Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  “No one is doomed,” he said, his voice firm but soft, too, a salve for me, a raft for Scottie to climb onto. “But we will all be sad for a while. Girls, I’m sorry, I’ll need you to wash up and get your things, and Scottie and I will drive you home.”

  They all got busy cleaning up. Only I saw in Scott’s eyes the fear and dread that he’d managed to keep out of his voice. He’d understood what had happened without my having to tell him. That’s how obvious it was, how easy for any thinking person to spot the rotten strain running through our family.

  He caught me watching him. “Zelda,” he said quietly, coming over to me. “No. His troubles were different from yours.” He took my hands. “Look at you—having a perfect day in a perfect home with your charming, happy daughter. I could hear you all from upstairs; the girls were having a grand time. You were the life of the party.”

  I nodded and drew a deep breath; my heart felt heavy as a brick in my chest. “Yes, okay. Okay.” In my ears, though, my pulse thumped away, Doomed, doomed, doomed.

  52

  I asked Scott, “Why do you suppose we haven’t gotten divorced yet?”

  It was Christmas Eve 1933, not long after we’d moved from La Paix to a cheaper residence, a redbrick row house in Baltimore. Scottie had fallen asleep during Scott’s discussion—lecture, really—on Ivanhoe and was now in bed awaiting Santa Claus. Scott and I sat in wing chairs facing the fireplace, both of us with one glass of double-strength eggnog in hand and another already in our bellies—my first drink in ages, and it was having an effect.

  Back in the fall, Scott had checked himself in for treatment at Johns Hopkins a few times, which would have impressed me greatly if he had admitted it was to get help with his drinking. What he said was that his old lung ailment—mild tuberculosis he claimed he’d caught in 1919—kept flaring up. Still, he managed to finish Tender Is the Night, his novel about the psychiatrist in love with a patient, and then sold the serialization to Scribner’s Magazine. He had written Hemingway to share his news, and Hemingway had written back, I’ll bet you feel like you’ve shit a boulder finally. Scott was disappointed; he’d hoped for something a little more congratulatory. He excused the slight, saying how Hemingway was occupied with his new baby, a new novel, and an African safari. (The new wife was yet to come.)

  With Scott’s book finished, I had again asserted my desire to write mine. I’d been reading every psychiatric tome I could find, learning all about the complex interplay of brain matter and chemistry and environment, trying to chase away Doomed by telling a story about it. Scott, though, insisted, “If you want to use anything about psychiatry, you’ve got to wait until my novel has carved its place into the American consciousness.” He told my doctor that regardless of subject matter, he believed another attempt at a novel would only harm me. The doctor, not wanting to take any risk that might compromise his own reputation for success, agreed. We’d been fighting a lot about that.

  Gazing at the fire, I continued, “I mean, I sure do hate you. You aren’t anything like the man I thought I was marrying.”

  “I’m exactly the man I was. The real mystery is why I don’t divorce you.”

  “Why would you want to? I’m smart and talented and I can be loving and devoted. I definitely have it in me.”

  “Remember the night we went riding down Park Avenue with you on the hood of that taxi and me on the running board, hanging on to the roof?”

  I smiled. “Didn’t we meet Dottie that night, at the Algonquin?”

  “Mm. That dinner that Bunny arranged … New York sure was a blast.”

  “Lord, we had fun.”

  Scott reached for my hand. “Damn it all, you are the love of my life.”

  * * *

  Warm words, though, are no panacea. Our ruts were now so deeply cut into the landscape, and we were so tired and worn, that neither Scott nor I could steer ourselves anyplace new.

  In early February I trudged the six blocks over snow-crusted concrete to Sara Haardt Mencken’s house, thinking, Gray, cold day, gray, cold month, gray, cold life. Tony’s body was gray and cold when I viewed it, same as Daddy’s was when he left me behind. Gray cold awaits every living thing. Even the light-falling snow appeared gray to my eyes. The wind whipped bits of paper trash about my feet. A delivery truck sputtered past, spewing oily smoke into the air in front of me. God, why have you drained all the color from Baltimore? Isn’t it enough to steal all the warmth?

