Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (387 page)

To his relief the outer door opened and an elderly lady came in. It was Mrs. Oral. Scott rose immediately and moved backward toward the door.

“If you’re sure there isn’t anything I can do —  — “

Yanci introduced him to Mrs. Oral; then leaving the elder woman by the fire walked with him to the door. An idea had suddenly occurred to her.

“Wait a minute.”

She ran up the front stairs and returned immediately with a slip of pink paper in her hand.

“Here’s something I wish you’d do,” she said. “Take this to the First National Bank and have it cashed for me. You can leave the money here for me any time.”

Scott took out his wallet and opened it.

“Suppose I cash it for you now,” he suggested.

“Oh, there’s no hurry.”

“But I may as well.” He drew out three new one-hundred-dollar bills and gave them to her.

“That’s awfully sweet of you,” said Yanci.

“Not at all. May I come in and see you next time I come West?”

“I wish you would.”

“Then I will. I’m going East tonight.”

The door shut him out into the snowy dusk and Yanci returned to Mrs. Oral. Mrs. Oral had come to discuss plans.

“And now, my dear, just what do you plan to do? We ought to have some plan to go by, and I thought I’d find out if you had any definite plan in your mind.”

Yanci tried to think. She seemed to herself to be horribly alone in the world.

“I haven’t heard from my aunt. I wired her again this morning. She may be in Florida.”

“In that case you’d go there?”

“I suppose so.”

“Would you close this house?”

“I suppose so.”

Mrs. Oral glanced around with placid practicality. It occurred to her that if Yanci gave the house up she might like it for herself.

“And now,” she continued, “do you know where you stand financially?”

“All right, I guess,” answered Yanci indifferently; and then with a rush of sentiment, “There was enough for t-two; there ought to be enough for o-one.”

“I didn’t mean that,” said Mrs. Oral. “I mean, do you know the details?”

“No.”

“Well, I thought you didn’t know the details. And I thought you ought to know all the details — have a detailed account of what and where your money is. So I called up Mr. Haedge, who knew your father very well personally, to come up this afternoon and glance through his papers. He was going to stop in your father’s bank, too, by the way, and get all the details there. I don’t believe your father left any will.”

Details! Details! Details!

“Thank you,” said Yanci. “That’ll be — nice.”

Mrs. Oral gave three or four vigorous nods that were like heavy periods. Then she got up.

“And now if Hilma’s gone out I’ll make you some tea. Would you like some tea?”

“Sort of.”

“All right, I’ll make you some ni-nice tea.”

Tea! Tea! Tea!

Mr. Haedge, who came from one of the best Swedish families in town, arrived to see Yanci at five o’clock. He greeted her funereally; said that he had been several times to inquire for her; had organized the pallbearers and would now find out how she stood in no time. Did she have any idea whether or not there was a will? No? Well, there probably wasn’t one.

There was one. He found it almost at once in Mr. Bowman’s desk — but he worked there until eleven o’clock that night before he found much else. Next morning he arrived at eight, went down to the bank at ten, then to a certain brokerage firm, and came back to Yanci’s house at noon. He had known Tom Bowman for some years, but he was utterly astounded when he discovered the condition in which that handsome gallant had left his affairs.

He consulted Mrs. Oral, and that afternoon he informed a frightened Yanci in measured language that she was practically penniless. In the midst of the conversation a telegram from Chicago told her that her aunt had sailed the week previous for a trip through the Orient and was not expected back until late spring.

The beautiful Yanci, so profuse, so debonair, so careless with her gorgeous adjectives, had no adjectives for this calamity. She crept upstairs like a hurt child and sat before a mirror, brushing her luxurious hair to comfort herself. One hundred and fifty strokes she gave it, as it said in the treatment, and then a hundred and fifty more — she was too distraught to stop the nervous motion. She brushed it until her arm ached, then she changed arms and went on brushing.

The maid found her next morning, asleep, sprawled across the toilet things on the dresser in a room that was heavy and sweet with the scent of spilled perfume.

