Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (386 page)

“This is the end of Crest Avenue,” said Yanci, turning to him. “This is our show street.”

“A museum of American architectural failures.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he murmured.

“I should have explained it to you. I forgot. We can go along the river boulevard if you’d like — or are you tired?”

Scott assured her that he was not tired — not in the least.

Entering the boulevard, the cement road twisted under darkling trees.

“The Mississippi — how little it means to you now!” said Scott suddenly.

“What?” Yanci looked around. “Oh, the river.”

“I guess it was once pretty important to your ancestors up here.”

“My ancestors weren’t up here then,” said Yanci with some dignity. “My ancestors were from Maryland. My father came out here when he left Yale.”

“Oh!” Scott was politely impressed.

“My mother was from here. My father came out here from Baltimore because of his health.”

“Oh!”

“Of course we belong here now, I suppose” — this with faint condescension — “as much as anywhere else.”

“Of course.”

“Except that I want to live in the East and I can’t persuade Father to,” she finished.

It was after one o’clock and the boulevard was almost deserted. Occasionally two yellow disks would top a rise ahead of them and take shape as a late-returning automobile. Except for that, they were alone in a continual rushing dark. The moon had gone down.

“Next time the road goes near the river let’s stop and watch it,” he suggested.

Yanci smiled inwardly. This remark was obviously what one boy of her acquaintance had named an international petting cue, by which was meant a suggestion that aimed to create naturally a situation for a kiss. She considered the matter. As yet the man had made no particular impression on her. He was good-looking, apparently well-to-do and from New York. She had begun to like him during the dance, increasingly as the evening had drawn to a close; then the incident of her father’s appalling arrival had thrown cold water upon this tentative warmth; and now — it was November, and the night was cold. Still —  —

“All right,” she agreed suddenly.

The road divided; she swerved around and brought the car to a stop in an open place high above the river.

“Well?” she demanded in the deep quiet that followed the shutting off of the engine.

“Thanks.”

“Are you satisfied here?”

“Almost. Not quite.”

“Why not?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he answered. “Why is your name Yanci?”

“It’s a family name.”

“It’s very pretty.” He repeated it several times caressingly. “Yanci — it has all the grace of Nancy, and yet it isn’t prim.”

“What’s your name?” she inquired.

“Scott.”

“Scott what?”

“Kimberly. Didn’t you know?”

“I wasn’t sure. Mrs. Rogers introduced you in such a mumble.”

There was a slight pause.

“Yanci,” he repeated; “beautiful Yanci, with her dark-blue eyes and her lazy soul. Do you know why I’m not quite satisfied, Yanci?”

“Why?”

Imperceptibly she had moved her face nearer until as she waited for an answer with her lips faintly apart he knew that in asking she had granted.

Without haste he bent his head forward and touched her lips.

He sighed, and both of them felt a sort of relief — relief from the embarrassment of playing up to what conventions of this sort of thing remained.

“Thanks,” he said as he had when she first stopped the car.

“Now are you satisfied?”

Her blue eyes regarded him unsmilingly in the darkness.

“After a fashion; of course, you can never say — definitely.”

Again he bent toward her, but she stooped and started the motor. It was late and Yanci was beginning to be tired. What purpose there was in the experiment was accomplished. He had had what he asked. If he liked it he would want more, and that put her one move ahead in the game which she felt she was beginning.

“I’m hungry,” she complained. “Let’s go down and eat.”

“Very well,” he acquiesced sadly. “Just when I was enjoying — the Mississippi.”

“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she inquired almost plaintively as they backed out.

“What an absurd question!”

“But I like to hear people say so.”

“I was just about to — when you started the engine.”

Downtown in a deserted all-night lunch room they ate bacon and eggs. She was pale as ivory now. The night had drawn the lazy vitality and languid color out of her face. She encouraged him to talk to her of New York until he was beginning every sentence with, “Well now, let’s see —  — “

The repast over, they drove home. Scott helped her put the car in the little garage, and just outside the front door she lent him her lips again for the faint brush of a kiss. Then she went in.

