Baby Warren
Nicole's elder sister and the family's purse — the one who decides that what Nicole needs is a doctor the Warrens can own.
To have the Nicole problem properly arranged. She says she cannot understand what the family is supposed to do, and she means to find a permanent answer she can pay for.
The book
At a glance
- Nicole's elder sister — Beth Evan Warren, called Baby
- Twenty-five when Dick meets her; almost thirty a few years later
- Chicago and Lake Forest, with long spells in London
- The Warren money — 'everything's been left to me'
- Toothsome, too intellectual, and not the sort of medical man she can envisage in the family
- The Zurich and Alpine chapters, the clinic negotiations, Rome, and the arrangements around the end
- A composite — Bruccoli connects her partly to Mary Hoyt Wiborg, Sara Murphy's sister; Jeffrey Meyers also finds elements of Rosalind Sayre Smith, Zelda's elder sister, who held Fitzgerald responsible for Zelda's illness · Wiborg 1888–1964; Sayre Smith 1889–1979 · Cincinnati, Ohio; Montgomery, Alabama
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeBeth Evan Warren signs her letters in full and is called Baby by everyone. Dick first meets her at twenty-five, tall and confident, and decides she is both formidable and vulnerable. She has certain spinsters' characteristics: she is alien from touch, starts if she is touched suddenly, and crosses and recrosses her knees in the manner of tall restless virgins. She is an Anglophile who imports men from London, and she measures Dick against that warped rule and finds him wanting — too intellectual, too willing to put himself out to be really of the correct stuff.
She is also, as she says, the one everything has been left to. The Warrens are what the book calls an American ducal family without a title, and Baby is exact about the leverage that gives her: the name written in a hotel register causes a psychological metamorphosis in people. Her question about Nicole is administrative rather than tender — the sanitarium was so indefinite, and she cannot understand what the family is supposed to do. Dick works out the answer they have reached before she says it, and puts it to himself bitterly: they decided to buy a doctor.
How the book draws them
- Alien from touchThe book is clinical about it. Kisses and lingering embraces slip straight through the flesh into the forefront of her consciousness, and she makes few gestures with her trunk.
- Almost thirtyBy the Alpine Christmas she is a tall, fine-looking woman deeply engaged in being almost thirty, and she has pulled two men with her from London — one scarcely down from Cambridge, one old and hard with Victorian lecheries.
- The interviewOver tea in Zurich she tells Dick his motives are ill-advised and that she is not sure she understands them. When he offers his father, his degree, and Mad Anthony Wayne, she asks who Mad Anthony Wayne was and observes that there is enough madness in the affair already.
- Everything's been left to meHer answer to being told that Nicole's money does not make Dick an adventurer. She repeats that Nicole is rich, and does not pretend the two things are unconnected.
- The second mannerShe examines Franz Gregorovius, fails to find any of the hall-marks she respects, and treats him from then on with what the book simply calls her second manner.
- UsefulNone of this makes her ineffective. When something has to be fixed, she is the one who arrives, works out who must be spoken to, and does not go home until it is done.
The marriage she doubted is the one her money underwrites, and she never stops treating Dick as a purchase with a warranty. Her decisive scene is Rome: after Dick is beaten and jailed, she works through the consulate at dawn with a persistence the book half admires, and comes away with something more valuable to her than his freedom. Whatever his previous record, she now possesses a moral superiority over him for as long as he proves of any use.
That sentence is the coldest in the book about what the Warren money buys, and it is Baby's. When the marriage ends she is ready with the practical arrangements, and the children go to their aunt in London for the winter. She is not punished and does not change. The family absorbs the loss of one doctor the way it absorbed the cost of acquiring him.