The letter disturbed Anthony. As he reached the postscript, which coolly made a rendezvous for five o’clock this afternoon, he heard Marice coming down-stairs, and put it back in his pocket.
Marice hummed and moved about the room. Anthony smoked.
“I saw you Tuesday afternoon,” she said suddenly. “You seemed to be having a fine time.”
“Tuesday,” he repeated, as if thinking. “Oh, yeah. I ran into some kids and we went to a tea dance. It was amusing.”
“You were almost alone when I saw you.”
“What are you getting at?”
Marice hummed again. “Let’s go out. Let’s go to a matinée.”
On the way Anthony explained how he had happened to be with Connie’s little sister; the necessity of the explanation somehow angered him. When he had done, Marice said crisply:
“If you wanted to rob the cradle, why did you have to pick out that little devil? Her reputation’s so bad already that Mrs. McRae didn’t want to invite her to dancing class this year--she only did it on account of Constance.”
“Why is she so awful?” asked Anthony, disturbed.
“I’d rather not discuss it.”
His five-o’clock engagement was on his mind throughout the matinée. Though Marice’s remarks served only to make him dangerously sorry for Josephine, he was nevertheless determined that this meeting should be the last. It was embarrassing to have been remarked in her company, even though he had tried honestly to avoid it. The matter could very easily develop into a rather dangerous little mess, with no benefit either to Josephine or to himself. About Marice’s indignation he did not care; she had been his for the asking all autumn, but Anthony did not want to get married; did not want to get involved with anybody at all.
It was dark when he was free at 5:30, and turned his car toward the new PhilanthrophilogicalBuilding in the maze of reconstruction in Grant Park. The bleakness of place and time depressed him, gave a further painfulness to the affair. Getting out of his car, he walked past a young man in a waiting roadster--a young man whom he seemed to recognize--and found Josephine in the half darkness of the little chamber that the storm doors formed.
With an indefinable sound of greeting, she walked determinedly into his arms, putting up her face.
“I can only stay for a sec,” she protested, just as if he had begged her to come. “I’m supposed to go to a wedding with sister, but I had to see you.”
When Anthony spoke, his voice froze into a white mist, obvious in the darkness. He said things he had said to her before but this time firmly and finally. It was easier, because he could scarcely see her face and because somewhere in the middle she irritated him by starting to cry.
“I knew you were supposed to be fickle,” she whispered, “but I didn’t expect this. Anyhow, I’ve got enough pride not to bother you any further.” She hesitated. “But I wish we could meet just once more to try and arrive at a more different settlement.”
“No.”
“Some jealous girl has been talking to you about me.”
“No.” Then, in despair, he struck at her heart. “I’m not fickle. I’ve never loved you and I never told you I did.”
Guessing at the forlorn expression that would come into her face, Anthony turned away and took a purposeless step; when he wheeled nervously about, the storm door had just shut--she was gone.
“Josephine!” he shouted in helpless pity, but there was no answer. He waited, heart in his boots, until presently he heard a car drive away.
At home, Josephine thanked Ed Bement, whom she had used, with a tartlet of hope, went in by a side door and up to her room. The window was open and, as she dressed hurriedly for the wedding she stood close to it so that she would catch cold and die.
Seeing her face in the bathroom mirror, she broke down and sat on the edge of the tub, making a small choking sound like a struggle with a cough, and cleaning her finger nails. Later she could cry all night in bed when every one else was asleep, but now it was still afternoon.
The two sisters and their mother stood side by side at the wedding of Mary Jackson and Jackson Dillon. It was a sad and sentimental wedding--an end to the fine, glamorous youth of a girl who was universally admired and loved. Perhaps to no onlooker there were its details symbolical of the end of a period, yet from the vantage point of a decade, certain things that happened are already powdered with yesterday’s ridiculousness, and even tinted with the lavender of the day before. The bride raised her veil, smiling that grave sweet smile that made her “adored,” but with tears pouring down her cheeks, and faced dozens of friends hands outheld as if embracing all of them for the last time. Then she turned to a husband as serious and immaculate as herself, and looked at him as if to say, “That’s done. All this that I am is yours forever and ever.”
