“Going Friday.”
“Elwood’s home.”
“Is Elwood home?”
“--you have broken my heart--”
“Look out now!”
“Look out!”
Basil sat beside Riply on the balustrade, listening to Joe Gorman singing. It was one of the griefs of his life that he could not sing “so people could stand it,” and he conceived a sudden admiration for Joe Gorman, reading into his personality the thrilling clearness of those sounds that moved so confidently through the dark air.
They evoked for Basil a more dazzling night than this, and other more remote and enchanted girls. He was sorry when the voice died away, and there was a rearranging of seats and a businesslike quiet--the ancient game of Truth had begun.
“What’s your favorite color, Bill?”
“Green,” supplies a friend.
“Sh-h-h! Let him alone.”
Bill says, “Blue.”
“What’s your favorite girl’s name?”
“Mary,” says Bill.
“Mary Haupt! Bill’s got a crush on Mary Haupt!”
She was a cross-eyed girl, a familiar personification of repulsiveness.
“Who would you rather kiss than anybody?”
Across the pause a snicker stabbed the darkness.
“My mother.”
“No, but what girl?”
“Nobody.”
“That’s not fair. Forfeit! Come on, Margaret.”
“Tell the truth, Margaret.”
She told the truth and a moment later Basil looked down in surprise from his perch; he had just learned that he was her favorite boy.
“Oh, yes-s!” he exclaimed sceptically. “Oh, yes-s! How about Hubert Blair?”
He renewed a casual struggle with Riply Buckner and presently they both fell off the balustrade. The game became an inquisition into Gladys Van Schellinger’s carefully chaperoned heart.
“What’s your favorite sport?”
“Croquet.”
The admission was greeted by a mild titter.
“Favorite boy.”
“Thurston Kohler.”
A murmur of disappointment.
“Who’s he?”
“A boy in the East.”
This was manifestly an evasion.
“Who’s your favorite boy here?”
Gladys hesitated. “Basil,” she said at length.
The faces turned up to the balustrade this time were less teasing, less jocular. Basil depreciated the matter with “Oh, yes-s! Sure! Oh, yes-s!” But he had a pleasant feeling of recognition, a familiar delight.
Imogene Bissel, a dark little beauty and the most popular girl in their crowd, took Gladys’ place. The interlocutors were tired of gastronomic preferences--the first question went straight to the point.
“Imogene, have you ever kissed a boy?”
“No.” A cry of wild unbelief. “I have not!” she declared indignantly.
“Well, have you ever been kissed?”
Pink but tranquil, she nodded, adding, “I couldn’t help it.”
“Who by?”
“I won’t tell.”
“Oh-h-h! How about Hubert Blair?”
“What’s your favorite book, Imogene?”
“Beverly of Graustark.”
“Favorite girl?”
“Passion Johnson.”
“Who’s she?”
“Oh, just a girl at school.”
Mrs. Bissel had fortunately left the window.
“Who’s your favorite boy?”
Imogene answered steadily, “Basil Lee.”
This time an impressed silence fell. Basil was not surprised--we are never surprised at our own popularity--but he knew that these were not those ineffable girls, made up out of books and faces momentarily encountered, whose voices he had heard for a moment in Joe Gorman’s song. And when, presently, the first telephone rang inside, calling a daughter home, and the girls, chattering like birds, piled all together into Gladys Van Schellinger’s limousine, he lingered back in the shadow so as not to seem to be showing off. Then, perhaps because he nourished a vague idea that if he got to know Joe Gorman very well he would get to sing like him, he approached him and asked him to go to Lambert’s for a soda.
Joe Gorman was a tall boy with white eyebrows and a stolid face who had only recently become one of their “crowd.” He did not like Basil, who, he considered, had been “stuck up” with him last year, but he was acquisitive of useful knowledge and he was momentarily overwhelmed by Basil’s success with girls.
It was cheerful in Lambert’s, with great moths batting against the screen door and languid couples in white dresses and light suits spread about the little tables. Over their sodas, Joe proposed that Basil come home with him to spend the night; Basil’s permission was obtained over the telephone.
Passing from the gleaming store into the darkness, Basil was submerged in an unreality in which he seemed to see himself from the outside, and the pleasant events of the evening began to take on fresh importance.
Disarmed by Joe’s hospitality, he began to discuss the matter.
“That was a funny thing that happened tonight,” he said, with a disparaging little laugh.
“What was?”
“Why, all those girls saying I was their favorite boy.” The remark jarred on Joe. “It’s a funny thing,” went on Basil. “I was sort of unpopular at school for a while, because I was fresh, I guess. But the thing must be that some boys are popular with boys and some are popular with girls.”
He had put himself in Joe’s hands, but he was unconscious of it; even Joe was only aware of a certain desire to change the subject.
“When I get my car,” suggested Joe, up in his room, “we could take Imogene and Margaret and go for rides.”
“All right.”
“You could have Imogene and I’d take Margaret, or anybody I wanted. Of course I know they don’t like me as well as they do you.”
“Sure they do. It’s just because you haven’t been in our crowd very long yet.”
