Guests on Earth (31 page)

The police were trying to disperse the crowd, but I could neither leave nor look away from the black figures in silhouette against the orange and red flames until the roof began to collapse and they were gone, my princesses, my chums, and it was over. Dixie died there, and Mrs. Fitzgerald, and Pauletta, and four other women. I remembered what Mrs. Fitzgerald had said in Art so long ago, about the danger of putting princesses in towers. Her body would be identified only by her charred ballet slipper, and Dixie’s by her dental work, that perfect smile.

Still I could not leave, for on the balcony still standing at the end of the top floor, several stockings hung out on a clothesline were dancing, dancing, dancing in the rising heat of the fire, and as I watched, I thought of Mrs. Fitzgerald and also of my own mother, and how much I had loved her, beautiful dancer, as I had loved my own big-headed baby girl. “Places!” I cried, clapping my hands as they danced on for as long as they could, Mamma and Mrs. Fitzgerald, through their hard, bright lives.

CHAPTER 16

I
AM IN
N
EW
O
RLEANS
now, where I teach private piano lessons and am proud to be a staff accompanist at the venerable Petit Theatre. I live alone—by choice, I might add—for I have had a few suitors here, most as odd as myself, yet not unattractive. After the fire, I found I could not marry Freddy, somehow, but the Carrolls gave me the small remainder of my inheritance from Arthur Graves, which has allowed me to return to this city.

And as for the fire, I am certain that Flossie set it, though I never said so, and other people voiced other opinions. Mrs. Hodges recalled hearing that Mrs. Fitzgerald herself had started other fires in the past, one in California and one at “La Paix” in Baltimore, and mentioned her fondness for cigarettes, which “that Jinx” was always slipping her despite the rules. Others believed that Jinx set the fire herself, for she took advantage of the commotion to vanish entirely, escaping both the remainder of her mandated stay at Highland Hospital and any possible prosecution in the death of Charles Winston. She has never been found. Pan disappeared as well, though I am not at all convinced that this had anything to do with Jinx Feeney. It is my personal feeling that he simply went to ground, moving farther back into the wilderness, like an animal fleeing a forest fire.

But I know he will come to me eventually, which is why I settled upon this particular apartment in the Garden District quite near Audubon Park, where he will be able to get a job with the landscaping crew. Oh, but this place was hard to find! Since New Orleans is below sea level, there are no basements anywhere in the entire city. Even the cemeteries are all above ground. Yet I feel strongly that Pan will be more comfortable in some sort of lair, and at last I found this little spot, which is actually a half-basement, seven steps down from street level, the butler’s former dwelling beneath the grand historic mansion above. It also has the unexpected advantage of being much cooler in the summer, and warmer in the wintertime.

I have furnished it quite simply with second-hand things, as you see, the piano being my only extravagance, if you can call it an extravagance. For me it is a necessity. A row of small square windows at the top of my parlor look out upon the street, and I do mean directly upon the street, and I love to sit right here in this soft green velvet armchair and watch the passing feet, the grand parade of humanity that moves along St. Charles Avenue day and night. High heels, sandals, tennis shoes, brown feet, white feet, cowboy boots, shiny pimp shoes, sensible brogans, and little patent leather pumps with white lace socks such as I once wore myself to Sunday mass at St. Louis Cathedral. It is a great variety, especially at Carnival time.

So I like to sit here and drink a bit of sweet wine in the late afternoon and watch the parade until it relaxes me after a long day’s work. It is so relaxing that sometimes it puts me right to sleep, and once I awoke with a start to find his feet there right above me, those handmade moccasins that I’d know anywhere, stopped on the sidewalk mere inches from my window. I flew for the door but by the time I got up to the sidewalk, he was gone. I do not for one minute believe it was a dream, as my friend Clara has suggested. I believe he will return, and I shall be here. I am not yet too old to bear another child, and I should like to do it, under more auspicious circumstances, of course. Why not? Freddy and Dr. Schwartz are married now, and they are expecting one, according to Phoebe Dean. Pan can learn to speak as the baby speaks, and we will all be very comfortable right here. This apartment is larger than it looks. My palm has been itching of late, so I believe he will return soon, possibly in time for Mardi Gras, and I shall be here waiting. Oh hurry, hurry, hurry up, the azaleas and jasmine and bougainvillea are blooming now the parade is almost constant it’s time it’s time it’s almost carnival time when he will appear at my door his face like a flower.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the many people who helped in bringing
Guests on Earth
to publication. Mary Caldwell, medical ethicist and lifelong Asheville resident with early work experience at Highland Hospital, was invaluable in her careful reading and detailed advice; she also consulted with noted Asheville psychiatrist Dr. William Matthews. Linda Wagner-Martin, author of
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, An American Woman’s Life,
generously shared her research with me, including photocopies of Zelda Fitzgerald’s unpublished letters and writings in her own hand, archived material in the Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Opera singer Andrea Edith Moore gave me several crucial, critical readings of the novel and allowed me to trail around observing her in performance and in practice sessions with her accompanist, Deborah Hollis; both agreed to interviews. Frances and Ed Mayes offered their expertise in Italian. I am indebted to Shannon Ravenel, for her brilliant editing of this manuscript; to Jill McCorkle, for her helpful early reading; to Jim Duffy and Susan Raines, for their knowledge of New Orleans; to Diane Plauche, for naming the “Intermezzo” section; to Hillsborough piano teacher and accompanist Grace Jean Roberts, for musical advice and teaching techniques; to Barbara Bennett, for alerting me to the Samarcand Manor mattress-burning case; to Scott Hill of Durham, North Carolina, a piano student of Mrs. Carroll’s throughout her youth, for her reminiscences; to ballad singer Sheila Kay Adams, my friend, who kindly took me up to Madison County, North Carolina, many years ago when I was researching Appalachian mountain ballads for my novel
The Devil’s Dream;
to Mona Sinquefield, for her help with research and manuscript preparation though draft after draft; to Chris Stamey, for his careful copyediting; to my agent, Liz Darhansoff, for always “being there” in every way; and to my husband Hal Crowther, for weird facts, companionship, risotto, and encouragement during the long years of writing this book.

