Letty Fox (6 page)

My father passed the sherry. My mother said a delicate and talented child would not receive proper attention in the public schools. They had forty, fifty, sixty, seventy in a class; it had been estimated that the teachers in a certain school had not one minute of time per day to give to each child in individual attention; and what of general health? Then, what about conservative, no reactionary ideas, brought subtly or with a shillelagh into the brains of innocent children in the public schools?

“You knock 'em out again,” said McLaren calmly. “What are you here for? If you can't take care of your own children, give up the family system and go in for communal living! Can she add two and two? No.”

“She has not felt the urge,” said Mother; “they do not force the children; they learn the play way, they learn by co-operation; there is no urging of the individual, it leads to the competitive spirit. Education isn't a treadmill and it isn't the star system. And then we must wait for the child's need to unfold itself.”

“Holy Methusalem,” said old McLaren, “and has she got to wait for the urge for everything her whole life long? Then she'll know no more than her A B C when she's a hundred, for that baby will more likely be a female wrestler.”

My father laughed, and McLaren told them, in their circumstances, they ought to take advantage of the free schools. But Mother spoke up for me, saying that I never would be a member of the community of dirty little foreign children, that I belonged to one sort of people and to one kind of society and their object was to push me up to better things than they had ever known, not to drag me down to the level of dirty little slum children, whose heads were as full of gangster ideas as of lice. Did McLaren even know what words those children used in the street, right outside the house? Letty had brought home two or three of them already.

Not liking to miss the fun, I raced into the room and joyously heaved a slipper over the electric light. I at once gave vent to these juicy words from my listening post. Mr. McLaren gave me an awful look which caused me to run behind my father's chair, upon which I then climbed with loud shrieks of victory. My mother was explaining to Mr. McLaren that if she now whipped me or washed my mouth out with soap (the old Scottish method apparently), I would be repressed, these words would be repressed in me for the rest of my life, and I would either take to filthy pictures years later or would become a nervous pale girl who would attract no one and never would succeed; my real personality would never emerge because they would have imposed their old-world behavior patterns upon me. “She is not over-protected,” she said dolefully; “we have not the money for that, for I realize that is your objection.”

Mr. McLaren listened, frowning, to this careful student-mother's recitation, and said, “It's some form of Voodoo—it's a secret society”; with my father saying, “Mac, I suppose there's a lot of Jean-Jacques in the idea, but on the financial side I agree with you”; McLaren saying, “All education should be free and every child will be spoiled till it is”; my father saying, “Middle-class radicals have a curious urge to prove they're the genteelest of all people”; and McLaren saying, “Point to one gentleman or genius!” and my father saying, “But Mathilde feels she is trying to give Letty the very best education,” it all ended by my mother saying, “If you had suffered as a child, as I did, you would understand everything”; the men both looked at her and said not another word.

“I suppose you think that too is just compensation,” said my mother, using one of the women's favorite words; “Letty shall want for nothing, she will have nothing to compensate for, and perhaps, when she grows up, her children can go to a free school. Perhaps we'll be in a different system then”; and the words dragged coldly, childishly, out of her mouth, like a distasteful formula.

Probably, however, the price of the school was too high, for immediately after I was sent to a public school, where I learned at once to read and write. I liked the school. I never tired of my tricks and of making the girls laugh and jump out of their desks, in fact, do what pleased me. But those girls were too intimidated, or too poor, I don't know what; they could never be got into the rapture of badness which overcame us so often at The Bairns. I was a great trial to my teachers, contradicting them and even quoting to them bits of doctrine about education from the talk of my mother and father. I made enemies. Many of the girls had become disciplined by this time (I was about six) and even had some ambitions. They disliked me, I upset the lessons. The ugly, ill-dressed ones admitted me, and laughed when I made a noise, though not always with good nature. For them I represented freedom, money, and privilege, and they hoped to see me punished. I let them see I didn't give a darn for the rules. These poor and ugly girls were always getting punished for lateness and dirt, and were suspected of any thefts. I suppose our mutual dislike helped them into jail, or onto a picket line.

