Letty Fox (77 page)

“Simon told you everything about that time?”

“He said that—he said, ‘Naturally, I stayed there because it was so late.' ”

“He was charming; he's a nice fellow; I wish some of the young men were as pleasant.”

“I know you've had a few lovers, Letty.”

“Yes, but Simon—”

I began to brag, flushed with my victory, my experience; I was puffed up with what seemed to me my real hold on life, and there was some goodness in me too. I wanted to let her see it wasn't as serious as she thought. Each time I said his name, I saw her resisting the pain of hearing it said by me, in this goofy, boasting, half-sneering, and half-affectionate tone. Then she said, “You see, Letty, you can't tell Mother! You're in the same boat as me. You would not dare. Why would you do that to me?”

I looked at her helplessly, and returned to my senses, “I was just boasting.”

“No, he told me too. One day we quarreled and when we made it up—I ran after him; I sent him a card and offered to meet him— he was anxious and pressed me, made me hurry—when I met him I could see he had sleepless nights just like me. I said to him, ‘There is something I must tell you, Simon; I can't live like this.' He said, ‘My dear, one doesn't die so easily.' But I saw how he looked. When I met him he was not waiting for me, but was cozily talking with a beautiful girl about my age. At first I wanted to go and never see him again. I couldn't do that. I saw him watching the door, waiting for me. I came up to him and he rose quickly, pleased to see me, glad I was so pretty; and when he passed the desk—it was in a bookshop—he gave a sly underhand look at the pretty woman he had been talking to, and a slight lift of the shoulders as if to say, ‘You see, I must take out my young niece'—it suggested something like that …”

“But if you know all that—you don't love him. Love is blind.”

Jacky said, “Love sees a thousand times more than other people, and almost everything it sees proves to it it isn't wanted.”

“God,” I said, “I wouldn't like to be in your shoes, Jacky. You're so darned serious; where will it end? I mean, you can't take anything as a joke. This is darned serious.”

“Well, we went to a teashop, where he offered me tea and cakes in his polite way, and he began to make conversation in his gay way. You know him—at first, I didn't follow the drift of his talk. I often don't. It's because he's really thinking about something else altogether. But he thinks you must chat about this and that with young girls. At last I saw that he was telling me about other women who had fallen in love with him, or at least been much struck with him at one time or another. But naturally, he wasn't bragging like a college boy. It was circumstantial, very colorful; and I gulped it down, but I was bored, bored—not a word about me. At last, I got ready to go. He put his ice-cold hand on my warm one, and I looked into his flaming face and his sleepless eyes, his face was quite sanded over with overwork and insomnia, and—it seemed to me—this was the worst thing—with unrequited love—”

“You're in a bad way—” I murmured, not liking this story, and resolved to go and tell my father as soon as Jacky had gone.

“I got ready to go, put on my hat, then he said, ‘You are going to leave me so soon, I see, my dear; but what did you want to tell me?' And he looked at me with a kind of bloodthirsty hunger, and it was so clear that he expected me to make a declaration that I grew quite cool. ‘Only that we must not quarrel, Simon.' Again he put his wrinkled, stone-cold hand on mine.”

I said, “Jacky, it's horrible, really, if you see him like that.”

She did not answer, but calmly continued, “Icy hand; it chilled me to the bone and I thought, imagine that hand reaching toward me and—here—” she touched her breast.

“Gosh,” I said, distressed, “you're dramatizing it a bit.”

