Too Cute for Words, F. Scott Fitzgerald

I

Bryan didn’t know exactly why Mrs. Hannaman was there. He thought it was something about his being a widower who should be looked after in some way. He had come home early from his office to catch up on certain aspects of his daughter.

“She has such beautiful manners,” Mrs. Hannaman was saying. “Old-fashioned manners.”

“Thank you,” he said. “We brought up Gwen in the Continental style, and when we came back here, we tried to keep up the general idea.”

“You taught her languages, and all that?”

“Lord, no! I never learned anything but waiter’s French, but I’m strict with Gwen. I don’t let her go to the movies, for instance——”

Had Mrs. Hannaman’s memory betrayed her, or had she heard her little niece Clara say that she and Gwen sat through three straight performances of Top Hat, and would see it again if they could find it at one of the smaller theaters.

“We have a phonograph,” Bryan Bowers continued, “so Gwen can play music of her own choice, but I won’t give her a radio. Children ought to make their own music.”

He heard himself saying this, only half believing it, wishing Gwen would come home.

“She plays the piano?”

“Well, she did. She took piano lessons for years, but this year there was so much work at school that we just let it go. I mean we postponed it. She’s just thirteen, and she’s got plenty of time.”

“Of course,” agreed Mrs. Hannaman dryly.

When Mrs. Hannaman left, Bryan went back to work on the apartment. They were really settled at last. At least he was settled; it seemed rather likely that Gwen never would be settled. Glancing into his daughter’s room now, he uttered a short exclamation of despair. Everything was just as it had been for the past three weeks. He had told the maid that nothing must be touched except the bed, because Gwen should do her own straightening up. She had been to camp this past summer; if this was the system she had learned, that was time wasted. A pair of crushed jodhpur breeches lay in the corner where they had been stepped out of, a section of them rising resentfully above the rest, as if trying to straighten up of its own accord; a stack of letters from boys—a stack that had once worn a neat elastic band— was spread along the top of the bureau like a pack of cards ready for the draw; three knitted sweaters in various preliminary stages of creation and the beginnings of many tidying-ups lay like abandoned foundations about the room. The business was always to be completed on the following Sunday, but Sunday was always the day when the unforeseen came up: Gwen was invited to do something very healthy, or she had so much homework, or he had to take her out with him because he didn’t want to leave her alone. For a while it had been a fine idea to let her live in this mess until she was impelled to act from within, but as October crept into November the confusion increased. She was late for everything because nothing could be found. The maid complained it had become absolutely impossible to sweep the room, save with the cautious steps of Eliza on the ice.

He heard his daughter come in, and, with the problem in his mind, went to meet her in the living room.

They faced each other in a moment of happiness. They looked alike. He had been handsome once, but middle age had added flesh in the unappealing places. When he spoke of the past, Gwen was never able to imagine him in romantic situations. She was an arresting little beauty, black-eyed, with soft bay hair and with an extraordinarily infectious laugh—a rare laugh that had a peal in it, and yet managed not to get on people’s nerves.

She had thrown herself full length on a couch, scattering her books on the floor. When Bryan came in, she moved her feet so that they just projected over the side of the couch. He noted the gesture, and suggested:

“Pull down your skirt or else take it off altogether.”

“Daddy! Don’t be so vulgar!”

“That’s the only way I can get through to you sometimes.”

“Daddy, I got credit plus in geometry. Cute?”

“What’s credit plus?”

“Ninety-two.”

“Why don’t they just say ninety-two?”

“Daddy, did you get the tickets for the Harvard game?”

“I told you I’d take you.”

She nodded, and remarked as if absently:

“Dizzy’s father’s taking her to the Harvard game and the Navy game. And her uncle’s taking her to the Dartmouth game. Isn’t that cute?”

“What’s cute about it? Do you know what you said to Doctor Parker the other day, when he asked you if you liked Caesar? You said you thought Caesar was cute.” He walked around the room in helpless laughter. “A man conquers the whole known world, and a little schoolgirl comes along a thousand years afterwards and says he’s cute!”

