Jewel Hudson
In "May Day": the woman Gordon Sterrett owes two hundred dollars and cannot get away from — described secondhand for forty pages before she is allowed to speak.
To be seen by him. She says it directly the moment she has him in front of her, and it is the opposite of what he has told everyone she wants: "I wanted to see you, Gordon, but you seem to prefer your somebody else."
The book
At a glance
- In "May Day", the third of the eleven pieces
- New York — a poor family, by Gordon Sterrett's account; her parents are dead and she lives with an old aunt
- Two hundred dollars, and holding letters Gordon wrote her drunk
- At a Delmonico's service door at about one in the morning, forty pages after she is first discussed
- Delmonico's, Childs' restaurant at dawn, and a small hotel off Sixth Avenue
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeJewel Hudson is the woman at the centre of Gordon Sterrett's trouble in "May Day", the long New York story F. Scott Fitzgerald set on 1 and 2 May 1919. For most of the story she exists only in his account of her, given to a rich former classmate in a hotel room: she used to be respectable up to about a year ago, she comes from a poor New York family, her people are dead and she lives with an old aunt. She wants two hundred dollars, she has letters he wrote her drunk, and she has a letter already written to send to his family.
That description is Gordon's, and Fitzgerald arranges the story so that a reader takes it on trust for forty pages. Then she turns up at a service door at Delmonico's at one in the morning, arguing with a waiter, and everything shifts. What she wants turns out not to be the money at all.
She is the only working-class woman in the story and the only person in it who says out loud that she has been neglected. Fitzgerald does not make her sympathetic in any conventional way. She is sharp, loud in a lobby, and entirely willing to use the letters — but he gives her the one motive nobody else in "May Day" admits to having.
How the book draws them
- What Gordon says about herEverything a reader knows for the first forty pages comes from a man asking for a loan. "She used to be 'pure,' I guess, up to about a year ago." And: "Her people are dead now and she lives with an old aunt." He is not a reliable narrator of his own mess, and Fitzgerald lets the imbalance stand until she arrives.
- The hold she hasTwo hundred dollars, and paper. Gordon tells Dean she has a couple of drunken letters he wrote her, and a letter all written to send to his family. He also concedes what makes her dangerous rather than pitiable: "Unfortunately she's not at all the flabby sort of person you'd expect."
- Why he lost his jobPartly her. She kept telephoning the export company where he worked, and that, in his account, was sort of the last straw. It is the one concrete thing she is shown to have done before she appears.
- At the service doorFitzgerald introduces her from Edith Bradin's point of view without naming her, as an over-rouged young lady in hot dispute with a weak-chinned waiter — and has her watch Edith run out into the street with a brief, bitter glance. She then makes her case to the waiter: she knows more college men, and more of them know her, than he has seen in his whole life. She produces a dollar bill and calls it what it is: "Here," she said, "here's a bribe."
- What she actually came forHe arrives apologising about the money and she cuts him off: "Money nothing!" Then the complaint underneath it: that he has not been near her for ten days, that he did not tell her he was sick, that he is well enough to come and play with his society friends. And finally: "I don't care about the money that bad. I didn't start bothering you about it at all until you began neglecting me."
- How she gets him out of the buildingNot with the letters. She proposes a drink at Devineries' and her apartment afterwards, and when he hesitates she comes close, puts her arms round his neck, and "then she suddenly pulled him to her and kissed him with soft, pulpy lips". He says he will get his hat.
- At Childs' at dawnGus Rose watches the pair of them from two tables away without knowing who they are. "The woman was almost if not quite sober." She is pretty, dark-eyed and feverishly coloured, and "she kept her active eyes fixed on her companion with the alertness of a hawk" — the only person in the restaurant at four in the morning who is paying attention to anything.
- Seeing off Philip DeanWhen Dean stops at their table to wag a finger and say he told him so, she gets Gordon on his feet, calls Dean drunk, and delivers the verdict as she leaves: "I know all about you!" she said fiercely. It is the only time in the story anyone tells Dean what he is.
She marries him. Fitzgerald never shows it happening and never says a word about how — the entire fact arrives inside Gordon's head the next morning, thirty seconds after he wakes: "he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson." The story does not say whether she engineered it, whether he agreed to it, or whether either of them was sober.
Half an hour later he goes out, buys a revolver, and shoots himself. Fitzgerald gives her no scene afterwards and no reaction, which leaves her carrying an ambiguity the story refuses to settle: she is either the woman who trapped him or the only person in "May Day" who wanted his company, and the text supports both readings without endorsing either. What it does establish is that she never once asks him for the money again after the first minute of their only real conversation.