The long living room which ran the width of the small stucco house was reddened by a dying fire which had been high when Yanci left and now was faded to a steady undancing glow. She took a log from the fire box and threw it on the embers, then started as a voice came out of the half darkness at the other end of the room.

“Back so soon?”

It was her father’s voice, not yet quite sober, but alert and intelligent.

“Yes. Went riding,” she answered shortly, sitting down in a wicker chair before the fire. “Then went down and had something to eat.”

“Oh!”

Her father left his place and moved to a chair nearer the fire, where he stretched himself out with a sigh. Glancing at him from the corner of her eye, for she was going to show an appropriate coldness, Yanci was fascinated by his complete recovery of dignity in the space of two hours. His graying hair was scarcely rumpled; his handsome face was ruddy as ever. Only his eyes, crisscrossed with tiny red lines, were evidence of his late dissipation.

“Have a good time?”

“Why should you care?” she answered rudely.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“You didn’t seem to care earlier in the evening. I asked you to take two people home for me, and you weren’t able to drive your own car.”

“The deuce I wasn’t!” he protested. “I could have driven in — in a race in an arana, areaena. That Mrs. Rogers insisted that her young admirer should drive, so what could I do?”

“That isn’t her young admirer,” retorted Yanci crisply. There was no drawl in her voice now. “She’s as old as you are. That’s her niece — I mean her nephew.”

“Excuse me!”

“I think you owe me an apology.” She found suddenly that she bore him no resentment. She was rather sorry for him, and it occurred to her that in asking him to take Mrs. Rogers home she had somehow imposed on his liberty. Nevertheless, discipline was necessary — there would be other Saturday nights. “Don’t you?” she concluded.

“I apologize, Yanci.”

“Very well, I accept your apology,” she answered stiffly.

“What’s more, I’ll make it up to you.”

Her blue eyes contracted. She hoped — she hardly dared to hope that he might take her to New York.

“Let’s see,” he said. “November, isn’t it? What date?”

“The twenty-third.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I’ll do.” He knocked the tips of his fingers together tentatively. “I’ll give you a present. I’ve been meaning to let you have a trip all fall, but business has been bad.” She almost smiled — as though business was of any consequence in his life. “But then you need a trip. I’ll make you a present of it.”

He rose again, and crossing over to his desk sat down.

“I’ve got a little money in a New York bank that’s been lying there quite a while,” he said as he fumbled in a drawer for a check book. “I’ve been intending to close out the account. Let — me — see. There’s just —  — “ His pen scratched. “Where the devil’s the blotter? Uh!”

He came back to the fire and a pink oblong paper fluttered into her lap.

“Why, Father!”

It was a check for three hundred dollars.

“But can you afford this?” she demanded.

“It’s all right,” he reassured her, nodding. “That can be a Christmas present, too, and you’ll probably need a dress or a hat or something before you go.”

“Why,” she began uncertainly, “I hardly know whether I ought to take this much or not! I’ve got two hundred of my own downtown, you know. Are you sure —  — “

“Oh, yes!” He waved his hand with magnificent carelessness. “You need a holiday. You’ve been talking about New York, and I want you to go down there. Tell some of your friends at Yale and the other colleges and they’ll ask you to the prom or something. That’ll be nice. You’ll have a good time.”

He sat down abruptly in his chair and gave vent to a long sigh. Yanci folded up the check and tucked it into the low bosom of her dress.

“Well,” she drawled softly with a return to her usual manner, “you’re a perfect lamb to be so sweet about it, but I don’t want to be horribly extravagant.”

Her father did not answer. He gave another little sigh and relaxed sleepily into his chair.

“Of course I do want to go,” went on Yanci.

Still her father was silent. She wondered if he were asleep.

“Are you asleep?” she demanded, cheerfully now. She bent toward him; then she stood up and looked at him.

“Father,” she said uncertainly.

Her father remained motionless; the ruddy color had melted suddenly out of his face.

“Father!”

It occurred to her — and at the thought she grew cold, and a brassiere of iron clutched at her breast — that she was alone in the room. After a frantic instant she said to herself that her father was dead.

