Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (82 page)

… The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness — the old illusion that truth and beauty were in some way entwined.

As he stood in front of Delmonico’s lighting a cigarette one night he saw two hansoms drawn up close to the curb, waiting for a chance drunken fare. The outmoded cabs were worn and dirty — the cracked patent leather wrinkled like an old man’s face, the cushions faded to a brownish lavender; the very horses were ancient and weary, and so were the white-haired men who sat aloft, cracking their whips with a grotesque affectation of gallantry. A relic of vanished gaiety!

Anthony Patch walked away in a sudden fit of depression, pondering the bitterness of such survivals. There was nothing, it seemed, that grew stale so soon as pleasure.

On Forty-second Street one afternoon he met Richard Caramel for the first time in many months, a prosperous, fattening Richard Caramel, whose face was filling out to match the Bostonian brow.

“Just got in this week from the coast. Was going to call you up, but I didn’t know your new address.”

“We’ve moved.”

Richard Caramel noticed that Anthony was wearing a soiled shirt, that his cuffs were slightly but perceptibly frayed, that his eyes were set in half-moons the color of cigar smoke.

“So I gathered,” he said, fixing his friend with his bright-yellow eye. “But where and how is Gloria? My God, Anthony, I’ve been hearing the dog-gonedest stories about you two even out in California — and when I get back to New York I find you’ve sunk absolutely out of sight. Why don’t you pull yourself together?”

“Now, listen,” chattered Anthony unsteadily, “I can’t stand a long lecture. We’ve lost money in a dozen ways, and naturally people have talked — on account of the lawsuit, but the thing’s coming to a final decision this winter, surely — “

“You’re talking so fast that I can’t understand you,” interrupted Dick calmly.

“Well, I’ve said all I’m going to say,” snapped Anthony. “Come and see us if you like — or don’t!”

With this he turned and started to walk off in the crowd, but Dick overtook him immediately and grasped his arm.

“Say, Anthony, don’t fly off the handle so easily! You know Gloria’s my cousin, and you’re one of my oldest friends, so it’s natural for me to be interested when I hear that you’re going to the dogs — and taking her with you.”

“I don’t want to be preached to.”

“Well, then, all right — How about coming up to my apartment and having a drink? I’ve just got settled. I’ve bought three cases of Gordon gin from a revenue officer.”

As they walked along he continued in a burst of exasperation:

“And how about your grandfather’s money — you going to get it?”

“Well,” answered Anthony resentfully, “that old fool Haight seems hopeful, especially because people are tired of reformers right now — you know it might make a slight difference, for instance, if some judge thought that Adam Patch made it harder for him to get liquor.”

“You can’t do without money,” said Dick sententiously. “Have you tried to write any — lately?”

Anthony shook his head silently.

“That’s funny,” said Dick. “I always thought that you and Maury would write some day, and now he’s grown to be a sort of tight-fisted aristocrat, and you’re — “

“I’m the bad example.”

“I wonder why?”

“You probably think you know,” suggested Anthony, with an effort at concentration. “The failure and the success both believe in their hearts that they have accurately balanced points of view, the success because he’s succeeded, and the failure because he’s failed. The successful man tells his son to profit by his father’s good fortune, and the failure tells his son to profit by his father’s mistakes.”

“I don’t agree with you,” said the author of “A Shave-tail in France.” “I used to listen to you and Maury when we were young, and I used to be impressed because you were so consistently cynical, but now — well, after all, by God, which of us three has taken to the — to the intellectual life? I don’t want to sound vainglorious, but — it’s me, and I’ve always believed that moral values existed, and I always will.”

“Well,” objected Anthony, who was rather enjoying himself, “even granting that, you know that in practice life never presents problems as clear cut, does it?”

“It does to me. There’s nothing I’d violate certain principles for.”

“But how do you know when you’re violating them? You have to guess at things just like most people do. You have to apportion the values when you look back. You finish up the portrait then — paint in the details and shadows.”

Dick shook his head with a lofty stubbornness. “Same old futile cynic,” he said. “It’s just a mode of being sorry for yourself. You don’t do anything — so nothing matters.”

