Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (361 page)

Nevertheless, he recalled the emptiness of many grander mansions built in more spectacular fashions--empty to him, at any rate, since he had first seen the Gunther place three months before. Something humanly valuable would vanish with the break-up of this family. The house itself, designed for reading long Victorian novels around an open fire of the evening, didn’t even belong to an architectural period worthy of restoration.

Lew circled an outer drive and stood quiet in the shadow of a rosebush as a pair of figures strolled down from the house; by their voices he recognized Jean and Allen Parks.

“Me, I’m going to New York,” Jean said, “whether they let me or not. . . . No, not now, you nut. I’m not in that mood.”

“Then what mood are you in?”

“Not in any mood. I’m only envious of Amanda because she’s hooked this M’sieur, and now she’ll go to Long Island and live in a house instead of a mouse trap. Oh, Jake, this business of being simple and swell--”

They passed out of hearing. It was between dances, and Lew saw the colors of frocks and the quick white of shirt fronts in the window-panes as the guests flowed onto the porch. He looked up at the second floor as a light went on there--he had a conception of the second floor as walled with crowded photographs; there must be bags full of old materials, and trunks with costumes and dress-making forms, and old dolls’ houses, and an overflow, everywhere along the vacant walls, of books for all generations--many childhoods side by side drifting into every corner.

Another couple came down the walk from the house, and feeling that inadvertently he had taken up too strategic a position, Lew moved away; but not before he had identified the pair as Amanda and her man from New York.

“What would you think if I told you I had another proposal tonight?”

“. . . be surprised at all.”

“A very worthy young man. Saved my life. . . . Why weren’t you there on that occasion, Bubbles? You’d have done it on a grand scale, I’m sure.”

Standing square in front of the house, Lew looked at it more searchingly. He felt a kinship with it--not precisely that, for the house’s usefulness was almost over and his was just beginning; rather, the sense of superior unity that the thoughtful young feel for the old, sense of the grandparent. More than only a house. He would like to be that much used up himself before being thrown out on the ash heap at the end. And then, because he wanted to do some courteous service to it while he could, if only to dance with the garrulous little sister, he pulled a brash pocket comb through his hair and went inside.

II

The man with the smiling scar approached Lew once more.

“This is probably,” he announced, “the biggest party ever given in New York.”

“I even heard you the first time you told me,” agreed Lew cheerfully.

“But, on the other hand,” qualified the man, “I thought the same thing at a party two years ago, in 1927. Probably they’ll go on getting bigger and bigger. You play polo, don’t you?”

“Only in the back yard,” Lewis assured him. “I said I’d like to play. I’m a serious business man.”

“Somebody told me you were the polo star.” The man was somewhat disappointed. “I’m a writer myself. A humani--a humanitarian. I’ve been trying to help out a girl over there in that room where the champagne is. She’s a lady. And yet, by golly, she’s the only one in the room that can’t take care of herself.”

“Never try to take care of anybody,” Lew advised him. “They hate you for it.”

But although the apartment, or rather the string of apartments and penthouses pressed into service for the affair, represented the best resources of the New York sky line, it was only limited metropolitan space at that, and moving among the swirls of dancers, thinned with dawn, Lew found himself finally in the chamber that the man had spoken of. For a moment he did not recognize the girl who had assumed the role of entertaining the glassy-eyed citizenry, chosen by natural selection to personify dissolution; then, as she issued a blanket invitation to a squad of Gaiety beauties to come south and recuperate on her Maryland estates, he recognized Jean Gunther.

She was the dark Gunther--dark and shining and driven. Lew, living in New York now, had seen none of the family since Amanda’s marriage four years ago. Driving her home a quarter of an hour later, he extracted what news he could; and then left her in the dawn at the door of her apartment, mussed and awry, yet still proud, and tottering with absurd formality as she thanked him and said good night.

He called next afternoon and took her to tea in Central Park.

“I am,” she informed him, “the child of the century. Other people claim to be the child of the century, but I’m actually the child of the century. And I’m having the time of my life at it.”

