Zelda (41 page)

Alabama decides to go out with one of David’s bachelor friends and leaves her family back at Dixie’s apartment. Alabama thinks, “If they hadn’t been so completely impervious to her she would have tried to explain.” When she does not return by 3 A.M. her family calls David, who races back to New York and is furious with Alabama. The scene ends with the Judge’s and Millie’s goodbyes. Alabama reflects, “‘Another tie broken…. The tie will be there but it will be different—I’m no longer part of them which they criticize but have to accept, but something foreign which they reject
at will.’ “David tells her that she must “‘understand that you can’t run roughshod over the world as you evidently think you can, doing everything you like and leaving others to check up after you.’ “He suggests that she compromise. From then on her mother’s letters to her ask her to behave. At the close of the cut galleys, “Wedged in between glowing accounts of their activities, she wrote that she was going to have a baby.”

In the published version there is a little more attention given to the birth of Bonnie, but not much. It is handled piecemeal and skittishly. Interrupting the story of whether Alabama is or is not pregnant are fine passages of description of New York City. This nervous, jagged interrupting of the narrative line works effectively to quicken the tempo of these pages and to propel us into the mood of the Knights’ early married life.

The top of New York twinkled like a golden canopy behind a throne. David and Alabama faced each other incompetently—you couldn’t argue about having a baby.

“So what did the doctor say?” he insisted.

“I told you—he said ‘Hello!’”

“Don’t be an ass—what else did he say?—We’ve got to know what he said.”

“So then we’ll have the baby,” announced Alabama, proprietarily.

David fumbled about his pockets. “I’m sorry—I must have left them at home.” He was thinking that then they’d be three.

“What?”

“The bromides.”

“I said ‘Baby.’”

“Oh.”

“We should ask somebody.”

“Who’ll we ask?”

Almost everybody had theories:…but nobody knew how to have a baby.

“I think you’d better ask your mother,” said David.

“Oh, David—don’t! She’d think I wouldn’t know how.”

“Well,” he said tentatively, “I could ask my dealer—he knows where the subways go.”

Breaking into their disjointed conversation about having a baby is another descriptive passage about New York and the popularity of the Knights. Then David says:

“I’ll have to do lots of work…. Won’t it seem queer to be the centre of the world for somebody else?”

“Very. I’m glad my parents are coming before I begin to get sick.”

“How do you know you’ll get sick?”

“I should.”

“That’s no reason.”

“No.”

“Let’s go some place else.”

It is after this, in the published version, that Alabama’s parents come for their visit and Alabama remarks that “she hadn’t been absolutely sure of how to go about anything since her marriage had precluded the Judge’s resented direction.” Six pages later, almost as an aside, Zelda wrote:

Vincent Youmans wrote a new tune. The old tunes floated through the hospital windows from the hurdy-gurdies while the baby was being born and the new tunes went the luxurious rounds of lobbies and grills, palm-gardens and roofs.

(Zelda’s treatment of the birth of Bonnie is reminiscent of Fitzgerald’s attempt in
The Beautiful and Damned
to handle Gloria’s supposed pregnancy. In both novels the reader is left uncertain about the basic facts. In Scott’s the fact that Gloria is not with child is written about as an aside. Bonnie’s birth is, after the build-up, similarly oblique.) After this passage Zelda slips in another about New York, but this one is marked with ominous descriptive material.

The New York rivers dangled lights along the banks like lanterns on a wire; the Long Island marshes stretched the twilight to a blue Campagna. Glimmering buildings hazed the sky in a luminous patchwork quilt. Bits of philosophy, odds and ends of acumen, the ragged ends of vision suicided in the sentimental dusk. The marshes lay black and flat and red and full of crime about their borders. Yes, Vincent Youmans wrote the music.

The final sentence would seem to tie this material to that about the birth of Bonnie, but there is no direct commentary about the baby at all. She is born, that’s it. We don’t know what she looks like or, more importantly, how her parents feel about her. Suddenly the novel switches direction and the Knight ménage is off for Europe.

