Letty Fox (68 page)

“Now there's a man in this city I love, but what is he? A pale-faced man, stooped with work and sickness; you all have seen his face, it is the face of the dear one, behind all faces that we eagerly, desperately hunt in. He's the demon-lover, himself a plain man, but his soul, a demon. When I didn't care for him I saw him often, sleeping, eating, drinking, talking, borrowing things, quite at his ease and we could have laid down on the couch, no one would have looked. But once the look is given, the first hint of the immortal embrace, the only immortality, when this took place, the jealous, flushed apes came round, getting between us—with—suitability, morality, marriage, lechery—tearing us apart, inventing, until the whole thing was a mere shallow, sordid disgrace; and, yes, my best friends, my father and mother would have rendered me this service, too. Who hasn't suffered this, that is alive today? Not one of us alive but has suffered this affront, this insult, this insult and injury—and why, because we offer life, body, heat, pleasure, all in one hour, to someone. It's not a mean act; besides death for a cause and life-giving, it's the only decent thing we ever do!”

Late, late at night, I came back to Jane Street. The house was cold; the lights were out upstairs; I suppose they were making love.

In three days I had a letter from Luke. I did not go to work, but went to the hospital. It was a long way; it took hours. He had had an operation and had just about come out of the ether. Nevertheless, he sat up, and put his foot, in its blue hospital slipper, on the side of my chair. I held it in my hand. There were six men in the same ward and I knew his wife was coming; but there are no stool pigeons among men. I thought, they'll never tell. They never did. This was how they repaid me for my outcry against everyone, of three nights before. I went back home and thought a great deal about the question of the family. Why did Adams live with his wife when he loved me? With the landless and the moneyless, I said, the family is their only possession, and it is the only property they can acquire by a mere signature. If Adams falls ill, he is sure his wife will come; it is just charity or a miracle that I come. The family is a tract of land belonging to numerous generations; a self-help mutual. All this made me very uneasy. I wanted now to become part of society myself and have a husband in the regular way. The interest of the whole world was turned on the betrayal in Madrid. I had not only their reasons, but my own. I did not imagine that Luke, who had this fatal power over me, was the right husband for me, and since Clays, I had not met anyone suitable for me but Bill van Week; but only Clays had mentioned marriage.

When I wrote to him, I tried to tell him something of all I was feeling, but naturally, I left out my adventures with men, thinking that if it proved wise, I would tell all this later; and I wrote to Clays, now escaped to London, from whom I just had a short note which said nothing.

D
EAR
C
LAYS
,

… I thought of you today, it's a lovely evening. It's some time that I've known you, Clays. It only came to me lately that I know how to love you. The afternoon you suddenly kissed me—you remember? (Yes, I do remember, Hebe!) All week I've been thinking of you, thinking, thinking, I know the kind of man Clays is. I know he's had women. I know your history. I don't expect too much from life. But I love you. I must, because all the week I've been thinking of you, I could do nothing, I told everyone about you, read your letters over the phone; I was half-crazy, I thought I was sick, but it was just wanting you to come back. I thought I heard your voice, in the night, once sitting alone in the house, four times, more times, were you thinking of me then? Were you thinking of me all those times? I was thinking of—all love. You know … I am not selfish. I am living I really believe twenty-five hours a day. I do everything I can, except actually go to Spain and I wish I could do that. It's no life we lead, the life here. No one likes it, but we make a fantastic effort to live, just the same …

Your
P
OOR
L
ETTY
.

This was the truth. I did not want to live the way I was living; and I was becoming more disillusioned about Bill van Week every day. He had too many girl friends. For a few days I thought I would never have anything to do with men till Clays came back. I had tried this before, with poor results. It is impossible to resist the pleasure of love, once tried; and I am not the kind to sit listlessly in a room. I distrust dithyrambs. I made one up about Luke and it was disproved the very next day; but
it faut que le cæur seul parle dans l'élégie
.