“Two thousand years,” remarked Gwen, unruffled… “Daddy, Mr. Campbell’s driving them up to the Harvard game in their new car. Isn’t that cu—isn’t that fine?”

She was always like this in the first half hour home from school or a party—outer worlds where she lived with such intensity that she carried it into the slower tempo of life at home like weather on her shoes. This is what made her say:

“It’d take forever the way you drive, daddy.”

“I drive fast enough.”

“Once I drove ninety miles an hour——”

Startled, he stared at her, and Gwen should have been acute enough to minimize the statement immediately. But still in her worldly daze, she continued “—on the way to Turtle Lake this summer.”

“Who with?”

“With a girl.”

“A girl your age driving a car!”

“No. The girl was nineteen—she’s a sister of a girl I was visiting. But I won’t tell you who. Probably you’d never let me go there again, daddy.”

She was very sorry that she had ever spoken.

“You might as well tell me. I know who you’ve visited this summer and I can find out who’s got a sister nineteen years old. I’m not going to have you mangled up against a telegraph post because some young——”

Momentarily Gwen was saved by the maid calling her father to the phone. As a sort of propitiation, she hung her overcoat in the closet, picked up her books and went on into her own room.

She examined it, as usual, with a vast surprise. She knew it was rather terrible, but she had some system of her own as to what to do about it—a system that never seemed to work out in actuality. She bounced with a cry upon the wastebasket—it was her record of “Cheek to Cheek,” broken, but preserved to remind her to get another. She cradled it to her arms, and as if this, in turn, reminded her of something else, she decided to telephone Dizzy Campbell. This required a certain diplomacy. Bryan had become adamant on the matter of long phone conversations.

“This is about Latin,” she assured him.

“All right, but make it short, daughter.”

He read the paper in the living room, waiting for supper; for some time he had been aware of a prolonged murmur which confused itself in his mind with distant guns in Ethiopia and China. Only when he turned to the financial page and read the day’s quotation on American Tel. and Tel. did he spring to his feet.

“She’s on the phone again!” he exclaimed to himself; but even as the paper billowed to rest in front of him, Gwen appeared, all radiant and on the run.

“Oh, daddy, the best thing! You won’t have to take me to the game, after all! I mean you will to the game, but not up to the game. Dizzy’s aunt, Mrs. Charles Wrotten Ray, or something like that— somebody that’s all right, that they know about, that they can trust, and all that sort of thing——”

While she panted, he inquired politely:

“What about her? Has she made the Princeton team?”

“No. She lives up there and she has some nephews or uncles or something—it was all kind of complicated on the phone—that go to some kind of prep school that are about our age—about fifteen or sixteen——”

“I thought you were thirteen.”

“The boy is always older,” she assured him. “Anyhow, she——”

“Don’t ever say ‘she.’”

“Well, excuse me, daddy. Well, anyhow, this sort of person—you know, not ‘she,’ but this sort of Mrs. Wrotten Ray, or whatever her name is—she wants Dizzy——”

“Now, calm yourself, calm yourself.”

“I can’t, daddy; she’s waiting on the phone.”

“Who? Mrs. Wrotten Ray?”

“Oh, that isn’t her name, but it’s something like that. Anyhow, Mrs. Wrotten Ray wants Dizzy to bring Clara Hannaman and one other girl up to a little dance the night before the game. And Dizzy wants me to be the other girl, and can I go?”

“This is all a little sudden. I don’t like such things during a school term, and you know that.” He hated to refuse her, though, for, excepting an occasional indiscretion of speech, she was a trustworthy child; she made good grades in school and conscientiously wrestled with her ebullient temperament.

“Well, can I, daddy? Dizzy’s waiting; she has to know.”

“I suppose you can.”

“Oh, thanks. Mrs. Campbell’s going to call you up, but Dizzy couldn’t wait to tell me. Cute?”

She vanished, and in a moment the low murmur behind the door began again.

Something told Bryan that she’d be leading a simpler life at boarding school, but didn’t Helen Hannaman say something today about her old-fashioned manners? He couldn’t afford it this year anyhow, and, besides, she was such a bright little thing to have around the house.

But if