It costs more to ride on the tops of taxis than on the inside; Joseph Urban skies are expensive when they’re real…. a thread of glamor, a Rolls-Royce thread, a thread of O. Henry…. their fifty thousand dollars bought a cardboard baby-nurse for Bonnie, a second-hand Marmon, a Picasso etching…two white knickerbocker suits exactly alike…and two first class tickets for Europe.

In the packing case a collection of plush teddy bears, David’s army overcoat, their wedding silver and four bulging scrapbooks full of all the things people envied them for were ready to be left behind.

……………………………………………………………………………

Alabama said to herself they were happy—she had inherited that from her mother. “We are very happy,” she said to herself, as her mother would have said, “but we don’t seem to care very much whether we are or not. I suppose we expected something more dramatic.”

When the Knights at last escape New York for the Riviera there is a return to the images of physical description that Zelda had used at the beginning of the novel in connection with Judge Beggs and the South. There is the scent of fruit trees, but this time there is the hint of something threatening within the setting. The foliage is “black,” there are “keeps” and “battlements” and “ancient moats,” and the scene is
“bound
in tangled honeysuckle; fragile poppies
bled
the causeways; vineyards
caught
on the jagged rocks” (my italics).

The name of the villa they take is “Les Rossignols,” the Nightingales, and when Alabama describes it she says, “Pastel cupids frolicked amidst the morning-glories and roses in garlands swelled like goiters or some malignant disease.” Alabama wonders whether it is going to be as “nice as it seems.” David tells her they are now in Paradise “—as nearly as we’ll ever get.” Alabama asks him if he’s going to work all the time and David replies that he hopes to. “‘It’s a man’s world,’ Alabama sighed…. ‘This air has the most lascivious feel—’ “David’s reply, “‘Well, I can’t paint at night, you know. We shall have plenty of private life,’ “was cut from the published version. But somehow they do not have much private life; David works and Alabama is left very much to herself. She tries to occupy herself reading, but she resents being left alone while David works. “When she was a child and the days slipped lazily past in the same indolent fashion, she had not thought of life as furnishing up the slow uneventful sequence, but of the Judge as meting it out that way, curtailing the excitement she considered was her due. She began to blame David for the monotony.”

Alabama has met Jacques, a French aviator, whose surname Chevre-Feuille (honeysuckle) is a conscious attempt to link him to the setting. Chevre-Feuille is, as David was when Alabama fell in love with him, in military uniform and a lieutenant.

Eventually Jacques asks her to come to his apartment. She says, “‘Yes—I don’t know. Yes.’ “And David, although he does not know exactly what has passed between the two, tells Alabama she is “sick
…insane” and threatens that if she sees Jacques any more he will go back to America without her. She tells Jacques that if she does not come to him he must not visit her any more. He asks what she will say to David.

“I’ll have to tell him.”

“It would be unwise,” said Jacques in alarm. “We must hang on to our benefits—”

Although it is never made explicit, what Jacques has seemed to say is that he wants Alabama, but not on a permanent basis. In other words, she is not to tell David and thereby threaten her marriage, or Jacques is clearly not prepared to offer Alabama anything more than an invitation to an affair. Up to this point they have done nothing more than kiss, and as it turns out (although they do meet once again in David’s company) Alabama does not go to his apartment. Jacques Chevre-Feuille gets himself transferred to “Indo-Chine” and leaves Alabama with a photograph of himself and a letter in French which she cannot read. She rips up the letter, and “Though it broke her heart, she tore the picture too…. What was the use of keeping it?…There wasn’t a way to hold on to the summer…. Whatever it was that she wanted from Jacques, Jacques took it with him to squander on the Chinese. You took what you wanted from life, if you could get it, and you did without the rest.” This is an almost exact repetition of Alabama’s earlier resolve, when the war began, “to take what she wanted when she could.” Except, of course, Alabama had not done so in this case. She had not taken Jacques Chevre-Feuille, whom she had apparently wanted; she had let him go, with regret perhaps, but she had not ventured very far.
^*

