A Short Trip Home

A Short Trip Home

Eddie Stinson, home from college for Christmas, is quietly infatuated with his childhood neighbor Ellen Baker, a St. Paul girl who has suddenly blossomed into a beauty pursued by several young men, including the wealthy, devoted Joe Jelke. On the night of a big dance, Ellen receives a note, slips out the back door, and disappears in a strange man's coupé, abandoning Joe. When the group finally intercepts her outside the hotel, a thin-faced, scarred man of about thirty-five sits in the car, radiating menace and contempt. He mocks Joe, and when Joe confronts him, the man knocks him out with brass knuckles. Ellen dismisses the incident and tells Eddie only that she met the man "on the train," warning Eddie to mind his own business. At the dance, Eddie notices her altered, hardened manner whenever the man is mentioned. The next afternoon, walking through St. Paul's shabby lower district, Eddie spots the same man loitering outside a pool hall; the man taunts him silently, lures him toward the building, then vanishes, and no one inside will admit to having seen him. Rattled, Eddie learns from Mrs. Baker that Ellen has abruptly decided to leave that night for Chicago to visit the "Brokaws," ahead of schedule. Relieved at first, Eddie later realizes the Brokaws are actually in Palm Beach, not Chicago, exposing Ellen's story as a lie to cover a rendezvous. Eddie rushes to the station too late to catch Ellen's train but takes a competing train that arrives in Chicago minutes earlier, allowing him to intercept her before she can disappear. He finds her sending a telegram and confronts her; she alternates between cunning deflection and pleas to be let alone, admitting only that she means to meet "a man" to say goodbye before boarding her ticketed five o'clock train east. Eddie refuses to leave her side, spending a tense day with her in Chicago, sensing an unseen presence trailing them and noticing Ellen's face shift into unnatural, mirthless expressions. She begs for a few hours alone to say goodbye "properly," but Eddie, seeing calculating cunning beneath her plea, refuses and forces her onto the train with him that evening. In her compartment, Eddie holds Ellen and presses her to explain her hold to the strange man, but she can only say she doesn't know if she loves him and cannot resist him. Sensing the man is near, Eddie leaves her and finds him in the smoking car. Their exchange grows openly supernatural: the man warns Eddie to get off at Fort Wayne or be "wiped out," reveals a glimpse of a revolver, and Eddie perceives that the man is actually dead, animated by some malevolent residual force. Eddie realizes there is a bullet hole in his forehead. Under a prolonged, hypnotic assault meant to erode Eddie's will and resistance, Eddie nearly succumbs to indifference but rallies, declares that Ellen is safe and trusts him, and tells the man his time is up and that he is "sinking." The man's face contorts inhumanly; with a scream of agony he collapses through what seems like a door into darkness and disappears, leaving only cold air and a fading shape on the bench. Eddie finds Ellen asleep, restored to her natural self, freed of whatever possessed her. Back home over Easter vacation, he visits the pool hall and learns from a man named Shorty that the stranger was Joe Varland, a con man who died the previous winter after a fight with a detective in the Pittsburgh station—Varland's "racket" had been preying on girls traveling alone on trains. Eddie never tells Ellen what he learned. Months later, the two remain close, with an unspoken understanding between them, and Eddie reflects that although Ellen will go off to more of her social world and he has two more years at Yale, some bond now ties her to him regardless of what happens next.

By F. Scott Fitzgerald · First published 1925 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age, Romance · 3 chapters · 9,895 words

First lines

I was near her, for I had lingered behind in order to get the short walk with her from the living room to the front door. That was a lot, for she had flowered suddenly and I, being a man and only a year older, hadn't flowered at all, had scarcely dared to come near her in the week we'd been home. Nor was I going to say anything in that walk of ten feet, or touch her; but I had a vague hope she'd do something, give a gay little performance of some sort, personal only in so far as we were alone together.

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A Short Trip Home is listed on Textopian as a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, dated 1925 CE.

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American Literature · Novella · Short Story Collection · Coming-of-Age · Family Drama · Social Commentary · Class Conflict · Identity Crisis · Youthful Rebellion · Nostalgia · Memory · Loss of Innocence

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