She had stayed once at the Ritz — once only. The Manhattan, where they usually registered, had been torn down. She knew that she could never induce her father to afford the Ritz again.
After a moment she borrowed a pencil and paper and scribbled a notification “To Mr. Bowman in the grill” that he was expected to drive Mrs. Rogers and her guest home, “by request” — this last underlined. She hoped that he would be able to do so with dignity. This note she sent by a waiter to her father. Before the next dance began it was returned to her with a scrawled O. K. and her father’s initials.
The remainder of the evening passed quickly. Scott Kimberly cut in on her as often as time permitted, giving her those comforting assurances of her enduring beauty which not without a whimsical pathos she craved. He laughed at her also, and she was not so sure that she liked that. In common with all vague people, she was unaware that she was vague. She did not entirely comprehend when Scott Kimberly told her that her personality would endure long after she was too old to care whether it endured or not.
She liked best to talk about New York, and each of their interrupted conversations gave her a picture or a memory of the metropolis on which she speculated as she looked over the shoulder of Jerry O’Rourke or Carty Braden or some other beau, to whom, as to all of them, she was comfortably anesthetic. At midnight she sent another note to her father, saying that Mrs. Rogers and Mrs. Rogers’ guest would meet him immediately on the porch by the main driveway. Then, hoping for the best, she walked out into the starry night and was assisted by Jerry O’Rourke into his roadster.
III
“Good night, Yanci.” With her late escort she was standing on the curbstone in front of the rented stucco house where she lived. Mr. O’Rourke was attempting to put significance into his lingering rendition of her name. For weeks he had been straining to boost their relations almost forcibly onto a sentimental plane; but Yanci, with her vague impassivity, which was a defense against almost anything, had brought to naught his efforts. Jerry O’Rourke was an old story. His family had money; but he — he worked in a brokerage house along with most of the rest of his young generation. He sold bonds — bonds were now the thing; real estate was once the thing — in the days of the boom; then automobiles were the thing. Bonds were the thing now. Young men sold them who had nothing else to go into.
“Don’t bother to come up, please.” Then as he put his car into gear, “Call me up soon!”
A minute later he turned the corner of the moonlit street and disappeared, his cut-out resounding voluminously through the night as it declared that the rest of two dozen weary inhabitants was of no concern to his gay meanderings.
Yanci sat down thoughtfully upon the porch steps. She had no key and must wait for her father’s arrival. Five minutes later a roadster turned into the street, and approaching with an exaggerated caution stopped in front of the Rogers’ large house next door. Relieved, Yanci arose and strolled slowly down the walk. The door of the car had swung open and Mrs. Rogers, assisted by Scott Kimberly, had alighted safely upon the sidewalk; but to Yanci’s surprise Scott Kimberly, after escorting Mrs. Rogers to her steps, returned to the car. Yanci was close enough to notice that he took the driver’s seat. As he drew up at the Bowman’s curbstone Yanci saw that her father was occupying the far corner, fighting with ludicrous dignity against a sleep that had come upon him. She groaned. The fatal last hour had done its work — Tom Bowman was once more hors de combat.
“Hello,” cried Yanci as she reached the curb.
“Yanci,” muttered her parent, simulating, unsuccessfully, a brisk welcome. His lips were curved in an ingratiating grin.
“Your father wasn’t feeling quite fit, so he let me drive home,” explained Scott cheerfully as he got himself out and came up to her.
“Nice little car. Had it long?”
Yanci laughed, but without humor.
“Is he paralyzed?”
“Is who paralyze’?” demanded the figure in the car with an offended sigh.
Scott was standing by the car.
“Can I help you out, sir?”
“I c’n get out. I c’n get out,” insisted Mr. Bowman. “Just step a li’l’ out my way. Someone must have given me some ‘stremely bad whisk’.”
“You mean a lot of people must have given you some,” retorted Yanci in cold unsympathy.
Mr. Bowman reached the curb with astonishing ease; but this was a deceitful success, for almost immediately he clutched at a handle of air perceptible only to himself, and was saved by Scott’s quickly proffered arm. Followed by the two men, Yanci walked toward the house in a furor of embarrassment. Would the young man think that such scenes went on every night? It was chiefly her own presence that made it humiliating for Yanci. Had her father been carried to bed by two butlers each evening she might even have been proud of the fact that he could afford such dissipation; but to have it thought that she assisted, that she was burdened with the worry and the care! And finally she was annoyed with Scott Kimberly for being there, and for his officiousness in helping to bring her father into the house.
Reaching the low porch of tapestry brick, Yanci searched in Tom Bowman’s vest for the key and unlocked the front door. A minute later the master of the house was deposited in an easy-chair.
“Thanks very much,” he said, recovering for a moment. “Sit down. Like a drink? Yanci, get some crackers and cheese, if there’s any, won’t you, dear?”
At the unconscious coolness of this Scott and Yanci laughed.
“It’s your bedtime, Father,” she said, her anger struggling with diplomacy.
