“But tell me why you--” He stopped himself in surprise. He had been about to ask her to explain a lot of other things--to say what was clean and unclean, what was worth knowing and what was only words--to open up a new gate to life. Looking for a last time into her eyes, full of cool secrets, he realized how much he was going to miss these mornings, without knowing whether it was the girl who interested him or what she represented of his ever-new, ever-changing country.
“All right,” he told Choupette that night. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”
“For Paris?”
“For America.”
“You mean I’m to go too? And the children?”
“Yes.”
“But that’s absurd,” she protested. “Last time it cost more than we spend in six months here. And then there were only three of us. Now that we’ve managed to get ahead at last--”
“That’s just it. I’m tired of getting ahead on your skimping and saving and going without dresses. I’ve got to make more money. American men are incomplete without money.”
“You mean we’ll stay?”
“It’s very possible.”
They looked at each other, and against her will, Choupette understood. For eight years, by a process of ceaseless adaptation, he had lived her life, substituting for the moral confusion of his own country, the tradition, the wisdom, the sophistication of France. After that matter in Paris, it had seemed the bigger part to understand and to forgive, to cling to the home as something apart from the vagaries of love. Only now, glowing with a good health that he had not experienced for years, did he discover his true reaction. It had released him. For all his sense of loss, he possessed again the masculine self he had handed over to the keeping of a wise little Provençal girl eight years ago.
She struggled on for a moment.
“You’ve got a good position and we really have plenty of money. You know we can live cheaper here.”
“The boys are growing up now, and I’m not sure I want to educate them in France.”
“But that’s all decided,” she wailed. “You admit yourself that education in America is superficial and full of silly fads. Do you want them to be like those two dummies on the beach?”
“Perhaps I was thinking more of myself, Choupette. Men just out of college who brought their letters of credit into the bank eight years ago, travel about with ten-thousand-dollar cars now. I didn’t use to care. I used to tell myself that I had a better place to escape to, just because we knew that lobster armoricaine was really lobster americaine. Perhaps I haven’t that feeling any more.”
She stiffened. “If that’s it--”
“It’s up to you. We’ll make a new start.”
Choupette thought for a moment. “Of course my sister can take over the apartment.”
“Of course.” He waxed enthusiastic. “And there are sure to be things that’ll tickle you--we’ll have a nice car, for instance, and one of those electric ice boxes, and all sorts of funny machines to take the place of servants. It won’t be bad. You’ll learn to play golf and talk about children all day. Then there are the movies.”
Choupette groaned.
“It’s going to be pretty awful at first,” he admitted, “but there are still a few good nigger cooks, and we’ll probably have two bathrooms.”
“I am unable to use more than one at a time.”
“You’ll learn.”
A month afterward, when the beautiful white island floated toward them in the Narrows, Henry’s throat grew constricted with the rest and he wanted to cry out to Choupette and all foreigners, “Now, you see!”
III
Almost three years later, Henry Marston walked out of his office in the Calumet Tobacco Company and along the hall to Judge Waterbury’s suite. His face was older, with a suspicion of grimness, and a slight irrepressible heaviness of body was not concealed by his white linen suit.
“Busy, judge?”
“Come in, Henry.”
“I’m going to the shore tomorrow to swim off this weight. I wanted to talk to you before I go.”
“Children going too?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Choupette’ll go abroad, I suppose.”
“Not this year. I think she’s coming with me, if she doesn’t stay here in Richmond.”
The judge thought: “There isn’t a doubt but what he knows everything.” He waited.
“I wanted to tell you, judge, that I’m resigning the end of September.”
The judge’s chair creaked backward as he brought his feet to the floor.
“You’re quitting, Henry?”
“Not exactly. Walter Ross wants to come home; let me take his place in France.”
“Boy, do you know what we pay Walter Ross?”
“Seven thousand.”
“And you’re getting twenty-five.”
“You’ve probably heard I’ve made something in the market,” said Henry deprecatingly.
“I’ve heard everything between a hundred thousand and half a million.”
“Somewhere in between.”
“Then why a seven-thousand-dollar job? Is Choupette homesick?”
“No, I think Choupette likes it over here. She’s adapted herself amazingly.”
“He knows,” the judge thought. “He wants to get away.”
After Henry had gone, he looked up at the portrait of his grandfather on the wall. In those days the matter would have been simpler. Dueling pistols in the old Wharton meadow at dawn. It would be to Henry’s advantage if things were like that today.
Henry’s chauffeur dropped him in front of a Georgian house in a new suburban section. Leaving his hat in the hall, he went directly out on the side veranda.
From the swaying canvas swing Choupette looked up with a polite smile. Save for a certain alertness of feature and a certain indefinable knack of putting things on, she might have passed for an American. Southernisms overlay her French accent with a quaint charm; there were still college boys who rushed her like a débutante at the Christmas dances.
Henry nodded at Mr. Charles Wiese, who occupied a wicker chair, with a gin fizz at his elbow.
“I want to talk to you,” he said, sitting down.
Wiese’s glance and Choupette’s crossed quickly before coming to rest on him.
