Letty Fox (65 page)

In the morning I replied to Lucy Headlong's sticky Christmas letter with a yes. It had occurred to me that this Luke affair began after the return from Arnhem. Superstitiously I attached some spiritual power to her ancient company of ghosts, to the love potion that the air of the mysterious region was for me. I could spend three sleepless nights like the last ones there. I wondered if, on my return, another love affair as exciting would await me, for like all lovecareerists I was a great believer in amulets, luck-bearers, and the evil eye. I added to my letter one lie, “Jacky cannot come.”

I did not ask Jacky. I wanted all the love-luck for myself. This suited me in every way. I hoped either to forget Luke or to substitute for him upon my return from Arnhem.

I confess I was shocked at the appearance of Lucy Headlong at the station.

The snow was hard and no more fell. The square melon-lighted houses were set among leafless woods and could be seen unnaturally near, without benefit of perspective. There was this thing, the lifelessness of Arnhem's neighborhood, perhaps Death by the hand of the unwarmed North that has neither sun nor sustenance nor spring; it was the spidery weather that floated. How miserable is the northern winter where even at sunlit midday, and certainly at nightfall, a vigorous, invisible yet very sensible creature of death goes striding past over the snow, leaving faint footprints like the marks of leaves, multitudinously treading in the bare forests. The snow spread like a dinner cloth on the shallow rim we climbed before reaching the mound of Arnhem. Slate-colored Juncos pecked in the snow beneath shriveled grapevines. There were wreaths in all the houses, from holly and seedling pines. Cherry ribbons and berries were hung up and there came the smell of baking and the sight of piled wood. By the roads, on the banks of snow, in less frequented ways, there were deer tracks; and small furred paws had pocked the snow hedges into clearings.

I spoke of the snow. From the aged woman in her yellow turban and yellow dress under the old fur coat, this other Lucy Headlong, came a bitter, crazy laugh.

“It reminds me of a Christmas when I was a child— My cousin had a little hatchet and was attacking a block of wood when he fell and cut his chin. The blood dripped from his chin and dug a hole in the snow. They all rushed out and picked him up, but I stood there laughing, and in me I felt something glorious I had never felt before. I felt no regret; and a strange wonder, a beauty in life, that this little boy that I so hated and despised—such an eanling, such a woolly lamb, such a mamma's boy—had created such a brilliant, if pathetic scene—the snow. See it, Letty, the boy's new blue coat, the scarlet blood, the sun, the bright hatchet, and my own yellow wool coat—I got my sense of color then and got it straight from Christmas Day. For the first time I felt victory and knowledge. I was superior.

“They brought me in. Father beat me with both bare hands. I bowed my head and shoulders and was secretly laughing. I was shut up in my room and thought of the wickedness of the world; but every time I calmed down I would begin to recall the scene and then a low chuckle ending in a snigger, or a loud childish laugh, would break from me. Again, suddenly, I would see his tooth showing through his lower lip, the blood-on-snow, and his silly face convulsed with howling. And I never did lose the humor of that scene! When I see snow, I still exult. Yes, how mild and stupid everyone is. He never came to any good. I knew it, I could see him as he was.”

Lucy Headlong embroidered this anecdote. She exclaimed with the same note, “All the people that I'm not supposed to see, that Adrian hates, are back, of course, for Christmas. They would be calling in, but he forbids it; and I am glad to have you, at least, my lady Letty.”

I looked at her through lowered lids. Her face had darkened and was clenched like a fist. She twitched and yanked at the wheel, and all the time had a desperate air. I said, “You seem tense; has something upset you?”

This time I was without fear. I had come to the country for myself and would put up with no flightiness in Mrs. Headlong. She tossed her head, “Nothing upsets me!”

I looked straight ahead. Presently I saw her biting her lips and making an effort to control herself. She spoke feverishly of the people in her class, dismissing all the male students with a tart word. “And you,” she said, pouncing upon me, “you are too servile!”

I looked at her sidelong.

“Yes, the turbulency, detail, the sensitive line, all show you think with your fingers, like a typist, not with your eyes; they aren't connected! Then you're afraid to do something ugly. What has art to do with beauty, morality, its convention of idea? And you want to set down the model, that is servilely and vulgarly copy, like a cheap little middle-class advertising punk—”

“What is art if not something to do with beauty?” I was about to open the door and jump out of the car.

