“What?” Jo turned from the cage where she had gone to try, unsuccessfully, to feed the bird a shelled peanut.
“Daddy, let’s stop worrying. I thought we stopped months ago. Mother’s coming home next week. Maybe some day we’ll be three peacocks again.”
Jason came over to the wire.
“I suppose peacocks have their problems.”
“I suppose so. Look, Daddy! I’ve got this one eating the popcorn.”
ON SCHEDULE,
In September, René’s old house seemed pretty fine to him, with its red maples and silver birches and the provident squirrels toiling overtime on the lawn. It was on the outskirts of a university town, a rambling frame structure that had been a residence in the 80’s, the county poorhouse in the 1900’s, and now was a residence again. Few modern families would care to live there, amid the groans of moribund plumbing and without even the silvery “Hey!” of a telephone, but René, at first sight of its wide veranda, which opened out into a dilapidated park of five acres, loved it for reminding him of a lost spot of his childhood in Normandy. Watching the squirrels from his window reminded René that it was time to complete certain winter provisions of his own, and laying aside his work, he took a large sheet of paper ruled into oblongs and ran over it once again. Then he went into the hall and called up the front staircase:
“Noël.”
“Yes, daddy.”
“I wish to see you, cherie.”
“Well, you told me to put away the soldiers.”
“You can do that later. I want you to go over to the Slocums’ and get Miss Becky Snyder, and then I wish to speak to you both together.”
“Becky’s here, daddy; she’s in the bathtub.”
René started. “In the bath — — “
The cracks and settlings of the house had created fabulous acoustics, and now another voice, not a child’s, drifted down to him:
“The water runs so slow over at the Slocums’, it takes all day to draw a bath. I didn’t think you’d mind, René.”
“Mind!” he exclaimed vaguely. As if the situation was not already delicate. “Mind!” If Becky took baths here, she might just as well be living here, so far as any casual visitor would conclude. He imagined himself trying to explain to Mrs. Dean-of-the-Faculty McIntosh the very complicated reasons why Becky Snyder was upstairs taking a bath.
At that, he might succeed — he would have blushed to attempt it in France.
His daughter, Noël, came downstairs. She was twelve, and very fair and exquisitely made, like his dead wife; and often in the past he had worried about that. Lately she had become as robust as any American child and his anxieties were concentrated upon her education, which, he had determined, was going to be as good as that of any French girl.
“Do you realize that your school starts tomorrow?”
“Yeah.”
“What is that?”
“Yes, daddy.”
“I am going to be busier than I have ever been in my life.”
“With all that water?”
“With all that water — think of all the baths Becky could take in it. And with the nice cute little power plant of my own the Foundation has built me. So, for you, Noël, I have prepared a schedule and my secretary has made three copies — one for you, one for me and one for Becky. We shall make a pocket in the back of your arithmetic in which to keep your copy. You must always keep it there, for if you lose it, then our whole day is thrown out of joint.”
Noël shifted restlessly in her chair.
“What I don’t understand,” she said, “is why I can’t take just like the other girls? Why I have to do a lot of goofy — — “
“Do not use that word!”
“Well, why I can’t do like everybody else?”
“Then you don’t want to continue the piano.”
“Oh, yes, piano; but why do I have to take French out of school every day?”
René rose, pushing his fingers distractedly over his prematurely iron-gray hair — he was only thirty-four.
“What is the use of explaining things to you?” he cried. “Listen. You speak perfect French and you want to preserve it, don’t you? And you can’t study in your school what you already know more accurately than a sophomore in the college.”
“Then why — — “
“Because no child retains a language unless she continues it till fourteen. Your brain — — “ René tapped his own ferociously. “It cannot do it.”
Noël laughed, but her father was serious.
“It is an advantage!” he cried. “It will help you — it will help you to be an actress at the Comedie Francaise. Do you understand?”
