Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (360 page)

MORE THAN JUST A HOUSE

Saturday Evening Post
(24 June 1933)

This was the sort of thing Lew was used to--and he’d been around a good deal already. You came into an entrance hall, sometimes narrow New England Colonial, sometimes cautiously spacious. Once in the hall, the host said: “Clare”--or Virginia, or Darling--”this is Mr. Lowrie.” The woman said, “How do you do, Mr. Lowrie,” and Lew answered, “How do you do, Mrs. Woman.” Then the man suggested, “How about a little cocktail?” And Lew lifted his brows apart and said, “Fine,” in a tone that implied: “What hospitality--consideration--attention!” Those delicious canapés. “M’m’m! Madame, what are they--broiled feathers? Enough to spoil a stronger appetite than mine.”

But Lew was on his way up, with six new suits of clothes, and he was getting into the swing of the thing. His name was up for a downtown club and he had his eye on a very modern bachelor apartment full of wrought-iron swinging gates--as if he were a baby inclined to topple downstairs--when he saved the life of the Gunther girl and his tastes underwent revision.

This was back in 1925, before the Spanish-American--No, before whatever it is that has happened since then. The Gunther girls had got off the train on the wrong side and were walking along arm in arm, with Amanda in the path of an approaching donkey engine. Amanda was rather tall, golden and proud, and the donkey engine was very squat and dark and determined. Lew had no time to speculate upon their respective chances in the approaching encounter; he lunged at Jean, who was nearest him, and as the two sisters clung together, startled, he pulled Amanda out of the iron pathway by such a hair’s breadth that a piston cylinder touched her coat.

And so Lew’s taste was changed in regard to architecture and interior decoration. At the Gunther house they served tea, hot or iced, sugar buns, gingerbread and hot rolls at half-past four. When he first went there he was embarrassed by his heroic status--for about five minutes. Then he learned that during the Civil War the grandmother had been saved by her own grandmother from a burning house in Montgomery County, that father had once saved ten men at sea and been recommended for the Carnegie medal, that when Jean was little a man had saved her from the surf at Cape May--that, in fact, all the Gunthers had gone on saving and being saved for the last fifty years and that their real debt to Lew was that now there would be no gap left in the tradition.

This was on the very wide, vine-curtained veranda [“The first thing I’d do would be tear off that monstrosity,” said a visiting architect] which almost completely bounded the big square box of the house, circa 1880. The sisters, three of them, appeared now and then during the time Lew drank tea and talked to the older people. He was only twenty-six himself and he wished Amanda would stay uncovered long enough for him to look at her, but only Bess, the sixteen-year-old sister, was really in sight; in front of the two others interposed a white-flannel screen of young men.

“It was the quickness,” said Mr. Gunther, pacing the long straw rug, “that second of coordination. Suppose you’d tried to warn them--never. Your subconscious mind saw that they were joined together--saw that if you pulled one, you pulled them both. One second, one thought, one motion. I remember in 1904--”

“Won’t Mr. Lowrie have another piece of gingerbread?” asked the grandmother.

“Father, why don’t you show Mr. Lowrie the apostles’ spoons?” Bess proposed.

“What?” Her father stopped pacing. “Is Mr. Lowrie interested in old spoons?”

Lew was thinking at the moment of Amanda twisting somewhere between the glare of the tennis courts and the shadow of the veranda, through all the warmth and graciousness of the afternoon.

“Spoons? Oh, I’ve got a spoon, thank you.”

“Apostles’ spoons,” Bess explained. “Father has one of the best collections in America. When he likes anybody enough he shows them the spoons. I thought, since you saved Amanda’s life--”

He saw little of Amanda that afternoon--talked to her for a moment by the steps while a young man standing near tossed up a tennis racket and caught it by the handle with an impatient bend of his knees at each catch. The sun shopped among the yellow strands of her hair, poured around the rosy tan of her cheeks and spun along the arms that she regarded abstractedly as she talked to him.

“It’s hard to thank a person for saving your life, Mr. Lowrie,” she said. “Maybe you shouldn’t have. Maybe it wasn’t worth saving.”

“Oh, yes, it was,” said Lew, in a spasm of embarrassment.

“Well, I’d like to think so.” She turned to the young man. “Was it, Allen?”

“It’s a good enough life,” Allen admitted, “if you go in for wooly blondes.”

