Percy Washington
In "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz": the quiet schoolboy who invites John T. Unger home for the summer, and mentions on the train that his father is the richest man in the world.
To have someone from outside see it. He has spent his school years unable to say a word about home, and the moment the train is moving he cannot stop talking, warning John in advance: it is not going to be like anything he has ever seen before.
The book
At a glance
- In "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", the fifth of the eleven pieces
- St. Midas's, near Boston, where he joined John T. Unger's form
- Son of Braddock Tarleton Washington; brother of Jasmine and Kismine
- Jewels — he used to collect them instead of stamps
- Via the seven o'clock Transcontinental Express, which stops at the village of Fish about six times a year
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freePercy Washington is the school friend who brings John T. Unger into the valley in "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz". He arrives at St. Midas's in the middle of John's second year, a quiet, handsome boy, exceptionally well dressed even for the most expensive school in the world, and keeps away from everybody. John is the only person he is close to, and even John is told nothing about his home or his family.
That changes on the train west. Over lunch in the dining car, in the middle of a conversation about other boys, Percy changes tone and says that his father is by far the richest man in the world. He then explains that his father pays almost no income tax because he does not pay it on his real income, dismisses the men on the World Almanac's rich list as financial small-fry, and finally leans forward and drops his voice: "My father has a diamond bigger than the Ritz-Carlton Hotel."
He is sixteen or so, and he has inherited his father's manner whole. Fitzgerald says it directly: Percy and his younger sister Kismine got the arrogant attitude from their father in all its harsh magnificence, and a chaste and consistent selfishness runs through every idea either of them has.
How the book draws them
- The carThe vehicle that collects them beyond the village of Fish has a body of metal richer than nickel, wheel hubs studded with green and yellow jewels, and upholstery of a thousand silk tapestries woven with jewels on cloth of gold. John says what a car twice. Percy's answer is the line that establishes him: "Why, it's just an old junk we use for a station wagon."
- Where the country stopsAfter the car is winched over a knife-blade of rock by cables, he points at the valley and says, entirely without irony, "This is where the United States ends, father says." The five square miles below are the only land in the country that has never been surveyed, and he explains cheerfully how each of the three attempts was defeated.
- The one thing they are afraid ofAsked what could still expose them, he sinks his voice to a whisper for a single word: "Aeroplanes," he breathed. He adds that there have been a few deaths and a great many prisoners, that he and his father do not mind that, but that it upsets his mother and the girls.
- How he asks about the pitWalking the golf course with his father and his guest, he interrupts to ask how many men are in the cage today. His father stumbles, swears, and says one less than there should be. Percy then brings up the Italian teacher who escaped, having heard about it from his mother.
- His motherMrs. Washington is aloof and reserved, apparently indifferent to her two daughters, and entirely absorbed in her son, with whom she holds interminable conversations in rapid Spanish at dinner. It is the only sign of affection anywhere in the household.
He dies with his parents. When the aeroplanes have knocked out the last gun, Braddock Washington comes down the mountain with two of the men he enslaved carrying the great diamond; halfway down his wife and son join him, Mrs. Washington leaning on Percy's arm. All five go through a trap-door in the side of the mountain, and the mountain is detonated.
He never learns that his sisters got out, and the story gives him no last words. His final appearance is as a figure seen at a distance from the far slope — a shape on his mother's arm, walking into a hole in a diamond.