Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (376 page)

‘You always were a lovely person. But I’m a little shocked to find you as beautiful as you are.’

It worked. The immediate recognition of their changed state, the bold compliment, made them interesting strangers instead of fumbling childhood friends.

‘Have a highball?’ she asked. ‘No? Please don’t think I’ve become a secret drinker, but this was a blue night. I expected my husband but he wired he’d be two days longer. He’s very nice, Donald, and very attractive. Rather your type and colouring.’ She hesitated, ‘--and I think he’s interested in someone in New York--and I don’t know.’

‘After seeing you it sounds impossible,’ he assured her. ‘I was married for six years, and there was a time I tortured myself that way. Then one day I just put jealousy out of my life forever. After my wife died I was very glad of that. It left a very rich memory--nothing marred or spoiled or hard to think over.’

She looked at him attentively, then sympathetically as he spoke.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she said. And after a proper moment,’ You’ve changed a lot. Turn your head. I remember father saying, “That boy has a brain.”‘

‘You probably argued against it.’

‘I was impressed. Up to then I thought everybody had a brain. That’s why it sticks in my mind.’

‘What else sticks in your mind?’ he asked smiling.

Suddenly Nancy got up and walked quickly a little away.

‘Ah, now,’ she reproached him. ‘That isn’t fair! I suppose I was a naughty girl.’

‘You were not,’ he said stoutly. ‘And I
will
have a drink now.’

As she poured it, her face still turned from him, he continued:

‘Do you think you were the only little girl who was ever kissed?’

‘Do you like the subject?’ she demanded. Her momentary irritation melted and she said: ‘What the hell! We
did
have fun. Like in the song.’

‘On the sleigh ride.’

‘Yes--and somebody’s picnic--Trudy James’s. And at Frontenac that--those summers.’

It was the sleigh ride he remembered most and kissing her cool cheeks in the straw in one corner while she laughed up at the cold white stars. The couple next to them had their backs turned and he kissed her little neck and her ears and never her lips.

‘And the Macks’ party where they played post office and I couldn’t go because I had the mumps,’ he said.

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘Oh, you were there. And you were kissed and I was crazy with jealousy like I never have been since.’

‘Funny I don’t remember. Maybe I wanted to forget.’

‘But why?’ he asked in amusement. ‘We were two perfectly innocent kids. Nancy, whenever I talked to my wife about the past, I told her you were the girl I loved almost as much as I loved her. But I think I really loved you just as much. When we moved out of town I carried you like a cannon ball in my insides.’

‘Were you
that
much--stirred up?’

‘My God, yes! I--’ He suddenly realized that they were standing just two feet from each other, that he was talking as if he loved her in the present, that she was looking up at him with her lips half-parted and a clouded look in her eyes.

‘Go on,’ she said, ‘I’m ashamed to say--I like it. I didn’t know you were so upset
then.
I thought it was
me
who was upset.’

‘You!’ he exclaimed. ‘Don’t you remember throwing me over at the drugstore.’ He laughed. ‘You stuck out your tongue at me.’

‘I don’t remember at all. It seemed to me you did the throwing over.’ Her hand fell lightly, almost consolingly on his arm. ‘I’ve got a photograph book upstairs I haven’t looked at for years. I’ll dig it out.’

Donald sat for five minutes with two thoughts--first the hopeless impossibility of reconciling what different people remembered about the same event--and secondly that in a frightening way Nancy moved him as a woman as she had moved him as a child. Half an hour had developed an emotion that he had not known since the death of his wife--that he had never hoped to know again.

Side by side on a couch they opened the book between them. Nancy looked at him, smiling and very happy.

‘Oh, this is
such
fun,’ she said. ‘Such fun that you’re so nice, that you remember me so--beautifully. Let me tell you--I wish I’d known it then! After you’d gone I hated you.’

‘What a pity,’ he said gently.

‘But not now,’ she reassured him, and then impulsively, ‘Kiss and make up--’

‘. . . that isn’t being a good wife,’ she said after a minute. ‘I really don’t think I’ve kissed two men since I was married.’

He was excited--but most of all confused. Had he kissed Nancy? or a memory? or this lovely trembly stranger who looked away from him quickly and turned a page of the book?

