Rachael Jerryl
Gloria Gilbert's other friend: quiet, beautifully dressed, and the one Gloria genuinely likes, until Anthony Patch starts paying her too much attention.
The book
At a glance
- One of Gloria Gilbert's two constant companions in Book One, and a recurring guest through the country-house summers and the war years
- Rachael Jerryl before her marriage; Mrs. Barnes, or Rachael Barnes, after it
- Three smart women's shops on Fifth Avenue and an apartment on Riverside Drive
- Rodman Barnes, a captain in the Quartermaster Corps, abroad for most of the war
Who they are in the book
Spoiler-freeRachael Jerryl is a fictional young New York woman who appears alongside Muriel Kane as one of the two friends Gloria Gilbert is always with in the opening chapters. F. Scott Fitzgerald introduces her as 'obviously a more subtle personality' than Muriel: an exquisitely dressed Jewish girl with dark hair and a milky pallor, shy and vague in company, with a delicate charm that the novelist Richard Caramel notices at once. Her family own three smart women's shops on Fifth Avenue and live in a large apartment on Riverside Drive, and Fitzgerald writes that they 'were "Episcopalians"', leaving the quotation marks to make the point.
She marries a man named Rodman Barnes, becomes Mrs. Barnes, takes a summer place a few miles from the house the Patches rent in the country, and is present at most of the parties of the novel's middle section. As the Patches' marriage sours she turns into a piece of it: Anthony pays her too much attention, Gloria notices, and it becomes one of the standing quarrels. The two women dislike each other and go on seeing each other anyway.
How the book draws them
- The quiet oneBeside Muriel Kane she says almost nothing. When she finally speaks at the Biltmore dinner — 'He has that air,' murmured Rachael, about the film producer at the table — Fitzgerald notes it: 'Anthony tried to remember whether she had said anything before. He thought not. It was her initial remark.'
- She copies GloriaRichard Caramel works it out within a few minutes of meeting her, and the narration hands down the general rule with it: 'it seemed to Dick, after a few moments, that she was attempting to imitate Gloria — he wondered that people invariably chose inimitable people to imitate.'
- Gloria's verdict on her friendsAsked why she goes about with these girls, Gloria says they are no exertion and believe everything she tells them, then makes an exception: 'but I rather like Rachael. I think she's cute — and so clean and slick, don't you?' At the same dinner where Muriel and Gloria sip champagne, 'Rachael Jerryl took none.'
- Mrs. Barnes of the summer placeShe marries Rodman Barnes and takes a house a few miles from the Patches' rented place in the country. Whether or not to call on the Barneses one Sunday night is the trigger for the worst public quarrel Anthony and Gloria have in the first half of the book, fought out on a railway platform over the money for the tickets.
- The thing Gloria will not standAnthony's attentions to her become one of the marriage's fixed arguments. 'I wouldn't be quite so attentive to Rachael Barnes,' Gloria tells him. 'Her husband doesn't like it any more than I do!' Later she puts a price on it: 'the next time I see you acting with any woman like you did with Rachael Barnes last night, I'll leave you.'
- Tea at the Ritz, and the dinner afterwardsMeeting on Fifth Avenue after a year apart, with both husbands in the army, the two women go to the Ritz, have two cocktails and decide they like each other. Rachael invites Gloria to dinner at her Park Avenue apartment with two machine-gun captains about to sail for France. The evening ends with Rachael flushed and dishevelled, one captain's arm around her waist, offering Gloria the spare room. Gloria leaves.