Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (284 page)

I left Ailie sitting in the car, looking very beautiful with the warm breeze stirring her long, curly bob.

It might have been here. That would make the company streets down there and the mess shack, where we dined that night, just over the way.

The taxi driver regarded me indulgently while I stumbled here and there in the knee-deep underbrush, looking for my youth in a clapboard or a strip of roofing or a rusty tomato can. I tried to sight on a vaguely familiar clump of trees, but it was growing darker now and I couldn’t be quite sure they were the right trees.

“They’re going to fix up the old race course,” Ailie called from the car. “Tarleton’s getting quite doggy in its old age.”

No. Upon consideration they didn’t look like the right trees. All I could be sure of was this place that had once been so full of life and effort was gone, as if it had never existed, and that in another month Ailie would be gone, and the South would be empty for me forever.

MAJESTY

The extraordinary thing is not that people in a lifetime turn out worse or better than we had prophesied; particularly in America that is to be expected. The extraordinary thing is how people keep their levels, fulfill their promises, seem actually buoyed up by an inevitable destiny.

One of my conceits is that no one has ever disappointed me since I turned eighteen and could tell a real quality from a gift for sleight of hand, and even many of the merely showy people in my past seem to go on being blatantly and successfully showy to the end.

Emily Castleton was born in Harrisburg in a medium-sized house, moved to New York at sixteen to a big house, went to the Briarly School, moved to an enormous house, moved to a mansion at Tuxedo Park, moved abroad, where she did various fashionable things and was in all the papers. Back in her debutante year one of those French artists who are so dogmatic about American beauties, included her with eleven other public and semipublic celebrities as one of America’s perfect types. At the time numerous men agreed with him.

She was just faintly tall, with fine, rather large features, eyes with such an expanse of blue in them that you were really aware of it whenever you looked at her, and a good deal of thick blond hair--arresting and bright. Her mother and father did not know very much about the new world they had commandeered so Emily had to learn everything for herself, and she became involved in various situations and some of the first bloom wore off. However, there was bloom to spare. There were engagements and semi-engagements, short passionate attractions, and then a big affair at twenty-two that embittered her and sent her wandering the continents looking for happiness. She became “artistic” as most wealthy unmarried girls do at that age, because artistic people seem to have some secret, some inner refuge, some escape. But most of her friends were married now, and her life was a great disappointment to her father; so, at twenty-four, with marriage in her head if not in her heart, Emily came home.

This was a low point in her career and Emily was aware of it. She had not done well. She was one of the most popular, most beautiful girls of her generation with charm, money and a sort of fame, but her generation was moving into new fields. At the first note of condescension from a former schoolmate, now a young “matron,” she went to Newport and was won by William Brevoort Blair. Immediately she was again the incomparable Emily Castleton. The ghost of the French artist walked once more in the newspapers; the most-talked-of leisure-class event of October was her wedding day.

Splendor to mark society nuptials. . . . Harold Castleton sets out a series of five-thousand-dollar pavilions arranged like the interconnecting tents of a circus, in which the reception, the wedding supper and the ball will be held. . . . Nearly a thousand guests, many of them leaders in business, will mingle with those who dominate the social world. . . . The wedding gifts are estimated to be worth a quarter of a million dollars. . . .

An hour before the ceremony, which was to be solemnized at St. Bartholomew’s, Emily sat before a dressing-table and gazed at her face in the glass. She was a little tired of her face at that moment and the depressing thought suddenly assailed her that it would require more and more looking after in the next fifty years.

“I ought to be happy,” she said aloud, “but every thought that comes into my head is sad.”

Her cousin, Olive Mercy, sitting on the side of the bed, nodded. “All brides are sad.”

“It’s such a waste,” Emily said.

Olive frowned impatiently.

“Waste of what? Women are incomplete unless they’re married and have children.”

For a moment Emily didn’t answer. Then she said slowly, “Yes, but whose children?”

For the first time in her life, Olive, who worshipped Emily, almost hated her. Not a girl in the wedding party but would have been glad of Brevoort Blair--Olive among the others.

