Letitia

In those days there were no experts on the newspapers; no specialized know-it-alls to bolster the publisher's editorial policy. The editorial writer had to do it all alone -- a sole intellectual Hercules straightening out the errors of the world.

We had a religion editor and a society editor on the Journal. Heaven and Lake Shore Drive were considered out-of-bounds for the normal journalist, but all other fields were open for a reporter to become an expert in, given a week of concentrated effort.

Shortly after my 19th birthday, I was recognized (by Mr. Eddie Mahoney, our city editor) as the Journal's lunacy expert. My eminence was the result of a few accidental assignments, a popeyed reading of Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and the noticing eye of Mr. Bunny Hare, our head photographer.

"Here's something in your line, professor," Mr. Mahoney used to say to me at seven A.M. "A honeymooning banker from Cedar Rapids has kept his nude bride chained to a bedpost in the Morrison Hotel for a week, feeding her only salted peanuts and whipping her hourly with a cat-o'-nine-tails. The zebra-striped bride is in Passavant Hospital unable to speak. But the groom is holding forth in Lieutenant Norton's office on the sanctity of marriage. See what you can dig up out of the financier's soul. And take Bunny Hare along."

Bunny and I had jointly covered another conjugal event a few weeks before. A West Side divine had agreed to forgive his unfaithful wife and take her back to his bosom, if she would prove her repentance by crawling around the block on her hands and knees to the door of his church, where he would stand magnanimously awaiting her arrival.

The lady did, Bunny Hare photographing her on her all-fours marathon, and I interviewed her on the homestretch. I remember only one of her statements, "I hope every wife who has fallen into sin will be inspired by my example to crawl out of it." And Bunny Hare asking, "Can you give us a few tears now, madam, to help put over your fine message?"

The crawler paused and wept. Bunny fiddled with her skirt and added a well-shaped thigh to the portrait of repentance.

Bunny Hare: I bow to his shade, ghost camera in hand, slyly clicking away wherever he is. There are few of his kind left on our side of the veil. Bunny had a modus operandi that marked the ace cameraman of his day -- a combination of cynicism and mesmerism that bent tarts and archbishops, statesmen, embezzlers and sobbing widows to his whim.

I knew Bunny in his 40s -- a bloodless, skeletonlike man of startling energy and vivid haberdashery. He wore a gray-and-pink-checked "dogfight" suit, with cap to match; a yellow tie, a white silk muffler with fringes like a prayer shawl, and dove-gray spats. With half a darkroom slung from his shoulders, Bunny had the look of a jaunty cadaver in quest of a revel.

It was Bunny Hare's noticing eye that started me off as a lunacy expert and thereby landed me in one of the most macabre amours of my youth. Yes, they were all a little green-lighted, these early gavottes with Venus. But there was small gain for the Devil in them. At least, so I think. Youthful sins are often more character-making than soul-destroying. And they leave only one regret in an honest man -- that they were so few.

Bunny Hare entered a West Side flat while I was interviewing a suicide's widow. Her late husband had kissed his sleepy wife goodbye a half-hour before, stepped into the next room, stuck a gun in his mouth and blown off the top of his head. The dead husband, a carpenter in overalls, was lying on the parlor floor, waiting for the morgue wagon. The weeping widow, still in a filmy nightgown, was telling me how happily married they had been for five years. "Oh, he loved me and I loved him," she sobbed.

At this point Bunny Hare joined us.

"I just had a look at the corpse," he said briskly. "That dead carpenter out there is a girl with big boobies. Come and I'll show you."

On the parlor floor I saw my first Lesbian, with part of her head missing but with her shapely breasts intact, sticking out of an unbuttoned shirt.

The "widow" now wailed the truth of their perverse marriage. Her Sapphic spouse had been unreasonably jealous of their neighbor, a retired steam fitter (male) who lived on the same floor. As the "widow" wept out her tale, Bunny Hare explained between flash-powder explosions, "There was something about the neck of that corpse that didn't fit. Too small for such a big chest. So I took a closer look. No chest. A pair of big bazooms."

I sought out Dr. Frank Lydston, the only American medico mentioned in Krafft-Ebing's phosphorescent pages. As a result, my story offered the Journal readers a full course in Sapphic secrets.

