Dorothy "Dot" Raycroft
The nineteen-year-old shop girl Anthony Patch picks up on a Southern street while he is in an army camp, and cannot get rid of afterwards.
Anthony, without conditions and without a plan. 'You're my whole life, that's all,' she tells him. 'I'd die for you right now if you said so.'
The book
At a glance
- Book Three: the section headed 'Dot', the Mississippi camp, and the final chapter
- Nineteen
- Jewelry store clerk at fourteen dollars a week; later a milliner's shop on Sixth Avenue in New York
- A small rickety house in a South Carolina town near Camp Hooker, where Anthony Patch is training
- A dead father who kept a corner store, and a mother who sits up reading Snappy Stories and notices nothing
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeDorothy Raycroft, called Dot, is a fictional nineteen-year-old shop girl in a small South Carolina town near the army camp where Anthony Patch is stationed during the First World War. He is married, drinking, and bored. He meets her on the sidewalk at dusk, walks her home, kisses her at the gate, and takes her to the movies the following Saturday. The whole affair runs about six months.
Her circumstances are given plainly and quickly. Her father kept a small, unprosperous corner store and died two days after she graduated from high school in the bottom quarter of her class. She earns fourteen dollars a week at a jewelry store. Her mother cares that she leaves for work on time and about very little else, and spends her evenings reading a magazine called Snappy Stories in the front room. Before Anthony there had been three men in eight months, and the town knows enough about it that boys she went to school with look the other way when they are out walking with what the novel calls 'nice girls'. She goes home and cries when that happens.
Fitzgerald will not make her a victim or a schemer. His summary of her is this: 'She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong, because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defied nor conformed nor compromised.' What she does have is one total attachment, and the novel takes it seriously even when Anthony does not.
How the book draws them
- The girl in the lilac dressAnthony sees her at dusk in a lilac gown of thin organdy, walking with a friend. He asks to see her home and takes off his hat, and she corrects him: 'You're supposed to salute. All the soldiers salute.' In daylight the next Saturday the dress has been washed and starched, and he decides that 'in a sketchy, faulty way she was lovely.'
- Fourteen dollars a weekShe works in a jewelry store. Her father's corner store never prospered, and he died two days after she finished high school. Her mother notices nothing about her evenings and cares only that she leaves for work on time.
- Three men in eight monthsThe book lists them without comment: a clerk from a store on Jackson Street who left for New York the next day; a naval officer passing through who stayed four days, gave her vague promises and, once on the train, was glad he had not told her his real name; and Cyrus Fielding, a local clothier's son who hailed her from his roadster. She decided the war had taken them from her.
- Things happen to her'As a rule things happened to Dot,' the narration says, and the paragraph around it is the coldest description of anyone in the book. She has no sense of humour and instead 'a happy disposition that made her laugh at the proper times when she was with men'. She makes no decisions and sets no terms.
- She thinks he is a bank clerkAnthony never tells her who he is, and she picks up his company's assumption that he does some sort of clerical work and is respectable and poor. 'If I had some money, darlin', I'd give ev'y bit of it to you,' she says. 'I'd like to have about fifty thousand dollars.' That same day Gloria has written to him about whether to settle the family lawsuit for a million.
- The line she gets rightWhen he tells her his unit is leaving and answers her grief with a long speech about desire being like a sunbeam, she stops him: 'I don't want just words. If that's all you have for me you'd better go.... What's death to me is just a lot of words to you. You put 'em together so pretty.'
- She follows him to MississippiWhen the camp moves she leaves home a day ahead of the brigade, telling her mother in a note that she has gone to New York, and Anthony pays for a boarding-house room for her all summer by writing to his broker for money. Calling at her old house afterwards he finds her mother collapsed and a policeman in the parlour, and gets himself out of the questioning with difficulty.
- The call from the telephone officeAt the Mississippi camp she rings him at ten at night to say good-bye, and when he says she cannot leave before tomorrow she answers, 'I don't mean "leave" that way,' and hangs up. He takes a jitney into town for a dollar and finds her in bed in the dark. 'Ah, I knew you'd come,' she says. He is stopped at the camp gate after midnight, panics and gives the sentry a false name and unit, is recognized two days later in a barber shop, and is reduced to the ranks without trial. That is the end of his chance at an officers' training camp.
She comes back. Years later she reads about the Patch lawsuit in a newspaper, gets Anthony's address from a court clerk, and appears at the door of the apartment. She is shabbily dressed, working in a milliner's shop on Sixth Avenue, and says what she said in South Carolina: she wants him, and if she cannot have him she will die.
Anthony, broke, drinking and alone in the flat, screams at her to get out and then that he will kill her. She takes a step toward him. He picks up an oak chair, swings it over his head and throws it at her face, and the scene ends there — the last violent thing that happens in the novel, and the point at which his mind gives way.