“You were out with young Cambell,” he said.
“Yes. Oh, don’t be mad. I feel—I feel so upset tonight.”
“Upset?”
She sat down, whimpering a little.
“I couldn’t help it. Please don’t be mad. He wanted so for me to take a ride with him and it was such a wonderful night, so I went just for an hour. And we began talking and I didn’t realize the time. I felt so sorry for him.”
“How do you think I felt?” He scorned himself, but it was said now.
“Don’t, Tom. I told you I was terribly upset. I want to go to bed.”
“I understand. Good night, Annie.”
“Oh, please don’t act that way, Tom. Can’t you understand?” put he could, and that was just the trouble. With the courteous bow of another generation, he walked down the steps and off into the obliterating moonlight. In a moment he was just a shadow passing the street lamps and then a faint footfall up the street.
IV
All through that summer he often walked abroad in the evenings. He liked to stand for a minute in front of the house where he was born, and then in front of another house where he had been a little boy. On his customary routes there were other sharp landmarks of the nineties, converted habitats of gaieties that no longer existed—the shell of Jansen’s Livery Stables and the old Nushka Rink, where every winter his father had curled on the well-kept ice.
“And it’s a darn pity,” he would mutter. “A darn pity.”
He had a tendency, too, to walk past the lights of a certain drug store, because it seemed to him that it had contained the seed of another and nearer branch of the past. Once he went in, and inquiring casually about the blonde clerk, found that she had married and departed several months before. He obtained her name and on an impulse sent her a wedding present “from a dumb admirer”, for he felt he owed something to her for his happiness and pain. He had lost the battle against youth and spring, and with his grief paid the penalty for age’s unforgivable sin—refusing to die. But he could not have walked down wasted into the darkness without being used up a little; what he had wanted, after all, was only to break his Wrong old heart. Conflict itself has a value beyond victory and defeat, and those three months—he had them for ever.
Comments
“At Your Age” was written in Paris in June 1929. Tranquillity had eluded the Fitzgeralds at Ellerslie, and he returned to France in the spring of 1929 with Tender Is the Night still unfinished. The departure from America was motivated by Zelda’s desire to study ballet in Paris as well as by Fitzgerald’s feeling that he would be able to work on his novel more effectively in its setting.
Harold Ober’s response to “At Your Age” was: “At this minute it seems to me the finest story you have ever written—and the finest I have ever read.” His enthusiasm brought a raise to $4000 from the Post, Fitzgerald’s peak story price. Ober was probably responsible for its selection for the Modern Library Great Modern Short Stories (1930) because “At Your Age” was not among the five stories Fitzgerald nominated…
Published in Saturday Evening Post magazine (17 August 1929).