• • •

"Here's something definitely in your line," said Mr. Mahoney, of another seven A.M. "The new doctor in charge of the Elgin insane asylum has discovered a method for curing lunatics. He's going to turn them all into artists. Which shouldn't be too hard. Take Bunny along and see what's going on in that loony house." Mr. Mahoney extended his hand and added solemnly, "I hope to see you back."

It was my first look at crazy people -- behind walls. I walked beside the new doctor down a long corridor lively with scrub ladies on hands and knees, scrubbing away with brush, soap and rag on an already immaculate floor. They were part of the work-therapy program.

We went into a large room with no other furniture than a bench around its walls. Some 50 women were sitting, standing, and all silent. A few were partly bald, having torn the hair out of the sides of their heads before being thwarted by the guards. Quite a number seemed to be playing "living statues." They stood in contorted poses, an arm oddly raised, a head cocked as if listening, all rigidly immobile.

The doctor told me that these stiffened ones kept their postures unchanged for days at a time and had to be carried to their beds like wooden Indians. I wrote on a piece of copy paper, "They stand like sentinels on the threshold of nightmare, and watch warily the dark wonders of their minds."

We entered the asylum's "studio." A few men and a dozen women were painting and sculpting in clay. Of all the startling characters that must have been in that studio, I remember only one. A young woman, with snow-blonde hair, was modeling a life-sized clay head of a girl. She worked slowly, her lips pulled down like the mouth of a tragedy mask. Tears kept rolling out of her eyes.

The sculpture she was finishing was the head of a girl with mouth opened wide in a burst of laughter. A Dionysian joy seemed to leap out of the clay, as its creator's tears continued to drip.

I took notes for the story I would write, "Name, Letitia Ekart. Twenty-three. Daughter of Rev. Oscar Ekart, Kenwood Avenue Church.... Letitia, called Letty -- two suicide tries. Cut wrists with razor. Three months later turned on gas, stuck head in oven. Mother dead. Lives with Pa. Letty is artist, also fine dancer -- member Rosina Galli's ballet corps for Chicago Grand Opera Co. Doc says patient improving rapidly. No suicide try for seven months in asylum. Letty modeled 15 heads of laughing girl, all the same, while in bughouse."

Mr. Mahoney shied at my copy of the weeping beauty who kept fashioning joyous heads, until Bunny laid a dozen corroborative prints on his desk.

"I'll be damned," said Mr. Mahoney. "There are more things in the Elgin State Hospital for the Insane than are dreamed of in my philosophy. Although, come to think of it, your Miss Ekart is the most commonplace of females -- a two-faced woman."

That was in the spring. Letty and her snowy mane stepped into my life again in November. To tell of her strangeness and sadness I must move my memory to another world into which I had drifted in my teens, a world unaware of doomed men and 4-11 fires; the world of the arts, of the Little Review magazine popping out of the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue. Fifty pages of partly comprehensible prose and unrhymed poetry brave with dots in which the bourgeoisie took the count every month. Who were the bourgeoisie Anybody who didn't read the Little Review. Since its circulation fluttered around 700, we had a large target. James Joyce's Ulysses was making its printed debut in it as a serial. Its editor was Margaret Anderson, aged 23 and as elegant and pretty a girl as ever walked our Avenue. She had already published a half-dozen of my first sorties into art -- Broken Necks, Dog Eat Dog, among others. Our lovely and penniless editor sat in her cubbyhole office, a Dido in Carthage. Her approbation (with never an accompanying check) was Knighthood. Her rejection note, "You can sell this somewhere, I'm sure. There are hundreds of periodicals that will be eager to buy it," was a crusher for her art-fevered contributors.

Attendez! Here's a partial list of Margaret's knights -- Ezra Pound, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Gertie Stein, Maxwell Bodenheim, T. S. Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Jane Heap, Wyndham Lewis, Amy Lowell, Jean Cocteau, e. e. chumming, Theodore Dreiser, etc., etc., and yours truly of the Chicago Journal.

What a world that was, dear money-smothered scriveners. Art on a high hill, looking down on the grubby streets of popularity. Youth full of Olympian hoots at its betters.