It was a blow over the heart to everyone radical in New York when Madrid, and with it, Spain, fell. People were blue. Also the war, with all its murderous derring-do and fire, and with the harsh, fierce flame it had lighted Europe up with, had disturbed everyone with the first truths about mortal combat in society. For most of us had not known the first European war, nor even much about the civil war between reaction and revolution in the land of the Soviets. We knew strikers were wounded and killed in our own country, and they had armored cars and regiments with steel helmets watching the streets in Paris, and hunger marchers in Britain, things like that, but international politics still seemed to us something you could tear to pieces in an evening's talk, in our strong white teeth; and we could now see it wasn't. The whole struggle in Spain had been full of diplomatic and tactical puzzles. Who was on which side of the fence and why? Who aided and didn't aid and why?

We went at the solution of the Spanish jigsaw piecemeal, but a mental fog had already begun to settle; and most people, at least in our crowd, were beginning to argue in circles. I did myself. I really didn't know anything about politics, I just had good instincts; but most people didn't even have that. If they were bright and egotistical, they drifted off into cranky Bohemia, and some, of course, joined the Government or the police; if they were goodhearted and felt a duty to society, they thought they ought to adhere unquestioningly to some party policy or another in the spirit of, “Who are we to question—here be issues greater than our small quibbles.”

But I had seen at least a bit of European political life and knew you have to keep on fighting for liberty, even in a revolution when you're on the right side. This is more than most people can bear, I suppose, especially if they belong to our soft set. New Yorkers are goodhearted, but frightfully soft, and they're afraid to come out in the open with an ideal, and they'd rather die than be Daniel in the lions' den. It doesn't show a sense of humor. Fortunately, a rough-tempered girl like I am doesn't mind looking ridiculous at times, but only when I can get away with it. That is my weakness, too. I'm well aware that after the blow, I'm only too anxious to belong, again.

Well, I knew that the triumph of reaction in Spain would encourage all the fascists in England, on the Continent, and elsewhere. Who didn't know that? The future looked sinister. And what would become of Clays and his like? As for Clays, I trusted that his Whitehall connections would pull him out of the fiery furnace. He had hinted that he might get through and back home; but I was not prepared for the letter which I received in April, from Clays. He told me that I was a wonderful girl, the best he had ever met, except for another; and he went on at this rate for a while, not too long a while. Then, with the Englishman's irresponsible love of brevity, he told me he had simply married another woman. It was not an accident, he really thought her a splendid woman who would suit him, and he hoped that I would not get too hard a blow, but would remember that in love you've got to play for high stakes and put all your eggs in one basket; but that I was too young and naïve a girl to have done this really, as he had, for a real young girl has, after all, not really invested in love. He concluded, “You may suffer, and I feel ashamed when I think of it. But what is a little suffering which may be got over, to such an experience! Would you have been without it? Love is a great experience anyhow; people are eternally grateful (you may not believe this at the moment) to those who gave them love. You and I have something in common. For the rest, my dear little Hebe, you are too beautiful to lack a man long; and it would never have done for us to marry and repent!”

I will not enlarge upon my feelings. I sent Clays a stinging reply. I thought of sending it to his wife, but I thought of the unprincipled cruelty and self-sufficiency of the British society woman and did not so expose myself. The woman was The Honourable Fyshe.

I was now in a solitude, more or less deserved, no doubt; but I suffered as much as any farm girl kissed under the blossom and deserted in the fall of the leaf. I made up my mind to marry as quickly as possible.

M
ore bad luck struck me. As soon as she heard my International Brigadier had wed another, Susannah piled on me and accused me of meddling with her men. Things were very cool, and then very hot, until I resolved to get out of Jane Street.

At one of Grandma's pinochle parties, I met Mrs. Betty Looper, who was still Grandma's crony. They had lived through thirty years of quarrels together. Mrs. Looper sent me to see a girl who worked in a model agency. Hundreds of girls, making their way, drifted in and out, and most were trying to pair up for a room, one of those rooms with pillows and lampshades I mentioned before. This girl was about twenty-five and lived at home, being the daughter of the owner, but she introduced me to Amy and Lorna, two girls a bit older than I was. They had a well-furnished railroad flat in Sixtysixth Street. It had two entrances and four rooms, three of which could be used as bedrooms. The rent was high, although it was in a street of stables, because it was near the Park. The girls suited me, and as they offered to give me the front room with a separate entrance, I took it. It was properly heated and had a real kitchen.

