Letty Fox (26 page)

She always said this when my mother scolded her, and would run with her head down, her eyes darting to one side, to the kitchen or bathroom. Sometimes she lost her temper, and shut her door with a bang. My mother complained that at night the old woman walked about on tiptoe in her nightgown, listening—to what? We did not know. My father found board and lodging for his mother in a place run for Americans in the Boulevard Raspail, and he would take us out with her once a week during his visits from Antwerp. When my mother asked him if she had gone to Geneva, my father answered that she had. We were unhappy! We had wild moments when Jacky and I, who by now both spoke French easily, ran away from home for a couple of hours to see some monument, or some actor, or telephoned numbers we found in the telephone book and announced that a husband or wife had left town for good; or telephoned famous stores, where we bought things on our mother's account, and the rest of it. At other times we quarreled. Our games fell to pieces. Jacky criticized my mother's taste in apartment decoration. I slapped Jacky for this treason. I stole letters from my mother's drawers, and Jacky called me a spy and sneak. Then we would come together again to imagine ourselves nuns in a convent, and get up at night to pray. We began two diaries which we never worked on afterwards. We invented a play from school (we were now in a French primary school) called
The Happy Crusader
. A happy crusader, returning full of honors and riches after ten years, is met by a smiling wife and eight children.

“I see you have been faithful to me,” says the Crusader.

“Yes, these are our eight beautiful boys,” says the wife.

This play, produced before Dora Dunn, Uncle Philip, Grandmother, and our parents, had such an instantaneous, unwarranted, and suspicious success that we could not be induced to give it in public again. We heard Uncle Philip and my father retelling it for months afterwards. My mother found it silly. But upon our next visit to Mme. Gouraud, who had become a close friend of the family, we boasted of it, recited it, and received a blow, “What childishness! Don't you know that a wife can have only one baby when her husband is away so long? Only one, and even then—”

I said, “Mother is having another baby and Papa was away a long time.” All heads turned at this kind of talk.

Within a month after the return from Grasse, Dora Dunn and Uncle Philip were married in the Mairie of the Eighth Arrondissement, the Pamples, American painters, coming up for the ceremony; and after a few weeks of whispered conversations, we heard that we had a young cousin named Bernard at nurse in England, the son of Philip and Dora. This, with the episode of
The Happy Crusader
, and some gossip we had heard about
Die Konkubine
(that is, by listening in corridors) and the advice long ago given to our mother and her new pregnancy, had given us a strange idea of marriage and cradle days, and we produced some odd, dramatic sequences which we found in the end began to bore our friends. Our French friends, especially, were not at all amused and began to give my mother advice, “Letty, especially, is quite a precocious little girl—”

I thought this referred to my school talents. I was book-smart, as Grandmother said proudly. Jacky did poorly in school. But she had taken to hanging round the color and brush merchants. She, for the first time, began to know things that I did not:
charcoal
,
aquarelle
,
sanguine
. We learned dancing now; she danced better than I. I was heavier then, and had a fair promise of broad, powerful loins. I called myself Spanish; evidently I was not, as a thickset little girl, a graceful dancer. I became turbulent, jealous, and cruel. They thought I hated her. No one could understand the change that had come over me: “Growing up,” they said.

For the first time I saw that I might not be forever the best, and that people could go their own road without paying attention to me. I found this cruelly hard to bear. It had never seemed to me that Father, Mother, or others could have reason to look at any other than me. I had always thought of them as my father, my mother, my grandmothers, and my sister, and never thought that I was only their daughter, her sister. Once, at about this time, I saw Jacky run across the street. I could not see why, being even then shortsighted. I crossed over too, and saw that she had run into a dark and deep shop full of canvases, frames, and brushes. The name on the shop was Bastien. She was speaking freely, breathlessly, using her hands, to the shopkeeper and his wife:

“Yes, Miss Jacqueline!”

She turned round and saw me standing in the long ray of light that thrust into the shop, dusty, heavy, and yellow as a beam of newsawn wood.

