Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (335 page)

There’s the whistle! The line of the Yale team sways ponderously forward from its balance and a split second afterward comes the sound of the ball. The field streams with running figures and the whole Bowl strains forward as if thrown by the current of an electric chair.

Suppose we fumbled right away.

Tatnall catches it, goes back ten yards, is surrounded and blotted out of sight. Spears goes through center for three. A short pass, Sampson to Tatnall, is completed, but for no gain. Harlan punts to Devereaux, who is downed in his tracks on the Yale forty-yard line.

Now we’ll see what they’ve got.

It developed immediately that they had a great deal. Using an effective crisscross and a short pass over center, they carried the ball fifty-four yards to the Princeton six-yard line, where they lost it on a fumble, recovered by Red Hopman. After a trade of punts, they began another push, this time to the fifteen-yard line, where, after four hair-raising forward passes, two of them batted down by Dolly, we got the ball on downs. But Yale was still fresh and strong, and with a third onslaught the weaker Princeton line began to give way. Just after the second quarter began Devereaux took the ball over for a touchdown and the half ended with Yale in possession of the ball on our ten-yard line. Score, Yale, 7; Princeton, 0.

We hadn’t a chance. The team was playing above itself, better than it had played all year, but it wasn’t enough. Save that it was the Yale game, when anything could happen, anything
had
happened, the atmosphere of gloom would have been deeper than it was, and in the cheering section you could cut it with a knife.

Early in the game Dolly Harlan had fumbled Devereaux’s high punt, but recovered without gain; toward the end of the half another kick slipped through his fingers, but he scooped it up, and slipping past the end, went back twelve yards. Between halves he told Roper he couldn’t seem to get under the ball, but they kept him there. His own kicks were carrying well and he was essential in the only back-field combination that could hope to score.

After the first play of the game he limped slightly, moving around as little as possible to conceal the fact. But I knew enough about football to see that he was in every play, starting at that rather slow pace of his and finishing with a quick side lunge that almost always took out his man. Not a single Yale forward pass was finished in his territory, but toward the end of the third quarter he dropped another kick--backed around in a confused little circle under it, lost it and recovered on the five-yard line just in time to avert a certain score. That made the third time, and I saw Ed Kimball throw off his blanket and begin to warm up on the sidelines.

Just at that point our luck began to change. From a kick formation, with Dolly set to punt from behind our goal, Howard Bement, who had gone in for Wash Sampson at quarter, took the ball through the center of the line, got by the secondary defense and ran twenty-six yards before he was pulled down. Captain Tasker, of Yale, had gone out with a twisted knee, and Princeton began to pile plays through his substitute, between Bean Gile and Hopman, with George Spears and sometimes Bob Tatnall carrying the ball. We went up to the Yale forty-yard line, lost the ball on a fumble and recovered it on another as the third quarter ended. A wild ripple of enthusiasm ran through the Princeton stands. For the first time we had the ball in their territory with first down and the possibility of tying the score. You could hear the tenseness growing all around you in the intermission; it was reflected in the excited movements of the cheer leaders and the uncontrollable patches of sound that leaped out of the crowd, catching up voices here and there and swelling to an undisciplined roar.

I saw Kimball dash out on the field and report to the referee and I thought Dolly was through at last, and was glad, but it was Bob Tatnall who came out, sobbing, and brought the Princeton side cheering to its feet.

With the first play pandemonium broke loose and continued to the end of the game. At intervals it would swoon away to a plaintive humming; then it would rise to the intensity of wind and rain and thunder, and beat across the twilight from one side of the Bowl to the other like the agony of lost souls swinging across a gap in space.

The teams lined up on Yale’s forty-one yard line and Spears immediately dashed off tackle for six yards. Again he carried the ball--he was a wild unpopular Southerner with inspired moments--going through the same hole for five more and a first down. Dolly made two on a cross buck and Spears was held at center. It was third down, with the ball on Yale’s twenty-nine-yard line and eight to go.

