Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (351 page)

“I like Norma Shearer the best. Do you?”

Driving homeward through the soft night, she put up her face quietly to be kissed. Holding her in the hollow of his arm, Jacob rubbed his cheek against her cheek’s softness and then looked down at her for a long moment.

“Such a lovely child,” he said gravely.

She smiled back at him; her hands played conventionally with the lapels of his coat. “I had a wonderful time,” she whispered. “Geeze! I hope I never have to go to court again.”

“I hope you don’t.”

“Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?”

“This is Great Neck,” he said, “that we’re passing through. A lot of moving-picture stars live here.”

“You’re a card, handsome.”

“Why?”

She shook her head from side to side and smiled. “You’re a card.”

She saw then that he was a type with which she was not acquainted. He was surprised, not flattered, that she thought him droll. She saw that whatever his eventual purpose he wanted nothing of her now. Jenny Delehanty learned quickly; she let herself become grave and sweet and quiet as the night, and as they rolled over Queensboro Bridge into the city she was half asleep against his shoulder.

II

He called up Billy Farrelly next day. “I want to see you,” he said. “I found a girl I wish you’d take a look at.”

“My gosh!” said Farrelly. “You’re the third today.”

“Not the third of this kind.”

“All right. If she’s white, she can have the lead in a picture I’m starting Friday.”

“Joking aside, will you give her a test?”

“I’m not joking. She can have the lead, I tell you. I’m sick of these lousy actresses. I’m going out to the Coast next month. I’d rather be Constance Talmadge’s water boy than own most of these young--” His voice was bitter with Irish disgust. “Sure, bring her over, Jake. I’ll take a look at her.”

Four days later, when Mrs. Choynski, accompanied by two deputy sheriffs, had gone to Auburn to pass the remainder of her life, Jacob drove Jenny over the bridge to Astoria, Long Island.

“You’ve got to have a new name,” he said; “and remember you never had a sister.”

“I thought of that,” she answered. “I thought of a name too--Tootsie Defoe.”

“That’s rotten,” he laughed; “just rotten.”

“Well, you think of one if you’re so smart.”

“How about Jenny--Jenny--oh, anything--Jenny Prince?”

“All right, handsome.”

Jenny Prince walked up the steps of the motion-picture studio, and Billy Farrelly, in a bitter Irish humor, in contempt for himself and his profession, engaged her for one of the three leads in his picture.

“They’re all the same,” he said to Jacob. “Shucks! Pick ‘em up out of the gutter today and they want gold plates tomorrow. I’d rather be Constance Talmadge’s water boy than own a harem full of them.”

“Do you like this girl?”

“She’s all right. She’s got a good side face. But they’re all the same.”

Jacob bought Jenny Prince an evening dress for a hundred and eighty dollars and took her to the Lido that night. He was pleased with himself, and excited. They both laughed a lot and were happy.

“Can you believe you’re in the movies?” he demanded.

“They’ll probably kick me out tomorrow. It was too easy.”

“No, it wasn’t. It was very good--psychologically. Billy Farrelly was in just the one mood--”

“I liked him.”

“He’s fine,” agreed Jacob. But he was reminded that already another man was helping to open doors for her success. “He’s a wild Irishman, look out for him.”

“I know. You can tell when a guy wants to make you.”

“What?”

“I don’t mean he wanted to make me, handsome. But he’s got that look about him, if you know what I mean.” She distorted her lovely face with a wise smile. “He likes ‘em; you could tell that this afternoon.”

They drank a bottle of charged and very alcoholic grape juice.

Presently the head waiter came over to their table.

“This is Miss Jenny Prince,” said Jacob. “You’ll see a lot of her, Lorenzo, because she’s just signed a big contract with the pictures. Always treat her with the greatest possible respect.”

When Lorenzo had withdrawn, Jenny said, “You got the nicest eyes I ever seen.” It was her effort, the best she could do. Her face was serious and sad. “Honest,” she repeated herself, “the nicest eyes I ever seen. Any girl would be glad to have eyes like yours.”

He laughed, but he was touched. His hand covered her arm lightly. “Be good,” he said. “Work hard and I’ll be so proud of you--and we’ll have some good times together.”

