Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (46 page)

“Just for a walk. I’ll be back in time to help with supper.”

My walks are my favorite part of being here in Montgomery. At first, they were my escape from Mama’s too-watchful eye. If I so much as frowned, she worried that I was slipping back into depression. “I’m
fine,
” I’d tell her, hiding my irritation because I know she worries that I’ll end up like our poor Tony.

Now I go more for the pleasure of getting to revisit my past.
There
is the courthouse, so timeless in appearance that it’s the most natural thing in the world to imagine my father inside, hard at work to understand and delineate some finer point of law before tidying his desk and shutting off the light, then catching the streetcar for home.

There
is the building where the Red Cross had its office during the Great War, which everyone now calls the First World War. Not one of us, back in 1918, would have believed that only twenty years would pass before the Europeans would be at one another’s throats again.

There
is Eleanor’s house, where I am a giddy girl who is unconcerned about women’s rights and too concerned about romance.

And there is the corner where Scott proposed to me. Suppose I’d gone home that night and decided that, no, I stood to lose more than I might gain by taking such a risk? In that alternate world, there might be no
Paradise,
no
Gatsby,
none of the hundred or more published stories that readers so love. Ernest Hemingway might yet be poor and little known. And my life, it would look like Marjorie’s: safe and predictable and unexceptional and dull. Even now, I wouldn’t choose differently than I did.

Passing the post office, I think, again, of following yesterday’s letter to Scott. I might miss Montgomery when I’m gone—it has become dear, after all—but I’m willing to sacrifice life here once more if it means I get a shiny new one with Scott. He’s forty-four now, and I’m forty, which are not quite the unimaginably old ages we’d once believed they must be. We can start anew.

Finally I’m back at Mama’s little house on Sayre Street, where she’s lived for several years now. I’m just in time to make it inside before full dark. She worries if I’m not in by dark—which amuses me no end, since it never troubled her when I was young. She’s scared of pretty much everything on my behalf. If it’s cool out, she fears I’m going to catch cold; if it’s hot out, she fears I’m going to get overcome with heat prostration; if it’s raining, I’m risking pneumonia; if it’s sunny, I’m risking a burn. Too much walking will tire me out, she says. “Why do you persist in going for miles and miles?” She keeps encouraging me to take up knitting; my modernist paintings trouble her.

Scottie, meantime, is at Vassar and doing quite well despite her upbringing. To hear her tell it, her childhood was replete with wonderful nannies and terrific friends and fascinating teachers. She is a student of the world, as fluent in French as she is in English. Her voice is seasoned with Southern—my hope is that this is all she’ll have inherited from me. No, I take that back: I hope she’s got my capacity for forgiveness, and her father’s, too. We sure don’t have anything else of value to pass on to her.

She’s staying with Harold Ober and his wife and son for her break from school, but she’ll be here for Christmas. My sweet little lamb, all grown up; this feels somehow both so right and so wrong.

The smell of frying pork greets me when I enter the house. “Mama, I’m back!”

There’s no reply, so I leave my sweater on the doorknob and go to the kitchen. Mama’s sitting at the table with her folded hands pressed to her mouth. Her eyes are damp.

“What’s the matter?” I ask. “More bad news? You should stop listening to the radio. There’s nothing we can do and it’s just so upsetting.”

“A man phoned while you were out,” she says. “A friend, he said … a friend of yours—”

“Harold? Was it Harold Ober? Is it Scottie?”

She shakes her head. “Not Harold.”

“
Who,
Mama? Is Scottie all right? She was going to a dance in Poughkeepsie tonight—is it about the dance? Did something happen? It’s icy there—”

“No, she’s fine.” Mama waves her hand, shooing away that particular worry. Then she says, “It’s Scott.”

“Scott phoned?”

