“I saw your sister,” he blurted out. Beginning with that, he might bridge this perverse and intolerable reverence she inspired. “She certainly looks like you.”
“Does she?”
“It was wonderful,” he said. “Wonderful! Let me tell you--”
“Yes, do.” She folded her hands expectantly in her lap.
“Well, this afternoon--”
The music had stopped and started several times. Now, in an intermission, there was the sound of determined footsteps on the veranda, and Basil looked up to find Rhoda and Hector Crum.
“I got to go home, Basil,” squeaked Hector in his changing voice. “Here’s Rhoda.”
Take Rhoda out to the dock and push her in the lake. But only Basil’s mind said this; his body stood up politely.
“I didn’t know where you were, Basil,” said Rhoda in an aggrieved tone. “Why didn’t you come back?”
“I was just coming.” His voice trembled a little as he turned to Minnie. “Shall I find your partner for you?”
“Oh, don’t bother,” said Minnie. She was not angry, but she was somewhat astonished. She could not be expected to guess that the young man walking away from her so submissively was at the moment employed in working his way through Yale.
From the first, Basil’s grandfather, who had once been a regent at the state university, wanted him to give up the idea of Yale, and now his mother, picturing him hungry and ragged in a garret, adjoined her persuasions. The sum on which he could count from her was far below the necessary minimum, and although he stubbornly refused to consider defeat, he consented, “just in case anything happened,” to register at the university for the coming year.
In the administration building he ran into Eddie Parmelee, who introduced his companion, a small, enthusiastic Japanese.
“Well, well,” said Eddie. “So you’ve given up Yale!”
“I given up Yale,” put in Mr. Utsonomia, surprisingly. “Oh, yes, long time I given up Yale.” He broke into enthusiastic laughter. “Oh, sure. Oh, yes.”
“Mr. Utsonomia’s a Japanese,” explained Eddie, winking. “He’s a sub-freshman too.”
“Yes, I given up Harvard, Princeton too,” continued Mr. Utsonomia. “They give me choice back in my country. I choose here.”
“You did?” said Basil, almost indignantly.
“Sure, more strong here. More peasants come, with strength and odor of ground.”
Basil stared at him. “You like that?” he asked incredulously.
Utsonomia nodded. “Here I get to know real American peoples. Girls too. Yale got only boys.”
“But they haven’t got college spirit here,” explained Basil patiently.
Utsonomia looked blankly at Eddie.
“Rah-rah!” elucidated Eddie, waving his arms. “Rah-rah-rah! You know.”
“Besides, the girls here--” began Basil, and stopped.
“You know girls here?” grinned Utsonomia.
“No, I don’t know them,” said Basil firmly. “But I know they’re not like the girls that you’d meet down at the Yale proms. I don’t think they even have proms here. I don’t mean the girls aren’t all right, but they’re just not like the ones at Yale. They’re just coeds.”
“I hear you got a crush on Rhoda Sinclair,” said Eddie.
“Yes, I have!” said Basil ironically.
“They used to invite me to dinner sometimes last spring, but since you take her around to all the club dances--”
“Good-bye,” said Basil hastily. He exchanged a jerky bow for Mr. Utsonomia’s more formal dip, and departed.
From the moment of Minnie’s arrival the question of Rhoda had begun to assume enormous proportions. At first he had been merely indifferent to her person and a little ashamed of her lacy, oddly reminiscent clothes, but now, as he saw how relentlessly his services were commandeered, he began to hate her. When she complained of a headache, his imagination would eagerly convert it into a long, lingering illness from which she would recover only after college opened in the fall. But the eight dollars a week which he received from his great-uncle would pay his fare to New Haven, and he knew that if he failed to hold this position his mother would refuse to let him go.
Not suspecting the truth, Minnie Bibble found the fact that he only danced with her once or twice at each hop, and was then strangely moody and silent, somehow intriguing. Temporarily, at least, she was fascinated by his indifference, and even a little unhappy. But her precociously emotional temperament would not long stand neglect, and it was agony for Basil to watch several rivals beginning to emerge. There were moments when it seemed too big a price to pay even for Yale.
