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By F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
my Beauty Boy - reading Plato so divine! O, dark, oh fair, colored golf
champion of Chicago.Over the rails he goes at night, steward of the club car, and afterwards in the dim smoke by the one light and the smell of stale spittoons, writing west to the Rosecrucian Brotherhood. Seeking ever.
O Beauty Boy here is your girl, not one to soar like you, but a clean swift serpent who will travel as fast on land and look toward you in the sky.
Lilymary loved him, oft invited him and they were married in St. Jarvis'
church in North Englewood. For years they bettered themselves, running
along the tread-mill of their reach, becoming only a little older and
no better than before. He was loaned the Communist Manifesto by the
wife of the advertising manager of a Chicago Daily but for preference
give him Plato - the Phaedo and the Apologia, or else the Rosecrucian
Brotherhood of Sacramento, California, which burned in his ears as the
rails clicked past Alton, Springfield Burlington in the dark.
Bronze lovers, never never canst thou have thy bronze child - or so it
seemed for years. Then the clock struck, the gong rang and Dr. Edwin
Burch of South Michigan Avenue agreed to handle the whole thing for
$200. They looked so nice–so delicately nice, neither of them over
hurting the other and graciously expert in the avoidance. Beauty Boy
took fine care of her in her pregnancy–paid his sister to watch with
her while he did double work on the road and served for caterers in the
city; and one day the bronze baby was born.
O Beauty Boy, Lilymary said, here is your beauty boy. She lay in a four
bed ward in the hospital with the wives of a prize fighter, an
undertaker and a doctor. Beauty Boy's face was so twisted with
radiance; his teeth shining so in his smile and his eyes so kind that it
seemed that nothing and nothing could ever.
Beauty Boy sad beside her bed when she slept and read Thoreau's Walden
for the third time. Then the nurse told him he must leave. He went on
the road that night and in Alton going to mail her a letter for a
passenger he slipped under the moving train and his leg was off above
the knee.
Beauty Boy lay in the hospital and a year passed. Lilymary went back to work again cooking. Things were tough, there was even trouble about his workman's compensation, but he found lines in his books that helped them along for awhile when all the human beings seemed away.
The little baby flourished but he was not beautiful like his parents; not as they had expected in those golden dreams. They had only spare-time love to give the child so the sister more and more and more took care of him. For they wanted to get back where they were, they wanted Beauty Boy's leg to grow again so it would all be like it was before. So that he could find delight in his books again and Lilymary could find delight in hoping for a little baby.
Some years passed. They were so far back on the treadmill that they
would never catch up. Beauty Boy was a night-watchman now but he had
six operations on his stump and each new artificial limb gave him
constant pain. Lilymary worked fairly steadily as a cook. Now they had
become just ordinary people. Even the sister had long since forgotten
that Beauty Boy was formerly colored golf champion of Chicago. Once in
cleaning the closet she threw out all his books–the Apologia and the
Phaedo of Plate, and the Thoreau and the Emerson and all the leaflets
and correspondence with the Rosecrucian Brotherhood. He didn't find
out for a long time that they were gone. And then he just stared at
the place where they had been and said "Say, man...say man."
For things change and get so different that we can hardly recognize them and it seems that only our names remain the same. It seemed wrong for them still to call each other Beauty Boy and Lilymary long after the delight was over.
Some years later they both died in an influenza epidemic and went to
heaven. They thought it was going to be all right then–indeed things
began to happen in exactly the way that they had been told as children.
Beauty Boy's leg grew again and he became golf champion of all heaven,
both white and black, and drove the ball powerfully from cloud to cloud
through the blue fairway. Lilymary's breasts became young and firm, she
was respected among the other angels, and her pride in Beauty Boy became
as it had been before.
In the evening they sat and tried to remember what it was they missed.
It was not this books, for here everyone knew all those things by heart,
and it was not the little boy for he had never really been one of
them. They couldn't remember so after a puzzled time they would give up
trying, and talk about how nice the other one was, of how fine a score
Beauty Boy would make tomorrow.
So things go.
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Footnotes
DEARLY BELOVED was copyrighted by the author's daughter in 1969.
In 1974, it was anthologized in BITS OF PARADISE Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald
with a note: "Probably written in 1940."
It is the only Fitzgerald story where the central characters are Afro-Americans.
Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940.
But someone painted a famous portrait of him in 1935.
You can see it here.
DEARLY BELOVED was copyrighted by the author's daughter in 1969.
In 1974, it was anthologized in BITS OF PARADISE Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald
with a note: "Probably written in 1940."
It is the only Fitzgerald story where the central characters are Afro-Americans.
Scott Fitzgerald died on December 21, 1940.
But someone painted a famous portrait of him in 1935.
You can see it here.
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