At Your Age, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

Tom Squires came into the drug store to buy a toothbrush, a can of talcum, a gargle, Castile soap, Epsom salts and a box of cigars. Having lived alone for many years, he was methodical, and while waiting to be served he held the list in his hand. It was Christmas week and Minneapolis was under two feet of exhilarating, constantly refreshed snow; with his cane Tom knocked two dean crusts of it from his overshoes. Then, looking up, he saw the blonde girl.

She was a rare blonde, even in that Promised Land of Scandinavians, where pretty blondes are not rare. There was warm colour in her cheeks, lips and pink little hands that folded powders into papers; her hair, in long braids twisted about her head, was shining and alive. She seemed to Tom suddenly the cleanest person he knew of, and he caught his breath as he stepped forward and looked into her grey eyes.

“A can of talcum.”

“What kind?”

“Any kind… That’s fine.”

She looked back at him apparently without self-consciousness, and, as the list melted away, his heart raced with it wildly.

“I am not old,” he wanted to say. “At fifty I’m younger than most men of forty. Don’t I interest you at all?”

But she only said, “What kind of gargle?”

And he answered, “What can you recommend?… That’s fine.”

Almost painfully he took his eyes from her, went out and got into his coupe.

“If that young idiot only knew what an old imbecile like me could do for her,” he thought humorously “what worlds I could open out to her!”

As he drove away into the winter twilight he followed this train of thought to a totally unprecedented conclusion. Perhaps the time of day was the responsible stimulant, for the shop windows glowing into the cold, the tinkling bells of a delivery sleigh, the white gloss left by shovels on the sidewalks, the enormous distance of the stars, brought back the feel of other nights thirty years ago. For an instant the girls he had known then slipped like phantoms out of their dull matronly selves of today and fluttered past him with frosty, seductive laughter, until a pleasant shiver crawled up his spine.

“Youth! Youth! Youth!” he apostrophized with conscious lack of originality, and, as a somewhat ruthless and domineering man of no morals whatsoever, he considered going back to the drug store to seek the blonde girl’s address. It was not his sort of thing, so the half-formed intention passed; the idea remained.

“Youth, by heaven—youth!” he repeated under his breath. “I want it near me, all around me, just once more before I’m too old to care.”

He was tall, lean and handsome, with the ruddy, bronzed face of a sportsman and a just faintly greying moustache. Once he had been among the city’s best beaux, organizer of cotillions and charity balls, popular with men and women, and with several generations of them. After the war he had suddenly felt poor, gone into business, and in ten years accumulated nearly a million dollars. Tom Squires was not introspective, but he perceived now that the wheel of his life had revolved again, bringing up forgotten, yet familiar, dreams and yearnings. Entering his house, he turned suddenly to a pile of disregarded invitations to see whether or not he had been bidden to a dance tonight

Throughout his dinner, which he ate alone at the Downtown Club, his eyes were half dosed and on his face was a faint smile. He was practising so that he would be able to laugh at himself painlessly, if necessary.

“I don’t even know what they talk about,” he admitted. “They pet—prominent broker goes to petting party with debutante. What is a petting party? Do they serve refreshments? Will I have to learn to play a saxophone?”

These matters, lately as remote as China in a newsreel, came alive to him. They were serious questions. At ten o’clock he walked up the steps of the College Club to a private dance with the same sense of entering a new world as when he had gone into a training camp back in ’17. He spoke to a hostess of his generation and to her daughter, overwhelmingly of another, and sat down in a corner to acclimate himself.

He was not alone long. A silly young man named Leland Jaques, who lived across the street from Tom, remarked him kindly and came over to brighten his life. He was such an exceedingly fatuous young man that, for a moment, Tom was annoyed, but he perceived craftily that he might be of service.

“Hello, Mr Squires. How are you, sir?”

“Fine, thanks, Leland. Quite a dance.”

As one man of the world with another, Mr Jaques sat, or lay, down on the couch and lit—or so it seemed to Tom—three or four cigarettes at once.

“You should of been here last night, Mr Squires. Oh, boy, that was a party and a half! The Caulkins. Hap-past five!”

“Who’s that girl who changes partners every minute?” Tom asked … “No, the one in white passing the door.”