“I don’t want to be an actress any more,” confessed Noël. “I’d rather electrolize water for the Foundation like you, and have a little doll’s power plant, and I can keep up my French talking to you in the evening. Becky could join in, because she wants to learn anyhow.”
Her father nodded his head sadly.
“Very well, then; all right.” He brushed the paper schedule aside; being careful, however, that it didn’t go into the wastebasket. “But you cannot grow up useless in this house. I will give you a practical education instead. We will stop the school and you can study sewing, cooking, domestic economy. You can learn to help about the house.” He sat down at his desk thoroughly disgusted, and made a gesture of waving her away, to be left alone with his disappointment.
Noël considered. Once this had been a rather alarming joke — when her marks were unsatisfactory, her father always promised to bring her up as a fine cook. But though she no longer believed him, his logic had the effect of sobering her. Her own case was simply that she hated running around to extra lessons in the middle of the morning; she wanted to be exactly like the other girls in school.
“All right, then,” she said. Both of them stood up as Becky, still damp and pink from her bath, came into the room.
Becky was nineteen, a startling little beauty, with her head set upon her figure as though it had been made separately and then placed there with the utmost precision. Her body was sturdy, athletic; her head was a bright, happy composition of curves and shadows and vivid color, with that final kinetic jolt, the element that is eventually sexual in effect, which made strangers stare at her. Who has not had the excitement of seeing an apparent beauty from afar; then, after a moment, seeing that same face grow mobile and watching the beauty disappear moment by moment, as if a lovely statue had begun to walk with the meager joints of a paper doll? Becky’s beauty was the opposite of that. The facial muscles pulled her expressions into lovely smiles and frowns, disdains, gratifications and encouragements; her beauty was articulated, and expressed vividly whatever it wanted to express.
Beyond that, she was an undeveloped girl, living for the moment on certain facets of René du Cary’s mind. There was no relation between herself and Noël as yet except that of fellow pupils — though they suspected each other faintly as competitors for his affection.
“So now,” René pursued, “let us get this exact, darlings. Here we have one car, no telephone and three lives. To drive the car we have you” — this to Becky — “and me, and usually Aquilla’s brother. I will not even explain the schedule, but I assure you that it is perfect. I worked on it until one this morning.”
They sat obediently while he studied it with pride for a moment.
“Now here is a typical day: On Tuesday, Aquilla’s brother takes me to laboratory, dropping Noël at her school; when he returns to house, Becky takes car to tennis practice, calls for Noël and takes her to Mlle. Segur’s. Then she does shopping — and so forth.”
“Suppose I have no shopping?” suggested Becky.
“Then you do ‘and so forth.’ If there is no ‘and so forth,’ you drive car to laboratory and catch bus home — in that case, I bring Aquilla’s brother — I mean Noël” — he stared at the schedule, screwing up his eyes — “I bring Noël from Mademoiselle’s back to school and continue home. Then�
� — he hesitated — “and then — — “
Noël rocked with amusement.
“It’s like that riddle,” she cried, “about the man who had to cross the river with the goose and the fox and the — — “
“Wait one minute!” René’s voice was full of exasperated flats. “There is one half hour left out here, or else Aquilla’s brother will have to lunch before it is cooked.”
Becky, who had been listening with a helpful expression, became suddenly a woman of sagacity and force. The change, expressed in every line of her passionate face, startled René, and he listened to her with a mixture of awe, pride and disapproval.
“Why not let my tennis lessons go this fall?” she suggested. “After all, the most important things are your experiment and Noël’s education. Tennis will be over in a month or two. It just complicates everything.”
“Give up the tennis!” he said incredulously. “Idiotic child! Of course, you’ll continue. American women must be athletes. It is the custom of the country. All we need is complete cooperation.”
