West of Sunset (13 page)

Ahead, the dome of the Capitol rose over the city like a medieval cathedral, the seat of power and privilege. A faithful servant of the law, the judge and his family lived in its shadow, along the elm-lined, aptly named Pleasant Avenue. The houses on her block weren't antebellum mansions boasting porticoes and slave quarters but the same stolid turn of the century brick piles he knew from St. Paul, with four chimneys, wraparound porches and maids' rooms tucked under the eaves, as if the designers of that era had signed a convention. The Sayres', when he'd first seen it, recalled his Grandmother McQuillan's, down to the stained-glass window on the stair landing, which he associated with old money and the antique majesty of the church. They shared an air of permanence at once easeful and suffocating. In a house like that nothing ever changed, and while the judge was patient with her, if vague, and her mother doting, Scott understood why Zelda was wild to get out. Leaving her there would be sentencing her to the dead past.

The house, now, as the LaSalle slowed for the drive, looked the same, the barbered lawn and box hedges, the white-pillared porch. She leaned across him, dipping her head to check the upstairs windows. The last time she was home was over a year ago, the summer before last, for her birthday. By the end of the visit she'd stopped talking, spending all of her time in the garden, wearing her father's old straw boater and filling her present of a sketchpad with messy studies of flowers her mother cooed over, saying she'd love a framed one for her birthday.

The car stopped. She'd gone quiet, after all the chatter, and when he offered his hand, she took it. Sara was already out. Still, she didn't move.

“Ready?” he asked.

“I am,” she said, nodding as if to convince herself.

Flanking the steps were leftover poinsettias, and a pinecone wreath adorned the front door, which opened before the driver could get it for them.

Leaning on her cane, Mrs. Sayre tottered out, a knit shawl draped over her shapeless housedress. She'd had Zelda late in life, and by the time Scott met her, her face bore only the slightest resemblance around the mouth. Since the judge had died, she'd become frowzy and heavyset, her cheeks gray with liver spots, eyelids sprigged with moles, a state his own mother didn't live long enough to attain. With her bifocals and rat's nest of ashen hair she would have seemed a pitiable opponent if he didn't know how expert she was at wielding her helplessness.

“There's my baby,” she said.

“Mama,” Zelda said.

Mrs. Sayre closed her arms around her, pulling her to her bosom, rocking side to side. “I was afraid I'd never see the day.” She said it for everyone to hear, a bad actress, and he wished he could get back in the car. “What in the world happened to your face?”

“It was my fault. We were playing tennis and I tripped over myself.”

“I don't know why they have you playing such a dangerous game in the first place. I think they need to look after you better, that's what I think.” She fixed on Scott as if she'd just noticed him standing there. “Thank you for going out of your way. You don't know how much we appreciate it.”

It had been the plan all along, and the “we” was calculated, but he was a diplomat. “My pleasure.”

“I wish Scottie could have come.”

“Me too.”

“How is the darling?”

“Very well. She sends her love.”

The judge would have shaken his hand and ushered him inside, regaling him with the political intricacies of his latest case, but Mrs. Sayre held on to Zelda as if she were her nurse. He and Sara trailed them to the parlor, where a Christmas tree shimmering with tinsel stood by the fireplace. Hanging from the mantel were stockings embroidered with the names of the Sayre children. Even in death her brother Anthony was represented. Not Scott. Later, when they went upstairs to get settled, he discovered Freeman had installed him in Anthony's old room in the back hall, as if he were a lodger.

For Zelda's sake as well as his own, he resolved to absorb these slights with Christian largesse. When Mrs. Sayre held forth on how Zelda's old beaux were prospering, or brought up the debacle of her last trip to Baltimore, or told, as a joke, the story of Zelda running naked around the country club pool as a child, he reminded himself that in five days he would be in New York, lunching with Max and Ober.