Joe was sensitive on that point and the remark did not please him. But Basil continued: “You ought to be more polite to the older people if you want to be popular. You didn’t say how do you do to Mrs. Bissel tonight.”
“I’m hungry,” said Joe quickly. “Let’s go down to the pantry and get something to eat.”
Clad only in their pajamas, they went downstairs. Principally to dissuade Basil from pursuing the subject, Joe began to sing in a low voice:
“Oh, you beautiful doll,
You great--big--”
But the evening, coming after the month of enforced humility at school, had been too much for Basil. He got a little awful. In the kitchen, under the impression that his advice had been asked, he broke out again:
“For instance, you oughtn’t to wear those white ties. Nobody does that that goes East to school.” Joe, a little red, turned around from the ice box and Basil felt a slight misgiving. But he pursued with: “For instance, you ought to get your family to send you East to school. It’d be a great thing for you. Especially if you want to go East to college, you ought to first go East to school. They take it out of you.”
Feeling that he had nothing special to be taken out of him, Joe found the implication distasteful. Nor did Basil appear to him at that moment to have been perfected by the process.
“Do you want cold chicken or cold ham?” They drew up chairs to the kitchen table. “Have some milk?”
“Thanks.”
Intoxicated by the three full meals he had had since supper, Basil warmed to his subject. He built up Joe’s life for him little by little, transformed him radiantly from what was little more than a Midwestern bumpkin to an Easterner bursting with savoir-faire and irresistible to girls. Going into the pantry to put away the milk, Joe paused by the open window for a breath of quiet air; Basil followed. “The thing is if a boy doesn’t get it taken out of him at school, he gets it taken out of him at colle
ge,” he was saying.
Moved by some desperate instinct, Joe opened the door and stepped out onto the back porch. Basil followed. The house abutted on the edge of the bluff occupied by the residential section, and the two boys stood silent for a moment, gazing at the scattered lights of the lower city. Before the mystery of the unknown human life coursing through the streets below, Basil felt the purport of his words grow thin and pale.
He wondered suddenly what he had said and why it had seemed important to him, and when Joe began to sing again softly, the quiet mood of the early evening, the side of him that was best, wisest and most enduring, stole over him once more. The flattery, the vanity, the fatuousness of the last hour moved off, and when he spoke it was almost in a whisper:
“Let’s walk around the block.”
The sidewalk was warm to their bare feet. It was only midnight, but the square was deserted save for their whitish figures, inconspicuous against the starry darkness. They snorted with glee at their daring. Once a shadow, with loud human shoes, crossed the street far ahead, but the sound served only to increase their own unsubstantiality. Slipping quickly through the clearings made by gas lamps among the trees, they rounded the block, hurrying when they neared the Gorman house as though they had been really lost in a midsummer night’s dream.
Up in Joe’s room, they lay awake in the darkness.
“I talked too much,” Basil thought. “I probably sounded pretty bossy and maybe I made him sort of mad. But probably when we walked around the block he forgot everything I said.”
Alas, Joe had forgotten nothing--except the advice by which Basil had intended him to profit.
“I never saw anybody as stuck up,” he said to himself wrathfully. “He thinks he’s wonderful. He thinks he’s so darn popular with girls.”
III
An element of vast importance had made its appearance with the summer; suddenly the great thing in Basil’s crowd was to own an automobile. Fun no longer seemed available save at great distances, at suburban lakes or remote country clubs. Walking downtown ceased to be a legitimate pastime. On the contrary, a single block from one youth’s house to another’s must be navigated in a car. Dependent groups formed around owners and they began to wield what was, to Basil at least, a disconcerting power.
On the morning of a dance at the lake he called up Riply Buckner.
“Hey, Rip, how you going out to Connie’s tonight?”
“With Elwood Leaming.”
“Has he got a lot of room?”
Riply seemed somewhat embarrassed. “Why, I don’t think he has. You see, he’s taking Margaret Torrence and I’m taking Imogene Bissel.”
“Oh!”
Basil frowned. He should have arranged all this a week ago. After a moment he called up Joe Gorman.
“Going to the Davies’ tonight, Joe?”
“Why, yes.”
“Have you got room in your car--I mean, could I go with you?”
“Why, yes, I suppose so.”
There was a perceptible lack of warmth in his voice.
“Sure you got plenty of room?”
“Sure. We’ll call for you quarter to eight.”
Basil began preparations at five. For the second time in his life he shaved, completing the operation by cutting a short straight line under his nose. It bled profusely, but on the advice of Hilda, the maid, he finally stanched the flow with little pieces of toilet paper. Quite a number of pieces were necessary; so, in order to facilitate breathing, he trimmed it down with a scissors, and with this somewhat awkward mustache of paper and gore clinging to his upper lip, wandered impatiently around the house.
At six he began working on it again, soaking off the tissue paper and dabbing at the persistently freshening crimson line. It dried at length, but when he rashly hailed his mother it opened once more and the tissue paper was called back into play.