“You’re free, Wiese,” Henry said. “Why don’t you and Choupette get married?”
Choupette sat up, her eyes flashing.
“Now wait.” Henry turned back to Wiese. “I’ve been letting this thing drift for about a year now, while I got my financial affairs in shape. But this last brilliant idea of yours makes me feel a little uncomfortable, a little sordid, and I don’t want to feel that way.”
“Just what do you mean?” Wiese inquired.
“On my last trip to New York you had me shadowed. I presume it was with the intention of getting divorce evidence against me. It wasn’t a success.”
“I don’t know where you got such an idea in your head, Marston; you--”
“Don’t lie!”
“Suh--” Wiese began, but Henry interrupted impatiently:
“Now don’t ‘Suh’ me, and don’t try to whip yourself up into a temper. You’re not talking to a scared picker full of hookworm. I don’t want a scene; my emotions aren’t sufficiently involved. I want to arrange a divorce.”
“Why do you bring it up like this?” Choupette cried, breaking into French. “Couldn’t we talk of it alone, if you think you have so much against me?”
“Wait a minute; this might as well be settled now,” Wiese said. “Choupette does want a divorce. Her life with you is unsatisfactory, and the only reason she has kept on is because she’s an idealist. You don’t seem to appreciate that fact, but it’s true; she couldn’t bring herself to break up her home.”
“Very touching.” Henry looked at Choupette with bitter amusement.
“But let’s come down to facts. I’d like to close up this matter before I go back to France.”
Ag
ain Wiese and Choupette exchanged a look.
“It ought to be simple,” Wiese said. “Choupette doesn’t want a cent of your money.”
“I know. What she wants is the children. The answer is, You can’t have the children.”
“How perfectly outrageous!” Choupette cried. “Do you imagine for a minute I’m going to give up my children?”
“What’s your idea, Marston?” demanded Wiese. “To take them back to France and make them expatriates like yourself?”
“Hardly that. They’re entered for St. Regis School and then for Yale. And I haven’t any idea of not letting them see their mother whenever she so desires--judging from the past two years, it won’t be often. But I intend to have their entire legal custody.”
“Why?” they demanded together.
“Because of the home.”
“What the devil do you mean?”
“I’d rather apprentice them to a trade than have them brought up in the sort of home yours and Choupette’s is going to be.”
There was a moment’s silence. Suddenly Choupette picked up her glass, dashed the contents at Henry and collapsed on the settee, passionately sobbing.
Henry dabbed his face with his handkerchief and stood up.
“I was afraid of that,” he said, “but I think I’ve made my position clear.”
He went up to his room and lay down on the bed. In a thousand wakeful hours during the past year he had fought over in his mind the problem of keeping his boys without taking those legal measures against Choupette that he could not bring himself to take. He knew that she wanted the children only because without them she would be suspect, even déclassée, to her family in France; but with that quality of detachment peculiar to old stock, Henry recognized this as a perfectly legitimate motive. Furthermore, no public scandal must touch the mother of his sons--it was this that had rendered his challenge so ineffectual this afternoon.
When difficulties became insurmountable, inevitable, Henry sought surcease in exercise. For three years, swimming had been a sort of refuge, and he turned to it as one man to music or another to drink. There was a point when he would resolutely stop thinking and go to the Virginia coast for a week to wash his mind in the water. Far out past the breakers he could survey the green-and-brown line of the Old Dominion with the pleasant impersonality of a porpoise. The burden of his wretched marriage fell away with the buoyant tumble of his body among the swells, and he would begin to move in a child’s dream of space. Sometimes remembered playmates of his youth swam with him; sometimes, with his two sons beside him, he seemed to be setting off along the bright pathway to the moon. Americans, he liked to say, should be born with fins, and perhaps they were--perhaps money was a form of fin. In England property begot a strong place sense, but Americans, restless and with shallow roots, needed fins and wings. There was even a recurrent idea in America about an education that would leave out history and the past, that should be a sort of equipment for aerial adventure, weighed down by none of the stowaways of inheritance or tradition.
Thinking of this in the water the next afternoon brought Henry’s mind to the children; he turned and at a slow trudgen started back toward shore. Out of condition, he rested, panting, at the raft, and glancing up, he saw familiar eyes. In a moment he was talking with the girl he had tried to rescue four years ago.
He was overjoyed. He had not realized how vividly he remembered her. She was a Virginian--he might have guessed it abroad--the laziness, the apparent casualness that masked an unfailing courtesy and attention; a good form devoid of forms was based on kindness and consideration. Hearing her name for the first time, he recognized it--an Eastern Shore name, “good” as his own.
Lying in the sun, they talked like old friends, not about races and manners and the things that Henry brooded over Choupette, but rather as if they naturally agreed about those things; they talked about what they liked themselves and about what was fun. She showed him a sitting-down, standing-up dive from the high springboard, and he emulated her inexpertly--that was fun. They talked about eating soft-shelled crabs, and she told him how, because of the curious acoustics of the water, one could lie here and be diverted by conversations on the hotel porch. They tried it and heard two ladies over their tea say:
“Now, at the Lido--”
“Now, at Asbury Park--”
“Oh, my dear, he just scratched and scratched all night; he just scratched and scratched--”
“My dear, at Deauville--”
“--scratched and scratched all night.”
