“Maybe you didn’t want it.”
“I thought I did when I was young.”
The mare neighed peremptorily and Bess backed out of the car.
“So that’s the story, Lew Lowrie, of the last Gunther girl. You always did have a sort of yen for us, didn’t you?”
“Didn’t I! If I could possibly stay in Baltimore, I’d insist on coming to your wedding.”
At the lost expression on her face, he wondered to whom she was handing herself, a very precious self. He knew more about people now, and he felt the steel beneath the softness in her, the girders showing through the gentle curves of cheek and chin. She was an exquisite person, and he hoped that her husband would be a good man.
When she had ridden off into a green lane, he drove tentatively toward Baltimore. This was the end of a human experience and it released old images that regrouped themselves about him--if he had married one of the sisters; supposing--The past, slipping away under the wheels of his car, crunched awake his acuteness.
“Perhaps I was always an intruder in that family. . . . But why on earth was that girl riding in bedroom slippers?”
At the crossroads store he stopped to get cigarettes. A young clerk searched the case with country slowness.
“Big wedding up at the Gunther place,” Lew remarked.
“Hah? Miss Bess getting married?”
“Next week. The wedding party’s there now.”
“Well, I’ll be dog! Wonder what they’re going to sleep on, since Mark H. Bourne took the furniture away?”
“What’s that? What?”
“Month ago Mark H. Bourne took all the furniture and everything else while Miss Bess was out riding--they mortgaged on it just before Gunther died. They say around here she ain’t got a stitch except them riding clothes. Mark H. Bourne was good and sore. His claim was they sold off all the best pieces of furniture without his knowing it. . . . Now, that’s ten cents I owe you.”
“What do she and her aunt live on?”
“Never heard about an aunt--I only been here a year. She works the truck garden herself; all she buys from us is sugar, salt and coffee.”
Anything was possible these times, yet Lew wondered what incredibly fantastic pride had inspired her to tell that lie.
He turned his car around and drove back to the Gunther place. It was a desperately forlorn house he came to, and a jungled garden; one side of the veranda had slipped from the brick pillars and sloped to the ground; a shingle job, begun and abandoned, rotted paintless on the roof, a broken pane gaped from the library window.
Lew went in without knocking. A voice challenged him from the dining room and he walked toward it, his feet loud on the rugless floor, through rooms empty of stick and book, empty of all save casual dust. Bess Gunther, wearing the cheapest of house dresses, rose from the packing box on which she sat, with fright in her eyes; a tin spoon rattled on the box she was using as a table.
“Have you been kidding me?” he demanded. “Are you actually living like this?”
“It’s you.” She smiled in relief; then, with visible effort, she spurred herself into amenities:
“Take a box, Mr. Lowrie. Have a canned-goods box--they’re superior; the grain is better. And welcome to the open spaces. Have a cigar, a glass of champagne, have some rabbit stew and meet my fiancé.”
“Stop that.”
“All right,” she agreed.
“Why didn’t you go and live with some relatives?”
“Haven’t got any relatives. Jean’s in China.”
“What are you doing? What do you expect to happen?”
“I was waiting for you, I guess.”
“What do you mean?”
“You always seemed to turn up. I thought if you turned up, I’d make a play for you. But when it came to the point, I thought I’d better lie. I seem to lack the S.A. my sisters had.”
Lew pulled her up from the box and held her with his fingers by her waist.
“Not to me.”
In the hour since Lew had met her on the road the vitality seemed to have gone out of her; she looked up at him very tired.
“So you liked the Gunthers,” she whispered. “You liked us all.”
Lew tried to think, but his heart beat so quick that he could only sit her back on the box and pace along the empty walls.
“We’ll get married,” he said. “I don’t know whether I love you--I don’t even know you--I know the notion of your being in want or trouble makes me physically sick.” Suddenly he went down on both knees in front of her so that she would not seem so unbearably small and helpless. “Miss Bess Gunther, so it was you I was meant to love all the while.”
“Don’t be so anxious about it,” she laughed. “I’m not used to being loved. I wouldn’t know what to do; I never got the trick of it.” She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. “So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.”
He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. “Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I’m not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don’t move suddenly.”
It was the same old story of reserve Lew could not fathom, motives reaching back into a past he did not share. With the three girls, facts seemed to reveal themselves precipitately, pushing up through the gay surface; they were always unsuspected things, currents and predilections alien to a man who had been able to shoot in a straight line always.
“I was the conservative sister,” Bess said. “I wasn’t any less pleasure loving but with three girls, somebody has to play the boy, and gradually that got to be my part. . . . Yes, touch me like that. Touch my cheek. I want to be touched; I want to be held. And I’m glad it’s you; but you’ve got to go slow; you’ve got to be careful. I’m afraid I’m the kind of person that’s forever. I’ll live with you and die for you, but I never knew what halfway meant. . . . Yes, that’s the wrist. Do you like it? I’ve had a lot of fun looking at myself in the last month, because there’s one long mirror upstairs that was too big to take out.”