Much information is available through the University of North Carolina at Asheville’s D. Hiden Ramsey Library Special Collections/ University Archives as well as the Pack Memorial Library on Haywood Street, part of the Buncombe County Public Library system. Here I learned about early life in Asheville and the Highland Hospital’s history, and about the tragic 1948 fire.

Adonna Thompson at the Duke University Medical Center Archives in Durham, North Carolina, was especially helpful when I began this project, guiding me through their Highland Hospital Records 1934–1980. Though actual patient records are not available, letters, clippings, memorabilia, and the many various archived Highland Hospital publications over the years proved invaluable to me in gaining a sense of hospital life during the years covered in my novel, 1936 to 1948. Here I found catalogs, brochures, programs of events such as concerts, dances, and celebrations of all kinds, the
Highland Highlights
magazine, and the wonderful
Highland Fling
newspaper published by the patients.

“Evalina Toussaint,” a story excerpted from an early draft of this novel, was published in
Smoky Mountain Living,
vol. 10, no. 1, winter 2010.

I also have my own personal knowledge of the landscape of this novel. My father was a patient there in the fifties. And I am especially grateful to Highland Hospital for the helpful years my son, Josh, spent there in the 1980s, in both inpatient and outpatient situations. Though I had always loved Zelda Fitzgerald, it was then that I became fascinated by her art and her life within that institution, and the mystery of her tragic death. I always knew I would write this book.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

Although Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Dr. Robert Carroll and Grace Potter Carroll, and other people who actually lived appear in this book as fictional characters, I wanted to depict them as truly as possible. I have been grateful for a number of sources, starting with the excellent biographies Zelda, by Nancy Milford; Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald: An American Woman’s Life, by Linda Wagner-Martin; and Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Voice in Paradise, by Sally Cline. Zelda’s own writing is found in her novel Save Me the Waltz and in The Collected Writings of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, with an introduction by Mary Gordon; Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda: The Love Letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks; as well as unpublished writings in several archived collections. Other helpful books for me were F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli; Fitzgerald’s novels The Great Gatsby, Tender Is the Night, The Beautiful and the Damned, This Side of Paradise; the nonfiction pieces in The Crack-Up, edited by Edmund Wilson; and Exiles from Paradise: Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, by Sara Mayfield. Dr. Robert S. Carroll’s books include The Soul in Suffering and The Mastery of Nervousness.

My single most illuminating source was Zelda: An Illustrated Life: The Private World of Zelda Fitzgerald, edited and introduced by Eleanor Lanahan, the granddaughter of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who has also written a book about the life of her mother entitled Scottie: The Daughter of . . . An essay by Peter Kurth in Zelda: An Illustrated Life details the Jazz Age world that the Fitzgeralds inhabited, and Jane S. Livingston, formerly the chief curator of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., offers insights into Zelda’s art, which is well represented here with reproductions of eighty of her best paintings from every phase of her life, along with her drawings and constructions, the beautiful and sometimes terrifying paper dolls, plus biographical photographs, artifacts, and other memorabilia. Another big, wonderful book is The Romantic Egoists: A Pictorial Autobiography from the Scrapbooks and Albums of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr.

Other books include Sexual Reckonings: Southern Girls in a Troubling Age, by Susan K. Cahn; Clothes for a Summer Hotel, A Ghost Play, by Tennessee Williams; After the Good Gay Times: Asheville Summer of ’35, A Season with F. Scott Fitzgerald, by Tony Buttitta; Gone With the Wind, the Three-Day Premiere in Atlanta, by Herb Bridges; Asylums, by Erving Goffman; Great and Desperate Cures: The Rise and Decline of Psychosurgery and Other Radical Treatments for Mental Illness, by Elliot S. Valenstein; My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully with Charles Fleming; The Center Cannot Hold, by Elyn R. Saks; Surviving Schizophrenia, by Dr. E. Fuller Torrey; A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway; The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe vs. Wade, by Ann Fessler; Beloved Infidel, by Sheilah Graham and Gerold Frank; Women and Madness, by Phyllis Chesler; The Madwoman in the Attic, by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar; The Writing on the Wall: Women’s Autobiography and the Asylum, by Mary Elene Wood; The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, by Elaine Showalter; and Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture, by Benjamin Reiss.

Articles: “The Doom of the Mountains,” by Ted Mitchell, Our State magazine, March 1999; “Zelda Sayre, Belle,” by Linda Wagner-Martin, Southern Cultures, summer 2004; “Professional Contributions to Invalidism,” by Dr. Robert S. Carroll, The Scientific Monthly, vol. 2, no.1, Jan. 1916; “Creatures of Fire” by David Allen Joy, Smoky Mountain Living, summer 2010; “Hortitherapy: To Teach the Art of Living,” by Steve M. Coe, Highland Highlights, fall 1973; “Literary Ghosts of Asheville,” by Hal Crowther, American Way, 1992; and “Sacrificial Couples, the Splendor of Our Failures and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald,” draft of a paper given by Allan Gurganus at the International F. Scott Fitzgerald Society Conference in Asheville, North Carolina, in September 1998, which he generously shared with me.

A Shannon Ravenel Book

Published by

ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL

Post Office Box 2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of

WORKMAN PUBLISHING

225 Varick Street

New York, New York 10014

© 2013 by Lee Smith.

All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

eISBN 978-1-61620-346-7