“That’s Annie Lorry.”

“Arthur Lorry’s daughter?”

“Yes.”

“She seems popular.”

“About the most popular girl in town—anyway, at a dance.”

“Not popular except at dances?”

“Oh, sure, but she hangs around with Randy Cambell all the time.”

“What Cambell?”

“D.B.”

There were new names in town in the last decade.

“It’s a boy-and-girl affair.” Pleased with this phrase, Jaques tried to repeat it: “One of those boy-and-girls affair—boys-and-girl affairs——” He gave it up and lit several more cigarettes, crushing out the first series on

Tom’s lap. “Does she drink?”

“Not especially. At least I never saw her passed out… That’s Randy Cambell just cut in on her now.”

They were a nice couple. Her beauty sparkled bright against his strong, tall form, and they floated hoveringly, delicately, like two people in a nice, amusing dream. They came near and Tom admired the faint dust of powder over her freshness, the guarded sweetness of her smile, the fragility of her body calculated by nature to a millimetre to suggest a bud, yet guarantee a flower. Her innocent, passionate eyes were brown, perhaps; but almost violet in the silver light.

“Is she out this year?”

“Who?”

“Miss Lorry.”

“Yes.”

Although the girl’s loveliness interested Tom, he was unable to picture himself as one of the attentive, grateful queue that pursued her around the room. Better meet her when the holidays were over and most of these young men were back in college “where they belonged”. Tom Squires was old enough to wait.

He waited a fortnight while the city sank into the endless northern mid-winter, where grey skies were friendlier than metallic blue skies, and dusk, whose lights were a reassuring glimpse into the continuity of human cheer, was wanner than the afternoons of bloodless sunshine. The coat of snow lost its press and became soiled and shabby, and ruts froze in the street; some of the big houses on Crest Avenue began to close as their occupants went South. In those cold days Tom asked Annie and her parents to go as his guests to the last Bachelors’ Ball.

The Lorrys were an old family in Minneapolis, grown a little harassed and poor since the war. Mrs Lorry, a contemporary of Tom’s, was not surprised that he should send mother and daughter orchids and dine them luxuriously in his apartment on fresh caviar, quail and champagne. Annie saw him only dimly—he lacked vividness, as the old do for the young—but she perceived his interest in her and performed for him the traditional ritual of young beauty—smiles, polite, wide-eyed attention, a profile held obligingly in this light or in that. At the ball he danced with her twice, and, though she was teased about it, she was flattered that such a man of the world—he had become that instead of a mere old man—had singled her out. She accepted his invitation to the symphony the following week, with the idea that it would be uncouth to refuse. There were several “nice invitations” like that. Sitting beside him, she dozed in the warm shadow of Brahms and thought of Randy Cambell and other romantic nebulosities who might appear tomorrow. Feeling casually mellow one afternoon, she deliberately provoked Tom to kiss her on the way home, but she wanted to laugh when he took her hands and told he fervently he was falling in love.

“But how could you?” she protested. “Really, you mustn’t say such crazy things. I won’t go out with you any more, and then you’ll be sorry.”

A few days later her mother spoke to her as Tom waited outside in his car:

“Who’s that, Annie?”

“Mr Squires.”

“Shut the door a minute. You’re seeing him quite a bit.”

“Why not?”

“Well, dear, he’s fifty years old.”

“But, mother, there’s hardly anybody else in town.”

“But you mustn’t get any silly ideas about him.”

“Don’t worry. Actually, he bores me to extinction most of the time.” She came to a sudden decision: “I’m not going to see him any more. I just couldn’t get out of going with him this afternoon.”

And that night, as she stood by her door in the circle of Randy Cambell’s arm, Tom and his single kiss had no existence for her.

“Oh, I do love you so,” Randy whispered. “Kiss me once more.”

Their cool cheeks and warm lips met in the crisp darkness, and, watching the icy moon over his shoulder, Annie knew that she was his surely and, pulling his face down, kissed him again, trembling with emotion.

“When’ll you marry me then?” he whispered.

“When can you—we afford it?”

“Couldn’t you announce our engagement? If you knew the misery of having you out with somebody else and then making love to you.”

“Oh, Randy, you ask so