“That is my sister, Letty,” said she.

How inferior I felt! I retaliated in the evening by saying she visited strangers and annoyed people in all the shops: she spoke to men on the streets. Enquiry was made and this passed over, but we received a solemn talk about not talking to men on the street and not visiting strange people. Our eager, mystified conversations about this wiped out the hurt.

Dora Dunn and Uncle Philip were now Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, but this had not conferred upon them money for the rent. They had moved away from Paris after the wedding, for a honeymoon to Corsica, with some money that my father advanced to Philip (upon a verbal assurance that Grandmother Morgan would repay him). My mother begged my father to do this for Philip. She believed that Dora was solid and would make him work. The best thing was to give him this last fling, and then send him back to work. She pointed out that Pauline, about whom some strange stories had circulated, had proved a good influence for Phyllis, who was now earning money for herself instead of taking it from men, and that things were on the upcurve. Although we had to pay for Grandmother Fox in the “American Courts” on the Boulevard Raspail, we had saved the money that would have been spent on Lily Spontini's trip and on her toyshop fiancé, who was still writing hopeful letters.

“A little more such saving,” said Solander, “and we'll be in the poorhouse.”

“And we are saving the money we spent on board, lodging, and tuition at Mme. Gouraud's.”

“Tell me how rich I am,” said my father, laughing.

“And,” continued my mother, “you must be saving money in Antwerp.”

“How do you mean?”

“The girl! Has she gone to Geneva?”

“We lived in one room. I live in one room,” said my father gloomily, “there is no change. It is the same room. There's little difference in rent.”

This was an unfortunate remark, for my father became serious for the rest of the evening, although, as usual, he came in to wish us good night, and tell us one of his long, extempore tales, baroque, worldly, extravagant—improvised Mark Twainery.

They drove us to go to see Grandmother Fox. She had a small room, with a pale blue wallpaper and almost entirely occupied by a country wardrobe, a bed, a chair, a washstand, and her worn-out valises. On her window sill stood two pot plants in colored paper.

“Who brought those? Aren't they lovely!”

“A lady,” she muttered, “a lady, a nice friend. She likes to visit me. A very kind lady, an American lady.”

“Aunt Dora?”

“Aunt Dora,” said Grandmother, with respect, “no, poor woman, never mind, she did quite right, say nothing about her. She's a good woman, she's a mother, never mind—”

“Mme. Gouraud?”

“Mme. Gouraud! She wouldn't spend that much, not that much,” said Grandmother spitefully, her face twisted with greed, very bright and pink, “she came here with her dinner in a bag; an old lettuce; she goes shopping for bargains. Give me the oldest and cheapest, I'll make soup, she says, and carries it all the way home. Trust the French for such pennysaving—pooh!”

“What lady brought the plants, Grandma?”

“I don't know her name. She didn't tell me, and I didn't ask. I didn't think it polite. If they don't tell me, I don't ask.”

A week or two later I had a moral inspiration. I would visit Grandmother without being forced to, poor lonely old woman! She ought to live with her own, some said, and she herself quoted long conversations with legendary persons she knew, as follows, “The Spanish woman, a nice woman, said to me, ‘Oh, Mrs. Fox, I can't understand such a nice woman as you, so thoughtful, living all alone, and your son and daughter-in-law and two grandchildren living so near to you—”

She reported this sentiment as echoed by most of her legendary figures, in words appropriate to their characters.

On this Saturday afternoon, just after Solander had arrived in the house, we set out and were about to go into the American Courts when I saw someone I knew in front of me, and held Jacky tightly by the arm.

The person, a young woman, walked into the American Courts with a package in pink paper, in her hand. She wore a pink coat and skirt, had a straw hat, and carried an umbrella.

“See that girl—woman! Look quick, you dope!”

Jacky stared.

“It's
Die Konkubine
!”

How Jacky stared! Then her face came around to me, transfixed. It was like the annunciation.

“Oh, I wish I could look at her. Where's she going?”

“To see Grandma,” I shrugged.

“How do you know? Perhaps she lives there.”

