Letty Fox (87 page)

“That's true.”

I wandered off. They were playing cards in part of the room, and I played for a bit. After I won two dollars at quarter-cent a point, I became restless again and walked round the room.

Templeton Hogg was there, being adored by two or three of the girls; I elbowed them away on the ground of seniority of acquaintance; but he had become foppish, shallow.

I left him, too, and walked round tapping with my heels and trying not to think about Cornelis. I had a bad headache, and its refrain was: What did he mean? “A schoolgirl complexion on my mind forever,” I said to myself, bitterly.

One of my relatives, puffed up in war-profits, was wearing a diamond ring, and showing off his wife's amethysts; another was telling where he got black-market gasoline, meat and cigarettes. According to them, the land was bursting with meat, wine, butter and anything needed, but most of it was underground, going moldy in warehouses and camps, often on account of bad management and bad calculation; they all proclaimed they didn't see why they shouldn't eat when it was going to waste anyhow.

I heard amazing stories of underground ice rooms gorged with carcasses; huge sums paid in auction rooms for out-of-date old masters by war-pigs, and so on, and so on. It was their talk. They shone like satin with it, their big bodies luscious and their eyes like stars. They were in heaven. What more would anyone have to offer them?

Philip roamed the room like a hankering ghost and ran into me when he could without attracting too much attention. Aunt Dora was telling the long story of his crimes to various sympathetic old women. Men were telling sordid and obscene stories; the women were talking about their furniture and summer vacations.

“This is my life from now on, you understand,” said Philip, at one of our encounters.

“Get out of it, Philip.”

“How? You remember I've been in jail quite a few times and she says she'll kill me if I leave her. She would!”

“I don't doubt it.”

“Then what's your answer?”

“There isn't any.”

“There's one. A rope round the neck.”

“Philip! You're not funny any more.”

I explained to him some of my miseries, and how I had as much to bear now as he had had at his age. He could give me no advice for he had been one of the very dandies and Don Juans who were now giving me so much trouble. He could only groan and say he was being punished, which, with all my sympathy for him, sickened me somewhat. I said, “How about the girls?”

He wandered away again. This went on all the evening, and I couldn't help thinking what a weakling he was; he couldn't take his medicine, strong as it was. The one wrong woman, eh?
Il ne faut pas badiner avec l'amour
, eh?

I continued roaming; our paths crossed again.

“To think, Letty,” he said quietly, one time, “that all those words, Shakespeare's sonnets, love songs, the weakest, worse lyrics in juke boxes, to die for love, star-crossed lovers, all that, mean something to me; they are enough to give me heartache. I am still looking for love, after all my bitter experience. Experience so black and cruel, it is enough to kill a man, and yet, I long to be loved. If only you and I could go away and love—I don't mean it, I mean if only—if still—at my age, with what I know; you can't kill love in a man. That, too, is driving me mad. Not that wicked, coarse old woman, Dora; but this agony and hunger for love is driving me mad. I'll never have it again. I had so much. I know what it is. I'll kill myself, Letty.”

I took his hand, looking up at him, and thinking I had known him since I was a little girl. He had said then, “Then I'm afraid I'm not a good man, Letty.”

Poor fellow. I talked to him for a long time, in a low voice, consoling him. He at last bent down and kissed me, “I love you, love you, Letty; we could have been happy, and see—we can't be. That's what's killing me. I see hundreds of women, and I have this one—” I turned away,

“Oh, as to that, the ones you see, if you're going to die for that, we could all die every day, for the ones we see, we can't have.”

He kept turning round me, whispering his sorrows at me, harrying me with his great lovelorn eyes on me, till Aunt Dora came at us again, giving us great blows of words in the face, racking us, tearing us apart, even though we were just uncle and niece.