“We got up, went outside, and he was hunched down, because he was disappointed, he wanted to have me in his power, just out of a lust of power. But when we got outside, it was a violet-blue evening, just coming down; the dusk so thick that it was like volcanic dust; and people rather idly going home, though thick as troops. He had on his squashed old hat that he must, one time, have thrown under a bus and his long-tailed coat in which he is every bit the professor; and he looked like a draggled old beetle crawling out of a pond where it has fallen. We stood side by side on the curb waiting to cross, and such peace came into us both as I never felt before; I could tell he felt it, too. It was like standing in an immense garden with no one about. We crossed and he stood hesitating at the corner, wondering if I would go further with him, for he was bitterly disappointed and hoped to get some sort of declaration of love from me. I found myself just a brisk, pert young girl. I made him bring me home. He sat in the bus beside me, patted my hand, and stole glances at his evening paper. His face was crushed, ridiculous. He held my fingers as we came down the street; and he smiled at me with his large eyes. He would not come in. I kissed him lightly on his cheek which was not well shaved, and nearly fainted from love and joy. I suppose I showed it. His face lighted up too. I walked in, quite dizzy; and was dizzy all evening until I thought I was getting something. Mother and Andrea were talking, Aunt Dora was there, and actually, at moments, there was a transformation scene. The room just reeled away, tossed itself away, and I even did not hear the voices for a moment, but saw Gondych, felt his cold hand and saw his wonderful eyes, and felt his cheek. I jerked myself back into the room, answered them. They thought I was tired. And then the smell I snuffed on Gondych's cheek—the shaving cream, the old felt of his hat, his newly starched shirt, I suppose—all poured over me at once, and I was drowned again; there was the transformation scene. At last I had to go to bed; I couldn't keep track of the conversation. Mother said, ‘Jacky's overworking, the work they have to do is a shame.' Aunt Dora offered to lend us her cottage at Cape Cod; she has an old ramshackle thing there. That gave me the idea. That's where we're going to stay. It's empty this summer. I set about fixing it all up at once. I told one lie after another; but I was happy. The theory is that I'm going to paint with a famous painting class up there, which is there every summer, and by the greatest good luck, they paint just round and about Aunt Dora's little house. So I said I'd stay there with a couple of the girls, because it is hard to get rooms in the usual cottages. The class is always full to overflowing and is so this year. That's no lie.”

She heaved a sigh, “Thank goodness one thing is not a lie. Simon is pleased enough, but a bit dubious about sanitary arrangements, hot water, cooking, cleanliness, and I don't know what else.” She laughed nervously, but happily. “Well, it's all arranged; I can't do much, can I?”

“No. It's madly harebrained, and what can Simon be thinking of?” Jacky said solemnly, “You know what I say to myself, Letty? I'm telling you so that you won't tell on me. Don't ruin it for me! Perhaps this is my only love; you don't know. When I'm alone, I throw myself on my bed or in a chair, or wherever I am, and I feel mad with bliss, just bliss. And I say, I have been touched by the mighty wing—as it swooped nearer earth than usual—”

I said nothing, sitting there, smoking one cigarette after another, and myself almost in a trance. After a silence, Jacky said, “The wing of a great thing—death or love, or Lucifer; that is just the feeling I have. Can you imagine the wing, an immense, dark wing, as broad as the sky almost, dusk-colored, and soft but strong with a surge of power such as—” she got up—“such as you and I never felt—” she walked up and down—“such as—” she stopped in front of me with tears in her eyes and her hands wrenched together—“such as anyone, with any heart or spirit, would die just to feel? For what is the good of living otherwise? There's nothing else in our lives—this gin-milling and lechery and selling-out. We think every fraud and crime is life, reality. I don't want to sound despairing—no one could feel that—the flight of the wing and despair. You know what I say to myself when I go out at night and I wish I was with Simon, I say, ‘Now I'm going out with the Angel of Death,' and when I sit in a movie by myself, the seat next to me, which is for the Angel of Death, is always empty.”

“You crazy kid,” I said. “You're imagining that, at any rate.”

“Oh, I assure you, it's quite true. And I feel safe; absolutely safe. And I think, if I am friends with the Angel of Death, he'll not lay hands on Simon.”

“Look, Jacky,” I said, spilling everything all over the floor, and looking cheerfully at the litter on my floor, “it wouldn't do you any harm to have a drink. Why don't you come out with me? I think you're alone too much. I realize Mother isn't quite the type you can rave to, and Andrea—of course—but why don't we go out and sit in a café? I don't want to corrupt youth or anything, but I think you ought to try first to get another boy friend.”

Jacky burst out laughing, “Oh, that kind of advice everyone gives me. I have boy friends. One wanted to marry me. He wrote Mother a letter. He asked her in the same letter if the twenty-five hundred dollars would be paid at once and if Mother's piano would go along with me.” She went on, laughing reasonably, “Simon isn't a next-best.”

