Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (372 page)

“I won’t come back,” said Winfield. “I couldn’t face Mr. Barnes after this. I’m not going home.”

At the suit brought by Irene Daley, all four of them lied loyally for Wister Schofield. They said that before they hit the gasoline pump they had seen Miss Daley grab the wheel. But Miss Daley was in court, with her face, familiar to the tabloids, permanently scarred; and her counsel exhibited a letter canceling her recent moving-picture contract. The students’ case looked bad; so in the intermission, on their lawyer’s advice, they settled for forty thousand dollars. Wister Schofield and Howard Kavenaugh were snapped by a dozen photographers leaving the courtroom, and served up in flaming notoriety next day.

That night, Wister, the three Minneapolis boys, Howard and Beau Lebaume started for home. George Winfield said good-by to them in the Pennsylvania station; and having no home to go to, walked out into New York to start life over.

Of all Barnes’ protégés, Jack Stubbs with his one arm was the favorite. He was the first to achieve fame--when he played on the tennis team at Princeton, the rotogravure section carried pictures showing how he threw the ball from his racket in serving. When he was graduated, Barnes took him into his own office--he was often spoken of as an adopted son. Stubbs, together with Schlach, now a prominent consulting engineer, were the most satisfactory of his experiments, although James Matsko at twenty-seven had just been made a partner in a Wall Street brokerage house. Financially he was the most successful of the six, yet Barnes found himself somewhat repelled by his hard egoism. He wondered, too, if he, Barnes, had really played any part in Matsko’s career--did it after all matter whether Matsko was a figure in metropolitan finance or a big merchant in the Middle West, as he would have undoubtedly become without any assistance at all.

One morning in 1930 he handed Jack Stubbs a letter that led to a balancing up of the book of boys.

“What do you think of this?”

The letter was from Louis Ireland in Paris. About Louis they did not agree, and as Jack read, he prepared once more to intercede in his behalf.

MY DEAR SIR:

After your last communication, made through your bank here and enclosing a check which I hereby acknowledge, I do not feel that I am under any obligation to write you at all. But because the concrete fact of an object’s commercial worth may be able to move you, while you remain utterly insensitive to the value of an abstract idea--because of this I write to tell you that my exhibition was an unqualified success. To bring the matter even nearer to your intellectual level, I may tell you that I sold two pieces--a head of Lallette, the actress, and a bronze animal group--for a total of seven thousand francs ($280.00). Moreover I have commissions which will take me all summer--I enclose a piece about me cut from CAHIERS D’ART, which will show you that whatever your estimate of my abilities and my career, it is by no means unanimous.

This is not to say that I am ungrateful for your well-intentioned attempt to “educate” me. I suppose that Harvard was no worse than any other polite finishing school--the years that I wasted there gave me a sharp and well-documented attitude on American life and institutions. But your suggestions that I come to America and make standardized nymphs for profiteers’ fountains was a little too much--

Stubbs looked up with a smile.

“Well,” Barnes said, “what do you think? Is he crazy--or now that he has sold some statues, does it prove that I’m crazy?”

“Neither one,” laughed Stubbs. “What you objected to in Louis wasn’t his talent. But you never got over that year he tried to enter a monastery and then got arrested in the Sacco-Vanzetti demonstrations, and then ran away with the professor’s wife.”

“He was just forming himself,” said Barnes dryly, “just trying his little wings. God knows what he’s been up to abroad.”

“Well, perhaps he’s formed now,” Stubbs said lightly. He had always liked Louis Ireland--privately he resolved to write and see if he needed money.

“Anyhow, he’s graduated from me,” announced Barnes. “I can’t do any more to help him or hurt him. Suppose we call him a success, though that’s pretty doubtful--let’s see how we stand. I’m going to see Schofield out in Minneapolis next week, and I’d like to balance accounts. To my mind, the successes are you, Otto Schlach, James Matsko,--whatever you and I may think of him as a man,--and let’s assume that Louis Ireland is going to be a great sculptor. That’s four. Winfield’s disappeared. I’ve never had a line from him.”

“Perhaps he’s doing well somewhere.”

“If he were doing well, I think he’d let me know. We’ll have to count him as a failure so far as my experiment goes. Then there’s Gordon Vandervere.”

