by Lee Smith
“I’ll bet you’d like to get your hands on that now, wouldn’t you?” Mrs. Hodges said as we crossed the lobby past the piano.
“Yes, I would,” I said sincerely, though I felt that I would never be able to play as well, or be so much at ease, as that smiling man.
We went through the tall, many-paned doors out onto the wide stone terrace that overlooked a pool area and a long golf course sloping down toward the bowl below that was Asheville. “There we are,” Mrs. Hodges announced, pointing over to the right, “that there’s the hospital,” as indeed it was, also overlooking Asheville from its different vantage point, its own mountain. I could see all the familiar buildings as if they were dollhouses, but we were too far away to spot any people. “Fore!” a man’s voice called out.
“They serve lunch and dinner out here on the terrace in the summertime,” Mrs. Hodges said. “Aah, it’s lovely then, the view. The sunset and the moon and the stars, don’t you know. Why, everybody has been here, everybody, politicians and movie stars . . .” Back inside, we looked at autographed pictures of Mae West, Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Herbert Hoover, and many others hanging on the corridor walls.
Our lunch in the grand dining room, with its view out over the mountains, was by far the fanciest meal I had ever had, surpassing even my breakfast in the dining car on the train. An elegant older man—I thought he looked like a count!—handed us the heavy menus as Moira slipped into her chair.
“Lo, Mum.” She leaned over to kiss Mrs. Hodges on the cheek. “Hi, Evalina, don’t you look pretty!”
Did I? I was wearing a pink matched sweater set, shell and cardigan, the unexpected gift of Mrs. C. I fingered my pearl-tone buttons.
“Now, Miss, order anything you’d like,” Mrs. Hodges directed grandly. “It’s on her!” pointing at Moira.
“Sssh! Hush, Mom,” Moira said. “Or you’ll lose your privileges.” She winked at me.
I read the menu from start to finish, as if it were a novel. It contained many items that were entirely foreign to me, such as Welsh Rarebit and Tomato Aspic.
“I’ll take a nip of the sherry,” Mrs. Hodges said when the aristocratic waiter came back. “Against the cold, you know.”
“I’ll bet you’d like the hot chocolate,” Moira said to me. “It’s quite famous.”
I nodded, then followed their lead in ordering the club sandwich as well, though I wasn’t sure what it was. I was delighted when it arrived in four triangular pieces with a fancy gold fringed toothpick stuck through each one, spearing all manner of meats and cheese within, curvy chips and tiny pickles to the side. “Oh my,” I said without meaning to. “And this hot chocolate is delicious, thank you so much,” I told Moira.
“She’s coming along now, isn’t she?” Mrs. Hodges said to her daughter as if I weren’t there. They launched into a long conversation about the financial problems and disastrous “love life” of yet another of Mrs. Hodges’s daughters while my attention wandered to the other tables, well-dressed and prosperous people such as I had never seen, really, except for our long-ago outings with Mr. Graves. But as I could not bear to think of that time, I began to make up scenarios in my mind for these other diners, their histories and personal lives.
She is an actual princess, that brunette, from Europe, and her husband is so much in love with her, look at him holding her hand across the table. Of course! They are on their honeymoon! While those awful crabby old lady sisters dripping with diamonds have nothing to say to each other, they have worn out all their topics, they are too mean to talk, just staring out hatefully at the rest of us. And that young man eating alone is so handsome, handsome beyond belief, maybe he is a movie star, though obviously he is heartbroken at the present time, perhaps because he has fallen in love with someone unsuitable, and knows he can never, ever have her . . . or maybe she has a wasting disease, or maybe she is crazy, maybe she is over at Highland Hospital right now, taking a rest cure . . . I ate my club sandwich as slowly as possible, savoring every bite, while Mrs. Hodges and her daughter talked on and on. The other diners conversed in hushed tones and the silverware shone and the glasses tinkled all around us and the waiters glided back and forth gracefully through the beautiful room like skaters until suddenly I realized that in fact I was staring straight at Mrs. Fitzgerald, and that man with her—that very man!—must be the famous Mr. Fitzgerald, the author, her husband. By then, I had heard all about him.
