“Now please,” she said hastily, “I want you to give me your calm attention for a minute. Will you?”
“Do you expect me to get up and walk away?”
“Did Dr. Vincintelli at any time tell you how the patients were dressed?”
“Why, yes,” he said wonderingly. “He said you all wore white to remind you that your best nurse is yourself.”
“And the doctors and nurses?”
“He said they just dressed like ordinary people so that the patients wouldn’t have the sense of being in a hospital. What of it?”
Every illogical remark he had made was explained—he had taken the nurses and doctors for patients, the patients for the staff. She saw him shiver inside the wet mummy case.
“Isn’t it true?” he demanded. “What is true in this crazy place? Are all the doctors crazy or all the patients sane—or what?”
“I think,” said Kay thoughtfully, “that one of the doctors is mad.”
“How about me? Am I sane?”
Before she could answer she turned at a sound behind her—Dr. Vincintelli stood in the open door.
“Miss Shafer.” His voice was low and intense. His eyes were fixed on hers. “Miss Shafer, come here to me.”
He retreated slowly before her, and she followed. He had a certain power of hypnosis which he used occasionally in treatments, and she saw that he was exerting it on her. Her will seemed to cloud a little and she followed him out step by step until he closed the door upon Peter Woods’ wild roar.
He seized her by the elbows.
“Listen to me, you little fool,” he breathed. “I am not crazy. I know what I am doing. It is you who are mad—you who are standing in the way of something that will be a monument to your father and a blessing to mankind forever. Listen.” He shook her a little. “A month ago the three insane Woods brothers came to your father voluntarily and said they wanted to will him all their money for research work.”
“But of course he refused,” said Kay indignantly.
“But now all is changed!” he cried triumphantly. “This is the fourth and last and there are no heirs. No one is wronged—we have our Institute, and we will have reared a monument for which humanity will bless our name forever.”
“But this man is sane!” Kay exclaimed. “As sane as I am.”
“You are wrong. I see signs that you do not see. He will break, like the others, in a week, in three days, perhaps before your father returns—”
“You devil!” she cried. “You’re mad—you’re driveling—”
There was a sudden interruption—the buzzing of bells, doors banging and the appearance of excited nurses in the corridors.
“What is it?”
“The three Woods brothers—they’ve disappeared!”
“Impossible!” cried Vincintelli.
“Their windows have been sawed with files from the carpentry shop.”
The veins grew large as worms on Vincintelli’s forehead.
“Get after them!” he shouted furiously. “They must be on the grounds. Sound the alarm in the main building—”
He had forgotten Kay—still crying orders, he rushed down the corridors and into the night.
When the corridor was empty Kay opened the door of the bath-room, and quickly unbuckled the straps that held Peter Woods.
“Get out and get dressed,” she said. “We’re leaving—I’ll run you away in my car.”
“But they’ve locked up all my clothes somewhere.”
“I’ll get you a blanket,” she said, and then hesitated. “That won’t do—the police will be watching the roads tonight and they’ll take us both for lunatics.”
They waited helplessly. But outside there were voices calling here and there through the shrubbery.
“I’ve got it,” she cried. “Wait!”
Straight to the room of Mr. Kirkjohn across the hall she fled, and opened the door. Scented and immaculate he stood before his mirror, brushing his hair.
“Mr. Kirkjohn,” Kay said breathlessly, “take off your clothes!”
“What?” Then, as he comprehended, a quiet glow of satisfaction spread over his face.
“Take off everything, and throw it to me.”
“With pleasure, dear lady,” he said.
Coat, vest, tie, trousers, shoes, socks—she caught them all and gathered them up in a pile.
“Dear lady, this—” his hand was on the top button of his union suit, “is the happiest day of my life.”
With a little shriek Kay shut the door.
Half an hour later, the throttle pressed down to the floor of the car, they were still speeding along the roads of New Hampshire through the summer night. There was a moon and the universe was wide and free about them. Peter Woods drew a deep breath.
“And what made you think that in spite of everything I was sane?” he demanded.
“I don’t know.” She looked demurely at the stars. “I suppose it was when you asked me to marry you. No girl could believe that a man who proposed to her could be entirely crazy.”
“And you won’t mind being a little saner than me.”
“But I’m not—darling.” She hurried over the word she had never used before. “I’m in the grip of the greatest lunacy of all.”
“Speaking of being in the grip of anything,” he said, “when you get to those next trees why not stop the car?”
IV
The three elder Woods brothers were never found. However, an unconfirmed story reached me some months ago that the announcer at a certain terminal in New York has a peculiar intonation that makes Wall Street men start and mutter—“Now where have I heard that voice before?” The second brother, Wallace, has conceivably fled to South America, where he can make himself understood. As for the tale itself, it was told me by the first barber in the Elixer Shop, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Check up on it if you like—the barber I mean is a tall, sheep-like man with an air of being somewhat above his station.
Scott and Zelda with their storied car, “The Rolling Junk,” in MOTOR magazine, 1924.
“What to Do About It” centers on a young male doctor. Dr. Bill Hardy is “irreverent,” to put it mildly, as he copes with both hypochondriacs and the truly ill. It is a boy-gets-girl tale made strange and fantastical, and surely cinematic, by the intersections of medicine and a madcap, gangster-derived plot.
