The Truth According to Us (4 page)

May 30, 1938

Miss Layla Beck

c/o Mr. Lance Beck

Department of Chemistry

Princeton University

Princeton, New Jersey

Dearest Layla,

I must say, it's very inconsiderate of you to run off to cry on Lance's shoulder and leave me here to cope with Papa in the state he's in, and I certainly hope you're not having a rendezvous with that awful Charles Antonin, because Papa will find out, and he'll be even more furious than he is right now. Nothing I say moves him even the tiniest bit, and I can't help it but you simply have to take Ben's tatty old job. I know what you think—and imagine
my
feelings at the thought of you among grubby coal miners—but I'm afraid Papa won't budge, darling. He says if you won't marry Nelson—I'm not lecturing, I'm only repeating what Papa says—then you have to face stark reality. I wept and said I was sure you'd get ringworm, but that just made Papa fuss the more. He said it was time you understood what you were throwing away and if it took worms to make you understand it, that was fine by him (I didn't tell Papa, but I don't believe there are real worms in ringworm).

I never thought my own daughter would be on relief. I could just
strangle
Ben.

Your loving,

Mother

P.S. Lucille saw Nelson at Bick's Saturday. She says he looks
terrible
, absolutely heartbroken and thin as a rail. You can't call a man insincere when he's lost weight like that. You just think about that, young lady.

June 6, 1938

Miss Rose Bremen

“The Waves”

Gurney Street

Cape May, New Jersey

Dearest Rose,

Your letter came like the King's Pardon, just after the severed head thumped into the straw. Thanks for the kind offer, but the die is cast, and I'm to arrive in Macedonia, West Virginia, next Tuesday to begin work for the Federal Writers' Project. I took the Pauper's Oath yesterday, and I am officially on relief.

I can't tell you how it happened because I don't understand it myself, really I don't. I've been a frivolous person for years now, and Father's never been bothered by it in the least. If anything, he seemed pleased by my success: Once, I overheard him bragging that I had been invited to every house party from the Adirondacks to the Appalachians. Everything was
fine
until Nelson appeared on the scene, and then the worm turned with a vengeance. They wanted me to marry him in the worst way, both Mother and Father did. I thought they were joking. He was so obviously, completely
awful—and they knew it. They knew it and they didn't care. Nelson! He's the Citronella Scion and hugely rich, but he's also vain and tedious and shallow as a dewdrop. That whinny laugh, that tiny mustache—I'd rather kiss an eel. His most cherished ambition is to be mistaken for Errol Flynn. Within ten minutes of meeting Nelson, I despised him, and if Nelson ever had a thought about anyone but himself, the feeling would have been mutual. I thought Mother and Father knew what a disaster he was, and when he proposed, I thought we'd all laugh about it. How wrong I was. They wanted me to be a good girl and say yes. Father was blinded by the glint of Citronella (he's running again next year), and Mother was blinded by Father, and Lance refused to concern himself with such trivialities. I didn't know what to do, and when Father demanded an explanation, I panicked and made a fatal error: I said I could never respect a man who didn't work. The moment I said it I wished I could take it back. Father's face turned perfectly purple—I thought he was going into apoplexy—and they probably heard him on Capitol Hill. On and on he went about people in glass houses and the walking definition of sloth and wastrels who bring nothing but anguish and shame to their parents. And that was just warming up. Once he hit his stride, he included bootstraps and paperboys in the snow and Abraham Lincoln and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? and Oklahoma and migrant workers in Model T's, until I lost my head and shrieked that I was going to take a job and become an independent woman and make Father eat his hat.

Oh, it gets worse. After Father stormed out of the house, I decided that if I laid low, he would forget about it, just as he always had before. So, like an idiot, I went to New York, and when I sashayed back into the house two days later, expecting an affectionate paternal greeting, Father growled, “You have an interview with Ben at two.” You remember Ben, don't you? Father's possibly Socialist younger brother who is some kind of muckety-muck at the Federal Writers' Project. Evidently, what I had viewed as a
cease-fire, Father had viewed as an opportunity to oil his musket, and before I knew it, I was down at Ben's office, demonstrating my literacy by reading the newspaper aloud to a bored assistant. I realize now that I should have muffed it, but I didn't, and, as you know, I am a
fiend
on the typewriter. By the end of the afternoon, I was feeling pretty smug. Fine, I thought. I'll show them. I'll be Ben's secretary. I could just see it—I'd be one of those ornamental secretaries, you know the ones, clad in an elegant black dress with crisp white organdy cuffs falling around my perfectly manicured fingers as I riffled through the mail, a picture of competence. “I don't know what I did without her,” Ben would say fondly to Father, who would likewise say fondly, “How could I have ever thought she should marry that despicable cur Nelson? She was right and I was wrong.”

You know the rest. I had no choice, Rose. I had to accept the job. Father really has cut me off, and there really is a Depression going on. Work is scarce and I have exactly $26 to my name. What was I to do? Mother says he'll relent by Christmas, but that's months away. I don't know how I'll bear it—trudging around Macedonia, West Virginia, in the blazing heat, taking down the reminiscences of a town full of toothless old hicks. I can hear it now: “Along about '95 or '96, the cows died o' the worm and we din't have a lick o' meat for ten year and all the chirren got rickets…” I don't know why the federal government wants a record of those people, I really don't.

And the worst of it is, Father is still so furious that I have to
live
on my salary, which means that I have to board in a poky little room in a house belonging to “a respectable family of Macedonia.” The house and the respectable family are probably encrusted in coal dust, and I will probably die of starvation or lice within weeks. You may read this letter at my funeral—from beyond the grave, I'll watch as Father writhes, which means, I suppose, that I'll be in hell. I'll feel right at home there after Macedonia.

There's one last thing I haven't told you: Everything with
Charles is finished. Please don't send me a sympathetic letter. I can't bear it.

Love,

Layla

P.S. In the heat of that first argument, Father called me a “canker on the social body.” Have you ever heard of anything so unjust? All this spring, I have been hemming washrags for the deserving poor and reading uplifting literature to Relicts of the Confederacy on the last Thursday of the month. How can I be a canker?

June 13, 1938

Dear Charles,

Now that I'm one of the proletariat, don't you think you could

June 13, 1938

Charles dear,

Last week I took the Pauper's Oath—without lying, too. Briefly, Father cut me off in a rage, I haven't a penny to my name, and tomorrow I begin working for the WPA Writers' Project. I'm to interview villagers in West Virginia. Now that I'm a member of your beloved proletariat (at least I think I am), perhaps you'll reconsider the terms of my banishment the quarantine perhaps you'll be willing to see me perhaps you'll reconsider perhaps we could

June 13, 1938

Dear Nelson,

I just have to tell you about a funny little incident: You know our maid, Mattie? This morning she was dusting your portrait—I keep it on my bureau—and she said, “I don't know what he sees
in that scrawny Olivia de Havilland.” I was utterly baffled—until I realized she had mistaken you for Errol Flynn! Isn't that darling?

It's been
ages
since Mother and Father have been missing You haven't come to see poor little me in