Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  I’d said as much to Scott during a recent outing to Geneva, begged him, “Deo, just tell ’em you’re satisfied with the job they did and now we’re going back to Paris.”

  Being away from the clinic made me feel wholly human, reminded me that I’d once had a life as real as any of the people we passed on the quai.

  Scott took my hand. “These doctors are the finest psychiatric minds in the world. We can’t second-guess their knowledge.”

  “But the expense—”

  “I’m handling it. Of more concern to me is that Dr. Forel says you’re still resisting some of their suggestions. Even though you feel better, you aren’t fully cured.”

  “Forel isn’t God. And even if he was, I don’t understand how we can afford—”

  “The Post has been taking everything I write,” Scott said, quite pleased with himself. “My productivity’s the best it’s been in ages.”

  Not only was he pleased, he was happy. I was suddenly suspicious. “Are you seeing someone?”

  “What? No!”

  “Then why don’t you want me out of there?” Then I realized he’d given me the answer already. “Never mind,” I said. “I understand.”

  Now Dr. Brandt was saying, “A judgment, yes.”

  “Okay then. Let’s get this done. Only—you have to guarantee that Scott doesn’t get to read what I write. No editorial oversight from my husband. No consulting. You can’t even tell him. If he knows I’m doing it, he’ll insist on having a look. There’d be no point, if that’s how it goes.”

  “Yes, we agree.” Dr. Brandt nodded. “We wish to make the objective evaluation.”

  Knowing that was impossible, I said, “I would like that very much.”

  He gave me some pages of blank paper and a pencil and left me to it. I started with this:

  The Recollections of one Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, as begun on this day, 21 March 1931, at the suggestion of Dr. Forel

  You said to begin anywhere, so here is a poem I especially like, by Emily Dickinson:

  I know a place where summer strives

  With such a practiced frost,

  She each year leads her daisies back,

  Recording briefly, “Lost.”

  But when the south wind stirs the pools

  And struggles in the lanes,

  Her heart misgives her for her vow,

  And she pours soft refrains

  Into the lap of adamant,

  And spices, and the dew,

  That stiffens quietly to quartz,

  Upon her amber shoe.

  Even from here, from Prangins today, when I haven’t seen my daughter in three months and no one’s willing to say whether I’m truly well or how much longer it might be before I get to leave, I sit bathed in sunshine that streams through the window and feel a sense of hopefulness, of possibility. Spring always did make me feel this way, before. So I think this is progress.

  * * *

  You asked me to say what happened, so I’ll tell you. Scott might tell you a different story about the same things—but then, hasn’t he always?

  The world was strange and perilous when I met Scott in 1918, with the Great War in progress and influenza raging across every continent, taking more than fifty million lives by 1919. This horror, along with knowing that fifteen million soldiers and civilians were killed in the war, infected everyone’s spirits if not our bodies. Life seemed more tenuous than ever. But Scott and I were lively and eager, unfettered by conventional ideals. We were sailing at the leading edge of a storm.

  Maybe we asked too much of everyone and everything right from the start. Our parents were kids during the American Civil War, you know; their world was a divided one. Scott and I weren’t supposed to even mingle much, let alone fall in love. And to make it worse, Scott wanted to be a professional novelist, which was not really a recognized occupation. We didn’t care. For us, it was a time to make everything up, to create our lives from scratch using unfamiliar ingredients and untested methods—only to now arrive at this unforeseeable result.

  Now that the stories about us, about “the Fitzgeralds,” have grown like wild Chinese wisteria past the borders of cocktail party gossip and are starting to encroach on literary myth, I hear that some of my friends have started saying I made Scott the writer he is—and you can imagine how well that goes over with him. His friends—and especially one in particular—are saying I’ve held him back, interfered with his talent and his work ethic—which is of course what he has said, too.

