Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (324 page)

‘He held my hand away,’ she said, ‘so I couldn’t give him an injection.’

‘Oh, an invalid he-man,’ Mrs Hixson grumbled. ‘They belong in sanatoria. I’ve got a case coming along in two minutes that you can get a little rest on. It’s an old woman--’

The phone rang again. ‘Oh, hello, Hattie. . . . Well, how about that big Svensen girl? She ought to be able to take care of any alcoholic. . . . How about Josephine Markham? Doesn’t she live in your apartment house? . . . Get her to the phone.’ Then after a moment, ‘Joe, would you care to take the case of a well-known cartoonist, or artist, whatever they call themselves, at Forest Park Inn? . . . No, I don’t know, but Dr Carter is in charge and will be around about ten o’clock.’

There was a long pause; from time to time Mrs Hixson spoke:

‘I see . . . Of course, I understand your point of view. Yes, but this isn’t supposed to be dangerous--just a little difficult. I never like to send girls to a hotel because I know what riff-raff you’re liable to run into. . . . No, I’ll find somebody. Even at this hour. Never mind and thanks. Tell Hattie I hope that the hat matches the négligé. . . .’

Mrs Hixson hung up the receiver and made notations on the pad before her. She was a very efficient woman. She had been a nurse and had gone through the worst of it, had been a proud, idealistic, overworked probationer, suffered the abuse of smart internees and the insolence of her first patients, who thought that she was something to be taken into camp immediately for premature commitment to the service of old age. She swung around suddenly from the desk.

‘What kind of cases do you want? I told you I have a nice old woman--’

The nurse’s brown eyes were alight with a mixture of thoughts--the movie she had just seen about Pasteur and the book they had all read about Florence Nightingale when they were student nurses. And their pride, swinging across the streets in the cold weather at Philadelphia General, as proud of their new capes as débutantes in their furs going into balls at the hotels.

‘I--I think I would like to try the case again,’ she said amid a cacophony of telephone bells. ‘I’d just as soon go back if you can’t find anybody else.’

‘But one minute you say you’ll never go on an alcoholic case again and the next minute you say you want to go back to one.’

‘I think I overestimated how difficult it was. Really, I think I could help him.’

‘That’s up to you. But if he tried to grab your wrists.’

‘But he couldn’t,’ the nurse said. ‘Look at my wrists: I played basketball at Waynesboro High for two years. I’m quite able to take care of him.’

Mrs Hixson looked at her for a long minute. ‘Well, all right,’ she said. ‘But just remember that nothing they say when they’re drunk is what they mean when they’re sober--I’ve been all through that; arrange with one of the servants that you can call on him, because you never can tell--some alcoholics are pleasant and some of them are not, but all of them can be rotten.’

‘I’ll remember,’ the nurse said.

It was an oddly clear night when she went out, with slanting particles of thin sleet making white of a blue-black sky. The bus was the same that had taken her into town, but there seemed to be more windows broken now and the bus driver was irritated and talked about what terrible things he would do if he caught any kids. She knew he was just talking about the annoyance in general, just as she had been thinking about the annoyance of an alcoholic. When she came up to the suite and found him all helpless and distraught she would despise him and be sorry for him.

Getting off the bus, she went down the long steps to the hotel, feeling a little exalted by the chill in the air. She was going to take care of him because nobody else would, and because the best people of her profession had been interested in taking care of the cases that nobody else wanted.

She knocked at his study door, knowing just what she was going to say.

He answered it himself. He was in dinner clothes even to a derby hat--but minus his studs and tie.

‘Oh, hello,’ he said casually. ‘Glad you’re back. I woke up a while ago and decided I’d go out. Did you get a night nurse?’

‘I’m the night nurse too,’ she said. ‘I decided to stay on twenty-four-hour duty.’

He broke into a genial, indifferent smile.

‘I saw you were gone, but something told me you’d come back. Please find my studs. They ought to be either in a little tortoiseshell box or--’

He shook himself a little more into his clothes, and hoisted the cuffs up inside his coat sleeves.

‘I thought you had quit me,’ he said casually.

‘I thought I had, too.’