Fitzgerald sent “What to Do About It” to Harold Ober in August 1933. The Saturday Evening Post, always the first port of call for Fitzgerald’s stories for many years by then, thought the story “not satisfying,” while Cosmopolitan found it “too subtile.” None of the magazine editors knew quite what to think of the boy, Ober’s own favorite character in the story and the originator of the title phrase.
In the summer of 1936, Ober suggested that a revised version of the story could go out for consideration again, but Fitzgerald replied he could “scarcely remember the plo[t]” and sent “Thank You for the Light,” which he’d just finished, instead. The surviving typescript of “What to Do About It” remains the property of the Trustees of the Fitzgerald Estate.
What to Do About It
The girl hung around under the pink sky waiting for something to happen. She was not a particularly vague person but she was vague tonight: the special dusk was new, practically new, after years under far skies; it had strange little lines in the trees, strange little insects, unfamiliar night cries of strange small beasts beginning.
—Those are frogs, she thought, or no, those are grillons—what is it in English?—those are crickets up by the pond.
—That is either a swallow or a bat, she thought; then again the difference of trees—then back to love and such practical things. And back again to the different trees and shadows, skies and noises—such as the auto horns and the barking dog up by the Philadelphia turnpike . . .
The dog was barking at a man at whom it presently sniffed; finding nothing either hostile or ingratiating, he nosed around and wanted to play. The man was on his way
to meet the girl, though as yet he was unaware of it; he continued to sit in the middle of the dirt lane and try to wrest a 1927 tire-lock of its prey.
“Get away, you animal!” he exuded, and muttering unwillingly he returned to the lock, which was an excellent job of steel and ingenuity and had only half yielded to his inadequate chisel.
He was not a burglar—he was a doctor and this was his car and had been for some months, during which the “rubber on it” in salesmen’s jargon had endured beyond modest expectations. Turning into the lane from the main road he became aware that the rubber had yielded gently to the pressure of time, thus accounting for the inaccuracy of the steering wheel. This he had noticed immediately after leaving the hospital.
“The old boy could have come in his sedan,” he muttered, “He’s getting lazy. In most businesses they’d send him to the minors—in ours we endow them.”
From overhearing this bellyache an interested observer might have deduced that Doctor Bill Hardy belonged to the latest and most irreverent of generations. He was little less than tall, and standardly welded, rather like the 1927 tire lock, and his thoughts in this moment of recuperation were inspired by the fact that his boss, the distinguished Doctor C. H. L. Hines, had delegated to him the most unpleasant of duties—to visit, console and administer to a chronic female hypochondriac of a certain age, on an evening when he had important business of his own.
He was too good a doctor to have confused duty with personal pleasure but in this case the line between the two was drawn very close: there was the woman in a southerly suburb of the city who must be called upon, consoled, or at least got rid of with tact, and there was this woman in the mansion at the lane’s end who needed nothing yet considered that she did, but who poured twenty-five dollars fortnightly into Doctor C. H. L. Hines’ coffers for the reassurance that her heart was not stopping and that she had neither leprosy nor what she referred to as “the bubonic.” Usually Dr. Hines did the reassuring. This evening he had merely rolled to the telephone and mumbled, “Look, Bill, I’m about to begin dressing for an engagement m’wife’nI’ve looked for’d to for ages. Go out see what you can do with the damn—with Mrs. Brickster.”
Bill adjusted the chisel and the gong—it was a curious thing he had found under the seat that he thought of as a gong because it gave out a ringing sound—and struck a discouraged blow. To his surprise the lock yielded: he was so inspired by his own mechanical, or archaeological, achievement that ten minutes later he was able to roll down the lane to face his case. Shutting off the motor and backing out of the car he confronted the girl.
Confronted is exact: for on her part she noticed his arrival with merely a hopeful surprise. She was eighteen with such a skin as the Italian painters of the decadence used for corner angels, and all the wishing in the world glistening in her grey eyes.
“How do you do—I’m Doctor Hardy, Dr. Hines’ assistant. Mrs. Brickster phoned—”
“Oh, how do you do. I’m Miss Mason, Mrs. Brickster’s daughter.”
The red dusk was nearly gone but she had advanced into the last patch of it. “Mother’s out but is there anything I can do?” she asked.
“Is there anything I can do,” he corrected her.
She smiled a little. “Well, I don’t think I know you well enough to decide that for you.”
“I mean tonight—is there anything I can do tonight?”
“I couldn’t even tell you that, Dr. Hines—”
“No. I’m Dr. Hardy, Dr. Hines’ assistant.”
“—excuse me, Doctor Hardy. We give a cup of coffee in the kitchen and what small change is in the house.”
Bill realized in the course of this last that all was not according to Aristotelian logic. He reconsidered, began again;
“I was called from this house, Miss Mason, to treat your mother. If she has been taken away—”
“Father took her away.”
“Oh—I’m sorry—what was the matter?”
“She found that the Chicago Opera Company was doing Louise.”
