Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (385 page)

“I know he’ll be terribly glad to. He’s got loads of room, because I came out with someone else.”

She was wondering if her father would be presentable at twelve.

He could always drive at any rate — and, besides, people who asked for a lift could take what they got.

“That’ll be lovely. Thank you so much,” said Mrs. Rogers.

Then, as she had just passed the kittenish late thirties when women still think they are
persona grata
with the young and entered upon the early forties when their children convey to them tactfully that they no longer are, Mrs. Rogers obliterated herself from the scene. At that moment the music started and the unfortunate young man with white streaks in his red complexion appeared in front of Yanci.

Just before the end of the end of the next dance Scott Kimberly cut in on her again.

“I’ve come back,” he began, “to tell you how beautiful you are.”

“I’m not, really,” she answered. “And, besides, you tell everyone that.”

The music gathered gusto for its finale, and they sat down upon the comfortable lounge.

“I’ve told no one that for three years,” said Scott.

There was no reason why he should have made it three years, yet somehow it sounded convincing to both of them. Her curiosity was stirred. She began finding out about him. She put him to a lazy questionnaire which began with his relationship to the Rogerses and ended, he knew not by what steps, with a detailed description of his apartment in New York.

“I want to live in New York,” she told him; “on Park Avenue, in one of those beautiful white buildings that have twelve big rooms in each apartment and cost a fortune to rent.”

“That’s what I’d want, too, if I were married. Park Avenue — it’s one of the most beautiful streets in the world, I think, perhaps chiefly because it hasn’t any leprous park trying to give it an artificial suburbanity.”

“Whatever that is,” agreed Yanci. “Anyway, Father and I go to New York about three times a year. We always go to the Ritz.”

This was not precisely true. Once a year she generally pried her father from his placid and not unbeneficent existence that she might spend a week lolling by the Fifth Avenue shop windows, lunching or having tea with some former school friend from Farmover, and occasionally going to dinner and the theater with boys who came up from Yale or Princeton for the occasion. These had been pleasant adventures — not one but was filled to the brim with colorful hours — dancing at Montmartre, dining at the Ritz, with some movie star or supereminent society woman at the next table, or else dreaming of what she might buy at Hempel’s or Waxe’s or Thrumble’s if her father’s income had but one additional naught on the happy side of the decimal. She adored New York with a great impersonal affection — adored it as only a Middle Western or Southern girl can. In its gaudy bazaars she felt her soul transported with turbulent delight, for to her eyes it held nothing ugly, nothing sordid, nothing plain.

She had stayed once at the Ritz — once only. The Manhattan, where they usually registered, had been torn down. She knew that she could never induce her father to afford the Ritz again.

After a moment she borrowed a pencil and paper and scribbled a notification “To Mr. Bowman in the grill” that he was expected to drive Mrs. Rogers and her guest home, “by request” — this last underlined. She hoped that he would be able to do so with dignity. This note she sent by a waiter to her father. Before the next dance began it was returned to her with a scrawled O. K. and her father’s initials.

The remainder of the evening passed quickly. Scott Kimberly cut in on her as often as time permitted, giving her those comforting assurances of her enduring beauty which not without a whimsical pathos she craved. He laughed at her also, and she was not so sure that she liked that. In common with all vague people, she was unaware that she was vague. She did not entirely comprehend when Scott Kimberly told her that her personality would endure long after she was too old to care whether it endured or not.

She liked best to talk about New York, and each of their interrupted conversations gave her a picture or a memory of the metropolis on which she speculated as she looked over the shoulder of Jerry O’Rourke or Carty Braden or some other beau, to whom, as to all of them, she was comfortably anesthetic. At midnight she sent another note to her father, saying that Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Rogers’ guest would meet him immediately on the porch by the main driveway. Then, hoping for the best, she walked out into the starry night and was assisted by Jerry O’Rourke into his roadster.

III

“Good night, Yanci.” With her late escort she was standing on the curbstone in front of the rented stucco house where she lived. Mr. O’Rourke was attempting to put significance into his lingering rendition of her name. For weeks he had been straining to boost their relations almost forcibly onto a sentimental plane; but Yanci, with her vague impassivity, which was a defense against almost anything, had brought to naught his efforts. Jerry O’Rourke was an old story. His family had money; but he — he worked in a brokerage house along with most of the rest of his young generation. He sold bonds — bonds were now the thing; real estate was once the thing — in the days of the boom; then automobiles were the thing. Bonds were the thing now. Young men sold them who had nothing else to go into.

“Don’t bother to come up, please.” Then as he put his car into gear, “Call me up soon!”

A minute later he turned the corner of the moonlit street and disappeared, his cut-out resounding voluminously through the night as it declared that the rest of two dozen weary inhabitants was of no concern to his gay meanderings.

Yanci sat down thoughtfully upon the porch steps. She had no key and must wait for her father’s arrival. Five minutes later a roadster turned into the street, and approaching with an exaggerated caution stopped in front of the Rogers’ large house next door. Relieved, Yanci arose and strolled slowly down the walk. The door of the car had swung open and Mrs. Rogers, assisted by Scott Kimberly, had alighted safely upon the sidewalk; but to Yanci’s surprise Scott Kimberly, after escorting Mrs. Rogers to her steps, returned to the car. Yanci was close enough to notice that he took the driver’s seat. As he drew up at the Bowman’s curbstone Yanci saw that her father was occupying the far corner, fighting with ludicrous dignity against a sleep that had come upon him. She groaned. The fatal last hour had done its work — Tom Bowman was once more
hors de combat
.

“Hello,” cried Yanci as she reached the curb.

“Yanci,” muttered her parent, simulating, unsuccessfully, a brisk welcome. His lips were curved in an ingratiating grin.