After a minute, Jacky stared at me again.

“Grandma doesn't know her!”

“Of course she does. Everyone knows her.”

“Then let us go in,” said Jacky, pulling away and starting to run toward the door.

“Quick, before she goes.”

But I had more savoir-faire than my sister. I was intrigued.

“Can we wait here till she comes out, Letty?”

“No, come along.”

Persia knew me. Persia was not in Geneva. Grandmother knew she was not in Geneva, yet Grandmother continued to hold conversations with my mother, of this sort, “Have you heard anything about—the other one?”

“Why should I have? I don't ask questions about her. It doesn't interest me.”

“Did she get a job there—wherever it was?”

“I tell you, I don't know, Mother.”

“It surprises me that she got a job so quickly, and in French. She must be smart.”

“She's smart enough. I wouldn't worry myself about a girl like that.”

I now realized that Grandmother Fox, who had seemed to me a simple, silly woman, just an old woman, was an evasive diplomat. But why didn't she tell Mother what she knew? How interesting intrigue was! I didn't tell Mother what I knew, for I was too busy fitting things together. I got Jacky away from the American Courts by saying we would both go to the canvas and paint shop. It was quite safe for us to go together. I said, “You must never tell Mother or Papa that you saw Persia.”

“Oh, no,” said my sister, clasping her hands together, and shining at me. “Oh, thank you for showing her to me.”

She skipped along the street, dropping my hand, her long, loose, fair curls dancing on her shoulders. She was singing softly to herself. She sang, “I saw
Die Konkubine
, the pretty
Konkubine
, the darling
Konkubine
…”

We did not know what this word meant. It had a foreign, interesting sound to us. The following day we all went to see Grandmother. Jacky did not make a false step. My father seemed quite as usual. A box of chocolates with a pink paper underneath it was on the table. Grandmother offered it to us and to Mother. Mother ate a lot of them. At this I laughed, and my father laughed back without knowing why. After we had got outside, I pretended I had forgotten to kiss Grandmother and ran back.

“Always some new trick,” said Mathilde, who had been disagreeable all the week end.

“Grandma,” I said, running in and bussing Grandmother fiercely on both cheeks, “Grandma,” I cried, climbing up on her and tussling with her in a way that frightened her, “Granny, Granny, I saw her yesterday—she came here—”

“Get down and behave yourself,” said Grandmother with surprising command.

“And she brought you those chocolates.”

Grandmother looked at me for some time vaguely; she didn't seem to know I was there. Then she muttered, “Yes, a nice American woman. I don't know her name, she doesn't tell, can I ask? Perhaps there's some secret behind it all. I don't ask people's secrets; it isn't right, I think. Perhaps some tragedy; one never knows. There are lots of tragedies in lives. It is not right to ask—”

I stepped forward, looking excitedly at her—I was already the same height as this small, old woman, “Grandma, Persia, she came here, I saw her—”

Grandmother Fox seemed deaf, “What? What do you say? She talks, but I don't understand a word! Getting old, that's what it is. I hear nothing. Perhaps people come, and I don't know their names. They don't tell me or else I don't hear. I like chocolate. I said yesterday, Miss Elsie, when you go out would you mind stepping into the candy shop,
la confiserie
, and getting me some chocolates? A nice woman, a schoolteacher who is studying here. A respectable woman, but not like the other one, she is a very good woman—”

I watched Grandmother for a few minutes with sparkling eyes, but she turned her back and busied herself with some of her little parcels. She forgot me.

“I hear nothing; I don't know names either,” said Grandmother. “Good-bye, Grandma,” I said, remembering them waiting for me.

“Yes, yes, good-bye, good-bye,” said Grandmother, without turning, “always good-bye.”

F
ather and Mother quarreled each week end, made up, and went to a café and a movie. My father said, “You said you would try to adjust yourself; you said you didn't want a child.”

“It wasn't a trick, but I have too much to worry me, nowhere to turn.”

“How long are we going to live in such uncertainty? It's terribly serious.”