Letty Fox (38 page)

Y
OUR
J
ACKY
.

 

O
ur first few hours, at our home on Riverside Drive, flew past, and we seemed to be happy and united as before, with many new and intoxicating aspects of life coming up between us, as Jacky said. But unfortunately that very evening we had to leave for Green Acres Inn for the New Year's party, and I did not have a word with my sister till the following day, on the train back home. I had grieved her and she herself was pale and lumpish with late hours and the unpleasant experiences at the Inn— for the party, which was nothing out of the ordinary, had seemed a debauchery to her.

I was nearly sixteen. I knew I had never looked so pretty as I had at the traditional New Year's party at Green Acres.

Grandmother Fox had been alone with Lily over the holidays, in the Audubon Street flat, for Edie had gone back to England and had written us a letter to say how happy she was.

I felt like a new girl. Is this, I thought, real girlhood? Well, though fifteen years is a long time to wait for it, it's worth waiting for. My confidences to Jacky of the day before seemed childish.

Mother had stayed out at Green Acres and Jacky and I had come back to be together for a day before going back to school. Jacky was very pretty by now, but not my type; and she had a curious line which was strictly not beau-catching.

“Time,” said Jacky, “is all we are taught; get through exams; hurry up and get through; get a job, succeed; youngsters in kindergarten are catching up with you! Be in style, be
à la page
, go to dances at the right age, get a beau and get married, neither too soon nor too late—don't you think so?”

This was in the train, coming home. I yawned, “What if it is so? So what? There are times for things.”

“Yes, but they've cut us up until it's nothing but
rites de passage
! Play school, pre-school, school, high school, and the rest; soda-shop gang, teen-agers, subdebs, debs, brides, young mothers, is that a human life? And that not for a class, but they try to put it over on the whole one hundred and twenty-five million—It's fantastic,” said my sister. “We've got no time. It's an express train. Everything's just speed, just getting there. That's the only thing. They never say, ‘Throw everything away; join a lost cause!' ”

“So what?” said I, beginning to whistle through my teeth.

An old lady looked at me angrily. This pleased me. It was only recently that old women had stopped patronizing me and begun to hate me. I bounced like a tennis ball. If she knew what I knew—she probably did, and she hated me for having it now when she was as good as dead. “You're a gilt-edged pain in the neck,” I said to Jacky; “you've got the goofiest line I ever heard; why don't you stop that sophomoronic philosophistry? Your head's in the clouds with the cuckoos.”

My sister said something. I sang to myself. I felt I had seen everything. I was sure, myself, of the only thing worth being sure of—I was a hit with the boys. I had for the first time been able to tackle them en masse, and the results were, shall we say, satisfactory. I couldn't bear the company of my little sister. She kept talking like a Hunter College girl (which she was to be). She was stuffy, straitlaced; and not a whiff of sex-appeal about her, although later she would be all right, I thought. She wore her hair like some pictured woman she had seen, bright gold hair in a long even braid round her head. At the other end, short socks. It looked odd. No one but a future Hunter College girl would have thought it up, I told her; a combination of high-mindedness and girlishness which would tell anybody the kind of girl she was, a sonnet-writer, an artist.

She said I thought too much about boys. I told her I was taking physics, modern history, geometry, and English and at present knew a lot about electromagnetism, but I didn't wear a sixteenth-century hairdo and bobby socks. She became scarlet; her eyes flashed. She told me I had been drunk the whole week end. This was true, of course. I gloried in it; yet, it seemed a bit sordid to me.

I left Jacky to poke about at home, very angry with me, and said I, at least, was going to visit dear Grandmother Jenny, who was all alone and always gave us five dollars for New Year's. Jacky did not want to pay visits to anyone; she said she had a headache. When I passed the street window, she was already sitting in the window-seat with a book. It was snowing, clear, bright, three in the afternoon. How glad Grandma would be to see me, I thought. I bought her some flowers and a small box of chocolates and then regretted this, for I had spent all my pocket money during the holidays, and Papa kept me short. I burst in upon the old lady, who flushed with joy.