VI

To be precise, as Mr. Haedge was to a depressing degree, Tom Bowman left a bank balance that was more than ample — that is to say, more than ample to supply the post-mortem requirements of his own person. There was also twenty years’ worth of furniture, a temperamental roadster with asthmatic cylinders and two one-thousand-dollar bonds of a chain of jewelry stores which yielded 7.5 per cent interest. Unfortunately these were not known in the bond market.

When the car and the furniture had been sold and the stucco bungalow sublet, Yanci contemplated her resources with dismay. She had a bank balance of almost a thousand dollars. If she invested this she would increase her total income to about fifteen dollars a month. This, as Mrs. Oral cheerfully observed, would pay for the boarding-house room she had taken for Yanci as long as Yanci lived. Yanci was so encouraged by this news that she burst into tears.

So she acted as any beautiful girl would have acted in this emergency. With rare decision she told Mr. Haedge that she would leave her thousand dollars in a checking account, and then she walked out of his office and across the street to a beauty parlor to have her hair waved. This raised her morale astonishingly.

Indeed, she moved that very day out of the boarding house and into a small room at the best hotel in town. If she must sink into poverty, she would at least do so in the grand manner.

Sewed into the lining of her best mourning hat were the three new one-hundred-dollar bills, her father’s last present. What she expected of them, why she kept them in such a way, she did not know, unless perhaps because they had come to her under cheerful auspices and might through some gayety inherent in their crisp and virgin paper buy happier things than solitary meals and narrow hotel beds. They were hope and youth and luck and beauty; they began, somehow, to stand for all the things she had lost in that November night when Tom Bowman, having led her recklessly into space, had plunged off himself, leaving her to find the way back alone.

Yanci remained at the Hiawatha Hotel for three months, and she found that after the first visits of condolence her friends had happier things to do with their time than to spend it in her company. Jerry O’Rourke came to see her one day with a wild Celtic look in his eyes, and demanded that she marry him immediately. When she asked for time to consider he walked out in a rage. She heard later that he had been offered a position in Chicago and had left the same night.

She considered, frightened and uncertain. She had heard of people sinking out of place, out of life. Her father had once told her of a man in his class at college who had become a worker around saloons, polishing brass rails for the price of a can of beer; and she knew also that there were girls in this city with whose mothers her own mother had played as a little girl, but who were poor now and had grown common; who worked in stores and had married into the proletariat. But that such a fate should threaten her — how absurd! Why, she knew everyone! She had been invited everywhere; her great-grandfather had been governor of one of the Southern states!

She had written to her aunt in India and again in China, receiving no answer. She concluded that her aunt’s itinerary had changed, and this was confirmed when a post card arrived from Honolulu which showed no knowledge of Tom Bowman’s death, but announced that she was going with a party to the east coast of Africa. This was a last straw. The languorous and lackadaisical Yanci was on her own at last.

“Why not go to work for a while?” suggested Mr. Haedge with some irritation. “Lots of nice girls do nowadays, just for something to occupy themselves with. There’s Elsie Prendergast, who does society news on the Bulletin, and that Semple girl —  — “

“I can’t,” said Yanci shortly with a glitter of tears in her eyes. “I’m going East in February.”

“East? Oh, you’re going to visit someone?”

She nodded.

“Yes, I’m going to visit,” she lied, “so it’d hardly be worth while to go to work.” She could have wept, but she managed a haughty look. “I’d like to try reporting sometime, though, just for the fun of it.”

“Yes, it’s quite a lot of fun,” agreed Mr. Haedge with some irony. “Still, I suppose there’s no hurry about it. You must have plenty of that thousand dollars left.”

“Oh, plenty!”

There were a few hundred, she knew.

“Well, then I suppose a good rest, a change of scene would be the best thing for you.”

“Yes,” answered Yanci. Her lips were trembling and she rose, scarcely able to control herself. Mr. Haedge seemed so impersonally cold. “That’s why I’m going. A good rest is what I need.”

“I think you’re wise.”