All his hopes centered upon one event. That was a farewell party in her honor for which the Kampfs had engaged the College Club and to which Rhoda was not invited. Given the mood and the moment, he might speed her departure knowing that he had stamped himself indelibly on her heart.
Three days before the party he came home from work at six to find the Kampfs’ car before his door and Minnie sitting alone on the front porch.
“Basil, I had to see you,” she said. “You’ve been so funny and distant to me.”
Intoxicated by her presence on his familiar porch, he found no words to answer.
“I’m meeting the family in town for dinner and I’ve got an hour. Can’t we go somewhere? I’ve been frightened to death your mother would come home and think it was fresh for me to call on you.” She spoke in a whisper, though there was no one close enough to hear. “I wish we didn’t have the old chauffeur. He listens.”
“Listens to what?” Basil asked, with a flash of jealousy.
“He just listens.”
“I’ll tell you,” he proposed: “We’ll have him drop us by grampa’s house and I’ll borrow the electric.”
The hot wind blew the brown curls around her forehead as they glided along Crest Avenue.
That he contributed the car made him feel more triumphantly astride the moment. There was a place he had saved for such a time as this--a little pigtail of a road left from the excavations of Prospect Park, where Crest Avenue ran obliviously above them and the late sun glinted on the Mississippi flats a mile away.
The end of summer was in the afternoon; it had turned a corner, and what was left must be used while there was yet time.
Suddenly she was whispering in his arms, “You’re first, Basil--nobody but you.”
“You just admitted you were a flirt.”
“I know, but that was years ago. I used to like to be called fast when I was thirteen or fourteen, because I didn’t care what people said; but about a year ago I began to see there was something better in life--honestly, Basil--and I’ve tried to act properly. But I’m afraid I’ll never be an angel.”
The river flowed in a thin scarlet gleam between the public baths and the massed tracks upon the other side. Booming, whistling, faraway railroad sounds reached them from down there; the voices of children playing tennis in Prospect Park sailed frailly overhead.
“I really haven’t got such a line as everybody thinks, Basil, for I mean a lot of what I say way down deep, and nobody believes me. You know how much alike we are, and in a boy it doesn’t matter, but a girl has to control her feelings, and that’s hard for me, because I’m emotional.”
“Haven’t you kissed anybody since you’ve been in St. Paul?”
“No.”
He saw she was lying, but it was a brave lie. They talked from their hearts--with the half truths and evasions peculiar to that organ, which has never been famed as an instrument of precision. They pieced together all the shreds of romance they knew and made garments for each other no less warm than their childish passion, no less wonderful than their sense of wonder.
He held her away suddenly, looked at her, made a strained sound of delight. There it was, in her face touched by sun--that promise--in the curve of her mouth, the tilted shadow of her nose on her cheek, the point of dull fire in her eyes--the promise that she could lead h
im into a world in which he would always be happy.
“Say I love you,” he whispered.
“I’m in love with you.”
“Oh, no; that’s not the same.”
She hesitated. “I’ve never said the other to anybody.”
“Please say it.”
She blushed the color of the sunset.
“At my party,” she whispered. “It’d be easier at night.”
When she dropped him in front of his house she spoke from the window of the car:
“This is my excuse for coming to see you. My uncle couldn’t get the club Thursday, so we’re having the party at the regular dance Saturday night.”
Basil walked thoughtfully into the house; Rhoda Sinclair was also giving a dinner at the College Club dance Saturday night.
It was put up to him frankly. Mrs. Reilly listened to his tentative excuses in silence and then said:
“Rhoda invited you first for Saturday night, and she already has one girl too many. Of course, if you choose to simply turn your back on your engagement and go to another party, I don’t know how Rhoda will feel, but I know how I should feel.”
And the next day his great-uncle, passing through the stock room, stopped and said: “What’s all this trouble about parties?”
Basil started to explain, but Mr. Reilly cut him short. “I don’t see the use of hurting a young girl’s feelings. You better think it over.”