Thinking back to another period--of young men on the tennis courts and hot buns in the afternoon, and of wistaria and ivy climbing along the ornate railings of a veranda--Lew became as moral as it was possible to be in that well-remembered year of 1929.

“What are you getting out of it? Why don’t you invest in some reliable man--just a sort of background?”

“Men are good to invest money for you,” she dodged neatly. “Last year one darling spun out my allowance so it lasted ten months instead of three.”

“But how about marrying some candidate?”

“I haven’t got any love,” she said. “Actually, I know four--five--I know six millionaires I could maybe marry. This little girl from Carroll County. It’s just too many. Now, if somebody that had everything came along--”

She looked at Lew appraisingly. “You’ve improved, for example.”

“I should say I have,” admitted Lew, laughing. “I even go to first nights. But the most beautiful thing about me is I remember my old friends, and among them are the lovely Gunther girls of Carroll County.”

“You’re very nice,” she said. “Were you terribly in love with Amanda?”

“I thought so, anyhow.”

“I saw her last week. She’s super-Park Avenue and very busy having Park Avenue babies. She considers me rather disreputable and tells her friends about our magnificent plantation in the old South.”

“Do you ever go down to Maryland?”

“Do I though? I’m going Sunday night, and spend two months there saving enough money to come back on. When mother died”--she paused--”I suppose you knew mother died--I came into a little cash, and I’ve still got it, but it has to be stretched, see?”--she pulled her napkin cornerwise--”by tactful investing. I think the next step is a quiet summer on the farm.”

Lew took her to the theater the next night, oddly excited by the encounter. The wild flush of the times lay upon her; he was conscious of her physical pulse going at some abnormal rate, but most of the young women he knew were being hectic, save the ones caught up tight in domesticity.

He had no criticism to make--behind that lay the fact that he would not have dared to criticize her. Having climbed from a nether rung of the ladder, he had perforce based his standards on what he could see from where he was at the moment. Far be it from him to tell Jean Gunther how to order her life.

Getting off the train in Baltimore three weeks later, he stepped into the peculiar heat that usually preceded an electric storm. He passed up the regular taxis and hired a limousine for the long ride out to Carroll County, and as he drove through rich foliage, moribund in midsummer, between the white fences that lined the rolling road, many years fell away and he was again the young man, starved for a home, who had first seen the Gunther house four years ago. Since then he had occupied a twelve-room apartment in New York, rented a summer mansion on Long Island, but his spirit, warped by loneliness and grown gypsy with change, turned back persistently to this house.

Inevitably it was smaller than he had expected, a small, big house, roomy rather than spacious. There was a rather intangible neglect about it--the color of the house had never been anything but a brown-green relict of the sun; Lew had never known the stable to lean otherwise than as the Tower of Pisa, nor the garden to grow any other way than plebeian and wild.

Jean was on the porch--not, as she had prophesied, in the role of gingham queen or rural equestrienne, but very Rue-de-la-Paix against the dun cushions of the swinging settee. There was the stout, colored butler whom Lew remembered and who pretended, with racial guile, to remember Lew delightedly. He took the bag to Amanda’s old room, and Lew stared around it a little before he went downstairs. Jean and Bess were waiting over a cocktail on the porch.

It struck him that Bess had made a leaping change out of childhood into something that was not quite youth. About her beauty there was a detachment, almost an impatience, as though she had not asked for the gift and considered it rather a burden; to a young man, the gravity of her face might have seemed formidable.

“How is your father?” Lew asked.

“He won’t be down tonight,” Bess answered. “He’s not well. He’s over seventy, you know. People tire him. When we have guests, he has dinner upstairs.”

“It would be better if he ate upstairs all the time,” Jean remarked, pouring the cocktails.

“No, it wouldn’t,” Bess contradicted her. “The doctors said it wouldn’t. There’s no question about that.”

Jean turned in a rush to Lew. “For over a year Bess has hardly left this house. We could--”

“What junk!” her sister said impatiently. “I ride every morning.”

“--we could get a nurse who would do just as well.”