Which brings us to the center of both the novel and the characterization of Alabama Beggs. Alabama has not fulfilled her promise to herself and she begins to see her life with David in terms of the sense of suffocation and eclipse she once felt with her family in the South. Once she had sought a definition of herself, but her marriage has brought her no answers to her quest. It is only when the Knights leave the Riviera for Paris (“a perfect breeding place for the germs of bitterness they brought with them”) that, caught up in the endless wave of parties, amid the debris of her marriage, she
finds her answer. And in the manner Zelda has established earlier in the novel, her flower imagery gives the clue to her fiction. In Paris the flowers are artificial: “They made nasturtiums of leather and rubber and wax gardenias and ragged robins out of threads and wires. They manufactured hardy perennials to grow on the meagre soil of shoulder straps and bouquets with long stems for piercing the loamy shadows under the belt.”

In that Parisian world of parties, at which no one is French, but English and American—with a peppering of Russians from the ballet—Alabama feels “excluded by her lack of accomplishment.” She is not as elegant as the other women and feels “clumsy” when she compares herself to Gabrielle Gibbs, with whom David is obviously charmed. (The ten-page revision of Section III of this chapter cuts out some of the small talk of the parties and gives a sharper sense of Alabama’s growing removal and isolation and insecurity.)

After a dinner party at which David and Miss Gibbs flirt they all go to the theatre to see a Stravinsky ballet. The ballet seems to Alabama to offer her a chance for distinction. Her friends completely misunderstand her reasons for wanting to dance, but provide an interesting glimpse into what Zelda knew they thought of Alabama/Zelda: “‘I think…that it would be the very thing for Alabama. I’ve always heard she was a little peculiar—I don’t mean actually batty—but a little difficult. An art would explain.’”

When Zelda was first at Phipps she had written Scott:

Life has become practically intolerable. Everyday I develop a new neurosis until I can think of nothing to do but place myself in the Confederate Museum at Richmond. Now it’s money: we must have more money. To-morrow it will [be] something else again: that I ran when Mamma needed me to help her move, that my hips are fat and shaking with the vulgarities of middle-age, that you had to leave your novel…a horrible sickening fear that I shall never be able to free myself from the mediocrity of my conceptions. For many years I have lived under the disastrous pressure of a conviction of power and necessity to accomplish without the slightest ray of illumination. The only message I ever thought I had was four pirouettes and a feueté. It turned out to be about as cryptic a one as [a] Chinese laundry ticket, but the will to speak remains.

In
Chapter 3
she wrote as fully as she was able of her consuming involvement with the ballet. This chapter moves at a higher pitch than the first two and the world of the young girls who dance at
Madame’s studio behind the stage of the Olympia Music Hall comes vibrantly to life. The curiously female and narcissistic atmosphere of the dance is emphasized by the incessant quarreling of the girls as they maneuver for positions of excellence before their teacher’s eyes. Alabama pushes her body beyond the pain of the stretches, the “Miles and miles of pas de bourrée,” toward excellence, but it is a punishing effort. In one of the sentences from the first galleys that were eliminated in the published version we are given a clue to Alabama’s development: “Of all things on earth she had never wanted anything quite so much as to possess herself, as it seemed to her, that she would if she could attain a perfected control.” Her consuming interest is in the perfection of her body. But, as she drives herself, David is left spending his time drinking with friends at the Ritz bar.

“Why will you never come out with me?” he said.

“Because I can’t work next day if I do.”

“Are you under the illusion that you’ll ever be any good at that stuff?”

“I suppose not; but there’s only one way to try.”

“We have no life at home any more.”

“You’re never there anyway—I’ve got to have something to do with myself.”

“Another female whine—I have to do my work.”

And this time when Zelda writes of flowers, they are a heady, lush, exotic contribution to the prose. They are flowers for the dance; flowers for Madame.