The Fitzgeralds sat together on a banquette next to a giant fern in a giant planter, both of their backs against the wall, looking out across their table at the vast dining room before them, and did not speak.
I touched Mrs. Hodges’s sleeve. When she did not respond, I grabbed it. “Isn’t that . . . ?” I started to ask, looking over at them.
“Hush now, Evalina, why yes it is, don’t stare. There’s a good girl.”
But I could not take my eyes off them for they seemed so odd, so unlike the others there in that lively, lovely company. He was much smaller than I had expected, and very pale, though he was undeniably good-looking, with sharp, fine features and glittering green eyes. She wore her stoic, secretive Cherokee face, and toyed with her food. He was drinking a beer directly from the bottle. While I watched, the waiter brought him another, taking that bottle away.
“Thirty a day, they say!” Moira leaned closer. “Thirty bottles a day, and that’s when he’s on the wagon, off the gin! Oh, it’s sad, sad. Such a talent, such a loss.”
“They look so unhappy,” I said inadvertently.
“I should imagine!” Mrs. Hodges snorted. “They’ve worn it all out, I daresay. What a life they’ve led! Dancing all night and jumping into fountains and drinking like fish all the while, mind you. Living in hotels and receiving guests in the bath. Frankly I don’t know what Himself is thinking, imagining that she should ever get well again, and make a proper wife! Who would want her, after all this?”
“Well, who would want him?” Moira asked. “Look at him. He’s up all night, can’t sleep, he’s got the insomnia, you know. Sick as a dog, never eats a thing but a bit of rice or potatoes and gravy, no wonder, imagine the shape his stomach is in! And that room, Lord, Lord. A pigsty!”
“But I heard he has a lady friend . . .” Mrs. Hodges scooted nearer her daughter.
“Oh he does, he does. She’s real nice, a young married woman from Memphis that comes up here by herself, rich as Croesus. She’s mad for him, you can tell. God knows what she thinks she’s doing. It will end in a disaster, of course. But that’s not all. Why, he’s even had fancy ladies up to his room, right here in the Inn, I am not kidding you, Mum”—in answer to her look of disbelief. “You just ask Ruthie, if you don’t believe me. Why, Ruthie’s passed them in the stairwell, close as you and me! And there’s one in particular that’s been up there visiting numerous times. You know that girl down at the Biltmore, the one that gets so dolled up and tells the fortunes, Lottie Stephens her name is, well they say she’s a mulatto . . .”
The red heads merged—the one dulled by grey, the other a riot of wild curls—as the conversation continued in whispers now, punctuated by Mrs. Hodges’s occasional “Why you don’t say!” or “Blessed saints in heaven preserve us!”
Meanwhile I could not keep myself from staring at the Fitzgeralds, though I knew it was rude to stare. I also knew instinctively that they would never notice me anyway, just a skinny little girl in whom they could have no possible interest, lost in a sea of people. I was beneath their notice. Mrs. Fitzgerald wore a purplish coat and a gray cloche hat. She looked dull and almost ugly. He wore a tweed jacket and a white shirt and a red bowtie, incongruously jaunty. Neither one of them ever spoke. They sat like dolls in a window staring out upon the world beyond them, a world they no longer owned. She was smoking. Their waiter came with beer after beer.
“Pity, pity, pity!” Mrs. Hodges concluded with a certain relish, pushing back her chair. Our own waiter returned with the bill, which Moira signed in a fancy, definitive hand, and then we left,
the three of us, as unlikely a trio as any in that elegant dining room that day—Moira back to her post in the lobby, Mrs. Hodges and I back to Highland Hospital in a taxicab. I craned my neck to view the stone arch at the entrance one more time as the taxi bore us rapidly down Sunset Mountain.
“Please, mam, can we come back at Christmas to see the tree?” I asked, and Mrs. Hodges said that we could, if I promised never to tell any of the other patients—my chums!—or anyone else about our lunchtime visit to the Grove Park Inn, since it was strictly against the rules. (Everything was strictly against the rules, unless Dr. C himself ordained it.) I gave my promise, of course, and I never told a soul—perhaps this is the reason that Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald, as I viewed them in the dining room that afternoon, made such an impression upon me; the scene would be permanently etched in my mind.
