas, very often in old and abandoned fields. He was now an old man. He had lots of nieces who expected money from him. Graduates of Sandhurst and Dartmouth were hanky-pankying with these nieces, waiting for the old man to die to see if the girls would be rich, and Mr. McRae felt a responsibility toward the girls, who were all sickly in love. Dora explained all this, and said that if she did not show herself, and her lovely child-to-be, and tell her sad story to McRae, her own dear children would be deprived of her expectations. She was a tigress mother, Dora explained. She had become one of Mrs. Morgan's favorites. She had visited Philip's first wife, begging her to go to work and turn back the alimony, not to jail Philip, as she threatened to do. She had been kicked down the stairs by the former wife's lover. All manner of cruel things had happened. Now she went to Mexico, had her baby, which she named Cissie after Grandmother Morgan, and came away, leaving the baby there to nurse. She explained that since fate and society were so hard toward mothers and their young, she must be deprived of her offspring until she could make sufficient for them all to live on; Mr. McRae had found a wet nurse for little Cissie Morgan.

She persuaded Grandmother Morgan to give her money for her business, which she started up again in Lexington Avenue, with the further help of her friends (the Gropers); and with money begged from Montrose (to whom she had promised Phyllis the very next spring at the latest), she kept the home going. Philip was said to be in misery. He had told her, when he married her to give the child a name, that each would live his own life; there would be no prison-marriage with them, modern people. To this Dora had agreed. But now she said this was nonsense. Then she had not known what marriage was, nor what motherhood was. Society was based on work, decorous living, respectable principles. Philip only worked occasionally. When a girl winked at him, he went to her. Dora found shocking, foolish, boyish letters in his pockets.

“Eleanor, my lust for you is as great as my love! I am no different from the old days, and at the mere thought of you I can't eat or sleep, and my …”

Here he spoke of the sexual prodigies he would perform if he lived with her. He proposed to run off with her, “I have made a great mistake.”

Dora had heard by now, of the four girls with the eight valises; of all the girls who had preceded her in temporary wifehood; she was righteously bitter. But after the first moments when she disliked Philip and thought of divorce, she hardened with her victory over these other women; and with her motherhood; she decided to go her own way. She'd chain him to the kitchen table before she let him go to his fancy women.

“What he wants from them, I can give him, and he must give me, and the children that come of it he must work for. The law allows me and the law forces him—he married me.”

My mother loathed her, and yet thought of her with wonder; “a terrible woman,” said she.

Grandmother Morgan said, “Poor woman; Philip is not all that he should be, and she knows how to manage him, which is more than I can say for the others. She's a good business woman.”

I went for about three months to an expensive private school in Devonshire, the one I had pestered my father about. We had scientists, writers, philosophers of standing to teach us, and there was no odor of the schoolroom in it. We lived in “life,” in the laboratory, in the theater, and in the private life of adults. There was not only a sense of free love, but much ethics of a free, liberal, idealist sort in the school. The owner of the school carried on the ideals of Shelley and Wollstonecraft when it came to love and married life, and the teachers were young, gifted, austere, and fond of youth. There were few pupils; they were of both sexes, and as I was now reaching puberty, I knew a different world. We talked about love and the marriages, free love and legally recognized, of our teachers. We fell in love with each other, and lay on the beds or lawns in pairs, miming a full adult life yet far away from us.

In accordance with the English tradition, we were supposed to experiment in all things, write, dramatize; in all ways, create. As I was experienced at this, I did very well, but no better than many of the others. They were mostly children of divorce, or of separation, or of free-love unions; there were some by-blows of celebrated persons. The school teemed with talent, with a devil-may-care insolence and gaiety, intelligence, and youthful, timely maturity which was different from anything else in my life; from either the wildness of middle-class American private schools, with the senseless union of “co-operation” and “lack of inhibition”; or the routine pressure of French schools.

In one year I had almost forgotten my sisters and only thought of Mathilde in connection with the man question. This made her interesting. I no longer believed in Aunt Dora's principles. Sometimes I thought I would never see Jacky again, and sometimes I hoped I would not, for Jacky had changed very much. She had become a new personality. I feared her. I had lost my one subject. In my school all were carefree, haughty, spoiled, self-indulgent, ambitious, and yet uncertain of their future. Yet we were happy. We didn't feel our age, or any problems. The children lived in an intelligent, open community, with a touch of luxury, a Utopia which severed us from the community. We were aristocrats. In the small town near by, people drove trades or belonged to the
working-classes
. We were above everyone in the world, including our parents. We were the creators, also the critics, we learned that creators, critics alone may be.