  Depending on who you ask, you’ll hear Scott’s either a misunderstood genius or a pathetic son-of-a-bitch who never met a liquor he didn’t want to cozy up to. He drinks too much, it’s true, and he has not always been good to me or to himself, but I think he’s broken somewhere inside, and he drinks to try to fill the cracks.

  * * *

  I’ve had a letter from one of my dearest, oldest friends, Sara Haardt, saying that she’s marrying another old friend of ours, Henry Mencken. She’s been frail with tuberculosis for a long while, but that didn’t sway him in the least.

  She wrote, “I’m not sure I’ll be any good at marriage, having gone without for so long. Your letters from over the years make a good primer, though; for all the troubles, I’ve never seen devotion such as you and Scott enjoy.”

  Sara must have had spies in Annecy, as Scott and my sweet baby girl and I have just returned from the most perfect two weeks there. We danced and dined and it was even better than old times for having Scottie always at my side, her soft hand in mine, and at night, Scott’s reassuring form curled behind me. I wish, oh, you have no idea how much, that I could bottle up those days and then climb inside that bottle too.

  * * *

  Here’s an anecdote, a memory that comes to mind as I’m writing: For our first trip to Europe, in 1921, we sailed on the Aquitania. There was a lot of drinking and, when the seas got rough, a lot of nervous humor over the prospect of going down with the ship. That would be the end for us all, everyone said.

  “Not for me,” I declared, and Scott said, “That’s right. My wife is not only beautiful, she’s an excellent swimmer. You’ll save us both, darling, won’t you?”

  That’s what I’m doing here, I’m swimming.

  * * *

  After reviewing the journal I’d been keeping for three months, Dr. Forel came in to see me. I was up and dressed and had eaten my usual fruit and yogurt, but was still shaking off the effects of my sleep medication.

  “Bonjour,” he said, all bright and cheerful. He wore a tweedy brown suit with vest and tie, and his beard—also tweedy—looked freshly trimmed.

  “Not so bon. I would like to try eliminating the sleeping pills.”

  “Eh? This is unexpected. Your regimen has been most effective; it would be unwise to alter it now.”

  “I always feel like my head’s been stuffed with cotton and I have to spend the morning plucking it out through my ears.”

  “It’s so?” He frowned, then smiled and said, “Ah, with you this is not a literal statement. What did you tell me before—such a thing is spoken figuratively, yes? Except when one is experiencing delusions. But you are past that.”

  “Past the delusions, still stuck on the metaphors. So how about it?”

  “I will consult with Dr. Brandt. Your quality of rest is of great import, as you are aware.”

  He gestured to the pair of ladder-back chairs that faced my window, and we sat down there. “We are finding much that is of interest,” he said, handing the book over to me. “We notice a pleasing amount of melancholia in your recollections. Clearly you have an enduring affection for your husband—would you say this is the case?”

  “Of course I do. We’ve been through everything together.”

  Outside, clouds—like the figurative cotton from my head—filled a lavender-blue sky. A tall, thin woman in a broad-brimmed hat shuffled along the garden path, her arm held securely by a young nurse.

  “Yet this affection, it was greatly diminished
before you came to us,” Dr. Forel said. “Shrouded by your anger. It is like this?”

  “It was a difficult time, that’s what I would say. I was a real mess. Angry? Sure, before my collapse I’d been real angry with him. He was drunk all the time. He let me down.”

  “And also you let him down, this we have established, no? A wife owes fidelity of all kinds. Her husband, her family, these are the things that must be foremost in her mind, always. When this is not the case, there are breakdowns. Some severe—as with your situation, when indeed the woman has pulled far away from her domestic circle, that place where the only genuine happiness can be found.”

  In the garden, the tall woman stopped abruptly. I could see the nurse speaking to her, but she didn’t respond, just stared off into the hedge. Poor thing, I thought, understanding too well her condition despite not knowing anything about it, or her.

  I said, “I’m not saying I don’t agree about what can happen—’cause I sure was awfully unhappy for a long time—but you know, sometimes being away from Scott, being in class with Madame and the others, sometimes that was the only place I was happy.”

