Letty Fox (50 page)

First curiousness must bear and die

As she; the kingly cockatrice

His hissing mail hath unwound twice

And startles the phalanstery
.

Ruby tree like blood doth shine

In jus-primae-noctis murk;

In all the shriveled bowers lurk

Carnivorous eyes that wait to dine
.

And sexless sentinels shake the night

With sapphire bayonets fixed in guns

Their bores like our star-shooting lenses
,

Hand mortars large as God's best suns

All throwing diamonds in cadenzas
.

(
But he has taken the best gift, Adam
,

Walking softly with his madam
.)

Fast shut now, the delicious gate—

With trembling hair, our mother white

Leads breath-filled Adam by the hand

On sticks, shards, stones, till weary quite

He falls, all spent, upon the sand

But thinks not Eve to reprimand
.

The angry God one thing knew not

This thing thought not to take away;

He knew not youth and age as they
,

He could not really curse the spot
.

Self-willed world-owner, all things lent

To all-obedient idiocy;

But gives for stealing from his tree
,

The hangman, cops, war, death and rent
.

He tries to interest take, in pain;

The loans retaken, he's bereft;

He fears the one who did the theft
,

He re-creates them, Abel, Cain
.

And the very day I received this, Clays left, with only twelve hours to spare, for Spain; he gave me a seal ring but I was not his bride. Mother was quite impatient with this or anything that was not a-b-c. Nevertheless, with pride, I showed my ring and my poem, not only at school, but ran with them to my father's ribald company, filled, usually, not with aesthetes but with those drifters of the big city, publishers, readers, and other idle wits who fortunately have time for drinking, eating, witting and whoring. They are not a moral lot to throw a young girl with, nor are they really vicious, but are a sounding-board of the city, as is Wall Street. As I was meeting publishers, or publishers' salesmen and publishers' readers, my thoughts turned more and more toward literature. I thought that I should get used to good society, Clays and I might cut a good figure here or in England or in France—or even in any country, say Italy or Turkey, in which we might live—if Clays really turned out to be an attaché. I thought a great deal about the expediency of our friendship for the Soviet Union; for the fact is that, with all his education, his birth in a foreign embassy, and his traveling, Magdalen College, and the rest of it, Clays would have to pant for his attaché-ship a bit if he remained a friend of Russia; the British Empire was still operating at the old stand. But Clays was young and so was I; we had not the sordid preoccupations of the adults. We did not want things to remain in
statu quo
for our lifetime, like the septuagenarian senators and congressmen and the heads of the Elks; because, actually, things had been changing since we were born, and we were enthusiastically used to it. Although our parents (my mother, I should say) worried about my
sense of security
(a cant phrase of the time), none of us had ever had that; and it was rather the struggle that made us strong. Some reporter (Clays told me) asked Karl Marx to define life in one word—well, a dopey question if ever there was one; but trust a reporter, said Clays, to think up the most vapid stunts in the world, anything for a byline—and K. M. said, “Struggle.” And what else indeed relates me,
Letty-Marmalade-always-in-a-jam
, to the plant in my window box (not put there by me, but by my Italian superintendent) if not this Darwinian word?

To proceed. I was always in such good form at my father's, and always so soggy at my mother's, that I preferred one to the other. Having told Father this, I heard him say, “And why not? Doesn't everyone prefer Life to Death?” This was his view of his own life, and he had reduced it to very simple terms. Mathilde was death; Persia was life. This was uncommon simplicity in the big city.