She turned her slender smile full upon Lew for a moment, and then aimed it a little aside, like a pocket torch that might dazzle him. “I’ll always feel that you own me, Mr. Lowrie; my life is forfeit to you. You’ll always have the right to take me back and put me down in front of that engine again.”

Her proud mouth was a little overgracious about being saved, though Lew didn’t realize it; it seemed to Amanda that it might at least have been someone in her own crowd. The Gunthers were a haughty family--haughty beyond all logic, because Mr. Gunther had once been presented at the Court of St. James’s and remained slightly convalescent ever since. Even Bess was haughty, and it was Bess, eventually, who led Lew down to his car.

“It’s a nice place,” she agreed. “We’ve been going to modernize it, but we took a vote and decided to have the swimming pool repaired instead.”

Lew’s eyes lifted over her--she was like Amanda, except for the slightness of her and the childish disfigurement of a small wire across her teeth--up to the house with its decorative balconies outside the windows, its fickle gables, its gold-lettered, Swiss-chalet mottoes, the bulging projections of its many bays. Uncritically he regarded it; it seemed to him one of the finest houses he had ever known.

“Of course, we’re miles from town, but there’s always plenty of people. Father and mother go South after the Christmas holidays when we go back to school.”

It was more than just a house, Lew decided as he drove away. It was a place where a lot of different things could go on at once--a private life for the older people, a private romance for each girl. Promoting himself, he chose his own corner--a swinging seat behind one of the drifts of vines that cut the veranda into quarters. But this was in 1925, when the ten thousand a year that Lew had come to command did not permit an indiscriminate crossing of social frontiers. He was received by the Gunthers and held at arm’s length by them, and then gradually liked for the qualities that began to show through his awkwardness. A good-looking man on his way up can put directly into action the things he learns; Lew was never again quite so impressed by the suburban houses whose children lived upon rolling platforms in the street.

It was September before he was invited to the Gunthers’ on an intimate scale--and this largely because Amanda’s mother insisted upon it.

“He saved your life. I want him asked to this one little party.”

But Amanda had not forgiven him for saving her life.

“It’s just a dance for friends,” she complained. “Let him come to Jean’s debut in October--everybody’ll think he’s a business acquaintance of father’s. After all, you can be nice to somebody without falling into their arms.”

Mrs. Gunther translated this correctly as: “You can be awful to somebody without their knowing it”--and brusquely overrode her: “You can’t have advantages without responsibilities,” she said shortly.

Life had been opening up so fast for Lew that he had a black dinner coat instead of a purple one. Asked for dinner, he came early; and thinking to give him his share of attention when it was most convenient, Amanda walked with him into the tangled, out-of-hand garden. She wanted to be bored, but his gentle vitality disarmed her, made her look at him closely for almost the first time.

“I hear everywhere that you’re a young man with a future,” she said.

Lew admitted it. He boasted a little; he did not tell her that he had analyzed the spell which the Gunther house exerted upon him--his father had been gardener on a similar Maryland estate when he was a boy of five. His mother had helped him to remember that when he told her about the Gunthers. And now this garden was shot bright with sunset, with Amanda one of its own flowers in her flowered dress; he told her, in a rush of emotion, how beautiful she was, and Amanda, excited by the prospect of impending hours with another man, let herself encourage him. Lew had never been so happy as in the moment before she stood up from the seat and put her hand on his arm lightly.

“I do like you,” she said. “You’re very handsome. Do you know that?”

The harvest dance took place in an L-shaped space formed by the clearing of three rooms. Thirty young people were there, and a dozen of their elders, but there was no crowding, for the big windows were opened to the veranda and the guests danced against the wide, illimitable night. A country orchestra alternated with the phonograph, there was mildly calculated cider punch, and an air of safety beside the open bookshelves of the library and the oil portraits of the living room, as though this were one of an endless series of dances that had taken place here in the past and would take place again.

“Thought you never would cut in,” Bess said to Lew. “You’d be foolish not to. I’m the best dancer of us three, and I’m much the smartest one. Jean is the jazzy one, the most
chic,
but I think it’s
passé
to be jazzy and play the traps and neck every second boy. Amanda is the beauty, of course. But I’m going to be the Cinderella, Mr. Lowrie. They’ll be the two wicked sisters, and gradually you’ll find I’m the most attractive and get all hot and bothered about me.”

