Letty Fox (7 page)

The house belonging to the Morgans in northern Jersey, was on a hillside steep, facing the setting sun and the blue ridges of Pennsylvania. Uncle Percival Hogg called it the old name of the hill, Lydnam Hill, and then changed the name to Lydnam Lodge, to the great annoyance of Aunt Angela who thought a poor man was putting on frills. It was really half a house, built by Grandfather Morgan in a moment of romance, and it looked like a grand-ducal hunting-lodge. Aunt Angela had been a Morgan girl.

Grandfather Morgan had a motto for his family: “First have a roof over your heads, the rest will follow.” He bought property and houses and looked for years for a large farm, not costing much, on which he could build roofs for his family. Before his powers failed, his family was large, but by that time also he had made some money.

At length he pitched on Lydnam Hill, and bought the entire hill, a small stony knoll with steep sides, in area about two hundred acres. On it he found three farms with farmhouses, an old forge from revolutionary times, some stony cornfields, a tall wood, a small wood, some moist bottoms near a river, and The Corners, a T-shaped junction of roads at which stood some ruins covered with poison ivy and an old stone cottage. Below the stone cottage was an orchard dipping north.

Two of the farms were in good repair. On a southeastern slope he built Morgan's Folly, now called Lydnam Lodge. He poured a fortune into it. It was a museum of modern house designing. He could not get anyone to live in it. It was too far from town and it was really only one room, though that room was the size of the Metropolitan Opera House stage, so that it required a servant.

The house stood in a wood of elms, beeches, and tulip trees. A place had been cleared under them for a further extension of the Lodge, and the cleared ground was now cluttered up with vines and shrubs, a haunting and hunting place of birds, insects, snakes, and frogs. A little fountain stood beside the flight of steps down to the winding approach. By this approach were stumps of trees intended as bird roosts and bird baths, but which had become ant-skyscrapers and which contained galleries, shoots, liftwells, staircases and apartments under the bark. At the door was a slab of granite with a knocker, on which could be imitated the woodpecker or sapsucker. Down the drive had been planted about one hundred conifers, Douglas fir, white fir, and blue spruce, eastern red cedar, most of which had increased and were now about eight feet high. A runnel about three feet wide ran down the sharp hillside; there many frogs were found and there the chickens came to roost. The undergrowth was full of stumps, fungi, and small and soft plants, many of them medicinal. The farmer's hens had laid eggs all over the wood. It was not safe to venture there without tall boots and gloves, on account of the copperheads, poison ivy, and other probable dangers; but it was a lovely wood, with mushrooms, mandrakes, lilies, and full of birds.

The Lodge was a splendid building. The original house had been built on a basement and surrounded by three walls of heavy stone taken from the revolutionary forge, and above and round these stones, heavy planks and beams of cedar, and giant old riveted beams bought out of some old house, with the roof rising above the immense rafters like the upturned hull of a boat. Beneath this hull was a polished floor and a fireplace with a stone apron stretching toward the middle of the floor.

Many logs had been cut down in the wood but all had rotted and were full of ants and termites. The piles of the veranda were termiteridden. The great fireplace on a cool day burned a pile of branches, and even sections of large logs. Old trees shadowed the place; before and during rains the old stones streamed with water and the beams sweated. The fog and moisture settled on the highly polished floor and on the waxed antiques and on the windows, whose fittings were covered with verdigris. The house linens were never quite dry, except in midsummer, and even then the high treetops and the soft woods sent down a soft, rotting damp.

Yet it was a beautiful house. Plants waved outside every set of windows except southerly, and all life was rich and prolific. Except for storms from the south, the house was folded into the hill and had no buffeting, but when storms came from the south, as they did in summer, generally in the afternoon, one could see them stalking across the near valley, up the neglected fields of tall grass, and cramping the trees. The trees were old and dangerous and should have been attended to by a forester; but after the death of old Bernard Morgan nothing was done there. My grandfather's bones later were built into one pillar of the roofed gate which was to make an entrance to the long drive edged with conifers. The rains flung themselves upon the house like a storm of light and music, sending the clouds so fast across the sky that the sun poured through; the thick crown of the wood parted and was filled with fragments of sky, and the fields all the way down the hill and the low tops at its foot and the smoky patterned fields and hills for mile upon mile tossed and shone, as the gusts poured north in a shining ocean. The house creaked and fluttered, but nothing moved, so solidly was it built. My Uncle Hogg, who lived there with my Aunt Angela, would go about crowing, “What is the matter? It fills your lungs, it clears the air.” Mother visited us there, but only when she must. Both women hated it. One feared rheumatism, the other thought a tree would uproot itself clumsily trying to move in the ocean of wind, and would stumble over the house. At night too they feared. But then would come my father who, looking out when the fresh winds blew the new leaves in the sunlight, felt romantic, strong, and full of promise; and my mother silently sat on the top step of the porch, just outside the screen door, saw the great circle which had been cut in the trees for the moon to shine through, into this sculptured and furnished wood, but which was just the same—beautiful, enchanted, a treasure house; and saw perhaps the boy with the blue hair, in his coolie dancing suit, walking lightly up the hill, or wandering, with his back to her, in the smoky moonlight of the wood. My father sat by her with his arm round her waist. She sat motionless in her impatience.

