Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (323 page)

The bus was all he expected--only one other man on the roof and the green branches ticking against each window through whole blocks. They would probably have to trim those branches and it seemed a pity. There was so much to look at--he tried to define the color of one line of houses and could only think of an old opera cloak of his mother’s that was full of tints and yet was of no tint--a mere reflector of light. Somewhere church bells were playing
“Venite Adoremus”
and he wondered why, because Christmas was eight months off. He didn’t like bells but it had been very moving when they played
“Maryland, My Maryland”
at the governor’s funeral.

On the college football field men were working with rollers and a title occurred to him: “Turf-keeper” or else “The Grass Grows,” something about a man working on turf for years and bringing up his son to go to college and play football there. Then the son dying in youth and the man’s going to work in the cemetery and putting turf over his son instead of under his feet. It would be the kind of piece that is often placed in anthologies, but not his sort of thing--it was sheer swollen antithesis, as formalized as a popular magazine story and easier to write. Many people, however, would consider it excellent because it was melancholy, had digging in it and was simple to understand.

The bus went past a pale Athenian railroad station brought to life by the blue shirted redcaps out in front. The street narrowed as the business section began and there were suddenly brightly dressed girls, all very beautiful--he thought he had never seen such beautiful girls. There were men too but they all looked rather silly, like himself in the mirror, and there were old undecorative women, and presently, too, there were plain and unpleasant faces among the girls; but in general they were lovely, dressed in real colors all the way from six to thirty, no plans or struggles in their faces, only a state of sweet suspension, provocative and serene. He loved life terribly for a minute, not wanting to give it up at all. He thought perhaps he had made a mistake in coming out so soon.

He got off the bus, holding carefully to all the railings and walked a block to the hotel barbershop. He passed a sporting goods store and looked in the window unmoved except by a first baseman’s glove which was already dark in the pocket. Next to that was a haberdasher’s and here he stood for quite a while looking at the deep shade of shirts and the ones of checker and plaid. Ten years ago on the summer Riviera the author and some others had bought dark blue workmen’s shirts, and probably that had started that style. The checkered shirts were nice looking, bright as uniforms and he wished he were twenty and going to a beach club all dolled up like a Turner sunset or Guido Reni’s dawn.

The barbershop was large, shining and scented--it had been several months since the author had come downtown on such a mission and he found that his familiar barber was laid up with arthritis; however, he explained to another man how to use the ointment, refused a newspaper and sat, rather happy and sensually content at the strong fingers on his scalp, while a pleasant mingled memory of all the barbershops he had ever known flowed through his mind.

Once he had written a story about a barber. Back in 1929 the proprietor of his favorite shop in the city where he was then living had made a fortune of $300,000 on tips from a local industrialist and was about to retire. The author had no stake in the market, in fact, was about to sail for Europe for a few years with such accumulation as he had, and that autumn hearing how the barber had lost all his fortune he was prompted to write a story, thoroughly disguised in every way yet hinging on the fact of a barber rising in the world and then tumbling; he heard, nevertheless, that the story had been identified in the city and caused some hard feelings.

The shampoo ended. When he came out into the hall an orchestra had started to play in the cocktail room across the way and he stood for a moment in the door listening. So long since he had danced, perhaps two evenings in five years, yet a review of his last book had mentioned him as being fond of night clubs; the same review had also spoken of him as being indefatigable. Something in the sound of the word in his mind broke him momentarily and feeling tears of weakness behind his eyes he turned away. It was like in the beginning fifteen years ago when they said he had “fatal facility,” and he labored like a slave over every sentence so as not to be like that.

“I’m getting bitter again,” he said to himself. “That’s no good, no good--I’ve got to go home.”

