Early in the game Dolly Harlan had fumbled Devereaux’s high punt, but recovered without gain; toward the end of the half another kick slipped through his fingers, but he scooped it up, and slipping past the end, went back twelve yards. Between halves he told Roper he couldn’t seem to get under the ball, but they kept him there. His own kicks were carrying well and he was essential in the only back-field combination that could hope to score.
After the first play of the game he limped slightly, moving around as little as possible to conceal the fact. But I knew enough about football to see that he was in every play, starting at that rather slow pace of his and finishing with a quick side lunge that almost always took out his man. Not a single Yale forward pass was finished in his territory, but toward the end of the third quarter he dropped another kick--backed around in a confused little circle under it, lost it and recovered on the five-yard line just in time to avert a certain score. That made the third time, and I saw Ed Kimball throw off his blanket and begin to warm up on the sidelines.
Just at that point our luck began to change. From a kick formation, with Dolly set to punt from behind our goal, Howard Bement, who had gone in for Wash Sampson at quarter, took the ball through the center of the line, got by the secondary defense and ran twenty-six yards before he was pulled down. Captain Tasker, of Yale, had gone out with a twisted knee, and Princeton began to pile plays through his substitute, between Bean Gile and Hopman, with George Spears and sometimes Bob Tatnall carrying the ball. We went up to the Yale forty-yard line, lost the ball on a fumble and recovered it on another as the third quarter ended. A wild ripple of enthusiasm ran through the Princeton stands. For the first time we had the ball in their territory with first down and the possibility of tying the score. You could hear the tenseness growing all around you in the intermission; it was reflected in the excited movements of the cheer leaders and the uncontrollable patches of sound that leaped out of the crowd, catching up voices here and there and swelling to an undisciplined roar.
I saw Kimball dash out on the field and report to the referee and I thought Dolly was through at last, and was glad, but it was Bob Tatnall who came out, sobbing, and brought the Princeton side cheering to its feet.
With the first play pandemonium broke loose and continued to the end of the game. At intervals it would swoon away to a plaintive humming; then it would rise to the intensity of wind and rain and thunder, and beat across the twilight from one side of the Bowl to the other like the agony of lost souls swinging across a gap in space.
The teams lined up on Yale’s forty-one yard line and Spears immediately dashed off tackle for six yards. Again he carried the ball--he was a wild unpopular Southerner with inspired moments--going through the same hole for five more and a first down. Dolly made two on a cross buck and Spears was held at center. It was third down, with the ball on Yale’s twenty-nine-yard line and eight to go.
There was some confusion immediately behind me, some pushing and some voices; a man was sick or had fainted--I never discovered which. Then my view was blocked out for a minute by rising bodies and then everything went definitely crazy. Substitutes were jumping around down on the field, waving their blankets, the air was full of hats, cushions, coats and a deafening roar. Dolly Harlan, who had scarcely carried the ball a dozen times in his Princeton career, had picked a long pass from Kimball out of the air and, dragging a tackler, struggled five yards to the Yale goal.
VI
Some time later the game was over. There was a bad moment when Yale began another attack, but there was no scoring and Bob Tatnall’s eleven had redeemed a mediocre season by tying a better Yale team. For us there was the feel of victory about it, the exaltation if not the jubilance, and the Yale faces issuing from out the Bowl wore the look of defeat. It would be a good year, after all--a good fight at the last, a tradition for next year’s team. Our class--those of us who cared--would go out from Princeton without the taste of final defeat. The symbol stood--such as it was; the banners blew proudly in the wind. All that is childish? Find us something to fill the niche of victory.
I waited for Dolly outside the dressing rooms until almost everyone had come out; then, as he still lingered, I went in. Someone had given him a little brandy, and since he never drank much, it was swimming in his head.
“Have a chair, Jeff.” He smiled, broadly and happily. “Rubber! Tony! Get the distinguished guest a chair. He’s an intellectual and he wants to interview one of the bone-headed athletes. Tony, this is Mr. Deering. They’ve got everything in this funny Bowl but armchairs. I love this Bowl. I’m going to build here.”
He fell silent, thinking about all things happily. He was content. I persuaded him to dress--there were people waiting for us. Then he insisted on walking out upon the field, dark now, and feeling the crumbled turf with his shoe.
He picked up a divot from a cleat and let it drop, laughed, looked distracted for a minute, and turned away.
With Tad Davis, Daisy Cary and another girl, we drove to New York. He sat beside Daisy and was silly, charming and attractive. For the first time since I’d known him he talked about the game naturally, even with a touch of vanity.
“For two years I was pretty good and I was always mentioned at the bottom of the column as being among those who played. This year I dropped three punts and slowed up every play till Bob Tatnall kept yelling at me, ‘I don’t see why they won’t take you out!’ But a pass not even aimed at me fell in my arms and I’ll be in the headlines tomorrow.”
He laughed. Somebody touched his foot; he winced and turned white.
“How did you hurt it?” Daisy asked. “In football?”
“I hurt it last summer,” he said shortly.
“It must have been terrible to play on it.”
“It was.”
“I suppose you had to.”
“That’s the way sometimes.”
