F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night [63]
* Diagnosis: Divided Personality. Acute and down-hill phase of the illness. The fear of men is a symptom of the illness and is not at all constitutional. . . . The prognosis must be reserved.
And then they waited with increasing interest as the days passed for Mr. Warren’s promised second visit.
It was slow in coming. After a fortnight Doctor Dohmler wrote. Confronted with further silence he committed what was for those days “une folie,” and telephoned to the Grand Hotel at Vevey. He learned from Mr. Warren’s valet that he was at the moment packing to sail for America. But reminded that the forty francs Swiss for the call would show up on the clinic books, the blood of the Tuileries Guard rose to Doctor Dohmler’s aid and Mr. Warren was got to the phone.
“It is—absolutely necessary—that you come. Your daughter’s health—all depends. I can take no responsibility.”
“But look here, Doctor, that’s just what you’re for. I have a hurry call to go home!”
Doctor Dohmler had never yet spoken to any one so far away but he dispatched his ultimatum so firmly into the phone that the agonized American at the other end yielded. Half an hour after this second arrival on the Zurichsee, Warren had broken down, his fine shoulders shaking with awful sobs inside his easy fitting coat, his eyes redder than the very sun on Lake Geneva, and they had the awful story.
“It just happened,” he said hoarsely. “I don’t know—I don’t know.
“After her mother died when she was little she used to come into my bed every morning, sometimes she’d sleep in my bed. I was sorry for the little thing. Oh, after that, whenever we went places in an automobile or a train we used to hold hands. She used to sing to me. We used to say, ‘Now let’s not pay any attention to anybody else this afternoon—let’s just have each other—for this morning you’re mine.’” A broken sarcasm came into his voice. “People used to say what a wonderful father and daughter we were—they used to wipe their eyes. We were just like lovers—and then all at once we were lovers—and ten minutes after it happened I could have shot myself—except I guess I’m such a Goddamned degenerate I didn’t have the nerve to do it.”
“Then what?” said Doctor Dohmler, thinking again of Chicago and of a mild pale gentleman with a pince-nez who had looked him over in Zurich thirty years before. “Did this thing go on?”
“Oh, no! She almost—she seemed to freeze up right away. She’d just say, ‘Never mind, never mind, Daddy. It doesn’t matter. Never mind.’”
“There were no consequences?”
“No.” He gave one short convulsive sob and blew his nose several times. “Except now there’re plenty of consequences.”
As the story concluded Dohmler sat back in the focal armchair of the middle class and said to himself sharply, “Peasant!”—it was one of the few absolute worldly judgments that he had permitted himself for twenty years. Then he said:
“I would like for you to go to a hotel in Zurich and spend the night and come see me in the morning.”
“And then what?”
Doctor Dohmler spread his hands wide enough to carry a young pig.
“Chicago,” he suggested.
IV
“Then we knew where we stood,” said Franz. “Dohmler told Warren we would take the case if he would agree to keep away from his daughter indefinitely, with an absolute minimum of five years. After Warren’s first collapse, he seemed chiefly concerned as to whether the story would ever leak back to America.”
“We mapped out a routine for her and waited. The prognosis was bad—as you know, the percentage of cures, even so-called social cures, is very low at that age.”
“Those first letters looked bad,” agreed Dick.
“Very bad—very typical. I hesitated about letting the first one get out of the clinic. Then I thought it will be good for Dick to know we’re