Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Illustrated) (138 page)

Relieved, Kaethe pursued her course in a less personal tone:

“I think Nicole is less sick than any one thinks--she only cherishes her illness as an instrument of power. She ought to be in the cinema, like your Norma Talmadge--that’s where all American women would be happy.”

“Are you jealous of Norma Talmadge, on a film?”

“I don’t like Americans. They’re selfish,
self
ish!
”

“You like Dick?”

“I like him,” she admitted. “He’s different, he thinks of others.”

--And so does Norma Talmadge, Franz said to himself. Norma Talmadge must be a fine, noble woman beyond her loveliness. They must compel her to play foolish rôles; Norma Talmadge must be a woman whom it would be a great privilege to know.

Kaethe had forgotten about Norma Talmadge, a vivid shadow that she had fretted bitterly upon one night as they were driving home from the movies in Zurich.

“--Dick married Nicole for her money,” she said. “That was his weakness--you hinted as much yourself one night.”

“You’re being malicious.”

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she retracted. “We must all live together like birds, as you say. But it’s difficult when Nicole acts as--when Nicole pulls herself back a little, as if she were holding her breath--as if I
smelt
bad!”

Kaethe had touched a material truth. She did most of her work herself, and, frugal, she bought few clothes. An American shopgirl, laundering two changes of underwear every night, would have noticed a hint of yesterday’s reawakened sweat about Kaethe’s person, less a smell than an ammoniacal reminder of the eternity of toil and decay. To Franz this was as natural as the thick dark scent of Kaethe’s hair, and he would have missed it equally; but to Nicole, born hating the smell of a nurse’s fingers dressing her, it was an offense only to be endured.

“And the children,” Kaethe continued. “She doesn’t like them to play with our children--” but Franz had heard enough:

“Hold your tongue--that kind of talk can hurt me professionally, since we owe this clinic to Nicole’s money. Let us have lunch.”

Kaethe realized that her outburst had been ill-advised, but Franz’s last remark reminded her that other Americans had money, and a week later she put her dislike of Nicole into new words.

The occasion was the dinner they tendered the Divers upon Dick’s return. Hardly had their footfalls ceased on the path when she shut the door and said to Franz:

“Did you see around his eyes? He’s been on a debauch!”

“Go gently,” Franz requested. “Dick told me about that as soon as he came home. He was boxing on the trans-Atlantic ship. The American passengers box a lot on these trans-Atlantic ships.”

“I believe that?” she scoffed. “It hurts him to move one of his arms and he has an unhealed scar on his temple--you can see where the hair’s been cut away.”

Franz had not noticed these details.

“But what?” Kaethe demanded. “Do you think that sort of thing does the Clinic any good? The liquor I smelt on him tonight, and several other times since he’s been back.”

She slowed her voice to fit the gravity of what she was about to say: “Dick is no longer a serious man.”

Franz rocked his shoulders up the stairs, shaking off her persistence. In their bedroom he turned on her.

“He is most certainly a serious man and a brilliant man. Of all the men who have recently taken their degrees in neuropathology in Zurich, Dick has been regarded as the most brilliant--more brilliant than I could ever be.”

“For shame!”

“It’s the truth--the shame would be not to admit it. I turn to Dick when cases are highly involved. His publications are still standard in their line--go into any medical library and ask. Most students think he’s an Englishman--they don’t believe that such thoroughness could come out of America.” He groaned domestically, taking his pajamas from under the pillow, “I can’t understand why you talk this way, Kaethe--I thought you liked him.”

“For shame!” Kaethe said. “You’re the solid one, you do the work. It’s a case of hare and tortoise--and in my opinion the hare’s race is almost done.”

“Tch! Tch!”

“Very well, then. It’s true.”

With his open hand he pushed down air briskly.

“Stop!”

The upshot was that they had exchanged viewpoints like debaters. Kaethe admitted to herself that she had been too hard on Dick, whom she admired and of whom she stood in awe, who had been so appreciative and understanding of herself. As for Franz, once Kaethe’s idea had had time to sink in, he never after believed that Dick was a serious person. And as time went on he convinced himself that he had never thought so.

