Letty Fox (82 page)

“Can you tie that, half the Americans there are don't ever get put in the army, what sort of goddamn luck, just because they're born with—” etc.

The others were wild guys who were pampered to death by the
Mom
and
War-Loan
publicity they were putting about, and to whom most civilians in bars were afraid to say a word. The civilians hunched over the bar, drinking their drinks and not daring to put in a word to help us when we got into trouble. I daresay they had a lewd pleasure in hearing these hayseeds and regimented pool-parlor kids get after us.

We pretty soon found we were only free in the Village or thereabouts. Once I was with Isabel Cartwright, this ugly, clever girl I had been with at high school. She was a doctor of medicine now, and we had been to an old school-tie affair. Afterwards we dropped in at a place we had known for years, taking no notice of a couple of flying dinosaurs in soldier-suits drinking there, even when they came up and tried to sit in our booth. I simply said, “You're making a mistake, boys.”

One of the boys, with a Texas accent, who was stinko, said, “Then what are you here for?”

“This is the result of self-appointed Southern chivalry,” said I to Isabel, “or the war of the U.S.A. with Texas is still being held.”

I said to the boys, “Come on, heave yourselves off that bench and leave us alone; we're not in business.”

The other lad looked glum, cruel, uneasy, and got up; but the tall dinosaur harried us till we had to leave the place; and when we looked at the civilians at the bar, he started to yell, “You're so homely, no man would ever (so-and-so) and you got such a loud mouth that the feller who (so-and-so) is a (so-and-so),” and he went on to say that he had a perfectly good wife at home that he could get at when he pleased; she never said no; and she didn't sit in bars, but waited for him, and so forth.

We walked out with the dignity, I fear, of ducks taking a walk. I was pretty red, though I knew decency takes a nose-dive in wartime, with the sexes cooped up and kept from each other. Oddly enough, it's sexual freedom that makes the world decent. However, out of curiosity, for I was burning with shame and anger, I said to Isabel, “How did you feel?”

She said, “I've been an ugly girl all my life, it started with my father, brothers, and cousins, and I guess I'm used to it now. They always said to me, ‘You're so goddamn plain, no man would give you a tumble.' Besides, I see more of these air-conditioned bats than you do. But I assure you, there's not much difference to me, between now and before; it's only to you, it's different.”

I felt my heart sinking at these words; for somehow they revealed to me the great shame in which we all lived, and I was quite blue for about a week. However, after a few such brawls, I got my tongue ready and I also took care never to take Jacky to my old haunts, now become unsuitable for a young girl.

For my Christmas vacation I went away for a trial marriage, to a hotel, with Wicklow, the ideal “American male,” since his mistress wanted to spend Christmas with her family at Seneca Falls, New York.

Ours was a lovely hotel near the Delaware, with a Coca-Cola stand across the road, an ice cream soda town at five miles, and a liquor town at eight; with this, nine holes of golf, swimming, riding, and a place full of young people. Posing as Mrs. Wicklow, the charming young bride, wore me out. There were a lot of middle-aged people beaming at us. We had to stick closer than brothers for the week of the holidays; eat, dress, sleep, walk, sit, read, and yawn together. I found it a second-rate life, and felt I was not ripe for marriage; this living inside each other's sweatshirt was not for me. I kept my eyes lovingly glued on Wicklow, while all the time I was wondering about his mistress, secretly observing the other men, and wondering if I wasn't passing up a real chance by this shamhoneymoon; for a good many men could have been better for me than Wicklow. Add to that the trifle that Wicklow was short of cash, and I had to advance the money for the holiday myself, first having squeezed it out of Papa, with promise of repayment. We did not click, and I thought with dread, “This might be a real honeymoon, and I would then be stuck for some period of months or years with this dull, vain, boorish showpiece; I'm afraid to take such a plunge.”

I looked back on my life with Mother, with Jacky; I was evidently suited for life with very few people. Your life becomes channeled into theirs, you've to put up with their confidences and weaknesses, you can't let things rip, and you yourself don't dare confide your true thoughts.