At Solander's and Persia's I met, among others, a young advertising man by the name of Gallant Stack, a radical from Kentucky, who made part of his fame by ridiculing southernisms. He was a bold, political radical certainly, and exposed himself very consistently; but a lot of people disliked him without cause. He was handsome, powerful, blond, gay, and reckless. He gave the impression of being a slob without being unclean; perhaps it was the loose-neckcloth idea of elegance in him. He was both a country boy and a gentleman, and successfully cultivated the pose of a Southland Squire. He had other idiosyncrasies: he told wonderful stories, some original, and boasted about the size and power of his male parts, with much joviality and good nature. He would relate how he told stories in small-town living rooms, while wives shifted and fanned themselves and glued their eyes on his extremities, the while, in fact, he felt the disseminator showing all its unusual dimensions, for this was the effect of wine, ladies, and fun upon him. When someone (a woman) would laugh with him, he would say instantly, rising and coming to stand over her, with boorish good-nature, “When do you want me to come and see you?” If the husband or brother were there, he thought it very gallant to say, “When will your husband (or brother, or friend) be away? Any evening you are lonely, let me know, and I will not disappoint you.”

This bouncing rustic gallant was so direct that at first I was obtuse, for I could not believe he was saying what he said; it was the drift of his stories that enlightened me further. I had always considered myself an indiscreet person (although an excellent and consistent liar), for, on occasion, if annoyed by a person, I might blurt out his characteristics to himself; but I certainly had never blurted out my own characteristics, failings, and misfortunes to others, as did Gallant Stack.

It was my father's forty-second birthday on this occasion I describe, and there was quite a gathering, chiefly of men. There was Gideon Bowles, the old family friend, a tall, strong man of forty-odd now, with thick black hair, clear hazel eyes, and red lips. He had been thin and a black-and-white dresser. Now a few visits to the Californian coast and to Mexico had shirted him in pink, red, or blue; and his suits had noticeable checks or stripes. He was an architect. He had built a Camelot castle on one corner of a crossroads in Beverly Hills, and a Riviera dream in ice-cream pink on the other. He designed fountains, gates, paths for these houses with the liberality of a dope fiend. For years he had been a modest, crushed, thoughtful man with darned socks; this was during his mother's lifetime. She had recently died and now he was bumptious, tipsy, and coarse; and his affairs, which had been kept hidden, now came out in all their misery. He was such a grand, tall, simple fellow in appearance, and spoke so of his mother, that the girls believed in him. Now one of his girls was with him, a tall sawney called Alice, who had been his mistress for a long time. She had a terrific lust for life and slept with anybody almost—priests, organizers, salesmen, stewards on boats—but was succulently jolly on her best days. She should have known better, but now she hankered after this Gideon. I was a wise child and knew my mother was sorrowful too, because she had thought he was her best friend. Sex is a mystery to me still.

There was also a rowdy goose-fleshed blonde who had had three husbands, who never smiled, and shouted commands at people; and Luke Adams, a pinched, nut-brown man with a monkey face and thick black hair. This man Adams was taller than he appeared to be. He stooped and shuffled, and he appeared to be careless of his body, in mind devious, silent, resentful; but he at times also seemed sharp, humane, passionate. When one came nearer, one saw that his clothes were clean; they were simply poor and did not fit. He believed in bargains and would shop for days for a cheap shirt on the East Side, or in some godforsaken hole in Jersey or in Brooklyn, rather than get the same thing round the corner. He had this gift: when he stood near a person and wished, at that moment, to express good feeling, a gust of heat was felt. If it was a woman, she was simply scorched by him, for women he was an open hearth; his eye lengthened, melted. He was a well-known trade-union organizer, a cartoonist and pamphleteer. At present, I looked at him from the outside, with curiosity, respect, and timidity. I had certainly not yet got over my timidity with men, and the experience with Clays held me back.

My father, who should have been secret, in a short time began to laugh, gesticulate. He lost control of himself in his earthy good humor, and told them all about Clays. “Letty's bound to marry into the English aristocracy! When she went to school, only eleven years old, she used to bed down with a duke, but that was in the daytime, and I saw her as the future Duchess of Greenshire, the Duke liked her very well—”

“He liked nearly all the girls very well,” said I, with unusual modesty.