They understood each other. They were both workers; sick or well, there were things that Daisy also had to do. She spoke of how, with a vile cold, she had had to fall into an open-air lagoon out in Hollywood the winter before.
“Six times--with a fever of a hundred and two. But the production was costing ten thousand dollars a day.”
“Couldn’t they use a double?”
“They did whenever they could--I only fell in when it had to be done.”
She was eighteen and I compared her background of courage and independence and achievement, of politeness based upon the realities of cooperation, with that of most society girls I had known. There was no way in which she wasn’t inestimably their superior--if she had looked for a moment my way--but it was Dolly’s shining velvet eyes that signaled to her own.
“Can’t you go out with me tonight?” I heard her ask him.
He was sorry, but he had to refuse. Vienna was in New York; she was going to see him. I didn’t know, and Dolly didn’t know, whether there was to be a reconciliation or a good-by.
When she dropped Dolly and me at the Ritz there was real regret, that lingering form of it, in both their eyes.
“There’s a marvelous girl,” Dolly said. I agreed. “I’m going up to see Vienna. Will you get a room for us at the Madison?”
So I left him. What happened between him and Vienna I don’t know; he has never spoken about it to this day. But what happened later in the evening was brought to my attention by several surprised and even indignant witnesses to the event.
Dolly walked into the Ambassador Hotel about ten o’clock and went to the desk to ask for Miss Cary’s room. There was a crowd around the desk, among them some Yale or Princeton undergraduates from the game. Several of them had been celebrating and evidently one of them knew Daisy and had tried to get her room by phone. Dolly was abstracted and he must have made his way through them in a somewhat brusque way and asked to be connected with Miss Cary.
One young man stepped back, looked at him unpleasantly and said, “You seem to be in an awful hurry. Just who are you?”
There was one
of those slight silent pauses and the people near the desk all turned to look. Something happened inside Dolly; he felt as if life had arranged his role to make possible this particular question--a question that now he had no choice but to answer. Still, there was silence. The small crowd waited.
“Why, I’m Dolly Harlan,” he said deliberately. “What do you think of that?”
It was quite outrageous. There was a pause and then a sudden little flurry and chorus: “Dolly Harlan! What? What did he say?”
The clerk had heard the name; he gave it as the phone was answered from Miss Cary’s room.
“Mr. Harlan’s to go right up, please.”
Dolly turned away, alone with his achievement, taking it for once to his breast. He found suddenly that he would not have it long so intimately; the memory would outlive the triumph and even the triumph would outlive the glow in his heart that was best of all. Tall and straight, an image of victory and pride, he moved across the lobby, oblivious alike to the fate ahead of him or the small chatter behind.
DESIGN IN PLASTER
Esquire (November, 1939)
“How long does the doctor think now?” Mary asked. With his good arm Martin threw back the top of the sheet, disclosing that the plaster armor had been cut away in front in the form of a square, so that his abdomen and the lower part of his diaphragm bulged a little from the aperture. His dislocated arm was still high over his head in an involuntary salute.
“This was a great advance,” he told her. “But it took the heat wave to make Ottinger put in this window. I can’t say much for the view but--have you seen the wire collection?”
“Yes, I’ve seen it,” his wife answered, trying to look amused.
It was laid out on the bureau like a set of surgeons’ tools--wires bent to every length and shape so that the nurse could reach any point inside the plaster cast when perspiration made the itching unbearable.
Martin was ashamed at repeating himself.
“I apologize,” he said. “After two months you get medical psychology. All this stuff is fascinating to me. In fact--” he added, and with only faint irony, “--it is in a way of becoming my life.”
Mary came over and sat beside the bed raising him, cast and all, into her slender arms. He was chief electrical engineer at the studio and his thirty-foot fall wasn’t costing a penny in doctor’s bills. But that--and the fact that the catastrophe had swung them together after a four months’ separation, was its only bright spot.
“I feel so close,” she whispered. “Even through this plaster.”
“Do you think that’s a nice way to talk?”
“Yes.”
“So do I.”
Presently she stood up and rearranged her bright hair in the mirror. He had seen her do it half a thousand times but suddenly there was a quality of remoteness about it that made him sad.
“What are you doing tonight?” he asked.
Mary turned, almost with surprise.
“It seems strange to have you ask me.”
“Why? You almost always tell me. You’re my contact with the world of glamour.”
“But you like to keep bargains. That was our arrangement when we began to live apart.”
“You’re being very technical.”
“No--but that was the arrangement. As a matter of fact I’m not doing anything. Bieman asked me to go to a preview, but he bores me. And that French crowd called up.”
“Which member of it?”
She came closer and looked at him.
“Why, I believe you’re jealous,” she said. “The wife of course. Or he did, to be exact, but he was calling for his wife--she’d be there. I’ve never seen you like this before.”
Martin was wise enough to wink as if it meant nothing and let it die away, but Mary said an unfortunate last word.
“I thought you liked me to go with them.”
“That’s it,” Martin tried to go slow, “--with ‘them,’ but now it’s ‘he.’“
“They’re all leaving Monday,” she said almost impatiently. “I’ll probably never see him again.”
