“Take care of Clare—always—Billy darling——”
Billy was puzzled and rather awed.
“You’re crying,” he accused gravely.
“I know—I know I am——”
Clare gave a few tentative sniffles, hesitated, and then clung to her mother in a storm of weeping.
“I d-don’t feel good, Mummy—I don’t feel good.”
Betty soothed her quietly.
“We won’t cry any more, Clare dear—either of us.”
But as she rose to leave the room her glance at Billy bore a mute appeal, too vain, she knew, to be registered on his childish consciousness.
Half an hour later as she carried her travelling bag to a taxicab at the door she raised her hand to her face in mute admission that a veil served no longer to hide her from the world.
“But I’ve chosen,” she thought dully.
As the car turned the corner she wept again, resisting a temptation to give up and go back.
“Oh, my God!?” she whispered. “What am I doing? What have I done? What have I done?”
IV
When Jerry, the sallow, narrow-faced waiter, left Sylvester’s rooms he reported to the head-waiter, and then checked out for the day.
He took the subway south and alighting at William Street walked a few blocks and entered a billiard parlour.
An hour later he emerged with a cigarette drooping from his bloodless lips, and stood on the sidewalk as if hesitating before making a decision. He set off eastward.
As he reached a certain corner his gait suddenly increased and then quite as suddenly slackened. He seemed to want to pass by, yet some magnetic attraction was apparently exerted on him, for with a sudden face-about he turned in at the door of a cheap restaurant—half cabaret, half chop-suey parlour—where a miscellaneous assortment gathered nightly.
Jerry found his way to a table situated in the darkest and most obscure corner. Seating himself with a contempt for his surroundings that betokened familiarity rather than superiority he ordered a glass of claret.
The evening had begun. A fat woman at the piano was expelling the last jauntiness from a hackneyed foxtrot, and a lean, dispirited male was assisting her with lean, dispirited notes from a violin. The attention of the patrons was directed at a dancer wearing soiled stockings and done largely in peroxide and rouge who was about to step upon a small platform, meanwhile exchanging pleasantries with a fat, eager person at the table beside her who was trying to capture her hand.
Over in the corner Jerry watched the two by the platform and, as he gazed, the ceiling seemed to fade out, the walls growing into tall buildings and the platform becoming the top of a Fifth Avenue bus on a breezy spring night three years ago. The fat, eager person disappeared, the short skirt of the dancer rolled down and the rouge faded from her cheeks—and he was beside her again in an old delirious ride, with the lights blinking kindly at them from the tall buildings beside and the voices of the street merging into a pleasant somnolent murmur around them.
“Jerry,” said the girl on top of the bus, “I’ve said that when you were gettin’ seventy-five I’d take a chance with you. But, Jerry, I can’t wait for ever.”
Jerry watched several street numbers sail by before he answered.
“I don’t know what’s the matter,” he said helplessly, “they won’t raise me. If I can locate a new job——”
“You better hurry, Jerry,” said the girl; “I’m gettin’ sick of just livin’ along. If I can’t get married I got a couple of chances to work in a cabaret—get on the stage maybe.”
“You keep out of that,” said Jerry quickly. “There ain’t no need, if you just wait about another month or two.”
“I can’t wait for ever, Jerry,” repeated the girl. “I’m tired of stayin’ poor alone.”
“It won’t be so long,” said Jerry clenching his free hand, “I can make it somewhere, if you’ll just wait.”
But the bus was fading out and the ceiling was taking shape and the murmur of the April streets was fading into the rasping whine of the violin—for that was all three years before and now he was sitting here.
The girl glanced up on the platform and exchanged a metallic impersonal smile with the dispirited violinist, and Jerry shrank farther back in his corner watching her with burning intensity.
“Your hands belong to anybody that wants them now,” he cried silently and bitterly. “I wasn’t man enough to keep you out of that—not man enough, by God, by God!”
But the girl by the door still toyed with the fat man’s clutching fingers as she waited for her time to dance.
V
Sylvester Stockton tossed restlessly upon his bed. The room, big as it was, smothered him, and a breeze drifting in and bearing with it a rift of moon seemed laden only with the cares of the world he would have to face next day.
“They don’t understand,” he thought. “They don’t see, as I do, the underlying misery of the whole damn thing. They’re hollow optimists. They smile because they think they’re always going to be happy.”
“Oh, well,” he mused drowsily, “I’ll run up to Rye tomorrow and endure more smiles and more heat. That’s all life is—just smiles and heat, smiles and heat.”
Notes
The story was written in St Paul in September 1919 as “A Smile for Sylvo”. After failing at his attempt to make a fast success as an advertising writer in New York, Fitzgerald returned to St Paul to rewrite his first novel. This Side of Paradise was accepted by Scribners in September, and Fitzgerald devoted the rest of the year to writing short stories for ready money. He submitted “The Smilers” to Scribner’s Magazine, which rejected it. After Harold Ober, his literary agent, was unable to place the story in one of the magazines that paid well, Fitzgerald sold it to the Smart Set for $35: “I want to keep in right with Menken+Nathan as they’re the most powerful critics in the country.” Although the Smart Set under editors H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan was an influential magazine among literary people, its limited circulation did not allow for generous payment. Fitzgerald sold stories to the Smart Set when they were unplaceable in the mass-circulation magazines—including two of his masterpieces, “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” and “May Day”.
Although “The Smilers” was written soon after acceptance of This Side of Paradise, it is still very much a college literary magazine piece—self-conscious and blatantly ironic. This story shows the didactic streak that marked several of Fitzgerald’s early stories, such as “The Four Fists” and “The Cut-Glass Bowl”. The moralizing quality in his work—especially the stories—has been obscured by Fitzgerald’s image as the Boswell of the Jazz Age. Near the end of his life he noted that he sometimes wishes he had gone into musical comedy, “but I guess I am too much a moralist at heart and really want to preach at people in some acceptable form rather than to entertain them.”
