“This is all a little sudden. I don’t like such things during a school term, and you know that.” He hated to refuse her, though, for, excepting an occasional indiscretion of speech, she was a trustworthy child; she made good grades in school and conscientiously wrestled with her ebullient temperament.
“Well, can I, daddy? Dizzy’s waiting; she has to know.”
“I suppose you can.”
“Oh, thanks. Mrs. Campbell’s going to call you up, but Dizzy couldn’t wait to tell me. Cute?”
She vanished, and in a moment the low murmur behind the door began again.
Something told Bryan that she’d be leading a simpler life at boarding school, but didn’t Helen Hannaman say something today about her old-fashioned manners? He couldn’t afford it this year anyhow, and, besides, she was such a bright little thing to have around the house.
But if he’d known that the movies were going to produce this Top Hat — — She had broken the record of “Cheek to Cheek,” but there was still the one about sitting on his top hat and climbing up his shirt front — —
Curiously, he opened the door to the dining room and discovered the phonograph going and his daughter in a crouching posture, arms outspread, head projecting from its proper neck, eyes half closed. When she saw him, she straightened up.
“I thought that this ‘Cheek by Jowl’ was broken,” he said.
“It is, but you can still play the inside a little. See, it’s over already. You certainly can’t object to that much of a record.”
“Let’s put it on again,” he suggested facetiously, “and we’ll dance.”
She looked at him with infinite compassion.
“Who do you imagine you are, daddy? Fred Astaire? What I want to know is if I can go to Princeton.”
“I said yes, didn’t I?”
“But you didn’t say it like when you mean it.”
“Yes, then — yes. Get enough rope and hang yourself.”
“Then I can go?”
“Yes, of course. Why not? Where do you think you’re going? To the prom or something? Of course, you can go.”
II
Having lunch on the train, the three girls were a little bit mad with excitement. Clara Hannaman and Dizzy Campbell were fourteen, a year older than Gwen, and Clara was already somewhat taller, but they were all dressed alike in suits that might have been worn by their mothers. Their jewelry consisted of thin rings and chains, legacies from grandmothers, supplemented by flamboyant Koh-i-noors from the five-and-ten; and it was true that their coats might once have responded to wheedling calls of “Pussy,” “Bunny,” or “Nanny.” But it was their attacks of hysteria that stamped them as of a certain age.
Clara had asked: “What kind of a joint is this we’re going to?” She was temporarily under the spell of Una Merkel and the hard-boiled school, and this question was enough to start a rat-tat-tat of laughter, to the extent that eating was suspended, napkins called into play. One word was usually enough to send them off; frequently it was a boy’s name that had some private meaning to them, and for a whole afternoon or evening this single word would serve as detonator. At other times a curious soberness fell upon all of them, a sort of quietude. They faced both ways — toward a world they were fast leaving and a world they had never met — and the contradiction was externalized in the uncanny mirth.
There was a sober moment now when they all looked at the girl across the way, who was the debutante of the year and bound for the fall prom. They looked with respect, even a certain awe, impressed with her ease and tranquility in the face of her ordeal. It made them feel very young and awkward, and they were both glad and sorry that they were too young for the prom. Last year that girl had been only the captain of the basketball team at school; now she was in the Great Game, and they had noted the men who came to see her off at the station with flowers and adjurations not to “fall for any babies up there… Be five years before they get a job.”
After luncheon, the three girls planned to study — they had conscientiously brought books along — but the excitement of the train was such that they never got any farther than the phrase “jeweled stomacher” from an English-history lesson — which thereafter became their phrase for the day. They reached Princeton in an uncanny, explosive quiet, because Dizzy claimed to have forgotten her jeweled stomacher on the train, but their wild chuckles changed to a well-bred reserve as they were greeted on the platform by Miss Ray, young and lovely and twenty.
Where were the boys? They peered for them through the early dusk, not expecting to be greeted like prom girls, but there might have been someone of their own age, the one for whom they had dressed and dreamed and waved their locks sidewise in these last twenty-four hours. When they reached the house, Miss Ray exploded the bomb; while they took off their coats, she said:
“You’re due for a disappointment. I tried to reach you by telegraphing and telephone, too, but you’d already left.”
Their eyes turned toward her, apprehensive, already stricken.
“Seems that grandmother’s not well, and mother felt she had to go up to Albany. So, before I was even awake, she called off the little dance, and she’d phoned everybody. I tried to fix it up, but it was too late.”
Now their faces were utterly expressionless.
“Mother was excited, that’s all,” continued Miss Ray. “Grandmother’ll live to be a hundred. I’ve been on the phone all afternoon trying to find some company for you girls for this evening, but the town’s a madhouse and nobody’s available — the boys for the little dance were coming from New York. Lord, if I’d only waked up before eleven o’clock!”
“We don’t mind,” Dizzy lied gently. “Really we don’t, Esther. We can amuse ourselves.”
“Oh, darling, I know how you feel!”
“Yes,” they said together, and Dizzy asked, “Where’s Shorty? Did he have to go to Albany too?”
