Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (148 page)
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Authors: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Baby’s lower jaw projected slightly as she said:
“That’s what he was educated for.”
The sisters sat in silence; Nicole wondering in a tired way about things; Baby considering whether or not to marry the latest candidate for her hand and money, an authenticated Hapsburg. She was not quite
thinking
about it. Her affairs had long shared such a sameness, that, as she dried out, they were more important for their conversational value than for themselves. Her emotions had their truest existence in the telling of them.
“Is he gone?” Nicole asked after a while. “I think his train leaves at noon.”
Baby looked.
“No. He’s moved up higher on the terrace and he’s talking to some women. Anyhow there are so many people now that he doesn’t
have
to see us.”
He had seen them though, as they left their pavilion, and he followed them with his eyes until they disappeared again. He sat with Mary Minghetti, drinking anisette.
“You were like you used to be the night you helped us,” she was saying, “except at the end, when you were horrid about Caroline. Why aren’t you nice like that always? You can be.”
It seemed fantastic to Dick to be in a position where Mary North could tell him about things.
“Your friends still like you, Dick. But you say awful things to people when you’ve been drinking. I’ve spent most of my time defending you this summer.”
“That remark is one of Doctor Eliot’s classics.”
“It’s true. Nobody cares whether you drink or not--” She hesitated, “even when Abe drank hardest, he never offended people like you do.”
“You’re all so dull,” he said.
“But we’re all there is!” cried Mary. “If you don’t like nice people, try the ones who aren’t nice, and see how you like that! All people want is to have a good time and if you make them unhappy you cut yourself off from nourishment.”
“Have I been nourished?” he asked.
Mary was having a good time, though she did not know it, as she had sat down with him only out of fear. Again she refused a drink and said: “Self-indulgence is back of it. Of course, after Abe you can imagine how I feel about it--since I watched the progress of a good man toward alcoholism--”
Down the steps tripped Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers with blithe theatricality.
Dick felt fine--he was already well in advance of the day; arrived at where a man should be at the end of a good dinner, yet he showed only a fine, considered, restrained interest in Mary. His eyes, for the moment clear as a child’s, asked her sympathy and stealing over him he felt the old necessity of convincing her that he was the last man in the world and she was the last woman.
. . . Then he would not have to look at those two other figures, a man and a woman, black and white and metallic against the sky. . . .
“You once liked me, didn’t you?” he asked.
“Liked
you--I
loved
you. Everybody loved you. You could’ve had anybody you wanted for the asking--”
“There has always been something between you and me.”
She bit eagerly. “Has there, Dick?”
“Always--I knew your troubles and how brave you were about them.” But the old interior laughter had begun inside him and he knew he couldn’t keep it up much longer.
“I always thought you knew a lot,” Mary said enthusiastically. “More about me than any one has ever known. Perhaps that’s why I was so afraid of you when we didn’t get along so well.”
His glance fell soft and kind upon hers, suggesting an emotion underneath; their glances married suddenly, bedded, strained together. Then, as the laughter inside of him became so loud that it seemed as if Mary must hear it, Dick switched off the light and they were back in the Riviera sun.
“I must go,” he said. As he stood up he swayed a little; he did not feel well any more--his blood raced slow. He raised his right hand and with a papal cross he blessed the beach from the high terrace. Faces turned upward from several umbrellas.
“I’m going to him.” Nicole got to her knees.
“No, you’re not,” said Tommy, pulling her down firmly. “Let well enough alone.”
XIII
Nicole kept in touch with Dick after her new marriage; there were letters on business matters, and about the children. When she said, as she often did, “I loved Dick and I’ll never forget him,” Tommy answered, “Of course not--why should you?”
Dick opened an office in Buffalo, but evidently without success. Nicole did not find what the trouble was, but she heard a few months later that he was in a little town named Batavia, N.Y., practising general medicine, and later that he was in Lockport, doing the same thing. By accident she heard more about his life there than anywhere: that he bicycled a lot, was much admired by the ladies, and always had a big stack of papers on his desk that were known to be an important treatise on some medical subject, almost in process of completion. He was considered to have fine manners and once made a good speech at a public health meeting on the subject of drugs; but he became entangled with a girl who worked in a grocery store, and he was also involved in a lawsuit about some medical question; so he left Lockport.