We considered success a loss of innocence, and fame a symptom of decay. Spake our sculptor, Stanislaus Szukalski (the World's Greatest and most unknown), "Art is the foolish business of making dancing slippers for monkeys." Our philosophy -- "To hell with the public" Our battle cry -- "No sales!" Our victory -- "The mantle of loneliness which our enemies called egomania.'"

I'll make only one boast about us when we were unknown in Chicago -- no one has taken our place.

• • •

I came out of the Fine Arts Building on a November afternoon, five copies of the Little Review, hot off the press, under my arm and paused in the waning daylight to reread my contribution -- a tale called The Yellow Goat. I knew it almost by heart, but reading it in print was always a new thrill. In a like manner pretty girls keep looking into a mirror.

"Hello," a voice said beside me. It was Letty from the Elgin asylum. She wore an old raincoat and ballet slippers. Her snow-blonde hair was almost invisible under a black beret -- a tight ballerina coiffure anchored on her neck. She looked a bit freakish, even to my uncritical eyes. But I had forgotten to look at her face.

Radiant blue eyes, a wide, unpainted mouth; features all straight lines like a museum head with a glow of friendliness adding a luster to them.

"I read your story in the Little Review this afternoon," she said. Her voice had a shiver in it as if she were cold. "It's utterly beautiful. I adore its phrases." With which Letty's freakishness vanished to a great extent. "I've often wondered if I would run into you. I take dancing lessons here. Magdalene Pataiki's studio. Not classic dancing. Eurythmic exercises. Posture control. Miss Pataiki is a pupil of Gurdjieff." I knew him -- a Russian who had prowled through Tibet and returned to the Occident full of salable mysticism. I'd interviewed him a year ago after watching his motionless ballet perform at the Blackstone Theater.

"Chicago," said Mr. Gurdjieff, "is a city of dead people turning slowly in their graves."

Letty went on, "I'm quite well now. But very lonely. When it gets dark, the streets look like orphans. So sad. Could I go with you wherever you're going?"

"I'm going way out on the South Side for dinner with some friends," I said; "I'll be glad if you come along."

Her hand took my arm gently. I was startled by a glimpse of her body under the raincoat. She was in black tights from neck to heel. "I ran out of Miss Pataiki's without changing my costume. I hope it isn't noticeable."

Today the female body, in or out of tights, has become socially commonplace. But in that November the cops were determinedly arresting young women who showed their legs in public and, so help me, females with jiggly bosoms who ventured uncorseted into the highways (continued on page 124)Letitia(continued from page 88) -- vide Edna Kenton, an early Feminist in a Mother Hubbard who was nabbed by the police on Michigan Avenue.

The only female anatomy legally permitted in polite areas was that of Annette Kellermann. Miss Kellermann's delightful shape, every bulge accented by uncompromising tights, had held Chicago audiences spellbound, as if before an import from Mars.

It was an hour's streetcar ride to Marjy Curry's studio on Stony Island Avenue. We stood up all the way, pressed against each other by fellow standees, and talked. I told her about Marjy. She had been divorced recently from Floyd Dell, the novelist, who had certainly ruined himself as a writer by migrating to New York City. Everyone (the Little Review) knew that New York was a place where artists ended up wearing price tags for souls. Marjy ran a sort of salon where you could talk your head off and eat free.

"It sounds divine," Letty said. "I adore artists, writers most of all. They have to be clearheaded."

"Not necessarily," I said.

Letty looked at me intently. "You haven't asked me about my sickness. I mean my craziness. Why haven't you?"

"I'd forgotten about it," I said.

This was true. The weeping face modeling the laughing girl's head, the case history of two suicide tries, were no part of my streetcar companion.

"Will they know about me, the ones at Marjy's?"

I said I didn't think so. Artists (unknown ones) went for months without looking at a newspaper. Sherwood Anderson explained, "There's more honest information on a tomato-can label than in a week of newspapers." His name hadn't appeared yet in print.

Letty laughed. "I'm glad you've forgotten about how I was. Because I have, too. I'm all well now. Happy and healed inside. Look how clear my eyes are -- without tears." She smiled merrily at me.

