Letty Fox (45 page)

“I'll be seventeen next February. Clays will get a court order and we'll be married in Connecticut. Or he won't, and we'll be married in Jersey. Or with a court order, he can even be married here, but only after a year—I think it is. But you don't know about all that. We ought to go to a lawyer.”

“At your age!” said my mother, grimly. “Who was his other wife?”

For as Mother was very sharp about divorces, I had never mentioned Manning's previous marriage. I told her the story and that I was quite innocent, but my tongue slipped, and it came out about Caroline, for she was the co-respondent.

“What are you letting yourself in for?” asked Mathilde; and was set against Clays from that time forward. At any rate, I had set a date for bringing him to the house and Mother could not refuse to meet him, nor would she battle him; but she set it all down on my father's account and said that it was because of his life that I was already set on the same path. And then she spoke gloomily about what she would do, if my father was so mad as to let me marry. What would she do for an apartment? She could not bear to live in a small place with the other girls; yet she would lose the money given for my keep. She did not suppose Clays would want to live with her, an old woman (she was forty); but perhaps I could remain with her and Jacky while Clays was away. By this she had cheered up somewhat, for she realized that I would have to go through college, even if I were married; that Clays would be most of the time in Washington and even in London. He was obliged to return to his source at times, both to see his chiefs and to see his family—and, I don't doubt, to see more secret connections. For almost every Englishman is a working patriot, though his politics are not those of the Government in power. I didn't then ask myself what would happen to me if I were such a patriot as Clays. What a situation! Under Two Flags!

My mother thought deeply about the Mannings' divorce. It fascinated her. This was a piping hot subject at that moment in the Morgan family. Not only were Philip and Percival Hogg still in jail for alimony (Hogg was still in jail, and Philip was again in jail, there was a difference), but Aunt Phyllis was bedeviled in a sad way. She had remarried a man named Bosper, who had been divorced. Aunt Phyllis had now a baby boy and was being sued by Bosper's former wife. The suit was a complicated one. Bosper was sued for bigamy, Aunt Phyllis for false pretenses (calling herself Mrs. Bosper), and an attempt was being made to call Aunt Phyllis's child a bastard. Bosper was resident in New York State; his first wife had obtained a Reno divorce, alleging that she was a Nevada resident. The first wife had already remarried, and had a child of this remarriage. The second marriage was a runaway marriage. The second Mrs. Bosper had been a married woman. After divorcing her husband, a New York women's magazine editor, she had run away to Florida (during her vacation) with Bosper and being offered the alternative by her first husband, divorce, or be divorced, had divorced her husband, a resident in New York State, and she resident in Nevada, and had remarried in New Jersey. Six weeks after the marriage she had left her second husband, charging intolerable cruelty, and had gone to Reno for a second divorce, there receiving a liberal allowance in alimony. She asserted she was a real Nevada resident, anxious to establish herself there as a magazine correspondent, and report the doings of the fashionable divorce colony.

However, Mr. Bosper began to make big money after this (in the fur business), for the war in Europe was not only making the shipment of furs difficult, but also raising the (unavowed) prices. This money he put into a home, diamond rings, and furniture for Phyllis and her baby, paid for in one-dollar bills, which he carried in a valise.

The first husband of the second Mrs. Bosper (Mr. X) had now remarried in Connecticut, but this marriage was at present illegal in New York State, for he had been the guilty party.

The second Mrs. Bosper, now twice a divorcée, once Mrs. X and then Mrs. Bosper, saw an excellent business in dresses and coats opening up; everyone now thought war was coming. She needed money to start the business. The remarriage had brought her in a good yield, but she needed more. She asked Mr. Bosper for additional alimony. This was refused. She sued for it, but at this moment the judges seemed hardhearted and she was turned down. The second Mrs. Bosper (once Mrs. X) now sued Mr. Bosper, alleging bigamy. She said Mr. Bosper had married the first Mrs. Bosper (Anne) and, somehow illegally, had obtained a divorce in Reno; he had not really been a resident of Nevada, but a New York resident, and the divorce, of which his wife was not notified, was obtained under false pretenses, and was not acceptable in New York State. He had then married her, Mrs. X, who was legally divorced and they were legally married.

