by Sally Koslow
“I fell in love with a pugnacious reporter who has become as domestic as a tabby cat. Tomorrow, darning socks?”
“I have other ideas.”
Tonight ends our forced celibacy. We are nervous as virgins. Scott unwraps me like a present down to my newly bought garland of lacy underthings, and we proceed in a courtly minuet that turns into voluptuous, elongated movement. He smiles above me, purring verbal caresses I return.
“Good to be back where we belong,” he says when it ends, blowing smoke rings, looking rather pugnacious himself.
“To the future.”
The following week, I come home from a shopping trip, eager to show Scott three new dresses, each more heavenly than the next.
“Don’t you think three is a bit extravagant?” he chides in the hectoring tone I’ve heard in letters to Scottie that he’s read aloud.
“You know I have to look the part.” Conscientious coquette.
“Nevertheless, I think I’ve made myself clear.” He galumphs out of the room, his verbal spanking leaving me peeved. I pay for my clothing, along with my rent, and I’ve recently gotten a raise.
The next chance I have to corner Frances, who does Scott’s banking, I ask how much money he has in his account. She hesitates.
“Franny,” I say, “this may seem intrusive, but I assure you my inquiry is in Scott’s best interest.”
“He has enough left to get him through the next four months,” she says, “if he’s frugal.” No more Brown Derby blowouts, no trips to Santa Barbara as we made a few weeks ago, no more hand-built bookshelves or expensive records. I thank her and hatch a plan.
What I know of Max Perkins, Scott’s editor at Scribner’s, is that he is not merely skilled, but fatherly, generous, and fond of Scott. We have never met, though Scott has made him aware of our relationship. Understanding how Scott appropriates his life in his fiction, I’m certain Max recognizes me as Kathleen in the early chapters he read of Tycoon.
Dear Max , the muse decides to write.
I want you to know that The Love of the Last Tycoon is coming along beautifully and furthermore, that Scott has not had a drink for a year. He has become devoted to finishing his novel, which, I am convinced, may be his best work yet. I hope you will agree. Beyond reporting this, I have another reason for writing, though I ask you to never mention this correspondence to Scott. What I propose would injure his pride.
I am enclosing a check for two thousand dollars. I would like you to give it to Scott as an advance against future royalties of Tycoon. A vote of confidence, as it were. If you would add a few thousand to this amount I—and, I’m sure, Scott—would be very grateful. Were he to get this money now, he would be able to fully commit to his novel rather than interrupt his work to take studio jobs in order to pay his bills, which as you know, include Scottie’s tuition at Vassar and Zelda’s fees for Highland Hospital.
My initiative may be unorthodox, but I believe it would make all the difference to Scott if he knew that you and Scribner’s were behind him. Also, please understand that even if the novel makes millions, I do not expect to be reimbursed.
The money is Scott’s that he gave me last year, deposited in the bank, earning interest. I mail my letter with no regret and wait to see if my conniving will pay dividends.
It is a shock when I notice that Scott’s weekly letter to Zelda, which he leaves next to the front door for Frances to mail, is addressed not to North Carolina, but Alabama. I sit on this discovery for a few days, but over dinner one night try to ask casually, “Has Zelda been discharged?”
Scott reacts as if I’ve hosed him with cold water. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious. It’s wonderful news if she’s healthy enough to no longer live in the sanitarium.” Wonderful for her.
“She hasn’t been in Highland for six months. Her doctor decided she can live with her mother in Montgomery, just as the Sayres always wanted.”
I have many questions, but the one I ask is, “How’s it going?”
“It depends on whom you ask. Mama Sayre says it’s perfectly splendid and long overdue, but she’s always blamed the cuckoo husband for her daughter’s situation. If you ask Scottie, poor girl, her mother is babbling nonsense half the time. I tell Scottie if you live in the South, no one will notice.”
But it isn’t funny. What if Zelda improves enough to reunite with Scott? What if she joins him in Hollywood? Worse, what if he moves to Alabama?
“Well, good for Zelda,” I say. “She must have excellent doctors.”