Letty's debut at Marjy's studio was an exciting event. We arrived early so there were only a few chop-suey fanciers on deck. Marjy always served chop suey out of a large pail, and department-store wine went with it.

A lumpy-faced man sat in a corner, humming and glaring at nothing. This was Theodore Dreiser who had published two novels that had been harpooned by censors and critics. Mrs. Dawson, literary critic of the New York Globe, had voiced the bruised feelings of New York's literary guardians -- "Mr. Dreiser would do better if he confined his writing to toilet walls, a much more fitting place for his talent than the pages of a book." I remember Mrs. Dawson's quote quite well, for a few years later she greeted my first novel, Erik Dorn, with the same pronouncement.

But Dreiser was glaring at no memory of Madam Dawson this evening. He had other troubles. There was a ring of boils on his neck, and beside him sat a pretty brunette whose father, a prominent Chicago jeweler, had vowed to have the toilet-wall Balzac up before a judge for corrupting his daughter.

At the other end of the large candlelit room sat my friend Swatty -- Sherwood Anderson. Officially he was still a copywriter for the advertising firm of Taylor-Critchfield and Co. But he ignored this lowest of identities. Unpublished and unknown, he was still our Great Novelist. "We had the hang of him, long ere Rome rang of him"; and we understood (and shared) his disapproval of all published authors except, possibly. Dreiser. But Sherwood stuck to his guns about Dreiser. "The fellow can't write for sour apples," Sherwood had told me, "but everybody thinks he's a true artist because he doesn't believe in marriage." "Everybody" was the Little Review.

I have a grab bag of Sherwood Anderson memories but I'll write only of the Sherwood who participated in Letty's greenlit story. This was his lover's side. He was in his 30s, black-eyed, heavy featured, with a wiglike clump of black hair; not fat but soft-bodied. He looked like an Italian barber but he exuded ego like a royalist. It was no barber who spoke but a moony sort of Socrates. His voice was full of caress and the smack of infinite superiority. To what? To everyone who wasn't Sherwood Anderson. He held out a hand as he talked and fluttered it as if he were patting an infant on its head, the infant being his listener or, possibly, the world.

As a wooer of women, Sherwood was full of originality. He refused to open doors for them and allow them first entrance, or let them finish a sentence. "Women are at their best as receptacles." Dancing, roller skating, kissing, hugging, and kindred sexual preliminaries were not for him. "Boys fondle, men fornicate." As far as I could make out from watching a few of his courtships, Sherwood made no promises and paid no compliments. He explained that he scorned all sensual outposts and went after the soul of his quarry. And he didn't even do that. He permitted the lucky girl to see his soul and bask in its fine harmonies. Purring in the candlelight of his Cass Street hall bedroom, he offered himself as a man of mystery and genius. I was always surprised at the way girls fell into the vortex of his ego -- without asking even for a word of love or a free meal. "I dislike going to bed with burglars, however pretty they are."

The other Marjyguest who high-dived into Letty's story that night was my friend, poet Maxwell Bodenheim. Bogie, our cubistic nightingale, was 20, tall, blondish, pale eyes rolled up in a constant grimace of derision, several teeth already missing; but a handsome face that seemed to peer out of a lost land of poets. His clothes were unpressed and unchanged. He smoked a corncob pipe and favored a sewer-smelling tobacco that cost a nickel a pound. With seldom a coin in his pocket, he loped through the day half-starved, stalking hors d'oeuvres at soirees. And on the alert for female admirers.

Bogie carried a moldy brief case bulging with all the poems he had written (none of them yet sold) and a change of socks. Take my word for it, they were fine poems. "Her emotions were like dried fruit in a paper bag," "Your smile is my throne," "You draw my heart about you like a cloak," "The trees stand naked in the blue tomb of air," "We worship lightning and mimic fireflies," "Then there came, the ghost sword of your name," "Fear trembles and raises the shield of adoration," "The man, parting with his cornet in a pawn shop, walks away -- a swindled Gabriel," "Dear Coquette, your eyes are filled with the sparkle of dead loves"...

Bogie's poems are part of Letty's story. They were to scamper around her like kittens for petting. But I have another reason, also, for quoting them. They were as much a part of my youth as the deeds of evil and despair I tracked down for Mr. Mahoney. Yes, they were fine poems, although few people were ever to think so to the day 40 years later when a nutty sailor with a gun put an end to the poetry-spawning wino of Greenwich Village -- homeless, fameless Max Bodenheim.

