Mona

How the book draws them

Appearance, manner, and tone — as the book sketches them, in our words.

• The apartment they could not affordThe book opens with the couple renting a Brooklyn flat at ninety dollars a month, twice what they had meant to pay. To reassure the landlords, Mona describes Val's job at the telegraph company as a career on the way up — a superintendent's post coming, a vice-presidency in a few more years — and finishes by asking whether that is not what his boss had told him, so that he has to nod along. Val puts down a ten-dollar deposit and privately writes it off as money lost. Then Mona produces three hundred dollars. She had asked an admirer for five hundred, and when he said his bank account was nearly empty she made him buy her a peasant dress and an expensive pair of shoes as well.
• She talks him into quitting his jobMona telephones Val's office to say his cold has got worse, and encourages him to stay home whenever he feels like it. "You should be writing," she tells him. When he finally decides to resign she is so pleased that she asks him to go and do it that morning and be back in time for lunch. She then tells him not to think about writing at all until he has had a long rest, and adds: "And don't worry about how we're going to get along. Leave that to me."
• Everything he owns is a present from herWhile Mona is at the theater in the evenings, Val reads at the Montague Street library and lives on things she has bought him — a silk bathrobe he says would suit a matinee idol better than himself, Moroccan slippers, a cigarette holder he only uses when she is in the room. He asks her to stop buying him presents, and she keeps bringing them home anyway, sometimes after what he calls an unusual touch.
• The night he tells her he knows she is JewishMona has kept her family and her background from Val. When it finally comes up, he tells her he has known for a long time, that he loves her more for it, and that the women of the Old Testament had golden names to him as a boy. Then he suggests that he convert and that the two of them marry again in front of a rabbi. She will not have it. "You're a fool, a clown, and I love you," she tells him, and says she does not want to be a Jew either, that she is not anything, that she is only a woman, and that he is never to raise the subject again.
• The prose poems she sells under her own nameVal has his short prose pieces printed as single sheets, which he calls Mezzotints. After two or three of them Mona proposes selling them herself around the Greenwich Village night spots, on the reasoning that half-drunk people are not very critical and that a good-looking woman is hard to refuse. Val's name is blacked out on the leftover copies and hers printed underneath. She works the clubs until about two in the morning.
• The men who pay for the householdThe regular she talks about most is Alan Cromwell, who says he is a banker from Washington. He bought seventy-five or eighty dollars' worth of the printed sheets at one sitting and then left them behind on the table, and he never says good night without putting a fifty-dollar bill in her hand for keeping him company. There is also a lumber king who keeps a suite at the Waldorf all year, a Sorbonne professor named Moreau, a Texas oil man named Neuberger who tips every taxi driver five dollars, and a retired brewer from Milwaukee who travels in for concerts and takes her along. Val notes that all her admirers, whatever they do for a living, turn out to have a tinge of culture about them.
• His manuscripts go out with her signature on themThe theater job dries up, the rent falls badly behind, and twenty or thirty manuscripts are in the post at any one time, going out and coming back. The two of them settle on a division of labour: Val writes, Mona handles everything else, including his career. "Thereafter everything I submit for publication will bear my wife's signature." Her own clothes give out around the same time, and in bitter weather she wears his overcoat.
• The stories she brings homeMona arrives back after midnight with a parcel of good food and a bottle of Benedictine and an account of the admirer who provided them — a retired baker from Weehawken, on one occasion. Ted O'Mara, the childhood friend living with them, used to interrupt with blunt questions about what the evening had actually involved, and has learned to hold his tongue. When her exaggerations get too big the two men laugh out loud; Mona laughs as hard as they do, then picks the story up exactly where she left it.
• Running the speakeasyLater the couple keep a speakeasy in Greenwich Village. Mona looks after the customers while Val, O'Mara and their friend Ned sit in the kitchen with a ukulele. One regular, Rothermel, comes by for a couple of hours in the late afternoon and pays her ten or twenty dollars for the privilege of talking to her on her own.