I heard the angels laughing as I came into the world and I cried out, as soon as I could, that it certainly didn’t take much to entertain some people. Angels have no sense of humor, anyway; I’ve since discovered that you have to go in the other direction if you want to appreciate good jokes. Why, up there in Heaven, the whole court thought this was a wow, judging by the celestial thunder-peals of glee which accompanied the parlor tricks, but if you can see anything funny in playing a trick like that on an unsuspecting couple of innocent young lovers who thought Birth Control was a pullman porter, then I hope you go to hell where red-hot jokes are the devil’s own sport!
Furthermore, the joke was not only on my parents, but also on us—for, you see, it happened that not only was I twins but also the other half of the consignment was a boy who should have been a girl while I was a girl who should have been a boy. The Head-Man certainly proved himself a magician; he scrambled our souls and temperaments and everything else so thoroughly that it would have required a better man than the Court Physician to put us together again as the Creator intended us to be, before that weak moment of kittenishness.
Even so, you’d think the Shipping Clerk would have hesitated at sending out a boy in a girl’s body and vice versa. Of course, the two bodies did look very much alike, but we were unashamedly naked at the time and you’d think that even a government clerk would notice something funny in such a parcel. Perhaps my Guardian Angel matched pennies or shot craps with the Clerk, and the latter may have rolled a natural for my brother and an even number for me. After seeing some of the other shipments that went out on my birthday, I’ll believe anything’s possible. I recently met a man, born on that same day, who sniffs like a rabbit, eats like a pig, walks like a woman and brays like an ass; and I know a woman who would be a cat if she had a tail. The Clerk must have been on the party, too, and maybe had a little too much nectar besides. Anyway, the Head-Man scrambled everything from frogs to elephants and nobody else unscrambled them, so if your birthday was mine you probably decided long ago that Heaven isn’t the most efficiently operated production plant that can be imagined. Even on good days, the service is rotten: nine times out of ten when you place an order for a boy you get a girl or vice versa—no wonder a lot of the circus freaks were born on my birthday!
My brother and I looked exactly alike. Indeed we were quite a biological achievement, because we even had identical moles in identical positions on our left cheeks. Father was actually quite proud of us and I think the burden of having twins was really responsible for his economic success, for he proceeded to accumulate more than enough money after we made our début in 1899. In fact, he became so successful that he never stayed long enough in any one city for us to become conspicuously familiar to even our nearest neighbors. He was always on the move, organizing new projects, developing new enterprises, rescuing his own and others’ investments and turning everything to profit. He was a hard-working man and he loved to keep busy, but I think that all that hustling around year after year had a lot to do with mother’s untimely death when we were only ten years old. She succumbed to typhoid fever, but that was only the last straw, for she had never really had a chance to get strong and healthy after we appeared on the scene.
After her death, the head of the house didn’t know what to do with us, it being obvious that he could not give us any care or attention and still keep up his program of industry; but he finally settled the problem by arranging a plan with our Aunt Elinor Canwick, his spinster sister, under the terms of which he provided liberally for us and for her on condition that she take charge of us and supervise our education. He gave Aunt Elinor carte blanche in all matters except one: he stipulated that we must receive, aside from whatever cultural finish she might provide, a thorough training in some practical occupation, in order that we might be able to earn a respectable living should our going to work become necessary through unfortunate circumstances. More specifically, he strongly advised that “they be trained in secretarial work, because such work will give them the best opportunities for improving their positions and for keeping in touch with the better class of people.”