Both were silent for a moment.

“I can’t make it out about Gordon,” Barnes said. “He’s such a nice fellow, but since he left college, he doesn’t seem to come through. He was younger than the rest of you, and he had the advantage of two years at Andover before he went to college, and at Princeton he knocked them cold, as you say. But he seems to have worn his wings out--for four years now he’s done nothing at all; he can’t hold a job; he can’t get his mind on his work, and he doesn’t seem to care. I’m about through with Gordon.”

At this moment Gordon was announced over the phone.

“He asked for an appointment,” explained Barnes. “I suppose he wants to try something new.”

A personable young man with an easy and attractive manner strolled in to the office.

“Good afternoon, Uncle Ed. Hi there, Jack!” Gordon sat down. “I’m full of news.”

“About what?” asked Barnes.

“About myself.”

“I know. You’ve just been appointed to arrange a merger between J. P. Morgan and the Queensborough Bridge.”

“It’s a merger,” agreed Vandervere, “but those are not the parties to it. I’m engaged to be married.”

Barnes glowered.

“Her name,” continued Vandervere, “is Esther Crosby.”

“Let me congratulate you,” said Barnes ironically. “A relation of H. B. Crosby, I presume.”

“Exactly,” said Vandervere unruffled. “In fact, his only daughter.”

For a moment there was silence in the office. Then Barnes exploded.

“
You’re
going to marry H. B. Crosby’s daughter? Does he know that last month you retired by request from one of his banks?”

“I’m afraid he knows everything about me. He’s been looking me over for four years. You see, Uncle Ed,” he continued cheerfully, “Esther and I got engaged during my last year at Princeton--my roommate brought her down to a house-party, but she switched over to me. Well, quite naturally Mr. Crosby wouldn’t hear of it until I’d proved myself.”

“Proved yourself!” repeated Barnes. “Do you consider that you’ve proved yourself?”

“Well--yes.”

“How?”

“By waiting four years. You see, either Esther or I might have married anybody else in that time, but we didn’t. Instead we sort of wore him away. That’s really why I haven’t been able to get down to anything. Mr. Crosby is a strong personality, and it took a lot of time and energy wearing him away. Sometimes Esther and I didn’t see each other for months, so she couldn’t eat; so then thinking of that I couldn’t eat, so then I couldn’t work--”

“And you mean he’s really given his consent?”

“He gave it last night.”

“Is he going to let you loaf?”

“No. Esther and I are going into the diplomatic service. She feels that the family has passed through the banking phase.” He winked at Stubbs. “I’ll look up Louis Ireland when I get to Paris, and send Uncle Ed a report.”

Suddenly Barnes roared with laughter.

“Well, it’s all in the lottery-box,” he said. “When I picked out you six, I was a long way from guessing--” He turned to Stubbs and demanded: “Shall we put him under
failure
or under
success
?”

“A howling success,” said Stubbs. “Top of the list.”

A fortnight later Barnes was with his old friend Schofield in Minneapolis. He thought of the house with the six boys as he had last seen it--now it seemed to bear scars of them, like the traces that pictures leave on a wall that they have long protected from the mark of time. Since he did not know what had become of Schofield’s sons, he refrained from referring to their conversation of ten years before until he knew whether it was dangerous ground. He was glad of his reticence later in the evening when Schofield spoke of his elder son, Wister.

“Wister never seems to have found himself--and he was such a high-spirited kid! He was the leader of every group he went into; he could always make things go. When he was young, our houses in town and at the lake were always packed with young people. But after he left Yale, he lost interest in things--got sort of scornful about everything. I thought for a while that it was because he drank too much, but he married a nice girl and she took that in hand. Still, he hasn’t any ambition--he talked about country life, so I bought him a silver-fox farm, but that didn’t go; and I sent him to Florida during the boom, but that wasn’t any better. Now he has an interest in a dude-ranch in Montana; but since the depression--”

Barnes saw his opportunity and asked:

“What became of those friends of your sons’ that I met one day?”

