Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (280 page)

“What?”

“I know where you can get a good pick-me-up, gov’nor. Never too late.” The door of the taxi opened on a nightmare. There was a cabaret that broke the closing hours; there was being with strangers he had picked up somewhere; then there were arguments, and trying to cash a check, and suddenly proclaiming over and over that he was William McChesney, the producer, and convincing no one of the fact, not even himself. It seemed important to see Lady Sybil right away and call her to account; but presently nothing was important at all. He was in a taxicab whose driver had just shaken him awake in front of his own home.

The telephone was ringing as he went in, but he walked stonily past the maid and only heard her voice when his foot was on the stair.

“Mr. McChesney, it’s the hospital calling again. Mrs. McChesney’s there and they’ve been phoning every hour.”

Still in a daze, he held the receiver up to his ear.

“We’re calling from the Midland Hospital, for your wife. She was delivered of a still-born child at nine this morning.”

“Wait a minute.” His voice was dry and cracking. “I don’t understand.”

After a while he understood that Emmy’s child was dead and she wanted him. His knees sagged groggily as he walked down the street, looking for a taxi.

The room was dark; Emmy looked up and saw him from a rumpled bed.

“It’s you!” she cried. “I thought you were dead! Where did you go?”

He threw himself down on his knees beside the bed, but she turned away.

“Oh, you smell awful,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

But she kept her hand in his hair, and he knelt there motionless for a long time.

“I’m done with you,” she muttered, “but it was awful when I thought you were dead. Everybody’s dead. I wish I was dead.”

A curtain parted with the wind, and as he rose to arrange it, she saw him in the full morning light, pale and terrible, with rumpled clothes and bruises on his face. This time she hated him instead of those who had hurt him. She could feel him slipping out of her heart, feel the space he left, and all at once he was gone, and she could even forgive him and be sorry for him. All this in a minute.

She had fallen down at the door of the hospital, trying to get out of the taxicab alone.

IV

When Emmy was well, physically and mentally, her incessant idea was to learn to dance; the old dream inculcated by Miss Georgia Berriman Campbell of South Carolina persisted as a bright avenue leading back to first youth and days of hope in New York. To her, dancing meant that elaborate blend of tortuous attitudes and formal pirouettes that evolved out of Italy several hundred years ago and reached its apogee in Russia at the beginning of this century. She wanted to use herself on something she could believe in, and it seemed to her that the dance was woman’s interpretation of music; instead of strong fingers, one had limbs with which to render Tschaikowsky and Stravinksi; and feet could be as eloquent in Chopiniana as voices in “The Ring.” At the bottom, it was something sandwiched in between the acrobats and the trained seals; at the top it was Pavlova and art.

Once they were settled in an apartment back in New York, she plunged into her work like a girl of sixteen--four hours a day at bar exercises, attitudes,
sauts,
arabesques and pirouettes. It became the realest part of her life, and her only worry was whether or not she was too old. At twenty-six she had ten years to make up, but she was a natural dancer with a fine body--and that lovely face.

Bill encouraged it; when she was ready he was going to build the first real American ballet around her. There were even times when he envied her her absorption; for affairs in his own line were more difficult since they had come home. For one thing, he had made many enemies in those early days of self-confidence; there were exaggerated stories of his drinking and of his being hard on actors and difficult to work with.

It was against him that he had always been unable to save money and must beg a backing for each play. Then, too, in a curious way, he was intelligent, as he was brave enough to prove in several uncommercial ventures, but he had no Theatre Guild behind him, and what money he lost was charged against him.

There were successes, too, but he worked harder for them, or it seemed so, for he had begun to pay a price for his irregular life. He always intended to take a rest or give up his incessant cigarettes, but there was so much competition now--new men coming up, with new reputations for infallibility--and besides, he wasn’t used to regularity. He liked to do his work in those great spurts, inspired by black coffee, that seem so inevitable in show business, but which took so much out of a man after thirty. He had come to lean, in a way, on Emmy’s fine health and vitality. They were always together, and if he felt a vague dissatisfaction that he had grown to need her more than she needed him, there was always the hope that things would break better for him next month, next season.