II

Dick told Nicole an expurgated version of the catastrophe in Rome--in his version he had gone philanthropically to the rescue of a drunken friend. He could trust Baby Warren to hold her tongue, since he had painted the disastrous effect of the truth upon Nicole. All this, however, was a low hurdle compared to the lingering effect of the episode upon him.

In reaction he took himself for an intensified beating in his work, so that Franz, trying to break with him, could find no basis on which to begin a disagreement. No friendship worth the name was ever destroyed in an hour without some painful flesh being torn--so Franz let himself believe with ever-increasing conviction that Dick travelled intellectually and emotionally at such a rate of speed that the vibrations jarred him--this was a contrast that had previously been considered a virtue in their relation. So, for the shoddiness of needs, are shoes made out of last year’s hide.

Yet it was May before Franz found an opportunity to insert the first wedge. Dick came into his office white and tired one noon and sat down, saying:

“Well, she’s gone.”

“She’s dead?”

“The heart quit.”

Dick sat exhausted in the chair nearest the door. During three nights he had remained with the scabbed anonymous woman-artist he had come to love, formally to portion out the adrenaline, but really to throw as much wan light as he could into the darkness ahead.

Half appreciating his feeling, Franz travelled quickly over an opinion:

“It was neuro-syphilis. All the Wassermans we took won’t tell me differently. The spinal fluid--”

“Never mind,” said Dick. “Oh, God, never mind! If she cared enough about her secret to take it away with her, let it go at that.”

“You better lay off for a day.”

“Don’t worry, I’m going to.”

Franz had his wedge; looking up from the telegram that he was writing to the woman’s brother he inquired: “Or do you want to take a little trip?”

“Not now.”

“I don’t mean a vacation. There’s a case in Lausanne. I’ve been on the phone with a Chilian all morning--”

“She was so damn brave,” said Dick. “And it took her so long.” Franz shook his head sympathetically and Dick got himself together. “Excuse me for interrupting you.”

“This is just a change--the situation is a father’s problem with his son--the father can’t get the son up here. He wants somebody to come down there.”

“What is it? Alcoholism? Homosexuality? When you say Lausanne--”

“A little of everything.”

“I’ll go down. Is there any money in it?”

“Quite a lot, I’d say. Count on staying two or three days, and get the boy up here if he needs to be watched. In any case take your time, take your ease; combine business with pleasure.”

After two hours’ train sleep Dick felt renewed, and he approached the interview with Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real in good spirits.

These interviews were much of a type. Often the sheer hysteria of the family representative was as interesting psychologically as the condition of the patient. This one was no exception: Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real, a handsome iron-gray Spaniard, noble of carriage, with all the appurtenances of wealth and power, raged up and down his suite in the Hôtel de Trois Mondes and told the story of his son with no more self-control than a drunken woman.

“I am at the end of my invention. My son is corrupt. He was corrupt at Harrow, he was corrupt at King’s College, Cambridge. He’s incorrigibly corrupt. Now that there is this drinking it is more and more obvious how he is, and there is continual scandal. I have tried everything--I worked out a plan with a doctor friend of mine, sent them together for a tour of Spain. Every evening Francisco had an injection of cantharides and then the two went together to a reputable bordello--for a week or so it seemed to work but the result was nothing. Finally last week in this very room, rather in that bathroom--” he pointed at it, “--I made Francisco strip to the waist and lashed him with a whip--”

Exhausted with his emotion he sat down and Dick spoke:

“That was foolish--the trip to Spain was futile also--” He struggled against an upsurging hilarity--that any reputable medical man should have lent himself to such an amateurish experiment! “--Señor, I must tell you that in these cases we can promise nothing. In the case of the drinking we can often accomplish something--with proper co-operation. The first thing is to see the boy and get enough of his confidence to find whether he has any insight into the matter.”