V

Yanci judged herself with inevitable gentleness — judged herself very much as a mother might judge a wild, spoiled child. She was not hard-minded, nor did she live by any ordered and considered philosophy of her own. To such a catastrophe as the death of her father her immediate reaction was a hysterical self-pity. The first three days were something of a nightmare; but sentimental civilization, being as infallible as Nature in healing the wounds of its more fortunate children, had inspired a certain Mrs. Oral, whom Yanci had always loathed, with a passionate interest in all such crises. To all intents and purposes Mrs. Oral buried Tom Bowman. The morning after his death Yanci had wired her maternal aunt in Chicago, but as yet that undemonstrative and well-to-do lady had sent no answer.

All day long, for four days, Yanci sat in her room upstairs, hearing steps come and go on the porch, and it merely increased her nervousness that the doorbell had been disconnected. This by order of Mrs. Oral! Doorbells were always disconnected! After the burial of the dead the strain relaxed. Yanci, dressed in her new black, regarded herself in the pier glass, and then wept because she seemed to herself very sad and beautiful. She went downstairs and tried to read a moving-picture magazine, hoping that she would not be alone in the house when the winter dark came down just after four.

This afternoon Mrs. Oral had said
carpe diem
to the maid, and Yanci was just starting for the kitchen to see whether she had yet gone when the reconnected bell rang suddenly through the house. Yanci started. She waited a minute, then went to the door. It was Scott Kimberly.

“I was just going to inquire for you,” he said.

“Oh! I’m much better, thank you,” she responded with the quiet dignity that seemed suited to her role.

They stood there in the hall awkwardly, each reconstructing the half-facetious, half-sentimental occasion on which they had last met. It seemed such an irreverent prelude to such a somber disaster. There was no common ground for them now, no gap that could be bridged by a slight reference to their mutual past, and there was no foundation on which he could adequately pretend to share her sorrow.

“Won’t you come in?” she said, biting her lip nervously. He followed her to the sitting room and sat beside her on the lounge. In another minute, simply because he was there and alive and friendly, she was crying on his shoulder.

“There, there!” he said, putting his arm behind her and patting her shoulder idiotically. “There, there, there!”

He was wise enough to attribute no ulterior significance to her action. She was overstrained with grief and loneliness and sentiment; almost any shoulder would have done as well. For all the biological thrill to either of them he might have been a hundred years old. In a minute she sat up.

“I beg your pardon,” she murmured brokenly. “But it’s — it’s so dismal in this house today.”

“I know just how you feel, Yanci.”

“Did I — did I — get — tears on your coat?”

In tribute to the tenseness of the incident they both laughed hysterically, and with the laughter she momentarily recovered her propriety.

“I don’t know why I should have chosen you to collapse on,” she wailed. “I really don’t just go ‘round doing it in-indiscriminately on anyone who comes in.”

“I consider it — a compliment,” he responded soberly, “and I can understand the state you’re in.” Then, after a pause, “Have you any plans?”

She shook her head.

“Va-vague ones,” she muttered between little gasps. “I tho-ought I’d go down and stay with my aunt in Chicago a while.”

“I should think that’d be the best — much the best thing.” Then, because he could think of nothing else to say, he added, “Yes, very much the best thing.”

“What are you doing — here in town?” she inquired, taking in her breath in minute gasps and dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief.

“Oh, I’m here with — with the Rogerses. I’ve been here.”

“Hunting?”

“No, I’ve just been here.”

He did not tell her that he had stayed over on her account. She might think it fresh.

“I see,” she said. She didn’t see.

“I want to know if there’s any possible thing I can do for you, Yanci. Perhaps go downtown for you, or do some errands — anything. Maybe you’d like to bundle up and get a bit of air. I could take you out to drive in your car some night, and no one would see you.”

He clipped his last word short as the inadvertency of this suggestion dawned on him. They stared at each other with horror in their eyes.

“Oh, no, thank you!” she cried. “I really don’t want to drive.”