“Charlatans I no longer have to pay, so at least there’s that.”
For days I can barely breathe. Scott has told me his marriage binds him only legally, but I know the depth of his Catholic-boy guilt and sense of obligation. Now that Scott has his drinking under control, I cannot risk having Zelda decimate our relationship.
I choose to respond in the best way I can imagine. Following the ancient wisdom of act first, apologize later, I toss my diaphragm.
Chapter 47
1940
I’ve finished my story about the character not-to-be-mistaken-for-Scottie. Scott tells me it’s possibly publishable and is determined to turn me into a writer capable of crafting more than another story or gee-whiz conjecture about whether Charles Boyer wears a toupee. He believes the world is waiting for a memoir by the gorgeous Miss Graham and to that end, has bought me a costly ledger of tobacco-colored leather embossed with my initials. In it, he expects me to plan my future book.
“Have you noticed how I work?” he asks.
Would it be possible to spend any time with the man and not notice?
“If I think of something, I write it down, right away. I dig it all out like diamonds—one sparkler to the cubic ton of dull, grey coal. You can always rewrite, but you may never recapture what you notice or think as vividly as the first time. Take notes, not just your own observations and things people say, but what you remember from your childhood.”
“What little I remember, I’m trying to forget.”
“Nonsense, Sheilo. Be proud of how far you’ve come. You’re my Gatsby.”
Poor imposter got involved with careless people, but Gatsby had his good points. “Nothing is more insufferable than a flawless character and you, sweetheart, have somewhat contradictory qualities that make for an interesting heroine—optimistic but cautious, brave but secretive, dreamy but sensible.”
“Cautious? Secretive? Sensible?” though it’s true and said with affection. When Scott’s writing goes well, he’s as light as a dancing sunbeam, which is the sort of hackneyed phrase that comes to my mind, proof that the author Scott thinks I can be will never exist. I remember the metaphors I tossed about like rice at a wedding in Gentleman Crook, and have no confidence that I can do better all these years later.
“Thank you for the handsome notebook. I promise I’ll try to be worthy of it.”
“You’ll use it?”
“Yes, Scott.” Eventually. Maybe. Unlikely.
We are sitting in my living room and start to play a recording of Mozart’s Così fan tutte. I try to listen while I read the libretto and Scott works out military tactics. He is winning the war with his book, but General Fitzgerald has lost every battle in Europe. When the opera ends, he announces that he needs some air and is off for cigarettes.
“Start the Bach. I’ll be back soon,” he says. “Twenty minutes.” Although the temperature is sixty-one degrees, he bundles himself into a grey topcoat, black scarf, and a homburg, as if he just parachuted in from Wall Street.
Twenty minutes pass. No Scott. I picture him at Schwab’s paging through magazines. I’ve never seen him walk by a Colliers or Saturday Evening Post that he wasn’t tempted to open so he could rant about the inferiors being published rather than F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Forty minutes pass. I begin to worry in earnest and am grateful when he staggers through the door, though I see at once that he is pale. I rush to his side as he flops into my green armchair. “What happ
ened?”
He plucks a Raleigh from his pocket, lights it with disquieting slowness, takes a long drag, and speaks in a voice worthy of Edgar Allan Poe. “I had the spookiest sensation at Schwab’s, as if the world around me was going dim, little by little.”
The chorus swelling to Bach’s Singet dem Herrn adds melodrama to Scott’s narration that I do not need. I switch off the music. “Do you think you had another seizure?”
“No, there wasn’t pain. This time I was dizzy and clammy and faint. I had to ask the man at the counter if I could sit somewhere.” He puts his hat in his lap, loosens his scarf, and shakes his head. “I felt like my own grandpa. Thoroughly embarrassing.”
“I’ll get you some water and help you out of this coat. You’re overheated.” I’m also thinking it wasn’t prudent to have enjoyed one another in bed both this morning and last night, even if the second time my middle-aged lover boy initiated it. Scott most likely needs just ordinary rest.
The next day he insists on seeing the doctor—alone. “It was a cardiac spasm,” he announces on his return.