I went at once and broke with Susannah. To my surprise, she wanted me to take Leon, Luke Adams's ward; she pretended that she had only taken the boy because I was in the house, to help me out. Of course, I was obliged to write Luke Adams about this and visited his home, where I met his wife, Elsie. Elsie had dropped the subject of Leon as soon as the unlucky boy had left her house and seemed put out to find that he was still in town. Luke, too, was put out. He had thought that Susannah had a heart as big as a whale, and now he found out that she was scatty, unreliable. For the time being, Leon would have to go back and sleep behind the watch-repairer's shop. Naturally, everyone thought that Leon was Luke's unacknowledged son, and made no move to help him; they just laughed. In the end Luke encouraged someone to start a children's colony only, I believe, for the sake of placing Leon there.

This Leon affair caused some heartburning in the Ford and Adams households. I felt obliged to tell Luke that Leon had caught some very bad habits from Blaise, Susannah's son, indolent and spoiled; and had heard corrupt conversation in Susannah's house. Easygoing Luke only smiled at me, and said the poor youngster had to knock about the world; he'd find himself in tighter places than that.

But my heart burned at all that went on in the Ford house. I don't mind a woman living with two husbands if she wants to and they want to. What angered me was the way Susannah played one against the other, pretending that she was going to take back, and reject, month after month; and, all the time, going to her psychoanalyst, to transfer to him. It was simple polygamy, but not the honest kind. When I left, I made some social criticism, not about her men, but about the way she tortured the children mentally and morally. She told me the pot shouldn't call the kettle black; I said, I've never done anything to children. She considered herself an admirable mother simply because she discussed Blaise's schools, intelligence quotient, sexual habits, and alleged neuroses in public. She was a reasonably rich woman and considered herself ideal from every point of view because she gave some of her money to radical causes, spent a lot on Blaise, and subscribed to the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The night before I left, I went up to say good-bye; and as things turned that way, I told her some of the more flagrant absurdities in her behavior. I said, “Blaise is about the worst-educated brat I've ever met; you're just a flabby bourgeois, Sue, and you're only radical because that's a kind of luxury too; everything is gilt-edged. Your brat can't hear dirty stories in the gutter; you have to pay a lot of money for him to hear dirty stories at the psychoanalyst's. You think you're a radical because you pay an awful lot of money for your radicalism. It's as plain as a pikestaff—”

“Why can't we part friends?” said Brock pathetically. “Poor Sue can't see herself the way we can see her, no one can.”

“That's too bad,” said Susannah, flaring up, “I know what I'm doing. I want Blaise to have a full life with no repressions.”

“You don't get the point; you've got gold-leaf all over your rose-colored specs,” said I. “You're just a sucker, Sue. They'll let you go along with your head in space, thinking you're a rebel and all that, till they're ready to clamp down. Radicalism is the opium of the middle class. Meanwhile, they're stealing your shirt.”

She looked at me as if I were mad, “Who are stealing my shirt?”

“Why,” I said, “you all kid yourselves your children are too sensitive to go to the public schools, even though every well-heeled man in this generation came from the public schools—and in those days they just had ordinary Irish and Jewish teachers who weren't respected very highly; there wasn't the to-do about education there is nowadays. But the products are all right. But your kids are too talented to go there. Private schools are just the means of encouraging the middle class to strip itself, don't you see. If you were really rich, you'd be real old-fashioned freethinkers and radicals and a danger to the State; but you are all crazy with money troubles, because Blaise and the other tots can't mix with
hoi polloi
, and so you can't think straight. You have stings of conscience, so you have, as an ointment for that, high-priced radicalism. Just the same, you can't train your kids to be radicals, not real ones, because they've got to pay you back some time and to make a living as nice bourgeois; they've got to enter the professional and government world, and for that you can't be a nay-sayer; no, ma'am. There's a very simple way of freeing little Blaise's mind and talents, and that's by saying every day, ‘Be free, think free, don't kowtow to anything, Fuehrer or Dogma.' But, you know yourself freedom's just a howling wilderness to you. You don't want freedom. Heaven's Connecticut to you, and you just want a cozy little place there, in the end. You don't want freedom; it might be uncomfortable. And you don't want Blaise to be uncomfortable, or free; you want him to conform.”