Judy Jones
The golf club member's daughter whom Dexter Green cannot stop wanting, in the story “Winter Dreams.” She is eleven when he first sees her, and has a dozen men circling her by eighteen.
Something to happen that she has not arranged herself. She tells Dexter she has been mad about loads of poor men and fully intended to marry them all, and then interrupts herself to start the evening over: “Who are you, anyhow?”
The book
At a glance
- Judy Jones — invented by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Mr. Mortimer Jones, a member of the Sherry Island Golf Club
- At eleven, out on the golf course with a nurse named Hilda and five small new clubs
- Darling, without meaning much by it
- Twenty-seven
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJudy Jones is a character in “Winter Dreams,” the story the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald described to his editor as a sort of first draft of the Gatsby idea. She is invented. She is the daughter of Mr. Mortimer Jones, a member of the Sherry Island Golf Club on a Minnesota lake, and she first appears at eleven, coming out onto the course at nine in the morning with a white linen nurse and five small new golf clubs in a white canvas bag.
Dexter Green, the fourteen-year-old caddy who watches her that morning, quits his job because of it. He meets her again nine years later on the same course and spends most of his twenties inside her orbit. She is not written as a prize or as a punishment. She does what she likes, says so, and is bored a great deal of the time.
How the book draws them
- Eleven years oldThe story's first sight of her is a little girl who is beautifully ugly, as little girls are apt to be who are destined to be inexpressibly lovely, with a general ungodliness in the way her lips twist down at the corners when she smiles. The smile itself is radiant, blatantly artificial and convincing.
- The nurseTold she must wait for a caddy, she takes one of the clubs and hits it on the ground, then raises it again to bring it down on the nurse's bosom, and the nurse seizes it and twists it out of her hands. “You damn little mean old thing!” cried Miss Jones wildly. Dexter, watching, cannot resist the conviction that she is justified.
- The ball in the stomachNine years later she slices a drive over a hill and catches Mr. T. A. Hedrick in the abdomen. She comes over, says she is sorry and that she yelled “Fore!”, and asks whether she bounced into the rough. It is impossible to tell whether the question is innocent or malicious. She plays on with a quick, insincere smile and a careless “Thank you!”
- The motor-boatThat night she cuts circles round the lake in a racing motor-boat, in a bathing suit that appears to consist of pink rompers, then pulls up at the raft where Dexter is lying and asks him to drive so she can ride the surf-board behind. She explains why she is out on the water at all: a man drove up to her house calling her his ideal, so she drove out of the dock.
- DinnerShe comes downstairs a little after seven in a blue silk afternoon dress, which disappoints him, and calls through the pantry door, “You can serve dinner, Martha.” There is no butler and no cocktail. During dinner she slips into a moody depression, and when the scarlet corners of her mouth curve down it is less a smile than an invitation to a kiss.
- “Do you mind if I weep a little?”She asks it on the dark sun-porch after dinner and then explains. A man she cared about told her that afternoon, out of a clear sky, that he was poor as a church-mouse; he had never even hinted it before, and her interest in him was not strong enough to survive the shock. She is not embarrassed by any of this and asks whether it sounds horribly mundane.
- One of a varying dozenBefore the summer ends Dexter works out that he is one of about twelve men circulating about her, each of whom had at some point been favoured above the others. Whenever one showed signs of dropping out through long neglect she granted him a brief honeyed hour, which kept him there another year. When a new man came to town, every date in the book was automatically cancelled.
- The gold dressShe reappears at the University Club at the worst possible moment for Dexter, a slender enamelled doll in cloth of gold — gold in a band at her head, gold in two slipper points at her hem. She tells him he has the most rememberable eyes, which is the sort of thing said to sophomores, and it stabs at him anyway.
- What she says in the carOutside her parents' house, crying for the first time he has ever seen: “I'm more beautiful than anybody else,” she said brokenly, “why can't I be happy?”
Judy asks Dexter to marry her twice, and means it both times for about as long as it takes to say. The second time comes a week before his engagement to Irene Scheerer is to be announced, and it works. The affair lasts a month, and she ends it on the grounds that she did not want to take him away from Irene — which the story calls the ultimate falsity, since taking him away was the only thing she had wanted. Dexter is beyond either revulsion or amusement about it.
The last we hear of her is second-hand, seven years later, in a New York office. A man named Devlin from Detroit says she is married to Lud Simms, who has gone to pieces in a way — he drinks and runs around; that she does not run around and stays at home with her kids; that when he is particularly outrageous she forgives him; and that Devlin is inclined to think she loves him. Then he says she was a pretty girl when she first came to Detroit, that she is all right now, and that she has nice eyes.