But even in his pretty youth, Bogie was an irritant that earned him many a shiner and bloody nose. He had a catfit was of delivering rococo insults -- clucking, stammering and screeching joyfully at his own wit. He also stamped his foot and slapped his thigh during his epic utterances. I don't deride them. They were good. I heard no brighter language in that time. To critic Burton Rascoe he said, "You erect ingenious pedestals for your blindness." To critic Llewellyn Jones he said, "You are a mental skeleton grinning at platitudes." To critic H.L. Mencken he said, "Your anesthetic of malice has put your own soul to sleep and set it to snoring in essay form."

But there was a larger reason for Bogie's unpopularity than his repartee. His tactics as a Romeo sent him sprawling out of innumerable doors.

Bogie began his courting usually by falling into a silence and staring knowingly at his quarry. If encouraged by a return look, the stare became a simper. I have never seen anyone who could distort his face into so maudlin and obscene an ogle. Any subsequent move by the girl to further their acquaintance was considered by Bogie an invitation to immediate cohabitation. He regarded the resistance that ensued as crude hypocrisy. A hundred lost wrestling matches failed to enlighten him. He continued to acquire shiners and bloody noses in his homage to such two-faced daughters of Venus.

But Bogie had another way of wooing. Stirred by a female sigh rather than by a stretch of stocking, he could change from rapist into troubadour, become as harmless as a guppy, chant and cluck his poems to his adored by the hour, and ask of her only the privilege of letting his heart break in her presence.

• • •

It was in front of a purring Sherwood Anderson and a cackling Maxwell Bodenheim that my companion removed her raincoat. From the silence that came upon my two friends I knew Letty had made the grade in our literary circle.

Letty in her skintight casing of black jersey was a shapely girl with larger breasts than are usually affixed to a dancer. I stared in silence as did the other two literateurs, and I could feel, embarrassedly, the sameness of our minds.

Confronted in a room with an uncovered female, the male response, young or old, seldom varies. His response is part of history and antedates his awe of kings. Mons Veneris preceded all other thrones. Beholding a woman bared, the male sees more than what he looks at. The promise of fine diversion harpoons him and he is halfway into the bedroom with his first look. But nudity is not only a door flung open. It is also a door forever closed. Beyond the contours of flesh is the magic interior out of which he is born, the womb-cathedral that converts pleasure into a human being. And what an ideal place for prayer.

Bogie pronounced as he bowed slowly, "Your body, Miss Ekart, is a closed fan."

Sherwood spoke in long robed words, "No matter how naked a girl is, she is never naked enough."

From the other end of the room came Dreiser's petulant voice. "I didn't know I'd been invited to a burlesque show."

Good Marjy with her schoolteacher face said, "A female body is no novelty to me. I've got one myself." It was partly true.

Letty's snow-blonde hair and blacktighted shape sat down before a bowl of chop suey. Her eyes sparkled as she looked at each of us. Then she laughed. Her opened mouth and the wild grimace of joy were the head she had modeled in the asylum.

• • •

Her laughter became part of my day. We met in hotel lobbies, police stations; in the Little Review office with its subway jam of poets and iconoclasts, nearly all of them young, and at loggerheads with the Universe. We prowled secondhand bookstores (Powner's) in search of stowaway first editions. With luck, Tamerlane and Other Poems by a Boston gentleman (E. A. Poe) could be bought for a dime and resold for $5000. We sat in Szukalski's Wabash Avenue home where stood his marvelous statues, a loft void of food, heat and furniture. We ate buckets of Marjy's chop suey, and hacked away at the puritanical Age of Darkness in which we lived. We went to Orchestra Hall to watch Harold Lloyd on the screen falling out of windows. We foregathered in Sherwood's Cass Street bedroom to listen to chapters of his rejected manuscripts. We hung around the Auditorium's backstage during opera rehearsals. And in all these places Letty's laughter continued. "Wouldn't they be surprised to learn I'm a lunatic out of an asylum? And, even more, that I can float out of windows, and strip people naked by thinking their clothes off?"