“No, he’s here. But he’s only sixteen and — — I hardly know how to explain it, but he’s the youngest man in his class in college, and very small, and this year he’s just impossibly shy. When the party was called off, he just refused to appear as the only boy; said he’d stay in his room and study chemistry, and there he is. And he won’t come out.”
Gwen formed a mental picture of him. Better that he remained in his hermitage; they could have more fun without him.
“Anyhow, you’ll have the game tomorrow.”
“Yes,” they said together.
That was that. Upstairs they took out their evening gowns, which, according to modern acceptance, were as long and as chic as any adult evening gowns, and laid them on their beds. They brought out their silk hosiery, their gold or silver sandal dancing shoes, and surveyed the glittering exhibit. At that age, their mothers would have worn ruffles, flounces and cotton stockings to brand them as adolescent. But this historical fact, dinned into them for many years, was small consolation now.
After they had dressed, things seemed better, even though they were only dressing for one another; when they went down to dinner, they gave such an impression of amiability and gaiety that they convinced even Esther Ray. It was difficult, though, when Miss Ray’s escort called to take her to the Harvard-Princeton concert, and she must have seen it in their eyes.
“I’ve got an idea,” she said. “I think we can get you into the concert, but you may have to stand up in back.”
That was something indeed. They brightened. They ran for coats; and Gwen caught sight of a very hurried young man in the upper hall with a plate in one hand and a cup in the other, but he disappeared into his room before she could see him plainly.
In any event, the concert turned out as precariously as most improvisations — it was jammed, and they were obliged to stand behind rows of taller people and to listen to tantalizing bursts of laughter and fragments of song — while from Clara’s superior three inches they gathered such information as they could as to what it looked like.
When it was over; they were washed o
ut with the happy, excited crowd, driven back to the Rays’, and dumped almost brusquely on the doorstep.
“Good night. Thanks.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“It was fine!”
“Thanks. Good night.”
Upstairs they moved around in silence, casting stray glances at themselves in the mirror and rearranging, to no purpose now, some bit of awry finery. Dizzy had even taken off her necklace of seed pearls, when Gwen said suddenly:
“I want to go to the prom.”
“Who doesn’t?” Clara said. Suddenly she looked at Gwen sharply and asked: “What do you mean, Gwen?”
Gwen was drawing her lips in the mirror with Dizzy’s lipstick. She would have had one along herself, save it had melted going through Alabama on the way to the ranch last summer, and she had never since been able to get the top off it. Clara watched her until Gwen said:
“How would you make up if you were going to the prom?”
“Like this,” Clara suggested.
In a minute they were all at it.
“Not like that; that looks very ordinary.” And: “Remember, that’s Esther’s eye pencil. That’s too much, Dizzy.”
“Not with powder, it isn’t.”
Within half an hour they had somehow managed to age themselves by several years, and crying: “Bring on my jeweled stomacher,” they minced, paraded and danced around the room.
“I’ll tell you what,” Gwen said. “I just sort of want to go to the outside of the prom. I mean I don’t want to do anything bad, you know, but I want to see how they work it.”
“Esther might see us.”
“She won’t,” said Gwen sagely. “She’s probably having herself a time, and that girl on the train too — that Marion Lamb — you know, we used to know her in school. You take a lot of these debutantes,” she continued, “and when they get by themselves — pretty cute is what I would say, if you asked me.”
Dizzy looked like white-pine shavings; even her eyes were so light and virginal that what she said now came as a sort of shock to the other two:
“We’ll do it — we’ll go to the prom. We’ve got more what it takes than most of those girls.”
“Of course this isn’t like a city,” Clara suggested uncertainly. “It’s perfectly all right; it’s just the same as going out in your yard.”
This remark was calming to their consciences, but they were really less concerned with kidnapers or molesters of womanhood than with what Gwen’s plan was. Gwen had no plan. She had literally nothing on her mind except a certain disparity between the picture of herself wandering around a college campus at night with rouged lips, and a little scene that had taken place a week before, when she had argued with her father that she wanted to set up her doll’s house in her room instead of having it sent to storage.
The deciding factor was that they had been cheated by their elders. Though Bryan had never met Mrs. Ray, he somehow seemed to share in her disastrous excitability of the morning. This was the sort of thing that parents did as a class. The sort of thing for which they had joint responsibility. Before Gwen and Dizzy had agreed to the excursion in words, they bumped shoulders around the mirror, modifying their faces until the theatrical quality yielded to the more seemly pigmentation of an embassy ball. In the last burst of conservatism, for they might run inadvertently into Esther Ray, they cleansed the area around their eyes, leaving only the faintest patina of evening on lips and noses. The ten-cent crown jewels disappeared from ear and wrist and throat so quickly that when they went downstairs all taint of the side show had disappeared. Taste had triumphed.
Issuing into a clear brilliant November night, they walked along a high exuberant street beneath the dark trees of Liberty Place — though that meant nothing to them. A dog panicked them momentarily from behind a hedge, but they met no further obstacle until it was necessary to pass beneath a bright arc on Mercer Street.
“Where are we going?” Clara asked.