Dinner was formal, with candles on the table and the two young women in evening dresses. Lew saw that much was missing--the feeling that the house was bursting with activity, with expanding life--all this had gone. It was difficult for the diminished clan to do much more than inhabit the house. There was not a moving up into vacated places; there was simply an anachronistic staying on between a vanishing past and an incalculable future.

Midway through dinner, Lew lifted his head at a pause in the conversation, but what he had confused with a mutter of thunder was a long groan from the floor above, followed by a measured speech, whose words were interrupted by the quick clatter of Bess’ chair.

“You know what I ordered. Just so long as I am the head of--”

“It’s father.” Momentarily Jean looked at Lew as if she thought the situation was faintly humorous, but at his concerned face, she continued seriously, “You might as well know. It’s senile dementia. Not dangerous. Sometimes he’s absolutely himself. But it’s hard on Bess.”

Bess did not come down again; after dinner, Lew and Jean went into the garden, splattered with faint drops before the approaching rain. Through the vivid green twilight Lew followed her long dress, spotted with bright red roses--it was the first of that fashion he had ever seen; in the tense hush he had an illusion of intimacy with her, as though they shared the secrets of many years and, when she caught at his arm suddenly at a rumble of thunder, he drew her around slowly with his other arm and kissed her shaped, proud mouth.

“Well, at least you’ve kissed one Gunther girl,” Jean said lightly. “How was it? And don’t you think you’re taking advantage of us, being unprotected out here in the country?”

He looked at her to see if she were joking, and with a swift laugh she seized his arm again. It was raining in earnest, and they fled toward the house--to find Bess on her knees in the library, setting light to an open fire.

“Father’s all right,” she assured them. “I don’t like to give him the medicine till the last minute. He’s worrying about some man that lent him twenty dollars in 1892.” She lingered, conscious of being a third party, and yet impelled to play her mother’s role and impart an initial solidarity before she retired. The storm broke, shrieking in white at the windows, and Bess took the opportunity to fly to the windows upstairs, calling down after a moment:

“The telephone’s trying to ring. Do you think it’s safe to answer it?”

“Perfectly,” Jean called back, “or else they wouldn’t ring.” She came close to Lewis in the center of the room, away from the white, quivering windows.

“It’s strange having you here right now. I don’t mind saying I’m glad you’re here. But if you weren’t, I suppose we’d get along just as well.”

“Shall I help Bess close the windows?” Lew asked.

Simultaneously, Bess called downstairs:

“Nobody seemed to be on the phone, and I don’t like holding it.”

A ripping crash of thunder shook the house and Jean moved into Lew’s arm, breaking away as Bess came running down the stairs with a yelp of dismay.

“The lights are out up there,” she said. “I never used to mind storms when I was little. Father used to make us sit on the porch sometimes, remember?”

There was a dazzle of light around all the windows of the first floor, reflecting itself back and forth in mirrors, so that every room was pervaded with a white glare; there followed a sound as of a million matches struck at once, so loud and terrible that the thunder rolling down seemed secondary; then a splintering noise separated itself out, and Bess’ voice:

“That struck!”

Once again came the sickening lightning, and through a rolling pandemonium of sound they groped from window to window till Jean cried: “It’s William’s room! There’s a tree on it!”

In a moment, Lew had flung wide the kitchen door and saw, in the next glare, what had happened: The great tree, in falling, had divided the lean-to from the house proper.

“Is William there?” he demanded.

“Probably. He should be.”

Gathering up his courage, Lew dashed across the twenty feet of new marsh, and with a waffle iron smashed in the nearest window. Inundated with sheet rain and thunder, he yet realized that the storm had moved off from overhead, and his voice was strong as he called: “William! You all right?”

No answer.

“William!”

He paused and there came a quiet answer:

“Who dere?”

“You all right?”

“I wanna know who dere.”

“The tree fell on you. Are you hurt?”

There was a sudden peal of laughter from the shack as William emerged mentally from dark and atavistic suspicions of his own. Again and again the pealing laughter rang out.