--The boy, with whom he sat on the terrace, was about twenty, handsome and alert.

“I’d like to know your attitude,” Dick said. “Do you feel that the situation is getting worse? And do you want to do anything about it?”

“I suppose I do,” said Francisco, “I am very unhappy.”

“Do you think it’s from the drinking or from the abnormality?”

“I think the drinking is caused by the other.” He was serious for a while--suddenly an irrepressible facetiousness broke through and he laughed, saying, “It’s hopeless. At King’s I was known as the Queen of Chili. That trip to Spain--all it did was to make me nauseated by the sight of a woman.”

Dick caught him up sharply.

“If you’re happy in this mess, then I can’t help you and I’m wasting my time.”

“No, let’s talk--I despise most of the others so.” There was some manliness in the boy, perverted now into an active resistance to his father. But he had that typically roguish look in his eyes that homosexuals assume in discussing the subject.

“It’s a hole-and-corner business at best,” Dick told him. “You’ll spend your life on it, and its consequences, and you won’t have time or energy for any other decent or social act. If you want to face the world you’ll have to begin by controlling your sensuality--and, first of all, the drinking that provokes it--”

He talked automatically, having abandoned the case ten minutes before. They talked pleasantly through another hour about the boy’s home in Chili and about his ambitions. It was as close as Dick had ever come to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle--he gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco to perpetrate his outrages, and, for Dick, charm always had an independent existence, whether it was the mad gallantry of the wretch who had died in the clinic this morning, or the courageous grace which this lost young man brought to a drab old story. Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away--realizing that the totality of a life may be different in quality from its segments, and also that life during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken universe of the war’s ending--in such contacts the personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself--there seemed some necessity of taking all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

As he sat on the veranda with young Francisco, a ghost of the past swam into his ken. A tall, singularly swaying male detached himself from the shrubbery and approached Dick and Francisco with feeble resolution. For a moment he formed such an apologetic part of the vibrant landscape that Dick scarcely remarked him--then Dick was on his feet, shaking hands with an abstracted air, thinking, “My God, I’ve stirred up a nest!” and trying to collect the man’s name.

“This is Doctor Diver, isn’t it?”

“Well, well--Mr. Dumphry, isn’t it?”

“Royal Dumphry. I had the pleasure of having dinner one night in that lovely garden of yours.”

“Of course.” Trying to dampen Mr. Dumphry’s enthusiasm, Dick went into impersonal chronology. “It was in nineteen--twenty-four--or twenty-five--”

He had remained standing, but Royal Dumphry, shy as he had seemed at first, was no laggard with his pick and spade; he spoke to Francisco in a flip, intimate manner, but the latter, ashamed of him, joined Dick in trying to freeze him away.

“Doctor Diver--one thing I want to say before you go. I’ve never forgotten that evening in your garden--how nice you and your wife were. To me it’s one of the finest memories in my life, one of the happiest ones. I’ve always thought of it as the most civilized gathering of people that I have ever known.”

Dick continued a crab-like retreat toward the nearest door of the hotel.

“I’m glad you remembered it so pleasantly. Now I’ve got to see--”

“I understand,” Royal Dumphry pursued sympathetically. “I hear he’s dying.”

“Who’s dying?”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t have said that--but we have the same physician.”

Dick paused, regarding him in astonishment. “Who’re you talking about?”

“Why, your wife’s father--perhaps I--”

“My
what
?”

“I suppose--you mean I’m the first person--”

“You mean my wife’s father is here, in Lausanne?”

“Why, I thought you knew--I thought that was why you were here.”

“What doctor is taking care of him?”

Dick scrawled the name in a notebook, excused himself, and hurried to a telephone booth.

It was convenient for Doctor Dangeu to see Doctor Diver at his house immediately.

Doctor Dangeu was a young Génevois; for a moment he was afraid that he was going to lose a profitable patient, but, when Dick reassured him, he divulged the fact that Mr. Warren was indeed dying.