At home I returned to my progressive school ways and in fact made such a noise around myself (my father calling me “his three-ring-circus”) that I felt stouter, smarter, better every day, and felt sure I would knock the world down later on just by strutting in upon it. So many a fat and loud child feels.

In all this, I had cronies, followers, and a sidekick, in my father's words, who was my sister Jacqueline, born a year after me. Jacqueline ( Jacky) wanted to be great, not famous, just great, she explained. She was a lively girl also, with yellow elf-locks, large oval eyes, and straight features, a small nose and a medium red mouth. She was thin at first, with long, thin arms, but when she grew up became like me, middle-sized and plump. She was not always as pretty as I, being graver; but she had a trait I did not have.

Her gravity threw a shadow over her face and mind, and this shadow was interesting; people even found her charming. When I was nearly seven, we had a world of our own, joky, mad, bad, selfish, scandalous, indecent, alert. We rifled drawers, read and stole letters, faked telephone calls, spied and informed. We became pious or godless together, full of parental respect or odiously unloving together. The beginning of each of these moods was simply the words, “What will we do?” Whatever we did, we did with unflagging energy for three, four, or five days. The mood would disappear in some minute of some day and we would once more sit blankly or stand jigging vacantly round a chair and repeat, “What will we do?” Many projects were presented, reviewed, rejected, before the next project—religion, mother love, slander, theft—was decided upon. Some projects were shabby imitations of the wickedness of other young desperadoes we heard or read about in children's books.

In all this world of tumble and fun, we did not at first see that there was trouble in our family. Jacky first saw it and I scoffed. Then I saw it, and we turned the trouble into another hilarious project; we became “Clark Gable and Joan Crawford” in a hog-calling scene imitated from movie (and Reno) ideas of marital dialogue.

S
olander had seen his wife Mathilde first as a somber girl, and he had let her feel him near her for years while she was struggling to make something of herself. She became used to his loyalty, which she rewarded by a hasty lunch near his office, a walk at nightfall near her home, an arm for his arm when she needed an escort. She confided things to him and listened to his interminable explanations. She lived in the heart of things, and the rest of the world, through him, spun round her. When she was lovesick over one boy actor or another, he saw, knew, grew anxious, ran them down a little, hoped for the worst. Once he saw her in a socialist procession, wearing low-heeled shoes and a skating skirt, black on top, red underneath. She walked stoutly along, shouting when they shouted, like a brave child. Her loose hair framed her pale face, without lipstick or powder; it was the lonely face of a pretty woman who cannot understand why she suffers so much, but who knows already that she must.

Solander never looked at any other women, though he liked them and talked to them; he would think to himself that he was rather lonely at times, but “I am a one-woman man,” he said to himself. He supposed he would get her at last; and when she agreed, hesitating, to marry him, after her last miserable love affair with the faun-boy, he thought naturally, “When she knows what the love of a man is, she will forget all this and love me; experiment is always unsatisfactory.”

She began serious family life by keeping her baby when it started, even though they were not sure they wanted it. She thought, “This will let us see where we stand; and if it doesn't work out, one child's nothing; I'll get a divorce. Oh, to get out of the worry of the world. He loves me, he will keep me.” They married. She felt a new joy and thought that now for the first time she had some reason for living. “I tried to be someone; now I see that real happiness is in being no one, in effacing yourself according to the rules of society.” She had all kinds of sayings; but as no learned roles fit experiences, she wished sometimes that she had met the right man. She had no idea how much she depended on Solander, for it seemed to her she was full of ideas, when she repeated his. The art she really knew, that she was born for, by which, with unaffected, persistent work, day and night, asleep and awake, she was able to form her plastic soul to take on the shape of another's, or even force a playwright's imaginings to be reborn in the flavor of her own mind, this she neglected, as being unreal, not the real world. She threw away all she really knew and repeated political and economic phrases, correctly and credulously, but without inner understanding.