I read Letty my new contribution to the Little Review in the Blue Fountain room of the La Salle Hotel where a single meal meant bankruptcy -- "Beware the hopelessly sane . . . Sanity is the social burlap bag into which we stick our heads . . . Freedom is fun but it means little. Often the artist who grows its wings becomes a mosquito nibbling on a billiard ball."

We went ice skating in Jackson Park at night. Japanese lanterns circled the frozen lagoon. A bonfire blazed on its edge. Near it, an accordion player wheezed out merry and nostalgic pieces.

Hands crossed, Letty and I skated together in a tangle of flitting figures. Here I became fretful and inquisitive. No word of love had been said between us, no intimacy attempted or dreamed of by me. We had shared only laughter and words. But suddenly I was invaded by longing and jealousy.

She answered my inquiries with amusement as we skated.

"Sherwood is wonderfully patient. When we're alone he reads me one of his Winesburg, Ohio stories the same way my father reads out of the Gospels to his Sunday congregation. After he finishes his reading, Sherwood waits for me to fall into his arms. And when I don't he's a little sorry for me for missing so great an opportunity. And he talks to me in that gurgle of his about my soul. He doesn't think it's working right because I keep it under a blanket. Alone. He doesn't approve of girls sleeping alone."

"Has he joined you?"

"God no," Letty shivered, "I'd rather go to bed with a crocodile."

I was partially convinced.

"Bogie is much less boring," Letty said. "He calls on me at my home and always bows when he sees me. Way over, as if he were going to do an arabesque. My father finds him very interesting. He thinks Bogie looks like the Hofmann painting of Christ. He does, too."

"I imagine he behaves otherwise."

"He behaves beautifully," Letty said.

"He holds my hand and recites new poems to me, and his eyes fill with tears."

"No grabbing?"

"No," Letty said, "he says he will never touch me until I say I love him."

"An ambuscade," I said.

Letty's laughter brought grins to the other skaters. Mittened hands waved at her.

"Do you talk to Sherwood and Bogie as you do to me?" I asked.

"No," Letty said, "I don't say anything to them, except to praise them."

"Why don't you praise me sometime?" I asked.

"You don't need praise," Letty said. I had never heard a more flattering opinion. I felt like another Nietzsche, but my heartache, also, increased. I lay in bed that night pondering how one could make love to a girl who was always laughing. And how could one seduce a girl who had so high an opinion of one? There was another barrier, an odd one. I kept noticing the healed cut on her wrist. It was hard to kiss a girl so full of secrets.

A week later we shared an adventure. Bogie and I had been engaged by the Chicago Book and Play Club to debate a literary topic (of our own choosing) before its monthly gathering. We had each been given a $100 check in advance.

Letty came with us to banker Loeb's South Side mansion where the city's finest had assembled to hear "two young modernists debate their startling literary theories" (read the Club's announcement). It was the same banker Loeb whose son later filled the headlines as Leopold's thrill-murder colleague.

Some 200 tuxedos and evening gowns occupied the little gilt chairs in the Loeb ballroom. Peeking at them from an anteroom, Bogie said. "Their look of tolerance is faintly nauseating even with $100 as smelling salts." We were escorted to a small platform facing the gilt chairs.

Letty was first at bat. Her beauty netted her a round of applause. She bowed and spoke:

"Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Hecht and Mr. Bodenheim have chosen the following subject to debate -- Resolved: People who attend literary debates are fools. Mr. Hecht will take the affirmative."

I stood up to a bit of confused hand clapping, and studied the audience in silence for as long as I could. Finally, with a gesture at the Club, I turned to Bogie and said, "I rest my case."

Bogie stood up promptly and ogled the membership for a full minute. Then he turned to me and said. "You win."

The three of us fled the mansion as if we had been robbing an apple orchard, Letty laughing loudly and Bogie crying triumphantly. "Oh boy! Oh boy!" Clutching the bills in my pocket, I felt chiefly the glow of riches.

• • •

Letty and I sat under the crystal chandeliers of the Blackstone Hotel's main dining room. My $100 fee as a debater had provided a week of high-toned diversion. I ordered the most expensive dishes on the menu, and a bottle of Chateau Yquem, a name I had encountered in George Moore's Hail and Farewell.