“Oh I see,” Bill agreed. Yet he didn’t see, for in the thickening dusk the girl was dazzling his vision a little, “You mean she can’t stand Louise—I know; I had an aunt who could never—”
“This is getting sadder and sadder, Dr. Hines—”
“No. Hardy, Dr. Hines’ assistant.”
“—excuse me, Doctor Hardy. But when aunts begin to appear in the picture you wonder just what are we driving at! Mother went toward Louise, not away from it. But she left rather suddenly with father carrying his cuff buttons. I’ve just come home after some years away and just met my new father and I’m trying to get adjusted. If somebody in the house is sick I don’t know who it is. Mother said nothing about it to me.”
“Then your mother isn’t sick? She didn’t phone Dr. Hines? It’s all a mistake?”
“She didn’t seem sick starting for the opera.”
“Well, suppose—well, suppose we give it up.” He looked at Miss Mason once more and decided not to. “I mean suppose we check up. I’ll give you the address of a physicians’ exchange and you phone and see if they received such a call. I won’t even take coffee or small change—I’ll wait out here in the car.”
“All right,” she agreed. “It’d be better to straighten out the situation.”
. . . When she appeared on the verandah some minutes later she had an envelope in her hand.
“Excuse me, Dr. Hines—you were perfectly right. Mother did call the doctor—”
“My name is Hardy.”
“Well—let’s not start that over again; she called up whichever you two is which; I’m sorry to seem discourteous, but for all I know you might be a racketeersman.”
He kept his laugh secret as he said:
“That leaves us where we were before—unless your mother expects me between the acts at the opera.”
She handed him the envelope.
“I found this on the hall table going out—addressed to Doctor—”—stopping herself in time she said gently while he took the letter to his headlights, for it had grown too dark for the sky’s light. “. . . I hope it clarifies matters.”
Dear Doctor
I really called you about the boy, as I am again growing interested in domestic affairs, as you suggested, and it is very successful. But my husband and I thought it would be better for me to go out so, I went out, especially as there was an opera I especially wanted to see. Or we may go to a movie. Almost anything to get one’s mind off myself, as you suggested. So sorry if I have caused you any trouble.
Sincerely
Anne Marshall Mason Brickster
P.S. I meant to stay and tell you about the boy but my husband felt I should get away. He told me he stole the bluga. I don’t know what the bluga is but I’m sure he shouldn’t do it at his age.
A.M.M.B.
Bill switched his car lights from dim to white; by the new brilliance he looked at the letter again—it read the same; the boy had stolen the bluga, the woman wanted something done about it. For the first time a dim appreciation of the problems which Dr. Hines was called upon to face, and to which he himself was to succeed, brought a dim, sympathetic sweat to his temples. He turned abruptly to the girl.
“Now, when did you miss the bruga?”
“What bruga?”
No go.
“The brunga?”
She edged away, faintly but perceptibly, and Bill covered himself by telling all:
“Here: your brother has evidently taken something that doesn’t belong to him. Your parents want to see the why and wherefore of it. Can you make out this word?”
Their heads were close together under the light, so that his brisk blond sidelocks scratched her cheek while a longer tenuous end of gold silk touched him materially in the corner of his eye, but really all over.
“I can’t help you out,” she said after a moment.
“I feel I should investigate,” he suggested.
“All right,” she agree
d. “His light’s still on.”
She led the way through a hall adorned with the remnants of slain game. “Will you see him down here?” She paused at the foot of the stairs—“or in his boudoir?”
“Let’s go up,” Bill suggested; he had a lingering hope that the bruga might be triumphantly snatched up from under a pillow, and the whole situation cleared up by that moral lecture carried in the knapsack for instant production. The Loveliness led the way upstairs like a beacon that afterwards upon the verandah might illume the problems of a young doctor—or some such matter.
There seemed justification for the beginning of his hope, the solution of the mystery, when, promptly upon their entrance into a presumably lighted room they were plunged into blackness. Miss Mason wielded the switch: whereupon Bill stared at a boy of thirteen clad in a pajama top that feebly covered an undoffed union suit, upon a bed blatantly uninhabited, yet used, and upon a book still quivering from its hasty transition under the pillow.
“That must be the igloo,” he thought. His mind had now transformed the object sought-for into North Arctic form; but as he reached deftly under the pillow beneath the boy’s hostile stare, and snatched a glance at the book in bringing it out he found it to be a faint blue volume entitled “EX-WHITE-SLAVER,”—the authorship being identified with touching modesty as “by a Man Who Still is one.”
He put it down coolly, as if it existed for him only in the sense that a copy of, say, My Forty Years in the Fountains of Tivoli can be said to exist in the memory of a guest, and remarked;
“Well, how’re you, young man?”
But the young man had long given up dealing with such palaver. He looked disgustedly at Bill, back at his sister, back at Bill: then treated them both to what, in the euphemistic tradition of their great-grandparents, might have been termed The Robin.
But Bill was of stern stuff; he seized the boy by his shoulder, lowered him firmly to the sheet and announced: “If you want to play that game you’ll find I’m bigger than you.”
The boy, reaching the surface of the sheet unresistingly, looked up at him with uncommunicative eyes and answered:
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