I'd Die For You

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  —Up toward nothing or perhaps toward a life of future misery and unhappiness, of other Carleys.

  He stopped at a turning, and looked at the starlight, and started on again counting Eighty-one, Eighty-two, Eighty-three. After that he stopped counting.

  When he reached the top at last he was frantic with worry. All his self control, all his restraint, all that made him a forceful person had left him as he mounted those last steps and came out into the open sky. What he had expected to see he could not have said.

  What he saw was a girl eating a sandwich.

  She was sitting with her back against one of the iron posts that supported the rail.

  “Is this Roger?” she demanded. “Or do my eyes deceive me?”

  He leaned against the rail, panting.

  “What are you doing up here?” he asked.

  “Enjoying the stars. I’ve decided to become an eccentric—you know—like Garbo. Only my stuff will be mountain tops. When we finish this picture I’m going to Mount Everest and climb—”

  “Make sense!” he interrupted. “What did you come up here for?”

  “To throw myself over, of course.”

  “Why?”

  “For love, I guess. But I happened to have this sandwich with me—and I was hungry. So I thought I’d eat first.”

  He sat down across from her.

  “Are you interested in anything that’s happening down below in the mere world?” he enquired. “If you are, you might as well know that they got Carley.”

  “Who did?”

  “The process server—the one that had been looking for him. It was a tough break. If he’d kept hid till midnight he couldn’t have been served—Statute of Limitations, or something.”

  “That’s too bad. How did it happen? How did they find where he was?”

  “Guess.”

  “I can’t—it wasn’t you.”

  “Good God, no! It was the Panzer girl.”

  She thought a minute.

  “Oh, so that’s what she was waiting for.”

  There was silence for a moment on top of the rock.

  “Why on earth did you think I’d do a thing like that?”

  “I didn’t after I thought. Excuse me, Roger.”

  “But I did have Mr. de Luxe looked up.”

  “What did you find out?” Her query was detached, impersonal.

  “Nothing much—except there wasn’t any girl who killed herself about him. A certain Josephine Jason he was engaged to found she had pleuro-cancer—that means the lining of the lungs are gone—and she crashed on purpose. You can’t blame Carley.”

  “Oh, I’m so tired of Carley, Roger. Couldn’t we let him alone for awhile?”

  He smiled to himself in the darkness.

  “What changed your mind—the sandwich?”

  “No, I guess it was the rock.”

  “Too high for you?”

  “No—it seemed somehow like you. After I got up on top it seemed as if I was standing on your shoulders. And I was so happy doing that, I didn’t want to leave.”

  “I see,” he said ironically.

  “I somehow knew you wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t a bit surprised when you came up the steps.”

  He grabbed her hands and pulled her to her feet.

  “All right,” he said. “Come on. We’ll go back to the hotel—I’m worried about the little Panzer—let’s see where she is.”

  She followed him down the steps; at the bottom, as he dismissed the hotel car and they got into his, Atlanta said:

  “No, it doesn’t seem to matter about him any more.”

  “It matters about everybody.”

  “He can probably take care of himself, I mean.”

  When they reached the hotel and found what had happened—that Carley Delannux had somehow locked the process server in his room in a state of bruised coma and driven off, Atlanta said:

  “You see? He’ll be all right. Maybe they won’t catch him this time.”

  “Won’t catch him—they’ve caught him. If you’re served with one of these writs and don’t show up, you’re a fugitive from justice. Anyhow, let Rasputin solve his own problems. I’m worried about what he left behind him—this girl. We didn’t pass a car or a person between here and Chimney Rock—and there’s no bus.”

  Atlanta guessed suddenly.

  “She’s on the lake. I chose Chimney Rock so she chose—”

  But he was already running toward the boathouse.

  ***

  They found her an hour later, drifting very quietly in the moonlight of a small cove. Her face upturned seemed placid and reconciled, almost as if surprised at their presence—in her hand, like Sesame of the Lilies, was clutched a bunch of mountain flowers—much as Atlanta’s hand had clutched a sandwich half an hour ago.