  Dr. Forel nodded. “Yes, that is part of the delusion’s complex. Schizophrenia divides the mind, deceives it. You are showing us, however, that your capacity to recognize the consequences of your choices is returning. I am persuaded that you now see the effects of your failure to create and maintain a secure hearth, which, had you done so, would have tethered your husband in ways that would have prevented his difficulties.”

  So there it was, in plain enough English: my main failure, the reason for all our troubles, was that I hadn’t created a secure hearth, a tether for my husband. I wondered if it was possible to tether Scott, but kept that thought to myself.

  “Yes,” Dr. Forel said, rising, “we are pleased.”

  “Well, since I’ve also mastered shuffleboard and woven more baskets than there were locusts in Egypt, will you consent to my release?”

  He smiled as if he found my question quaint. “Not yet. But you may cease the journal. And the baskets.” He started to bow, then stopped himself. “I would, however, like to pose a question, which you may, if you wish, explore in the journal before we meet next: What is woman’s duty to her husband, philosophically speaking? You are a person of true intelligence; I’m interested to know your thoughts.”

  A Woman’s Duty in Marriage

  The specific details of how a woman enacts her duty to her husband will depend upon many different circumstances. What is the couple’s social standing? What is the husband’s occupation? Do the couple have children? Do they have money? What is his personality—independent? Needy? Demanding? A woman has to assess her circumstances with thoughtfulness and thoroughness before she knows how she will be expected to comport herself in her role as wife. Once she understands what’s needed, she must endeavor to anticipate her husband’s desires in all matters. She must make the creation of a stable, comfortable household her primary occupation, however that translates to her particular situation.

  Nature has created roles for male and female, which in the case of the higher species such as humans comes with a moral component as well. Because most women are supported by their husbands entirely, the women are bound to offer support of an equivalent nature in return. This is a cooperative arrangement, and a correct one.

  When I finished the essay, I thought, There, that oughta do the trick, and presented it to Dr. Forel with contrived—but apparently convincing—sincerity. He and Scott agreed that after sixteen months they’d finally, successfully reeducated me, and it was time for me to go home. If the reeducation had actually succeeded, that might have been the end of it. As it was, the worst was yet to come.

  50

  Believing Europe had turned toxic, or at least toxic for us, we moved to a charming little house in Montgomery, where I would have my family to help me readjust.

  Little had changed in the eleven years we’d been away, but for me, everything had changed. I had changed. Freedom from Prangins had been my greatest desire, yet like a slave after emancipation, I wasn’t quite sure how to exist in this quiet, calm, open-ended world, how to be a mother to my cautious daughter, a wife to any man—let alone one as observant and particular as Scott. When he left Scottie and me for an unexpected six-week job in Hollywood for MGM, my moods and my confidence rolled like the ocean in a storm, leaving me seasick, sometimes, and scared. I’d been forbidden to resume ballet—and was so out of condition that I was hardly tempted anyway—so to steady myself I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote: essays, stories, letters to friends, an article for Esquire, the start of a book.

  My father had been ill when we arrived in September, having had an awful bout of the flu in the spring and then pneumonia in summer, which laid him lower still. Daddy was legendary in Alabama, still on the bench at seventy-three, still a vital legal and moral force for the state. His old body just could not keep up with his stubbornly healthy mind, though, and he passed in November, while Scott was still in Hollywood.

  At the end, he was such a small version of himself—but still Daddy: “I don’t know why you don’t divorce that boy” were among his last words to me.

  * * *

  “What’s that on your neck?” Scott asked. “Did you get bit? Do we need to go inside?”

  It was February of ’32, and we were on the veranda at the towering, pink Don CeSar resort in Tampa, Florida, during our “getaway on the Gulf,” a little holiday for just the two of us. Scott hated the Montgomery quiet, the calm. Home two months from Hollywood, he’d gotten stir-crazy. My mother and Marjorie’s constant hovering over the three of us hadn’t helped a bit. We would move again soon.