“Scott
died,
Baby. A heart attack. Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

*   *   *

See me sitting in Montgomery’s empty Union Station on a cold, late-December morning, when most of the town’s residents are home wrapping presents, baking pies, singing along to carols on the radio. I’m the woman alone on the long wooden bench, there in the middle of the waiting room. Pine garlands with glossy red ribbons make the balcony railings festive. High windows display a steely-gray sky. The arrivals platform is thirty feet away from me, through the stained-glass archway, right outside the doors.

My brothers-in-law Newman and Minor have stayed outside to keep the local reporters at bay. Those reporters, who’ve been calling the house and stopping by, want to see the weeping widow. They want newsworthy statements—something to supplement the lengthy obituary that ran yesterday, naming F. Scott Fitzgerald as Montgomery’s favorite adopted son. Well, here’s all I have to say, all that matters, a truth that’s so simple but, for me, profound:

Scott is gone.

I’ve had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we’re acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I’d collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. “Gone?” I would whisper, to no one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed—but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts,
before
and
foreverafterward
. And then in the morning, I called my daughter and delivered the awful news.

Now I sit in the station remembering the suit I wore when I waited in this lobby twenty years and eight months ago, on a spring morning when the train would take Marjorie and me to the grandest city on the planet, to a young, prospering fella who’d imagined and arranged a romantic, imprudent existence for himself and his bride. Now I wear widow’s black from the soles of my shoes to the crown of my simple wool hat. Now Scott—Scott’s remains, I should say (oh
God,
that sounds so wrong), are traveling by train to Maryland for the funeral next week. Now the train will deliver my daughter,
our
daughter, a girl who’s left with only her mother to depend upon.

“He said he was getting better,” Scottie had protested when I called. “He sent me Sheilah’s old fur coat, and we were— Oh, Mama,” she whispered, and the whisper was swollen with tears. “I wasn’t supposed to—”

“Shh,” I said, tears filling my own eyes again. “It’s all right. I knew. I didn’t know her name is all. It didn’t mean anything.”

“He chided me about how I would write my thank-you note—before I’d even begun to think of writing it!”

I smiled a little. “Always looking ahead.”

“How can he be
gone
?” she asked me. “It just feels impossible, doesn’t it?”

It does. It feels as if, when the train pulls in this morning, Scott will step off it, then stride through the doors and wrap me in his arms. He’ll kiss my wet cheeks and say, “What’s this? Did you think I wasn’t coming back?”

“Yes. Wasn’t that silly of me?”

“Lingering side effects,” he’ll tell me, and tap my forehead gently. “Not to worry. I said I’d never leave you and I meant it. You know me, Zelda. I’m a man of my word.”

And he was. Anything that didn’t happen—for us, for him—turned out that way despite his best efforts.

Here’s the train’s whistle now, for the crossing at Court Street, and here’s the rumbling that hails the train’s approach. I know when I see Scottie, I’ll see Scott’s face in hers. The past lives in the present, just like he always said, like he always wrote. There’s comfort in the thought.

And then when Christmas is done—a strange, somber event it’s going to be—Scottie will board the train again, this time bound for Maryland. Again, she’ll be traveling alone. All the worriers around me fear I’m too fragile to endure Scott’s funeral, and I’ve chosen not to fight the current this time.

There’s no need for me to be present; I’m not saying good-bye.

AFTERWORD

Upon Scott’s death, Zelda directed his lawyer to have Scott interred in the Fitzgerald family plot at St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland, which he had said was his wish. The church, however, wouldn’t allow this, as Scott was a lapsed Catholic at his death. He was buried instead at the Rockville Union Cemetery.

Together with Max Perkins, Zelda then put Scott’s manuscript and notes for
The Love of the Last Tycoon
into Edmund “Bunny” Wilson’s hands for editing. In late 1941, Scribner published it as part of a volume that included
The Great Gatsby
and the five short stories that Perkins felt were Scott’s strongest works. Titled
The Last Tycoon,
the book was well regarded by critics, beginning an F. Scott Fitzgerald renaissance that would be helped along by paperback Armed Services Editions of
Gatsby
and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which were distributed to servicemen during the Second World War. Soon after, Bunny Wilson compiled Scott’s essays in a 1945 collection called
The Crack-Up,
and Dorothy Parker edited a collection titled
The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald
. These efforts led to others, ensuring Scott’s membership in the literary canon he always believed he should be part of, as well as sales of some twenty million copies of
The Great Gatsby
alone, to date.

