“It’s a nice life,” Evelyn said emphatically. “If I had daughters with talent I’d choose it for them. I certainly wouldn’t want them to be society girls.”
“But we can’t all have talent,” said Colonel Cary.
“Of course most people have the craziest prejudices about the stage,” pursued Evelyn.
“Not so much nowadays,” said Mrs Ives. “So many nice girls go on the stage.”
“Girls of position,” added Colonel Cary.
“They don’t usually last very long,” said Evelyn. “Every time some debutante decides to dazzle the world there’s another flop due on Broadway. But the thing that makes me maddest is the way people condescend. I remember one season on the road—all the small-town social leaders inviting you to parties and then whispering and snickering in the corner. Snickering at Gladys Knowles!” Evelyn’s voice rang with indignation: “When Gladys goes to Europe she dines with the most prominent people in every country, the people who don’t know these backwoods social leaders exist——”
“Does she dine with their wives too?” asked Colonel Cary.
“With their wives too.” She glanced sharply at Mrs Ives. “Let me tell you that girls on the stage don’t feel a bit inferior, and the really fashionable people don’t think of patronizing them.”
The silence was there again heavier and deeper, but this time excited by her own words Evelyn was unconscious of it.
“Oh, it’s American women,” she said. “The less they have to offer the more they pick on the ones that have.”
She drew a deep breath, she felt that the room was stifling.
“I’m afraid I must go now,” she said.
“I’ll take you,” said George.
They were all standing. She shook hands. She liked George’s mother, who after all had made no attempt to patronize her.
“It’s been very nice,” said Mrs Ives.
“I hope we’ll meet soon. Good night.”
With George in a taxi she gave the address of a theatre on Broadway.
“I have a date,” she confessed.
“I see.”
“Nothing very important.” She glanced at him, and put her hand on his. Why didn’t he ask her to break the date? But he only said:
“He better go over Forty-fifth Street.”
Ah, well, maybe she’d better go back to England—and be Mickey Mouse, He didn’t know anything about women, anything about love, and to her that was the unforgivable sin. But why in a certain set of his face under the street lamps did he remind her of her father?
“Won’t you come to the picture?” she suggested.
“I’m feeling a little tired—I’m turning in.”
“Will you phone me tomorrow?”
“Certainly.”
She hesitated. Something was wrong and she hated to leave him. He helped her out of the taxi and paid it.
“Come with us?” she asked almost anxiously. “Listen, if you like——”
“I’m going to walk for a while!”
She caught sight of the men waiting for her and waved to them.
“George, is anything the matter?” she said.
“Of course not.”
He had never seemed so attractive, so desirable to her. As her friends came up, two actors, looking like very little fish beside him, he took off his hat and said:
“Good night, I hope you enjoy the picture.”
“George——”
— and a curious thing happened. Now for the first time she realized that her father was dead, that she was alone. She had thought of herself as being self-reliant, making more in some seasons than his practice brought him in five years. But he had always been behind her somewhere, his love had always been behind her—She had never been a waif, she had always had a place to go. And now she was alone, alone in the swirling indifferent crowd. Did she expect to love this man, who offered her so much, with the naive romantics of eighteen. He loved her—he loved her more than any one in the world loved her. She wasn’t ever going to be a great star, she knew that, and she had reached the time when a girl had to look out for herself. “Why, look,” she said, “I’ve got to go. Wait—or don’t wait.” Catching up her long gown she sped up Broadway. The crowd was enormous as theatre after theatre eddied out to the sidewalks. She sought for his silk hat as for a standard, but now there were many silk hats. She peered frantically into groups and crowds as she ran. An insolent voice called after her and again she shuddered with a sense of being unprotected. Reaching the corner she peered hopelessly into the tangled mass of the block ahead. But he had probably turned off Broadway so she darted left down the dimmer alley of Forty-eighth Street. Then she saw him, walking briskly, like a man leaving something behind—and overtook him at Sixth Avenue.
“George,” she cried.
He turned; his face looking at her was hard and miserable. “George, I didn’t want to go to that picture, I wanted you to make me not go. Why didn’t you ask me not to go?”
“I didn’t care whether you went or not.”
“Didn’t you?” she cried. “Don’t you care for me any more?”
“Do you want me to call you a cab?”
“No, I want to be with you.”
“I’m going home.”
“I’ll walk with you. What is it, George? What have I done?” They crossed Sixth Avenue and the street became darker. “What is it, George? Please tell me. If I did something wrong at your mother’s why didn’t you stop me?” He stopped suddenly. “You were our guest,” he said. “What did I do?”
“There’s no use going into it.” He signalled a passing taxi. “It’s quite obvious that we look at things differently. I was going to write you tomorrow but since you ask me it’s just as well to end it today.” “But why, George?” She wailed, “What did I do?” “You went out of your way to make a preposterous attack on an old gentlewoman who had given you nothing but courtesy and consideration.” “Oh, George, I didn’t, I didn’t… I’ll go to her and apologize. I’ll go tonight.”
“She wouldn’t understand. We simply look at things in different ways.”
“Oh—h-h.” She stood aghast.
He started to say something further, but after a glance at her he opened the taxi door.
“It’s only two blocks. You’ll excuse me if I don’t go with you.”
She had turned and was clinging to the iron railing of a stair.
“I’ll go in a minute,” she said. “Don’t wait.”
She wasn’t acting now. She wanted to be dead. She was crying for her father, she told herself—not for him but for her father.
His footsteps moved off, stopped, hesitated—came back.
“Evelyn.”
His voice was close beside her.
“Oh, poor baby,” it said. He turned her about gently in his arms and she clung to him.
“Oh yes,” she cried in wild relief. “Poor baby—just your poor baby.” She didn’t know whether this was love or not but she knew with all her heart and soul that she wanted to crawl into his pocket and be safe for ever.
Comments
“On Your Own” was written as “Home to Maryland” in the spring of 1931 after Fitzgerald’s return to Europe from his father’s funeral, a strongly emotional event for him. Edward Fitzgerald was buried in the little cemetery of St Mary’s Catholic Church on Rockville, Maryland—changed to “Rocktown” in the story—now a suburb of Washington, but then the sleepy county seat where he had been raised during and after the Civil War. “Then it was over,” the story says, “and the country doctor lay among a hundred Lovejoys and Dorseys and Crawshaws.”
This story shows the way Fitzgerald took an emotion and wove his hyperbolic magic around it. Though he had no ancestors named Lovejoy or Crawshaw, he was indeed descended from a long line of imposing Dorseys going back to the original Edward, who moved to Maryland from Virginia in 1650. Not a Dorsey is buried at St Mary’s but a few Scotts, with whom they intermarried, are, inspiring the line repeated in Tender Is the Night, “It was very friendly leaving Mm there with all his relations around him.” Later in the story, the heroine is asked why she doesn’t buy and restore “a fine old house called Lovejoy Hall” in “St Charles County”, which had belonged to one of her Lovejoy forebears. This is a reference to “Tudor Half, home of Fitzgerald’s great-great-grandfather Philip Key, a member of the Continental Congress, in the southern Maryland county of St Mary’s. It was for sale at that time, as he must have heard from relatives at the funeral.
Over the five years after it was written, “On Your Own” was declined by seven magazines, the first time this had happened to a Fitzgerald story since his apprentice days. It is one of the stories he “stripped” for his Notebooks, salvaging favourite passages for later use. “On Your Own” is included here because it is the only remaining unpublished story bearing, in his words, that “one little drop of something … the extra I had.”
Published in Esquire magazine (30 January 1979).