The centerpiece of the visit was Christmas dinner with her sisters Rosalind and Marjorie and their families. As if he might redeem himself through good works, he volunteered for every chore and errand, riding around town in the front seat with Freeman, drawing stares until the man asked him, plaintively, if he wouldn't mind sitting in back. In chastised silence he watched the signs and storefronts scroll by. The city was hers, its soul inscrutable to a northerner. More than any place they'd lived, the streets were overlaid with memories, one past folded atop another. A trolley stop, a park bandstand, a Confederate field gun guarding a square—everywhere he went he was met with the empty stage sets of their courtship.

Though she was encouraged to revisit her favorite places, Zelda didn't go out. She scuffed around the house in her moccasins like a prisoner, playing casino with her mother and listening to the phonograph while Sara polished the silver. Her only job was to make the place cards, which her mother fawned over as if she were Picasso. She napped in the afternoon, on her narrow bed in her old room, decorated with the painted fans and paper roses of the war years. Her bookshelves were filled with nursery rhymes, her closet with frilly organdy dresses. Curled up with her face turned toward the wall, she might have been a girl again.

Anthony's room, too, belonged to another time, with his crusty baseball glove and tarnished diving trophies and stale cigar box of marbles. At night, alone in the cold bed, Scott fended off visions of his final minutes—the window and the long drop. In Saint-Raphael he'd had a nightmare in which he'd fallen off a cliff, or been pushed, going over backwards, flailing as if he might right himself. He and Zelda had been fighting, and their hotel balcony perched above the rocks, so it made sense. Still, every night he dreaded the sensation. He couldn't imagine it being a relief.

Not quite arbitrarily, Mrs. Sayre had chosen the twenty-fifth for Christmas. In the morning a fire blazed on the hearth and they watched Zelda spill her stocking out on the carpet. He made sure she'd taken her pills so there wouldn't be any problems, and felt like an accomplice. Along with the walnuts and oranges and candy canes, Santa had left her an expensive set of charcoal sticks. She held them up for all to see, smiling for the camera, and Scott, who hadn't been asked to contribute, was jealous. Sara gave her a sheer lilac scarf she knotted about her throat and wore for the rest of the day. From her mother she received a set of tea-rose silk pajamas and a chenille bedspread with matching hand-appliquéd pillowcases, and a gold charm bracelet, and a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and, lastly, carried in by Sara from its hiding place in the library, sporting only a red bow, a full-sized easel—none of which she would be allowed at Highland.

“That's for your studio when you come home,” her mother explained. “I was thinking we might do something with the solarium.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

“Merry Christmas, Baby.”

“Yes, thank you,” Scott said. “That's overly generous.”

“Don't think we've forgotten you.” Her mother handed him a present the size of a book but lighter, rigid as glass beneath the silver wrapping paper.

“You haven't opened any of yours yet,” he protested, but tore away the foil to reveal a framed picture of the judge and Mrs. Sayre, Zelda, Scottie and himself dressed for church with the LaSalle in the background. It might have been Easter: Zelda and her mother held lilies. Scottie, in a blinding white pinafore, barely came to his waist. It had to have been ten years ago, before the Crash, and struck him as a non sequitur. He had no idea why she was giving it to him now. “Thank you. It's very nice.”

“Look on the back.”

As if captioning the picture for posterity, she'd listed their names and
Easter, 1928
.

“That was the last time we were all together for a holiday.”

Was the implication that this was his fault, or was it a general lament? There was nothing he could say to rebut her, so he showed it to Zelda.

“Look how darling Scottie was,” she said.

“She's still darling.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I know.” He was being oversensitive, reflexively. He would always defend Scottie from her, as he did his best to protect her from her mother.

“Thank you again,” he said, and when they were done, put it upstairs with Zelda's self-portrait.

The day was given over to the production of dinner, which consisted of Mrs. Sayre sending Sara in to check on Melinda the cook every fifteen minutes. Following a longstanding tradition, they were having goose. By midafternoon, when Zelda went up for her nap, the fat was crackling in the pan and the whole house smelled richly, recalling the holidays at his grandmother's. Mrs. Sayre worried that they'd put the bird in too early, but, as with most of her fears, it was a way of making people obey her, and nothing came of it.