For there was the oddest thing about Mrs. Fitzgerald, then and always, and this is when I first realized it: she never looked the same, from one day to another. Truly she was like a salamander, or a lizard, shedding its skin, or like a chameleon, changing its color constantly. She never, ever looked the same. It was the oddest facility, almost as if she were empty, her face as blank as those paper dolls we made, that anyone could draw upon, giving them whatever features and expressions they desired . . . or like a lump of clay on the pottery table in the Art Room, that others could take and form to fit the shape of their dreams.
I have thought a lot about this, for even the photographs taken of her vary radically one from another; they appear to be photographs of different people. And in almost none of them can be seen her extraordinary beauty, that quality of intense and shimmering life that animated her when she was truly “on,” especially when she was dancing.
IN FACT, IN the clearest image I have of Mrs. Fitzgerald from this period, she is dancing—dancing, dancing, dancing ecstatically—in a performance at a masquerade ball held at Highland Hospital in 1938.
Not only had she choreographed the entire performance; she had also designed the costumes, such as they were, drawing feverishly in the black notebook she carried about everywhere that spring, when she was again more animated and talkative than anybody, urging all to help with the paper masks and hats, the net skirts and funny costumes that took over the Art Room during this period. Every patient able enough to participate was enlisted, and there we all sat for weeks, making paper moons to hang from the ceiling on strings, and cows to jump over them, for the theme was “Mother Goose.” A big old book of nursery rhymes had appeared in the Art Room for inspiration. I paged through it, fascinated, as I had never heard any of these odd and charming little poems. I don’t know who came up with the idea—Miss Malone perhaps, or perhaps Mrs. Fitzgerald herself—but it truly was inspired, as everyone except me, grown-ups and children alike, seemed to have some familiarity with Mother Goose, and this theme gave everybody the chance to dress up, to become somebody other than the broken, sick people we really were . . . or, at the very least, to put on a silly hat!
And we made silly hats by the dozen in the Art Room, colorful cones with puffy balls of cotton at the top and ribbons hanging down all around, or top hats created by making a black tube of construction paper, then setting it down on a hollow circle carefully cut from cardboard. The average person could never understand, I believe, how boring it is to be crazy—to be unable to live a regular life, unable to have a regular family or friends or a job, for instance, unable sometimes even to read or think or do anything except smoke, perhaps, on a veranda, staring into space. How wonderful it is, then, to make a cardboard hat, or a giant paper flower! To have, even for a moment, even if it’s all make-believe, a happy childhood.
Mrs. Fitzgerald herself chose to be “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.”
“I shouldn’t wonder! She’ll be grand at it!” Mrs. Hodges snorted when she heard this news.
Mrs. Fitzgerald chose a half-dozen others, young women and girls, to be the “silver bells and cockleshells and pretty maids all in a row” in “Mary’s” garden; each was fitted with a loose, silvery blouse and pink net skirt, worn over a leotard and tights. “Mary” was the soloist—prima ballerina—as well as choreographer and director of the grand finale, a “Flower Dance.”
And I—I was directly involved in this ambitious project, too, for Mrs. Carroll had pushed me into playing the piano for the entire production: first, the march of all the nursery-rhyme characters into the ballroom, then an appropriate musical interlude between each performance, then the “Waltz of the Flowers,” from the Nutcracker.
Our few rehearsals of the “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary” dance were disastrous, as one or another of the “flowers” always burst into tears or ran offstage in a fury, though really all they had to do was kneel in artful positions upon the stage while Mrs. Fitzgerald recited her own poem and danced, after which they were to rise and “bloom” in turn, finishing up with a simple step in unison before their twirling finale. But my goodness, the fireworks!
“She kicked me, on purpose!” Virginia cried out on the very afternoon of the ball. “That little bitch!” flailing out at Grace Barker, a new girl, who doubled up and fell forward weeping onto the stage.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Lily muttered.
“Get up now, dear, this won’t do,” said Mrs. Fitzgerald. “No temperament. You don’t have time for it. You have a performance tonight.”
Miraculously, Grace obeyed her.
