|
|
Winter Dreams
By F. Scott Fitzgerald
Dexter Green, middle-class boy from Keeble, Minnesota, dreams of being part of the "old money" elite. His father owns the 'second-most-profitable' grocery store in Black Bear Lake, Minnesota (purportedly based on White Bear Lake, Minnesota, a real town). Dexter took a job as a gold caddy at the Yacht Club for a short period of time, where he works for Mortimer Jones and meets his daughter Judy Jones. He doesn't like feeling inferior to the people he caddys for, so he quits.
After graduating from college, Dexter partners up in a laundry business. He goes back to the golf club and is invited to play with the very men he once caddied for. He meets Judy Jones again, and she has become beautiful over the years. That evening, as Dexter is swimming, he encounters Judy again, takes a boat ride with her, and she invites him to dinner. They being having an affair - he later learns, one of dozens she is 'managing'.
A year and a half later, Dexter becomes engaged to Irene Scheerer while Judy is vacationing in Florida. When Judy returns, however, she asks Dexter to marry her. He drops Irene, only to be dropped in turn by Judy. To escape, he joins the Army just in time to fight World War I.
Several years later, Dexter is a single, successful New York businessman meeting a client who had attended Judy Jones' wedding. The client describes her husband as alcoholic, unfaithful, and cruel and Jody as "faded".
Dexter's vision of Judy cannot survive the description of her reality, and the cognitive dissonance destroys Dexter's "winter dreams". The dream of Judy, of being with her more permanently, has kept him from seeing that the glory of his social climbing lies in it's journey, not in it's destination.
|