So we went to live in Wakeham with Aunt Elinor and I had even less chance to be as boyish as I felt because our dear Aunt had certain rather definite ideas about the limits of a young lady’s sphere of activity. Also she was a confirmed art enthusiast and just as soon as she saw any signs of talent in either of us, she promptly did everything in her power to encourage us in the direction of artistic careers. We went to the best schools and had the best tutors obtainable; we traveled abroad and absorbed culture in many lands; we developed a certain amount of artistic creativeness and appreciativeness. And yet Aunt Elinor did not neglect the kind of training which Dad advised: indeed, I think he was rather proud of us, for we really did become quite proficient after studying stenography, typewriting, business English, commercial law, filing, and lots of other purely commercial subjects and had made them still more valuable by having mastered three foreign languages; so that at the age when most American boys and girls are completing high school with a smattering knowledge of half a hundred subjects, we were both capable of speaking and writing French, Italian or German, and taking dictation in any of them or in English. Aunt Elinor was proud of us, too. The last time I saw our father, before his accidental death in 1916, he and Aunt Elinor were indulging in mutual admiration exercises, congratulating each other on the results obtained. And we twins were the nicest, meekest, most harmless and un-regular kids that ever existed—at least, so we must have seemed.
But from the day of Dad’s funeral, Aunt Elinor made a radical about-face and bent all her energies toward cultivating our artistic talents. No more commercial stuff now. She thought that Leon had distinctive poetic ability, so she saw to it that he became acquainted with all the literature and literary people that could possibly help him develop, while Leona, the big “I,” being somewhat of a dancer and having been remarked upon by some really competent theatrical people, was promptly given over to the best dancing master available, after which my life was just one pirouette and kick after another—which really wasn’t so bad because it was physical work and that was what I needed to keep me happy. We lived in Wakeham, one of the Big City’s most fashionable suburbs, and moved in a very exclusive, art-loving and -fostering circle.
Life rolled away in its customary monotony and gradually the curtains of our horizon were drawn back to reveal new interests and new hopes. Leon and I seemed to grow more similar in appearance and more dissimilar in nature as we grew up. Aunt Elinor used to say that our sexes were all mixed up, that our natures were diametrically opposite to our respective physiques, and for once she was really near the truth, since I was very much of a tomboy while Leon was an ethereal-spirited, effeminate, poetic soul who cringed from all physical matters and even resented having to be near my dog Esky, who worshiped the very ground I walked on and evinced not uncertainly his suspicions of people who were too nasty nice to play with a pup now and then. Leon wasted no love on Esky and once declared that the pup’s mother must have been promiscuous. Well, Esky was nothing but a mongrel, to be sure, although Aunt Elinor said his mother was a thoroughbred Eskimo dog, but even thoroughbreds have been known to have cuckold husbands; mongrel or not, a dog instinctively attaches himself to the man of the house—but not so with Esky. He hadn’t any use for Leon at all, probably because Leon high-hatted him, whereas I liked nothing better than a chance to romp and wrestle with him.
You can readily understand how I looked upon my sweet brother. He did none of the things that regular boys do. Sports and games and any kind of exercise that was the least bit rough did not appeal to him at all. I even suspected that he was too damned nice to be interested in girls—but on this point I was mistaken, for I discovered that Vyvy Martin, one of Wakeham’s deep-eyed débutante beauties, was more or less Leon’s soul mate. One was about as dizzy as the other, so they made a perfect couple, entirely sufficient unto themselves—a condition which must, I suppose, be called Love. But you can imagine how I looked upon Leon when every impulse in me was toward the very kind of living which he shunned. It seemed that not a day went by without my wishing I were in his shoes so that I could chase off and enjoy myself as he should enjoy himself. Truly in mental and emotional equipment, we were as dissimilar as Tom Thumb and the Fat Lady.
The more fed up I became with our “cultured” friends and interests, the more Leon became absorbed in them. He was a thorough-going æsthete and the more æsthetic he grew, the more discontented I became, until it seemed that life held absolutely nothing of interest for me. For days and weeks at a time I carried a grouch and consoled myself by making the aforementioned complaints to the Creator. Every time Aunt Elinor entertained, I had to perform for the benefit of the guests, and afterwards everyone would feed her a lot of slush about my “remarkable talent for the dance.” You might have thought I was some kind of thoroughbred dog, the way they studied me and passed comments on my body and brains. My Aunt should have known long before that time that her niece had a beautiful body and enough brains to know how to use it, but she continued to gather in the same old line of flattery and flowery compliments until you’d have thought it was her own body people were talking about.