At quarter to eight, dressed in blue coat and white flannels, he drew one last bar of powder across the blemish, dusted it carefully with his handkerchief and hurried out to Joe Gorman’s car. Joe was driving in person, and in front with him were Lewis Crum and Hubert Blair. Basil got in the big rear seat alone and they drove without stopping out of the city onto the Black Bear Road, keeping their backs to him and talking in low voices together. He thought at first that they were going to pick up other boys; now he was shocked, and for a moment he considered getting out of the car, but this would imply that he was hurt. His spirit, and with it his face, hardened a little and he sat without speaking or being spoken to for the rest of the ride.
After half an hour the Davies’ house, a huge rambling bungalow occupying a small peninsula in the lake, floated into sight. Lanterns outlined its shape and wavered in gleaming lines on the gold-and-rose colored water, and as they came near, the low notes of bass horns and drums were blown toward them from the lawn.
Inside Basil looked about for Imogene. There was a crowd around her seeking dances, but she saw Basil; his heart bounded at her quick intimate smile.
“You can have the fourth, Basil, and the eleventh and the second extra. . . . How did you hurt your lip?”
“Cut it shaving,” he said hurriedly. “How about supper?”
“Well, I have to have supper with Riply because he brought me.”
“No, you don’t,” Basil assured her.
“Yes, she does,” insisted Riply, standing close at hand. “Why don’t you get your own girl for supper?”
--but Basil had no girl, though he was as yet unaware of the fact.
After the fourth dance, Basil led Imogene down to the end of the pier, where they found seats in a motorboat.
“Now what?” she said.
He did not know. If he had really cared for her he would have known. When her hand rested on his knee for a moment he did not notice it. Instead, he talked. He told her how he had pitched on the second baseball team at school and had once beaten the first in a five-inning game. He told her that the thing was that some boys were popular with boys and some boys were popular with girls--he, for instance, was popular with girls. In short, he unloaded himself.
At length, feeling that he had perhaps dwelt disproportionately on himself, he told her suddenly that she was his favorite girl.
Imogene sat there, sighing a little in the moonlight. In another boat, lost in the darkness beyond the pier, sat a party of four. Joe Gorman was singing:
“My little love--
--in honey man,
He sure has won my--”
“I thought you might want to know,” said Basil to Imogene. “I thought maybe you thought I liked somebody else. The truth game didn’t get around to me the other night.”
“What?” asked Imogene vaguely. She had forgotten the other night, all nights except this, and she was thinking of the magic in Joe Gorman’s voice. She had the next dance with him; he was going to teach her the words of a new song. Basil was sort of peculiar, telling her all this stuff. He was good-looking and attractive and all that, but--she wanted the dance to be over. She wasn’t having any fun.
The music began inside--”Everybody’s Doing It,” played with many little nervous jerks on the violins.
“Oh, listen!” she cried, sitting up and snapping her fingers. “Do you know how to rag?”
“Listen, Imogene”--He half realized that something had slipped away--”let’s sit out this dance--you can tell Joe you forgot.”
She rose quickly. “Oh, no, I can’t!”
Unwillingly Basil followed her inside. It had not gone well--he had talked too much again. He waited moodily for the eleventh dance so that he could behave differently. He believed now that he was in love with Imogene. His self-deception created a tightness in his throat, a counterfeit of longing and desire.
Before the eleventh dance he was aware that some party was being organized from which he was purposely excluded. There were whisperings and arguings among some of the boys, and unnatural silences when he came near. He heard Joe Gorman say to Riply Buckner, “W
e’ll just be gone three days. If Gladys can’t go, why don’t you ask Connie? The chaperons’ll--” he changed his sentence as he saw Basil--”and we’ll all go to Smith’s for ice-cream soda.”
Later, Basil took Riply Buckner aside but failed to elicit any information: Riply had not forgotten Basil’s attempt to rob him of Imogene tonight.
“It wasn’t about anything,” he insisted. “We’re going to Smith’s, honest. . . . How’d you cut your lip?”
“Cut it shaving.”
When his dance with Imogene came she was even vaguer than before, exchanging mysterious communications with various girls as they moved around the room, locked in the convulsive grip of the Grizzly Bear. He led her out to the boat again, but it was occupied, and they walked up and down the pier while he tried to talk to her and she hummed:
“My little lov-in honey man--”
“Imogene, listen. What I wanted to ask you when we were on the boat before was about the night we played Truth. Did you really mean what you said?”
“Oh, what do you want to talk about that silly game for?”
It had reached her ears, not once but several times, that Basil thought he was wonderful--news that was flying about with as much volatility as the rumor of his graces two weeks before. Imogene liked to agree with everyone--and she had agreed with several impassioned boys that Basil was terrible. And it was difficult not to dislike him for her own disloyalty.
But Basil thought that only ill luck ended the intermission before he could accomplish his purpose; though what he had wanted he had not known.
Finally, during the intermission, Margaret Torrence, whom he had neglected, told him the truth.
“Are you going on the touring party up to the St. Croix River?” she asked. She knew he was not.
“What party?”
“Joe Gorman got it up. I’m going with Elwood Leaming.”
“No, I’m not going,” he said gruffly. “I couldn’t go.”
“Oh!”
“I don’t like Joe Gorman.”
“I guess he doesn’t like you much either.”
“Why? What did he say?”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 205