Her mind was full of dreams now. For a few years before she had married, after she had begun to fail as an actress and when the blue-haired boy was leaving her, she had been walking barefoot, hideously, it seemed to her, in a bustling world, confused, hoarse-voiced, which hated her, or had no use for her. Now that she was married, even though she was unhappy, she had gone back to the dreams she had had up to her sixteenth or seventeenth year. My father did not figure in them; he was merely the one who threw the dark tent of his love around her so that she could rest away from life. She did not know this. She thought she was a naturally unhappy woman.

The world in the early twenties seemed to my father full of hope and opportunity, however. He
was young. He had made connections abroad such that he hoped some day or other to realize a great dream of his, which was to go and live in Europe. At the present time, however, he agreed to do anything to please my mother and her family; and he continued with the partners, McLaren and Montrose.

Uncle Percival Hogg, who had married Angela Morgan, a very handsome but cold woman, was quite an original. They had several children, of whom one was my cousin Templeton, a handsome boy who later went into the movies. We had been visiting at Lydnam Lodge for several years, quite accustomed to the obvious disunion of the Hogg household, and were surprised and cast down when the news came to New York that Angela and Percival Hogg had separated. Aunt Angela had gone out to Long Beach, but Uncle Perce, the day Angela left him, thumbed his nose at the Morgan “palace,” as he called it, and moved his things and his children into a weatherbeaten house on the other side of the Morgan hilltop. This house he called “The Wreck.” He did not neglect us either. He immediately wrote to our parents to say that things must be as they had been and he wanted to see Jacky and me there, in The Wreck, every summer.

The Wreck was a weather-board house three stories high, with a dugout basement in stone; it was Hogg's storehouse, workshop, play house. Some distance away was a new garage, with living quarters to one side. This was rented to artists in the summer. The Wreck and its garage stood on the first shoulder of the hill, with an uncut field below them and an unpruned orchard lower still. They faced a wide and distant view, with roads, houses, and home woods between. A road ran down beside the house to the main road, beside which was Farmington, the farm prison. Opposite The Wreck and the garage in the lane were tall stone ruins. Trees grew from the center of the ruins. Lower down the hill was a fine stone house with some story of scandal attached to the upper apartment; I forget it now, but a nice boy named Carl lived there; and down the lane was an old family house, with dormer windows and attics, not to mention the Morgan farms, and the well-run profitable farm beyond the hill where lived the man with bull-charm, a city accountant who had come to the country to recuperate and discovered a country talent, bull-charm. The black monster lay red-eyed and suspicious in his compound, horrible to look at, approachable only by the city accountant.

Uncle Perce feared horses, cattle, and rams as much as we did, but loved meek undomesticated nature. He sometimes worked in the Natural History Museum, gave scientific lectures, or sold microscopes, according to his fortunes. His fortunes depended on official opinions, particularly those on war and reaction, for he was a reformer, a crank, an original; he called himself The Evangelist and The Vox Humana. When a piece of paper blew his way he picked it up and studied it; he said it had a message for him; he said the printed word was sacred; at the same time he sacrilegiously denounced the writings of all his rivals in botany.