To make matters worse, Grandmother Morgan, after having given Aunt Phyllis, for Christmas, a diamond ring worth three thousand dollars, all paid for in small bills, to avoid income tax detection, and bought herself diamonds and a new fur coat, had only given Andrea, Mother, and me a couple of pairs of stockings each. I had at once sent mine back, with an angry note, saying I knew she gave the servants at Green Acres more, and that she was actually paying Jape, Grandfather Morgan's crony, the old gardener, an income for life.

“Why do you do this, Grandma?” I asked her. “Is it because Jape started to go tippling and saying you kept your husband in the outhouse; and played around with Sid and Muron and so on? Aunt Phyllis has just become one of your own crowd and she attracts men to the hotel, you know that. I know myself that Joseph Montrose is making a play for her to this very day. But we don't do this; we're your poor relatives.”

I reproached her and, by proxy, Aunt Phyllis, for being warbrides and profiteers and exhibiting their true selves in the minks, skunks, cross-foxes, and heavy-hearted stones nothing could make a dent in. I said, “They'll be sending
coureurs de bois
down to Green Acres yet; aren't you crazy putting on this show and letting everyone see your crazy war-money. I think diamonds are a disgrace.” I continued, “Are we all queens in the Morgan family? It's simply a means of shrieking to high heaven that you're not an honest worker.”

I had tried to encourage Mother and Andrea to send back their stockings, but, with the humble life-plan which was theirs, of
a dime here, a dime there
, they refused, although sore.

I was sweating over the injustice reigning in the family, and the boredom of my holiday; I could hardly entertain Wicklow. I was pining for the end of the week. I thought, Good Gosh! I might be a real bride and having a baby with this man. What a prospect!

I wanted to quit a few days before, but he did not want to. I sulked and found him uncivil at night, picked faults in him, invisible before; and would not say a word to him all the way back in the train. He came to the apartment with me ( Jacky was at home for the week) and coaxed me back into a good humor. The notion that I was free of him was enough. However, as he owed me money, he felt free to criticize me. He told me I had no sex-appeal, that I ought to see a psychoanalyst for it; and he recommended one, to whom his mistress also went. This friend was a celebrated practitioner with a swank address, who had created a halo round himself because he treated poor patients free in public hospitals. Wicklow himself arranged an appointment with this man, who turned out to be one of his best friends. Wicklow was not in the army because he was doing war work in some studio of engineering design near Rockefeller Center.

His medical friend was excused because he was a doctor, and doing some very valuable work in new treatments of mental disease by a combination of psychoanalysis and physical violence; this is the way I prefer to describe it. He attacked his madmen physically, either by violent drugs, or by dropping them on the floor, out of bed, or by imposing upon them slight wounds, which cured them temporarily (of course). Some of the patients screamed with fear when they saw him coming, or knew their day for treatment had arrived. He hoped to liberate some of his young male patients for the draft. This is what I heard upon inquiry from Solander, and knowing my father's style of merry hooliganism in discourse, it's possible he garbled it a bit.

This practitioner turned out to be a silky wolf who lived in a lovely house in one of the best streets in the Village, those that most resemble Mayfair. He had a white door, brass knocker, a maid, the latest furnishings, a piano painted white, silk hangings; all that, and himself, were remarkably handsome.

I was very happy to see him, because he suggested understanding and even love. He begged me to stretch myself on a padded Récamier couch, and tell him all about myself.

There were some peculiar paintings on the walls, perhaps done by some of his mad patients, all of which suggested sex in some way, although they were pictures of the sea, ships, a vineyard, and a medieval battle for a bridgehead.

The lights were low, his voice too; and after hearing the details of my life—some of them—he placed his head in his large fine hand, to think. He emerged from his trance to announce that I, unquestionably, had a father fixation, and that I must be liberated from this before I would feel free with men. This Solander-fixation was the reason I did not keep men and did not get married. I asked him if he did not think the war had anything to do with it. He said I was resisting him, which was a good sign, because it meant I was beginning already to transfer from my father to him. He said he would treat me twice a week, for as long as necessary, at the rate of twenty dollars a visit.