Tennis was Becky’s forte. She had been New Jersey scholastic champion at sixteen, thereby putting the small town of Bingham upon the map. René had followed the careers of his compatriots Lacoste and Lenglen, and he was very particular about Becky’s tennis. He knew that already there had been a trickle of talk in the community about himself and Becky — this young girl he had found somewhere or nowhere, and had recently deposited in the keeping of Mr. and Mrs. Slocum on the adjacent truck farm. Becky’s tennis had a certain abstract value that would matter later. It was a background for Becky — or rather it was something that would stand between Becky and her lack of any background whatsoever. It had to go into the schedule, no matter how difficult it made things.
René had loved his wife, an American, and after she faded off agonizingly in Switzerland, three years had dragged by before the tragic finality of the fact ceased to present itself at the end of sleep as a black period that ended the day before it began. Curiously crediting the legend that every seven years the human body completely renews itself, she had put a provision in her last sick will that if he married within seven years of her death, the moderate income she bequeathed him should accrue in trust for Noël. What he did after the seven years would be, Edith considered, an act of someone she had never known. The provision had not bothered him. It was rather a convenience to know that marriage was out of the question, and many a trap set for him had gone unsprung during his years as a widower in the college town. The income made it possible for him to stay in research, under the aegis of one of those scientific foundations that gravitated to the university, instead of seeking a livelihood as a pedagogue in a foreign land. In his own line he was a man with that lucky touch. Last year, in cleaning up the junk of someone else’s abandoned experiment, he had stumbled upon an entirely new technic in the activation of a catalyst for bringing about chemical reactions. He felt that after another year he would be able to provide for Noël far better than could his wife’s shrunken trust fund.
So, for a thousand days he wore his grief down, and eventually he found that his daughter was growing up and that work really was the best thing with which to fill a life. He settled down, and existence became as foreshortened as the rhythm of the college itself.
“My relations with my daughter,” he used to say, in those days, “are becoming what you call the Electra complex. If man was an adaptable animal, I should develop a lap and a very comfortable bosom and become a real mother to her, but I cannot. So, how can I put a stop to this father-and-daughter complex we are developing between us?”
The problem solved itself in its own terms. René was in love with youth, and one day he saw Becky Snyder’s beauty peering over the back of a cut-down flivver stalled on the Lincoln Highway. It was an old flivver, even for its old-flivverish function of bearing young love from nook to nook. Jokes climbed feebly upon its sides and a great “Bingham H.S. 1932” defaced — if one can call it that — the radiator. René du Cary, aloof as any university don spending an afternoon on his bicycle, would have passed it with a shrug of amusement, if he had not suddenly perceived the cause of the flivver’s motionless position in the road — a deeply intoxicated young man was draped across the wheel.
“Now, this is too bad,” he thought, when, with his bicycle in the back seat, he was conducting the car toward its destination. He kept imagining Noël in a like situation. Only when they had returned the young man and his movable couch to the bosom of his family, and he sat with Becky and her deaf aunt on the farmhouse stoop, did he realize how authentically, radiantly beautiful she was and want to touch her hair and her shining face and the nape of her neck — the place where he kissed Noël good night.
She walked with him to the gate.
“You must not permit that young man to call on you,” he said. “He’s not good for you.”
“Then what do I do?” She smiled. “Sit home?”
He raised his hands.
“Are there no more solid citizens in this village?”
Becky looked impatient, as if he ought to know there weren’t.
“I was engaged to a nice fellow that died last year,” she informed him, and then with pride: “He went to Hamilton. I was going to the spring dance with him. He got pneumonia.”
“I’m sorry,” said René.
“There’re no boys around here. There was a man said he’d get me a job on the stage in New York, but I know that game. My friend here — a girl, I mean — she goes to town to get picked up by students. It’s just hard luck for a girl to be born in a place like this. I mean, there’s no future. I met some men through playing tennis, but I never saw them again.”
He listened as the muddled concepts poured forth — the mingled phrases of debutante, waif and country girl. The whole thing confused him — the mixture of innocence, opportunism, ignorance. It made him feel very foreign and far off.