“Oh, I’m quite capable of self-pity,” admitted Anthony, “nor am I claiming that I’m getting as much fun out of life as you are.”

“You say — at least you used to — that happiness is the only thing worth while in life. Do you think you’re any happier for being a pessimist?”

Anthony grunted savagely. His pleasure in the conversation began to wane. He was nervous and craving for a drink.

“My golly!” he cried, “where do you live? I can’t keep walking forever.”

“Your endurance is all mental, eh?” returned Dick sharply. “Well, I live right here.”

He turned in at the apartment house on Forty-ninth Street, and a few minutes later they were in a large new room with an open fireplace and four walls lined with books. A colored butler served them gin rickeys, and an hour vanished politely with the mellow shortening of their drinks and the glow of a light mid-autumn fire.

“The arts are very old,” said Anthony after a while. With a few glasses the tension of his nerves relaxed and he found that he could think again.

“Which art?”

“All of them. Poetry is dying first. It’ll be absorbed into prose sooner or later. For instance, the beautiful word, the colored and glittering word, and the beautiful simile belong in prose now. To get attention poetry has got to strain for the unusual word, the harsh, earthy word that’s never been beautiful before. Beauty, as the sum of several beautiful parts, reached its apotheosis in Swinburne. It can’t go any further — except in the novel, perhaps.”

Dick interrupted him impatiently:

“You know these new novels make me tired. My God! Everywhere I go some silly girl asks me if I’ve read ‘This Side of Paradise.’ Are our girls really like that? If it’s true to life, which I don’t believe, the next generation is going to the dogs. I’m sick of all this shoddy realism. I think there’s a place for the romanticist in literature.”

Anthony tried to remember what he had read lately of Richard Caramel’s. There was “A Shave-tail in France,” a novel called “The Land of Strong Men,” and several dozen short stories, which were even worse. It had become the custom among young and clever reviewers to mention Richard Caramel with a smile of scorn. “Mr.” Richard Caramel, they called him. His corpse was dragged obscenely through every literary supplement. He was accused of making a great fortune by writing trash for the movies. As the fashion in books shifted he was becoming almost a byword of contempt.

While Anthony was thinking this, Dick had got to his feet and seemed to be hesitating at an avowal.

“I’ve gathered quite a few books,” he said suddenly.

“So I see.”

“I’ve made an exhaustive collection of good American stuff, old and new. I don’t mean the usual Longfellow-Whittier thing — in fact, most of it’s modern.”

He stepped to one of the walls and, seeing that it was expected of him,
Anthony arose and followed.

“Look!”

Under a printed tag Americana he displayed six long rows of books, beautifully bound and, obviously, carefully chosen.

“And here are the contemporary novelists.”

Then Anthony saw the joker. Wedged in between Mark Twain and Dreiser were eight strange and inappropriate volumes, the works of Richard Caramel — “The Demon Lover,” true enough … but also seven others that were execrably awful, without sincerity or grace.

Unwillingly Anthony glanced at Dick’s face and caught a slight uncertainty there.

“I’ve put my own books in, of course,” said Richard Caramel hastily, “though one or two of them are uneven — I’m afraid I wrote a little too fast when I had that magazine contract. But I don’t believe in false modesty. Of course some of the critics haven’t paid so much attention to me since I’ve been established — but, after all, it’s not the critics that count. They’re just sheep.”

For the first time in so long that he could scarcely remember, Anthony felt a touch of the old pleasant contempt for his friend. Richard Caramel continued:

“My publishers, you know, have been advertising me as the Thackeray of
America — because of my New York novel.”

“Yes,” Anthony managed to muster, “I suppose there’s a good deal in what you say.”

He knew that his contempt was unreasonable. He, knew that he would have changed places with Dick unhesitatingly. He himself had tried his best to write with his tongue in his cheek. Ah, well, then — can a man disparage his life-work so readily? …

 — And that night while Richard Caramel was hard at toil, with great hittings of the wrong keys and screwings up of his weary, unmatched eyes, laboring over his trash far into those cheerless hours when the fire dies down, and the head is swimming from the effect of prolonged concentration — Anthony, abominably drunk, was sprawled across the back seat of a taxi on his way to the flat on Claremont Avenue.

