F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise

Amory Blaine inherited from his mother every trait, except the stray inexpressible few, that made him worthwhile. His father, an ineffectual, inarticulate man with a taste for Byron and a habit of drowsing over the Encyclopedia Britannica, grew wealthy at thirty through the death of two elder brothers, successful Chicago brokers, and in the first flush of feeling that the world was his, went to Bar Harbor and met Beatrice OHara. In consequence, Stephen Blaine handed down to posterity his height of just under six feet and his tendency to waver at crucial moments, these two abstractions appearing in his son Amory. For many years he hovered in the background of his familys life, an unassertive figure with a face half-obliterated by lifeless, silky hair, continually occupied in taking care of his wife, continually harassed by the idea that he didnt and couldnt understand her.

But Beatrice Blaine! There was a woman! Early pictures taken on her fathers estate at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, or in Rome at the Sacred Heart Conventan educational extravagance that in her youth was only for the daughters of the exceptionally wealthyshowed the exquisite delicacy of her features, the consummate art and simplicity of her clothes. A brilliant education she hadher youth passed in renaissance glory, she was versed in the latest gossip of the Older Roman Families; known by name as a fabulously wealthy American girl to Cardinal Vitori and Queen Margherita and more subtle celebrities that one must have had some culture even to have heard of. She learned in England to prefer whiskey and soda to wine, and her small talk was broadened in two senses during a winter in Vienna. All in all Beatrice OHara absorbed the sort of education that will be quite impossible ever again; a tutelage measured by the number of things and people one could be contemptuous of and charming about; a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas, in the last of those days when the great gardener clipped the inferior roses to produce one perfect bud.

In her less important moments she returned to America, met Stephen Blaine and married himthis almost entirely because she was a little bit weary, a little bit sad. Her only child was carried through a tiresome season and brought into the world on a spring day in ninety-six.

When Amory was five he was already a delightful companion for her. He was an auburn-haired boy, with great, handsome eyes which he would grow up to in time, a facile imaginative mind and a taste for fancy dress. From his fourth to his tenth year he did the country with his mother in her fathers private car, from Coronado, where his mother became so bored that she had a nervous breakdown in a fashionable hotel, down to Mexico City, where she took a mild, almost epidemic consumption. This trouble pleased her, and later she made use of it as an intrinsic part of her atmosphereespecially after several astounding bracers.

So, while more or less fortunate little rich boys were defying governesses on the beach at Newport, or being spanked or tutored or read to from Do and Dare, or Frank on the Mississippi, Amory was biting acquiescent bell-boys in the Waldorf, outgrowing a natural repugnance to chamber music and symphonies, and deriving a highly specialized education from his mother.

Amory.

Yes, Beatrice. (Such a quaint name for his mother; she encouraged it.)

Dear, dont think of getting out of bed yet. Ive always suspected that early rising in early life makes one nervous. Clothilde is having your breakfast brought up.

All right.

I am feeling very old today, Amory, she would sigh, her face a rare cameo of pathos, her voice exquisitely modulated, her hands as facile as Bernhardts. My nerves are on edgeon edge. We must leave this terrifying place tomorrow and go searching for sunshine.

Amorys penetrating green eyes would look out through tangled hair at his mother. Even at this age he had no illusions about her.

Amory.

Oh, yes.

I want you to take a red-hot bath as hot as you can bear it, and just relax your nerves. You can read in the tub if you wish.

She fed him sections of the Ftes Galantes before he was ten; at eleven he could talk glibly, if rather reminiscently, of Brahms and Mozart and Beethoven. One afternoon, when left alone in the hotel at Hot Springs, he sampled his mothers apricot cordial, and as the taste pleased him, he became quite tipsy. This was fun for a while, but he essayed a cigarette in his exaltation, and succumbed to a vulgar, plebeian reaction. Though this incident horrified Beatrice, it also secretly amused her and became part of what in a later generation would have been termed her line.

This son of mine, he heard her tell a room full of awestruck, admiring women one day, is entirely sophisticated and quite charmingbut delicatewere all delicate; here, you know. Her hand was radiantly outlined against her beautiful bosom; then sinking her voice to a whisper, she told them of the apricot cordial. They rejoiced, for she was a brave raconteuse, but many were the keys turned in sideboard locks that night against the possible defection of little Bobby or Barbara....

These domestic pilgrimages were invariably in state; two maids, the private car, or Mr. Blaine when available, and very often a physician. When Amory had the whooping cough four disgusted specialists glared at each other hunched around his bed; when he took scarlet fever the number of attendants, including physicians and nurses, totalled fourteen. However, blood being thicker than broth, he was pulled through.

The Blaines were attached to no city. They were the Blaines of Lake Geneva; they had quite enough relatives to serve in place of friends, and an enviable standing from Pasadena to Cape Cod. But Beatrice grew more and more prone to like only new acquaintances, as there were certain stories, such as the history of her constitution and its many amendments, memories of her years abroad, that it was necessary for her to repeat at regular intervals. Like Freudian dreams, they must be thrown off, else they would sweep in and lay siege to her nerves. But Beatrice was critical about American women, especially the floating population of ex-Westerners.

They have accents, my dear, she told Amory, not Southern accents or Boston accents, not an accent attached to any locality, just an accentshe became dreamy. They pick up old, moth-eaten London accents that are down on their luck and have to be used by someone. They talk as an English butler might after several years in a Chicago grand-opera company. She became almost incoherentSupposetime in every Western womans lifeshe feels her husband is prosperous enough for her to haveaccentthey try to impress me, my dear