“Oh, the lovely snow,” she cried; “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, my darling, and look, wait, wait, I have something for you!”

I danced with impatience. It was some old trinket. I threw it on the bed without opening it, so that she had to pull at the clumsy wrapping herself; “Look in it, my darling.”

She insisted upon enquiring after everyone; wistfully, for she had wanted an invitation to Green Acres. Because we had been there, she seemed to think it had been a children's party, or one of those boy and girl affairs you see in children's books—white dresses and sashes, and Eton jackets. I decided to let her see life, out of deviltry, not really out of badheartedness. She'll be happier if she knows what it's really like, I thought; she certainly won't be sorry she wasn't there. I laughed; I danced. “You should have seen me dancing, Grandma!”

“Oh, I wish I could have been there, Tootsy.”

“I had eleven boy friends; they all danced with me.”

Her face brightened, then fell.

I cried, “Oh, Grandma, I have to admit I had a good time. I shouldn't, I suppose, but it really was, Grandma. I don't mind admitting I got good and drunk, but that's what New Year's is for, after all, isn't it? Green Acres was simply stacked. They were sleeping four in a room and they even turned the servants out of their beds, and put guests in the barn and in that old place belonging to Jape and even in the garage. Everyone was crazy to get into the place. Grandmother always gives them such a swell time. They had Tommy Goodman's band and three other bands going all the time. Oh, I had a swell time—”

Laughing, I was watching Grandmother's face. It was the oddest mixture of shock and envy; she began to look crushed. I went on malevolently, “At first, I was all right, then I had four long drinks one after the other. That didn't seem to do me any harm. I sat down to dinner. We all sat round the long table, and half-way through dinner I just got up and went across the floor and kissed a boy I saw sitting there. I don't know why. I just kissed him and came back to my seat. I didn't even know him. And when I got up—oh, gee, I suddenly realized, well, I wasn't—quite sober; I wobbled. But I got back to my seat all right … Then we danced. Errol was there. He went down with me. You know him—I told you—he begged to go down with me. And it was a good job I went down with him. No sooner did I get there than I saw Bobby Tompkins; he walked in and pretended not to see me. Well, such is life. Can you beat that? I told you all about Bobby Tompkins, the boy who was out with me when I met the cop in Washington Square, who wrote a poem and said he must have been thinking of me all the while, and Bobby—oh, I told you anyhow. But try to see it! Pretending not to see me. Presently, he began walking out again. All right, smarty, I thought; now, I won't see you. So I averted my face, and I pretended not to see
him
. Well, so life goes on … He went out and he didn't know if I'd seen him or not. I wonder what he'd think of if he'd known I did it on purpose. Well, came the dawn … I was doing the Big Apple. Errol was my partner nearly all the evening, although I danced with a couple of other boys I'd just met, and there were a couple of old guys about forty or fifty tried to make me, and I danced with a couple just to kid them, but I wasn't really having any; no gray hairs in my beer, I said to myself, and I said it to them, too; not quite that, but pretty much that. They got it anyway; but everyone was so stewed that they'd just go and try another girl. And back comes Bobby; and out goes I! I just walked right past him, staggered would be a more appropriate word, I suppose. Errol was holding me up, I must admit. I just said, ‘What's new, Bobby?' He was too shikker, poor kid, to know what was what. I guess he'd been practically passing out all along and hadn't noticed me at all. It's just possible … Well, we went out and we walked up and down; we had to walk, the elevator was going all the time, or maybe someone was necking in it. I guess that was it; and we looked in every corner—well, frankly, for a place to neck—and we couldn't find one place. Everywhere we went there were a couple of kids necking, and even more than necking. Gee, much more. And kids wasn't always the appropriate word. Finally, we had to sit in a corner of a sort of storeroom right behind the kitchen, where there were already three other couples. Overcrowding—Malthus, all that.”

“Where was your mother?” asked Grandmother in a gray kind of voice.

