On Schedule, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

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