He had obtained an illegal divorce from her, and was in arrears of alimony, for which she now sued in New York. But she further claimed that he was not divorced at all, and had married, illegally, Phyllis Morgan, who, therefore, used her (Mrs. Bosper's) name and obtained money and credit under it, and filched away the real Mrs. Bosper's friends by misrepresentation, while, of course, their child (Phyllis's and Mr. Bosper's) was a bastard, and could not normally inherit Mr. Bosper's money.

Mrs. Bosper II (formerly Mrs. X) hoped to collect a small sum from Mrs. Bosper I, from Mr. X, and from Mr. Bosper II. She was suddenly warned, however, that if she won her suit for back alimony (which she was about to do), she would be unable to obtain a decision in her other suit alleging misrepresentations in divorce proceedings, thus losing her basis for blackmail. She illegally agreed to drop her charges, however, upon payment of a round sum of ten thousand dollars, although she had previously alleged a felony. This was arranged.

Mathilde was bitter in lament over the wickedness of the world, but the rest of the women were openly discussing the profit of the alimony game, which now took on complications that they, in their simple, old world ways, had never suspected. They had simply divorced men and lived modestly on men's labors during their respectable lifetimes; but here were brilliant female gamesters unmarrying and remarrying, seizing parts and profits. The women were as shocked as huggermugger sidewalk traders are at the bold feats of speculators and profiteers on the exchanges.

Mrs. Looper said it was better than poker. Mrs. Morgan said she hoped the women didn't get too clever, because Green Acres, most of the year, was kept running on the weekly board of middle-aged women who were put out of the way by their husbands on neat little alimonies; it was one of America's own particular Asia Minors, a relative of London's Lancaster Gate and South Kensington, and the refuge of similar superstitions, race-superiorities, palmistry, and flag-wagging. If all these became conspirators and monsters (well, if pigs could fly) of fraud, said Grandmother (though she was not opposed to self-protection as such), the men would become irritated, arise in their might, and cut down the juicy little game. Then, “We girls should remember our place,” said Grandmother Morgan solemnly to her two married daughters and several of her friends. “The men marry us, keep us and our children; give us allowances, buy life insurance, and leave us their money and even hand us alimony! But all for one reason, and one reason alone. To buy us off! They don't want us running the world; they are willing to pay a lot, so they can run it themselves. It's insurance, as I see it. Now, if we start plundering the men, if we burden the trade with more than it can bear, it stands to reason that Congress or the Supreme Court, or whoever does these things, don't you see, will start to go over the situation and we will get either no alimony at all, or else no divorce (which would be awful, girls, after all), or else a uniform law; and there are no pickings when there is a uniform law. You see what we women have now, in the U.S.A., is an arbitrage business; we make pickings, even a fat living out of the differences between state laws, an excellent business, considering there are forty-eight states and not only a difference in the laws, but a confusion in the minds of judges, lawyers and divorcees.”

“In my opinion,” said Mathilde, gloomily, “there should be no divorce. What good does it do anyone? You marry a man anyhow.”

“You have no divorce,” jeered my grandmother cheerfully, “and look where it's landed you. That is no solution. We girls can only go on getting freer. But not by gangsterism, don't you see? I know there are a few pioneers who will get away with it, like this bird, Mrs. X, but you'll see, there'll be a moral wave and we'll be swept up.

“And,” said Grandmother, pulling out another stop, with her great sang-froid and good faith in the world, “there's my poor, darling Phyllis, my little beauty; she should never have had a cloud in her blue sky, a woman men should kiss the feet of, a natty dresser, smart, a good wife and mother, and she gets herself into all this trouble; and how she has cried, my darling. We must also, don't you see, stand together, for our daughters. We must not let these harpies and speculators—these women out for what they can get—” My grandmother coughed.

“Where did you get those openwork stockings, Ada? They certainly slim the leg. Do you think if I went there I could get some? You see, I have no hair on my legs, and I wear the sheerest of sheer, but I could do with a pair of openwork, too, for Muron says my legs are one of the most beautiful things about me.”

