Lois
The nineteen-year-old in “Benediction,” who stops on the way to meet a married man to spend an afternoon with the brother she barely knows.
To be understood without having to explain. She is described in the second paragraph of the story as very romantic and curious and courageous, and the phrase comes back when she is bracing herself.
The book
At a glance
- The central character of “Benediction,” the sixth of the eight stories
- Nineteen
- A nervous, half-invalid mother, fourteen years in Europe with her, and a brother she last saw at five
- Farmington. Her mother wanted a convent and she refused
- Wilmington, to meet a man named Howard, who has written that they cannot marry
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeLois is the central character of “Benediction,” the sixth story in Flappers and Philosophers. She is nineteen, blonde, from a Catholic family, and the reader meets her in the hot Baltimore railway station reading a letter she already knows by heart. It is from a man called Howard, and it says that they cannot marry and cannot lose each other, and that if she wires him he will meet her in Wilmington. She sends the telegram without hesitating.
Before Wilmington she goes out to a Jesuit seminary in the Maryland countryside to spend an afternoon with her brother Kieth, who is thirty-six, seventeen years into his training, and still a year short of becoming a priest. She last saw him when she was five and remembers him from a photograph over her mother's bureau. She has decided in advance to be cheerful about it whether he likes it or not.
How the book draws them
- The telegram in the first sceneShe has read Howard's letter so many times that she knows it word by word, and it still startles her. She takes a blank, writes her answer, and the narration notes that there were no overtones to the finality of her decision.
- Her plan for the visitShe expects the afternoon to be solemn if she lets it be, so she intends to give her very best imitation of undiluted sunshine, the one she can produce when her head is splitting or when her mother has a nervous breakdown.
- What she says firstThe one subject she had resolved to avoid is the one she raises within a minute of the embrace: their mother is getting worse all the time, every way. Her brother nods as if he already knew.
- Sweetness is hardThinking about an argument she once had with a man over what sweetness in a man is, she says it aloud without meaning to. She had been told she meant a soppy softness and knew she did not: “I suppose real sweetness is a sort of hardness — and strength.”
- Her objection to the young seminariansWatching boys of nineteen on the paths, she tells her brother it does not seem fair: they have had no experience of what they are missing, and life has simply scared them at first. She thinks men who have seen life would be better at it. He disagrees, at length.
- What happens in the chapelAt the service she is first thrilled by the incense and the coloured light, and then a weight comes down on her. Her brother's face and the young man's beside her look cold, pale, set — like dead men. Then she becomes convinced that there is something coming out of the candle on the altar, and that no one else can see it.
- What she tells him afterwardsWaiting for the bus, she explains why she is lukewarm: that being a Catholic is inconvenient, that it does not seem to apply any more, that some of the wildest boys she knows are Catholics and the brightest ones do not believe in much of anything. He says he is not shocked and that he understands better than she thinks.
- The thing she nearly saysAt the gate, with her hands on his cheeks and her tear-wet face against his: “Oh, Kieth, brother, some day I’ll tell you something.” She does not tell him. Nobody at the seminary is ever told why she was travelling that day.
The story does not end with her. It ends in the Baltimore telegraph office, where two clerks are talking about a good-looking girl who came in the day before to wire someone to meet her, came back with a second telegram written out, and tore it up at the counter without sending it.
One of them picks the two halves off the floor and puts them together. Thirteen words: “This is in the way of a permanent goodbye. I should suggest Italy.” Signed Lois. Fitzgerald never says whether the afternoon at the seminary was the reason, and the clerks have no idea what they are reading.