Letty Fox (64 page)

Some caution in me made me not so much doubt his words as try to think of them addressed to another woman. I “tried them over on my piano.” If he had been younger, I would have swallowed everything. And all the time, as I walked along with Bobby, and felt Luke's charm, I was thinking, do I have to listen always to these old serenades? I felt throughout my adventures that I was only looking for the right man; if I had found him, I should have been very glad to renounce all these affairs. I had to admit it—the dangerous Luke was the most negligible of affairs.

I thought with gloom of the time, when I was about fifteen, when I had thought I could manage men. Now, the barrier between men and women had come up, the question of marriage. No man I knew wanted to marry, and for me it had become desperate; not, of course, to enjoy men, which makes it the only resort of timid girls, but to give myself a start in life. As it was, I was living spiritually and mentally, from pillar to post (pillow to post!) and from hand to mouth.

In these dark days Susannah Ford, for all her faults, was a good influence upon me. She believed that public discussion made all things moral and easy to bear. She not only teased out every strand of my affairs (for I told her all), but dragged me back into what was a sort of social and intellectual life. She forced me, with good-natured fanaticism, to think of every popular substitute for snake-oil and soul-balm. Led to believe that Freudianism would keep her chaste, she wallowed chin deep in psychoanalysis; and also took mudpacks for her complexion. She was so engrossed also with her troubles between husbands and lover, and with trying to regulate the love affairs of her friends (usually this meant to steal their men, though almost a naïve, blind theft), and she believed so rapturously in any man she chanced upon, if he were crooked enough and persuasive enough to cheat her and get her money from her, that in her house, at least at first, I plated my sensitive soul in the rich, thick, wholesome folly of thoughtless, bodily living. Here was a woman who lived as I did and was none the worse for it. New come from life in a female house, with a defeated and lazy woman, and two young sisters, I began to see I had my own place in the world. I had grown up.

Susannah made me free of the house. I had expected, on taking up my residence in this house in Jane Street, that Luke would seize on the excuse of Leon, the orphan boy, to come and see me regularly, twice a week or more. But Adams was delighted to rid himself of his responsibility and stayed far away from Leon. Susannah's eyes had lighted up when she first had seen Luke. Everyone in the room could see that she marked him for her prey! Luke, too. He had smiled, shifted his legs, cast his dark eyes down, and afterwards he had said to me, “Susannah's a nice girl, she's got a heart as big as a whale—but, you know, she wastes her time—I've known girls like that—”

At first Susannah, then, watched and waited for him; perhaps that too kept him away. My need for a diversion was keen. Luke was the
homme fatal
. He only understood lechery. I understood him for a heartless coquette, yes, cold, for all his flame. The whereby of his daily food and roof and his pleasure, were all his concern.

The struggle to suppress my feelings, difficult, since I have a nature, open, frank, and bold, and my unreciprocated love, produced whirlwinds in my blood. Once or twice he dropped in on me when he “happened to be passing.” One evening, I turned on Luke and scolded him for his ways. He opened his eyes, laughed and drawled out, I was a witch, a danger to men, a termagant queen, a lovely shrew; “You'll get on all right, Letty.” As I saw that this excitement pleased him, I boiled and bubbled—but at what cost to myself! In the end, I realized that no matter what happened, he was the winner; my sufferings and outcries were merely pleasurable drama for him. I tried to tear Luke Adams out—he was much deeper rooted than I thought. It was like tearing my veins out one by one.

I gave him a short history of my love adventures, so that he would be easy on that point; but he deduced from this account that I could look after myself and hence worried about me less than another.

Some nights I came home late from work, to Jane Street, and looked from the street, over the little railed areaway, into the broad double windows of my flat. Often I hoped to see Luke there. He was never there. Once, I saw his back, in an old man's crouch, as he turned the corner of the street. I ran after him, at length shouted, “Luke! Luke!”