What Mr. Haegde would have thought had he seen the dozen drafts she wrote that night of a certain letter is problematical. Here are two of the earlier ones. The bracketed words are proposed substitutions:

Dear Scott:
Not having seen you since that day I was such a silly ass and wept on your coat, I thought I’d write and tell you that I’m coming East pretty soon and would like you to have lunch [dinner] with me or something. I have been living in a room [suite] at the Hiawatha Hotel, intending to meet my aunt, with whom I am going to live [stay], and who is coming back from China this month [spring]. Meanwhile I have a lot of invitations to visit, etc., in the East, and I thought I would do it now. So I’d like to see you —  —

This draft ended here and went into the wastebasket. After an hour’s work she produced the following:

My dear Mr. Kimberly:
I have often [sometimes] wondered how you’ve been since I saw you. I am coming East next month before going to visit my aunt in Chicago, and you must come and see me. I have been going out very little, but my physician advises me that I need change, so I expect to shock the proprieties by some very gay visits in the East —  —

Finally in despondent abandon she wrote a simple note without explanation or subterfuge, tore it up and went to bed. Next morning she identified it in the wastebasket and decided it was the best one after all and sent him a fair copy. It ran:

Scott
: Just a line to tell you I will be at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel from February seventh, probably for ten days. If you phone me some rainy afternoon I’ll invite you to tea.

Sincerely, Yanci Bowman.

VII

Yanci was going to the Ritz for no more reason than that she had once told Scott Kimberly that she always went there. When she reached New York — a cold New York, a strangely menacing New York, quite different from the gay city of theaters and hotel-corridor rendezvous that she had known — there was exactly two hundred dollars in her purse.

It had taken a large part of her bank account to live, and she had at last broken into her sacred three hundred dollars to substitute pretty and delicate quarter-mourning clothes for the heavy black she had laid away.

Walking into the hotel at the moment when its exquisitely dressed patrons were assembling for luncheon, it drained at her confidence to appear bored and at ease. Surely the clerks at the desk knew the contents of her pocketbook. She fancied even that the bell boys were snickering at the foreign labels she had steamed from an old trunk of her father’s and pasted on her suitcase. This last thought horrified her. Perhaps the very hotels and steamers so grandly named had long since been out of commission!

As she stood drumming her fingers on the desk she was wondering whether if she were refused admittance she could muster a casual smile and stroll out coolly enough to deceive two richly dressed women standing near. It had not taken long for the confidence of twenty years to evaporate. Three months without security had made an ineffaceable mark on Yanci’s soul.

“Twenty-four sixty-two,” said the clerk callously.

Her heart settled back into place as she followed the bell boy to the elevator, meanwhile casting a nonchalant glance at the two fashionable women as she passed them. Were their skirts long or short? — longer, she noticed.

She wondered how much the skirt of her new walking suit could be let out.

At luncheon her spirits soared. The head waiter bowed to her. The light rattle of conversation, the subdued hum of the music soothed her. She ordered supreme of melon, eggs Susette and an artichoke, and signed her room number to the check with scarcely a glance at it as it lay beside her plate. Up in her room, with the telephone directory open on the bed before her, she tried to locate her scattered metropolitan acquaintances. Yet even as the phone numbers, with their supercilious tags, Plaza, Circle, and Rhinelander, stared out at her, she could feel a cold wind blow at her unstable confidence. These girls, acquaintances of school, of a summer, of a house party, even of a week-end at a college prom — what claim or attraction could she, poor and friendless, exercise over them? They had their loves, their dates, their week’s gayety planned in advance. They would almost resent her inconvenient memory.

Nevertheless, she called four girls. One of them was out, one at Palm Beach, one in California. The only one to whom she talked said in a hearty voice that she was in bed with grippe, but would phone Yanci as soon as she felt well enough to go out. Then Yanci gave up the girls. She would have to create the illusion of a good time in some other manner. The illusion must be created — that was part of her plan.

She looked at her watch and found that it was three o’clock. Scott Kimberly should have phoned before this, or at least left some word. Still, he was probably busy — at a club, she thought vaguely, or else buying some neckties. He would probably call at four.