  “How did you find me?” she called from her canoe.

  As the launch sailed alongside, Roger said:

  “We wouldn’t have—if I hadn’t had some portable flares with me. You’d be drifting still.”

  “I decided I didn’t want to go overboard. After all, I’ve got my certificate now.”

  Long after Roger had gotten her a taxi, and pressed on her the money to go back to her people in Tennessee for awhile—long after he and Atlanta became one of the many untold legends of Lake Lure, the best kind, and he had left her outside her door—he walked down through the arcade past the little shops of the mountaineers and up to the post office, where there was nothing beyond save the bottomless black pools that were rumored to hold black secrets of Reconstruction days.

  There he stopped. He had heard in the lobby what he had not wanted Atlanta to hear to-night—that what was left of Carley Delannux had been picked up at the foot of Chimney Rock an hour ago.

  It was sad that the season of Roger’s greatest happiness was ushered in by this tragedy of another man, but there must have been something in Carley Delannux that made it necessary for him to die—something sinister, something that had lived too long, or had been too long dead on its feet, and left corruption in its wake.

  Roger was sorry for him; he was a slow-thinking man but he knew that what was useful and valuable must not be sacrificed to that. It was good to think of Atlanta, who meant starlight to so many people, sleeping safely in a room a hundred yards away.

  FSF on a mountain road in North Carolina.

  This undated fragment, “Day Off from Love,” written in 1935 or 1936, is a character study of men and women, of the sort Fitzgerald could do so very well. Set in the Southern Appalachians, it is about a young engaged couple, Mary and Sam. She has lived a lifetime already, before they met, and suggests they maintain a certain distance, taking a day off from each other every week as their wedding approaches. She rambles in the mountains and meets an older, worn, yet fascinating man who is rather like Carley Delannux in “I’d Die for You.” But Fitzgerald, in “Day Off from Love,” is more interested in the woman. In some important ways, Mary is a prototype for Cecilia in The Last Tycoon. Fitzgerald had long been dissatisfied with the way he wrote women characters, complaining to Max Perkins in December 1924, before Gatsby’s publication, that Jordan “fades out” and apologizing for Myrtle being “better than Daisy.” Mary has a vividness, vitality, and self-knowledge that make one wish Fitzgerald had finished this story beyond a chapter-length sketch.

  Written across the top of the typescript in pencil, in Fitzgerald’s hand: “The trouble is of course that I forgot the real idea—this is Nora, or the world, looking at me.”

  Day Off from Love

  On the afternoon they decided to marry they walked through the wood over damp, matted pine needles, and rather hesitantly Mary told him her plan.

  “But now I see you every day,” Sam mourned.

  “Only this last week,” Mary corrected him. “This was because we had to find out whether we could be together all the time and not—not—”

  “Not drive each other mad,” he finished for her. “You wanted to see if you could t
ake it.”

  “No,” Mary objected, “Women don’t get bored the same way men do. They can sort of shut off their attention—but they always know when men are bored. For instance, I knew a girl whose marriages lasted just so long—until she heard herself telling her husband a story she’d told him before. Then she went to Reno. We can’t have that—I’m sure to repeat myself. And we’ll both have to take it.”

  She repeated even now a gesture that he loved, a sort of hitch at her skirt as if to say, “Tighten up your belt, baby. Let’s get going—to any pole.” And Sam Baetjer wanted her to repeat on the same costume forever—the bright grey woolen dress with the scarlet zipper vest and lips to match.

  Suddenly he guessed something. He was one of those men who seem eternally stolid, even unobserving—and then announce the score added up to the last digit.

  “It’s because of your first marriage,” he said. “And I thought you never looked back.”

