Image on the Heart and Other Stories

Scott Fitzgerald F.

Description

When Tudy's first husband tragically dies, she takes up the offer of Tom, a family friend, to pay for her to go study in France. As she and her benefactor become close, she agrees to marry him in Provence later that year. But as the wedding approaches, Tom discovers that his fiancee has become involved with Riccard, a dashing French pilot and his near-double. A tale of broken trust and infidelity based on Zelda Fitzgerald's own dalliance with a French pilot, 'Image on the Heart' is here presented with other lesser-known stories written by Fitzgerald in the late 1920s and early 1930s, which develop many of the themes found in his novels and his more famous works of short fiction.

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780714547343
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Image on the Heart and Other Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald

ALMA CLASSICS




Alma Classics Ltd Hogarth House 32–34 Paradise Road Richmond Surrey T W9 1SE United Kingdom www.almaclassics.com
This collection first published by Alma Classics Ltd in 2015
Extra Material © Richard Parker
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR 0 4 YY
isbn : 978-1-84749-565-5
All the pictures in this volume are reprinted with permission or pre sumed to be in the public domain. Every effort has been made to ascertain and acknowledge their copyright status, but should there have been any unwitting oversight on our part, we would be happy to rectify the error in subsequent printings.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Image on the Heart and Other Stories
Zone of Accident
Fate in Her Hands
Image on the Heart
Too Cute for Words
Inside the House
Three Acts o f Music
An Author’s Mother
“Trouble”
The Guest in Room Nineteen
In the Holidays
The End of Hate
On an Ocean Wave*
The Woman from Twenty-One
Discard (Director’s Special)
Note on the Texts
Notes
Extra Material
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Life
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Works
Select Bibliography


Other books by F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
published by Alma Classics
All the Sad Young Men Babylon Revisited and Other Stories
Basil and Josephine
The Beautiful and Damned Flappers and Philosophers
The Great Gatsby The Intimate Strangers and Other Stories
The Last Tycoon The Last of the Belles and Other Stories
The Love Boat and Other Stories
The Pat Hobby Stories
Tales of the Jazz Age
Tender Is the Night
This Side of Paradise