The poor apartment was now hung with children's clothes. She heard her husband air the opinions of various smart young men with whom he was infatuated (for he was an ardent lover of his friends, as well), and she wondered if he had any ability. He, meanwhile, asked himself if he were not, like many men, laughing and talking, even making love, in a mirror. Timidly each looked for another mate; such cowardly and inoffensive glances attract no one. But each said, it cannot last; and though there were tender reconciliations and moments when it was clear that they could understand each other as acquaintances, or as people living in the same city understand each other, there was nothing else between them but the children— myself a noisy, showy child, and slow-mooded, tender Jacky—and a gloomy feeling of years lost together.

Convinced that in the familiarity of the marital bed she had cheapened herself, Mathilde now tried to keep the marriage together by spending months away from her husband with the children. He slaved away in the city, attended his meetings, visited his friends, came to a house cleaned once a week, lived through the cold, the heat, and made money to keep them. Mathilde, living unhappily with the noisy, greedy, money-loving Morgans in Green Acres Inn or in Long Beach, and even up in Lydnam Lodge, the Morgan place near Clinton, New Jersey, hoped that Solander would call her back, or even take a mistress, so that she could have a complaint against him—any real misdemeanor would force a solution. All this was a vague, almost incoherent dream. She lived from day to day and listened to the advice poured upon her. Presently her relatives began to neglect her, and between themselves said, “She'll lose him.” Grandmother Morgan began introducing her to well-situated businessmen. “I like Sol, but businessmen are the best providers and they need a real home, they've got to have a place their bank manager and their boss can recognize. A bank manager likes a nice home. When you're looking for credit you mustn't have ideas. People with ideas have no bank account. For every idea you have you lose a dollar. I want to see my girls comfortable. A man with ideas can't be a good provider, and an idea is a thing you can change overnight. Now, you can't lose a good credit balance overnight.”

Sometimes my mother left us in the country places and with families in the city while she lived with my father alone, to patch it up. I always had a great adaptability, was a regular chameleon; I was a country girl in the country, very pert and up-to-date in the city; I did my best to be ignorant and coarse in a rural one-room school, and head of the class in town; but I was always off on some fresh tack, learning, imitating, acting something new. I hated equals. I lied about gifted, traveled, or propertied children, fought rivals as well as I could, despised those who obeyed me. As for those who seemed to ignore me, I flattered myself they did not exist. Jacky accepted all change with a reasoning gaiety. Green Acres Inn, New Canaan, and Lydnam Lodge in northern New Jersey were our occasional refuges in those early years.

G
reen Acres Inn was a white-painted house, New England style, with deep porches, gabled ends, and many windows opening on lawns and gardens. It was set back from the road but not too far back, for the visitors to the Inn were all of one sort—a sort that lives in the bustle made by others; that is to say, old people who would fret if they missed an automobile on the road, and who looked lugubriously and even desperately into their plates at lunch if they heard the other women calling
across the softaired dining room, “It was a Pierce-Arrow, wasn't it?” “Yes, blue, with pale blue initials.” My grandmother knew these old women well enough. At such a moment, a hostess, a young woman of thirty or so, would come into the room and ask after their health or the meals. A short grumble about the soup, and the old creatures would begin to cheer up. But they were ill-natured and spoiled, living on someone else's money for the most part, and they looked upon young women as encumbrances. They were intent upon their secret cocktail parties in bedrooms (from which they emerged with red faces for lunch), their favorite records on the Inn phonograph (Geraldine Farrar, Schumann-Heink, Caruso), their card games which started at eleven in the morning, their discussions of George Sand's love life and of the Bluebeard of the day. All their discussions ended in the condemnation of women. They were steel-ribbed ladies of fifty to eighty; to them my mother, and even their own sons and daughters, seemed inexperienced, sexless. To these avid old people, only themselves were alive and burning with sex; the rest of mankind had all to learn. There were two or three old men at the Inn. The only struggles these old women knew were for the attentions of the men, or to be invited to bedroom parties where palms were read and fortunes told. Of course, this was in the days of prohibition when every man was devoted to breaking the law.