  “Only for warnings.” Mary hesitated, “Pete and I were close like that—for three years—up to the day he died. I was him and he was me—and at the end it didn’t work—I couldn’t die with him.” Again she hesitated, not sure of her ground. “I think a woman has to have some place to go inside herself—like a man’s ambition.”

  So there was always to be a day off from love, a day in every week when they were to live separate geographical lives. And there was to be no talking over those days—no questions.

  “Have you a little one hidden away?” Sam teased her. “A twin brother in the pen? Are you X9? Will I ever know?”

  When they came to their destination, a party in one of those elaborate “cabins” that dot the Virginia foothills, Mary took off her scarlet vest and stood with her feet planted far apart before the great fire, telling the friends of her youth she was going to be married again. She wore a silver belt with stars cut out of it, so that the stars were there and not quite there—and watching them Sam knew that he had not quite found her yet. He wished for a moment that he were not so entirely successful nor Mary so desirable—wished that they were both a little broken and would want to cling together. All the evening he felt a little sad watching the intangible stars as they moved here and there about the big rooms.

  Mary was twenty-four. She was a professor’s daughter with the glowing exterior of a chorus girl—bronze hair and blue green eyes and a perpetual high flush that she was almost ashamed of. The contrast between her social and physical equipment had set her many problems in the little college town. She had married a professor whom there was no special reason for marrying and made a go of it—so much so that she had come near to dying with him, and only after two years had found the nights unhaunted and the skies blue. But now marrying the exceptional young Baetjer, who was reorganizing coal properties just over the West Virginia line, seemed as natural as breathing. The materials are all here, she knew, weighing things in her two handed way, and love is what you make of it.

  ***

  The next Tuesday too she went to the mountain village, a county seat—a court house square with its cast iron Confederate soldier and a movie house, its population male and female in blue denim and the blue ridge rising as a back-drop on three sides. This time she felt she had rather exhausted its possibilities—the purely physical side of her disappearance act would be when Sam took his seat in Congress this fall. Once the little town had been a health center in a small way. There was a sanitarium on a hillside above and a little higher up the central building of what in 1929 was to have been a resort hotel. She asked about it and was told that all the beds had been stolen, the furniture disappeared little by little, and looking again at [the] white shell in its magnificent location she drove up there idly in the late afternoon.

  ***

  “—anyhow in the opinion of a poor widow woman,” she told the stranger up at Simpson’s Folly.

  “In theory,” said the stranger, “But in theory this fellow Simpson could have made this the greatest resort hotel in the country.”

  “There was the depression,” said Mary, looking around at the empty shell, high on its crag—a shell from which the mountaineers had long removed even the plumbing.

  “You had your depression,” ventured the stranger, “and look at you now, as full of belief and hope as if it was all a matter of trying. Why on your first day off—even before you’re married you meet a man, or the remnants of one. Just suppose we fell in love and you met me up here every week. Then that day would grow more important than all the six days you spent with him. Then where’s your plan?”

  They sat with their legs hung over a cracking balustrade. A spring wind was sweeping up warm from the valley and Mary let her heels swing with it against the limestone.

  “I’ve told you an awful lot,” she said.

  “You see—you’re interested. Already I’m the man you told a lot to. That’s a dangerous situation—to start out with a trust that people spend weeks working up to.”

  “I’ve been coming up here to think for ten years,” she protested. “It’s the wind I’m talking to.”

  “I suppose so,” he admitted. “It’s a hell of a good wind to sass—especially at night.”

  “Do you live up here?” she asked in surprise.

  “No—I’m visiting,” he answered hesitantly. “I’m paying a visit to a young man.”

  “I didn’t know anyone lived here.”

  “No one does—the young man is—or rather was myself.”

  He broke off. “There’s a storm coming.”

  Mary looked at him curiously. He was in his middle thirties and all of six feet four, a gaunt man with a slow way of talking. He wore high-laced hunting boots and a chamy windbreaker that matched his brown rather ruthless eyes. About his face was some of that cadaverous look that lingers after a long illness and he lit a cigarette with unsteady fingers.