Coming home from ballet school one November evening, Emmy swung her little gray bag, pulled her hat far down over her still damp hair, and gave herself up to pleasant speculation. For a month she had been aware of people who had come to the studio especially to watch her--she was ready to dance. Once she had worked just as hard and for as long a time on something else--her relations with Bill--only to reach a climax of misery and despair, but here there was nothing to fail her except herself. Yet even now she felt a little rash in thinking: “Now it’s come. I’m going to be happy.”

She hurried, for something had come up today that she must talk over with Bill.

Finding him in the living room, she called him to come back while she dressed. She began to talk without looking around:

“Listen what happened!” Her voice was loud, to compete with the water running in the tub. “Paul Makova wants me to dance with him at the Metropolitan this season; only it’s not sure, so it’s a secret--even I’m not supposed to know.”

“That’s great.”

“The only thing is whether it wouldn’t be better for me to make a début abroad? Anyhow Donilof says I’m ready to appear. What do you think?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“I’ve got something on my mind. I’ll tell you about it later. Go on.”

“That’s all, dear. If you still feel like going to Germany for a month, like you said, Donilof would arrange a début for me in Berlin, but I’d rather open here and dance with Paul Makova. Just imagine--” She broke off, feeling suddenly through the thick skin of her elation how abstracted he was. “Tell me what you’ve got on your mind.”

“I went to Doctor Kearns this afternoon.”

“What did he say?” Her mind was still singing with her own happiness. Bill’s intermittent attacks of hypochondria had long ceased to worry her.

“I told him about that blood this morning, and he said what he said last year--it was probably a little broken vein in my throat. But since I’d been coughing and was worried, perhaps it was safer to take an X-ray and clear the matter up. Well, we cleared it up all right. My left lung is practically gone.”

“Bill!”

“Luckily there are no spots on the other.”

She waited, horribly afraid.

“It’s come at a bad time for me,” he went on steadily, “but it’s got to be faced. He thinks I ought to go to the Adirondacks or to Denver for the winter, and his idea is Denver. That way it’ll probably clear up in five or six months.”

“Of course we’ll have to--” she stopped suddenly.

“I wouldn’t expect you to go--especially if you have this opportunity.”

“Of course I’ll go,” she said quickly. “Your health comes first. We’ve always gone everywhere together.”

“Oh, no.”

“Why, of course.” She made her voice strong and decisive. “We’ve always been together. I couldn’t stay here without you. When do you have to go?”

“As soon as possible. I went in to see Brancusi to find out if he wanted to take over the Richmond piece, but he didn’t seem enthusiastic.” His face hardened. “Of course there won’t be anything else for the present, but I’ll have enough, with what’s owing--”

“Oh, if I was only making some money!” Emmy cried. “You work so hard, and here I’ve been spending two hundred dollars a week for just my dancing lessons alone--more than I’ll be able to earn for years.”

“Of course in six months I’ll be as well as ever--he says.”

“Sure, dearest; we’ll get you well. We’ll start as soon as we can.”

She put an arm around him and kissed his cheek.

“I’m just an old parasite,” she said. “I should have known my darling wasn’t well.”

He reached automatically for a cigarette, and then stopped.

“I forgot--I’ve got to start cutting down smoking.” He rose to the occasion suddenly: “No, baby, I’ve decided to go alone. You’d go crazy with boredom out there, and I’d just be thinking I was keeping you away from your dancing.”

“Don’t think about that. The thing is to get you well.”

They discussed the matter hour after hour for the next week, each of them saying everything except the truth--that he wanted her to go with him and that she wanted passionately to stay in New York. She talked it over guardedly with Donilof, her ballet master, and found that he thought any postponement would be a terrible mistake. Seeing other girls in the ballet school making plans for the winter, she wanted to die rather than go, and Bill saw all the involuntary indications of her misery. For a while they talked of compromising on the Adirondacks, whither she would commute by aeroplane for the week-ends, but he was running a little fever now and he was definitely ordered West.