We all marveled at this new, calm Mrs. Fitzgerald with her black notebook—“Cool as a cucumber, she is!” Mrs. Hodges pronounced.
As for myself, I was more excited than I had ever been; anticipation was not an emotion I had had much cause to feel. Apprehension, yes, even fear—but not anticipation.
“HOLD STILL,” MRS. Carroll said, buttoning up the back of my blue silk frock herself, a hand-me-down from her grown daughter. Mrs. Hodges stood by with her needle and pincushion, prepared to alter the fit if need be, but “Perfect!” Mrs. Carroll breathed, smoothing the liquid silk down over my nonexistent hips. “Look now.” She led me to the long mirror on the back of the door that opened into her own private dressing room, where I had never been before, and suddenly there I stood, a thin, unrecognizable girl in fashionable new shoes called “French heels” and a long shiny dress as blue as the sky, with flyaway curls down to her shoulders and big blue eyes and rosy red dots on her cheeks that looked like rouge, though I wore none. Mrs. Carroll grabbed my chin and tilted it up to the light. She smoothed pink lipstick on my lips. It felt good, and tasted delicious, like strawberries. “There now. What do you think?”
“I think I look beautiful,” I said sincerely.
They both burst into laughter, though Mrs. Hodges dabbed at her eyes.
“Don’t you get nervous out there now,” she said as she helped me into my old coat.
“You don’t have to worry. Evalina will not be nervous,” Mrs. Carroll announced grandly, arranging her own evening cape around her shoulders just so. “Why, Evalina doesn’t have a nervous bone in her body, isn’t that right, honey?” She smiled at me. “She is already a professional, Mrs. Hodges, with a brilliant career ahead of her. I knew it the moment I first heard her play. She’s the real thing.” I was to repeat this phrase, doggedly and sometimes desperately, over and over in my mind in the years to come.
But in all truth, she was right. I was not nervous at all, despite the fact that we had not had a dress rehearsal. I seated myself at the grand piano onstage and warmed up the crowd by playing “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Mighty Lak’ a Rose” by ear while viewing the Great Hall, now hung with glittering suns and moons, while cows, dogs, cats, fiddles, and real spoons borrowed from the dining hall dangled at the ends of their strings. These decorations came from my favorite nonsense rhyme of all:
Hey, diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle,
The cow jumped over the moon;
The little dog laughed to see such sport,
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
Suc
h silliness astonished me—I had had no chance at silliness, so I had not much aptitude for it, either. Still, I was delighted.
The Great Hall was transformed utterly, as were the partygoers, all in fancy dress, patients and staff and townspeople alike. Looking out upon this crowd from my perfect vantage point at the piano onstage, I really couldn’t make any distinction among them. They mingled and chatted, a vibrant sea of color beneath me. I played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “Moonlight Bay.” Unobtrusively the flowers and maids slipped out onstage and knelt or sat and bowed their heads in their dormant positions—all nine of them! even the obstreperous Grace.
I hit five stirring major chords—the prearranged signal—and the golden curtains parted as the Grand Parade began. Here they all came, the characters from the nursery rhymes marching in ragged step as I played “The Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” They crossed the stage, came down the steps, and made a full tour of the ballroom, to continuing applause, then tramped back up on stage to form a semicircle behind the still motionless flowers. I finished with a commanding flourish as Mr. Pugh himself stepped forward first—a surprise to all of us, even the other performers!—elegant in a top hat, wearing a suit with an enormous flowing purple silk tie and a yellow waistcoat stuffed with a pillow as he declaimed:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall,
And all the King’s horses, and all the King’s men
Could not put Humpty together again.
Everybody clapped, and I played a little interlude as he bowed and went back to his place. Though improvised, it was easy, easy, my fingers filled with a power I didn’t know I possessed.
The Gould twins followed, skittering out in bright polka-dot sacklike dresses, each carrying a pail, to recite “Jack and Jill.” They blinked in the stage lights and seemed totally surprised by the applause.
Enormously fat Mr. Lewinski stepped forward with a pie to proclaim, in his funny accent, “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie . . .” He gave a big wink as he held up his plum, and left the stage in a funny skedaddle walk.
