Letty Fox (76 page)

“Like Talleyrand—”

“All the time, I listen painfully, and want to say, But I, Simon, I am like that. I am all those—I would sacrifice for you, only ask me to. And so on.”

“I'd feel funny going out with him; he's quite strange-looking.”

“Yes; I feel strange; he is odd-looking. He's like that old Egyptian king, the one with the stoop who was so brilliant and such a materialist—”

“Ignaton,” I said, smiling wryly.

“Yes, Ikhnaton—you know everything,” she flattered me.

“I don't know everything. He told me that story too. At that last party too.”

“Yes, I suppose. He's a scholar; he doesn't have a regular line, so I suppose he just has stories.”

“They all have their package goods.”

“And did he tell you about the old troubadour songs?” she asked dolefully.

“No.”

She cheered up.

“Well, I am glad he—” She laughed. “I am a fool. I'm wanting him to love me.”

“Why shouldn't he?” I said coldly.

“That would be like a vision of paradise, to me.”

“As far as I can tell, a good many girls have had that vision of paradise.”

“I know. I've swallowed that. I say to myself, What can I expect? Do I expect a man to wait till—his age—just because I am not even born yet.”

“Eh?”

“I mean—I'm getting mixed.”

“In other words, you love him, you burn for him, and if only he could recognize you, if only he could reciprocate—the very situation you were in with ‘Varnish,' the professor, you remember?”

She blushed and sulked.

“Naturally, this is very different. I am older.”

“There's something funny about your always picking someone who can't do you any good. What do you want? The martyr's crown?”

She became silent and looked at me in doubt. For my part, I was irritated and jealous. From the above and other confidences, I realized he had confided in her a good deal. I felt disgraced that after the episode between Gondych and me he had not made me his friend. I put him down as a pure philanderer who preferred to float from butterfly to butterfly, and I accused him, in fact publicly to Jacky, of having no staying power as a lover. It made her very uncomfortable, but did not move her.

“Such things could not last under any circumstances.”

“Everyone says so,” she murmured, “I have asked people in a general way. They're all amazingly interested in the idea; they don't know it's about me and Gondych. They all say, it can be, but it can't last.”

She took herself off, and I thought she was coming out of it, inferring this from her last words.

I confess that I had troubles of my own and forgot hers. It was almost spring, and I owed: item, one hundred dollars borrowed from Bill van Week, payment of which was promised for the previous Christmas (though he didn't dun me); item, one hundred dollars borrowed from Susannah Ford and which she now needed back as she was settling her financial and marital affairs with Brock. Although wealthy, she was making as much profit out of this, her second divorce, as she had made out of her first. She always agreed to settlements, not to alimonies, which cease upon remarriage. Brock, meanwhile, had settled out of town in a chemical factory on a site he had bought near Trenton, New Jersey, and when he came into town, came to see me. I was in danger, for Susannah had telephoned me several times, asking me if I was seeing Brock and asking what tales he had told about her. In fact, I knew that Susannah was already living with Aleck, who had now deserted me completely. I realized that I had always disliked the feeble boy. Brock, on the rebound, seemed lovesick about me, but I knew Susannah was quite a viper and would gladly put the divorce on my shoulders. As I did not care for Brock enough to marry him, I saw little of him, and did not sleep with him once.

I saw little of Bill van Week for the moment—he was engaged in some new venture for which his parents had put up a lot of money; and though I was really disgusted with him, because of his innumerable philanderings, I liked him. I thought perhaps we might make up a household between us, legal or extra-marital, at some time.

I had also really fallen in love with the man I mentioned before, Erskine, the married man; and as Erskine said he was on the point of divorcing his wife, I had some hopes of settling down at last. I had bumped into a few friends, like Gallant Stack and even Gideon Bowles, old family friends who now considered me enfranchised and did their best to make me—in fact, one of them did make me and I heard all the ins and outs of his
amourettes
. That is what gallants in New York consider an attractive line—to lie in bed and talk about other women.

