Zelda (56 page)

It seems useless to wait any more; I know that you are better; and being taken care of; and I am of no assistance; so I’ll go back to the hospital on the 2:30 train.… Why don’t you come to Tryon?… we could keep a little house on the lake and let you get better. We might have a very happy summer in such circumstance— You like it there, and I am very clever at serving bird-song and summer clouds for breakfast.

Scottina could visit us; and we could find a better meaning to so many things.…

Please believe
that I stayed over solely to the purpose of helping you if I could. I know from experience what a difference it makes in life where somebody cares about your troubles.… I know mat I have written you all this before but, as you know my letters are censored from
the Hospital and I wont have another chance to communicate until we meet again.

To the Hospital, this version: We had a most enviable trip. And everything was according to the rules. This last refers to cigarettes and wine concerning which I will follow our agreement as to any irregularity of arrival. Your lungs are bad, and required attention, and I am capable of travelling alone so there wasnt any use in your adding another tiring journey to what you had before you.

D.O. please take care of yourself. So you will be well again and happier than these last times. There are so few people of our era who have made original contributions to the life about us, and not many who can be so charming, and almost not any with a greater capacity for enjoyment.

There are still a great many things which could give us pleasure

And there are such a lot of people fond of you.…

Back at Highland Zelda stuck to her story, although the staff was quite aware of the pattern most of the Fitzgeralds’ trips together took. “We were all afraid when she went off with him of what would happen—and it always did,” one staff member recalls. “They simply could not be in each other’s company for more than a few days at a time. Dr. Carroll would allow them to go together for a week or so, but they always came back a few days early and usually something terrible had occurred. It was awful, it really was, because you could see that he still loved her very much and did not want to abandon her. But they couldn’t be together for any prolonged length of time.”

Zelda wrote Scott soon after her return. “Don’t feel bad. You were so sweet in the station. I wish things had been so that we were going on together, somewhere. There are lots of happy places: it says so in the time tables, and before long we’ll surely find one.…

“Meantime: You know I’ll be there waiting on that green hillside: and expecting you.”

Back in Hollywood after his stint in the hospital, Scott wrote her at once:

You were a peach throughout the whole trip and there isn’t a minute of it when I don’t think of you with all the old tenderness and with a consideration that I never understood that you had before.… You are the finest, loveliest, tenderest, most beautiful person I have ever known, but even that is an understatement because the length that you went to there at the end would have tried anybody beyond endurance. Everything that I said and that we talked about during that time stands—

Unknown to either of them, this was the last time they would see each other.

As devastating as their vacation together had been, the contact between them renewed Zelda’s feelings for Scott; to some measure it must also have rekindled Scott’s toward her, for in May he was seriously considering bringing Zelda to Hollywood for a month. He had not yet made up with Sheilah, but when he did Zelda remained in North Carolina. Scottie had an attack of appendicitis during her spring term at Vassar and her doctor recommended that she have an appendectomy. Scott decided that this would provide a perfect opportunity for Zelda and Scottie to come together. He arranged for Scottie to have her operation in Asheville and recuperate during the month of July in Zelda’s company.

When Scottie came Zelda said she’d “never seen her so pretty before.…” Their round-faced little girl had become a lively slim blond. Scottie recovered quickly and spent most of the month swimming and taking long walks with her mother; she was also working on a novel she had just begun.

Scott, who was undergoing financial and health troubles on the West Coast, wrote Scottie that she was welcome to come and visit him for the rest of the summer, but he warned her that she might find him “depressing, over-nervous about small things, and dogmatic.…” Above all he wanted to avoid any situations of excitement. Somewhat gruffly he told her that he’d rather not see her at all, “than see you without loving you.” He felt it was imperative for her to realize that her home now was Vassar.

Scottie let her mother read this letter, and Zelda tried to explain to Scott what a burden he put on Scottie, who was, after all, not yet eighteen.

Dearest: I trust that you will not resent this.… [Scottie] bears the best morale a child could possibly have considerring the fact of that absence of the moral support that a conventionally established family conveys, and I think it’s rather a needlessly painful punishment to remind her of the absence of material attributes which to a person of twenty-one every child has a right to the sense of safety.… She is such a particularly brave and self-reliant child that it would be lamentable to allow a sense of the absence of stability to twist her mind with neuroses concerning the necessity to make a living.…

I do not criticize your letter: but I believe that the only right of a parent to share his tragedies with children under age is of a most factual
nature—how much money there is and the technical name of his illness it about the only fallibilites that debutantes are equipped to encompass…and it doesn’t do any good to let them know that one is harassed. Nobody is better aware than I am, and, I believe, so is Scottie, of your generosity, and the seriousness of your constant struggle to provide the best for us. I am most deeply grateful to you for the sustained and tragic effort that you have made to keep us going.… I wasn’t critical, only trying to remind you of the devastating ravages that a sense of insecurity usually manages to establish when theres nothing to do about it.

During Scottie’s period of recovery with her mother she decided Zelda was well enough to live with Mrs. Sayre and no longer needed to remain in the hospital. After all Scott had been through on this score he impatiently wrote Dr. Suitt, who assisted Dr. Carroll with Zelda at Highland Hospital, and suggested that he have a talk with Scottie. He wanted the doctor to mention to Scottie how adversely the menopause could affect Zelda’s mental balance; he warned that Scottie’s attitude toward Zelda could affect “my whole future relation with my daughter.” He did not want her to swing over to the Sayres’ side. It was one of the reasons he hesitated to have her come out to California. “She is a dominant little girl in a polite way and to have her appear here now as a sort of ambassador of what I call the Montgomery point of view—‘throw Zelda on her own immediately’—would be much more than upsetting.”