Basil had thought it over; on Saturday afternoon he was still expected at both dinners and he had hit upon no solution at all.
Yale was only a month away now, but in four days Erminie Bibble would be gone, uncommitted, unsecured, grievously offended, lost forever. Not yet delivered from adolescence, Basil’s moments of foresight alternated with those when the future was measured by a day. The glory that was Yale faded beside the promise of that incomparable hour.
On the other side loomed up the gaunt specter of the university, with phantoms flitting in and out its portals that presently disclosed themselves as peasants and girls. At five o’clock, in a burst of contempt for his weakness, he went to the phone and left word with a maid at the Kampfs’ house that he was sick and couldn’t come tonight. Nor would he sit with the dull left-overs of his generation--too sick for one party, he was too sick for the other. The Reillys could have no complaint as to that.
Rhoda answered the phone and Basil tried to reduce his voice to a weak murmur:
“Rhoda, I’ve been taken sick. I’m in bed now,” he murmured feebly, and then added: “The phone’s right next to the bed, you see; so I thought I’d call you up myself.”
“You mean to say you can’t come?” Dismay and anger were in her voice.
“I’m sick in bed,” he repeated doggedly. “I’ve got chills and a pain and a cold.”
“Well, can’t you come anyhow?” she asked, with what to the invalid seemed a remarkable lack of consideration. “You’ve just got to. Otherwise there’ll be two extra girls.”
“I’ll send someone to take my place,” he said desperately. His glance, roving wildly out the window, fell on a house over the way. “I’ll send Eddie Parmelee.”
Rhoda considered. Then she asked with quick suspicion: “You’re not going to that other party?”
“Oh, no; I told them I was sick too.”
Again Rhoda considered. Eddie Parmelee was mad at her.
“I’ll fix it up,” Basil promised. “I know he’ll come. He hasn’t got anything to do tonight.”
A few minutes later he dashed across the street. Eddie himself, tying a bow on his collar, came to the door. With certain reservations, Basil hastily outlined the situation. Would Eddie go in his place?
“Can’t do it, old boy, even if I wanted to. Got a date with my real girl tonight.”
“Eddie, I’d make it worth your while,” he said recklessly. “I’d pay you for your time--say, five dollars.”
Eddie considered, there was hesitation in his eyes, but he shook his head.
“It isn’t worth it, Basil. You ought to see what I’m going out with tonight.”
“You could see her afterward. They only want you--I mean me--because they’ve got more girls than men for dinner--and listen, Eddie, I’ll make it ten dollars.”
Eddie clapped him on the shoulder.
“All right, old boy, I’ll do it for an old friend. Where’s the pay?”
More than a week’s salary melted into Eddie’s palm, but another sort of emptiness accompanied Basil back across the street--the emptiness of the coming night. In an hour or so the Kampfs’ limousine would draw up at the College Club and--time and time again his imagination halted miserably before that single picture, unable to endure any more.
In despair he wandered about the dark house. His mother had let the maid go out and was at his grandfather’s for dinner, and momentarily Basil considered finding some rake like Elwood Leaming and going down to Carling’s Restaurant to drink whiskey, wines and beer. Perhaps on her way back to the lake after the dance, Minnie, passing by, would see his face among the wildest of the revelers and understand.
“I’m going to Maxim’s,” he hummed to himself desperately; then he added impatiently: “Oh, to heck with Maxim’s!”
He sat in the parlor and watched a pale moon come up over the Lindsays’ fence at McKubben Street. Some young people came by, heading for the trolley that went to Como Park. He pitied their horrible dreariness--they were not going to dance with Minnie at the College Club tonight.
Eight-thirty--she was there now. Nine--they were dancing between courses to “Peg of My Heart” or doing the Castle Walk that Andy Lockheart brought home from Yale.
At ten o’clock he heard his mother come in, and almost immediately the phone rang. For a moment he listened without interest to her voice; then abruptly he sat up in his chair.