Lily Spontini came to see me and, of course, I gave her dinner, which was the family system. She was a sieve of scandalous gossip with a censorship bureau, just like a Freudian mind. I heard what was juicy, but not too nasty, and what was suitable for me to hear. Lily never ran down anyone, however, whether out of a kind heart or out of provision for the future, I cannot say.

I saw my mother and sisters twice a week, but avoided Jacky, whose doting upon Gondych made me acutely jealous. Andrea was already a glamorous young miss with pictures of movie stars and singers everywhere. She was going to develop in the usual style, from the waist downwards first, but had shapely straight legs and wanted to become a model; this shocked the whole family. It was all right for Edwige—but a daughter of Solander Fox! Andrea was like Jacky at her age, with less brains—“Am I glamorous like this? Don't fandancers wear anything? Watch me do a strip tease! Don't you think I have come-hither legs?” and referred to herself and her friends as subdebs. She even had plans for a coming-out party. Since she had long ago found out that she had not any of Grandmother Fox's money, she made a comic stance out of it, and proclaimed herself, first, as the only proletarian in the family, and then, as the only career girl. She wanted to join up with Cousin Edwige, now a young married woman, living with her husband, Ernest, and her mother in Hollywood.

The husband was a young writer, very serious, consecrating himself to husbandhood. Edwige and her mother were carrying on a loving-mother-and-daughter pose which turned out to be nothing more than a cheat upon the husband. Edwige had a car in which she raced up and down her canyon, visited friends in Beverly Hills, and went shopping in Westwood. She was a friend and correspondent of Bill van Week, who was having a transient affair with her. She was man-mad, but she wrote to Bill quite simply that she wanted to turn her talents to use. She did not intend to turn into a raggle-taggle. She wanted to make use of some few of the hundreds and hundreds of pretty girls at a loose end in Hollywood. Most of these girls were winners of contests, or ambitious showgirls, or even homegirls, who had turned up their noses at small-town boys, broken with their families, and now had too much experience. They would do anything rather than go home. They had already, mostly, done anything: been the bait of restaurants and cheap agencies, the meat of any whorehound, the nameless party girls at the great obscene drunken feasts; and most had gone out there in the belief that they would have to sleep with everyone in the studios to make their way. Most of the girls, in spite of their concessions, had not made good and were drifting, prepared to do anything, including starve, rather than go back home with their tailfeathers missing. Those who had acted a bit in the movies were best. Edwige had written not only to Bill van Week but a few other suitable men asking them whether they could not help her set up a little entertainment house for men, in Hollywood. If it succeeded, she would come East, paying the fares of the girls back again, but in an inconspicuous way. She wished to be a madam. She was married; her serious husband stood in the way. She must either get rid of him, which would be a disadvantage, or contrive to carry on her business through her correspondents, Bill van Week and others.

Bill wrote to her, “Calm yourself, my beauty, can't you be content with highjacking? Have you got to go into straight business?”

He said she was probably the most corrupt girl alive, although she had many close competitors in New York and Hollywood.

One of her other friends fell in love with her and was mad enough to promise to help her. He thought it wonderfully ingenious for one so young. This was a blond curly-haired amorous man, already once married and divorced, who was completely dazzled by Edwige's wax beauty. By now everyone knew Edwige's foibles and laughed at them. The men were very weak toward her, and her mother was a mealy-mouthed church-goer, talking of her daughter and son-in-law like a character in a slick magazine, but willing to do anything for the profit-making little trull. Everyone liked Ernest, and no one had yet told him of Edwige's goings-on.

My precocious sister Andrea was childish enough to fancy that Edwige was a Hollywood star and she had to be restrained from taking the train out to join the family white-slaver. I was obliged at last to go and tell Solander the whole story. Gallant Stack was there, and before I had left, had gouged Edwige's address out of me.

The wonder was that Jacky could live in such a set as we were, Grandmother Morgan, Edwige, even myself, and could remain what she was. I had only occasional qualms about myself, for society justified me, not Jacky. Jacky no more had the line of the day than a suicide or a saint.