‘Wait!’ he said. ‘I don’t think I could
see
a picture for a few seconds.’

‘We won’t do it again. I don’t feel so very calm myself.’

Donald said one of those trivial things that cover so much ground.

‘Wouldn’t it be awful if we fell in love again?’

‘Stop it!’ She laughed, but very breathlessly. ‘It’s all over. It was a moment. A moment I’ll have to forget.’

‘Don’t tell your husband.’

‘Why not? Usually I tell him everything.’

‘It’ll hurt him. Don’t ever tell a man such things.’

‘All right I won’t.’

‘Kiss me once more,’ he said inconsistently, but Nancy had turned a page and was pointing eagerly at a picture.

‘Here’s you,’ she cried. ‘Right away!’

He looked. It was a little boy in shorts standing on a pier with a sailboat in the background.

‘I remember--’ she laughed triumphantly, ‘--the very day it was taken. Kitty took it and I stole it from her.’

For a moment Donald failed to recognize himself in the photo--then, bending closer--he failed utterly to recognize himself.

‘That’s not me,’ he said.

‘Oh yes. It was at Frontenac--the summer we--we used to go to the cave.’

‘What cave? I was only three days in Frontenac.’ Again he strained his eyes at the slightly yellowed picture. ‘And that isn’t me. That’s Donald Bowers. We did look rather alike.’

Now she was staring at him--leaning back, seeming to lift away from him.

‘But you’re Donald Bowers!’ she exclaimed; her voice rose a little. ‘No, you’re not. You’re Donald
Plant
.’

‘I told you on the phone.’

She was on her feet--her face faintly horrified.

‘Plant! Bowers! I must be crazy. Or it was that drink? I was mixed up a little when I first saw you. Look here! What have I told you?’

He tried for a monkish calm as he turned a page of the book.

‘Nothing at all,’ he said. Pictures that did not include him formed and re-formed before his eyes--Frontenac--a cave--Donald Bowers--’You threw
me
over!’

Nancy spoke from the other side of the room.

‘You’ll never tell this story,’ she said. ‘Stories have a way of getting around.’

‘There isn’t any story,’ he hesitated. But he thought: So she was a bad little girl.

And now suddenly he was filled with wild raging jealousy of little Donald Bowers--he who had banished jealousy from his life forever. In the five steps he took across the room he crushed out twenty years and the existence of Walter Gifford with his stride.

‘Kiss me again, Nancy,’ he said, sinking to one knee beside her chair, putting his hand upon her shoulder. But Nancy strained away.

‘You said you had to catch a plane.’

‘It’s nothing. I can miss it. It’s of no importance.’

‘Please go,’ she said in a cool voice. ‘And please try to imagine how I feel.’

‘But you act as if you don’t remember me,’ he cried, ‘--as if you don’t remember Donald
Plant
!’

‘I do. I remember you too . . . But it was all so long ago.’ Her voice grew hard again. ‘The taxi number is Crestwood 8484.’

On his way to the airport Donald shook his head from side to side. He was completely himself now but he could not digest the experience. Only as the plane roared up into the dark sky and its passengers became a different entity from the corporate world below did he draw a parallel from the fact of its flight. For five blinding minutes he had lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He had been a boy of twelve and a man of thirty-two, indissolubly and helplessly commingled.

Donald had lost a good deal, too, in those hours between the planes--but since the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things, that part of the experience probably didn’t matter.

WHAT A HANDSOME PAIR!

Saturday Evening Post
(27 August 1932)

At four o’clock on a November afternoon in 1902, Teddy Van Beck got out of a hansom cab in front of a brownstone house on Murray Hill. He was a tall, round-shouldered young man with a beaked nose and soft brown eyes in a sensitive face. In his veins quarreled the blood of colonial governors and celebrated robber barons; in him the synthesis had produced, for that time and place, something different and something new.

His cousin, Helen Van Beck, waited in the drawing-room. Her eyes were red from weeping, but she was young enough for it not to detract from her glossy beauty--a beauty that had reached the point where it seemed to contain in itself the secret of its own growth, as if it would go on increasing forever. She was nineteen and, contrary to the evidence, she was extremely happy.