“I always have a good time with you.” Her eyes were full on his, in his, held there like hands. Her voice was clear and dry. “Honest, I’m not kidding about your eyes. You always think I’m kidding. I want to thank you for all you’ve done for me.”

“I haven’t done anything, you lunatic. I saw your face and I was--I was beholden to it--everybody ought to be beholden to it.”

Entertainers appeared and her eyes wandered hungrily away from him.

She was so young--Jacob had never been so conscious of youth before. He had always considered himself on the young side until tonight.

Afterward, in the dark cave of the taxicab, fragrant with the perfume he had bought for her that day, Jenny came close to him, clung to him. He kissed her, without enjoying it. There was no shadow of passion in her eyes or on her mouth; there was a faint spray of champagne on her breath. She clung nearer, desperately. He took her hands and put them in her lap.

She leaned away from him resentfully.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you like me?”

“I shouldn’t have let you have so much champagne.”

“Why not? I’ve had a drink before. I was tight once.”

“Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. And if I hear of your taking any more drinks, you’ll hear from me.”

“You sure have got your nerve, haven’t you?”

“What do you do? Let all the corner soda jerkers maul you around whenever they want?”

“Oh, shut up!”

For a moment they rode in silence. Then her hand crept across to his. “I like you better than any guy I ever met, and I can’t help that, can I?”

“Dear little Jenny.” He put his arm around her again.

Hesitating tentatively, he kissed her and again he was chilled by the innocence of her kiss, the eyes that at the moment of contact looked beyond him out into the darkness of the night, the darkness of the world. She did not know yet that splendor was something in the heart; at the moment when she should realize that and melt into the passion of the universe he could take her without question or regret.

“I like you enormously,” he said; “better than almost anyone I know. I mean that about drinking though. You mustn’t drink.”

“I’ll do anything you want,” she said; and she repeated, looking at him directly, “Anything.”

The car drew up in front of her flat and he kissed her good night.

He rode away in a mood of exultation, living more deeply in her youth and future than he had lived in himself for years. Thus, leaning forward a little on his cane, rich, young and happy, he was borne along dark streets and light toward a future of his own which he could not foretell.

III

A month later, climbing into a taxicab with Farrelly one night, he gave the latter’s address to the driver. “So you’re in love with this baby,” said Farrelly pleasantly. “Very well, I’ll get out of your way.”

Jacob experienced a vast displeasure. “I’m not in love with her,” he said slowly. “Billy, I want you to leave her alone.”

“Sure! I’ll leave her alone,” agreed Farrelly readily. “I didn’t know you were interested--she told me she couldn’t make you.”

“The point is you’re not interested either,” said Jacob. “If I thought that you two really cared about each other, do you think I’d be fool enough to try to stand in the way? But you don’t give a darn about her, and she’s impressed and a little fascinated.”

“Sure,” agreed Farrelly, bored. “I wouldn’t touch her for anything.”

Jacob laughed. “Yes, you would. Just for something to do. That’s what I object to--anything--anything casual happening to her.”

“I see what you mean. I’ll let her alone.”

Jacob was forced to be content with that. He had no faith in Billy Farrelly, but he guessed that Farrelly liked him and wouldn’t offend him unless stronger feelings were involved. But the holding hands under the table tonight had annoyed him. Jenny lied about it when he reproached her; she offered to let him take her home immediately, offered not to speak to Farrelly again all evening. Then he had seemed silly and pointless to himself. It would have been easier, when Farrelly said “So you’re in love with this baby,” to have been able to answer simply, “I am.”

But he wasn’t. He valued her now more than he had ever thought possible. He watched in her the awakening of a sharply individual temperament. She liked quiet and simple things. She was developing the capacity to discriminate and shut the trivial and the unessential out of her life. He tried giving her books; then wisely he gave up that and brought her into contact with a variety of men. He made situations and then explained them to her, and he was pleased, as appreciation and politeness began to blossom before his eyes. He valued, too, her utter trust in him and the fact that she used him as a standard for judgments on other men.

Before the Farrelly picture was released, she was offered a two-year contract on the strength of her work in it--four hundred a week for six months and an increase on a sliding scale. But she would have to go to the Coast.