Grandmother simpered. Muron, a broker, was her latest beau and wished to marry her. Grandmother broke off all thought of alimony to plunge into a rose-and-honey account of her romance.

“I would go right off with him tomorrow to City Hall but the boys are so harsh to me, and Stella says it's ridiculous at my age. I want you to come out to Green Acres. I'll throw a big party. We'll have a big get-together; and,” she continued gleefully, “Muron's a real good-time-Charlie; that is when I'm there. But other times he likes to sit home—maybe too much. I don't understand what is the matter with the men; they all show their age. But Muron is real nice, good-looking,” said Grandmother; “and perhaps this time I'll throw my cap over the windmills. A woman can't live alone forever. It isn't natural.”

Thus ended Grandmother's instructions on alimony. Grandmother was delighted with my own prospects, and lectured Mathilde. I must get married; I was a lively young girl, and girls knew everything these days. I better get married before it was too late, she told my depressed mother.

“If only her father took some interest in her,” cried Mathilde; “and where will they live? Letty can't live all alone in an apartment.”

But she was unheard, for the ladies were all over me, wanting to hear about the rich Englishman.

Grandmother left. She had a date with Muron. The ladies seeped away in her wake and I was left alone with Mother, who indulged as usual, in Poësque visions of my future and hers, not to mention Jacky's, my father's, and so forth.

On me she bent a profound, cold eye, for when Mathilde had tried out the line, “She is too young to know the realities of adult life,” Grandmother had hawked, laughed, sneezed, and said, “She's getting too restive. You'd better let her have her head. I know, I remember—”

Grandmother said no more and became grave. It was now no longer admitted that Phyllis, the matron and wronged woman, had once gadded about Europe; and if anyone mentioned Vichy or Cairo, Phyllis preferred to be as ignorant as any woman in the cornbelt, as we conceive it. Mathilde, too, had reached that stage and age when a lazy woman finds it more seemly to forget she ever had a desire or want. Still the thought was there, and not only was I before her eyes, but my cryptic sister Jacky, who was not taking sex in her stride. Mother was even morbid about Jacky, who was doing well enough in the usual subjects for the punch-drunk, history and English, but knew nothing of the modern world or of her contemporaries; who never went to the theater unless the family took us; despised politics; who repeated all the gossip about the male teachers. She criticized them, and satirized them. I tried to make Mother take her away from Hunter, which seemed to me unhealthy, because all girls together, but Mother said it was I who was unnatural and unhealthy.

My final argument to Mother was (about Clays) that she knew I was too young to have the experience of college. This, simply because a professor she had admired at college had said youths ought to go out in the world and get a job and know something about mankind, before they started learning the higher arts and sciences.

I said to her, Why couldn't I take a few months off, try married life, wander about a bit with Clays, and return to college in the autumn, a young, married woman. My mother made an outcry at this, saying I had no idea of how a married woman was shut out of the lives of young girls, despised and treated as a pariah. Indeed, all married women were pariahs from life itself, said my mother, unless they consented to behave like Grandmother Morgan, members of a joyous, ribald camarilla, hardly women, more like men. Where was a place for a married woman in the world today, groaned my mother, wringing her hands. She wanted me to have my playtime. And what about children? Did I realize that they might come—too soon? Why not, was my argument. It would be fun to have them, and get them over; then, by, say, twenty-four, I would be a settled woman and have a career. My mother said, little did I know what I was letting myself in for. Why, this carefree, but far from heart-free man I was marrying did not even stoop to make the promises her children's father (that meant Solander) had made to her; in fact, he practically proclaimed himself a rogue with women.

Perhaps, my mother enquired with a sad sneer, I intended to be like my maternal grandfather, my paternal grandfather, my maternal grandmother (for Mother could not blink the fact that Grandma Morgan was not entirely chaste), my Uncle Philip, and various other relatives, not to mention my own father. Yes, it was a nice pattern they had in marital relations today, and perhaps it suited a girl like me; although, thank goodness, Jacky showed more of her mother in her, and Andrea was an innocent child.