"Sherwood's going to join us," I said. "I didn't particularly want him but he insisted. He said he had something important to tell me." Letty's statue face remained voiceless. "What's the matter?" I asked. "You're as gloomy as the first plume on a hearse. You've been like that nearly all week."

"I'm sorry," Letty said.

The string orchestra started a Lanier waltz. Our ornamental waiter brought food. Another dashing fellow appeared with a wine bottle and a Bavarian accent. I felt on a stage in a play. Pretty music, waiters in braided green jackets, George Moore's Chateau Yquem, a tablecloth as white and impressive as a bridal gown -- where was there a better scene in the world?

I looked at Letty and a line from Turgenev spoke, "The heart of another is always darkness." Her eyes were furtive.

"What is it?" I asked. "Drink your wine and tell me."

"There's nothing to tell."

A bellboy who knew me came to our table. "A telegram for you, sir." I rewarded the "sir" with a lordly dollar. The telegram said, Find Out Yourself About Letitia. But be careful. She's a window-jumper. sherwood.

"It's from Sherwood," I said, "Apologizing for being unable to join us."

"I hate him," said Letty. "I threw one of his manuscripts into the fire. He burned his hands rescuing it."

"What else?"

"I broke a window, I think," Letty said.

A sly look came to her.

"Was he trying to make love to you?" I asked.

"That crocodile!" Letty said, and took my hand. Her eyes were tender and frightened. I thought of my childhood when I had been afraid of dark stairways and mirrors hung in lonely halls.

That night a famous blizzard began. I stood with Letty outside her Kenwood house and watched the ghostly storm. Covered with snow, we embraced. I tasted snow and tears when we kissed.

"Why are you crying?" I asked.

"It's not me who's crying," Letty answered.

"Is it like it was -- before?" I asked.

"No, you're here," Letty said.

The turned-down tragedy mouth straightened.

"I love you," she said. "Look, we've almost disappeared in the snow. Nobody can see us. Look, the trees are all white and blooming with snow."

I said, "Yes, the snow paints ghostly summer on the trees."

"I love you," Letty said again. Her face was a vanishing light in the snow. "I'll phone you tomorrow at your office. We'll be together all day and all night."

I watched her run toward her front door. An apparition called to me in a faraway voice, "I'll phone you tomorrow, darling. Wait for me."

• • •

I sat motionless all the next day beside my silent typewriter and stared out of the Journal's windows at the thick snowfall. No call came from Letty. After two months of odd, impersonal comradeship I was suddenly pining for her voice. I was stranded without it. I thought of how her face had changed from the laughing one to the weeping one. To change it back, to change it back. Lunacy expert though I was, I thought only of the cure youth has for all ladies in distress -- the magic of desire.

Mr. Mahoney and his staff, ulstered and mufflered, drifted away. I remained, a casualty, in the gloomy, light-speckled room. In the darkness outside the windows, the blizzard shone like a permanent monument. I knew that Agnes was gone from her switchboard, and that no phone could ring until morning. But I still waited for her voice. And, lo, a miracle. A snow-bedecked Letty entered.

I ran to her, stood in front of her unable to speak, and piloted her speechlessly to Bunny Hare's darkroom on the fourth floor. It was a derelict of a floor beyond any human alarms. And I had noted an army cot in Bunny's lair.

Inside the darkroom, I switched on the red developing lamp and helped Letty take off her coat. We kissed and carried on for a time, but her behavior confused me. It varied from ardent clinging to fanatic resistance -- a not uncommon technique in that time when virtue was the pearl of great price. But there was something wilder in Letty than such token defense of innocence. Letty finally spoke, "Not here, not here." Her face was slippery with tears. I paused, out of breath, and answered, "You don't have to, anywhere."

I sat down on Bunny's army cot. Letty kneeled beside me and pleaded that I not be angry, and that I not stop loving her. She said she would come to my room tonight. I stood up and apologized for my surliness. "Come on, Letty." Letty said, "No, you go first. I'll be there an hour after you. I want to walk there alone."

"Why?"

"I'll know then that I came to you."

Her voice begged, "Please love me. Say you love me, want me, you want me."