“What a sentimental idea for one so strong and practical as yourself!”

She began to laugh and I could feel her poise returning. I said, “In some cases in your class, there's a real soul-tussle going on! The students are trying to tear themselves away from what they have incarnated, as beauty in their own eyes. They try to please you, but honestly, not just to please; to see what you see.”

And to annoy her, I said (having perceived before how much she despised the mediocre male students), “Now Parker is most conscientious, and he has vigor.”

She jarred the brakes, but came to herself, and sent the car speeding along as before. It seemed a slight smile twisted her mouth. She answered me presently in a soft voice, “Letty, I have been ill for years, a nervous illness; some days, like today, I suffer. With you, the first, was I able to trust myself—the first time you came to the class. And I thought with little Jacky. You have seen me in quite a bad moment, but you have calmed me down.” She went on hastily, “And now tell me about the flat in Jane Street and your Susannah, and about your Robespierre and all the Hollywood plans “

We slid easily into the narrow opening of Arnhem, past the tall weatherboard dwelling which stood there as a decoy. The rich, always fearing local risings and those movie riots with spades and scythes, often have these decoy houses, with tenants in them to protect their wood-hidden mansions. Now, however, in full winter, glittering with all its panes, on the snowy slope, Arnhem could be seen for some hundred yards along the road. It was the true Christmas house. Its noble proportions, beauty and gaiety, promised all joy. We drew up to the small Norman door. Adrian Headlong said, “Hello, here's Baby-face again.”

The guests made much of me. I almost had a love affair with a drunken young bachelor of extreme elegance, who looked like an old family portrait; a blond, sweet libertine, who called me
cinquecento
and told me the most improper jokes I ever heard.

It was the best Christmas Day of my life, and not only did Lucy Headlong treat me as a guest of honor (which I was at a loss to explain), but Adrian appeared to take a great fancy to me. By the next morning they had all vanished. Adrian was obliged to go to another city for a Christmas party which his wife refused to attend; and once more we were left alone in the house. Although I no longer felt uneasy at receiving so much loving friendship from the eccentric woman, and, in fact, was thinking of asking her to introduce me to her friends—for the Tweed and Silk Shop—the curse of the place got the better of me; and I was flying back to town in Lucy Headlong's car before the third night came.

No sooner had I reached home, than as before, and almost as I had hoped, the same cruel fever shook my body. I was alone. The empty room, now my only true home, was bitterly cold and I asked myself in misery if anyone in this world cared for me. Others were loving, marrying, dancing, drinking, with hordes of friends, and if I was in this solitude, it was because I had been hunted by a foolish dread from a palace in the woods, lovelier than I would ever see again. I had made up my mind not to return to it. I believed Lucy Headlong was a mad woman, and my impression was that, in a diseased moment, she had been going to strangle me. She had come in the night, strangely bundled, though in silk sleeping clothes, her hair in two plaits of mixed gray, and leaned over me. She would never know how ashy and cadaverous she looked in the night. When I cried out, she moved gently away, down the staircase. There I lay in a sweat until I heard her move in bed, and then had hurried through to the guest rooms empty below, where I stayed the whole night.

The winter pressed round me. I was unable to go and sit in company in merrymaking New York as I was then, so I stayed in the room without food or fire the whole night. I tore my arms and legs in the unendurable spasms of desire, and wondered, in a superstitious moment, what there was at Arnhem—it was like a sacred mount, a haunted grove. I thought of the things in legend, the shirt burning like fire, the potions, the brews, the love-draughts, and some words came into my mind rather tardily—
cantharides
, a poison. The Headlong woman thought me mediocre, vulgar, without fantasy; and had she chosen this method to show me hellfire and heaven-glint? Did she know what I was suffering at this moment; and did she too, suffer it? But why? But at this moment an unspeakable idea came to me, which helped me through the hours and days I still must suffer; for I thought, as Grandma Fox would say, “Without money there is no honey.” Once more I had fancied I was admired for my wit and girlhood's pride, when it was really a lawless, unnameable, shameful possession of me she had wanted. I promised myself, at least, after this sordid episode, to look every gift horse in the mouth. But I did not. Betrayed again, but no wiser— Poor Letty-Marmalade! I hope this will be my epitaph—just a
schlemihl
, not a heel.

