Letty Fox (41 page)

I was in a special class for themes; I was leading member of the school paper, and slaved in the publications office from morn till night; became, after two issues, an expert at dummying, writing headlines, rewriting, getting pally with the printers and writing fill-in poetry when I needed two extra lines; I learned, without tears, how to prostitute my talent, putting in little things to please the faculty adviser and editor. I turned poet, toured the radical sheets with my output, having imitated, without effort, T. S. Eliot, Ogden Nash, and perhaps Abe Lincoln in some of his worse moments. As for the rest, like every other literary-minded brat in the U.S. of the day, with Jacky as my detested and derided competitor, I was at work on the great American novel of the youth of 1936, which seemed to us then decidedly fifty years ahead of anyone born fifty years before.

We knew how to be not only iconoclastic, but smooth and level-headed about it; we had a sense of humor and could wind up an exhortation with a punch line. That is, I could. Jacky never was humorous. She lacked this quality. She intended to move into history with all sails set. She took things seriously, and I was always telling her that we'd both wind up on the barricades, only she would get shot, and I'd get the editor of the
Daily Worker
, whoever he might happen to be. Jacky told me I was shallow and an ape; I said she was like the tarpools, profound, black mud. She was a bit pale at this time, with sunken eyes; and she did not like the boys I brought round.

I swallowed every new book; she pretentiously made notes on the classics. I read
Personal History
by Vincent Sheean, which bored me intensely;
Mary, Queen of Scots
, by Stefan Zweig; much ado about nothing, as Grandmother would have said, for it apparently didn't occur to that pale-loined son of the upper-upper that she might not be the white-faced angel which he made her out to be; but this, of course, was peach melba to the mammas in the book clubs; then another book, overwhelming in its superciliousness,
Eyeless in Gaza
. I had been to a British school, and I had never seen a man so anxious to show that he had been to a British public school, that he knew a thing or two about philosophy and literature and that he was one of the Huxleys, of the inside-inside. And then,
Good-bye, Mr. Chips
, sweet, and the depressing
Ethan Frome
.

All this from my diary of that year; for, from time to time, I did keep a diary, with every intention (of course) of publishing it. It seemed to me it was a pretty easy way to write a novel about yourself. Just jot down a few notes, and later on, get it typed and give it a title. But now it is only a paragraph to me, for I had a queer sort of luck in life, which didn't depend at all, as I thought at that time, on the Sunday columns of the
New York Times
book section.

Things moved fast. I saw all the movies, including The General Died at Dawn, which we all touted; for Clifford Odets was the man who was going to take the revolution to Hollywood.

In many things we saw
soupçons
of class-consciousness. I yearned to write for the New Masses as a literary or film editor—I tried to improve them by correspondence; “You had better step down a step,” I wrote to them, “in the ladder of understandability and unassumed sincerity.” I thought I would be there in a year or two as a junior editor.

New York was lively. There were Roosevelt and Landon to be listened to, special Y.C.L. training schools. I went to one; and upon coming back, enthusiastically explained to everybody what the communist stand was on Roosevelt, grabbing what threads I could of the floating cobwebs of political explanation.

But while a stalwart in public, I was dissatisfied when by myself. I even felt the things at school were only half-explained. A thirst for the real explanation of things took hold of me. I hardly had time to worry about this. I read
The Last Puritan
, saw Gielgud's
Hamlet
twice, in the hope that the “let” would be in the second performance (the first was the opening),
White Horse Inn
, and the W.P.A. Negro theater rendering of
Noah
.

I wrote abroad to Mme. Gouraud (not a good choice) for copies of the
Humanité
to show to communist friends. I got fat, then lost sixteen pounds, spent all my monthly allowance in the first week of the month, and at length determined to ask my father for some of the famous twenty-five hundred dollars.

Everyone in the Morgan crowd became interested in this attempt; they egged me on and asked for news. Everyone doubted that the money for Jacky and me existed. I began the campaign astutely, in my usual manner, by sending Solander a poem written for the occasion.

D
EAR
S
OL
-P
APA
,

You complain with all my literary efforts I never wrote one to the author of my being, the co-author, that is. I am touched, co-author, by this complaint and here is one for you:

 

U.O.I
.

One's one, then two and later, there are three;

Then two subtracted, leaves a count of one
,

The adding was result of chemistry;

And the subtraction profit is to none
.