“You’re lucky,” she said. “You’re so lucky you don’t even know it. You ought to be paddled for talking like that.”

“I shall learn to love him,” announced Emily facetiously. “Love will come with marriage. Now, isn’t that a hell of a prospect?”

“Why so deliberately unromantic?”

“On the contrary, I’m the most romantic person I’ve ever met in my life. Do you know what I think when he puts his arms around me? I think that if I look up I’ll see Garland Kane’s eyes.”

“But why, then--”

“Getting into his plane the other day I could only remember Captain Marchbanks and the little two-seater we flew over the Channel in, just breaking our hearts for each other and never saying a word about it because of his wife. I don’t regret those men; I just regret the part of me that went into caring. There’s only the sweepings to hand to Brevoort in a pink waste-basket. There should have been something more; I thought even when I was most carried away that I was saving something for the one. But apparently I wasn’t.” She broke off and then added: “And yet I wonder.”

The situation was no less provoking to Olive for being comprehensible, and save for her position as a poor relation, she would have spoken her mind. Emily was well spoiled--eight years of men had assured her they were not good enough for her and she had accepted the fact as probably true.

“You’re nervous.” Olive tried to keep the annoyance out of her voice. “Why not lie down for an hour?”

“Yes,” answered Emily absently.

Olive went out and downstairs. In the lower hall she ran into Brevoort Blair, attired in a nuptial cutaway even to the white carnation, and in a state of considerable agitation.

“Oh, excuse me,” he blurted out. “I wanted to see Emily. It’s about the rings--which ring, you know. I’ve got four rings and she never decided and I can’t just hold them out in the church and have her take her pick.”

“I happen to know she wants the plain platinum band. If you want to see her anyhow--”

“Oh, thanks very much. I don’t want to disturb her.”

They were standing close together, and even at this moment when he was gone, definitely preëmpted, Olive couldn’t help thinking how alike she and Brevoort were. Hair, coloring, features--they might have been brother and sister--and they shared the same shy serious temperaments, the same simple straightforwardness. All this flashed through her mind in an instant, with the added thought that the blond, tempestuous Emily, with her vitality and amplitude of scale, was, after all, better for him in every way; and then, beyond this, a perfect wave of tenderness, of pure physical pity and yearning swept over her and it seemed that she must step forward only half a foot to find his arms wide to receive her.

She stepped backward instead, relinquishing him as though she still touched him with the tip of her fingers and then drew the tips away. Perhaps some vibration of her emotion fought its way into his consciousness, for he said suddenly:

“We’re going to be good friends, aren’t we? Please don’t think I’m taking Emily away. I know I can’t own her--nobody could--and I don’t want to.”

Silently, as he talked, she said good-by to him, the only man she had ever wanted in her life.

She loved the absorbed hesitancy with which he found his coat and hat and felt hopefully for the knob on the wrong side of the door.

When he had gone she went into the drawing-room, gorgeous and portentous; with its painted bacchanals and massive chandeliers and the eighteenth-century portraits that might have been Emily’s ancestors, but weren’t, and by that very fact belonged the more to her. There she rested, as always, in Emily’s shadow.

Through the door that led out to the small, priceless patch of grass on Sixtieth Street now inclosed by the pavilions, came her uncle, Mr. Harold Castleton. He had been sampling his own champagne.

“Olive so sweet and fair.” He cried emotionally, “Olive, baby, she’s done it. She was all right inside, like I knew all the time. The good ones come through, don’t they--the real thoroughbreds? I began to think that the Lord and me, between us, had given her too much, that she’d never be satisfied, but now she’s come down to earth just like a”--he searched unsuccessfully for a metaphor--”like a thoroughbred, and she’ll find it not such a bad place after all.” He came closer. “You’ve been crying, little Olive.”

“Not much.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said magnanimously. “If I wasn’t so happy I’d cry too.”

Later, as she embarked with two other bridesmaids for the church, the solemn throbbing of a big wedding seemed to begin with the vibration of the car. At the door the organ took it up, and later it would palpitate in the cellos and base viols of the dance, to fade off finally with the sound of the car that bore bride and groom away.

