Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (432 page)

“What’s it all about anyhow?”

Furiously she turned to him.

“I
won’t
tell you! You can shake me, Daddy! You can beat me!”

“For
God’s
sake — what’s this all about? When did I ever beat you?”

“They wanted to this morning because I wouldn’t say what they wanted.”

Jo flung herself into a corner of the big couch and wept into it. He walked around the room, concerned and embarrassed.

“I don’t want to know, Jo. Whatever you do is all right with me. I trust you, Baby, all the way. I’m not even making any inquiries.”

She turned tired eyes up at him.

“You won’t? You promise, word of honor?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve got an idea, a real hunch. Unless — or say till I get the Gehrbohm account, I have lots of time in the afternoon. Suppose I be your private tutor for awhile. I was pretty good once in Latin and Algebra. For the languages we’ll get a reading list from the library.”

She sobbed again deep into the big cushions.

“Oh Baby! Stop that. We’re not defeatists, you and me. Take a bath and then we’ll get up some dinner.”

When she had gone into her room Jason tried to think of something outside himself. Then he remembered what Annie Lee had said in their short quarter hour this morning.

“I can’t understand about the farm — it was all so simple. There was the seasoning — nine tablespoons of salt, then nine of hickory ash, then the pepper and sage. And of course always the tenderloin — “

“Hickory ash?” Jason had exclaimed. “Tenderloin?”

Stirred by his surprise she lifted herself up in bed, so that he had to ease her gently down again. “Don’t tell me Young Seneca isn’t using tenderloin — isn’t putting in the tablespoons of
hic
kory ash?”

 —  — In the living room of the apartment Jason sat down and wrote Young Seneca.

When Jo came downstairs he said, “Take this over to the post office, will you? It’s about the farm.”

After examining the address Jo demanded:

“Father — do you mean seriously you’re going to teach me?”

“Am I? You bet! Teach you all I know.”

“All right.”

But in the grey dusk he was still bent over the ragged text-book.

“Caesar,” he said over the first text. “It’s addressed to the damn Swiss!”

He translated:

“In Switzerland they necked the Gods and the men — “

“
What
, Daddy?”

“Wait now: In Switzerland they necked the men and then they necked the Gods — This is difficult now — Latin didn’t seem like that in
my
day.”

Jason turned to Jo with exasperation. “Don’t they give you sentences to construe?
Helvetii qui nec Deos nec homines verebantur
— That means quiver I think —
magnum dolorem.
That means it all ends up very sad. Why did you ask me to translate it in the first place?”

“I
didn’t
ask you. I knew that part. It means the Helvetians who feared neither Gods nor men came to great grief because they were restrained on all sides by mountains.”

He read again: “
Patiebantur quod ex omnibus partibus,
and that means a rampart of ten feet,” he cried exultantly across the lamplight.

“Yah! You saw that in a footnote.”

“I did not,” he lied.

“Give me your word of honor?”

“Let’s talk about something else.”

“You fancy yourself as a teacher.”

That was the end of the first night’s Latin.

Thumbing over the book Jo found her place and read aloud slowly:

“If the government revenue from taxes increased from one billion dollars in 1927 to five hundred billion dollars in 1929, what was the increased percent?”

“Go on,” said Jason.

“Go on yourself, Daddy. You’re this wonderful mathematician. And try this one!”

“Let me read it myself:

‘If the sum of the reciprocals of two consecutive even numbers is zero. Then the sum of two other consecutive numbers is 11/60. What are the numbers?’“

Jason said, “There’s always for the X an unknown quantity. You have to have some system — haven’t you?”

“Swell system.”

“Got to start somewhere.” He bent over it again: “If the government revenue increased from five billions in 1927 to — “

He was temporarily at the end of his resources.

“Darling,” he said. “In a week I’ll know more about this — “

“Yes, Daddy.”

“Time for you to go to bed.”

There was a pregnant silence between them.

“I know.”

She came over to him and pecked briefly at an old baseball scar on his forehead.