In her pew, Constance, who had been at school with Mary Jackson, was frankly weeping, from a heart that was a ringing vault. But the face of Josephine beside her was a more intricate study; it watched intently. Once or twice, though her eyes lost none of their level straight intensity, an isolated tear escaped, and, as if startled by the feel of it, the face hardened slightly and the mouth remained in defiant immobility, like a child well warned against making a disturbance. Only once did she move; hearing a voice behind her say: “That’s the little Perry girl. Isn’t she lovely looking?” she turned presently and gazed at a stained-glass window lest her unknown admirers miss the sight of the side face.
Josephine’s family went on to the reception, so she dined alone--or rather with her little brother and his nurse, which was the same thing.
She felt all empty. Tonight Anthony Harker, “so deeply lovable--so sweetly lovable--so deeply, sweetly lovable” was making love to someone new, kissing her ugly, jealous face; soon he would have disappeared forever, together with all the men of his generation, into a loveless matrimony, leaving only a world of Travis de Coppets and Ed Bements--people so easy as to scarcely be worth the effort of a smile.
Up in her room, she was excited again by the sight of herself in the bathroom mirror. Oh, what if she should die in her sleep tonight?
“Oh, what a shame,” she whispered.
She opened the window, and holding her only souvenir of Anthony, a big initialed linen handkerchief, crept desolately into bed. While the sheets were still cold, there was a knock at the door.
“Special-delivery letter,” said the maid.
Putting on the light, Josephine opened it, turned to the signature, then back again, her breast rising and falling quickly under her nightgown.
DARLING LITTLE JOSEPHINE: It’s no use, I can’t help it, I can’t lie about it. I’m desperately, terribly in love with you. When you went away this afternoon, it all rushed over me, and I knew I couldn’t give you up. I drove home, and I couldn’t eat or sit still, but only walk up and down thinking of your darling face and your darling tears, there in that vestibule. And now I sit writing this letter--
It was four pages long. Somewhere it disposed of their disparate ages as unimportant, and the last words were:
I know how miserable you must be, and I would give ten years of my life to be there to kiss your sweet lips good night.
When she had read it through, Josephine sat motionless for some minutes; grief was suddenly gone, and for a moment she was so overwhelmed that she supposed joy had come in its stead. On her face was a twinkling frown.
“Gosh!” she said to herself. She read over the letter once more.
Her first instinct was to call up Lillian, but she thought better of it. The image of the bride at the wedding popped out at her--the reproachless bride, unsullied, beloved and holy with a sweet glow. An adolescence of uprightness, a host of friends, then the appearance of the perfect lover, the Ideal. With an effort, she recalled her drifting mind to the present occasion. Certainly Mary Jackson would never have kept such a letter. Getting out of bed, Josephine tore it into little pieces and, with some difficulty, caused by an unexpected amount of smoke, burned
it on a glass-topped table. No well-brought-up girl would have answered such a letter; the proper thing was to simply ignore it.
She wiped up the table top with the man’s linen handkerchief she held in her hand, threw it absently into a laundry basket and crept into bed. She suddenly was very sleepy.
IV
For what ensued, no one, not even Constance, blamed Josephine. If a man of twenty-two should so debase himself as to pay frantic court to a girl of sixteen against the wishes of her parents and herself, there was only one answer--he was a person who shouldn’t be received by decent people. When Travis de Coppet made a controversial remark on the affair at a dance, Ed Bement beat him into what was described as “a pulp,” down in the washroom, and Josephine’s reputation rose to normal and stayed there. Accounts of how Anthony had called time and time again at the house, each time denied admittance, how he had threatened Mr. Perry, how he had tried to bribe a maid to deliver letters, how he had attempted to waylay Josephine on her way back from school--these things pointed to the fact that he was a little mad. It was Anthony Harker’s own family who insisted that he should go West.
