Letty Fox (79 page)

He groaned and said, in the state he was in, it was all out of the question. This was how it stood between us until Christmas. I was really fond of the guy, and would have done what I said, although the prospect of it made me tired; I said to myself, “I'm rather selfish and perhaps what I need is just this, a rather charming selfish grouch, who needs a nurse and mother; perhaps this will reform me; it will take my mind off myself and keep me away from other men—and that's a first-rate consideration; and perhaps I'll really be happy at last.” I was very sweet to Bobby and he showed his gratitude in his peculiar way; I hoped he was transferring this inward, sick love from his mother to me. Whatever influence he had he used, and he received a deferment; and he was at last admitted for limited service. From then on my dear coward made use of every device for keeping himself not only safe from the danger he saw too clearly, but even for keeping himself near New York. Yet months passed when I did not see him and he began to go out of my mind. When he did write, he emphasized the mental old age which was coming over him. When he came to town, for a while the old flame and pleasure would be renewed. But I was also looking elsewhere.

With the passing of conscription, marriages came amongst us thick and fast; the town was gay and the girls hopeful. Sad dalliances ended happily overnight, and not only these college girls and unhappy flirts, but middle-aged women started to have babies, thick as buds in May. The men did not want to work at professions, believing they would all be in the army soon and would be getting good pay in the more romantic and professional services; and that intriguing and planning began which we are all so familiar with now: the learning of special trades, the using of influence, the taking of courses, all with a view toward avoiding the greatest danger, receiving higher pay and better grades. No woman can possibly see anything wrong in this; we do not start wars and we don't like killing. However patriotic we may be, we can't inwardly understand the madness of a nation which does its best to kill off all its healthy males.

Jacky received several proposals, but could not bring herself to cut herself off forever from Simon, who was charming to her, spoke tenderly about her, but appeared to be merely annotating it before he filed it for reference, at a yet greater age. The thought of having children tempted her; we, of course, kept urging her to marry, while she kept saying, “But he was so kind to me; no one else ever understood me; and no one understands him as I do.”

She wept at all references to age; she gave money to old men in streets and stood, stony, when she had turned to look after some bent old fellow trudging through the streets between dinner and bedtime, all alone, muttering to himself. It dismayed people. They could not say what upset them so. They said, “He'll never be like that.” She would not answer this.

The war came and during the first days after Pearl Harbor, people went about with a holy expression, both dumb and secretly shocked and yet radiant. Some young men were terrified; the girls began enrolling themselves for war service; the oppression of the last few months fell away. The nation was glad to be at war, and yet in a trance. Marriages fell off; when people heard that babies conceived after Pearl Harbor would not count for deferments, marriages fell off even more. As for myself, I had not been lucky enough to find the right man at the right time, in the panic, and so had to look round in the same old hit-and-miss way. The town was bright at this time, however; and the middle classes and those beginning to see money in the war were in a spendthrift, hopeful mood. A young girl like me could have a very good time, and there were still a lot of men in their twenties to take as escorts. The town was jammed with wealthy refugees from Europe, and war profiteers on the upgrade. Among the refugees we met some recent wives who had once been mistresses and café loafers in our time in Paris and London—friends of Aunt Phyllis, Mother, Pauline, and ourselves. Aunt Phyllis avoided all these, having forgotten this world and having by now deeply embedded herself in a fat, rich, middle-class, card-playing set, where nothing was spoken of but the prices of furs and apartments and the vices of servants. With some malice, though, I talked quite freely about them when I went to see Aunt Phyllis, mentioning the names she had known them under and the ones they now wore. Most of them had done so much better than she had, poor smug suburban wife. As for me, I made the rounds. Their husbands, who had been their lovers, had nearly all kept in touch with Solander, who was a merry good-natured man, with a wonderful talent for business, though not for moneymaking. The new couples, most of whom were past middle age, remembered me as a handsome, shrewd, impudent Paris child, and so enquired after me. When they saw me, they were delighted at my appearance and clever conversation; and while the husbands went about their new businesses, the wives set about inviting me out and running up lists of eligible bachelors for me; I was offered, tentatively, a colonel from North Africa, a rich young Jew from Oxford, a young psychoanalyst. I spoiled these chances, if chances they were, by my impatience and by having too many other irons in the fire. I could not play the role of interesting young girl for more than an hour or two; my hard knowledge of the business and social world, my sense of the comic, and that fierce, almost brutal energy that took hold of me when I saw a new man, and turned me into termagant and seducer, soon ripped the veil from the eyes of these women who were, after all, no such sentimental fools as they pretended to be. These women of the world made me quite sick when they played at the maternal, and toward me; “Oh, sisters, drop those masks,” I wanted to say. Were they not like me, I like them? I was no more a young eligible girl than they, yet I had as much chance of success as they, if I went about, as they had, with my eyes open. I do not want to give the wrong impression about these women; some of them had paid their own expenses during their long liaisons, many were rich women; one I know for certain had bought a house, an automobile, and furniture for the wealthy man whose mistress she had been and whose wife she now was. Not only that, but she now worked day and night with him, in his business, like any proper French wife, and in all good faith did not understand libertinage or impurity in speech.

These women, who were mostly of good bourgeois families, had excellent manners and expected European manners from me. This was the turn of the screw; I had to forget them. Also, I had other fish to fry. But if I dropped them, it was not out of hypocrisy or necessity, as it was with Aunt Phyllis and Mother. Mother was ashamed before them, that was her trouble. She was a deserted wife and poor, and they were now wives moving in good café society, living in uptown hotels, wearing expensive clothes, with much forward-looking toward war speculation. All had active and quite tender husbands. Months passed for me, in this way, months of excitement and fever, alternating with dull, fretful months in which I worried about my future.

The example of Jacky, my father's good advice, and the general restlessness put me to work again. I looked at my love letters, my unfinished novels, poems, and plays, and began to think: Time's fever is all in their bloods, and I think I won't beat it by neglect. Time does not respond either to affection or neglect; and I can't close my eyes to the fact that I, Letty Fox, am now just on twenty-one years old.

In a fit of petulance, I resigned from my publishing office, but through Erskine, I got a job in the editorial office of a weekly political magazine, with smart circulation and flip vocabulary. I was forced to it, too, by my debts, which were outstanding from the previous Christmas. I learned the journalist's technique, had practice in writing, learned cable writing, read the provincial press for clippings, and wrote stories, as well, about certain things that I was supposed to know, such as modern personalities in art and music, on the radical side, economics (because I had once been such a hard-working Communist), and things of that sort, that I had honestly come by. I was on the editorial side of the fence, and was now uptown, near Rockefeller Center. As I had joined this crowd of cynical radicals—they thought of themselves as radicals, though they were completely corrupt, worked like mad for the success of the paper, and cared not a jot about the poor—I was obliged at last to give up my true political views, at least officially.

For a long time now I had been working with people with the same underlying political philosophy, the same esthetic creed, the same over-all interests in life, the same love-lives, almost; the same advanced, sophisticated views on things like psychoanalysis, divorce, writing, new trends in the movies. I had been with people who took in the same magazines, went to the same coffee shops and dances, and I had been (for all my doubts and troubles) very happy. I had felt a great compatibility with all these people, of whom some were Susannah Ford, Bill van Week, and even most of my other men; and this compatibility of views, and pure, deep-spirited New Yorkism had made me friendly even with men who had loved and left me. The sting was there, sometimes; sometimes it hurt very much; but, also, I could live with them and not feel shipwrecked, just because society or this social group had not abandoned me. I had no need of great personal passions. I had no need of being exceptional. What I had in me that gave me the most joy were two things: the capacity for an enormous output of work, and the ability to enjoy myself regardless of expense, regardless of others; a healthy trait, if a bit barbaric.

There were no
delicates
in this new job; all were New York born. I had no secrets. In my moments of suffering I told most of my troubles to everyone, men, women, and bosses. They were like me, sympathized. People are generally kind; some take advantage, but even they can be kind. The person who gives himself away as I do is more likely to receive kindness than the timid soul hiding his wounds—so said I; and it seemed to work out for me. To keep up my mental life, I began to keep a diary for myself, full of quite silly political speculation, and I found, if I didn't want to repeat editorials, that I had a few and very feeble economic concepts, nothing to enable me to solve the problems that every turn of patriotic feeling and every necessitated change of political line brought up. One of the questions was pretty common those days: “In the face of extreme restriction, what was the incentive for capital to go on capitalizing?”