“Up to where we can hear it.”
She stopped. Figures had loomed up ahead, and they linked arms protectively, but it was only two colored women carrying a basket of laundry between them.
“Come on,” Gwen said.
“Come on to where?”
“To where we’re going.”
They reached a cathedral-like structure which Clara recognized as a corner of the campus, and by a sort of instinct they turned into an archway, threaded a deserted cloister and came out into a wider vista of terraces and Gothic buildings, and suddenly there was music in the air. After a few hundred yards, Dizzy pulled them up short.
“I see it,” she whispered. “It’s that big building down there with all the lights. That’s the gymnasium.”
“Let’s go closer,” said Gwen. “There isn’t anybody around. Let’s go till we see somebody, anyhow.”
Arms linked, they marched on in the shadow of the long halls. They were getting dangerously close to the zone of activity, could distinguish figures against the blur of the gymnasium entrance, and hear the applause in the intervals. Once more they stopped, afraid either to go on or to hold their ground, for there were voices and footsteps approaching out of the darkness.
“Over at the other side,” Clara suggested. “It’s dark there and we can get really close.”
They left the path and ran across the turf; stopped, breathless, in the haven of a group of parked cars. Here they huddled silently, feeling like spies behind the enemy lines. Within the great bulky walls, fifty feet away, a sonorous orchestra proclaimed a feeling that someone was fooling, announced that someone was its lucky star, and demanded if it wasn’t a lovely day to be caught in the rain. Inside those walls existed ineffable romance — an orchid-colored dream in which floated prototypes of their future selves, surrounded, engulfed, buoyed up by unnumbered boys. No one spoke; there was no more to say than the orchestra was saying to their young hearts, and when the music stopped, they did not speak; then suddenly they realized that they were not alone.
“We can eat later,” a man’s voice said.
“I don’t care about it at all, when I’m with you.”
The three young girls caught their breath in a gasp, clutched at one another’s arms. The voices came from a car not five feet from where they stood; it was turned away from the gymnasium, so that under cover of the music, their approach had gone unobserved.
“What’s one supper,” the girl continued, “when I think of all the suppers we’ll have together all through life?”
“Beginning next June, darling.”
“Beginning next June, darling, darling, darling.”
And once again a clutching went on among the listeners. For the girl’s voice was that of Marion Lamb, the debutante who had been on the train.
At this point, because it was a rather cool night and her evening cloak was thin, Dizzy sneezed — sneezed loudly and sneezed again.
III
“But how do we know you kids won’t tell?” the man was demanding: He turned to Marion: “Can’t you explain to them how important it is not to tell? Explain that it’ll absolutely wreck your debut at home.”
“But I don’t care, Harry. I’d be proud — — “
“I care. It simply can’t get around now.”
“We won’t tell,” the young girls chorused ardently. And Gwen added: “We think it’s cute.”
“Do you realize you’re the only ones that know?” he asked sternly. “The only ones! And if it slipped out, I’d know who told, and — — “
There were such sinister threats in his voice that instinctively the trio recoiled a step.
“That isn’t the way to talk to them,” said Marion. “I went to school with these girls and I know they won’t tell. Anyhow, they know it’s not serious — that I get engaged every few weeks or so.”
“Marion,” cried the young man, “I can’t stand hearing you talk like that!”
“Oh, Harry, I didn’t mean to hurt you!” she gasped, equally upset. “You know the
re’s never been anyone but you.”
He groaned.
“Well, how are we going to silence this gallery?” Distraught, he fumbled in his pocket for money.
“No, Harry. They’ll keep quiet.” But looking at those six eyes, she felt a vast misgiving. “Listen, what would you three like more than anything in the world?”
They laughed and looked at one another.
“To go to the prom, I guess,” said Gwen frankly. “But of course, we wouldn’t be allowed to. Our parents wouldn’t let us, even if we were invited — I mean — — “
“I’ve got the idea,” said Harry. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I know a side entrance that leads up to the indoor track. How would you like to sit up there in the dark and look on awhile without anybody seeing you?”
“Whew!” said Dizzy.
“If I take you up there, will you give me your sacred words of honor that you’ll never breathe a word of what you heard tonight?”
“Will we!” they exclaimed together.
IV
Leaving them on the running track, the focusing eye must move down momentarily to the thick of the dance below. Or rather to its outskirts, where a person had just appeared who has hitherto played a small and sorry part in this history, and there he stood uncertainly, his view obscured by a throbbing Harvard-Princeton stag line. If, half an hour before, anyone had told Shorty Ray that eleven o’clock would find him in his present situation, he would not even have said, “Huh!” Some boys of inconsiderable height are compensated by an almost passionate temerity. Not Shorty; since adolescence, he never had been able to face girls with a minimum of dignity. The dance at home was part of a campaign to break him of his shyness, and it had seemed a stroke of luck to him that if his grandmother’s health were going to fail anyhow, it should have chosen this particular day.
As if in retribution for this irreverence, a telegram from Albany addressed to his sister had come to the house at the very moment when he had started to turn out his lights.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 336