That was the kind of thing I would do, ruining my game after weeks of continence. Luke was, in all, a tease, a hound of love; he worried and gnawed the heart to death. Luke would leave me half seduced, which was one of his cruelest, most telling trullmaker's tricks. He would take himself off, murmuring something about his wife, my young girlhood, his respect for my father's friendship, the presence of Leon in the house, and several other modesties and moralities; and at the door would turn with pain and yearning in his eyes and, holding me to him, whisper that he loved me. He had the boldness to say that he loved me, he needed me, and was in a fever fit thinking of long nights with me. I was at my wits' end. I knew that while Luke found consolation for black hours and heart-stings in his wife's arms, I found none anywhere. I decided to break with Luke at any cost. All the cost would be borne by me. This was my own fault. I bragged about my conquest. One of my acquaintances, a union organizer, David Bench, a gawky fellow of the Lincoln type, reproached me with it. It was strange to hear this tall man's shamed whisper above me, “You let everyone know—you don't try to conceal it. And if you even go out with that man, people suspect you.”

David himself seemed to love me, but he was ashamed of me. I thought he was jealous, and that he had an interest in me himself. Sometimes, when I look back at my relations with David Bench, it seems to me I behaved with him as my slippery friends with me. “I loved her, she loved another, and he in turn neglected her for another.” Heine says something like that. This is love.

I seized the occasion of a union dance to break with Luke. He had half asked me, which was his way. We went out into Jane Street; we walked along one street and another holding hands, making for Washington Square and then Union Square, and all the time Luke murmured and talked about sex. That was his pressing way, not love, but the end of it. He began by saying, “I have been thinking about you all the week.”

“What were you thinking?”

“I was thinking of you” his voice dropped and dropped—“all the week.”

I fancy he prepared his speeches and only used what was long tried and tested.

“I'd like to go away with you for a week, Luke, to your shack.”

In the dark I saw his flattered smile. Then he said, “I've loved so often and I'll love again; life is never done with us; you love better the more you love.”

I said, “Yes, but I'm a woman; it's different.”

I was haunted by the thought of Jacky taking perhaps this same walk with Luke and hearing these things. He said, “But, Letty, don't you love this boy of yours—Clays—eh? Or is it Bobby Thompson?”

“I love them and love you too—I don't know how it can be; but it is.”

“Yes, I suppose it can be. Ye-es—”

“You are not the same, you're kind of impersonal—you're Adam.”

“Adam? Adams—oh, I see.”

“No, Adam, the first man. You make me Eve.”

He laughed, “Adam!”

“Hello, Adam.”

He laughed, wonderingly, “Adam!”

The hat sign opposite said Adam Hats. He laughed: “Adam Hats, says the sign, Adam Hats.”

He bent down and kissed me. After a while he said, “Now I am very sleepy.”

“Oh,” I cried, offended.

“I am sleepy.”

I cried, “Oh,” again, but in a different tone and pressed myself to him.

“We ought to continue this discussion somewhere else—in bed,” he said.

“What discussion? I think we agree.”

But the rigmarole flowed out of him, “Men and women—” he said softly.

“There's my place.”

He said: “There are hotels too—everywhere; no one would know—that night your father came in—not nice, Letty. You must think about your father.”

The signs said, Rooms, $1; Smoor, $1.

“I couldn't.”

“Of course,” he said, in a low, considerate tone, “I couldn't take a girl like you there.”

“But I've got a place.”

“Well, you see, Letty dear, I'm known about there; my friends live in that house on the top floor and I wouldn't want my wife— and going out with you is just a holiday—you know, for me you're a dangerous girl—” gutturally he rolled the endearing word girl, “a dangerous pretty girl.”

“Oh, damn, I'll forget you, that's what I'll do,” I cried out. He looked surprised.

I said, “It's the old tease; you don't care for anyone outside the thrill. I'm just marijuana to you. See what you said, ‘A holiday.' This is blind man's buff and no clinch. I'm looking for a man, and I tried you out because I'm wild about you. I'll tell you now,” I said madly, losing all discretion, “but if you don't say the word, I don't care, I'll take anyone, even David Bench—I won't stay chastely waiting for you, like a good little girl. I suffer too much. Let's go in here,” I said, pointing to a café in a side street, by now quite famous, a smoky little den, with paintings by local artists on the walls; “I've got to settle this.”