I was not born of mathematic strain

And had to be laboriously long taught
,

To solve quadratics, which makes worse the strain

Of multiplying debts when I have naught
.

If it's not clear, I'll draw a diagram:

To wit, to buzzard, wanton, wolf and lewd

Misogynist, misanthropist, I am

Feloniously indebted; to be crude

I could pay all in kind—this would be rash;

They'd call it their per cent, and still want cash
.

—
Letty Vulpes
.

 

Yours for purity, insecurity. This, I made, quite new, for you. I am even so devoted as to attach the original from which the above was on the typewriter wroted … Please, Papa! Your Letty-Marmalade hollers: let me have about one hundred dollars—(to begin with).

L. M.

Every magazine in the country was on my side. They all showed a slick, amusing Powers model gouging money out of smooth Papas for clothes, automobiles, hairdos, and society colleges.

Grandmother Morgan thought me not only
cute
, but became quite anxious about the money. Jacky was even
activated
so far as to write a note to her father, in which she enshrined the gem, “The conception of pocket money has grown for young girls.”

I was behind this letter. These five thousand dollars were an interest in life, something to live for. I must admit that at times I made it appear (to my friends) that the entire sum was for me, on my graduation, marriage, or whatever I had in mind.

Solander simply wrote back, “Letty, you are too flighty to handle big sums of money.” This was the first time I felt toward my father, not as a child, but as an adult. I was furious. I took a taxi over to his house and finding him in, with Persia, I began to abuse him for withholding my money from me and let him see how badly I was living. Girls with real homes did much better than I; I not only had no real home to ask my friends to, so that my chances of marriage were reduced, but he was actually sitting on my property. When was I ever to get it? He put me off with cold and severe words and promises—when I showed some self-control and had chosen a profession.

As to Jacky, he said he took no notice of her note. It was I who had prompted her to write it. I could not resist a grin at this. My sense of humor lost the battle. We ended by laughing together. However, I decided to use him as we used Congressmen and Senators. I began to send him postcards daily. I'm of an indolent nature; this didn't last long; also, Solander took no notice of me. I sent him a study of the Whodunit I had prepared for school, called “Who Killed Everybody? Or, the Mystery of the Mystery; No One Cries for the Corpse.” There were three pages of speculation, ending with the plot of a detective novel I said I was writing under a pseudonym and a paragraph I intended to include, giving away my real name. The speculative work was entitled, “Economic Bases of the Whodunit,” and the pseudonym was Abernathy Evans as the last paragraph told:

All butlers end rather nastily, especially truly high-class Yankees, entirely vapid and natural simpletons, in stories, largely existing to titillate youths, vicious, untrained, lacking perspective, eternal sophomores, who have overlooked nearly every essential, dumb so-and-so's demanding orthodox unpleasantness, gilded hangmen.

(Sigd.) Letty Vulpes.

My father telephoned me, “Well, come over, you bloody fool, and let me know what you want money for”; and he laughed.

I suppressed the joy and expectation which now kept rising in me, for Papa and I always got on well, and the interchange of our ideas, always much the same, was like the babbling of the Schubert trout stream when we were in good mood. All this because of the bursting of the money-sacks. I defended Solander three or four times in one week. I could see his point of view, entirely. Yes, he has the money, I thought. He's a true, good man. My gracious, if a man had to rule his life by these women ankylosed in matrimony, where would he be?

Grandmother Morgan, Phyllis, has a right to kick over the traces, but not Solander? What does my mother do with her life, I asked myself. Better to be Lysistrata, Diane de Poitiers, Catherine III, than Phaedra, Mariana in the Moated Grange, Ophelia. My spirit rushed toward my father, and I understood him utterly. How we had misunderstood him all these years, in our petty way! A man fights the world, makes money for his family, and they sit at home, mope, and criticize. They think up plans for plunder, and all around, life welters. But they are not life, as the poets say; they are corpses. Yes, all except, of course, young girls who have found out the secret of living, which is, that you must live for the day, have no regrets, and take as much of life as you can get; also, not to accept old saws, old wives' tales.

I telephoned my father the same evening, and went to the house to dinner. I got there on time, for I knew it was one of their complaints against me, my “C.P. time.” We had cocktails; it had the air of a celebration. I became excited.