THE BEATING

As winter approached it seemed that a sort of madness seized upon Anthony. He awoke in the morning so nervous that Gloria could feel him trembling in the bed before he could muster enough vitality to stumble into the pantry for a drink. He was intolerable now except under the influence of liquor, and as he seemed to decay and coarsen under her eyes, Gloria’s soul and body shrank away from him; when he stayed out all night, as he did several times, she not only failed to be sorry but even felt a measure of relief. Next day he would be faintly repentant, and would remark in a gruff, hang-dog fashion that he guessed he was drinking a little too much.

For hours at a time he would sit in the great armchair that had been in his apartment, lost in a sort of stupor — even his interest in reading his favorite books seemed to have departed, and though an incessant bickering went on between husband and wife, the one subject upon which they ever really conversed was the progress of the will case. What Gloria hoped in the tenebrous depths of her soul, what she expected that great gift of money to bring about, is difficult to imagine. She was being bent by her environment into a grotesque similitude of a housewife. She who until three years before had never made coffee, prepared sometimes three meals a day. She walked a great deal in the afternoons, and in the evenings she read — books, magazines, anything she found at hand. If now she wished for a child, even a child of the Anthony who sought her bed blind drunk, she neither said so nor gave any show or sign of interest in children. It is doubtful if she could have made it clear to any one what it was she wanted, or indeed what there was to want — a lonely, lovely woman, thirty now, retrenched behind some impregnable inhibition born and coexistent with her beauty.

One afternoon when the snow was dirty again along Riverside Drive, Gloria, who had been to the grocer’s, entered the apartment to find Anthony pacing the floor in a state of aggravated nervousness. The feverish eyes he turned on her were traced with tiny pink lines that reminded her of rivers on a map. For a moment she received the impression that he was suddenly and definitely old.

“Have you any money?” he inquired of her precipitately.

“What? What do you mean?”

“Just what I said. Money! Money! Can’t you speak English?”

She paid no attention but brushed by him and into the pantry to put the bacon and eggs in the ice-box. When his drinking had been unusually excessive he was invariably in a whining mood. This time he followed her and, standing in the pantry door, persisted in his question.

“You heard what I said. Have you any money?”

She turned about from the ice-box and faced him.

“Why, Anthony, you must be crazy! You know I haven’t any money — except a dollar in change.”

He executed an abrupt about-face and returned to the living room, where he renewed his pacing. It was evident that he had something portentous on his mind — he quite obviously wanted to be asked what was the matter. Joining him a moment later she sat upon the long lounge and began taking down her hair. It was no longer bobbed, and it had changed in the last year from a rich gold dusted with red to an unresplendent light brown. She had bought some shampoo soap and meant to wash it now; she had considered putting a bottle of peroxide into the rinsing water.

“ — Well?” she implied silently.

“That darn bank!” he quavered. “They’ve had my account for over ten years — ten years. Well, it seems they’ve got some autocratic rule that you have to keep over five hundred dollars there or they won’t carry you. They wrote me a letter a few months ago and told me I’d been running too low. Once I gave out two bum checks — remember? that night in Reisenweber’s? — but I made them good the very next day. Well, I promised old Halloran — he’s the manager, the greedy Mick — that I’d watch out. And I thought I was going all right; I kept up the stubs in my check-book pretty regular. Well, I went in there to-day to cash a check, and Halloran came up and told me they’d have to close my account. Too many bad checks, he said, and I never had more than five hundred to my credit — and that only for a day or so at a time. And by God! What do you think he said then?”

“What?”

“He said this was a good time to do it because I didn’t have a damn penny in there!”

“You didn’t?”

“That’s what he told me. Seems I’d given these Bedros people a check for sixty for that last case of liquor — and I only had forty-five dollars in the bank. Well, the Bedros people deposited fifteen dollars to my account and drew the whole thing out.”

In her ignorance Gloria conjured up a spectre of imprisonment and disgrace.