Teddy put his arm around her and kissed her cheek, and found it changing into her ear as she turned her face away. He held her for a moment, his own enthusiasm chilling; then he said:

“You don’t seem very glad to see me.”

Helen had a premonition that this was going to be one of the memorable scenes of her life, and with unconscious cruelty she set about extracting from it its full dramatic value. She sat in a corner of the couch, facing an easy-chair.

“Sit there,” she commanded, in what was then admired as a “regal manner,” and then, as Teddy straddled the piano stool: “No, don’t sit there. I can’t talk to you if you’re going to revolve around.”

“Sit on my lap,” he suggested.

“No.”

Playing a one-handed flourish on the piano, he said, “I can listen better here.”

Helen gave up hopes of beginning on the sad and quiet note.

“This is a serious matter, Teddy. Don’t think I’ve decided it without a lot of consideration. I’ve got to ask you--to ask you to release me from our understanding.”

“What?” Teddy’s face paled with shock and dismay.

“I’ll have to tell you from the beginning. I’ve realized for a long time that we have nothing in common. You’re interested in your music, and I can’t even play chopsticks.” Her voice was weary as if with suffering; her small teeth tugged at her lower lip.

“What of it?” he demanded, relieved. “I’m musician enough for both. You wouldn’t have to understand banking to marry a banker, would you?”

“This is different,” Helen answered. “What would we do together? One important thing is that you don’t like riding; you told me you were afraid of horses.”

“Of course I’m afraid of horses,” he said, and added reminiscently: “They try to bite me.”

“It makes it so--”

“I’ve never met a horse--socially, that is--who didn’t try to bite me. They used to do it when I put the bridle on; then, when I gave up putting the bridle on, they began reaching their heads around trying to get at my calves.”

The eyes of her father, who had given her a Shetland at three, glistened, cold and hard, from her own.

“You don’t even like the people I like, let alone the horses,” she said.

“I can stand them. I’ve stood them all my life.”

“Well, it would be a silly way to start a marriage. I don’t see any grounds for mutual--mutual--”

“Riding?”

“Oh, not that.” Helen hesitated, and then said in an unconvinced tone, “Probably I’m not clever enough for you.”

“Don’t talk such stuff!” He demanded some truth: “Who’s the man?”

It took her a moment to collect herself. She had always resented Teddy’s tendency to treat women with less ceremony than was the custom of the day. Often he was an unfamiliar, almost frightening young man.

“There is someone,” she admitted. “It’s someone I’ve always known slightly, but about a month ago, when I went to Southampton, I was--thrown with him.”

“Thrown from a horse?”

“Please, Teddy,” she protested gravely. “I’d been getting more unhappy about you and me, and whenever I was with him everything seemed all right.” A note of exaltation that she would not conceal came into Helen’s voice. She rose and crossed the room, her straight, slim legs outlined by the shadows of her dress. “We rode and swam and played tennis together--did the things we both liked to do.”

He stared into the vacant space she had created for him. “Is that all that drew you to this fellow?”

“No, it was more than that. He was thrilling to me like nobody ever has been.” She laughed. “I think what really started me thinking about it was one day we came in from riding and everybody said aloud what a nice pair we made.”

“Did you kiss him?”

She hesitated. “Yes, once.”

He got up from the piano stool. “I feel as if I had a cannon ball in my stomach,” he exclaimed.

The butler announced Mr. Stuart Oldhorne.

“Is he the man?” Teddy demanded tensely.

She was suddenly upset and confused. “He should have come later. Would you rather go without meeting him?”

But Stuart Oldhorne, made confident by his new sense of proprietorship, had followed the butler.

The two men regarded each other with a curious impotence of expression; there can be no communication between men in that position, for their relation is indirect and consists in how much each of them has possessed or will possess of the woman in question, so that their emotions pass through her divided self as through a bad telephone connection.

Stuart Oldhorne sat beside Helen, his polite eyes never leaving Teddy. He had the same glowing physical power as she. He had been a star athlete at Yale and a Rough Rider in Cuba, and was the best young horseman on Long Island. Women loved him not only for his points but for a real sweetness of temper.