“I know his pretty ways, the so-and-so—” and the women approved her. Everything the vixen did was approved of; she called on the sacred wicked names of the family gods. Presently, Uncle Philip could not stand it and left the room. I was sorry for the poor soul, but glad that he had gone, for my own troubles were nosing out, from the black lock where they had been crowded in this day of troubles, and I knew I should be with them all night. I thought I would go. There were no fish for my fry here. What a life I lead, I thought. I'm mad. I'll end up like Uncle Philip. But I hung round, talking like they were talking, telling filthy jokes, too, showing how bright I was, till a general move was made; then Aunt Dora set up a cry for Philip to bring her wraps and wake the boy, who was lying down on two chairs. Philip had locked himself in the bathroom. Aunt Dora thought he was acting up; he did that so often, at home.

Well, they called and pounded, eventually broke in, and though the window was open he was nowhere to be seen. There was a lean-to roof just underneath; not a sign of him. After a while, one of the men saw a linen towel hanging out of the window and pulled at it. It hung taut. It was at the end of a couple of linen towels that they found him. He had gone out just like that, on some sort of impulse, surrounded by that company. A fine end.

I went home to Mother's, quite unable to spend the night alone with the thought of that body dangling, without thought or feeling, outside my window. It would be outside my window, he would be dangling, trying to get me to understand some more, I felt. He died for love. But I don't want to.

U
nable to bear my place after this, for I always had the sensation that Uncle Philip was outside my window, I moved to a hotel. Then, finding it too lonely and expensive, went looking for a place, until I came across the one in Eleventh Street, as I have described in the beginning.

I had been there some little time, trying to break myself of the habit of loving men, which is just a vice like taking a snifter too often, knowing well enough I could cure myself of it if I had only the grit, when Bill van Week drifted back into my life.

He had quarreled at last with Edwige, even though her book had been quite a success, and she had enough money to go into a Hollywood agency with some of the fellows back on the Coast who knew the seamy side of the game. Edwige could only stand the seamy side of things. Edwige had made the grand play for Bill and thought him hooked. She had managed to get the affection of his parents, who, for all their worldly wisdom, knew nothing about simple little crooks of her sort. Bill, whose pastime in life was splitting with his parents, could not endure the idea of a dovecote balanced up there on the twentieth story of their skyscraper, in the hanging garden they had built for themselves and him; and it was because of this alone that my Edwige, too clever by half, had lost the Van Week air castle.

Bill was like an old friend. He was a great relief. We began to go out a bit, and I was so calmed down by my misfortunes with De Groot and the Philip tragedy that I behaved better than usual.

All one summer night in 1945 we walked the streets, talking about our lives and what a mess we had made of them, and how we could do better. We didn't think of our parents. Our lives stretched behind us, for aeons, without parents or anything, just the extraordinary tangle we had invented for ourselves. It was one of those nights when everyone is out.

The brats were walking the streets on the East Side and in Chelsea till four in the morning. People were making love in corners of loft buildings, or on the steps of churches, anywhere where it was dark, and a bit cool, and I knew there would be thousands sleeping on the beaches.

It was pretty cool and we thought of going back to my place; and then Bill said, his parents were out of town and we'd go to his. I'd never been to the Van Week mansion in the skies. But just as we came to the door, I said, “Let's not go up, Bill, let's go somewhere and get a drink, or sit by the lake, and see the dawn rise, or let's go to Staten Island, or get a taxi and just rove a bit; I just don't feel like going up to any more apartments, no matter how gilt-edged, with any more men, no matter how nice; I'm tired, or something. You know me, I'm frank. I'm Letty-say-it-with-nuts. Don't tell me I'm like Cornelis de Groot. I am, like the King of Siam. I want to get married. I'm off the town.”

Bill put his arm round me and said he felt pretty much like that, too. We walked about a bit more; morning came; we had breakfast and people started to go to work. I said I couldn't go. Bill said he had a job as counterman, since he quarreled with Edwige and his parents, but he'd give it up, too.

We walked for a bit, the sun got good and hot; we sat in the park, and then we went to my place to get washed up. When we had had baths, we came out again and went into Stuyvesant Park.

There were children from the East Side playing in the sand pit, and mothers with their baby carriages, children round the statue of Stuyvesant the Peg-leg, and a woman, with a big tummy, waiting for her big pains, near the hospital. There were old men and old women. Everyone seemed rested. We came back to the children.