“You mean you really love him.”

She gave a shout of laughter, “Oh, that fiery bean, that mind of flame; you do catch on quickly”; she cried out, and in the next hilarious few moments, she insulted me and I could see her flinging me off, my dull influence, paying me out for my anecdotes about Gondych, like a big terrier, throwing the pond water off his hide. We went out and I came to the conclusion, within myself, that I must tell my father the whole thing next morning. He would know what to do. He would go and see Gondych. I thought the whole thing a disgrace. Gondych was no doubt pleased to have a hideaway in a quiet place while he worked out all his plans for his sabbatical year. He was not certain of his future, whether it was to be here, or in England, or on the Continent. They were to live as friends and lovers and her youth was a guarantee to him; they would separate when the summer was over.

“But if you love him, why don't you try to marry him?”

“I will try,” she said, laughing sideways at me. “Imagine how simply perfect—oh, I'd say, ‘Life, you don't owe me anything.' ”

I laughed, “Oh, yes, we always say that; but at the next toothache we're not so sure; and the next man who turns us down, we're asking Life for the nipple all over again.”

Jacky left me; but on the way home I met Bill van Week coming from my place, where he had been to get me. We went out, drank too much, wrangled, told each other too many home-truths; and as he was stronger and nastier than I, this went on all the way home. When I got home, I cried and then telephoned Bill to ask him to console me. He told me he meant every word. I was this, that, and the other.

The next morning I had too much to think about to even call Jacky to mind. I was then at low ebb and I was on the slide. Would I really end badly, just a slut, a rolling stone?

The unusual pair thus went off to Cape Cod without my having put in my oar; and, after all, I was not sorry. My fate is that when I interfere, all the troubles of both parties spill out over onto me. But by the next week, thinking they were well established and she ruined, so to speak, I went to my father and told him the story. By that time I felt very guilty indeed, and called myself the most selfish woman alive. Jacky wrote, telling of the northern lights, the cold water, and the eddying darkness of their dunes, and her extravagant nature seemed here to be developing out of bounds; “I wonder if I am not fated to found a love-cult or a religion; those are the ideas that now possess me; it is not only that I love such a man as this, but the climate here—”

Soon my father had set off after her, to rescue her from her infatuation under the twanging and wavering night curtains of the northern lights.

J
ACKY was indisposed for the old family life when she returned. The family was scandalized; and she, being very unhappy, had no stomach for their sermons and questions. She came to live with me. We both had to suffer reproaches for living away from our mother.

Jacky went back to college, where she slaved away to forget her disappointment over Gondych, in work. They had been very happy; so much so that Gondych had done no work, spending each fine day in her company, bathing, riding, walking, and visiting the more disreputable of the neighbors. Gondych declared that no work, especially not bio-chemistry, compared with the happiness of a summer spent with a lovely young creature; and Jacky believed in this idyll.

Solander visited them, saw nothing he could do in the strange situation, and left them on their sand dunes. At the end of the summer, however, Gondych became much irritated with the letters he was receiving, not because he felt guilty, but because he had a hot temper. He had work to do; he could not waste his hot but diminishing suns at a schoolgirl's side. She found him sitting hunched, in black moods; he talked wildly; he hurried up and down the sandy roads talking to himself; he flung his fist at the starry sky, one summer evening; he hated the worn flooring, the squeaking doors, the sand, wind, rains, birds, ticks, and gorse. He hated the place eventually, and dragged Jacky back to town. He was kind and tender, but said, “Can we live together forever, my dear? And I am an old man. I cannot be your husband; I cannot give you a child; I am more like a father. Think; it's all right now, but in a few years, five, six, how many, I will be more than old. Perhaps dead! Don't let people see you living with me. You go back to your young girl's life and we will always be friends, lovers, always love each other. Isn't that better?”

Jacky was in such dense misery that she spoke of it little, and appeared tranquil, cold. If asked about Gondych, she answered almost severely. But she began to work in this unusual way.