“I will collect some undergraduates,” he surprised himself by promising. “They should appreciate living beauty, if they appreciate nothing else.”
But that wasn’t the way it worked out. The half dozen seniors, the lady who came to pour tea on his porch, recognized, before half an hour had passed, that he was desperately in love with the girl, that he didn’t know it, that he was miserable when two of the young men made engagements with her. Next time she came, there were no young men.
“I love you and I want you to marry me,” he said.
“But I’m simply — — I don’t know what to say. I never thought — — “
“Don’t try to think. I will think for us both.”
“And you’ll teach me,” she said pathetically. “I’ll try so hard.”
“We can’t be married for seven more months because — — My heavens, you are beautiful!”
It was June then, and they got to know each other in a few long afternoons in the swing on the porch. She felt very safe with him — a little too safe.
That was the first time when the provision in Edith’s will really bothered René. The seven specified years would not be over until December, and the interval would be difficult. To announce the engagement would be to submit Becky to a regents’ examination by the ladies of the university. Because he considered himself extravagantly lucky to have discovered such a prize, he hated the idea of leaving her to rusticate in Bingham. Other connoisseurs of beauty, other discerning foreigners, might find her stalled on the road with unworthy young men. Moreover, she needed an education in the social civilities and, much as the railroad kings of the pioneer West sent their waitress sweethearts to convents in order to prepare them for their high destinies, he considered sending Becky to France with a chaperon for the interval. But he could not afford it, and ended by installing her with the Slocums next door.
“This schedule,” he said to her, “is the most important thing in our lives; you must not lose your copy.”
“No, dearest.”
“Your future husband wants a lot; he wa
nts a beautiful wife and a well-brought-up child, and his work to be very good, and to live in the country. There is limited money. But with method,” he said fiercely — “method for one, method for all — we can make it go.”
“Of course we can.”
After she had kissed him and clung to him and gone, he sat looking out at the squirrels still toiling in the twilight.
“How strange,” he thought. “For the moment my rôle is that of supérieure in a convent. I can show my two little girls about how good work is, and about politeness. All the rest one either has or hasn’t.
“The schedule is my protection; for now I will have no more time to think of details, and yet they must not be educated by the money changers of Hollywood. They should grow up; there is too much of keeping people children forever. The price is too high; the bill is always presented to someone in the end.”
His glance fell on the table. Upon it, carefully folded, lay a familiar-looking paper — the typewritten oblongs showed through. And on the chair where Becky had sat, its twin rested. The schedules, forgotten and abandoned, remained beside their maker.
“Mon Dieu!” he cried, his fingers rising to his young gray hair. “Quel commencement! Noël!”
II
With a sort of quivering heave like the attempt of a team to move a heavy load, René’s schedule got in motion. It was an uncertain motion — the third day Noël lost her schedule and went on a school botany tour, while Aquilla’s brother — a colored boy who had some time ago replaced a far-wandering houseman, but had never quite acquired a name of his own in the household — waited for her two hours in front of the school, so that Becky missed her tennis lesson and Mlle. Ségur, inconvenienced, complained to René. This was on a day that René had passed in despair trying to invent a process for keeping the platinum electrodes nicely blurred in a thousand glass cells. When he came home he blew up and Noël, at his request, had her supper in bed.
Each day plunged him deeper into his two experiments. One was his attempt to develop the catalyst upon which he had stumbled; the second was based on the new knowledge that there are two kinds of water. Should his plan of decomposing electrolytically one hundred thousand gallons of water yield him the chance of studying the two sorts spectrographically, the results might be invaluable. The experiment was backed by a commercial firm as well as by the Foundation, but it was already running into tens of thousands of dollars — there was the small power plant built for his use, the thousand platinum electrodes, each in its glass jar, as well as the time consumed in the difficult and tedious installation of the apparatus.
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 343