  Ten minutes later he said:

  “Your car won’t start and it’s a four hour job. You can coast down to the garage at the foot of the hill and then I’ll drive you into a town.”

  They were quiet on the way in. A day of deliberately absenting herself turned out to be a long time, and she felt a twinge of doubt about the whole plan. Even now as they drove along the principal street toward her father’s house it was only six o’clock with an evening to dispose of.

  But she toughened herself—the first day was the hardest. She even kept an eye on the sidewalks with the mischievous hope that Sam would see her. The stranger at least had a hint of mystery.

  “Pull over to the curb,” she said suddenly. Just ahead of them she had seen Sam’s roadster slowing up. And as both cars stopped she perceived that Sam was not alone.

  “Yonder is my love,” she said to the stranger. “He seems to be having a day off too.”

  He looked obediently.

  “The pretty girl with him is Linda Newbold,” said Mary. “She is twenty and she made a great play for him a month ago.”

  “You’re not disturbed?” the stranger asked curiously.

  She shook her head.

  “They left jealousy out of me. Probably gave me a big dose of conceit instead.”

  FSF (with his broken shoulder) and his nurse at the Grove Park Inn.

  “Cyclone in Silent Land” is one of his stories influenced by Scott’s and Zelda’s time in hospitals. It is the first of a series Fitzgerald planned about a student nurse who rejoices in the name of Benjamina Rosalyn—“Trouble to her friends”—and the young intern, Bill Craig, who loves her. Her beauty, to the beholders, jeopardizes her career though she is smart and professional: Trouble is essentially too attractive to be borne by the staff or the patients. The “silent land” in the title not only equates Trouble with a cyclone in the hushed world of a hospital, but also sounds a movie allusion that becomes stronger in the increasing action sequences, when little or nothing is said. The shift from silent movies to talkies is something to which Fitzgerald gave much thought, as the Pat Hobby stories have long shown.

  Fitzg
erald was proud of “Cyclone in Silent Land,” telling Harold Ober on May 31, 1936, “When I finished that story I felt absolutely sure it was the best story I had written in a year.” He very much wanted it to be published, and was looking forward to writing more stories about Trouble. But though in need of money, he was determined not to submit to any requests for revisions, and wanted it to be printed as he had written it. If the Saturday Evening Post had the temerity to turn it down “on such grounds as purely moral ones” or any other, he told Ober, Ober should alter their longtime arrangement of offering Fitzgerald’s stories to the Post first. To say he felt strongly about this is understatement: “I’d rather put Zelda in a public insane asylum and live on Esquire’s $200 a month.”

  On June 29, 1936, the Post’s editor, George Lorimer, and fiction editor, Adelaide Neall, asked for revisions, with Neall saying, “Personally, this last piece encouraged me a great deal because it shows that Mr. Fitzgerald still can write the simple love story, free of the melodrama that he introduced into his recent manuscripts.” Fitzgerald did not revise it, and the Post declined “Cyclone in Silent Land.” He also held the line on its sequel, “Trouble,” writing to Neall in October 1936, “I have thought that you underestimated Trouble as a story, and if you can make any possible constructive suggestion about it, please do so, but I like it as it stands now.” The Post then belatedly accepted “Trouble,” which was published in the March 6, 1937, issue. It was the last of Fitzgerald’s stories in the Post, after nearly two decades of regular appearances there.

  Cyclone in Silent Land

  “Why don’t you just pull the socks off? Get an orderly to help you. Good Lord, that’s what I’d do if a patient kept me up all night with idiotic calls.”

  “I’ve thought of that,” Bill said. “I’ve tried to think of everything in my whole medical training. But this man is a big shot—”

  “You’re not supposed to pay any attention to that—”

  “I don’t mean just rich—I mean he has the air of being a big shot in his own profession like Dandy and Kelly in ours—”