“Why, yes; how do you do, Mrs. Reilly. . . . Oh, I see. . . . Oh. . . . Are you sure it isn’t Basil you want to speak to? . . . Well, frankly, Mrs. Reilly, I don’t see that it’s my affair.”
Basil got up and took a step toward the door; his mother’s voice was growing thin and annoyed: “I wasn’t here at the time and I don’t know who he promised to send.”
Eddie Parmelee hadn’t gone after all--well, that was the end.
“. . . Of course not. It must be a mistake. I don’t think Basil would possibly do that; I don’t think he even knows any Japanese.”
Basil’s brain reeled. For a moment he was about to dash across the street after Eddie Parmelee. Then he heard a definitely angry note come into his mother’s voice:
“Very well, Mrs. Reilly. I’ll tell my son. But his going to Yale is scarcely a matter I care to discuss with you. In any case, he no longer needs anyone’s assistance.”
He had lost his position and his mother was trying to put a proud face on it. But her voice continued, soaring a little:
“Uncle Ben might be interested to know that this afternoon we sold the Third Street block to the Union Depot Company for four hundred thousand dollars.”
Mr. Utsonomia was enjoying himself. In the whole six months in America he had never felt so caught up in its inner life before. At first it had been a little hard to make plain to the lady just whose place it was he was taking, but Eddie Parmelee had assured him that such substitutions were an American custom, and he was spending the evening collecting as much data upon American customs as possible.
He did not dance, so he sat with the elderly lady until both the ladies went home, early and apparently a little agitated, shortly after dinner. But Mr. Utsonomia stayed on. He watched and he wandered. He was not lonesome; he had grown accustomed to being alone.
About eleven he sat on the veranda pretending to be blowing the smoke of a cigarette--which he hated--out over the city, but really listening to a conversation which was taking place just behind. It had been going on for half an hour, and it puzzled him, for apparently it was a proposal, and it was not refused. Yet, if his eyes did not deceive him, the contracting parties we
re of an age that Americans did not associate with such serious affairs. Another thing puzzled him even more: obviously, if one substituted for an absent guest, the absent guest should not be among those present, and he was almost sure that the young man who had just engaged himself for marriage was Mr. Basil Lee. It would be bad manners to intrude now, but he would urbanely ask him about a solution of this puzzle when the state university opened in the fall.
THE HOTEL CHILD
Saturday Evening Post (31 January 1931)
It is a place where one’s instinct is to give a reason for being there--”Oh, you see, I’m here because--” Failing that, you are faintly suspect, because this corner of Europe does not draw people; rather, it accepts them without too many inconvenient questions--live and let live. Routes cross here--people bound for private cliniques or tuberculosis resorts in the mountains, people who are no longer persona grata in Italy or France. And if that were all--
Yet on a gala night at the Hotel des Trois Mondes a new arrival would scarcely detect the current beneath the surface. Watching the dancing there would be a gallery of Englishwomen of a certain age, with neckbands, dyed hair and faces powdered pinkish gray; a gallery of American women of a certain age, with snowy-white transformations, black dresses and lips of cherry red. And most of them with their eyes swinging right or left from time to time to rest upon the ubiquitous Fifi. The entire hotel had been made aware that Fifi had reached the age of eighteen that night.
Fifi Schwartz. An exquisitely, radiantly beautiful Jewess whose fine, high forehead sloped gently up to where her hair, bordering it like an armorial shield, burst into lovelocks and waves and curlicues of soft dark red. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet and shining; the color of her cheeks and lips was real, breaking close to the surface from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body was so assertively adequate that one cynic had been heard to remark that she always looked as if she had nothing on underneath her dresses; but he was probably wrong, for Fifi had been as thoroughly equipped for beauty by man as by God. Such dresses--cerise for Chanel, mauve for Molyneux, pink for Patou; dozens of them, tight at the hips, swaying, furling, folding just an eighth of an inch off the dancing floor. Tonight she was a woman of thirty in dazzling black, with long white gloves dripping from her forearms. “Such ghastly taste,” the whispers said. “The stage, the shop window, the manikins’ parade. What can her mother be thinking? But, then, look at her mother.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 273