Although Scottie and Zelda got on well enough that summer, the visit was really only a qualified success. For one thing Scottie was still too young to realize how deeply Zelda resented any advice from her, no matter how harmless it appeared to be on the surface. Zelda concealed her reactions from Scottie, but not from her doctors. For her part Zelda tried very hard, too hard, to quickly re-establish with Scottie a relationship which was largely nonexistent, and which between any mother and seventeen-year-old daughter would have been difficult. Scottie was not, and had probably never been, dependent upon her mother for either direction or emotional sustenance. During Scottie’s visit Zelda wanted to share, as well as oversee, Scottie’s attentions from young men, and when Scottie left Asheville Zelda began referring to herself as “the glamorous Mrs. Fitzgerald.”

But to Scott she confided her aloneness: “My tennis progresses— by which I mean that I can play about half as well as I can play— Its almost demoralizing to have attained the age where all ones attributes are visibly retrogressing: speed, volume…Ashville regales
itself on 3 days of folk dance.… I wish I had a beau but I haven’t got any beaux.…”

By late summer Zelda’s letters to Scott were marked by a forlorn sadness. She wrote about the only things that happened to her, her walks, five miles each day, through fields of phlox and marguerites in the mountains. “Roads lace the mountains to earth, far below and leading home and nowhere, and the people are tan and brown and wreathed in lonliness.” But it was her own loneliness that pierced these letters to Scott.

Writing to Scottie she tried to remind her of times they had shared in the past and of her dreams for her: “Be brown and happy.… Buy yourself a white dress with a long and lovely sash, an ashes of roses sash or a sash as pale and chrystalline as a Greek ocean—and buy yourself a leghorn hat—and you will be as picturesque as a summer path over the meadows.” Zelda was saying—be me, my daughter, as I was.

Time passed slowly for Zelda and she grew more and more aware of its passing, not in any anxious way, but aware of it as a pastoral stream, with seasons changing, flowers to be watched and painted, flowers marking the changes of season, breaking time into rhythms. Scott once wrote Scottie, “Think of the enormous pleasure amounting, almost, to the consolation for the tragedy of life that flowers have been to your mother and your grandmother.”

Again and again Zelda would appeal to him and let him know how much she missed him. “If you flew East I’d be glad—and if I flew West so would I.” She wanted to meet him again, to try for something they had had which she remembered, but which they had lost. Perhaps she was trying to win him back, but only the disadvantages were on her side. She was truly alone now.

When you come won’t you bring me another pair of mocassins because I’m a very good little Indian girl, sometimes, and I deserve them.

And don’t let yourself get drowned in the perfect California climate—We got sunshine here—And springtime too, and weather that’s mostly a raison d’etre—

May I go to France and Greece and Italy? At once, next week—Devotedly, Dear. I wish that I could see you—

Zelda

She also began, cautiously at first but with increasing fervor, to prod Scott on every occasion with what she considered to be constructive
suggestions for leaving Highland. To a certain degree she was echoing her family’s advice to her, but undoubtedly she shared their opinions: “If Alabama should prove an unfortunate venture I can always come back; which I assure you I would do most gratefully rather than run the risk of any further debacles. Having accepted the concept of me as a precarious and dangerous experiment at best, am I to be relegate, at considerable inconvenience to both yourself and myself to invalidism for the rest of my life?”

Dr. Carroll had not heard from Scott for nearly two months. On September 27, 1939, he did. Scott had been ill and was without money. Harold Ober, who had always generously lent him whatever he needed, no longer felt that he could. Consequently, Fitzgerald broke with him, insisting that Ober no longer believed in him. Scott asked Dr. Carroll to trust him for another month and not have Zelda deprived of anything she needed. “As you know I tried to give Zelda every luxury permissible when I could afford it (the trip to Florida, etc.) but it is simply impossible to pay anything, even on installments when one drives in a mortgaged Ford and tries to get over the habit of looking into a handkerchief for blood when talking to a producer.” Grimly he added that the hospital could reimburse itself out of his life insurance if things continued downhill.

October was worse than September and he wrote Zelda: “I am almost penniless—I’ve done stories for
Esquire
because I’ve had no time for anything else with $100.00 bank balances.” Friends of theirs had helped him send Scottie back to Vassar.

After her, you are my next consideration; I was properly moved by your mother’s attempt to send for you—but not enough to go overboard.… I ask only this of you—leave me in peace with my hemorrhages and my hopes, and what eventually will fight through as the
right
to save you, the
permission
to give you a chance.

Your life has been a disappointment, as mine has been too. But we haven’t gone through this sweat for nothing. Scottie has got to survive and this is the most important year of her life.

In the following letter, which is undated, Zelda answered Scott.

Needless to say, your letter somewhat hurt me. Very possibly you do not give thought to the fact that this hospital regimentation, while most excellent for whipping into shape, is very gruelling over long periods of time.… I am now well able to make a social in the bigger sense effort: Mamma would be happy to have me: if any trouble arose I could and
would return here—and short of your possible paranoiacal self-defensive reflex I cant see any legitimization of keeping me under hospitalization much longer.… There is every reason to believe that I am more able to observe the social dictats than yourself—on the evidence of our “vacations” from the hospital—which have been to date a dread affair of doctors and drink and confirmation of the impossibility of any equitable reunion. Although you know this—and that the probabilities are much against our ever having any life together again—you are persistent in not letting me have a chance to exist alone—at least in comfort—in Alabama and make my own orientation. Or even in Ashville. I
might
be able to get a job:…Won’t you, in fairness, please consider this letter from some other basis than that I am your possible enemy and that your first obligation is self-defensive.…

It was in October, 1939, under enormous duress, that Scott began in earnest to write his novel
The Last Tycoon.
It would be about Hollywood, which he would view with a basilisk eye. He wrote Scottie: