Letty Fox (4 page)

After I had, on Saturday, given the superintendent the promised thirty dollars, an unavoidable bribe during the housing shortage, I went to my father's office in the Produce Exchange. He is a manager and perpetual understudy for an old friend, Joseph Montrose, who is in ship chartering and freights. Papa likes to see me there and to show off my good looks and cleverness. He took me out to lunch in “the Custom House” restaurant in the Exchange; and after we had chatted for a long time about the Third World War and the general fate of this lithosphere, I asked him for the thirty dollars which I had paid the superintendent. He frowned. I had a long tussle before he sighed, pulled out a piece of paper and pencil, figured upon it ostentatiously, and agreed to take me back to the office, where he would get an advance from the treasurer. I told him the address of the place and when I was to move in. I asked him if he would come and help me bring in the furniture, but he said, “I will be there, all right, but you must have the money to pay the men.” I was irritated and said he had never given me a home. He stood me another drink downstairs, and it ended well, with my father merely repeating that I must not expect him to have the money for the men. I had taken a taxi downtown, and had had a cocktail before going to his office; and now I took a taxi back uptown to Eleventh Street. As this made a small hole in the thirty dollars (and this was about all I had) I telephoned to Mother asking her to meet me for a cocktail at Longchamps in Twelfth Street. She made a fuss about it, but did eventually meet me there, and sat on a stool at the bar as she really likes to do. I then asked her to lend me ten dollars for tips to the men who move the furniture. She only had six dollars with her and this left me rather short. I told her I had barely the money to pay out to servants at the hotel, and as she had disappointed me, I was obliged to ask her to pay for the drinks. However, it was all right. She told me she was visiting her youngest sister, my Aunt Phyllis, for the week end, and that Phyllis, Phyllis's husband and Cissie Morgan (her mother) were always so ashamed of her poor dress that they were always offering her small sums. I begged her to take the money this time if it were offered to her. “It humiliates me so,” cried Mother. “It makes me indignant, too,” I said; “but take it once.” However, I dropped this fruitless struggle.

When Mother asked me the address of my new place I misquoted it, so that she would not go straight there; and though she would see it soon, I could not let her see it till I was in. My plan has always been to present people with the fait accompli. It is the only way to get things done. I therefore told her, as I had told Papa, that the rent was only sixty dollars monthly; I thought I would leave them in the dark, making myself out to be a good bargainer, for a few months at least, until life caught up with me. If expenses mounted too high, I would simply put it all before them and ask for aid; but, frankly, I did not expect to come down on them; I thought I would see my way clear by the fall. I would have had it out with Cornelis by then.

After all these anxious calculations I left Mother on lower Fifth Avenue to navigate her way home. She lived near the Hudson River now, in a small affair. I came back to my apartment.

I was at first almost deliriously happy. The first night, after I had put up photographs of the Morgan family, I unpacked all my old letters and books and I plunged into this stuff, this real, close-woven fabric of my youth, which was past, with pleasure. There were boxes of letters, photographs which I had kept from childhood, letters I had written to Grandma Fox, returned to me after her death, poor darling; letters which had passed between me and my sister Jacky, in our squabbles, and letters from my mother and father, who had been separated for many years. There were theater programs, menus from Paris, bills from a school I once attended in England. What a varicolored life; and yet at times I felt I had nothing to tell. There were also, of course, many packets of letters from boy friends. I had been wanting to get at these for months, just to check up; to see, for example, whether the graduated mendacity of Mr. A of five years ago, was not a perfect model of that of Mr. B with whom I was still philandering. I had come to the point when I wanted to make a clean sweep, and felt a general uneasiness about the kind of life I was leading. “A tourist,” Papa called me, a tourist to men, that is. I reckoned I knew enough about life to write a real book of a girl's life. Men don't like to think that we are just as they are. But we are much as they are; and therefore I have omitted the more wretched details of that close connection, that profound, wordless struggle that must go on in the relation between the sexes. I have come to the conclusion that it must go on and that certain realities of love between men and women should not be told. I have written everyday facts which, doubtless, have happened in the life of almost every New York middle-class girl who has gone out from high school or college to make a living in the city.

M
y office friends and Captain White came on Sunday and painted the apartment. I had no time to clean up on Monday before work. My father and his girl, Persia, came on Saturday evening and helped me to arrange things. I was obliged to put Mother off until Monday evening, so that she would not meet them on Saturday, or Captain White on Sunday. Mother was very liberal about my boy friends, but seemed quite bitter about my going about with any married man, even though we were still, you might have said, still under martial order. Father came back alone on Monday night and found Mother there; and so I got all my cleaning up done, for since they would not speak to each other, except to say “Good evening,” no time was lost. The next night my poor good mother came again, with my sister Andrea and Andrea's friend Anita, and so between us all I got settled in. Mother had found out the rent and said it would have been better for all of us to get a place together, but I had no consideration. She and Andrea and Anita lived in a hole over in Chelsea while Mother and Anita worked long hours at mediocre pay in war work, and Andrea did all the housework and minded the baby. All that my father could give them went to a lawyer in a certain legal affair which I will explain later—to put it briefly here, a paternity suit against the father of Anita's baby, a young war worker.

What I said in response to Mother's outcry was, “But, Mummy, you never had any consideration for us. In the first place, you did not get a divorce and so did not have regular alimony to keep us in security. Then, you were too proud to take help from Grandma Morgan, and so I never had the right clothes or atmosphere, till I earned them myself. Then, if you had settled everything as women usually do, instead of messing round in your habitual way, I believe the family would have taken you into Green Acres or Grandma's Long Beach hotel long ago, and we would all have had a wonderful home for years. Grandma would certainly have found you another husband.” Mother and I had another squabble after this along the usual lines. She said I thought only of myself and I said she thought only of striking an attitude and what a gloomy, unrewarding attitude it was. “Some people, I know,” said I, “say I have bounce, I am preposterous, I elbow people out of my way and am out for myself. I am, Mummy, like the King of Siam, but at least it doesn't impose on anyone; I am what I am, and I make my way in the world. But, goodness, I should have been much better off with a stepfather or with anything than with this perpetual casting back into the past. Could I bring my friends to a real home, even when I lived with you—no! Echo loudly answers no! Why? Because I was imposing on you. So I was. A youngster has to impose on its parents. I know you effaced yourself and went to the movies and all that, but was that a home? Well, you ask what kind of a home I wanted? Well, my own kind, I suppose. You're a good woman, Mummy, but we don't mix; and what is the use of pretending that we do. I know it's unfair, I don't say I'm the best daughter you could have had; but I've simply got to be on my own now. Do you know how old I am, Mother? I'm twenty-four. That's awful. I've simply got to live my own life. I know we've been over this before, but I simply boil over with it every night. Think how I live! Men make me propositions every day—this, that, and the other: none of them so far honorable enough for me to take the plunge. You don't like to hear that. I can't help it. I'm sorry. I've got to make the right start in life. Mother, I'm absolutely determined, when I find the right man, to be the perfect wife. Now you know nothing about men, Mother; and I do. I don't say I'm a genius at them. I've seen my friends marry and I wouldn't say they did badly, but how dull they look; I can't stand that lamplight conversation round the family table. There must be something better for me. So I'm browsing! You've got to let me. I've got to be selfish now in order to be a good wife and mother later on. That's why I can't live with you and the girls. Anita's got her kid and you've had three, Mother; but I have none. You've got to let me have my way.”

“I'm not going to argue,” sighed my mother; “you're just like your father. You can argue up and down and round the corner and still I know I'm right. However, you're far too selfish to bother about us.”

I was furious with Mother. When she went I telephoned to Papa and he came over and took me to Chumley's, where I had two brandy alexanders and was at once, as usual, scolded by him, for my extravagance

“You take too much advantage of your male escorts, that's your weakness,” said my father; “men don't like it.”

“Look, Papa, have I got to write to Aunt Maybell's Soul Secrets Column or something,” I said, tears coming into my eyes; “I want to talk to a realist. I had another fight with Mother. Why are there good, gentle women in the world? They make wonderful mammas— and I don't pretend I'm a good daughter—but what a pain in the neck they are!”

“You owe your mother a lot,” said he, of course.

“Life, love, but not the declining of happiness,” said I. “I could write a book about what she doesn't know.”

“Well, why don't you?”

“I would,” said I gloomily, “if I didn't know so much. The trouble is that I haven't a naïve young flame, my Pegasus isn't a pony. I've read the world's best literature and the world's best critics and inspiration comes only when you're green.”

“I'd like to fan your noble tail,” said Papa, laughing. “Come on, lazybones, admit you're a slob and have a good time out of life. You know damn well you don't care who wins the horse race as long as you've got a dinner date.”

“That's true,” I said, sighing; “I'll end up yet strutting it as fattest goose round the village mudhole; I like anywhere and nowhere; it's ambition with clay feet.”

My father is very sympathetic and has many of my characteristics, although not my vices; and perhaps this is his weakness. We spent a lovely evening talking over everything and Papa told me about my mother's youth (he became moist-eyed) and many other things; and as you don't know my father, Solander Fox, I have to explain that all this was told with exuberance, freshness, and astounding detail as if it had all happened yesterday, no, half an hour ago, and Solander had been a witness of it all. Not only that, my father's genius as a conversationalist is such that no one can remember later whether or not he, too, was not a witness of all the events and conversations Solander describes; the truth is, I have heard friends of my father describe events at which they never could have been present (and which, in fact, did not take place except in my father's imagination). Solander's stories are the kind which are carried all over town; months later they come back to him in a different— usually a diluted—form. Solander is prized as an evening visitor, he is a great entertainer, he has spent his life at it; he is too much of an entertainer, he has spent his talent at it. And in this respect we are very much alike. That is why we still like to go out together, in spite of the differences in our tastes and morals, and why we can chuckle robustly, argue earnestly for hours, and come home exhilarated. Of course, it is not Freudian love, for I never wanted to marry anyone like my father; I always preferred those (to be frank) more shoddy; and I had to have a man who could spend money on me freely and who can make love as an amusement.

What I heard this night about Mother was, briefly, this. Father had known Mother as a little girl, but first been conscious of her attractions as a woman when she was about fifteen and was leaving high school to go to drama school. Mother was lovely, he said, serious, absorbed in her future. She studied her roles when he was there, in a husky, ventriloquial voice which was really moving, frightening even, and which seemed to reach farther as she lowered it—a magnificent stage voice. But she had a very uneven temperament, none of that blast of energy and self-confidence necessary, and took her first few failures to heart.

I myself think she was born for the stage, and that she never got over her disappointment. She knew many roles by heart, especially out of Chekhov, Shakespeare, and Eugene O'Neill, and she often recited them to me when I was a child. At the time I thought they were her own experiences and that she had deeply suffered. What moved me most were the stereotyped words that always came so penetratingly out of her mouth. I would sit in one end of the places we inhabited—rooms in hotels, apartments and the rest—and listen to her at the other end. Her personality, full of drama, filled the apartment, and she had a disturbing quality: she unsettled you so much that you could neither meet her eyes nor return to your own reflections. It took me years to sort out in my mind which were my mother's own experiences, which were her dramatic roles, and which were roles which she had created for herself out of her own experiences. When I first read one of my mother's roles—it was Chekhov's
The Seagull
, and I read it when I was about nine years old—I was astounded and then angry. I thought my mother had stolen the words and was a liar. But I at once got to understand about the theater through this and became a voracious reader, thinking I could see through everyone in the same way; I had the impression that everyone stole some of their roles from books.