There were unaccountable drift-lines of gossip about Gondych at this time—that he had plans for joining the Government in Washington, that he wanted to go abroad and had an offer from London, that he felt war was coming to the U.S.A. and felt he had a duty overseas as a bio-chemist, helping civilian populations protect themselves against the yet unimagined horrors of the war; rumors, too, that he had already asked for and received his sabbatical leave, to complete some researches, in this country. Ordinarily, such straws of talk about a bio-chemist did not stick in our family's hair; there was something significant in the way they now did.

Jacky reached the end of her school year. One rose-dusted evening I was watching for her out of my window. I saw her, in a rosy dress, coming down the treeless, asphalted, brown-walled street. Coming, she seemed a stranger; when she got close I recognized her, but was surprised, still, at how far away and alien she seemed to me. It occurred to me that for years I had not been her friend, attempted to understand her. We had dinner out of some packets she had brought from the delicatessen; and then she told me that she was going away with Gondych, to Cape Cod, for the summer. He was worn out by the year in town and thought her charming; he was flattered by her love. She knew it was that.

“Perhaps he'll get to love me really; now he's just delighted that such a young girl admires him so much.”

“You can go away on those terms?”

“Yes; I think over everything he has ever said to me, his laughing and smiling, his talk, and it seems to me we could become very intimate. He kisses my hand so many times, out of gratitude too, and with passion, with the passion young men haven't; and then, when we go out I look round and think, Not one boy can compare with him. I am madly in love with him.”

“But you don't quite believe in it?”

“Last night I had three dreams about him. I didn't know they were about him, but each time I woke up suddenly, with my heart beating fast, and I thought, it was almost as if I had said aloud in my sleep, ‘That is about Simon.' Will I tell you, I know it's boring; but they mean so much to me.”

I assented, lighting a cigarette and leaning back to look across the street. There sat the daughter-in-law of the old man she had talked about before. The old man was dead. I did not mention this. Jacky said, “I dreamed I was climbing a mountain road with you; and in front of us, Mother, but she was an old woman. There were clods of earth which turned into cow-turds; and these, into patches of snow, as we came into the high regions. We were now in a plateau so high that you could see mountain tops, humps, and the tops of long sierras, covered with snow. Night came. The old woman had disappeared, you had gone; but someone I knew as well as you was there, close as my own blood. We got into a toboggan and now I could see the night sky thickly banded with stars and the broad Milky Way. The toboggan started off, and we flew up and down while I felt intense joy, indescribable; but we were descending as we flew. We were flying in the night sky, but I thought, Yes, but this will only end in the yellow sand of morning. Then I knew I was with Lucifer, the morning star. When I woke up I thought, That is about Simon … I fell asleep and a dream flashed past. There were two or three bony fishes from the great ocean deeps, showing their ribs and with leafy decoys around their faces and mouths. One gaped and gasped till it was a skeleton; and it gaped after a bony man resembling them; it chased the man who became skinnier. They were all disgusting phantasms; but I was not afraid. The man had no chance. They fell away into an extremity of extinction, there was no thought of life; they were long ago crushed, ages ago; and devouring, soul-eating creatures, one and all. I woke up and thought, That's about Gondych. The third time, the same night, I dreamed I was in an underground tomb of the Pharaohs. I was not afraid. There was a large chamber with a sealed door, leading to a small chamber, and a broad foyer leading outside. I was not afraid; and I thought, Gondych is in there, meaning the sealed chamber. Those are all dreams of death, aren't they? I am afraid he will die?” And she burst into tears.

“Is he sick?”

“No, but he is old.”

“Are you really going away with him?”

“Yes, next week. I am pretending to go away to a camp at Cape Cod.”

“I'll have to tell Mother, Jacky.”

“No, don't do that. I'll write to them from there.”

“How on earth can Simon do it? Look, I've got something to tell you—”

She said, in a deadened voice, “I know what it is. He was here. He told me. That is the kind of thing he tells me.”