There was some confusion immediately behind me, some pushing and some voices; a man was sick or had fainted--I never discovered which. Then my view was blocked out for a minute by rising bodies and then everything went definitely crazy. Substitutes were jumping around down on the field, waving their blankets, the air was full of hats, cushions, coats and a deafening roar. Dolly Harlan, who had scarcely carried the ball a dozen times in his Princeton career, had picked a long pass from Kimball out of the air and, dragging a tackler, struggled five yards to the Yale goal.

VI

Some time later the game was over. There was a bad moment when Yale began another attack, but there was no scoring and Bob Tatnall’s eleven had redeemed a mediocre season by tying a better Yale team. For us there was the feel of victory about it, the exaltation if not the jubilance, and the Yale faces issuing from out the Bowl wore the look of defeat. It would be a good year, after all--a good fight at the last, a tradition for next year’s team. Our class--those of us who cared--would go out from Princeton without the taste of final defeat. The symbol stood--such as it was; the banners blew proudly in the wind. All that is childish? Find us something to fill the niche of victory.

I waited for Dolly outside the dressing rooms until almost everyone had come out; then, as he still lingered, I went in. Someone had given him a little brandy, and since he never drank much, it was swimming in his head.

“Have a chair, Jeff.” He smiled, broadly and happily. “Rubber! Tony! Get the distinguished guest a chair. He’s an intellectual and he wants to interview one of the bone-headed athletes. Tony, this is Mr. Deering. They’ve got everything in this funny Bowl but armchairs. I love this Bowl. I’m going to build here.”

He fell silent, thinking about all things happily. He was content. I persuaded him to dress--there were people waiting for us. Then he insisted on walking out upon the field, dark now, and feeling the crumbled turf with his shoe.

He picked up a divot from a cleat and let it drop, laughed, looked distracted for a minute, and turned away.

With Tad Davis, Daisy Cary and another girl, we drove to New York. He sat beside Daisy and was silly, charming and attractive. For the first time since I’d known him he talked about the game naturally, even with a touch of vanity.

“For two years I was pretty good and I was always mentioned at the bottom of the column as being among those who played. This year I dropped three punts and slowed up every play till Bob Tatnall kept yelling at me, ‘I don’t see why they won’t take you out!’ But a pass not even aimed at me fell in my arms and I’ll be in the headlines tomorrow.”

He laughed. Somebody touched his foot; he winced and turned white.

“How did you hurt it?” Daisy asked. “In football?”

“I hurt it last summer,” he said shortly.

“It must have been terrible to play on it.”

“It was.”

“I suppose you had to.”

“That’s the way sometimes.”

They understood each other. They were both workers; sick or well, there were things that Daisy also had to do. She spoke of how, with a vile cold, she had had to fall into an open-air lagoon out in Hollywood the winter before.

“Six times--with a fever of a hundred and two. But the production was costing ten thousand dollars a day.”

“Couldn’t they use a double?”

“They did whenever they could--I only fell in when it had to be done.”

She was eighteen and I compared her background of courage and independence and achievement, of politeness based upon the realities of cooperation, with that of most society girls I had known. There was no way in which she wasn’t inestimably their superior--if she had looked for a moment my way--but it was Dolly’s shining velvet eyes that signaled to her own.

“Can’t you go out with me tonight?” I heard her ask him.

He was sorry, but he had to refuse. Vienna was in New York; she was going to see him. I didn’t know, and Dolly didn’t know, whether there was to be a reconciliation or a good-by.

When she dropped Dolly and me at the Ritz there was real regret, that lingering form of it, in both their eyes.

“There’s a marvelous girl,” Dolly said. I agreed. “I’m going up to see Vienna. Will you get a room for us at the Madison?”

So I left him. What happened between him and Vienna I don’t know; he has never spoken about it to this day. But what happened later in the evening was brought to my attention by several surprised and even indignant witnesses to the event.