That is the way I put it to myself. We mulled these things over, but I found no one knew any more than I did, for the answer wasn't, “They do it out of patriotism.” It's a fairly safe estimate that no one does anything from noble motives, until you strike the exceptions like Jacky and Gondych; and Gondych, query. I am not, we are not, as they. Society itself must change; you cannot depend on individual nobility. That is what I think. We have no measures of morality and motive—someone said something like that. Alas! I copy; but the sentiment is true. And this is why, with such heartiness, I have always sunk myself in my group. There are great movements of the group to which no one can be superior. I am not wiser than my fellow; and especially, I doubt my wisdom to be smarter than the massed forward pressure of the vanguard. I would not dare to stand alone. I might be mad and not know it.

Now, inspirited by this lively work on this snappy magazine weekly, I shook myself out of a long sleep. I had been in a cocoon, it seemed to me. For instance, while loafing, I worried about my misadventures with men; but, at work, I took them in my stride. I had spent a year, no, eighteen months in a protective envelope of routine and vice and occasional moods, without producing anything. I was rewarded for this outburst of work and new adult stand by meeting, it seemed to me, the ideal man for me. One can't help these feelings of rewards and punishments.

I discussed the trivia of daily existence with the office crowd, and important theoretical questions with those that remained of the old group; with my friends too, and of course, domestic questions with Jacky. I sometimes visited my father or mother; but now I had one other to whom I could talk about more serious problems—well, slightly more serious, they seemed. I had met a Man. I breathed not, stir I dared not, lest something should happen: the usual misstep or mistake. As the cow in State Fair thought, looking at the hog hero, “She was not sure whether Blue Boy was a hog or an illusion.” When you find everything you want, you hold your breath. I had created like—who was it?—created a man in my image, or the hope of one, and then, whenever I saw man or boy with the appearances of my ideal—unworthy confession, but the basis of real love I suppose—I fancied myself in love. I had never, till now, been in love. Every time, disillusioned, I said to myself, Am I never going to be in love? I don't fancy myself as a quester, but I'm a human being; I'm frail, I have to quest. And so on! But now—a man of twenty-seven, the ideal age, the perfect American, completely blond, blue-eyed, handsome, beautiful in every respect, and with an expression on his face, when he was not thinking of anything in particular (which seemed to be often), which was a mixture of natural dignity with goodness. A miracle! Well, in short, all I needed. He had been an actor, but only as a student. He had been an engineer and an economic analyst for a foreign government. Now, he was working for a big uptown firm and I met him through the newspaper. He used to cast his eye over technical articles for us. I had the job of taking the articles to him. Romantically—pretty girl enters office and finds the man; thus, I found him. Better, he came from a very old New England family, and his general sophistication and political views were the best possible for me. All this is just a description of externals, things that can be described.

As for the rest, what you see but can't describe in round figures or on a chart—he was a man, not just half a human couple, like so many men I have met. He was a man with all the sensibilities and experiences, and even the craft of a real man; and my attitude toward him was extraordinary; that is, for me. I felt at once that I couldn't bear a cheap episode with him. I thought, if he tries to make me, it's all over, I won't see him again. But anyone could see he was not the type to go into love affairs like that; he was too serious—perhaps if not serious enough for marriage, for the great and sober emotions. When I know someone who seems fun, but doesn't really get me excited, I telephone him if I want to see him. But this time I could not. I didn't want to start things from my side; I wanted nature to take a hand. We contacted psychically, you could say, at once, at first sight; got to know each other in the first few words. It was steady, delightful, and there was the flash of lightning. We knew each other, and yet not altogether; there was an element of wildness and speed in the air, exhilaration, as if we were on the Loop-the-Loop. Then, each time I saw him, I lost my breath in this way. Curious, for me. I wasn't excessive. I couldn't be, with my new method.