All this was a trying time for Josephine. She saw how close she had come to disaster, and by constant consideration and implicit obedience, tried to make up to her parents for the trouble she had unwittingly caused. At first she decided she didn’t want to go to any Christmas dances, but she was persuaded by her mother, who hoped she would be distracted by boys and girls home from school for the holidays. Mrs. Perry was taking her East to the BreerlySchool early in January, and in the buying of clothes and uniforms, mother and daughter were much together, and Mrs. Perry was delighted at Josephine’s new feeling of responsibility and maturity.
As a matter of fact, it was sincere, and only once did Josephine do anything that she could not have told the world. The day after New Year’s she put on her new travelling suit and her new fur coat and went out by her familiar egress, the side door, and walked down the block to the waiting car of Ed Bement. Downtown she left Ed waiting at a corner and entered a drug store opposite the old Union Station on LaSalle Street. A man with an unhappy mouth and desperate, baffled eyes was waiting for her there.
“Thank you for coming,” he said miserably.
She didn’t answer. Her face was grave and polite.
“Here’s what I want--just one thing,” he said quickly: “Why did you change? What did I do that made you change so suddenly? Was it something that happened, something I did? Was it what I said in the vestibule that night?”
Still looking at him, she tried to think, but she could only think how unattractive and rather terrible she found him now, and try not to let him see it. There would have been no use saying the simple truth--that she could not help what she had done, that great beauty has a need, almost an obligation, of trying itself, that her ample cup of emotion had spilled over on its own accord, and it was an accident that it had destroyed him and not her. The eyes of pity might follow Anthony Harker in his journey West, but most certainly the eyes of destiny followed Josephine as she crossed the street through the falling snow to Ed Bement’s car.
She sat quiet for a minute as they drove away, relieved and yet full of awe. Anthony Harker was twenty-two, handsome, popular and sought after--and how he had loved her--so much that he had to go away. She was as impressed as if they had been two other people.
Taking her silence for depression, Ed Bement said:
“Well, it did one thing anyhow--it stopped that other story they had around about you.”
She turned to him quickly. “What story?”
“Oh, just some crazy story.”
“What was it?” she demanded.
“Oh, nothing much,” he said hesitantly, “but there was a story around last August that you and Travis de Coppet were married.”
“Why, how perfectly terrible!” she exclaimed. “Why, I never heard of such a lie. It--” She stopped herself short of saying the truth--that though she and Travis had adventurously driven twenty miles to New Ulm, they had been unable to find a minister willing to marry them. It all seemed ages behind her, childish, forgotten.
“Oh, how perfectly terrible!” she repeated. “That’s the kind of story that gets started by jealous girls.”
“I know,” agreed Ed. “I’d just like to hear any boy try to repeat it to me. Nobody believed it anyhow.”
It was the work of ugly and jealous girls. Ed Bement, aware of her body next to him, and of her face shining like fire through the half darkness, knew that nobody so beautiful could ever do anything really wrong.
A NICE QUIET PLACE
I
All that week she couldn’t decide whether she was a lollipop or a roman candle--through her dreams, dreams that promised uninterrupted sleep through many vacation mornings, drove a series of long, incalculable murmuring in tune with the put-put-put of their cut-outs, “I love you--I love you,” over and over. She wrote in the evening:
Dear Ridge: When I think of not being able to come to the freshman dance with you this June, I could lie down and die, but mother is sort of narrow-minded in some ways, and she feels that sixteen is too young to go to a prom; and Lil Hammel’s mother feels the same way. When I think of you dancing around with some other girl and hear you handing her a line, like you do to everybody, I could lie down and scream. Oh, I know--because a girl here at school met you after I left Hot Springs at Easter. Anyhow, if you start rushing some other kid when you come out to Ed Bement’s house party this summer, I intend to cut her throat, or my own, or something desperate. And probably no one will even be sorry I’m dead. Ha-ha--
Summer, summer, summer--bland inland sun and friendly rain. Lake Forest, with its thousand enchanted verandas, the dancing on the outdoor platform at the club, and always the boys, centaurs, in new cars. Her mother came East to meet her, and as they walked together out of the Grand Central Station, the symphony of promise became so loud that Josephine’s face was puckered and distorted, as with the pressure of strong sunshine.