“Not a heart attack?”
“The doc didn’t use those words.”
Thank God. When John Wheeler had a heart attack he was out flat on his back for six weeks, though now he has returned to work and is, he claims, in the pink.
“Do you have any restrictions?”
“No stairs.”
The next step comes to me as if foreordained. “You’ll move into my second bedroom till we find you your own place.”
Scott’s eyebrows arch to his high forehead. “But Sheilo, that’s where you and your secretary work.”
“Don’t be silly. We’ll switch to the dining room, and Frances and I will look for a different apartment for you, on the ground floor, somewhere nearby. You’ll be able to move soon enough. Staying with me is simply temporary.”
I try to feign nonchalance, but inside I am cheering. Scott will now be as physically close as I feel him to be emotionally. I’ll watch over my love with vigilance and affection, offering him the attention he requires and that I am as eager as a bride to bestow. I’ll be the next best thing to Mrs. Fitzgerald. The real version may elude me, but having spent half my life playing let’s-pretend, I believe I can be at peace with an almost-marriage.
Taking care of Scott will be different from the vile servitude of nursing my mother, because I’m convinced she never loved me. I certainly stopped loving her the moment I was left at the Asylum. For all his failings, Scott does love me, deeply, and I love him. What’s more, looking after him will be my choice, as it wasn’t when Mama fell ill. No one is destroying my future. Scott is my future.
“One more thing. Intimacy is out again,” he says primly, “until the cardiograms improve. But they will. You know what Dr. Nelson says, ‘the heart heals. ’” He imitates the doctor’s baritone. “Your old man isn’t finished yet.”
“I never thought you were. We’ll be back in business soon enough,” I say, and I kiss him long and sweetly.
Scott moves to Hayworth Avenue. For the first time in our almost four years together, we thumb our nose at the movie industry’s smug moralism by openly living together.
Scott has had a lifetime of dress rehearsals for being an invalid. They serve him well. Ensconced at his lap desk during the day, he becomes king of his bed, fluffing pillows, twirling the dial on the radio, and churning out pages by the dozen. Frances ferries them to his flat on Laurel, returns the typed copy to the author to correct, and the loop begins anew, as if Scott is manufacturing shoes or gloves. He’s chipper, partly because he’s heard from Max, who said he’d reconsidered and would be pleased to give him a small advance after all. Two thousand. It’s a partial victory for me, but a bigger victory for Scott.
“Aha! Told you so!” is all he says the day the letter and check arrive, but Scott’s confidence orbits throughout my flat. I love when he calls out remarks like “What film-land feast are you serving readers in Milwaukee today?” when he sees my secretary or me pass in the hall. Our life is harried in the same buoyant way it might be if we were preparing for a party.
Every weekday at five o’clock, my assistant leaves and at six we eat the maid’s T-bone, peas, and baked potatoes. After dinner we stroll to Schwab’s and treat ourselves to chocolate malts while we discuss Bleak House, the current assignment for College of One.
“Dickens’s best novel,” Scott proclaims.
“I have to disagree.” Which I dare to do now. “I love the description of London’s jumbled shops, but Esther is too good to be believable.”
“You’re reading only for story,” Scott says. “You need to look at craft. It’s astonishing. Before I start writing a novel I always reread Dickens along with Dostoevsky.”
At night we snuggle in my room, breathing in unison until Scott returns to the bed next door or, when insomnia wins, walks the flat. Hearing him quietly tuning in to the radio in the middle of the night, when he thinks I’m asleep, makes me smile, as it does to see his toothbrush parked next to mine. I love having Scott nearby, although it will be for merely weeks. In January, he’ll move into an apartment only blocks away on Fountain Avenue that Frances found.
Since cardiograms show slight improvement, we decide to attend a screening of Little Nellie Kelly, adapted from George M. Cohan’s Broadway hit. We can use a shot of musical comedy, especially with my young friend Judy Garland in the lead. Only when we pull into the parking lot do I remember that tonight’s projection room is a Sisyphean vault to the second floor. If I point this out, I worry that in a fit of irrational rebellion, Scott will attempt to sprint up the stairs like a Princeton freshman.