“Give me my guitar,” he suggested, “and I’ll play you tune.”
Except on such occasions as this, he had not touched his guitar for twenty years. Yanci turned to Scott.
“He’ll be fine now. Thanks a lot. He’ll fall asleep in a minute and when I wake him he’ll go to bed like a lamb.”
“Well — — “
They strolled together out the door.
“Sleepy?” he asked.
“No, not a bit.”
“Then perhaps you’d better let me stay here with you a few minutes until you see if he’s all right. Mrs. Rogers gave me a key so I can get in without disturbing her.”
“It’s quite all right,” protested Yanci. “I don’t mind a bit, and he won’t be any trouble. He must have taken a glass too much, and this whisky we have out here — you know! This has happened once before — last year,” she added.
Her words satisfied her; as an explanation it seemed to have a convincing ring.
“Can I sit down for a moment, anyway?” They sat side by side upon a wicker porch setee.
“I’m thinking of staying over a few days,” Scott said.
“How lovely!” Her voice had resumed its die-away note.
“Cousin Pete Rogers wasn’t well to-day, but tomorrow he’s going duck shooting, and he wants me to go with him.”
“Oh, how thrilling! I’ve always been mad to go, and Father’s always promised to take me, but he never has.”
“We’re going to be gone about three days, and then I thought I’d come back and stay over the next week-end — — “ He broke off suddenly and bent forward in a listening attitude.
“Now what on earth is that?”
The sounds of music were proceeding brokenly from the room they had lately left — a ragged chord on a guitar and half a dozen feeble starts.
“It’s father!” cried Yanci.
And now a voice drifted out to them, drunken and murmurous, taking the long notes with attempted melancholy:
Sing a song of cities,
Ridin on a rail,
A niggah’s ne’er so happy
As when he’s out-a jail.
“How terrible!” exclaimed Yanci. “He’ll wake up everybody in the block.”
The chorus ended, the guitar jangled again, then gave out a last harsh sprang! and was still. A moment later these disturbances were followed by a low but quite defini
te snore. Mr. Bowman, having indulged his musical proclivity, had dropped off to sleep.
“Let’s go to ride,” suggested Yanci impatiently. “This is too hectic for me.”
Scott arose with alacrity and they walked down to the car.
“Where’ll we go?” she wondered.
“I don’t care.”
“We might go up half a block to Crest Avenue — that’s our show street — and then ride out to the river boulevard.”
IV
As they turned into Crest Avenue the new cathedral, immense and unfinished, in imitation of a cathedral left unfinished by accident in some little Flemish town, squatted just across the way like a plump white bulldog on its haunches. The ghosts of four moonlit apostles looked down at them wanly from wall niches still littered with the white, dusty trash of the builders. The cathedral inaugurated Crest Avenue. After it came the great brownstone mass built by R. R. Comerford, the flour king, followed by a half mile of pretentious stone houses put up in the gloomy 90’s. These were adorned with monstrous driveways and porte-cocheres which had once echoed to the hoofs of good horses and with huge circular windows that corseted the second stories.
The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street. Beyond the first half mile it became newer, essayed ventures in terraced lawns, in concoctions of stucco or in granite mansions which imitated through a variety of gradual refinements the marble contours of the Petit Trianon. The houses of this phase rushed by the roadster for a succession of minutes; then the way turned and the car was headed directly into the moonlight which swept toward it like the lamp of some gigantic motorcycle far up the avenue.
Past the low Corinthian lines of the Christian Science Temple, past a block of dark frame horrors, a deserted row of grim red brick — an unfortunate experiment of the late 90’s — then new houses again, bright-red brick now, with trimmings of white, black iron fences and hedges binding flowery lawns. These swept by, faded, passed, enjoying their moment of grandeur; then waiting there in the moonlight to be outmoded as had the frame, cupolaed mansions of lower town and the brownstone piles of older Crest Avenue in their turn.
The roofs lowered suddenly, the lots narrowed, the houses shrank up in size and shaded off into bungalows. These held the street for the last mile, to the bend in the river which terminated the prideful avenue at the statue of Chelsea Arbuthnot. Arbuthnot was the first governor — and almost the last of Anglo-Saxon blood.
All the way thus far Yanci had not spoken, absorbed still in the annoyance of the evening, yet soothed somehow by the fresh air of Northern November that rushed by them. She must take her fur coat out of storage next day, she thought.
“Where are we now?”
As they slowed down, Scott looked up curiously at the pompous stone figure, clear in the crisp moonlight, with one hand on a book and the forefinger of the other pointing, as though with reproachful symbolism, directly at some construction work going on in the street.
“This is the end of Crest Avenue,” said Yanci, turning to him. “This is our show street.”
“A museum of American architectural failures.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” he murmured.
“I should have explained it to you. I forgot. We can go along the river boulevard if you’d like — or are you tired?”
Scott assured her that he was not tired — not in the least.
