Читать книгу The Beautiful and Damned / Прекрасные и обреченные. Уровень 4 - Френсис Скотт Фицджеральд, Френсис Фицджеральд - Страница 3

Anthony was the grandson of Adam J. Patch. Adam J. Patch, more familiarly known as “Cross Patch[3],” left his father’s farm in Tarrytown[4] early in sixty-one to join a New York cavalry regiment. He came home from the war a major, walked to Wall Street, and he gathered for himself some seventy-five million dollars.

This occupied his energies until he was fifty-seven years old. Then, after a severe attack of sclerosis, he decided to consecrate the remainder of his life to the moral regeneration of the world. He became a reformer among reformers. From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness.

Early in his career Adam Patch had married an anemic lady of thirty, Alicia Withers[5], who brought him one hundred thousand dollars. Immediately she had borne him a son. The boy, Adam Ulysses Patch, became an inveterate joiner of clubs, and at the age of twenty-six he began his memoirs under the title “New York Society as I Have Seen It.”

This man married at twenty-two. His wife was Henrietta Lebrune[6], and the single child of the union was, at the request of his grandfather, christened Anthony Comstock Patch. Young Anthony had one picture of his father and mother together. It showed a dandy of the nineties, standing beside a tall dark lady with a muff. Between them was a little boy with long brown curls, dressed in a velvet suit. This was Anthony at five, the year of his mother’s death.

His mother was a lady who sang, sang, sang, in the music room of their house on Washington Square – sometimes with guests scattered all about her, and often she sang to Anthony alone, in Italian or French or in a strange and terrible dialect.

After Henrietta Lebrune Patch had “joined another choir,” as her widower remarked, father and son lived up at grandfather’s in Tarrytown. Ulysses came daily to Anthony’s nursery and was continually promising Anthony hunting trips and fishing trips and excursions to Atlantic City, “oh, some time soon now”; but none of them ever materialized. One trip they took; when Anthony was eleven they went abroad, to England and Switzerland, and there in the best hotel in

Lucerne his father died. Anthony was brought back to America, and a vague melancholy stayed beside him through the rest of his life.