VI

To keep the chronicle going one must skip through the days when Annie Lee’s farm came to life again — when Young Seneca realized that Mr. Davis actually wanted
tenderloin
put into the sausage — the day he recalled that an important appendage was
nine tablespoons of hickory ash.

Orders for the buckets began to increase. From merely paying for itself, the farm began to dribble a trickle of profit.

VII

Some nights Jason used to go to her bedside and sit. Not tonight, though. He picked up in the living room the copy of
Caesar’s Gaellic Wars.

The Swiss, who feared neither Gods nor men, suffered…

“Who am I to be afraid?” Jason thought. He who had led eight Ohio country boys to death in a stable in France and come out of it with only the loss of the tip of his left shoulder!

The Swiss who feared neither Gods nor men suffered
—

He pulled the lamp closer.

The night wore on in a melange of verbs and participles. Toward eleven the phone rang.

“This is Mr. McCutcheon.”

“Oh, yes.”

“There’s a serious injustice been done your daughter.”

It seems that there had been some wild excursion into the boys’ locker-room — during which someone was posted as sentry outside. The sentry had run away but Jo was there trying to warn them at the moment when the monitors appeared.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Davis. There isn’t much we can do in these cases — except offer our sincere apology.”

“I know.”

The phone put on the voice of Mr. Halklite.

Here it was! The Pan-American Textile account.

“Hel
lo
, Mr. Davis! I’m in Philadelphia. We’ve had some correspondence — I’ll be down in your part of the world tomorrow and I thought I’d drop in. Sorry to call so late…”

Breakfast was waiting when, having made a journey to his office and back, Jason went to his bedroom — almost immediately Jo, who had heard him come in, knocked at the door and demanded in alarm:

“What’s the matter?”

“I’m just tired. I’ve been working all night. Say, if you have those girls to lumpshun — “ the words seemed extraordinarily hard and long — “then fix up the room afterwards. Very important. Business meeting.”

“I understand, Daddy.”

Holding to the bed-post he swayed precariously. “Whole future depends on this man. Make it nice for him.”

With no more warning he pitched forward across the bed.

VIII

Unexpectedly at eleven o’clock the colored girl admitted Mr. Halklite. On his tour of inspection Mr. Halklite had become, perforce, less and less kind, though he was kindly by nature. Keenness was his valuable business asset — exercising the quality had temporarily become dull — there was the necessity of weeding out the exhausted and the inefficient. Halklite could tell the dead from the living, and that was half of why he had just been elected a vice-president of Pan-American Textile. Only half, though. The other half was because he was kind.

A little girl came into the room.

“Good morning. Is your father in? I think he expected me.”

“Won’t you come in? Father’s got a cold — he’s lying down.”

In Jason’s bedroom Jo shook and shook the exhausted body without result. She went back into the living room.

“Daddy’ll be getting up presently,” she said. “He’s sorry he wasn’t dressed to meet you.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’re Mr. Davis’ little girl?” Mr. Halklite said.

Jo crossed as if casually to the piano bench and turned back to him with sudden decision.

“Mr. Halklite, father’s had flu, and the doctor doesn’t want him to get up. He’s going to try to.”

“Oh, we can’t let him!”

“The doctor didn’t want him to. But Daddy’s like that. If he says he’ll do something, he does. Daddy needs a woman to take care of him. And I’m so busy at school — “

“Tell him not to get up,” Halklite repeated.

“I don’t even know whether he can.”

“Then tell him it doesn’t matter.”

She went to her father’s room and presently returned.

“He sent you best regards. He was sorry not to see you.”

Her heart was in agony. Keeping that agony out of her expression was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.

“I’m good and sorry,” Mr. Halklite said. “I wanted to talk to him.”

“How old is your father, young lady?”

“I don’t know. I guess he’s about thirty-eight.”

“Well a man can be young at thirty-eight,” he protested. “Isn’t your father still young?”

“Daddy’s young. But he’s serious.” She hesitated.

“Go on,” Halklite said. “Tell me about him. I’ll leave you to your lessons as soon as I finish my cigarette. But I think you ought to stay out of your father’s room while he’s ill.”