“We’ve got the best plans,” her mother said.
“Oh, what? What, mother?”
“A real change. I’ll tell you all about it when we get to the hotel.”
There was a sudden discord; a shadow fell upon Josephine’s heart.
“What do you mean? Aren’t we going to Lake Forest?”
“Some place much better”--her mother’s voice was alarmingly cheerful. “I’m saving it till we get to the hotel.”
Before Mrs. Perry had left Chicago, she and Josephine’s father had decided, from observations of their own and some revelations on the part of their elder daughter, Constance, that Josephine knew her way around Lake Forest all too well. The place had changed in the twenty years that it had been the summer rendezvous of fashionable Chicago; less circumscribed children of new families were resoundingly in evidence and, like most parents, Mrs. Perry thought of her daughter as one easily led into mischief by others. The more impartial eyes of other members of the colony had long regarded Josephine herself as the principal agent of corruption. But, preventive or penalty, the appalling thing to Josephine was that the Perrys were going to a “nice quiet place” this summer.
“Mother, I simply can’t go to Island Farms. I simply--”
“Father feels--”
“Why don’t you take me to a reform school if I’m so awful? Or to state’s penitentiary? I simply can’t go to a horrible old farm with a lot of country jakes and no fun and no friends except a lot of hicks.”
“But, dear, it’s not like that at all. They just call it Island Farms. In fact, your aunt’s place isn’t a farm; it’s really a nice little resort up in Michigan where lots of people spend the summer. Tennis and swimming and--and fishing.”
“Fishing?” repeated Josephine incredulously. “Do you call that something to do?” She shook her head in mute incomprehension. “I’ll just be forgotten, that’s all. When it’s my year to come out nobody will know who I am. They’ll just say, ‘Wh
o in heck is this Josephine Perry? I never saw her around here.’ ‘Oh, she’s just some hick from a horrible old farm up in Michigan. Let’s not invite her.’ Just when everybody else is having a wonderful time--”
“Nobody’ll forget you in one summer, dear.”
“Yes, they will. Everybody’ll have new friends and know new dances, and I’ll be up there in the backwoods, full of hayseed, forgetting everything I know. If it’s so wonderful why isn’t Constance coming?”
Lying awake in their drawing-room on the Twentieth Century, Josephine brooded upon the terrible injustice of it all. She knew that her mother was going on her account, and mostly because of the gossip of a few ugly and jealous girls. These ugly and jealous girls, her relentless enemies, were not entirely creatures of Josephine’s imagination. There was something in the frank sensuousness of her beauty that plain women found absolutely intolerable; they stared at her in a frightened, guarded way.
It was only recently that gossip had begun to worry Josephine. Her own theory was that, though at thirteen or fourteen she had been “speedy”--a convenient word that lacked the vulgar implication of “fast”--she was now trying to do her best, and a difficult enough business it was, without the past being held against her; for the only thing she cared about in the world was being in love and being with the person she currently loved.
Toward midnight her mother spoke to her softly and found that she was asleep. Turning on the berth light, she looked for a moment at the flushed young face, smoothed now of all its disappointment by a faint, peculiar smile. She leaned over and kissed Josephine’s brow, behind which, doubtless, were passing in review those tender and eagerly awaited orgies of which she was to be deprived this summer.
II
Into Chicago, resonant with shrill June clamor; out to Lake Forest, where her friends moved already in an aura of new boys, new tunes, parties and house parties yet to be. One concession was granted her--she was to come back from Island Farms in time for Ed Bement’s house party--which is to say, for Ridgeway Saunders’ visit, the first of September.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 213