“Why shouldn't you have one like that one of these days,” said Bill, pointing out one that appealed to him.

“You can't pick 'em; it's a grab-bag,” said I.

“Well, take us, for example; we're not so bad. You're good-looking and I'm a moneymaker.”

“Anyhow, I'm not going to make that old crack from Bernard Shaw.”

He said, “I'm serious, Letty, it's time to settle down. We've been through hell together, as they say in the Grade B war movies, even if it wasn't hell in the same spot. I'm fed up.”

“Well,” I said, much surprised, “if I thought for a minute that you were serious, and you meant me, I'd certainly take your name and address and let you know if anything turned up.”

“Don't be so wise.”

I blushed, “Well, I hate to make a fool of myself. I've been taken for a ride so often—” and I went on, blushing, thinking to myself, “I'll never meet a man who'll make me an honest proposal in plain terms.”

“Sure! Let's get the damn papers, and get looked over and all that, and we'll go down to City Hall and you can have champagne cocktails at that place opposite.”

“Well,” I said, “excuse me taking a seat, Bill, I'm overcome. I won't fool you. This is the first honest-to-god proposal I've ever had, whatever I may say when I'm an old married woman about the youths formerly clustering round my pearly feet. Well, sure, Bill. I'm willing.”

He threw his arms round me, and raised me off my feet, kissed me in his resounding way, and said to everyone near us, “We're going to get married.”

“This calls for a celebration.”

“We'll have a real little drink, to prove we're serious about married life.”

“Good Gosh!” I kept saying, as I walked along the street. “I can't believe it. I'm going to get married. Bill, let's do it before we tell. How long does it take? I've cried Wolf so often, I mean that, literally, I'm ashamed to turn up once more before the ring is on. But who'll we get to witness us?”

I went home alone and spent the next few days in a cloud. I was obliged to go to my father and say:
This
time I had to have a reckoning, and to my sad astonishment found I had only nine hundred dollars left of all my grandmother's money.

My father couldn't get over the fact that I was actually marrying a multi-millionaire, but I had known Bill so long and was so sure there'd be a slip between the cup and the lip that I didn't dare think of that aspect of it.

My father was enthusiastically anxious to meet what he called his new “co-paternals,” but gave up this idea with humorous grace when I explained that Bill was usually at loggerheads with his family, for one thing; that they still expected him to marry Edwige Lantar (now divorced), for another; and last, that he was a skeptic and they were strong for divine service; that they believed God had given them their millions because they were so devout. They were near the head of the procession on Easter Sunday in Fifth Avenue, and they sincerely thought it a religious duty to have their pictures in the paper on that occasion. “The only place you could meet them, Papa,” said I, “is in the comic strip, and then—” and I could not help saying good-naturedly, “even in the comic strip they only read Mr. and Mrs., if you get what I mean.”

Persia raised her eyebrows and said idly, “Well, I hope you won't cut your father and me, when you're an honest woman.”

I blushed, “I admit I don't care whether I am or not; I think Bill and I will go to it anyway; but it would be better if—”

I told them Bill was even then with his papa and mamma, going into things thoroughly with them; he expected the worst. Persia said, “I knew you must have been stood up when you telephoned to say you could come.”

“Shut up!”

We laughed; it was good for me to be treated so unceremoniously, and I noticed it each time as I felt the stiffening beginning to dampen; for I was obliged to have some self-respect, except at my father's, or I could not have kept going; and really, what did I do that was wrong? I lived the best way I could; I could not see how to manage any other way. Nevertheless, I thought it best to say, “You know, the reformed rake—I'm going to be a decent woman, I must tell you, so that we may avoid the grisly reference, and you ought to burn your card-catalogue on my past, I mean, in your memories which appear to be unnecessarily good; of course, Bill knows all, or about all, but sensible couples, as far as I have heard, clean up after each other's crimes; and that's what we'll do, Bill and I.”