  There on the veranda, he’d been elaborating on a new plan for his novel. Where originally the story had been about matricide, now it would be the story of a psychiatrist who falls in love with one of his patients, a poor, sad woman in a mental hospital. He’d lay the story in Europe as planned, he’d use the places we’d been, the people we’d met, all the things he’d learned while helping Dr. Forel treat my illness, he said. “You don’t mind, do you, darling?”

  And then he noticed the spot.

  I put my hand up to where he pointed and felt angry skin. My fingers knew too well what was happening. My hand trembled as I lowered it. “Eczema.”

  “From what? You’re not having trouble, are you? You seem fine.”

  I shrugged, not trusting my voice. I’d been trying hard to remain steady, to avoid overexcitement, to eat properly. I, too, had thought I was more or less fine.

  I am, I am, I am. Nothing to worry about. Do not worry! Do not scratch! Think about the palm trees, look at the water, isn’t it lovely here? Nice place, nice trip, nice husband to bring me here …

  A few days later, a second spot appeared, and the first had grown larger. Something was going very wrong. I wasn’t as well as I thought. My confidence crumbled. “I need to go home, Deo. I need to see my doctor before this gets any worse.” My voice was now as shaky as my hands.

  * * *

  The doctor recommended a rest cure at the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s Phipps Clinic. Some time away from anything or anyone who might upset me—Scott interpreted this to mean Mama—would surely set me right again.

  My official overseer was gruff, formal Dr. Adolf Meyer, the very prototype of a rigid German overlord. At my admission exam, he poked and frowned and squinted as he looked me over, saying, “Vut haf vee here?”

  I frowned and squinted back at him and refused to answer.

  His assistant, Dr. Mildred Squires, was a godsend. Unlike her male counterparts, she drifted through the institution’s ugliness like a rare butterfly, somehow above the coarseness of it all. To me she was Sara Murphy in a white coat and spectacles, dispensing care and wisdom and encouraging you to rise above the indignities of your treatment—the intestinal cleanses, the stupor that followed sedation—and assert your humanity, if only to yourself. I loved her.

  To right myself, I
would write myself. Well, not me, exactly, but a version of me, and a version of Scott, and a dramatization of the not-me’s life, including her struggles as the ballet-dancing wife of a popular artist, and the breakdown that came as a result. The more I wrote, the less I itched, to the point where I nearly forgot the eczema altogether and it began to fade.

  Weeks passed in a blur of story, a complete escape into the depths of my imagination. I’d named my not-Scott after his first novel’s protagonist, Amory Blaine. To me, this was a nod, a public sign that I had studied at École Fitzgerald and was a devotee. As Scott had done with This Side of Paradise and Hemingway had done with The Sun Also Rises, I’d fictionalized my characters while maintaining, I thought, the truth of our lives and our society. I tried to marry modernist art to modern fiction, using words to paint vivid, fractured images that would evoke my desired responses. When the handwritten draft was done, I had an aide find me someone to turn it into a typescript.

  “Two copies,” I told the young woman when I gave her my handwritten pages. “Thanks so much.”

  Dr. Squires stopped in at my room one day and, upon seeing typed, stacked pages done up with twine, said, “You’re not finished with your book already?”

  That stack was a beautiful thing to have sitting atop my desk, an affirmation that I wasn’t only a useless burden in life. I grinned and told her, “I am. Beginning, middle, end. Hard to believe, I know.”

  “It’s only been, what, a little over a month since you started writing?”

  “I sketched some of it when Scott was away in Hollywood.”

  “Even so! May I read it?”

  “I hoped you would.”

  Dr. Squires’s admiration puffed me up—and I got puffier still after she read and praised my efforts.

  “What a story,” she said when she brought the pages back. “So creative, so compelling. What do you plan to do with it?”