The sisters and the branches of their respective families arrived all at once, as if they'd caravanned together. The judge and Mrs. Sayre had had Zelda so late in life that most of her nieces and nephews were older than her. While Mrs. Sayre presided from her rocker, their children gathered in a ring around the tree while Zelda played Santa's elf, doling out presents. Scott stood back between his brothers-in-law, with whom, over the years, he'd been summarily paired at garden parties and golf outings. As the two nursed their bourbons, Scott sipped his ginger ale. Usually they talked football, but the season was over. They were both lawyers who worked at the Capitol, sound, calculating men more interested in what was happening down the corridor than in Europe, but the menace had grown impossible to ignore. Country by country, strike by strike, the Communists were undermining the system. He thought of Dottie and Ernest, conjuring their arguments, but there was no point here, and soon enough the talk turned to Hollywood, which, having never been, they saw as a charmed and glamorous fairyland. They asked him the same questions everyone did, as if, between briefs, they read the scandal sheets: Was Gable shorter in person? Did Garbo really not speak to anyone off the set?

“Garbo's actually very smart,” he told them, and spun a yarn about her knowing six languages and walking in on her talking with an Armenian tailor in Metro's wardrobe department in his native tongue. It was a naked fabrication, for their sake. While he'd never met her, he knew, as Photoplay did, that they wanted him not to dispel but to deepen the mystique.

The children weren't interested in the adults' gifts, and Mrs. Sayre sent them off to the library with Sara. Zelda started to follow, till her mother called her back. He was afraid they'd have a repeat of the morning, but her sisters' presents were practical—a camel sweater, wool socks, a pack of linen handkerchiefs. Scott had gotten them French perfume and golf balls and, on Freeman's recommendation, their favorite pralines, accepting in return a leather-bound journal and monogrammed pen and pencil set he coveted on sight.

Dinner went equally well. To Mrs. Sayre's surprise, the goose was perfectly juicy. Along with the teetotaling Sara, he and Zelda refrained from the champagne punch, while the rest of the adult table gradually dissolved into a sloppy jollity. He hadn't wanted to come, but as Zelda laughed along with everyone and the candles cast their wavering shadows across the walls, he was glad he could give her a real Christmas.

A grateful guest, he made the mistake, the next day, of seeking out her mother and thanking her for inviting them. The whole time he'd pointedly avoided being alone with her, knowing she'd use the opportunity to plead her case, but it was their last day, and while part of him wanted to make a clean escape, he needed to offer her that courtesy. They sat on opposite sides of the fireplace, she ensconced in her rocker, he on a low ottoman, a peasant attending a dowager queen.

“I have to say there's a world of difference,” she said. “I can't remember her ever doing so well.”

“That's the effect of the medication.”

“It's working.”

“She doesn't seem subdued to you?”

“She seems happy. It's been an absolute treat having her.”

“I'd like to see how she does with a lower dosage.”

“I thought you'd be thrilled, after the last time.”

“I want her to be well but also to be herself.”

“She's more herself than she's been in ages. She's been wonderful company, that's what I'm going to tell Dr. Carroll.”

“That's fair.”

“I think this is progress.”

Rather than quarrel with her, he strategically retreated. In their own ways they both wanted the best for Zelda, and yet discussing her fate with her mother seemed a betrayal, partly because she seemed less interested in Zelda's well-being than in possessing her again. His position was just as entrenched, based as it was on resentment, if not outright dislike. As long as she was sick, he was convinced that if he let her go home she would never get better. But, as her mother in her Pollyanna optimism couldn't bring herself to argue, if she was never going to get better, wouldn't she be happier at home?

That night he helped Zelda pack her bags, and the next morning lugged them down the stairs and outside over Freeman's protests. He expected a teary parting scene, but after her pills she was bemused, leaving her mother wet-eyed and sniffling on the porch, waving her cane as they backed away. In the LaSalle, she watched the fields roll by without comment, slouched against him as if she were tired. The bumpy flight over the Smokies didn't faze her, or the winding drive up the mountain. They might have been going anywhere.