I wrote a play which was performed. This was ignorantly Rabelaisian and was, in a nutshell, the vision of the medieval church held by Protestant youth; its name
Muns and Nuncs
. This, a pageant in verse, my first, began with the Muns groaning in their solitude, followed by the joyful announcement of the
Primus
and
Secundus
that the Abbess was approaching with her
Nuncs
, for a long visit. Followed a cheerful scene of the Muns furbishing up the old place, the entry of the Nuncs, and some indecorous scenes of feasting. It ended with the gay clerics pairing off, rounding the great hall and mounting the staircase; finally, the farewell to the Nuncs, with some of their offspring. The Muns kept the boys, the Nuncs went home with the girls.

This was not ill-intentioned. It was supposed to be libelous, outrageous, shocking, but not insulting. We all believed that this was how things were, more or less, conducted in, say, Chaucerian times, and that this was how, at least in part, the ecclesiastical houses were recruited, with bastards, rips, superfluous heirs, and unmarried women; and that men like Erasmus sprang from such loins. A Rabelaisian time, my masters! But such was the adult world to us— every day of the week.

S
olander expected much from me. He already happily arranged, in his head, a marriage between me and a young duke at the school, who was only one year older than myself. I fell in love with this duke; we made young, ribald love; and for a year or two after leaving, I wanted to go back, as I really dreamed of marrying him, for he was the boy of highest rank at the school. Every girl there had this dream.

At length, with all the extra expenses, and the high fees charged by doctors and dentists to children at such a school, Solander had to withdraw me. My mother, hearing of this, asked for me to be sent back to the States.

I traveled by myself, under the special care of the Captain, the Purser, and a stewardess on a liner, and reaching New York in summer at the age of thirteen, felt myself a woman of experience.

Jacky was at the wharf to meet me. I hardly recognized her. I was far developed, with promises of good looks, and a turbulent, gay, ambitious face, bad manners, no doubt, restive, overbearing. With my mother was a pretty girl, with long hair, well-shaped eyes and mouth, a vain, nervous face, clouded with shifting notions, whims; a face delicate, but uneasy with temperament. It was, I saw with shock, my sister Jacky. It was not the same person. I had no confidence in her. No doubt the disappointment and jealousy of this moment affected me profoundly, and formed one of the reasons for my becoming so bold, arrogant, and coarse in the following years. I saw that the world of things I had learned abroad would not do; I dropped it from my shoulders and set to work to learn whatever would make me a success here. I knew I was sharper than Jacky; experience did not hurt me and it stunned her; it would not alter my looks, while she would droop. I did not fear Jacky's competition in popularity, but it seemed to me another person had been substituted for the girl I knew. She looked sly and I saw a sort of plausible charm, partly acquired from the local slick fable of women. She swung her curls, was a pretty, feminine dresser, coquettish, snobbish, looked sideways at all the young men and laughed. When I boasted that the young Duke had kissed me, and lain by my side on a cot, she stared at me with well-bred astonishment. “I would never do that!”

It was humiliating. I answered this with bounce and invention. I said he had proposed to me. She accused me of vulgarity and lying. I said she was a parrot, a pet, an actress, and in French, “What a comedy!”

She had not forgotten her French. We quarreled; I called her prig and man-mad. But I set to work to shine in school, for I had always had the best reputation for scholarship in the family—the only reputation. Most of my cousins were soft, satisfied materialists. They already went to dances, had beaux, were leaving school and having a good time. The family, inspired by Grandmother Morgan, spoiled them and smiled fondly at their misdemeanors. There wasn't a serious face in the family. But as I also had reasonable good looks, I hoped to do as well as they—indeed something better than that.

Solander, who had
left
me, as my mother and aunts said, had always talked to me as man to man; his rapid, ribald hurricane of humor, his merry exaggeration and explosion of honest anger, his kindness of heart, always took me by storm.

An obscure but general ambition had been implanted in me by him, or was there to begin with. There was nothing to hold me back. Grandmother Morgan did not know one grandchild from another. My mother, though still young and sweet, was pale and uninteresting, and whenever any subject was mentioned which referred in the least to love, marriage, divorce, children, and the like, she had a sick, beaten, or dull and bitter look, and seemed to turn her back, not only on those who had injured her, but on the world. It was true that no one but my father had ever been very kind to her; and this had gone too.

Grandmother Fox, to whom I wrote sometimes (I must admit, generally before my birthday, and in time for Christmas), adored me more than Jacky because I resembled my father in the face. My father's nature, recklessly generous and unprejudiced, was made to spoil me. While trying to give me serious instruction and to make me honest, in a broad strain, reminding one of folklore, he invented so much, and so often revealed to me the seamy side of things, though always in a cheerful way, that I was more likely to become a satirist, or comedy playwright, or buffoon, or scandal-columnist than anything else in the world. I think at this age, before their daughters become serious-minded frumps of sixteen, or giggling flirts, with their stout bosoms and childish romances, all fathers expand genially and try to do their best for their daughters. Afterwards, at about fifteen and onwards, the relation is better forgotten.