“Oh, I do.”

“You’re fond of your daddy?”

“Yes — everybody is.”

“Does he go around much?”

“Not much — Oh, he does though. He goes out to see Mama once a week. And he goes to walk half an hour when I go to bed. He starts out when I start to bed and then I call down to him when I hear him open the door coming in — pour dire bon soir.”

“You speak French?” She regretted that she had mentioned it, but she admitted, “I grew up in France.”

“So did your daddy, didn’t he?”

“Oh no, Daddy’s very American. He can’t even speak French much, really.”

Halklite stood up, made his decision suddenly, perhaps irrationally.

“You tell your father we want to put our account in his hands. Maybe that’ll cheer him up and help him get well. ‘Pan-Am-Tex.’ Can you remember that? He’ll understand.”

IX

It was April again and they walked in the zoo.

“It’s been a hard year, Jo.”

“I know that, Daddy. But look at the peacocks!”

“This is your education, Jo. It’s most of what you’ll ever know about life. You’ll understand later.”

“I know we’ve had bad times, Daddy. Everything’s better again, isn’t it? Look at the peacocks,
mon pere. They
don’t worry.”

“Well, if you insist, let’s sit on the bench and stare at them.”

Jo sat silent for a moment. Then she said:

“We were peacocks once, weren’t we?”

“What?”

“They probably have sorrows and troubles sometimes, when their tails don’t grow out.”

“I guess so. What school do you want to go to next year? You can have your choice.”

“That doesn’t seem to matter any more. Look at the peacock — Look! the one that’s trying to peck outside the cage. I love him — do you?”

Jason said, “After all, considering everything, it wasn’t such a bad year.”

“What?” Jo turned from the cage where she had gone to try, unsuccessfully, to feed the bird a shelled peanut.

“Daddy, let’s stop worrying. I thought we stopped months ago. Mother’s coming home next week. Maybe some day we’ll be three peacocks again.”

Jason came over to the wire.

“I suppose peacocks have their problems.”

“I suppose so. Look, Daddy! I’ve got this one eating the popcorn.”

ON SCHEDULE,

In September, René’s old house seemed pretty fine to him, with its red maples and silver birches and the provident squirrels toiling overtime on the lawn. It was on the outskirts of a university town, a rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 80’s, the county poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again. Few modern families would care to live there, amid the groans of moribund plumbing and without even the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, but René, at first sight of its wide veranda, which opened out into a dilapidated park of five acres, loved it for reminding him of a lost spot of his childhood in Normandy. Watching the squirrels from his window reminded René that it was time to complete certain winter provisions of his own, and laying aside his work, he took a large sheet of paper ruled into oblongs and ran over it once again. Then he went into the hall and called up the front staircase:

“Noël.”

“Yes, daddy.”

“I wish to see you,
cherie
.”

“Well, you told me to put away the soldiers.”

“You can do that later. I want you to go over to the Slocums’ and get Miss Becky Snyder, and then I wish to speak to you both together.”

“Becky’s here, daddy; she’s in the bathtub.”

René started. “In the bath —  — “

The cracks and settlings of the house had created fabulous acoustics, and now another voice, not a child’s, drifted down to him:

“The water runs so slow over at the Slocums’, it takes all day to draw a bath. I didn’t think you’d mind, René.”

“Mind!” he exclaimed vaguely. As if the situation was not already delicate. “Mind!” If Becky took baths here, she might just as well be living here, so far as any casual visitor would conclude. He imagined himself trying to explain to Mrs. Dean-of-the-Faculty McIntosh the very complicated reasons why Becky Snyder was upstairs taking a bath.

At that, he might succeed — he would have blushed to attempt it in France.

His daughter, Noël, came downstairs. She was twelve, and very fair and exquisitely made, like his dead wife; and often in the past he had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child and his anxieties were concentrated upon her education, which, he had determined, was going to be as good as that of any French girl.

“Do you realize that your school starts tomorrow?”