Dexter Green
A grocer's son who caddies at a Minnesota golf club, makes a fortune in laundries, and cannot stop wanting Judy Jones. “Winter Dreams” is his story.
The glittering things, not the company of the people who own them. The story puts it exactly: “He wanted not association with glittering things and glittering people—he wanted the glittering things themselves.” Judy Jones becomes the shortest name for all of it.
The book
At a glance
- Dexter Green — invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Black Bear Village, Minnesota; born in Keeble, fifty miles further north
- Owner of the second best grocery store in Black Bear
- Caddy at the Sherry Island Golf Club, thirty dollars a month; quit at fourteen
- A partnership in a laundry bought with a thousand borrowed dollars, and the largest string of laundries in his section of the country before he was twenty-seven
- Irene Scheerer, in January of the year he turned twenty-five
- “Winter Dreams,” first printed in Metropolitan, December 1922
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDexter Green is the central figure of “Winter Dreams,” a story the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in September 1922 and later described to his editor as a sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea. Metropolitan printed it that December, and it was collected in All the Sad Young Men in 1926. Dexter is invented.
He grows up in Black Bear Village, Minnesota, where his father owns the second best grocery store in town, and he caddies in the summers at the Sherry Island Golf Club, which the wealthy people from the lake belong to. He is fourteen when he quits, on the morning he first sees an eleven-year-old member's daughter named Judy Jones. Everything after that — the university in the East, the laundries, the money, the engagement to another girl — happens in the shadow of what the story calls his winter dreams.
How the book draws them
- The grocery storeHis father owns the second best grocery store in Black Bear. The best one, The Hub, is where the wealthy people from Sherry Island shop. Dexter caddies only for pocket money, and he is good at it: thirty dollars a month through the summer, an “A Class” badge, and a reputation for never losing a ball.
- The winter dreamsIn the fall his skis move over the snow that hides the fairways, and the closed course gives him a feeling of profound melancholy. In his head he beats Mr. T. A. Hedrick in a marvellous match played a hundred times over, and steps out of a Pierce-Arrow into the club lounge with an admiring crowd watching.
- Quitting at fourteenHe hands in his badge the morning he first sees Judy Jones and gives the caddy-master no reason beyond “I think I'll quit.” To Mr. Mortimer Jones, who offers to make it worth his while to stay, he says only that he is too old. He is fourteen, the thirty dollars a month is not to be made anywhere else around the lake, and the enormity of the decision frightens him.
- The laundriesHe passes up a business course at the state university for an older and more famous university in the East, where his funds are scanty. Then he borrows a thousand dollars on his college degree and his confident mouth and buys a partnership in a laundry. He makes a specialty of learning how the English wash fine woollen golf stockings without shrinking them, and within a year he has the trade that wears knickerbockers. Before he is twenty-seven he owns the largest string of laundries in his section of the country.
- The town he gives as homeHe was born in Keeble, a Minnesota village fifty miles further north, and he always gives Keeble rather than Black Bear Village. His mother's name had been Krimslich; she was a Bohemian of the peasant class and talked broken English to the end of her days.
- “I'm nobody”Judy Jones asks him at dinner who he is. “I'm nobody,” he announced. “My career is largely a matter of futures.” Asked whether he is poor, he says frankly that he is probably making more money than any man his age in the Northwest, and adds that he knows it is an obnoxious remark.
- How he tries to stopHe lies awake telling himself the trouble and pain she has caused him, enumerating her glaring deficiencies as a wife; then he says to himself that he loves her, and falls asleep. A week later he goes to a dance, cuts in on her once, and for almost the first time since they met does not tell her she is lovely. What hurts him is that she does not miss it.
- New York at thirty-twoHe sells the laundries and goes east, where he does so well that there are no barriers too high for him. Then a man named Devlin comes into his office from Detroit on business and mentions, with careless curiosity, the wife of one of his best friends: Judy Simms, Judy Jones she was once.
Dexter breaks his engagement to Irene Scheerer after one night with Judy Jones, and Judy's flare for him lasts exactly one month. He never regrets it. Looking at it from ten years' distance the length of the month seems to him of little importance, and he bears Judy no malice: he loved her, he could not have her, and he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong. He goes east in February meaning to sell the laundries, the war reaches America in March, and he joins the first officers' training camp in April with a certain amount of relief.
The last scene is seven years later in a New York office, and nothing happens in it. Devlin, the man from Detroit, mentions in passing that Judy is married to a man named Lud Simms who drinks and runs around and treats her badly; that she does not run around; that she stays at home with her kids; and that she is a little too old for him. “Too old!” cried Dexter. “Why, man, she's only twenty-seven.” Then Devlin says she was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit and is all right now, and that lots of women fade just like that. Dexter, braced for grief, finds he cannot produce any. He lies down on his lounge and, for the first time in years, cries — for himself.