Letty Fox by Christina Stead

stock market and go abroad. She often talked about
gay Paree
; it consoled her for washing the dishes and scrubbing the wooden floors, and was knit into her dreams of her child. She was full of hope for the child, thought it would bring Dr. Goodsir back to her. When the child was born in The Wreck, Dr. Goodsir came, a tall, good-looking, grave man, with black hair. He and Uncle Perce quarreled, and he went away. We never saw him again. The poor mother was never able to understand why the father did not stay with her baby. In a few years she was calling herself a doctor’s widow, and got jobs in that character.
    After our experience with Mrs. Goodsir’s childbirth, we added a new game, the one called Confinement. The teacher at the school, a woman who seemed old and worn but was probably about thirty, screamed at the youngsters and beat them on the knuckles with her stick. We would look across at each other and think of the way she would be tried and punished later on that afternoon, in our Court. We cursed her, hoped she died in agony, wished a can cer in her, or heart disease; now we wished she would have a baby and never be able to get rid of it, “scream all the time.” This was a very satisfactory game: we would lie on our backs at the side of the orchard, in the long grass, smelling the blossomy air, scratch our legs against the insects, watch the blue sky and think of this interesting and even quite probable torture for the teacher. She was married; it could happen to her. We wished it on our wicked Aunt Stella; we wished it on numerous women. Serious at the thought, though, we added, “I’ll have my children with anaesthetics.” Jacky thought we should begin to practice then, to endure pain. I said, “Why, by the time we’re that old, they will have invented something.” Jacky tried to endure pain, though, for years after that. She tried to make a game out of it, but I would not enter into it. Why should we endure pain? She could not tell me. At another time, we became religious and kept beads and crosses we fabricated out of matchbook wood under our pillows. We prayed to Jesus. All this was in the hope of wearing white dresses for First Communion. I visited several Sunday Schools in turn in the hope of getting to several Sunday School picnics. But generally this required more regular attendance than I could give. We had to keep this secret from Uncle Perce, a rabid unbeliever; and our games and secret life, which we lived entirely in common at this time, became more secret; our games were wicked.

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    U ncle Percival had four or five men friends, who were attracted by his peculiarities and talent. P. Hogg sometimes quarreled with the scientific institutions, societies, or men for whom he worked, and he then became a salesman, traveling the country and placing optical lenses, microscopes, field glasses, observatory lenses, and even arranging for observatories and planetaria. The same man who was hated by his poor neighbors, who gave the Mussolini salute for a joke, fought against the farmers in the district; the man who thought it weakened the poor to pay them unemployment insurance and hated trades unions, also fought for trades unions when the time came; the man who gave the fascist salute walked in a May Day procession. He was an ardent patriot and knew the ways to hang up the flag on July Fourth, and at the same time he opposed war and was imprisoned during World War I as a conscientious objector. He oppressed his womenfolk by making them scrub floors and fetch water from a well, and yet he was for the education, full citizenship, full emancipation of women; he thought a pregnant woman was the better for toting water and yet he agitated for Twilight Sleep and approved of the Soviet Union because they took proper care of children, and inducted them early into community life. This disagreeable man had devoted friends. One was my father, Solander, one Uncle Philip Morgan, one Dr.