Careless People (14 page)

Zelda took a train back to St. Paul to collect their daughter, in time for her first birthday. “I brought Scottie to New York. She was round and funny in a pink coat and bonnet and you met us at the station,” she wrote to Scott years later, reminiscing. Zelda fired the nurse Scott had hired, “
and since then I have had the Baby myself. Now I have another one (nurse, not baby),” she told the Kalmans. With the rigors of several days of full-time parenting out of the way they could resume their fun.

The family settled in—but they did not settle down. Keeping house was
neither Zelda's forte nor her aspiration, and Scott loudly objected to her failure to keep his shirts clean. Asked in 1925 to contribute to a collection of “Favorite Recipes of Famous Women,” Zelda explained how to make breakfast: “
See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily.”

Zelda had no intention of being a self-sacrificing helpmeet and she was already contributing to Scott's art more than she may have liked: a few celebrated passages in both
This Side of Paradise
and
The Beautiful and Damned
were lifted almost straight from her letters and diaries, and Scott often put many of Zelda's wittier or more memorable lines in the mouths of his female characters. A practice he would continue through
Tender Is the Night
, it would eventually lead to great acrimony. For now, Zelda's response was flippant.
In her review of
The Beautiful and Damned
for Burton Rascoe earlier that year, she had facetiously accused her husband of believing that plagiarism, like charity, should begin at home.

Soon after the Fitzgeralds' marriage, Alec McKaig noted in his diary: “
Went to Fitzgeralds. Usual problem there. What shall Zelda do? I think she might do a little housework—apartment looks like a pig-sty. If she's there Fitz can't work—she bothers him—if she's not there he can't work—worried what she might do . . . Zelda increasingly restless—says frankly she simply wants to be amused and is only good for useless, pleasure-giving pursuits; great problem—what is she to do?” Zelda was only twenty when he wrote this; perhaps she had no more idea what she wanted to do than many twenty-year-olds. In
Save Me the Waltz
, Alabama is left alone on the Riviera, drifting with ennui, while her husband pursues artistic greatness. “
What'll we
do
, David,” she asks, “with ourselves?” He never answers the question. Fitzgerald had given the same question to Daisy Buchanan ten years earlier: “‘What'll we do with ourselves this afternoon,' cried Daisy, ‘and the day after that, and the next thirty years?'”

Does the artist have to invent, or is discovering a fugitive theme original enough? Such invidious questions were for the future. For now, it was hard to take anything very seriously. Scott would say later that in those
years he thought life was something you dominated if you were any good. Zelda thought life was simply to be enjoyed. She couldn't understand why Scott wasn't satisfied writing high-paying stories for the
Saturday Evening Post
. “
I always felt a story in the Post was tops; a goal worth seeking. It really meant something, you know—they only took stories of real craftsmanship. But Scott couldn't stand to write them.” When they'd visited New York earlier that year for the publication of
The Beautiful and Damned
, Mencken had written to a friend: “
Fitzgerald blew into New York last week. He has written a play, and [George Jean] Nathan says that it has very good chances. But it seems to me that his wife talks too much about money. His danger lies in trying to get it too rapidly. A very amiable pair, innocent and charming.”

Success in 1922 was beginning to be measured in what advertisers would later teach us to call “lifestyle.” It was also measured in time, defining the leisure class; if you couldn't make time, you just borrowed it. Edmund Wilson lamented how few of his compatriots believed they “
had something left to live for beside a high standard of living.” Teaching its citizens to fashion themselves through emulation, and passing it off as a theory of moral sentiment, America was settling down to the serious business of selling pleasure.

Scott now placed the Fitzgeralds squarely and ironically among the “newly rich”: “
That is to say, five years ago we had no money at all, and what we now do away with would have seemed like inestimable riches to us then. I have at times suspected that we are the only newly rich people in America, that in fact we are the very couple at whom all the articles about the newly rich were aimed.” Their money may have been new, but there wasn't, in truth, enough to warrant it being termed riches, as Fitzgerald admitted in 1923: “Thirty-six-thousand [a year] is not very wealthy—not yacht-and-Palm-Beach wealthy—but it sounds to me as though it should buy a roomy house full of furniture, a trip to Europe once a year, and a bond or two besides. But our $36,000 . . . bought nothing at all.” No matter: money seemed to blow in on the trade winds off Long Island Sound. “
Even when you were broke,
you didn't worry about money,” he said later, “because it was in such profusion around you.”
They paid for fun with a promissory note, “
checks written in disappearing ink,” confident that the world would never collect on the debt.