“Don't drop dead,” I told Solander. “I know I'm very nearly pretty, but really, I've often been told so; and I've already been painted by a Hungarian painter. Oh, boy! has he etchings! But real ones. By Rodin; he says it's Rodin. I told him, they're very
moche
. That hurt his feelings. He said to me, ‘I can't pay for Felicien Rops, you know. I have to live on my work.' I said to him, ‘Why don't you make etchings yourself?' He said, ‘I have no model'; and then he asked me to pose for him, on account of my interesting figure. I assure you, Papa, you scold me for not dieting, but I have a good figure. Well, I went to the place, he put his wife and sister out of the studio and I undressed—completely—and he made some drawings, not etchings. He says I'm unique, and in a way, beautiful. That is how I know. Don't be shocked.”

“Well, go on, fair skunk,” said my father, laughing, “how does this entitle you to one hundred dollars?” He became serious. “Try to keep fixed in your mind how your poor old grandmother made that one hundred dollars and all that goes with it. Not by getting undressed for Hungarian worthies.”

I burst out laughing, and then became serious, for I saw he expected it of me. I said, “Oh, Papa, sooner or later I must tell you the truth; it may as well be sooner. I have met the man, I am in love, and it's for good.”

“Not the Hungarian, I hope!”

“Oh, no, Papa! This is innocent, the real thing.”

But Persia was there, and I was really in love, so I waited till she had gone into the kitchen. To tell the truth, on this first occasion, I felt properly a young girl and embarrassed. I said, “Papa, I've met some people you'd really approve of, this time, not my childhood friends, Selma, Linda, Celeste, who are in jams most of the time, but some people I met at the special Y.C.L. school and a friend of theirs is an Englishman—no less—a descendant of George III. I mean, spiritually; he thinks we're terribly inefficient over here. He has surprisingly fresh ideas about us. What's his name? I don't know, really. He's always in a crowd. It's Clays, but I don't know whether that's his first or his last name. He's a lanky one, older than any of us, twenty-four or twenty-five, madly fascinating, handsome; and I am almost the only one who can understand everything he says, but he is a rapturous
raconteur
, Papa; he can talk by the hour and besides, he's a wonderful kind of socialist, an Aclandite, that's after Sir Richard Acland. They believe in giving away their estates and nationalizing everything and dividing up the land and putting in a new Domesday Book. Doesn't it sound, Papa, like the eve of the French Revolution? What a slap in the nose for us if the British went socialist before the Great Democracy, eh? He says it can. I have never been so thrilled, and it isn't a crush this time; it isn't like the Duke and the English school. This man could be a duke and he's almost blue-blooded, at least some relative of his is a relative of the Silver Stick in Waiting. I am mad with enthusiasm. Alas!—there's always an alas with a man—he has a girl friend here, and furthermore, he's been married and is getting a divorce. The girl who introduced me, Hilda, she seems to be living with him and expects to marry him. I regret to say, she's not bad, but she wears flannel underwear or something. She and Clays Blank-Blank conduct themselves like husband and wife. It makes me feel so terrible—I mean, I really am in love with him, and I know—I don't blame you for not really believing me, but you know how it is. Well, I don't say Blank-Blank out of respect for his wife, or because I am afraid of the Gestapo; I just don't know his name. He told me, but I didn't get it, there were so many people there, buzzing round him; he was the lion of the party and Hilda told me she enjoyed it; her people up in White Plains think it so rude to be a radical, and here is this Clays Name-Name just the rage of New York, and if she goes with him, she meets people her parents couldn't possibly meet. He has spots on his tie, soup spots, not polka dots, and a greasy overcoat. It's because he's a younger son, or something, and anyhow, that's very British, isn't it? I don't mind. Well, frankly, Papa, it's for him I need the money—I mean, to dress up for him, because this is IT. Hilda lends him money because he doesn't get enough and anyhow what does a radical get? And, worse is to come—I wrote him a poem! You see? Don't think I'm getting soft in the brain, but it's serious. When you compare Clays with the silly boys, only eighteen or nineteen, who don't know anything, but talk about the riddle of the universe and turn their heads away in the coffee pots, so that the girls have to bleat to their wilted collars, and who say, ‘Yers, yers, I suppose so,' and can't take a cocktail without getting rough, and sit for half an hour in a booth, and then say, ‘How about it, kid!'—well, I mean I'm just giving you a vague idea—I don't mean this actual thing really happened to me—but it could—well, Papa, it isn't in the same world. They are puppies. He is a man. You know English education is so different. It expects them to be men; it doesn't tolerate puppyishness. Here is what I wrote for the Great Unknown!”