Entering the boulevard, the cement road twisted under darkling trees.
“The Mississippi — how little it means to you now!” said Scott suddenly.
“What?” Yanci looked around. “Oh, the river.”
“I guess it was once pretty important to your ancestors up here.”
“My ancestors weren’t up here then,” said Yanci with some dignity. “My ancestors were from Maryland. My father came out here when he left Yale.”
“Oh!” Scott was politely impressed.
“My mother was from here. My father came out here from Baltimore because of his health.”
“Oh!”
“Of course we belong here now, I suppose” — this with faint condescension — “as much as anywhere else.”
“Of course.”
“Except that I want to live in the East and I can’t persuade Father to,” she finished.
It was after one o’clock and the boulevard was almost deserted. Occasionally two yellow disks would top a rise ahead of them and take shape as a late-returning automobile. Except for that, they were alone in a continual rushing dark. The moon had gone down.
“Next time the road goes near the river let’s stop and watch it,” he suggested.
Yanci smiled inwardly. This remark was obviously what one boy of her acquaintance had named an international petting cue, by which was meant a suggestion that aimed to create naturally a situation for a kiss. She considered the matter. As yet the man had made no particular impression on her. He was good-looking, apparently well-to-do and from New York. She had begun to like him during the dance, increasingly as the evening had drawn to a close; then the incident of her father’s appalling arrival had thrown cold water upon this tentative warmth; and now — it was November, and the night was cold. Still — —
“All right,” she agreed suddenly.
The road divided; she swerved around and brought the car to a stop in an open place high above the river.
“Well?” she demanded in the deep quiet that followed the shutting off of the engine.
“Thanks.”
“Are you satisfied here?”
“Almost. Not quite.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he answered. “Why is your name Yanci?”
“It’s a family name.”
“It’s very pretty.” He repeated it several times caressingly. “Yanci — it has all the grace of Nancy, and yet it isn’t prim.”
“What’s your name?” she inquired.
“Scott.”
“Scott what?”
“Kimberly. Didn’t you know?”
“I wasn’t sure. Mrs. Rogers introduced you in such a mumble.”
There was a slight pause.
“Yanci,” he repeated; “beautiful Yanci, with her dark-blue eyes and her lazy soul. Do you know why I’m not quite satisfied, Yanci?”
“Why?”
Imperceptibly she had moved her face nearer until as she waited for an answer with her lips faintly apart he knew that in asking she had granted.
Without haste he bent his head forward and touched her lips.
He sighed, and both of them felt a sort of relief — relief from the embarrassment of playing up to what conventions of this sort of thing remained.
“Thanks,” he said as he had when she first stopped the car.
“Now are you satisfied?”
Her blue eyes regarded him unsmilingly in the darkness.
“After a fashion; of course, you can never say — definitely.”
Again he bent toward her, but she stooped and started the motor. It was late and Yanci was beginning to be tired. What purpose there was in the experiment was accomplished. He had had what he asked. If he liked it he would want more, and that put her one move ahead in the game which she felt she was beginning.
“I’m hungry,” she complained. “Let’s go down and eat.”
“Very well,” he acquiesced sadly. “Just when I was enjoying — the Mississippi.”
“Do you think I’m beautiful?” she inquired almost plaintively as they backed out.
“What an absurd question!”
“But I like to hear people say so.”
“I was just about to — when you started the engine.”
Downtown in a deserted all-night lunch room they
ate bacon and eggs. She was pale as ivory now. The night had drawn the lazy vitality and languid color out of her face. She encouraged him to talk to her of New York until he was beginning every sentence with, “Well now, let’s see — — “
The repast over, they drove home. Scott helped her put the car in the little garage, and just outside the front door she lent him her lips again for the faint brush of a kiss. Then she went in.
The long living room which ran the width of the small stucco house was reddened by a dying fire which had been high when Yanci left and now was faded to a steady undancing glow. She took a log from the fire box and threw it on the embers, then started as a voice came out of the half darkness at the other end of the room.
“Back so soon?”
It was her father’s voice, not yet quite sober, but alert and intelligent.
“Yes. Went riding,” she answered shortly, sitting down in a wicker chair before the fire. “Then went down and had something to eat.”
“Oh!”
Her father left his place and moved to a chair nearer the fire, where he stretched himself out with a sigh. Glancing at him from the corner of her eye, for she was going to show an appropriate coldness, Yanci was fascinated by his complete recovery of dignity in the space of two hours. His graying hair was scarcely rumpled; his handsome face was ruddy as ever. Only his eyes, crisscrossed with tiny red lines, were evidence of his late dissipation.
“Have a good time?”
“Why should you care?” she answered rudely.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
“You didn’t seem to care earlier in the evening. I asked you to take two people home for me, and you weren’t able to drive your own car.”
“The deuce I wasn’t!” he protested. “I could have driven in — in a race in an arana, areaena. That Mrs. Rogers insisted that her young admirer should drive, so what could I do?”
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 305