“Wouldn’t you rather have me wait?” she said, as they drove in from the country one afternoon. “Wouldn’t you rather have me stay here in New York--near you?”

“You’ve got to go where your work takes you. You ought to be able to look out for yourself. You’re seventeen.”

Seventeen--she was as old as he; she was ageless. Her dark eyes under a yellow straw hat were as full of destiny as though she had not just offered to toss destiny away.

“I wonder if you hadn’t come along, someone else would of,” she said--”to make me do things, I mean.”

“You’d have done them yourself. Get it out of your head that you’re dependent on me.”

“I am. Everything is, thanks to you.”

“It isn’t, though,” he said emphatically, but he brought no reasons; he liked her to think that.

“I don’t know what I’ll do without you. You’re my only friend”--and she added--”that I care about. You see? You understand what I mean?”

He laughed at her, enjoying the birth of her egotism implied in her right to be understood. She was lovelier that afternoon than he had ever seen her, delicate, resonant and, for him, undesirable. But sometimes he wondered if that sexlessness wasn’t for him alone, wasn’t a side that, perhaps purposely, she turned toward him. She was happiest of all with younger men, though she pretended to despise them. Billy Farrelly, obligingly and somewhat to her mild chagrin, had left her alone.

“When will you come out to Hollywood?”

“Soon,” he promised. “And you’ll be coming back to New York.”

She began to cry. “Oh, I’ll miss you so much! I’ll miss you so much!” Large tears of distress ran down her warm ivory cheeks. “Oh, geeze!” she cried softly. “You been good to me! Where’s your hand? Where’s your hand? You been the best friend anybody ever had. Where am I ever going to find a friend like you?”

She was acting now, but a lump arose in his throat and for a moment a wild idea ran back and forth in his mind, like a blind man, knocking over its solid furniture--to marry her. He had only to make the suggestion, he knew, and she would become close to him and know no one else, because he would understand her forever.

Next day, in the station, she was pleased with her flowers, her compartment, with the prospect of a longer trip than she had ever taken before. When she kissed him good-by her deep eyes came close to his again and she pressed against him as if in protest against the separation. Again she cried, but he knew that behind her tears lay the happiness of adventure in new fields. As he walked out of the station, New York was curiously empty. Through her eyes he had seen old colors once more; now they had faded back into the gray tapestry of the past. The next day he went to an office high in a building on Park Avenue and talked to a famous specialist he had not visited for a decade.

“I want you to examine the larynx again,” he said. “There’s not much hope, but something might have changed the situation.”

He swallowed a complicated system of mirrors. He breathed in and out, made high and low sounds, coughed at a word of command. The specialist fussed and touched. Then he sat back and took out his eyeglass. “There’s no change,” he said. “The cords are not diseased--they’re simply worn out. It isn’t anything that can be treated.”

“I thought so,” said Jacob, humbly, as if he had been guilty of an impertinence. “That’s practically what you told me before. I wasn’t sure how permanent it was.”

He had lost something when he came out of the building on Park Avenue--a half hope, the love child of a wish, that some day--

“New York desolate,” he wired her. “The night clubs all closed. Black wreaths on the Statue of Civic Virtue. Please work hard and be remarkably happy.”

“Dear Jacob,” she wired back, “miss you so. You are the nicest man that ever lived and I mean it, dear. Please don’t forget me. Love from Jenny.”

Winter came. The picture Jenny had made in the East was released, together with preliminary interviews and articles in the fan magazines. Jacob sat in his apartment, playing the Kreutzer Sonata over and over on his new phonograph, and read her meager and stilted but affectionate letters and the articles which said she was a discovery of Billy Farrelly’s. In February he became engaged to an old friend, now a widow.

They went to Florida and were suddenly snarling at each other in hotel corridors and over bridge games, so they decided not to go through with it after all. In the spring he took a stateroom on the Paris, but three days before sailing he disposed of it and went to California.

IV

Jenny met him at the station, kissed him and clung to his arm in the car all the way to the Ambassador Hotel. “Well, the man came,” she cried. “I never thought I’d get him to come. I never did.”