Lew stood up. “All right, we’ll start like that. I’ll be so healthy that I’ll make you all healthy again.”
“Yes, like that,” she agreed.
“Suppose we begin by setting fire to this house.”
“Oh, no!” She took him seriously. “In the first place, it’s insured. In the second place--”
“All right, we’ll just get out. We’ll get married in Baltimore, or Ellicott City if you’d rather.”
“How about Juniper? I can’t go off and leave her.”
“We’ll leave her with the young man at the store.”
“The house isn’t mine. It’s all mortgaged away, but they let me live here--I guess it was remorse after they took even our old music, and our old scrapbooks. They didn’t have a chance of getting a tenant, anyhow.”
Minute by minute, Lew found out more about her, and liked what he found, but he saw that the love in her was all incrusted with the sacrificial years, and that he would have to be gardener to it for a while. The task seemed attractive.
“You lovely,” he told her. “You lovely! We’ll survive, you and I because you’re so nice and I’m so convinced about it.”
“And about Juniper--will she survive if we go away like this?”
“Juniper too.”
She frowned and then smiled--and this time really smiled--and said: “Seems to me, you’re falling in love.”
“Speak for yourself. My opinion is that this is going to be the best thing ever happened.”
“I’m going to help. I insist on--”
They went out together--Bess changed into her riding habit, but there wasn’t another article that she wanted to bring with her. Backing through the clogging weeds of the garden, Lew looked at the house over his shoulder. “Next week or so we’ll decide what to do about that.”
It was a bright sunset--the creep of rosy light that played across the blue fenders of the car and across the
ir crazily happy faces moved across the house too--across the paralyzed door of the ice house, the rusting tin gutters, the loose-swinging shutter, the cracked cement of the front walk, the burned place of last year’s rubbish back of the tennis court. Whatever its further history, the whole human effort of collaboration was done now. The purpose of the house was achieved--finished and folded--it was an effort toward some commonweal, an effort difficult to estimate, so closely does it press against us still.
NEWS OF PARIS--FIFTEEN YEARS AGO
Furioso (Winter, 1947)
“We shouldn’t both be coming from the same direction,” Ruth said. “A lot of people know we’re at the same hotel.”
Henry Haven Dell smiled and then they both laughed. It was a bright morning in April and they had just turned off the Champs Elysées toward the English Church.
“I’ll walk on the other side of the street,” he said, “and then we’ll meet at the door.”
“No, we oughtn’t even to sit together. I’m a countess--laugh it off but anything I do will be in that damn ‘Boulevardier.’“
They stopped momentarily.
“But I hate to leave you,” he said. “You look so lovely.”
“I hate to leave you too,” she whispered. “I never knew how nice you were. But good-bye.”
Half way across the street, he stopped to a great screech of auto horns playing Debussy.
“We’re lunching,” he called back.
She nodded, but continued to walk looking straight ahead on her sidewalk. Henry Haven Dell continued his crossing and then walked quickly, from time to time throwing a happy glance at the figure across the way.
--I wonder if they have telephones in churches, he thought. After the ceremony he would see.
He stood in a rear row, catching Ruth’s eye from time to time, teasing her. It was a very fashionable wedding. As the bride and groom came down the aisle the bride caught his arm and took him with them down the street.
“Isn’t it fun,” the bride said. “And just think, Henry, I almost married you.”
Her husband laughed.
--at what, Henry thought. I could have had her if she’d really been the one.
Aloud he said:
“I have to telephone before the reception.”
“The hotel’s full of phones. Come and stand beside me. I want you to be the first to know.”
He got to the phone only after an hour.
“The Paris is delayed,” said the Compagnie Transatlantique. “We can’t give you an exact hour. Not before four.”
“Oh, no, Monsieur--not possibly.”
Good. In the lobby he joined a party of wedding guests and repaired to the Ritz on the man’s part of the bar. You couldn’t be with women incessantly.
“How long will you be in Paris, Henry?”
“That’s not a fair question. I can always tell you how long I’ll be in New York or London.”
He had two cocktails--each at a different table. A little before one when the confusion and din were at their height he went out into the Rue Cambon. There was not a taxi to be had--the doormen were chasing them all the way up to the Rue de Rivoli. One sailed into port with a doorman on the running board but a lovely little brunette in pale green was already waiting.
“Oh, look,” begged Henry. “You’re not by any chance going near the Bois?”
He was getting into the cab as he spoke. His morning coat was a sort of introduction. She nodded.
“I’m lunching there.”
“I’m Henry Dell,” he said, lifting his hat.
“Oh, it’s you--at last,” she said eagerly. “I’m Bessie Wing--born Leighton. I know all your cousins.”
“Isn’t this nice,” he exclaimed and she agreed.
“I’m breaking my engagement at luncheon,” she said. “And I’ll name you.”
“Really breaking your engagement?”
“At the Café Dauphine--from one to two.”
“I’ll be there--from time to time I’ll look at you.”
“What I want to know is--does he take me home afterward. I’m not Emily Posted.”