My heart sank, for I believed that Wicklow had meant me to just have a little preparatory talk with the great physician of bodies and souls. I said I could not afford twenty dollars a visit, that is forty dollars a week.

He said, “Don't you want to be cured? Don't you want to marry?”

I said, “Yes, I do; but I don't want to be put in jail for debt either.”

He told me, with some asperity, that the draining of my purse would be far better for me than the draining of my heart's blood, and that if I were serious, I would get some night work, or borrow from my relatives to pay him; this financial pain would cure me of my erotic preoccupations. I informed him that I did not mind my erotic preoccupations at all; I only wanted to know how to keep a man and, in fact, how to fall in love with him, and stay in love. The doctor said this was easy; I had only to be rid of my father-fixation. I told him that I had not lived with my father most of my life, and he said, “Good grounds for a fixation.”

“But,” said I, in great confusion, much troubled by the prospect of the forty dollars weekly, “I thought girls who lived with their fathers had father-fixations.”

“They do, too,” said the great doctor.

“Is there no way out?” I asked.

“Only by analysis,” said the eminent prognosticator.

But before I left him, he had poured balm over my painful doubts, with his charming, loving manner, and he wrote down on his calendar the date of my next appointment.

I went out, torn between pleasure at the man's appearance and doubt about his understanding. It was an honor to be his patient and, indeed, I felt at once that I could love him; and that perhaps, up till now, I had not met the right type of man. My father had always told me I would be better off with professional men. Then there was the other thing—the money. I went to my father and told him he must give me the money for the treatments which might last a year or so, because my whole future depended on it. Didn't he want to see me married?

“What,” cried my father, starting to his feet, as soon as the facts of the high-priced visits reached his ears, “are you crazy?” and I had much trouble keeping him away from the fire department, the police, the homicide squad, and other emergency outfits, for he shouted that it was blackmail and highway robbery.

“Pickpockets,” he shouted, “matricides, embezzlers are nothing to this—nothing—imposing on a fool of a girl looking for a boy friend—nothing doing,” and he continued to shout and stare at me with incredulity in his eyes.

Persia said, “You'd do better, Letty, to go to a fortune-teller. It's only a dollar, I think, and you can get tea-leaves read for a quarter or thirty-five cents.”

I laughed, and it seemed to me that this was rather good advice, the best I'd ever heard on the subject. I myself trembled so much at the idea of the outlay that I wrote to the great doctor and also to Wicklow the very next day.

Though the doctor attempted to make me pay for the visit had, and the visit proposed, I did not, and nothing came of it. I scolded Wicklow when he came to see me. He grinned, sat down on a stool, took off his hat, and remarked, “You're more fascinating as a termagant, Letty, than as a sweet little wife.”

I relented toward him for a while, and regretted it afterwards. I reproached him with the whole story of the mistress and his pretense of passion for me. He only said, “Letty, you know how to take care of yourself, don't you?”

It took him four weeks to pay me back the cost of his vacation with me at Christmas; he did eventually. The next I heard of him he was almost living at Susannah Ford's house and no one heard a word about the mistress.

The very next day, after my father's fit of temper, when I had posted the two letters, with a sigh of relief at seeing all this money saved, I went upstairs to a gypsy tea-leaf reader in Fourteenth Street and had a very amusing fortune told. The woman especially impressed me by saying that I would have some affair with a man whose initials were T. or B. The amazing thing was that I did know a man with both these—T.B., Tom Bratt.

When I went out for a walk that evening, I was in such good spirits, in spite of my misadventures, that I walked down Bank Street and rang the doorbell of the Bratts' flat. Tom Bratt had a wife called Bronte. Everyone knew Bronte for the fuss she kicked up round herself at parties. Tom was quite a rounder, and I don't suppose Bronte would have stayed with him if she could have got another man. She was a big-hipped, chesty girl, with black, bright eyes, and a white skin; she looked like a half-breed Indian, to my mind; but some people thought she was handsome.