After that he didn’t ask for the children to be sent to America and didn’t answer when Nicole wrote asking him if he needed money. In the last letter she had from him he told her that he was practising in Geneva, New York, and she got the impression that he had settled down with some one to keep house for him. She looked up Geneva in an atlas and found it was in the heart of the Finger Lakes Section and considered a pleasant place. Perhaps, so she liked to think, his career was biding its time, again like Grant’s in Galena; his latest note was post-marked from Hornell, New York, which is some distance from Geneva and a very small town; in any case he is almost certainly in that section of the country, in one town or another.
THE END
THE LOVE OF THE LAST TYCOON
A Western
This novel was unfinished at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, when he was aged 44. The notes for the novel were initially collected and edited by the literary critic Edmund Wilson, who was a close friend of Fitzgerald, and the unfinished novel was published in 1941 as
The Last Tycoon
, though many critics now agree that Fitzgerald intended the title to be
The Love of the Last Tycoon
. It consists of seventeen extant chapters out of the thirty-one planned chapters. The novel tells the story of Monroe Stahr and his rise to power in Hollywood, including his conflicts with rival Pat Brady, a character based on real-life studio head Louis B. Mayer.
The first edition
CONTENTS
SYNPOSIS OF THE REST OF THE NOVEL
FITZGERALD’S NOTES FOR
The Last Tycoon
Chapter I
Though I haven’t ever been on the screen I was brought up in pictures. Rudolph Valentino came to my fifth birthday party — or so I was told. I put this down only to indicate that even before the age of reason I was in a position to watch the wheels go round.
I was going to write my memoirs once, “The Producer’s Daughter,” but at eighteen you never quite get around to anything like that. It’s just as well — it would have been as flat as an old column of Lolly Parsons’. My father was in the picture business as another man might be in cotton or steel, and I took it tranquilly. At the worst I accepted Hollywood with the resignation of a ghost assigned to a haunted house. I knew what you were supposed to think about it but I was obstinately unhorrified.
This is easy to say, but harder to make people understand. When I was at Bennington some of the English teachers who pretended an indifference to Hollywood or its products really hated it. Hated it way down deep as a threat to their existence. Even before that, when I was in a convent, a sweet little nun asked me to get her a script of a screen play so she could “teach her class about movie writing” as she had taught them about the essay and the short story. I got the script for her and I suppose she puzzled over it and puzzled over it but it was never mentioned in class and she gave it back to me with an air of offended surprise and not a single comment. That’s what I half expect to happen to this story.
You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. And perhaps the closest a woman can come to the set-up is to try and understand one of those men.
The world from an airplane I knew. Father always had us travel back and forth that way from school and college. After my sister died when I was a junior, I travelled to and fro alone and the journey always made me think of her, made me somewhat solemn and subdued. Sometimes there were picture people I knew on board the plane, and occasionally there was an attractive college boy — but not often during the Depression. I seldom really fell asleep during the trip, what with thoughts of Eleanor and the sense of that sharp rip between coast and coast — at least not till we had left those lonely little airports in Tennessee.
This trip was so rough that the passengers divided early into those who turned in right away and those who didn’t want to turn in at all. There were two of these latter right across from me and I was pretty sure from their fragmentary conversation that they were from Hollywood — one of them because he looked like it, a middle-aged Jew who alternately talked with nervous excitement or else crouched as if ready to spring, in a harrowing silence; the other a pale, plain, stocky man of thirty, whom I was sure I had seen before. He had been to the house or something. But it might have been when I was a little girl, and so I wasn’t offended that he didn’t recognize me.
The stewardess — she was tall, handsome and flashing dark, a type that they seemed to run to — asked me if she could make up my berth.
“ — and, dear, do you want an aspirin?” She perched on the side of the seat and rocked precariously to and fro with the June hurricane, “ — or a Nembutal?”
“No.”
“I’ve been so busy with everyone else that I’ve had no time to ask you.” She sat down beside me and buckled us both in. “Do you want some gum?”
This reminded me to get rid of the piece that had been boring me for hours. I wrapped it in a piece of magazine and put it into the automatic ash-holder.
“I can always tell people are nice — “ the stewardess said approvingly “ — if they wrap their gum in paper before they put it in there.”
We sat for a while in the half-light of the swaying car. It was vaguely like a swanky restaurant at that twilight time between meals. We were all lingering — and not quite on purpose. Even the stewardess, I think, had to keep reminding herself why she was there.
She and I talked about a young actress I knew, whom she had flown west with two years before. It was in the very lowest time of the Depression and the young actress kept staring out the window in such an intent way that the stewardess was afraid she was contemplating a leap. It appeared though that she was not afraid of poverty, but only of revolution.