To preempt that disaster, I take one step out of the car, flinch, and cry out, “Oh bugger! These shoes. I never should have worn such high heels.” I turn to Scott and groan, “I’ve twisted my ankle. Could you please help me?” Trying not to lean on him, I take his arm and at a stately pace we proceed upstairs. It takes a solid five minutes.
During movies, I look forward to Scott’s whispering punditry as he points out abysmal acting, stilted dialogue, and specious plot twists. His critique is better than most films. But tonight, despite a heavy pour of Irish accents he usually mimics, he’s mute. Even Judy’s first, decidedly awkward, on-film kiss to the fatherly George Murphy fails to spark a reaction. I attribute this to the story line—newlyweds move to New York City, as did he and Zelda—and I worry about a siege of melancholia. But when the film ends, Scott admits that for the last two hours he’s been light-headed and queasy.
“Take my arm when we walk out,” I say under my breath. “It might be the grippe. You’ve been working too hard.”
“People will assume I’m drunk.” After a year of fortitude to stay on his custom model of the wagon, Scott’s dignity is at stake, but his distress wins. I smile at people we know, point to my ankle, and shrug as we slowly walk to the car, which I proceed to drive. At home, he falls immediately to sleep and stays that way for ten hours—a personal best.
“If I could sleep like that every night,” he says in the morning, stretching, “I’d already be starting my next novel while we sailed around the world on Tycoon’s royalties.”
“Do you think you should call Dr. Nelson and tell him about last night?”
“I was just worn out,” he insists. “I’m all better now.”
I don’t argue. Scott’s expansive mood continues to the afternoon, when he asks me what I’d like for Christmas.
“Your good health.” It’s the truth, although I do have a second, bigger wish.
“Then we’ll leave it up to God and Santa, but I want to think of something special for Frances,” he says. “Perfume?”
“Too personal. She might misinterpret. How about a cashmere cardigan? I saw one at Saks and that apartment of yours is chilly.”
“I knew you’d know. And Scottie? She’s a tough one.”
Not really. Scottie wants the same luxuries most girls find indispensable at nineteen. Last ye
ar she asked Papa for twenty dollars to buy a gown for her debut. He not only refused, but he belittled the notion of a coming-out party—because, I suspect, he had no money to stage or attend it. Where Scottie is concerned, Scott is maddeningly inconsistent. He insists on Vassar—not, say, UCLA, whose tuition is more within his budget—yet he denigrates Scottie when she wants to participate in one of the grand traditions of the set to which she belongs. I try to intervene, but tread lightly. Scottie Fitzgerald is Zelda’s daughter, not mine.
This didn’t stop me from secretly sending her money to buy the dress. The loneliness of being a girl on her own is something I know all too well, and while no child in America gets more letters from Daddy, Scott hasn’t seen his daughter for fourteen months. I adore that girl, and have been waiting to present another idea.
“Why don’t you give my silver-fox jacket to Scottie?” With our decorous social life, I rarely wear it. I expect Scott to suggest that I’m ungrateful for wanting to give away his gift to me. I am wrong.
“Isn’t the style too mature? She’s a little bug of a thing.”
“Isn’t Frances’s father a furrier?”
Mr. Kroll remodels the coat—at no cost—and my fox migrates East for its own coming-out party, accompanied by a letter Scott dictates, signed by me.
Please send your father a picture of you in the fur or he won’t be able to recognize you next you meet, which he hopes is soon. Warm wishes for everything you want in the New Year, and know that while your father has not been well, he is better and—this is the best part—hasn’t had a drink in a year.
The next day Scott sends a letter signed by Ecclesiastes Fitzgerald, reminding Scottie to write three notes: to me, to Frances, and to him to show to me. “ A giver gets no pleasure in a letter acknowledging a gift late even though it crawls with apologies,” says sermonizing dad. I, however, am not paying note to when an acknowledgment arrives from Scottie. I am counting the days in another matter.
Chapter 48