"I've been sick all day longing for you," I said.

"I know," Letty whispered. "Me, too. I had to come to you. I was so happy when I saw you all alone in that big room, waiting for me."

"Why can't we go together?"

"I can't," Letty said. "I must walk away from the other one alone. I must leave her in the snow. She'll fall to her knees in the snow and wail for me. But I'll laugh. And keep walking to you."

She stood up. I remember her most as she was that moment -- a shadowy figure in a dim, red mist, only her hair and uncovered breasts in clear outline.

"Wait for me in your room," she said. "I have the address. Top floor at the end of the hall. Oh darling, wait for me. I'll come alone. Wait for me."

And she was gone.

So I remember it. But memory is a lame-duck reporter of passion. As always with love or lust, it is the mind that remembers, not the senses. And toward the dramas of passion, the mind is a spectator with a seat behind a post. I write of Letty but the words I remember may belong to others. I look at lines I wrote in my first youth -- "Her white thigh was like a lightning flash," "Her breasts glowed like the lanterns of a Bacchanal." Of whom did I write? Alas, the flesh is buried. Anonymous epitaphs remain to remind me I once knew wondrous girls. Or, more likely, that I thought them wondrous. And this odd one, Letty, was among them.

I left Bunny Hare's darkroom and waded through the blizzard. Arriving at my room I worked excitedly tidying it up. Then I sat and waited. Chilled, half-starved, I watched my open doorway for a second miracle -- Letty's reappearance. At midnight I still watched but I knew there would be no Letty. Why had she clung so rapturously and resisted so desperately; and wept with her bared breasts glowing like erotic beacons? And fled with words of love, only to fool me and vanish?

I knew why. Her craziness. I lay angry with myself. Instead of pawing her like a nitwitted seducer, why hadn't I asked her questions about the wild things she hinted -- the other one, the wailer in the snow she wanted to leave behind. She had come to me out of some nightmare, begging for sanity. And I had grabbed only for pleasure. I'd be less selfish next time. Yes, next time I would talk, talk; keep my hands off her, try to lead her mind out of its nightmare.

I went to work the next morning and alerted Harry, the head copyboy. "I'm expecting an important call. Be sure to call me, no matter what I'm doing."

My heartache and worry remained as I wrote the lead weather story under the seven column headline, City Surrenders to Blizzard. Remembering Letty's fondness for rhyme, I intruded a few quatrains into my account of the storm -- for her. One of them:

"A great white leopard, prowling silently,Over the rooftops, up and down the sky --Trailing its ermine and its ivory,The lithe, wind-footed snow creepsby."

I wrote another story, without rhymes, the next morning about the suicide of Letitia Ekart. Her body had been found in a snowbank in Grant Park. Her frozen hand held an empty bottle with a poison label. A coroner's autopsy revealed that the dead girl had swallowed a lethal dose of bichloride of mercury solution. I informed neither the Journal's readers nor the coroner that in Bunny Hare's darkroom there were always bottles of bichloride of mercury for use in his work. I tried also not to imagine during what moment of our lovemaking she had stolen the poison.

• • •

Marjy Curry's new year's eve party was a sparse affair. Only about a dozen of us ran the snow blockade to Stony Island Avenue. So long ago, so faraway -- that party. And all of its faces dead but mine. But I see it still, a little ghost scene with lighted candles and young, undaunted voices noisy with laughter and debate. Chop suey and cups of eggnog. A piano playing and Monsieur Dalmores of the Grand Opera Company singing French street songs, and Lou Wahl More doing one of her slow Navajo Indian dances.

I look into this distant night for a memory of Letty, only a few days in her grave. Who spoke of her? Not Dreiser, Marjy, Sherwood. Or I. There is no memory. We were all sprinters turned toward a new year. Except one. Yes, there was one true poet among us, one memorizer of griefs -- Bogie.

He sat apart and poured eggnogs down his gullet as if it were bottomless. His pale face was filled with a sneer, his eyes and ears disdained our festive scene. As the music and laughter rose around him, I heard him address the empty air:

"To Letitia, to Letitia -- all things about me are steeped in your remembrance, and shivering as they try to speak of you."

Some 45 years later I say a tardy "Amen."