Vienna and Dolly. She disappeared with him for two hours the night of the club dances, and Harold Case was in despair. When they walked in again at midnight I thought they were the handsomest pair I saw. They were both shining with that peculiar luminosity that dark people sometimes have. Harold Case took one look at them and went proudly home.
Vienna came back a week later, solely to see Dolly. Late that evening I had occasion to go up to the deserted club for a book and they called me from the rear terrace, which opens out to the ghostly stadium and to an unpeopled sweep of night. It was an hour of thaw, with spring voices in the warm wind, and wherever there was light enough you could see drops glistening and falling. You could feel the cold melting out of the stars and the bare trees and shrubbery toward Stony Brook turning lush in the darkness.
They were sitting together on a wicker bench, full of themselves and romantic and happy.
“We had to tell someone about it,” they said.
“Now can I go?”
“No, Jeff,” they insisted; “stay here and envy us. We’re in the stage where we want someone to envy us. Do you think we’re a good match?”
What could I say?
“Dolly’s going to finish at Princeton next year,” Vienna went on, “but we’re going to announce it after the season in Washington in the autumn.”
I was vaguely relieved to find that it was going to be a long engagement.
“I approve of you, Jeff,” Vienna said.
“I want Dolly to have more friends like you. You’re stimulating for him--you have ideas. I told Dolly he could probably find others like you if he looked around his class.”
Dolly and I both felt a little uncomfortable.
“She doesn’t want me to be a Babbitt,” he said lightly.
“Dolly’s perfect,” asserted Vienna. “He’s the most beautiful thing that ever lived, and you’ll find I’m very good for him, Jeff. Already I’ve helped him make up his mind about one important thing.” I guessed what was coming. “He’s going to speak a little piece if they bother him about playing football next autumn, aren’t you, child?”
“Oh, they won’t bother me,” said Dolly uncomfortably. “It isn’t like that--”
“Well, they’ll try to bully you into it, morally.”
“Oh, no,” he objected. “It isn’t like that. Don’t let’s talk about it now, Vienna. It’s such a swell night.”
Such a swell night! When I think of my own love passages at Princeton, I always summon up that night of Dolly’s, as if it had been I and not he who sat there with youth and hope and beauty in his arms.
Dolly’s mother took a place on Ram’s Point, Long Island, for the summer, and late in August I went East to visit him. Vienna had been there a week when I arrived, and my impressions were: first, that he was very much in love; and, second, that it was Vienna’s party. All sorts of curious people used to drop in to see Vienna. I wouldn’t mind them now--I’m more sophisticated--but then they seemed rather a blot on the summer. They were all slightly famous in one way or another, and it was up to you to find out how. There was a lot of talk, and especially there was much discussion of Vienna’s personality. Whenever I was alone with any of the other guests we discussed Vienna’s sparkling personality. They thought I was dull, and most of them thought Dolly was dull. He was better in his line than any of them were in theirs, but his was the only specialty that wasn’t mentioned. Still, I felt vaguely that I was being improved and I boasted about knowing most of those people in the ensuing year, and was annoyed when people failed to recognize their names.
The day before I left, Dolly turned his ankle playing tennis, and afterward he joked about it to me rather somberly.
“If I’d only broken it things would be so much easier. Just a quarter of an inch more bend and one of the bones would have snapped. By the way, look here.”
He tossed me a letter. It was a request that he report at Princeton for practice on September fifteenth and that meanwhile he begin getting himself in good condition.
“You’re not going to play this fall?”
He shook his head.
“No. I’m not a child any more. I’ve played for two years and I want this year free. If I went through it again it’d be a piece of moral cowardice.”
“I’m not arguing, but--would you have taken this stand if it hadn’t been for Vienna?”
“Of course I would. If I let myself be bullied into it I’d never be able to look myself in the face again.”
Two weeks later I got the following letter:
DEAR JEFF:
When you read this you’ll be somewhat surprised. I have, actually, this time, broken my ankle playing tennis. I can’t even walk with crutches at present; it’s on a chair in front of me swollen up and wrapped up as big as a house as I write. No one, not even Vienna, knows about our conversation on the same subject last summer and so let us both absolutely forget it. One thing, though--an ankle is a darn hard thing to break, though I never knew it before.
I feel happier than I have for years--no early-season practice, no sweat and suffer, a little discomfort and inconvenience, but free. I feel as if I’ve outwitted a whole lot of people, and it’s nobody’s business but that of your
Machiavellian (sic) friend, DOLLY. P.S. You might as well tear up this letter.
It didn’t sound like Dolly at all.
V
Once down at Princeton I asked Frank Kane--who sells sporting goods on Nassau Street and can tell you offhand the name of the scrub quarterback in 1901--what was the matter with Bob Tatnall’s team senior year.
“Injuries and tough luck,” he said. “They wouldn’t sweat after the hard games. Take Joe McDonald, for instance, All-American tackle the year before; he was slow and stale, and he knew it and didn’t care. It’s a wonder Bill got that outfit through the season at all.”