The bus was a long time coming but he didn’t like taxis and he still hoped that something would occur to him on that upper-deck passing through the green leaves of the boulevard. When it came finally he had some trouble climbing the steps but it was worth it for the first thing he saw was a pair of high school kids, a boy and a girl, sitting without any self-consciousness on the high pedestal of the Lafayette statue, their attention fast upon each other. Their isolation moved him and he knew he would get something out of it professionally, if only in contrast to the growing seclusion of his life and the increasing necessity of picking over an already well-picked past. He needed reforestation and he was well aware of it, and he hoped the soil would stand one more growth. It had never been the very best soil for he had had an early weakness for showing off instead of listening and observing.

Here was the apartment house--he glanced up at his own windows on the top floor before he went in.

“The residence of the successful writer,” he said to himself. “I wonder what marvelous books he’s tearing off up there. It must be great to have a gift like that--just sit down with pencil and paper. Work when you want--go where you please.”

His child wasn’t home yet but the maid came out of the kitchen and said:

“Did you have a nice time?”

“Perfect,” he said. “I went roller skating and bowled and played around with Man Mountain Dean and finished up in a Turkish Bath. Any telegrams?”

“Not a thing.”

“Bring me a glass of milk, will you?”

He went through the dining room and turned into his study, struck blind for a moment with the glow of his two thousand books in the late sunshine. He was quite tired--he would lie down for ten minutes and then see if he could get started on an idea in the two hours before dinner.

AN ALCOHOLIC CASE

Esquire
(February 1937)

CHAPTER I

‘Let--go--that--Oh-h-h! Please, now, will you?
Don’t
start drinking again! Come on--give me the bottle. I told you I’d stay awake givin’ it to you. Come on. If you do like that a-way--then what are you going to be like when you go home. Come on--leave it with me--I’ll leave half in the bottle. Pul-lease. You know what Dr Carter says--I’ll stay awake and give it to you, or else fix some of it in the bottle--come on--like I told you, I’m too tired to be fightin’ you all night. . . . All right, drink your fool self to death.’

‘Would you like some beer?’ he asked.

‘No, I don’t want any beer. Oh, to think that I have to look at you drunk again. My God!’

‘Then I’ll drink the Coca Cola.’

The girl sat down panting on the bed.

‘Don’t you believe in anything?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing you believe in--please--it’ll spill.’

She had no business there, she thought, no business trying to help him. Again they struggled, but after this time he sat with his head in his hands awhile, before he turned around once more.

‘Once more you try to get it I’ll throw it down,’ she said quickly. ‘I will--on the tiles in the bathroom.’

‘Then I’ll step on the broken glass--or you’ll step on it.’

‘Then let go--oh you promised--’

Suddenly she dropped it like a torpedo, sliding underneath her hand and slithering with a flash of red and black and the words: SIR GALAHAD, DISTILLED LOUISVILLE GIN. He took it by the neck and tossed it through the open door to the bathroom.

It was on the floor in pieces and everything was silent for a while and she read
Gone With the Wind
about things so lovely that had happened long ago. She began to worry that he would have to go into the bathroom and might cut his feet, and looked up from time to time to see if he would go in. She was very sleepy--the last time she looked up he was crying and he looked like an old Jewish man she had nursed once in California; he had had to go to the bathroom many times. On this case she was unhappy all the time but she thought:

‘I guess if I hadn’t liked him I wouldn’t have stayed on the case.’

With a sudden resurgence of conscience she got up and put a chair in front of the bathroom door. She had wanted to sleep because he had got her up early that morning to get a paper with the story of the Yale-Dartmouth game in it and she hadn’t been home all day. That afternoon a relative of his had come to see him and she had waited outside in the hall where there was a draught with no sweater to put over her uniform.

As well as she could she arranged him for sleeping, put a robe over his shoulders as he sat slumped over his writing table, and one on his knees. She sat down in the rocker but she was no longer sleepy; there was plenty to enter on the chart and treading lightly about she found a pencil and put it down:

Pulse 120

Respiration 25

Temp. 98--98.4--98.2

Remarks--

--She could make so many:

Tried to get bottle of gin. Threw it away and broke it.