‘If you look on that table,’ he said, ‘you’ll find a whole strip of cartoons that I drew you.’

‘Who are you going to see?’ she asked.

‘It’s the President’s secretary,’ he said. ‘I had an awful time trying to get ready. I was about to give up when you came in. Will you order me some sherry?’

‘One glass,’ she agreed wearily.

From the bathroom he called presently:

‘Oh, Nurse, Nurse, Light of my Life, where is another stud?’

‘I’ll put it in.’

In the bathroom she saw the pallor and the fever on his face and smelled the mixed peppermint and gin on his breath.

‘You’ll come up soon?’ she asked. ‘Dr Carter’s coming at ten.’

‘What nonsense! You’re coming down with me.’

‘Me?’ she exclaimed. ‘In a sweater and skirt? Imagine!’

‘Then I won’t go.’

‘All right then, go to bed. That’s where you belong anyhow. Can’t you see these people tomorrow?’

‘No, of course not!’

She went behind him and reaching over his shoulder tied his tie--his shirt was already thumbed out of press where he had put in the studs, and she suggested:

‘Won’t you put on another one, if you’ve got to meet some people you like?’

‘All right, but I want to do it myself.’

‘Why can’t you let me help you?’ she demanded in exasperation. ‘Why can’t you let me help you with your clothes? What’s a nurse for--what good am I doing?’

He sat down suddenly on the toilet seat.

‘All right--go on.’

‘Now don’t grab my wrist,’ she said, and then, ‘Excuse me.’

‘Don’t worry. It didn’t hurt. You’ll see in a minute.’

She had the coat, vest, and stiff shirt off him but before she could pull his undershirt over his head he dragged at his cigarette, delaying her.

‘Now watch this,’ he said. ‘One--two--three.’

She pulled up the undershirt; simultaneously he thrust the crimson-grey point of the cigarette like a dagger against his heart. It crushed out against a copper plate on his left rib about the size of a silver dollar, and he said ‘Ouch!’ as a stray spark fluttered down against his stomach.

Now was the time to be hard-boiled, she thought. She knew there were three medals from the war in his jewel box, but she had risked many things herself: tuberculosis among them and one time something worse, though she had not known it and had never quite forgiven the doctor for not telling her.

‘You’ve had a hard time with that, I guess,’ she said lightly as she sponged him. ‘Won’t it ever heal?’

‘Never. That’s a copper plate.’

‘Well, it’s no excuse for what you’re doing to yourself.’

He bent his great brown eyes on her, shrewd--aloof, confused. He signalled to her, in one second, his Will to Die, and for all her training and experience she knew she could never do anything constructive with him. He stood up, steadying himself on the wash-basin and fixing his eyes on some place just ahead.

‘Now, if I’m going to stay here you’re not going to get at that liquor,’ she said.

Suddenly she knew he wasn’t looking for that. He was looking at the corner where he had thrown the bottle the night before. She stared at his handsome face, weak and defiant--afraid to turn even half-way because she knew that death was in that corner where he was looking. She knew death--she had heard it, smelt its unmistakable odour, but she had never seen it before it entered into anyone, and she knew this man saw it in the corner of his bathroom; that it was standing there looking at him while he spat from a feeble cough and rubbed the result into the braid of his trousers. It shone there crackling for a moment as evidence of the last gesture he ever made.

She tried to express it next day to Mrs Hixson:

‘It’s not like anything you can beat--no matter how hard you try. This one could have twisted my wrists until he strained them and that wouldn’t matter so much to me. It’s just that you can’t really help them and it’s so discouraging--it’s all for nothing.’

AT YOUR AGE

Saturday Evening Post
(17 August 1929)

Tom Squires came into the drug store to buy a toothbrush, a can of talcum, a gargle, Castile soap, Epsom salts and a box of cigars. Having lived alone for many years, he was methodical, and while waiting to be served he held the list in his hand. It was Christmas week and Minneapolis was under two feet of exhilarating, constantly refreshed snow; with his cane Tom knocked two clean crusts of it from his overshoes. Then, looking up, he saw the blonde girl.