I sat in the stands with Dolly and watched them beat Lehigh 3-0 and tie Bucknell by a fluke. The next week we were trimmed 14-0 by Notre Dame. On the day of the Notre Dame game Dolly was in Washington with Vienna, but he was awfully curious about it when he came back next day. He had all the sporting pages of all the papers and he sat reading them and shaking his head. Then he stuffed them suddenly into the waste-paper basket.
“This college is football crazy,” he announced. “Do you know that English teams don’t even train for sports?”
I didn’t enjoy Dolly so much in those days. It was curious to see him with nothing to do. For the first time in his life he hung around--around the room, around the club, around casual groups--he who had always been going somewhere with dynamic indolence. His passage along a walk had once created groups--groups of classmates who wanted to walk with him, of underclassmen who followed with their eyes a moving shrine. He became democratic, he mixed around, and it was somehow not appropriate. He explained that he wanted to know more men in his class.
But people want their idols a little above them, and Dolly had been a sort of private and special idol. He began to hate to be alone, and that, of course, was most apparent to me. If I got up to go out and he didn’t happen to be writing a letter to Vienna, he’d ask “Where are you going?” in a rather alarmed way and make an excuse to limp along with me.
“Are you glad you did it, Dolly?” I asked him suddenly one day.
He looked at me with reproach behind the defiance in his eyes.
“Of course I’m glad.”
“I wish you were in that back field, all the same.”
“It wouldn’t matter a bit. This year’s game’s in the Bowl. I’d probably be dropping kicks for them.”
The week of the Navy game he suddenly began going to all the practices. He worried; that terrible sense of responsibility was at work. Once he had hated the mention of football; now he thought and talked of nothing else. The night before the Navy game I woke up several times to find the lights burning brightly in his room.
We lost 7 to 3 on Navy’s last-minute forward pass over Devlin’s head. After
the first half Dolly left the stands and sat down with the players on the field. When he joined me afterward his face was smudgy and dirty as if he had been crying.
The game was in Baltimore that year. Dolly and I were going to spend the night in Washington with Vienna, who was giving a dance. We rode over there in an atmosphere of sullen gloom and it was all I could do to keep him from snapping out at two naval officers who were holding an exultant post mortem in the seat behind.
The dance was what Vienna called her second coming-out party. She was having only the people she liked this time, and these turned out to be chiefly importations from New York. The musicians, the playwrights, the vague supernumeraries of the arts, who had dropped in at Dolly’s house on Ram’s Point, were here in force. But Dolly, relieved of his obligations as host, made no clumsy attempt to talk their language that night. He stood moodily against the wall with some of that old air of superiority that had first made me want to know him. Afterward, on my way to bed, I passed Vienna’s sitting room and she called me to come in. She and Dolly, both a little white, were sitting across the room from each other and there was tensity in the air.
“Sit down, Jeff,” said Vienna wearily. “I want you to witness the collapse of a man into a schoolboy.” I sat down reluctantly. “Dolly’s changed his mind,” she said. “He prefers football to me.”
“That’s not it,” said Dolly stubbornly.
“I don’t see the point,” I objected. “Dolly can’t possibly play.”
“But he thinks he can. Jeff, just in case you imagine I’m being pig-headed about it, I want to tell you a story. Three years ago, when we first came back to the United States, father put my young brother in school. One afternoon we all went out to see him play football. Just after the game started he was hurt, but father said, ‘It’s all right. He’ll be up in a minute. It happens all the time.’ But, Jeff, he never got up. He lay there, and finally they carried him off the field and put a blanket over him. Just as we got to him he died.”
She looked from one to the other of us and began to sob convulsively. Dolly went over, frowning, and put his arm around her shoulder.
“Oh, Dolly,” she cried, “won’t you do this for me--just this one little thing for me?”
He shook his head miserably. “I tried, but I can’t,” he said.
“It’s my stuff, don’t you understand, Vienna? People have got to do their stuff.”
Vienna had risen and was powdering her tears at a mirror; now she flashed around angrily.
“Then I’ve been laboring under a misapprehension when I supposed you felt about it much as I did.”
“Let’s not go over all that. I’m tired of talking, Vienna; I’m tired of my own voice. It seems to me that no one I know does anything but talk any more.”
“Thanks. I suppose that’s meant for me.”
“It seems to me your friends talk a great deal. I’ve never heard so much jabber as I’ve listened to tonight. Is the idea of actually doing anything repulsive to you, Vienna?”
“It depends upon whether it’s worth doing.”
“Well, this is worth doing--to me.”
“I know your trouble, Dolly,” she said bitterly. “You’re weak and you want to be admired. This year you haven’t had a lot of little boys following you around as if you were Jack Dempsey, and it almost breaks your heart. You want to get out in front of them all and make a show of yourself and hear the applause.”
He laughed shortly. “If that’s your idea of how a football player feels--”
“Have you made up your mind to play?” she interrupted.
“If I’m any use to them--yes.”
“Then I think we’re both wasting our time.”