She corrected it to read:

In the struggle it dropped and was broken. Patient was generally difficult.

She started to add as part of her report:
I never want to go on an alcoholic case again,
but that wasn’t in the picture. She knew she could wake herself at seven and clean up everything before his niece awakened. It was all part of the game. But when she sat down in the chair she looked at his face, white and exhausted, and counted his breathing again, wondering why it had all happened. He had been so nice today, drawn her a whole strip of his cartoon just for fun and given it to her. She was going to have it framed and hang it in her room. She felt again his thin wrists wrestling against her wrist and remembered the awful things he had said, and she thought too of what the doctor had said to him yesterday:

‘You’re too good a man to do this to yourself.’

She was tired and didn’t want to clean up the glass on the bathroom floor, because as soon as he breathed evenly she wanted to get him over to the bed. But she decided finally to clean up the glass first; on her knees, searching a last piece of it, she thought:

--This isn’t what I ought to be doing. And this isn’t what
he
ought to be doing.

Resentfully she stood up and regarded him. Through the thin delicate profile of his nose came a light snore, sighing, remote, inconsolable. The doctor had shaken his head in a certain way, and she knew that really it was a case that was beyond her. Besides, on her card at the agency was written, on the advice of her elders, ‘No Alcoholics’.

She had done her whole duty, but all she could think of was that when she was struggling about the room with him with that gin bottle there had been a pause when he asked her if she had hurt her elbow against a door and that she had answered: ‘You don’t know how people talk about you, no matter how you think of yourself--’ when she knew he had a long time ceased to care about such things.

The glass was all collected--as she got out a broom to make sure, she realized that the glass, in its fragments, was less than a window through which they had seen each other for a moment. He did not know about her sister, and Bill Markoe whom she had almost married, and she did not know what had brought him to this pitch, when there was a picture on his bureau of his young wife and his two sons and him, all trim and handsome as he must have been five years ago. It was so utterly senseless--as she put a bandage on her finger where she had cut it while picking up the glass she made up her mind she would never take an alcoholic case again.

CHAPTER II

It was early the next evening. Some Halloween jokester had split the side windows of the bus and she shifted back to the Negro section in the rear for fear the glass might fall out. She had her patient’s cheque but no way to cash it at this hour; there was a quarter and a penny in her purse.

Two nurses she knew were waiting in the hall of Mrs Hixson’s Agency.

‘What kind of case have you been on?’

‘Alcoholic,’ she said.

‘Oh, yes--Gretta Hawks told me about it--you were on with that cartoonist who lives at the Forest Park Inn.’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘I hear he’s pretty fresh.’

‘He’s never done anything to bother me,’ she lied. ‘You can’t treat them as if they were committed--’

‘Oh, don’t get bothered--I just heard that around town--oh, you know--they want you to play around with them--’

‘Oh, be quiet,’ she said, surprised at her own rising resentment.

In a moment Mrs Hixson came out and, asking the other two to wait, signalled her into the office.

‘I don’t like to put young girls on such cases,’ she began. ‘I got your call from the hotel.’

‘Oh, it wasn’t bad, Mrs Hixson. He didn’t know what he was doing and he didn’t hurt me in any way. I was thinking much more of my reputation with you. He was really nice all day yesterday. He drew me--’

‘I didn’t want to send you on that case.’ Mrs Hixson thumbed through the registration cards. ‘You take T.B. cases, don’t you? Yes, I see you do. Now here’s one--’

The phone rang in a continuous chime. The nurse listened as Mrs Hixson’s voice said precisely:

‘I will do what I can--that is simply up to the doctor . . . That is beyond my jurisdiction . . . Oh, hello, Hattie, no, I can’t now. Look, have you got any nurse that’s good with alcoholics? There’s somebody up at the Forest Park Inn who needs somebody. Call back will you?’

She put down the receiver. ‘Suppose you wait outside. What sort of man is this, anyhow? Did he act indecently?’