“Oh, Mother—she had a couple of long drinks, she can't take it the way I can, and she passed out—out of sight,” I emended, seeing my grandmother's face. “I don't know where she was, sleeping, I guess. She was dancing a bit with Mr. Bozo, something or other, but she got dizzy and went off the floor. Grandmother was in full sight, however. She didn't let up all night. So I felt no qualms about staying—and I guess I wouldn't have, anyhow. Well, after a bit of necking, we wanted another drink to jazz things up a bit, and we went back on the floor. I don't know what time it was. I would have been tired of Errol by that, although he's a swell kid, but frankly, I hardly knew who I was with. I just had to have someone to hang on to; and my recollections are, there were more than Errol. What did it matter? We were too drunk to even talk. No one could have made an improper advance, believe me, Grandma. We went back on the floor after the drink; the swing band was hopping away. I felt sorry for the poor guys. They were a swell band, but they just had to keep going. Mr. Masters, that's the manager, you know, paid them three times the usual rate to get them that night; and they knew what to expect. When we got on the floor, we found we couldn't dance, so we just trucked and shagged.”

“What's that?” enquired Grandmother, in alarm.

“Really, Grandmother! You're not serious? You're not joking, are you? Why, all the kids, even round here—look out in that courtyard any time— Look! That's trucking; now I'll show you shagging; that's shagging.”

“So you were trucking and shagging …”

“Yes. Then I got sick of Errol and I said, ‘I say, I'm sick of you, Errol, let's get a couple of other guys.' He said, ‘Okay,' and we went to look for a partner for Errol first, because I can always get anyone, partly because I'm Tommy Goodman's employer's grandchild, I suppose, or maybe—I don't know—not worth the inquest. Well— Jacky had disappeared hours before, I don't know where. Anyway, there was Edwige, nearly passed out, and I dumped Errol down beside her and left him mushing her. He didn't know she was only thirteen; no one would. I went off to look for someone. There was a kid there, was hanging round me all the evening. Dizzy they called him. Dizzy said, ‘Let's go some place, kid.' I said, ‘Okay, but remember, I'm not the age of consent.' He said, ‘No fooling?' I said, ‘I wouldn't fool you, I'm only sixteen.' I didn't dare tell him not even that; quite, that is. ‘Well, there's something I want awful bad,' he said. ‘Me too,' I told him What's the good of beating round the bush, Grandmother? You may as well know what life is these days. We've got to be realists. Otherwise, you and I'll get into those mushy, old-fashioned conversations where you still pretend I'm a little girl. It saves all the baloney, too, between the girls and boys; and if a boy tells you what he wants, he certainly isn't deceiving you or seducing you, or anything. It's all darn clean and honest.”

Grandmother looked as if she had been a French woman just hearing of the Battle of Waterloo. I laughed and kissed her on the cheek. Her cheek was dry, cool, ruggedly soft like an old peccary glove. Her eyes were dull.

“I'll put you out of your misery, Grandmother,” I said tenderly; “I am still as Mother delivered me to the world, though how I can't say. I guess that age of consent or something—I don't know. Or, I ought to tell the truth I suppose. We had some liquor; we went and sat in a car and we both passed out. I didn't catch a cold —not even that. A hangover! Oh, boy. Well, there you are, I did a plain, unvarnished tale deliver! And you've got to stand for it, Grandma, for I'm grown up now and there's no turning back. No standing with reluctant feet, you know. So let's you and I get along all right, eh?”

Grandmother kissed me softly, and with a very lovely expression, called me her turtle dove; but she was worried, I could see. I believe that she wrote to my father that day. This led to an interchange of letters. My mother spoke a good deal about the wildness of children in the States, and the immorality of local family life, and family illhealth. This was not the first time this had occurred; but now my father had finished his job in England and was ready to come home. Some members of the family had wild hopes that he would leave Persia behind. He did not.

Mathilde was again visited by more serious members of the family circle, and advised to come to an understanding with my father, a separation or a divorce; the latter would be more profitable. This was treated in a more sedate manner than before because Philip Morgan had just been jailed by Amabel for back alimony; and the serious side of married life had appeared again to these spinning heads.

It was reported that in the cell, Philip met Percival Hogg, who had been jailed by Aunt Angela.