Her expression was ruthless, but Dolly refused to see that she was in earnest. When I got away he was still trying to make her “be rational,” and next day on the train he said that Vienna had been “a little nervous.” He was deeply in love with her, and he didn’t dare think of losing her; but he was still in the grip of the sudden emotion that had decided him to play, and his confusion and exhaustion of mind made him believe vainly that everything was going to be all right. But I had seen that look on Vienna’s face the night she talked with Mr. Carl Sanderson at the Frolic two years before.
Dolly didn’t get off the train at Princeton Junction, but continued on to New York. He went to two orthopedic specialists and one of them arranged a bandage braced with a whole little fence of whalebones that he was to wear day and night. The probabilities were that it would snap at the first brisk encounter, but he could run on it and stand on it when he kicked. He was out on University Field in uniform the following afternoon.
His appearance was a small sensation. I was sitting in the stands watching practice with Harold Case and young Daisy Cary. She was just beginning to be famous then, and I don’t know whether she or Dolly attracted the most attention. In those times it was still rather daring to bring down a moving-picture actress; if that same young lady went to Princeton today she would probably be met at the station with a band.
Dolly limped around and everyone said, “He’s limping!” He got under a punt and everyone said, “He did that pretty well!” The first team were laid off after the hard Navy game and everyone watched Dolly all afternoon. After practice I caught his eye and he came over and shook hands. Daisy asked him if he’d like to be in a football picture she was going to make. It was only conversation, but he looked at me with a dry smile.
When he came back to the room his ankle was swollen up as big as a stove pipe, and next day he and Keene fixed up an arrangement by which the bandage would be loosened and tightened to fit its varying size. We called it the balloon. The bone was nearly healed, but the little bruised sinews were stretched out of place again every day. He watched the Swarthmore game from the sidelines and the following Monday he was in scrimmage with the second team against the scrubs.
In the afternoons sometimes he wrote to Vienna. His theory was that they were still engaged, but he tried not to worry about it, and I think the very pain that kept him awake at night was good for that. When the season was over he would go and see.
We played Harvard and lost 7 to 3. Jack Devlin’s collar bone was broken and he was out for the season, which made it almost sure that Dolly would play. Amid the rumors and fears of mid-November the news aroused a spark of hope in an otherwise morbid undergraduate body--hope all out of proportion to Dolly’s condition. He came back to the room the Thursday before the game with his face drawn and tired.
“They’re going to start me,” he said, “and I’m going to be back for punts. If they only knew--”
“Couldn’t you tell Bill how you feel about that?”
He shook his head and I had a sudden suspicion that he was punishing himself for his “accident” last August. He lay silently on the couch while I packed his suitcase for the team train.
The actual day of the game was, as usual, like a dream--unreal with its crowds of friends and relatives and the inessential trappings of a gigantic show. The eleven little men who ran out on the field at last were like bewitched figures in another world, strange and infinitely romantic, blurred by a throbbing mist of people and sound. One aches with them intolerably, trembles with their excitement, but they have no traffic with us now, they are beyond help, consecrated and unreachable--vaguely holy.
The field is rich and green, the preliminaries are over and the teams trickle out into position. Head guards are put on; each man claps his hands and breaks into a lonely little dance. People are still talking around you, arranging themselves, but you have fallen silent and your eye wanders from man to man. There’s Jack Whitehead, a senior, at end; Joe McDonald, large and reassuring, at tackle; Toole, a sophomore, at guard; Red Hopman, center; someone you can’t identify at the other guard--Bunker probably--he turns and you see his number--Bunker; Bean Gile, looking unnaturally dignified and significant at the other tackle; Poore, another sophomore at end. Back of them is Wash Sampson at quarter--imag
ine how he feels! But he runs here and there on light feet, speaking to this man and that, trying to communicate his alertness and his confidence of success. Dolly Harlan stands motionless, his hands on his hips, watching the Yale kicker tee up the ball; near him is Captain Bob Tatnall--
There’s the whistle! The line of the Yale team sways ponderously forward from its balance and a split second afterward comes the sound of the ball. The field streams with running figures and the whole Bowl strains forward as if thrown by the current of an electric chair.
Suppose we fumbled right away.
Tatnall catches it, goes back ten yards, is surrounded and blotted out of sight. Spears goes through center for three. A short pass, Sampson to Tatnall, is completed, but for no gain. Harlan punts to Devereaux, who is downed in his tracks on the Yale forty-yard line.
Now we’ll see what they’ve got.
It developed immediately that they had a great deal. Using an effective crisscross and a short pass over center, they carried the ball fifty-four yards to the Princeton six-yard line, where they lost it on a fumble, recovered by Red Hopman. After a trade of punts, they began another push, this time to the fifteen-yard line, where, after four hair-raising forward passes, two of them batted down by Dolly, we got the ball on downs. But Yale was still fresh and strong, and with a third onslaught the weaker Princeton line began to give way. Just after the second quarter began Devereaux took the ball over for a touchdown and the half ended with Yale in possession of the ball on our ten-yard line. Score, Yale, 7; Princeton, 0.
We hadn’t a chance. The team was playing above itself, better than it had played all year, but it wasn’t enough. Save that it was the Yale game, when anything could happen, anything had happened, the atmosphere of gloom would have been deeper than it was, and in the cheering section you could cut it with a knife.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 264