“Let’s see--I wonder who you mean. There was Kavenaugh--you know, the flour people--he was here a lot. Let’s see--he eloped with an Eastern girl, and for a few years he and his wife were the leaders of the gay crowd here--they did a lot of drinking and not much else. It seems to me I heard the other day that Howard’s getting a divorce. Then there was the younger brother--he never could get into college. Finally he married a manicurist, and they live here rather quietly. We don’t hear much about them.”

They had had a glamour about them, Barnes remembered; they had been so sure of themselves, individually, as a group; so high-spirited, a frieze of Greek youths, graceful of body, ready for life.

“Then Larry Patt, you might have met him here. A great golfer. He couldn’t stay in college--there didn’t seem to be enough fresh air there for Larry.” And he added defensively: “But he capitalized what he could do--he opened a sporting-goods store and made a good thing of it, I understand. He has a string of three or four.”

“I seem to remember an exceptionally handsome one.”

“Oh--Beau Lebaume. He was in that mess at New Haven too. After that he went to pieces--drink and what-not. His father’s tried everything, and now he won’t have anything more to do with him.” Schofield’s face warmed suddenly; his eyes glowed. “But let me tell you, I’ve got a boy--my Charley! I wouldn’t trade him for the lot of them--he’s coming over presently, and you’ll see. He had a bad start, got into trouble at Hotchkiss--but did he quit? Never. He went back and made a fine record at New Haven, senior society and all that. Then he and some other boys took a trip around the world, and then he came back here and said: ‘All right, Father, I’m ready--when do I start?’ I don’t know what I’d do without Charley. He got married a few months back, a young widow he’d always been in love with; and his mother and I are still missing him, though they come over often--”

Barnes was glad about this, and suddenly he was reconciled at not having any sons in the flesh--one out of two made good, and sometimes better, and sometimes nothing; but just going along getting old by yourself when you’d counted on so much from sons--

“Charley runs the business,” continued Schofield. “That is, he and a young man named Winfield that Wister got me to take on five or six years ago. Wister felt responsible about him, felt he’d got him into this trouble at New Haven--and this boy had no family. He’s done well here.”

Another one of Barnes’ six accounted for! He felt a surge of triumph, but he saw he must keep it to himself; a little later when Schofield asked him if he’d carried out his intention of putting some boys through college, he avoided answering. After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains. The young princes in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there. Back there ten years, Schofield had seen his sons and their friends as samurai, as something shining and glorious and young, perhaps as something he had missed from his own youth. There was later a price to be paid by those boys, all too fulfilled, with the whole balance of their life pulled forward into their youth so that everything afterward would inevitably be anticlimax; these boys brought up as princes with none of the responsibilities of princes! Barnes didn’t know how much their mothers might have had to do with it, what their mothers may have lacked.

But he was glad that his friend Schofield had one true son.

His own experiment--he didn’t regret it, but he wouldn’t have done it again. Probably it proved something, but he wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps that life is constantly renewed, and glamour and beauty make way for it; and he was glad that he was able to feel that the republic could survive the mistakes of a whole generation, pushing the waste aside, sending ahead the vital and the strong. Only it was too bad and very American that there should be all that waste at the top; and he felt that he would not live long enough to see it end, to see great seriousness in the same skin with great opportunity--to see the race achieve itself at last.

THE SWIMMERS

Saturday Evening Post
(19 October 1929)

In the Place Benoït, a suspended mass of gasoline exhaust cooked slowly by the June sun. It was a terrible thing, for, unlike pure heat, it held no promise of rural escape, but suggested only roads choked with the same foul asthma. In the offices of The Promissory Trust Company, Paris Branch, facing the square, an American man of thirty-five inhaled it, and it became the odor of the thing he must presently do. A black horror suddenly descended upon him, and he went up to the washroom, where he stood, trembling a little, just inside the door.

Through the washroom window his eyes fell upon a sign--1000 Chemises. The shirts in question filled the shop window, piled, cravated and stuffed, or else draped with shoddy grace on the show-case floor. 1000 Chemises--Count them! To the left he read Papeterie, Pâtisserie, Solde, Réclame, and Constance Talmadge in Déjeuner de Soleil; and his eye, escaping to the right, met yet more somber announcements: Vêtements Ecclésiastiques, Declaration de Décès, and Pompes Funèbres. Life and Death.