He took strays into The Wreck like ourselves and an unfortunate young woman, his sister, who called herself Mrs. Dr. Goodsir. His house was managed by Mrs. Dr. Goodsir, now far advanced in a pregnancy, and his daughter Cecily Hogg, a twelve-year-old girl, a breasted, heavy-limbed child, very blonde, with a pretty mouth, but stupid and sulky. She never played with us or with her own family, that I remember, but sat looking over the orchard or the view when not working, or stood at the broken fence staring at the ivies, the things in bloom, a little dead swallow that hung from the telegraph wire, or at the boys passing. She was love-mad. We heard her talking to herself and singing, between the irregular rows of stunted corn in the Lodge cornfield, pulling out weeds, chasing small animals, and making a sort of chant of romance, sorrow, triumph. When we burst out shouting and hooraying from the far edge, where we had run behind her back, bending below the corn, her skin flushed dark red; the stain seemed to spread all over her. She said nothing, but turned and walked to the shade-knot in the center of the field. From there, too, from everywhere on the Morgan farm, you could look into a distance of miles, with blue ridges and fields. It was hard to get her to come into the house, even at night. Then, when she had jobs waiting for her, she would still be out under the stars or stormclouds, singing and talking to herself. We pretended to think she was mad, tapped our heads, and burst out laughing. We knew better than she did, however, that it all came from her longing to lie down with a man; to us all these antics were still ridiculous.

Mrs. Dr. Goodsir was quite different, this young thin woman with small hands and feet who laughed and talked to all the neighbors in spite of her situation.

Uncle Hogg was rebuilding The Wreck, using his own materials, retaining the original pattern, doing it haphazard and in his own good time. In return for this, he got the place rent-free for a year. His father-in-law liked him. Nothing suited him better. His father was a carpenter, his grandfather a stonemason. One of his rules was to lay out a job at sunrise and have it finished by sundown. He tried to induce us all to do the same: “Something attempted, something done, has earned a night's repose,” he sang continuously. In addition, he endeavored to teach everyone the sciences of the field, made everyone in the house say the Latin names of living things, as
Liriodendron tulipifera
instead of tulip tree, while we were obliged to refer to the way flowers grew as inflorescences; but there was much more of this than anyone could remember. I never could take an interest in things that I had not seen as commodities in town. To be plain, I despised the country and only used it to grow in, like the plants and sheep. But Uncle Perce despised those who come to the country to melt at the sight of flowers and trees. If some visitor tried to please him by saying, “Is that a ragweed?” he would say, “I don't know the names of flowers, I only know their physiology, morphology and ecology,” or something of that sort. He depressed innocent nature-lovers.

My mother and father were trying to live with each other again and had gone into a new apartment and a quiet street. We spent months with Uncle Perce at The Wreck or with Uncle Philip Morgan at Lydnam Lodge, where he was enjoying the honeymoon of his second marriage. Angela Hogg would not get a divorce: “He does not need a woman, he only needs plants.” The Goodsir woman cleaned up after Cecily. Aunt Angela did not like her daughter. When she had last been out at Lydnam Lodge, Cecily, her first child, who resembled her father in all ways, came to her and said, “Mother, were you like me when you were twelve? Did you think about things?”

“What things, what things? You're gaping like a fish!”

When Cecily was a little over twelve, she approached Jacky and me one day in the early afternoon, when we were playing in the long grass, and began to question us about boys. What had we been told? How did it begin? We both saw at once, although I was then only about seven, that she had been afraid of us and respected us. By listening at doors and pretending to be innocent little girls, we had learned a lot too; but if she had learned it, it would have done her no good; she was not the kind of person to learn anything from experience.

Uncle Percival gave her his prejudices. He did not think a man could be a good statesman, for example, if that man had a mistress; he could not even be a good writer, teacher, philosopher, or tradesman if he went in for fornication. As for fornicating women, he got out of the difficulty by saying, “I speak no scandal, no, nor listen to it.” Cecily also thought only the pure could love. She wouldn't listen to scandal, no one could have a good time with her. She was lonely; she wasn't human. When the boy from the stone house down the road, a tall good-looking boy, blond, with good clothes, Carl Lokart, started to wait for her at the bottom of the orchard, she believed it was love. She was invited to the stone house for biscuits in the afternoon too, and allowed to read Carl's books with him. Jacky and I were never invited there. Of course, we had played too many tricks down there in full view of the house. The lawn and gardens ran down to the road without a fence, and we had gone gathering flowers in the gardens without permission and given Cecily the bouquet to take to Mrs. Lokart. At another time, when two boys escaped from Farmington and the countryside was in terror by night, we stole some things from the kitchen window and from the shed in order to scare the people; but we laughed so much while getting off with the loot that perhaps we were seen from the numerous windows. There is no telling now, but then we thought Cecily had told on us and we hated her. Uncle Perce, while reproving us, would also give her a sermon about silly girls and calf love; and, oddly enough, when he was scolding anyone he was not such a fool as at other times, but showed a knowledge of human nature. What he said was so true that even we felt awkward, but we laughed loudly at her. Mrs. Dr. Goodsir looked sideways at her, embarrassed, and said, “She is precocious; she knows what she ought not.”