The crowd was thick around the church, and ten feet out of it the air was heavy with perfume and faint clean humanity and the fabric smell of new clean clothes. Beyond the massed hats in the van of the church the two families sat in front rows on either side. The Blairs--they were assured a family resemblance by their expression of faint condescension, shared by their in-laws as well as by true Blairs--were represented by the Gardiner Blairs, senior and junior; Lady Mary Bowes Howard, née Blair; Mrs. Potter Blair; Mrs. Princess Potowki Parr Blair, née Inchbit; Miss Gloria Blair, Master Gardiner Blair III, and the kindred branches, rich and poor, of Smythe, Bickle, Diffendorfer and Hamn. Across the aisle the Castletons made a less impressive showing--Mr. Harold Castleton, Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Castleton and children, Harold Castleton Junior, and, from Harrisburg, Mr. Carl Mercy, and two little old aunts named O’Keefe hidden off in a corner. Somewhat to their surprise the two aunts had been bundled off in a limousine and dressed from head to foot by a fashionable couturière that morning.

In the vestry, where the bridesmaids fluttered about like birds in their big floppy hats, there was a last lip rouging and adjustment of pins before Emily should arrive. They represented several stages of Emily’s life--a schoolmate at Briarly, a last unmarried friend of débutante year, a travelling companion of Europe, and the girl she had visited in Newport when she met Brevoort Blair.

“They’ve got Wakeman,” this last one said, standing by the door listening to the music. “He played for my sister, but I shall never have Wakeman.”

“Why not?”

“Why, he’s playing the same thing over and over--’At Dawning.’ He’s played it half a dozen times.”

At this moment another door opened and the solicitous head of a young man appeared around it. “Almost ready?” he demanded of the nearest bridesmaid. “Brevoort’s having a quiet little fit. He just stands there wilting collar after collar--”

“Be calm,” answered the young lady. “The bride is always a few minutes late.”

“A few minutes!” protested the best man. “I don’t call it a few minutes. They’re beginning to rustle and wriggle like a circus crowd out there, and the organist has been playing the same tune for half an hour. I’m going to get him to fill in with a little jazz.”

“What time is it?” Olive demanded.

“Quarter of five--ten minutes of five.”

“Maybe there’s been a traffic tie-up.” Olive paused as Mr. Harold Castleton, followed by an anxious curate, shouldered his way in, demanding a phone.

And now there began a curious dribbling back from the front of the church, one by one, then two by two, until the vestry was crowded with relatives and confusion.

“What’s happened?”

“What on earth’s the matter?”

A chauffeur came in and reported excitedly. Harold Castleton swore and, his face blazing, fought his way roughly toward the door. There was an attempt to clear the vestry, and then, as if to balance the dribbling, a ripple of conversation commenced at the rear of the church and began to drift up toward the altar, growing louder and faster and more excited, mounting always, bringing people to their feet, rising to a sort of subdued roar. The announcement from the altar that the marriage had been postponed was scarcely heard, for by that time everyone knew that they were participating in a front-page scandal, that Brevoort Blair had been left waiting at the altar and Emily Castleton had run away.

II

There were a dozen reporters outside the Castleton house on Sixtieth Street when Olive arrived, but in her absorption she failed even to hear their questions; she wanted desperately to go and comfort a certain man whom she must not approach, and as a sort of substitute she sought her Uncle Harold. She entered through the interconnecting five-thousand-dollar pavilions, where caterers and servants still stood about in a respectful funereal half-light, waiting for something to happen, amid trays of caviar and turkey’s breast and pyramided wedding cake. Upstairs, Olive found her uncle sitting on a stool before Emily’s dressing-table. The articles of make-up spread before him, the repertoire of feminine preparation in evidence about, made his singularly inappropriate presence a symbol of the mad catastrophe.

“Oh, it’s you.” His voice was listless; he had aged in two hours. Olive put her arm about his bowed shoulder.

“I’m so terribly sorry, Uncle Harold.”

Suddenly a stream of profanity broke from him, died away, and a single large tear welled slowly from one eye.