On impulse he said:
“No, I do. You may be faint or something. I’ll keep an eye on you.”
She shook her head.
“No--it wouldn’t be reverend this afternoon,” she said. “But I’ll be here weeks.”
“This afternoon,” he said. “You see, there’s a boat coming in.”
After a moment’s reluctance she answered:
“I do almost know you. Leave it this way. If you see me talk shaking a spoon back and forth I’ll meet you in front in five minutes.”
Ruth was waiting at table. Henry talked lazily to her for ten minutes, watching her face and the spring light upon the table. Then with a casual glance he located Bessie Wing across the room, deep in conversation with a man of twenty-six, his own age.
“We’ll have this afternoon--and then good-bye,” said Ruth.
“Not even this afternoon,” he answered solemnly, “I’m meeting the boat in an hour.”
“I’m sorry, Henry. Hasn’t it been fun?”
“Lots of fun. So much fun.” He felt sincerely sad.
“It’s just as well,” said Ruth with a little effort, “I have fittings that I’ve postponed. Remember me when you go to the Opera or out to St.-Germain.”
“I’ll do my best to forget you.”
A little later he saw the spoon waving.
“Let me go first,” he said. “I somehow couldn’t bear to sit here and see you walk off.”
“All right, I’ll sit here and think.”
Bessie was waiting under a pear tree in front--they crammed hastily into a taxi like escaping children.
“Was it bad?” he asked. “I watched you. There were tears in his eyes.”
She nodded.
“It was pretty bad.”
“Why did you break it?”
“Because my first marriage was a flop. There were so many men around that when I married I didn’t know who I loved any more. So there didn’t seem to be any point if you know what I mean. Why should it have been Hershell Wing?”
“How about this other man?”
“It would have been the same way only now it would be my fault because I know.”
They sat in the cool American drawing room of her apartment and had coffee.
“For anyone so beautiful--” he said, “there must be many times like those. When there isn’t a man--there’s just men.”
“There was a man once,” she said, “when I was sixteen. He looked like you. He didn’t love me.”
Henry went and sat beside her on the fauteuil.
“That happens too,” said Henry. “Perhaps the safest way is ‘Ships that pass in the night.’“
She held back a little.
“I don’t want to be old-fashioned but we don’t know each other.”
“Sure we do--remember--we met this morning.”
She laughed.
“Sedative for a broken engagement!”
“The specific one,” he said.
It was quiet in the room. The peacocks in the draperies stirred in the April wind.
Later they stood on her balcony arm in arm and looked over a sea of green leaves to the Arc de Triomphe.
“Where is the phone?” he asked suddenly. “Never mind--I know.”
He went inside, picked up the phone beside her bed.
“Compagnie Générale? . . . How about the boat train from the Paris?”
“Oh, she has not docked in Havre yet, monsieur. Call in several hours. The delay has been at Southampton.”
Returning to the balcony Henry said:
“All right--let’s do go to the Exposition.”
“I have to, you see,” she said. “This woman, Mary Tolliver I told you about--she’s the only person I can go to with what I did at luncheon. She’ll understand.”
“Would she understand about us too?”
“She’ll never know. She�
�s been an ideal of mine since I was sixteen.”
She was not much older than Bessie, Henry thought as they met her in the Crillon lobby--she was a golden brown woman, very trim and what the French call “soignée”--which means washed and something more. She had an American painter and an Austrian sculptor with her and Henry gathered that they were both a little in love with her, or else exploiting her for money--money evident in the Renault town car that took them to the exhibition of decorative arts that ringed the Seine.
They walked along through the show, passed the chromium rails, the shining economy of steel that was to change the furniture of an era. Henry, once art editor of the Harvard Lampoon, was not without a seeing eye but he let the painter and sculptor talk. When they sat down for an apéritif afterwards, Bessie sat very close to him--Mary Tolliver smiled and saw. She looked appraisingly at Henry.
“Have you two known each other long?” she asked.
“Years,” said Henry. “She is a sister to me. And now I must leave you all--after a charming afternoon.”
Bessie looked at him reproachfully, started to rise with him--controlled herself.
“I told you there was a boat,” he said gently.
“Ship,” she answered.
As he walked away he saw the painter move to the chair he had vacated by her side.
The Paris was still delayed at Southampton and Henry considered what to do. When you have been doing nothing in a pleasant way a long time it is difficult to fill in stray hours. More difficult than for one who works. In the country he might have exercised--here there were only faces over tables. And there must continue to be faces over tables.
--I am become a contemptible drone, he thought. I must give at least a thought to duty.
He taxied over to the left bank--to the Rue Nôtre-Dame des Champs--to call on a child he had endowed just after the war. A beautiful little orphan who begged in front of the Café du Dôme, Henry had sent her for three years to convent. He saw her once or twice each summer--not now for almost a year.
“Hélène is out,” said a new concierge whom Henry did not know. “How should I guess where she is? At the Café des Lilas? At Lipps?”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 287