He willingly went in, put me before him, opened the door, treated me with deference and with what I would have sworn (if I hadn't known him) was love in every intonation. I said: “You can't give me the runaround.”

He said, appearing to be much troubled, “You see, little Letty, I'm a married man, dear, and you're such a sweet youngster, and the sort of girl who always gets me, and if Elsie weren't a mother—”

And again the fascinating guttural. He shook his head sadly. “But these things are real, Letty, motherhood, family life—We don't think so. I believed in free love at your age. Practiced it too. You don't want to be bound down either. Not at your age. And then, think of Clays!”

I swallowed my cocktail in a gulp, and raising my voice, bawled him out.

“Faker,” I said. “Social fraud! ‘It will be better for us in another world.' I won't stand for that song. Motherhood.”

And under this head I reproached him with the stories about him that everyone knew, the women seduced, the homes broken; and even with her children which I had held on my lap and longed for. I said, “Love's free, but children aren't free; men get all there is to free love and women are robbed of their children.”

And for the moment, hot and lusty-tongued as I was, it seemed to me I wanted and desired nothing so much as a hearth and home. He raised his eyes presently, saying: “Why, Letty, you're quite a strongminded girl, aren't you?”

The woman who was at the cash desk near me frowned at me. She hated me from the first, and she said: “Ssh!” I turned upon her and said, “Is this a free place or isn't it? I've heard enough family brawls here to know. I pay for my drinks. You shut up. This place is for public entertainment or it isn't; and I'm entertaining the public.”

A man beside me, quite drunk, with two floozies, laughed, “Some temper.”

The waiter said, “Take it easy!”

Luke shuffled his feet, but he finished his drink.

“Take it easy, Letty! Let's get out of here.”

I said to the woman who was still staring at me, “If you don't like the way I behave, I'll get some friends of mine in the N.M.U. to come in and louse up your place for you.”

“Heh, Letty,” said Luke, laughing frankly; “you devil, come on, let's go home.”

I tried to read his eyes, my desperate love rushing back into me, but no sooner were we out in the damp river air than he, buttoning my coat at the throat and kissing me on the lips, said, “Letty, don't you think you're getting a bit wild? Maybe you ought to go back and live with Mathilde, eh? You're too young. Life's hard. I don't think you can take it, Letty.”

“I can,” I cried, dashing my hand to my eyes so that I wouldn't cry, but I did cry. He piloted me toward my home. He came in with me, and I clung to him, “Oh, stay, dear Luke, oh, don't tease me so much,” but he kept murmuring, “But it was only a holiday from morality, Letty, last time; we couldn't overstep the bounds, we'd both get into trouble. I've got to go, dear.”

I threw myself on the studio couch, face downwards, and sobbed loudly into the coverlet. I heard all sound cease in the little Ford apartment upstairs and with renewed energy gave out heartrending sobs. Luke stood by, helpless, saying, “What do you want me to do, Letty, what can I do? I can't help it, dear; it's the way things are.”

When I had cried myself out, I sat up, with my pink, fluffy face, and looked at him. But he picked up a brush, brushed my hair which was loose on my shoulders, took a little packet out of his pocket and said, clearing his throat, “Here's a bracelet, Letty, that I won in a lottery up at the Union; it's for the sick benefit society, I won it—here, it would look just right on you—like all young girls you've got such a pretty round wrist—”

I took it, but said, “It was for Elsie?”

“Oh, no. I told Elsie how you helped me with Leon and she said I must give it to you.”

I took it, trying it on and looking at myself in the mirror. All the old passion rose between us. I flung myself into his arms and felt my legs turn to fire. My eyes were filled with tears, “Oh, Luke, how wonderful you are.”

“How wonderful you are, Letty.”

He edged away. When he was in the street, I opened the window and flung the bracelet at him. I didn't want him to think he had tricked me. This was a cruel night that I spent, and in it was only one consoling thought, that I had been so treated because, after all, I myself was a fraud, I had intended only to make love to Luke as an experience, to perfect my technique. And sometimes at this thought, between agonies, I would laugh slightly, “Two heels, one slightly worn.”