Edith Bradin
In "May Day": twenty-two, the most danced-with girl at the Yale fraternity ball, and the only character in the story who crosses from the party into the riot.
To marry Gordon Sterrett, or her memory of him. Alone in the doorway before the dance she thinks two things in succession: "I smell sweet", and then "I'm made for love." Fitzgerald sums the rest up in a line: "Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett."
The book
At a glance
- One of the four strands of "May Day", the third of the eleven pieces
- Twenty-two; from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, staying at the Biltmore with the Hoyts
- Peter Himmel, a Yale junior, whom she has been writing to on special-delivery terms for two months
- Henry Bradin, who left an economics instructorship at Cornell to write for a radical weekly in New York
- A crimson fur-trimmed opera cloak, and stockings her brother notices are embroidered
- Delmonico's, the newspaper office on Forty-fourth Street, and the Biltmore lobby at nine the next morning
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeEdith Bradin is one of the four strands of "May Day", F. Scott Fitzgerald's long story of New York on 1 and 2 May 1919. She is twenty-two, from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and staying at the Biltmore Hotel with friends. She has come to the Gamma Psi fraternity dance at Delmonico's with a Yale junior named Peter Himmel, whom she snubbed in the taxi on the way for trying to put an arm round her and brushing her freshly done hair with his elbow.
What she is really at the dance for is Gordon Sterrett. She knew him at home, went up to New Haven with him twice before the war, and has spent the last two months deciding that she wants him back. Fitzgerald is precise about what that decision is made of: a pile of letters, half a dozen photographs, some memories, and tiredness. "She was a little tired; she wanted to get married." He also says, without unkindness, that she is a grave, slow-thinking girl underneath the polish, and that she has the same streak of seriousness that turned her brother into a socialist.
The story gives her one of the era's most exact portraits of a young woman managing a room. It also gives her the only journey anyone in the story makes between its separate worlds: at half past one in the morning she puts on a crimson opera cloak, walks out of the ball and across Forty-fourth Street to the office where her brother works, and arrives about twenty minutes before a mob does.
How the book draws them
- The taxi, and the two mistakesPeter Himmel put his near arm round her instead of his far arm, which is clumsy, and his elbow brushed the hair she had spent the afternoon on, which is worse. Fitzgerald calls them his first and second faux pas and observes that two were quite enough. She snubs him with what the story calls the correct mixture of dignity and reticent pity.
- Her lineShe has a manner she can put on and knows it: current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together, careless and faintly provocative. She uses it on every man who cuts in, guesses their names wrong, tells one his name has two syllables anyway, and gives out her hotel to another without meaning any of it.
- How she handles the floorBy one in the morning she has been kissed once and made love to six times, and has acquired what the story calls her own entourage, half a dozen men cutting in on her in regular succession. Asked to be taken home, she puts the request to a red-faced stag with a diffidence Fitzgerald flatly identifies as an affectation.
- What happens when she gets GordonShe has been imagining the conversation for two months. Then she is actually dancing with him, feels his hand spread on her back, sees that his eyes are bloodshot and that he is drunk, and the whole thing collapses inside a page. Her sympathy turns to distaste and then to boredom, and she gets up and says, coolly, "Shall we dance?"
- Crossing the streetShe works out that her brother's newspaper office must be around the corner, decides on the spot to surprise him, and slips out of the dance in her crimson opera cloak. A man in the street whispers at her; she is reminded of a night in childhood when a dog howled at her from a back yard. In the office she looks round at the desks and the file copies and asks, brightly, "Where do you keep the bombs?"
- In the riotWhen the soldiers come up the stairs she backs toward the open window, and then does the opposite of what she has done all evening: she swings her arms and pushes into the middle of the fighting, shouting for her brother. When the lights come back on she beats her way through the crowd on her fists to find him sitting on the floor with a broken leg.
- The next morningIn the Biltmore lobby at nine, in a rumpled evening dress with circles under her eyes, she walks straight past two drunk undergraduates who bow to her, stops ten paces on, points at a short dark soldier and says: "There's the soldier who broke my brother's leg." It is the only accusation anyone in the story makes.
She survives it, which in this story counts for something. Her brother's leg is broken in the fight; one of the soldiers goes out of the back window and is killed on the pavement. In the Biltmore lobby the next morning she identifies the surviving soldier, Gus Rose, and a stout man springs at him while the lobby closes round the group. Her escort by then is a plain fat man she asked to take her home, and the two young men bowing at her in the middle of it are Peter Himmel and Philip Dean, who have spent the dawn calling themselves Mr. In and Mr. Out.
What she does not learn, and the reader does, is what happened to Gordon Sterrett. She has already written him off on the stairs. He leaves Delmonico's with Jewel Hudson while Edith is across the street in the newspaper office, and by the time she is pointing out Gus Rose in the lobby he has a few hours left. The two of them are the only characters in "May Day" who could have changed the other's night, and Fitzgerald keeps them a block apart from midnight onward.