Dolly walked into the Ambassador Hotel about ten o’clock and went to the desk to ask for Miss Cary’s room. There was a crowd around the desk, among them some Yale or Princeton undergraduates from the game. Several of them had been celebrating and evidently one of them knew Daisy and had tried to get her room by phone. Dolly was abstracted and he must have made his way through them in a somewhat brusque way and asked to be connected with Miss Cary.

One young man stepped back, looked at him unpleasantly and said, “You seem to be in an awful hurry. Just who are you?”

There was one of those slight silent pauses and the people near the desk all turned to look. Something happened inside Dolly; he felt as if life had arranged his role to make possible this particular question--a question that now he had no choice but to answer. Still, there was silence. The small crowd waited.

“Why, I’m Dolly Harlan,” he said deliberately. “What do you think of that?”

It was quite outrageous. There was a pause and then a sudden little flurry and chorus: “Dolly Harlan! What? What did he say?”

The clerk had heard the name; he gave it as the phone was answered from Miss Cary’s room.

“Mr. Harlan’s to go right up, please.”

Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow in his heart that was best of all. Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate ahead of him or the small chatter behind.

DESIGN IN PLASTER

Esquire
(November, 1939)

“How long does the doctor think now?” Mary asked. With his good arm Martin threw back the top of the sheet, disclosing that the plaster armor had been cut away in front in the form of a square, so that his abdomen and the lower part of his diaphragm bulged a little from the aperture. His dislocated arm was still high over his head in an involuntary salute.

“This was a great advance,” he told her. “But it took the heat wave to make Ottinger put in this window. I can’t say much for the view but--have you seen the wire collection?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it,” his wife answered, trying to look amused.

It was laid out on the bureau like a set of surgeons’ tools--wires bent to every length and shape so that the nurse could reach any point inside the plaster cast when perspiration made the itching unbearable.

Martin was ashamed at repeating himself.

“I apologize,” he said. “After two months you get medical psychology. All this stuff is fascinating to me. In fact--” he added, and with only faint irony, “--it is in a way of becoming my life.”

Mary came over and sat beside the bed raising him, cast and all, into her slender arms. He was chief electrical engineer at the studio and his thirty-foot fall wasn’t costing a penny in doctor’s bills. But that--and the fact that the catastrophe had swung them together after a four months’ separation, was its only bright spot.

“I feel so close,” she whispered. “Even through this plaster.”

“Do you think that’s a nice way to talk?”

“Yes.”

“So do I.”

Presently she stood up and rearranged her bright hair in the mirror. He had seen her do it half a thousand times but suddenly there was a quality of remoteness about it that made him sad.

“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.

Mary turned, almost with surprise.

“It seems strange to have you ask me.”

“Why? You almost always tell me. You’re my contact with the world of glamour.”

“But you like to keep bargains. That was our arrangement when we began to live apart.”

“You’re being very technical.”

“No--but that
was
the arrangement. As a matter of fact I’m not doing anything. Bieman asked me to go to a preview, but he bores me. And that French crowd called up.”

“Which member of it?”

She came closer and looked at him.

“Why, I believe you’re jealous,” she said. “The wife of course. Or
he
did, to be exact, but he was calling for his wife--she’d be there. I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Martin was wise enough to wink as if it meant nothing and let it die away, but Mary said an unfortunate last word.

“I thought you liked me to go with them.”

“That’s it,” Martin tried to go slow, “--with ‘them,’ but now it’s ‘he.’“

“They’re all leaving Monday,” she said almost impatiently. “I’ll probably never see him again.”

Silence for a minute. Since his accident there were not an unlimited number of things to talk about, except when there was love between them. Or even pity--he was accepting even pity in the past fortnight. Especially their uncertain plans about the future were in need of being preceded by a mood of love.

“I’m going to get up for a minute,” he said suddenly. “No, don’t help me--don’t call the nurse. I’ve got it figured out.”