There was an interval of intervals before Lew could maneuver Amanda to his chosen segment of the porch. She was all radiant and shimmering. More than content to be with him, she tried to relax with the creak of the settee. Then instinct told her that something was about to happen.

Lew, remembering a remark of Jean’s--”He asked me to marry him, and he hadn’t even kissed me”--could yet think of no graceful way to assault Amanda; nevertheless he was determined to tell her tonight that he was in love with her.

“This’ll seem sudden,” he ventured, “but you might as well know. Please put me down on the list of those who’d like to have a chance.”

She was not surprised, but being deep in herself at the moment, she was rather startled. Giving up the idea of relaxing, she sat upright.

“Mr. Lowrie--can I call you by your first name?--can I tell you something? No, I won’t--yes, I will, because I like you now. I didn’t like you at first. How’s that for frankness?”

“Is that what you wanted to tell me?”

“No. Listen. You met Mr. Horton--the man from New York--the tall man with the rather old-looking hair?”

“Yes.” Lew felt a pang of premonition in his stomach.

“I’m engaged to him. You’re the first to know--except mother suspects. Whee! Now I told you because you saved my life, so you do sort of own me--I wouldn’t be here to be engaged, except for you.” Then she was honestly surprised at his expression. “Heavens, don’t look like that!” She regarded him, pained. “Don’t tell me you’ve been secretly in love with me all these months. Why didn’t I know? And now it’s too late.”

Lew tried a laugh.

“I hardly know you,” he confessed. “I haven’t had time to fall in love with you.”

“Maybe I work quick. Anyhow, if you did, you’ll have to forget it and be my friend.” Finding his hand, she squeezed it. “A big night for this little girl, Mr. Lew; the chance of a lifetime. I’ve been afraid for two days that his bureau drawer would stick or the hot water would give out and he’d leave for civilization.”

They were silent for a moment; then he asked:

“You very much in love with him?”

“Of course I am. I mean, I don’t know. You tell me. I’ve been in love with so many people; how can I answer that? Anyhow, I’ll get away from this old barn.”

“This house? You want to get away from here? Why, this is a lovely old house.”

She was astonished now, and then suddenly explosive:

“This old tomb! That’s the chief reason I’m marrying George Horton. Haven’t I stood it for twenty years? Haven’t I begged mother and father on my knees to move into town? This--shack--where everybody can hear what everybody else says three rooms off, and father won’t allow a radio, and not even a phone till last summer. I’m afraid even to ask a girl down from school--probably she’d go crazy listening to the shutters on a stormy night.”

“It’s a darn nice old house,” he said automatically.

“Nice and quaint,” she agreed. “Glad you like it. People who don’t have to live here generally do, but you ought to see us alone in it--if there’s a family quarrel you have to stay with it for hours. It all comes down to father wanting to live fifty miles from anywhere, so we’re condemned to rot. I’d rather live in a three-room apartment in town!” Shocked by her own vehemence, she broke off. “Anyhow,” she insisted, “it may seem nice to you, but it’s a nuisance to us.”

A man pulled the vines apart and peered at them, claimed her and pulled her to her feet; when she was gone, Lew went over the railing with a handhold and walked into the garden; he walked far enough away so that the lights and music from the house were blurred into one entity like a stage effect, like an approaching port viewed from a deck at night.

“I only saw her four times,” he said to himself. “Four times isn’t much. Eeney-meeney-miney-moe--what could I expect in four times? I shouldn’t feel anything at all.” But he was engulfed by fear. What had he just begun to know that now he might never know? What had happened in these moments in the garden this afternoon, what was the excitement that had blacked out in the instant of its birth? The scarcely emergent young image of Amanda--he did not want to carry it with him forever. Gradually he realized a truth behind his grief: He had come too late for her; unknown to him, she had been slipping away through the years. With the odds against him, he had managed to found himself on solid rock, and then, looking around for the girl, discovered that she had just gone. “Sorry, just gone out; just left; just gone.” Too late in every way--even for the house. Thinking over her tirade, Lew saw that he had come too late for the house; it was the house of a childhood from which the three girls were breaking away, the house of an older generation, sufficient unto them. To a younger generation it was pervaded with an aura of completion and fulfillment beyond their own power to add to. It was just old.