She was a rare blonde, even in that Promised Land of Scandinavians, where pretty blondes are not rare. There was warm color in her cheeks, lips and pink little hands that folded powders into papers; her hair, in long braids twisted about her head, was shining and alive. She seemed to Tom suddenly the cleanest person he knew of, and he caught his breath as he stepped forward and looked into her gray eyes.

“A can of talcum.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind. . . . That’s fine.”

She looked back at him apparently without self-consciousness, and, as the list melted away, his heart raced with it wildly.

“I am not old,” he wanted to say. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty. Don’t I interest you at all?”

But she only said “What kind of gargle?”

And he answered, “What can you recommend? . . . That’s fine.”

Almost painfully he took his eyes from her, went out and got into his coupé.

“If that young idiot only knew what an old imbecile like me could do for her,” he thought humorously--”what worlds I could open out to her!”

As he drove away into the winter twilight he followed this train of thought to a totally unprecedented conclusion. Perhaps the time of day was the responsible stimulant, for the shop windows glowing into the cold, the tinkling bells of a delivery sleigh, the white gloss left by shovels on the sidewalks, the enormous distance of the stars, brought back the feel of other nights thirty years ago. For an instant the girls he had known then slipped like phantoms out of their dull matronly selves of today and fluttered past him with frosty, seductive laughter, until a pleasant shiver crawled up his spine.

“Youth! Youth! Youth!” he apostrophized with conscious lack of originality, and, as a somewhat ruthless and domineering man of no morals whatsoever, he considered going back to the drug store to seek the blonde girl’s address. It was not his sort of thing, so the half-formed intention passed; the idea remained.

“Youth, by heaven--youth!” he repeated under his breath. “I want it near me, all around me, just once more before I’m too old to care.”

He was tall, lean and handsome, with the ruddy, bronzed face of a sportsman and a just faintly graying mustache. Once he had been among the city’s best beaus, organizer of cotillions and charity balls, popular with men and women, and with several generations of them. After the war he had suddenly felt poor, gone into business, and in ten years accumulated nearly a million dollars. Tom Squires was not introspective, but he perceived now that the wheel of his life had revolved again, bringing up forgotten, yet familiar, dreams and yearnings. Entering his house, he turned suddenly to a pile of disregarded invitations to see whether or not he had been bidden to a dance tonight.

Throughout his dinner, which he ate alone at the Downtown Club, his eyes were half closed and on his face was a faint smile. He was practicing so that he would be able to laugh at himself painlessly, if necessary.

“I don’t even know what they talk about,” he admitted. “They pet--prominent broker goes to petting party with débutante. What is a petting party? Do they serve refreshments? Will I have to learn to play a saxophone?”

These matters, lately as remote as China in a news reel, came alive to him. They were serious questions. At ten o’clock he walked up the steps of the College Club to a private dance with the same sense of entering a new world as when he had gone into a training camp back in ‘17. He spoke to a hostess of his generation and to her daughter, overwhelmingly of another, and sat down in a corner to acclimate himself.

He was not alone long. A silly young man named Leland Jaques, who lived across the street from Tom, remarked him kindly and came over to brighten his life. He was such an exceedingly fatuous young man that, for a moment, Tom was annoyed, but he perceived craftily that he might be of service.

“Hello, Mr. Squires. How are you, sir?”

“Fine, thanks, Leland. Quite a dance.”

As one man of the world with another, Mr. Jaques sat, or lay, down on the couch and lit--or so it seemed to Tom--three or four cigarettes at once.

“You should of been here last night, Mr. Squires. Oh, boy, that was a party and a half! The Caulkins. Hap-past five!”

“Who’s that girl who changes partners every minute?” Tom asked. . . . “No, the one in white passing the door.”

“That’s Annie Lorry.”

“Arthur Lorry’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She seems popular.”

“About the most popular girl in town--anyway, at a dance.”

“Not popular except at dances?”

“Oh, sure, but she hangs around with Randy Cambell all the time.”

“What Cambell?”

“D. B.”

There were new names in town in the last decade.

“It’s a boy-and-girl affair.” Pleased with this phrase, Jaques tried to repeat it: “One of those boy-and-girls affair--boys-and-girl affairs--” He gave it up and lit several more cigarettes, crushing out the first series on Tom’s lap.