Image on the Heart and Other Stories


Zone of Accident
1
B ill missed the usual feeling of leaving her house. Usually there was a wrench as the door closed upon the hall light and he found himself alone again in the dark street. Usually there was a series of light-headed emotions that sometimes sent him galloping half a block or made him walk very slow, frowning and content. He wouldn’t have recognized the houses nearby going away from them; he only knew what they looked like when he came towards them, before hers was in sight.
Tonight there was this talk of California, the intensity of this talk about California. Half-familiar, suddenly menacing names – Santa Barbara, Carmel, Coronado – Hollywood. She’d try to get a screen test – more fun! Meanwhile he would be completing his second year as an intern here in the city.
“But mother and I would go to the shore anyhow,” Amy said.
“California’s so far away.”
When he reached the hospital, he ran into George Schoatze under the murky yellow lamps of the long corridor.
“What’s doing?” he asked.
“Nothing. I’m looking for somebody else’s stethoscope – that’s how busy I am.”
“How’s everything out in Roland Park?”
“Bill, it’s all settled.”
“What?” Hilariously, Bill slapped George’s shoulder. “Well, congratulations! Let me be the first—”
“She was the first.”
“—let me be the second to congratulate you.”
“Don’t say anything, will you – not yet?”
“All right.” He whistled. “Ink scarcely dry on your medical certificate and you let some girl write ‘meal ticket’ on it.”
“How about you?” countered George. “How about that love life of yours?”
“Obstacles are developing,” said Bill gloomily. “Matter of climate.”
His heart winced as he heard his own words. Walking along in the direction of the accident room, he had a foretaste of the summer’s loneliness. Last year he had taken his love where he found it. But Thea Singleton, the demon anaesthetist, was now at the new Medical Centre in New York; and gone also was the young lady in the pathology department who sliced human ears thinner than carnation sandwiches, and the other attractive ghoul on the brain-surgery staff who spent her time rushing into people’s brains with a sketch pad and pencil. They had been properly aware that, seriously speaking, Bill was nobody’s business – that he was in the safety zone. And now, in a fortnight, there was a girl who didn’t know centigrade from Fahrenheit, but who looked like a rose inside a bubble and had promised to trade exclusive personal rights with him in another June.
The accident room was in a dull humour. Holidays are the feasts of glory there, when the speed merchants send in their victims and the dusky brand of Marylander exhibits his Saturday-night specimens of razor sculpture. Tonight the tiled floor and walls, the rolling tables packed with splints and bandages were all for the benefit of a single client, just being unstrapped from the examination table.
“It’s been wonderful,” he said, humbly drunk. “I’m going to send you doctors a barrel of oysters.” Barber by trade, he stood swaying gently in his worn coat. “My father’s the biggest fish dealer in Carsontown.”
“That’ll be fine,” the intern said. The patient regarded his bandaged hand proudly.
“I can take it,” he boasted, “can’t I?”
“You certainly can. But don’t push your hand through any more windows.”
His friend was summoned from without and, wobbling a little, the injured barber strutted out. The same swing of the door admitted a stout man of fifty who blurted incoherent words to Doctor Moore, intern on duty; Bill turned meanwhile to Miss Wales, who for a decade had been priestess of this battlefield. “Any high comedy?” he asked.
“Mostly regulars,” she answered. “Minnie the Moocher turned up again, carrying her head under her arm and wanting it sewed on again. She was cut this morning. Why is it niggers never know they’re sick till after dark?”
“Terror by night; let’s see – a negotio perambulante in tenebris .” *
“Whatever that means,” agreed Miss Wales. “And there’s another coloured number with a hundred-and-three-point-two waiting for the medical man.”
“I’ll take a look at him.”
Doctor Moore had meanwhile backed away from his exigent vis-à-vis; he turned to Bill.
“Here’s a mystery for you. This man—”
“You don’t understand!” cried the stout man. “We can’t let anybody know! She made me promise!”
“Who did?”
“This lady outside in the car. She’s bleeding from her whole back. I live only two blocks away, so I brought her here.”
Simultaneously the interns started for the door and the man followed, insisting: “It’s got to be no publicity. We only came because we couldn’t get a doctor to the house.”
In a small sedan in the dark, deserted street slumped a bundled form that emitted a faint moan as Moore opened the door. It took but an instant for Doctor Moore to feel the blood-soaked dress.
“Get the stretcher out quick!”
The middle-aged man followed Bill to the door.
“It must be kept quiet,” he persisted.
“You want her to bleed to death?” Bill answered sharply.
A few minutes later, the patient was wheeled into the white light of the accident room. A curtain was flung aside from a cubicle which contained an operating table, and the two interns began untangling the ravel of dish towels, torn sheeting and broadcloth in which she was swathed. It was a young girl, the pale colour of her own ashen hair. Pearls lay along her gasping throat, and her back was slit from waist to shoulder.
“Lost a lot of blood,” Moore said. He was looking at the blood-pressure gauge. “Say, it’s low – eighty over fifty! We’ll pack the wound right away. Tell Miss Wales.”
Miss Wales faced the father, as he admitted himself to be, and spoke impatiently, pad in hand: “You’ve got to tell the name. We can’t take care of your daughter if you won’t tell the name.”
“Doctor Moore wants to pack the wound right away,” said Bill. To the father he added, “Wait outside. Your daughter’s badly hurt. What did it?”
“It was an accident.”
“What did it – a knife?”
At his peremptory voice, the man nodded.
“You didn’t do it?
“No! I can’t tell you about it except that it was an accident.”
He was talking at Bill’s vanishing back; presently, bumped by a hurrying nurse and orderly, he was pushed out the door.
Back in the cubicle, Bill whispered, “How’s the pulse?”
“It’s thready – I can hardly get it.”
He was sponging the wound, exposing the lovely young lines of the back. “This is going to leave a beautiful scar.”
He spoke low, but the patient heard him and murmured: “No scar.”
Bill called Moore’s attention to the pearls, and whispered, “This girl’s well off; maybe she cares about her back. You ought to send for a good surgeon.”
“And let her bleed to death while we wait?”
“I was thinking of the resident.”
“You medical guys!” said Moore disgustedly.
“All right,” said Bill. “Anyhow, I’m going to get the father’s consent and protect you that much.”
“He’s not John D. Rockefeller. * Or why did he come to the accident room?” Moore dried his hands thoroughly. “How do you know these are real pearls – five-and-ten, maybe.”
“I know this woman’s well dressed – or was till half an hour ago.”
Bill went out in the hall again.
“I want this woman’s name,” he said to the father. “If you won’t tell me, I’ll trace it through the car licence.”
“Labroo!” he breathed, incomprehensibly.
“Who?”
This time Bill heard the name, Loretta Brooke, but it meant nothing to him until the man added: “in the movies”. Then Bill remembered it vaguely.
“Our name’s