“The Duke was fourteen then,” said my father, “and I thought if I kept Letty around there a few more years, I would be father-in-law to a duke. But now, I'm going to be father-in-law—and in point of fact, illegally am father-in-law—to the relative of a knight-baronet, and knowing the incest committed by the English upper classes, note I mean social and financial incest, Miss Paula Fitz-Broke marrying the Birthday-Honored Sir Oodles Lucre and the sister of Sir Oodles marrying Mr. Maudlin Degree, who is first cousin of the Duchess of Handmedown, whose son will marry Miss Angela FitzBroke—since this is the system, in England, I expect in a very short time, after the Spanish Civil War and all that, or even before, to be related to almost everyone in Burke's Peerage and the Cabinet. I don't know whether you know that there is a rule in England that at least fourteen members of any Cabinet, if you trace them out, are really first cousins or first cousins of first cousins. It's impossible to avoid it; and if they're not first cousins, they sit side by side, in the administration of industries, and eventually become brothers-in-law. Thus, when Clays Manning does his duty by my daughter and makes her an honest woman—I regret to say it is now necessary—”

“Papa!” I cried.

“Well, my dear,” he said, “if you stayed all that time with Clays and you are still a virgin, I should be very much surprised,” and he laughed.

“Jesus, Solander,” said the slow, thoughtful voice of Luke Adams, “you ought to give her a break!” And he turned on me his secret smile.

“Is it true, kid; is it true?” cried Gideon, in his whisky baritone. “Are you married, or thereabouts? Let's celebrate this. This calls for a drink. Let's all drink to Letty—what's his name? Manning. And will you be Lady Manning?”

“He is not a baronet,” I said. “He's just a tramp; a red. Of course, the family forgives him, because in England they allow Oxford boys to champ their wild oats a bit and be reds for a couple of years. They think they'll coax them round. Clays—” But with this name on my lips, in this company which had just heard all these details of my private life, I could say no more, and blushed deeply.

Luke Adams smiled and came impulsively to my side, putting his arm round my shoulders. “Jesus, Letty,” said he, “congratulations; what's he like? I'm glad. What are you going to do while he's in Spain? Gee, I'm sorry—it's a pity.”

Meanwhile, Gideon had routed out glasses and got a bottle from Persia and was pouring out drinks all round, rummaging ice from the icebox, and splashing water into the glasses. He poured his own drink last, made it strong, and this he raised for a second, “Well, good luck, Letty!” And he downed the drink.

They had been talking mostly about politics, collective security, whether France or the U.S.A. would intervene in Spain in any way, the hopes for Russia's intervention, food for the people, new books; but now they became gay and got on to stories and conundrums.

Gallant Stack said, “Do you see any resemblance between a constipated owl and a soldier? Well, there isn't a real resemblance; the soldier shoots and shoots and sometimes hits. I knew a woman, this is true,” he continued smartly, “she kept a call house; later she got married, and came in to see me, when I was in her town again, all fluttery, and showed me her ring. I said, ‘Well, Mamie, I suppose you're keeping your business on.' She flushed angrily and said, ‘He ain't no pimp; I'm retiring. He'll run it.' ”

Gideon Bowles laughed loudly and slapped his knee at everything, making rude noises in his hands and mouth, and washing it down with liquor all the time. He now horned in with one of his horse stories going about town.

“A man down in the streets of Louisville, or Frankfort, Kentucky, near the big Derby track, that is—this man is going along the street on Derby Day, or else during the morning sprints—have it your own way, and the man hears, ‘And to think I used to be at even money right there!' He looks round, but the street is empty except for a milkcart with an old horse in it. He takes another step and hears, ‘To think I used to start from scratch and get to the post first every time!' And with it, a heartbroken sigh. The man starts, looks round, and the horse says, ‘Yes, it's me. To think I used to be a coming wonder as a two-year-old!' The man, aghast, stands by, and when the milkman comes out of the house, he says, ‘Say, your horse can talk!' The milkman says, ‘Oh, him! You can't believe a thing he says. Has he been at you with his lies?' ”

He continued, “Say, do you know this one? A man with a dog goes into a stable to saddle a horse for riding. The horse says, ‘Oh, let me alone; I'm too tired to take you out this morning.' The man says, ‘Can you talk?' The dog says, ‘Yeah, he really don't talk bad for a horse; it's kinda wonderful, ain't it?' ”