Silence for a minute. Since his accident there were not an unlimited number of things to talk about, except when there was love between them. Or even pity--he was accepting even pity in the past fortnight. Especially their uncertain plans about the future were in need of being preceded by a mood of love.
“I’m going to get up for a minute,” he said suddenly. “No, don’t help me--don’t call the nurse. I’ve got it figured out.”
The cast extended half way to his knee on one side but with a snake-like motion he managed to get to the side of the bed--then rise with a gigantic heave. He tied on a dressing gown, still without assistance, and went to the window. Young people were splashing and calling in the outdoor pool of the hotel.
“I’ll go along,” said Mary. “Can I bring you anything tomorrow? Or tonight if you feel lonely?”
“Not tonight. You know I’m always cross at night--and I don’t like you making that long drive twice a day. Go along--be happy.”
“Shall I ring for the nurse?”
“I’ll ring presently.”
He didn’t though--he just stood. He knew that Mary was wearing out, that this resurgence of her love was wearing out. His accident was a very temporary dam of a stream that had begun to overflow months before.
When the pains began at six with their customary regularity the nurse gave him something with codein in it, shook him a cocktail and ordered dinner, one of those dinners it was a struggle to digest since he had been sealed up in his individual bomb-shelter. Then she was off duty four hours and he was alone. Alone with Mary and the Frenchman.
He didn’t know the Frenchman except by name but Mary had said once:
“Joris is rather like you--only naturally not formed--rather immature.”
Since she said that, the company of Mary and Joris had grown increasingly unattractive in the long hours between seven and eleven. He had talked with them, driven around with them, gone to pictures and parties with them--sometimes with the half comforting ghost of Joris’ wife along. He had been near as they made love and even that was endurable as long as he could seem to hear and see them. It was when they became hushed and secret that his stomach winced inside the plaster cast. That was when he had pictures of the Frenchman going toward Mary and Mary waiting. Because he was not sure just how Joris felt about her or about the whole situation.
“I told him I loved you,” Mary said--and he believed her, “I told him that I could never love anyone but you.”
Still he could not be sure how Mary felt as she waited in her apartment for Joris. He could not tell if, when she said good night at her door, she turned away relieved, or whether she walked around her living room a little and later, reading her book, dropped it in her lap and looked up at the ceiling. Or whether her phone rang once more for one more good night.
Martin hadn’t worried about any of these things in the first two months of their separation when he had been on his feet and well.
At half-past eight he took up the phone and called her; the line was busy and still busy at a quarter of nine. At nine it was out of order; at nine-fifteen it didn’t answer and at a little before nine-thirty it was busy again. Martin got up, slowly drew on his trousers and with the help of a bellboy put on a shirt and coat.
“Don’t you want me to come, Mr. Harris?” asked the bellboy.
“No thanks. Tell the taxi I’ll be right down.”
When the boy had gone he tripped on the slightly raised floor of the bathroom, swung about on one arm and cut his head against the wash bowl. It was not so much, but he did a clumsy repair job with the adhesive and, feeling ridiculous at his image in the mirror, sat down and called Mary’s number a last time--for no answer. Then he went out, not because he wanted to go to Mary’s but because he had to go somewhere toward the flame, and he didn’t know any other place to go.
At ten-thirty Mary, in her nightgown, was at the phone.
“Thanks for calling. But, Joris, if you want to know the truth I have a splitting headache. I’m turning in.”
“Mary, listen,” Joris insisted. “It happens Marianne has a headache too and has turned in. This is the last night I’ll have a chance to see you alone. Besides, you told me you’d never had a headache.”
Mary laughed.
“That’s true--but I am tired.”
“I would promise to stay one-half hour--word of honor. I am only just around the corner.”
“No,” she said and a faint touch of annoyance gave firmness to the word. “Tomorrow I’ll have either lunch or dinner if you like, but now I’m going to bed.”
She stopped. She had heard a sound, a weight crunching against the outer door of her apartment. Then three odd, short bell rings.
“There’s someone--call me in the morning,” she said. Hurriedly hanging up the phone she got into a dressing gown.
By the door of her apartment she asked cautiously.
“Who’s there?”
No answer--only a heavier sound--a human slipping to the floor.
“Who is it?”
She drew back and away from a frightening moan. There was a little shutter high in the door, like the peephole of a speakeasy, and feeling sure from the sound that whoever it was, wounded or drunk, was on the floor Mary reached up and peeped out. She could see only a hand covered with freshly ripening blood, and shut the trap hurriedly. After a shaken moment, she peered once more.
This time she recognized something--afterwards she could not have said what--a way the arm lay, a corner of the plaster cast--but it was enough to make her open the door quickly and duck down to Martin’s side.
“Get doctor,” he whispered. “Fell on the steps and broke.”
His eyes closed as she ran for the phone.
Doctor and ambulance came at the same time. What Martin had done was simple enough, a little triumph of misfortune. On the first flight of stairs that he had gone up for eight weeks, he had stumbled, tried to save himself with the arm that was no good for anything, then spun down catching and ripping on the stair rail. After that a five minute drag up to her door.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 265