Bill settled it all one gloomy Sunday night, with that rough, generous justice that had first made her admire him, that made him rather tragic in his adversity, as he had always been bearable in his overweening success:

“It’s just up to me, baby. I got into this mess because I didn’t have any self-control--you seem to have all of that in this family--and now it’s only me that can get me out. You’ve worked hard at your stuff for three years and you deserve your chance--and if you came out there now you’d have it on me the rest of my life.” He grinned. “And I couldn’t stand that. Besides, it wouldn’t be good for the kid.”

Eventually she gave in, ashamed of herself, miserable--and glad. For the world of her work, where she existed without Bill, was bigger to her now than the world in which they existed together. There was more room to be glad in one than to be sorry in the other.

Two days later, with his ticket bought for that afternoon at five, they passed the last hours together, talking of everything hopeful. She protested still, and sincerely; had he weakened for a moment she would have gone. But the shock had done something to him, and he showed more character under it than he had for years. Perhaps it would be good for him to work it out alone.

“In the spring!” they said.

Then in the station with little Billy, and Bill saying: “I hate these graveside partings. You leave me here. I’ve got to make a phone call from the train before it goes.”

They had never spent more than a night apart in six years, save when Emmy was in the hospital; save for the time in England they had a good record of faithfulness and of tenderness toward each other, even though she had been alarmed and often unhappy at this insecure bravado from the first. After he went through the gate alone, Emmy was glad he had a phone call to make and tried to picture him making it.

She was a good woman; she had loved him with all her heart. When she went out into Thirty-third Street, it was just as dead as dead for a while, and the apartment he paid for would be empty of him, and she was here, about to do something that would make her happy.

She stopped after a few blocks, thinking: “Why, this is terrible--what I’m doing! I’m letting him down like the worst person I ever heard of. I’m leaving him flat and going off to dinner with Donilof and Paul Makova, whom I like for being beautiful and for having the same color eyes and hair. Bill’s on the train alone.”

She swung little Billy around suddenly as if to go back to the station. She could see him sitting in the train, with his face so pale and tired, and no Emmy.

“I can’t let him down,” she cried to herself as wave after wave of sentiment washed over her. But only sentiment--hadn’t he let her down--hadn’t he done what he wanted in London?

“Oh, poor Bill!”

She stood irresolute, realizing for one last honest moment how quickly she would forget this and find excuses for what she was doing. She had to think hard of London, and her conscience cleared. But with Bill all alone in the train it seemed terrible to think that way. Even now she could turn and go back to the station and tell him that she was coming, but still she waited, with life very strong in her, fighting for her. The sidewalk was narrow where she stood; presently a great wave of people, pouring out of the theater, came flooding along it, and she and little Billy were swept along with the crowd.

In the train, Bill telephoned up to the last minute, postponed going back to his stateroom, because he knew it was almost certain that he would not find her there. After the train started he went back and, of course, there was nothing but his bags in the rack and some magazines on the seat.

He knew then that he had lost her. He saw the set-up without any illusions--this Paul Makova, and months of proximity, and loneliness--afterward nothing would ever be the same. When he had thought about it all a long time, reading
Variety
and
Zit’s
in between, it began to seem, each time he came back to it, as if Emmy somehow were dead.

“She was a fine girl--one of the best. She had character.” He realized perfectly that he had brought all this on himself and that there was some law of compensation involved. He saw, too, that by going away he had again become as good as she was; it was all evened up at last.

He felt beyond everything, even beyond his grief, an almost comfortable sensation of being in the hands of something bigger than himself; and grown a little tired and unconfident--two qualities he could never for a moment tolerate--it did not seem so terrible if he were going West for a definite finish. He was sure that Emmy would come at the end, no matter what she was doing or how good an engagement she had.