“Your father wasn’t feeling quite fit, so he let me drive home,” explained Scott cheerfully as he got himself out and came up to her.

“Nice little car. Had it long?”

Yanci laughed, but without humor.

“Is he paralyzed?”

“Is who paralyze’?” demanded the figure in the car with an offended sigh.

Scott was standing by the car.

“Can I help you out, sir?”

“I c’n get out. I c’n get out,” insisted Mr. Bowman. “Just step a li’l’ out my way. Someone must have given me some ‘stremely bad whisk’.”

“You mean a lot of people must have given you some,” retorted Yanci in cold unsympathy.

Mr. Bowman reached the curb with astonishing ease; but this was a deceitful success, for almost immediately he clutched at a handle of air perceptible only to himself, and was saved by Scott’s quickly proffered arm. Followed by the two men, Yanci walked toward the house in a furor of embarrassment. Would the young man think that such scenes went on every night? It was chiefly her own presence that made it humiliating for Yanci. Had her father been carried to bed by two butlers each evening she might even have been proud of the fact that he could afford such dissipation; but to have it thought that she assisted, that she was burdened with the worry and the care! And finally she was annoyed with Scott Kimberly for being there, and for his officiousness in helping to bring her father into the house.

Reaching the low porch of tapestry brick, Yanci searched in Tom Bowman’s vest for the key and unlocked the front door. A minute later the master of the house was deposited in an easy-chair.

“Thanks very much,” he said, recovering for a moment. “Sit down. Like a drink? Yanci, get some crackers and cheese, if there’s any, won’t you, dear?”

At the unconscious coolness of this Scott and Yanci laughed.

“It’s your bedtime, Father,” she said, her anger struggling with diplomacy.

“Give me my guitar,” he suggested, “and I’ll play you tune.”

Except on such occasions as this, he had not touched his guitar for twenty years. Yanci turned to Scott.

“He’ll be fine now. Thanks a lot. He’ll fall asleep in a minute and when I wake him he’ll go to bed like a lamb.”

“Well —  — “

They strolled together out the door.

“Sleepy?” he asked.

“No, not a bit.”

“Then perhaps you’d better let me stay here with you a few minutes until you see if he’s all right. Mrs. Rogers gave me a key so I can get in without disturbing her.”

“It’s quite all right,” protested Yanci. “I don’t mind a bit, and he won’t be any trouble. He must have taken a glass too much, and this whisky we have out here — you know! This has happened once before — last year,” she added.

Her words satisfied her; as an explanation it seemed to have a convincing ring.

“Can I sit down for a moment, anyway?” They sat side by side upon a wicker porch setee.

“I’m thinking of staying over a few days,” Scott said.

“How lovely!” Her voice had resumed its die-away note.

“Cousin Pete Rogers wasn’t well to-day, but tomorrow he’s going duck shooting, and he wants me to go with him.”

“Oh, how thrilling! I’ve always been mad to go, and Father’s always promised to take me, but he never has.”

“We’re going to be gone about three days, and then I thought I’d come back and stay over the next week-end —  — “ He broke off suddenly and bent forward in a listening attitude.

“Now what on earth is that?”

The sounds of music were proceeding brokenly from the room they had lately left — a ragged chord on a guitar and half a dozen feeble starts.

“It’s father!” cried Yanci.

And now a voice drifted out to them, drunken and murmurous, taking the long notes with attempted melancholy:

Sing a song of cities,

Ridin on a rail,

A niggah’s ne’er so happy

As when he’s out-a jail.

“How terrible!” exclaimed Yanci. “He’ll wake up everybody in the block.”

The chorus ended, the guitar jangled again, then gave out a last harsh sprang! and was still. A moment later these disturbances were followed by a low but quite definite snore. Mr. Bowman, having indulged his musical proclivity, had dropped off to sleep.

“Let’s go to ride,” suggested Yanci impatiently. “This is too hectic for me.”

Scott arose with alacrity and they walked down to the car.

“Where’ll we go?” she wondered.

“I don’t care.”

“We might go up half a block to Crest Avenue — that’s our show street — and then ride out to the river boulevard.”

IV

As they turned into Crest Avenue the new cathedral, immense and unfinished, in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghosts of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white, dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cocheres which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with huge circular windows that corseted the second stories.

The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street. Beyond the first half mile it became newer, essayed ventures in terraced lawns, in concoctions of stucco or in granite mansions which imitated through a variety of gradual refinements the marble contours of the Petit Trianon. The houses of this phase rushed by the roadster for a succession of minutes; then the way turned and the car was headed directly into the moonlight which swept toward it like the lamp of some gigantic motorcycle far up the avenue.

Past the low Corinthian lines of the Christian Science Temple, past a block of dark frame horrors, a deserted row of grim red brick — an unfortunate experiment of the late 90’s — then new houses again, bright-red brick now, with trimmings of white, black iron fences and hedges binding flowery lawns. These swept by, faded, passed, enjoying their moment of grandeur; then waiting there in the moonlight to be outmoded as had the frame, cupolaed mansions of lower town and the brownstone piles of older Crest Avenue in their turn.

The roofs lowered suddenly, the lots narrowed, the houses shrank up in size and shaded off into bungalows. These held the street for the last mile, to the bend in the river which terminated the prideful avenue at the statue of Chelsea Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot was the first governor — and almost the last of Anglo-Saxon blood.

All the way thus far Yanci had not spoken, absorbed still in the annoyance of the evening, yet soothed somehow by the fresh air of Northern November that rushed by them. She must take her fur coat out of storage next day, she thought.

“Where are we now?”

As they slowed down, Scott looked up curiously at the pompous stone figure, clear in the crisp moonlight, with one hand on a book and the forefinger of the other pointing, as though with reproachful symbolism, directly at some construction work going on in the street.