After a while the sea got to be that very blue color of four o’clock, and the girl told him how, at nineteen, she had been divorced from a Spaniard who locked her in the hotel suite when he went out at night.
“It was one of those things,” she said lightly. “But speaking more cheerfully, how’s your beautiful wife? And the boys--did they learn to float? Why can’t you all dine with me tonight?”
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. He must do nothing, however trivial, to furnish Choupette weapons, and with a feeling of disgust, it occurred to him that he was possibly being watched this afternoon. Nevertheless, he was glad of his caution when she unexpectedly arrived at the hotel for dinner that night.
After the boys had gone to bed, they faced each other over coffee on the hotel veranda.
“Will you kindly explain why I’m not entitled to a half share in my own children?” Choupette began. “It is not like you to be vindictive, Henry.”
It was hard for Henry to explain. He told her again that she could have the children when she wanted them, but that he must exercise entire control over them because of certain old-fashioned convictions--watching her face grow harder, minute by minute, he saw there was no use, and broke off. She made a scornful sound.
“I wanted to give you a chance to be reasonable before Charles arrives.”
Henry sat up. “Is he coming here this evening?”
“Happily. And I think perhaps your selfishness is going to have a jolt, Henry. You’re not dealing with a woman now.”
When Wiese walked out on the porch an hour later, Henry saw that his pale lips were like chalk; there was a deep flush on his forehead and hard confidence in his eyes. He was cleared for action and he wasted no time. “We’ve got something to say to each other, suh, and since I’ve got a motorboat here, perhaps that’d be the quietest place to say it.”
Henry nodded coolly; five minutes later the three of them were headed out into Hampton Roads on the wide fairway of the moonlight. It was a tranquil evening, and half a mile from shore Wiese cut down the engine to a mild throbbing, so that they seemed to drift without will or direction through the bright water. His voice broke the stillness abruptly:
“Marston, I’m going to talk to you straight from the shoulder. I love Choupette and I’m not apologizing for it. These things have happened before in this world. I guess you understand that. The only difficulty is this matter of the custody of Choupette’s children. You seem determined to try and take them away from the mother that bore them and raised them”--Wiese’s words became more clearly articulated, as if they came from a wider mouth--”but you left one thing out of your calculations, and that’s me. Do you happen to realize that at this moment I’m one of the richest men in Virginia?”
“I’ve heard as much.”
“Well, money is power, Marston. I repeat, suh, money is power.”
“I’ve heard that too. In fact, you’re a bore, Wiese.” Even by the moon Henry could see the crimson deepen on his brow.
“You’ll hear it again, suh. Yesterday you took us by surprise and I was unprepared for your brutality to Choupette. But this morning I received a letter from Paris that puts the matter in a new light. It is a statement by a specialist in mental diseases, declaring you to be of unsound mind, and unfit to have the custody of children. The specialist is the one who attended you in your nervous breakdown four years ago.”
Henry laughed i
ncredulously, and looked at Choupette, half expecting her to laugh, too, but she had turned her face away, breathing quickly through parted lips. Suddenly he realized that Wiese was telling the truth--that by some extraordinary bribe he had obtained such a document and fully intended to use it.
For a moment Henry reeled as if from a material blow. He listened to his own voice saying, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard,” and to Wiese’s answer: “They don’t always tell people when they have mental troubles.”
Suddenly Henry wanted to laugh, and the terrible instant when he had wondered if there could be some shred of truth in the allegation passed. He turned to Choupette, but again she avoided his eyes.
“How could you, Choupette?”
“I want my children,” she began, but Wiese broke in quickly:
“If you’d been halfway fair, Marston, we wouldn’t have resorted to this step.”
“Are you trying to pretend you arranged this scurvy trick since yesterday afternoon?”
“I believe in being prepared, but if you had been reasonable; in fact, if you will be reasonable, this opinion needn’t be used.” His voice became suddenly almost paternal, almost kind: “Be wise, Marston. On your side there’s an obstinate prejudice; on mine there are forty million dollars. Don’t fool yourself. Let me repeat, Marston, that money is power. You were abroad so long that perhaps you’re inclined to forget that fact. Money made this country, built its great and glorious cities, created its industries, covered it with an iron network of railroads. It’s money that harnesses the forces of Nature, creates the machine and makes it go when money says go, and stop when money says stop.”
As though interpreting this as a command, the engine gave forth a sudden hoarse sound and came to rest.
“What is it?” demanded Choupette.
“It’s nothing.” Wiese pressed the self-starter with his foot. “I repeat, Marston, that money--The battery is dry. One minute while I spin the wheel.”
He spun it for the best part of fifteen minutes while the boat meandered about in a placid little circle.
“Choupette, open that drawer behind you and see if there isn’t a rocket.”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 296