O
n Sunday, October 1, as Scott Fitzgerald read about himself in the
New York Times
, headlines announced “
STAR TROOPERS AID IN HUNT FOR
SLAYER OF HALL AND WOMAN: STATE'S CRIME EXPERTS PUT TO WORK ON MYSTERY
.” The New Jersey State Constabulary sent a trio of policemen with Dickensian names—Sergeant Lamb, Corporal Spearman, and Trooper Dickman—to New Brunswick to take over the investigation. Not only had local authorities missed a few bullet holes and a near decapitation; they had also failed to interview anyone in the vicinity of the crime scene. More than two weeks after the bodies were found,
police finally began canvassing the area of Buccleuch Park and the Phillips Farm, searching for the weapons used to kill the minister and his lover. They were energetically assisted by the ever-growing crowds of thrill-seekers, who “
tore down the front porch of the old house, while others ripped apart the platform at the rear.” Someone else “tore out a windowpane, entered, and opened the front door. Hundreds of persons went through the rooms, all furnished, and in the search for souvenirs, destroyed a quantity of furnishings.” Quite possibly they destroyed a quantity of evidence as well.

Questions continued to be asked about the bungled investigation. Defending his failure to demand an autopsy, Prosecutor Beekman explained: “
Dr. Long notified me on Monday, September 18, that he had examined Eleanor Mills's body and had found a single bullet had gone completely through the head. He declared also that he had cut open the abdomen, and I naturally assumed that he had made a full autopsy.” This small detail went
unremarked: although Dr. Long had not performed a full autopsy and had missed two bullets in the face and a slit throat, he had not neglected to ascertain whether the female victim was pregnant. She wasn't.

Charlotte Mills and Florence North,

October 11, 1922

Disgusted with the inept investigation, Charlotte Mills wrote to the governor demanding his help and retained “
a woman lawyer,” Florence North, who understood publicity—before she became an attorney,
Miss North had been a boxing promoter.
Charlotte and her “good looking young, smartly dressed” lawyer sold the love letters her mother had kept from the rector for five hundred dollars to William Randolph Hearst's
American
magazine rather than turning them over to the state as evidence.

The case was becoming scandalous enough to interest
Town Topics
, who declared that New Brunswick's “
authorities have shown themselves guilty of the most amazing neglect, their conduct being such as to create a widespread impression that they have been endeavoring to shield the perpetrators of this particularly brutal and unsavory double murder.” It seemed as if “the Hall–Mills double murder were destined to [a] process of hushing up.”

The following weekend, the front pages headlined a potentially salacious new angle to the story:
“RECTOR HALL SENT SINGER ‘SPICY' BOOKS
.” Eleanor Mills's letters to the rector revealed that “he had been in the habit of purchasing sensational books for her”; in one she had written, “
I am sorry you bought me that spicy book. It fired my soul and wafted me into the spiritual world—Oh, goodness!” If you are having an illicit affair with a rector, it may be convenient to confuse the erotic and spiritual, and Eleanor Mills was clearly susceptible to vicarious pleasures.

O
n the mild evening of Friday, October 6, as clouds gathered over the New York night sky, Scott Fitzgerald attended a literary dinner party at the publisher Horace Liveright in Manhattan; wives were not invited. His friends the critics Ernest Boyd and George Jean Nathan were present, as was Carl Van Vechten, who would be remembered as the most prominent white patron of the Harlem Renaissance and whom Fitzgerald met for the first time that night. Van Vechten noted in his diary that the party included this memorable introduction, adding that during it Liveright “
pushes me off a piano stool, & breaks my arm.” It didn't break up the party.

Also on the job was Burton Rascoe, who described the dinner in his Day Book column, not neglecting the party's nonchalant violence: “
There were many mock speeches of the hands-across-the-sea variety . . . Liveright pushed Van Vechten off a chair and broke his collar-bone; Evans played the ‘Oh, My Gawd' prelude by Rachmaninoff, to which I gave a terpsichorean interpretation, and Evans, Brackett and I bundled into a taxicab, declaring one another to be ‘the life of the party,' and singing ‘God Save the King,' and ‘Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean' . . . It was a great day for literature.” Fitzgerald saved Rascoe's notice in his scrapbook.

Rascoe's facetiousness aside, it was a great day for modern literature, although he had no way of knowing it. Across the ocean in Sussex, Virginia Woolf had begun thinking about a novel that would use a magnificent summer party as a symbol of modern life. On October 6, 1922, she jotted down “Thoughts upon beginning a book to be called, perhaps, At Home: or the Party”; it would consist of “six or seven chapters, each complete separately . . . And all must converge upon the party at the end.” From November, Woolf kept a notebook for the novel, which began: “
Suppose the idea of the book is the contrast between life and death. All must bear finally upon the party at the end; which expresses life, in every variety and full of conviction.” Woolf would publish
Mrs. Dalloway
in May 1925, exactly a month after
Scott Fitzgerald published his own novel about parties that symbolize modern life and death. A simple chime, Mrs. Dalloway reflects at one point in her story, can remind us of the beauty in ordinary things: beauty is everywhere, even in the small chimes of history.