Because Scott was in debt when he died and because it would be some time before his work would earn more than negligible royalties, Zelda and Scottie had only the thirty-five thousand dollars from his life insurance policy with which to fund Scottie’s studies and support Zelda indefinitely. Her monthly income from the trust established by Scott’s Princeton friend and lawyer John Biggs, who administered the estate, was not quite fifty dollars, which was supplemented by the thirty-five dollars a month she received for being a veteran’s widow. Zelda, therefore, continued to live with her mother in Montgomery. She maintained relationships with a great many friends, including Sara Mayfield, the Murphys, the Obers, and Ludlow Fowler, traveling to visit them and others as often as her budget would permit.

Severed for good, however, was Zelda’s connection to Ernest Hemingway, who was becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol and suffered worsening periods of depression. His opinion about the Fitzgeralds grew ever more critical in the years that followed, perhaps as if to push back against Scott’s returning popularity. Though biographers and researchers have shown that the unflattering stories Hemingway wrote about the Fitzgeralds in
A Moveable Feast
consist of half-truths and outright fictions, they persist in popular culture as truth. Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961.

In the 1940s, Zelda worked on a novel she called
Caesar’s Things
and painted some of her most charming and whimsical works. She did a series of cityscapes depicting New York City and Paris locations, as well as scenes from fairy tales, and made a collection of intricately done, Arthurian-themed paper dolls. All these she exhibited at various galleries, and enjoyed genuine critical acclaim. Many of the paintings have since gone missing or been destroyed, but others have been preserved and are still sometimes exhibited publicly.

Scottie and Zelda’s relationship following Scott’s death was not always easy. Having been ill during Scottie’s most formative years, Zelda was not as close to her daughter as Scott had been, and the two of them sometimes differed in their opinions on appropriate ways to ensure Scott’s legacy. Zelda was delighted, though, with Scottie’s 1943 marriage to a well-off tax attorney. The births of a grandson in 1946 and a granddaughter in early 1948 brought her real joy. Scottie, who would later have two more children, worked as a journalist, wrote musical comedies for charity events, struggled with alcoholism, and eventually returned to live in Montgomery, where she encouraged young women to get involved in politics.

While Zelda undoubtedly suffered from some type of mental illness, one of her physicians at Highland Hospital, Dr. Irving Pine, believed that Zelda had been largely misunderstood by her other doctors, as well as misdiagnosed as schizophrenic. According to more recent opinions of doctors who have reviewed her medical records, she had what’s now called bipolar disorder, which was initially complicated by alcohol use and weakness from excessive physical activity. She suffered debilitating and permanent side effects from some of the very treatments that were supposed to make her well. The cumulative effect of years of “reeducation” and drug therapies may have contributed to her later infrequent episodes of depression and insecurity.

When these episodes occurred, she would go to Highland for brief periods of what she called “stabilization.” It was her fourth such stay, begun in January 1948, that would be her last. During the night of March 10, Highland Hospital caught fire; Zelda, who had been out to a dance earlier that evening and then took her prescribed sedative before bed, was one of nine women who were trapped inside. All nine perished in the fire.

Zelda’s remains were interred alongside Scott’s at Rockville Union Cemetery. In 1975, however, Scottie prevailed in her efforts to have her parents’ graves moved to the Fitzgerald family plot and had a marker engraved with the sentence that ends
The Great Gatsby:

SO WE BEAT ON, BOATS AGAINST

THE CURRENT, BORNE BACK

CEASELESSLY INTO THE PAST

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is a work of fiction, but because it’s based on the lives of real people, I have tried to adhere as much as possible to the established particulars of those people’s lives.