T
he next day I went to my mother's for something to eat, and I took along Aleck, who was disconsolate, during a reconciliation between Susannah and Brock, upstairs. Aleck made a creditable show. He was blond, naïve, and impressionable, and I wondered if he were not the man destined to me, anyhow.

At my mother's I found Jacky, Andrea, Mother, my cousin Edwige Lantar with her fiancé Ernest, anxious, and always on his toes, the born husband. Jacky had brought a very presentable man, Bill van Week, a chestnut blond, about thirty, dressed in English sporting clothes, with a British mustache; tall, with a small shapely head. We just looked at each other across the room and it was like the Bishop of Exeter, only that we made the sign of sex at each other; it was invisible, but sure. This instantaneous recognition of someone you've never seen before is very thrilling. There was also there Simon Gondych, a distant relative of the Foxes and the family offering to the Hall of Fame: a Nobel Prizeman. Gondych was now about fifty-nine. His thick, frizzled hair was clean, bright brown; his merry hazel eyes were clear and large. Perhaps his face was a little too red, his chin a little heavy; there he was, bright as a spark from the fire, dancing attendance on Edwige, a child not yet seventeen.

I was staring at Edwige, whose immoderate vice was apparent to every woman and scarcely to any man, except, perhaps, her poor bedeviled fiancé, Ernest, now longing after her in public, with fine, loyal eyes. When I turned my head aside to get a light, Bill van Week, petting Edwige, saw I needed a match and got me one. Smiling through the smoke, with the little usual jokes, I turned back and saw that Edwige had already captured my escort, Aleck, who looked at her with a fixed, empty smile. Meanwhile, Jacky, sitting in the corner like little Jack Horner, was looking at Edwige.

“Have you known Edwige long?” I asked Van Week.

“Did I wish you Merry Christmas, dear,” said he, “it's a bit late, but since I laid eyes on you, I want to be your Christmas tree: come, hang yourself round my neck.”

I did so, but pressed him, “Don't avoid the question: how did you get to know a dame like that? A man's judged by the company he keeps.”

“Eddie and I go round a bit in Hollywood, dear.”

“I know how to interpret that.”

“Me-owch!”

“What did you do in Hollywood, honey-chile; are you a director?”

“I worked in a restaurant: also was a soda-jerker.”

“Then why did Edwige waste her time on the likes of you?” “Well, dear, a good wine needs no bush, and she has taste.”

“Pooh!”

“I'm a millionaire, also, though I never mention it; it loses me friends. The fact is, dear, I went out there to start a drama school; I used up all my money, or rather my parents' money, and I wouldn't ask them for any more, also no more was forthcoming, unless I would promise to go home and attend church every Sunday. The conditions were too hard. I said, Am I a man or a deacon? Thus, like every well-found male in the U.S.A., I have ridden the rods, been a lumber-jack in Wisconsin, and sung suitable lyrics in the
House of the Rising Sun
.”

“You interest me, as they say in the gangster movies.”

“Eddie never mentioned her lovely cousins; kiss Cousin Bill, dear. What a woman—” he flung himself on my neck. I disengaged myself after a while (Gondych was twinkling at us too, too paternally).

“You're fun, Bill.” But at this moment I turned my eyes to Edwige. Aleck wore his most foolish expression. I crossed the floor in three strides, plucked Aleck by the sleeve, “Aleck, come play with us.”

Edwige smiled slyly. “He seems to like being with me, don't you, Aleck?” and she nestled up to him. With her high heels and ridiculous topknot hairdo, she barely reached to his mid-arm. I turned red and tapped my heel.

“He's mine. I brought him here. This is my beat, dearie.”

“Letty—” shrieked my mother.

“Stick to the three or four dopes you've got already.” Jacky turned pale. Andrea burst out laughing. The others looked vaguely about. I marched Aleck back with me, while Edwige, I am glad to say, reclaimed her fiancé. But Gondych, after staring, had an eager little smile, and Bill van Week waited for my return with a grin, “What-ho, my little tiger-cat; a woman of action, no?” I burst out laughing, “Direct action is the only way with Edwige; Eddie's a female pup, why mince words.” I pounced round him angrily.