  At Sara’s stoop, I looked up at the dozen steps I’d have to climb to reach the door and sighed as if I’d come to the base of Mont Blanc. It might be easier to turn around and go home.

  Except, inside one of those windows up there is Sara.

  And I needed to see my darling good friend, my touchstone. It wasn’t as if I had any particular complaint to share, no particular crisis, no event to fuss about. My list of Scott’s offenses had grown so long that the devil himself would grow bored hearing it. But with Scottie gone all day at the Bryn Mawr School, our house was an inanimate space, lacking color, warmth, inspiration, purpose—or maybe that was just me.

  “It’s awfully cold and gray today,” Sara said, after her maid had shown me into the parlor. She coughed, then said, “I shouldn’t have asked you over when it’s so raw out.”

  “No, I’m glad to see you.”

  “Goodness, you’re so thin! Are you eating? Your hands are like ice! Here, sit by the fire. How about some hot broth?”

  “Fine, sure,” I said dully. Trying harder, I added, “Where’s Henry today?”

  “At the office. It’s Tuesday.”

  “Of course.” I stared into the grate. Tuesday. Of course.

  “And Scott?”

  “I haven’t seen him since yesterday.”

  “Ah. Zelda … that’s partly why I wanted to see you.”

  I turned toward her. “You know where he is?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “We saw him on Friday, though. Henry was having a couple of friends in. A quiet gathering—you know how he is.” She paused to cough. “No liquor, no music, just a lot of book talk. There was a commotion downstairs, then next thing we knew, Scott was stumbling up the stairs and calling out to ask if they’d started without him.”

  “But he wasn’t invited.”

  “Yes. So there was a bit of an argument. He’s been coming by a lot—late at night, sometimes, long after we’ve turned in. Henry was losing patience. He said, ‘Scott, can’t you see this isn’t your sort of gathering?’ And Scott said, ‘Right, right, I may have a new novel being serialized by Scribner’s Magazine, but I haven’t got the exalted qualifications to be a part of this esteemed group. What I do have, however’—and he undid his pants, then dropped them, saying—‘is this.’”

  “He exposed himself?”

  Sara nodded. “I looked away, of course. We were all terribly embarrassed for him, and Henry hauled him out of the room. Later, Henry said there’d be no more socializing with either of you. He had steam coming from his ears, I swear to you, and that never happens.”

  I felt sick. “Who can blame him?”

  “He eased up regarding you, though. Really, he has nothing against you. But Zelda, Scott has got to get help. How can you bear to stay with him?”

  I shrugged.

  “When did you last see a doctor?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “They can’t cure me, and Scott can’t afford to pay them anyway, and I can’t pay for myself.” I glanced out the window. The view was of pale gray clouds and medium gray buildings and the dark gray water of the bay.

  “Maybe you should go stay with Tootsie or Tilde.”

  I shrugged again.

  “Are you writing at all?”

  “I’ve been forbidden. The doctors agree with Scott that it’s harmful for me. Maybe they’re right.”

  Sara began to cough, a cough that seemed endless and left blood on her handkerchief.

  “When did you last see a doctor?” I asked when the spell was past.

>   “Henry makes me go twice a month. Though of course there’s nothing anyone can do.”

  * * *

  Those words, that truth about her life and my life and all of life, seeped into my head and played themselves over and over and over. There’s nothing anyone can do.

  I used them as a mantra after reading the serialization of Tender Is the Night, which I’d expected to be a perhaps tragic but certainly romanticized, well-fictionalized story that used our experiences as a frame at most. But, no, no, Scott had used whole passages of tortured letters I’d written him from Prangins. He’d made his not-me into a half-homicidal incest victim whose eventual health comes only through the complete destruction of her once-exalted husband’s life. I couldn’t get any distance from it, couldn’t separate myself from his Nicole.

  I said nothing.

  I poured a drink.

  I poured another.

  There’s nothing anyone can do.

  I guess the words showed up on my face and in my eyes, and at some point Scott noticed, and then somehow I found myself in a hospital room at Phipps.

  —Tell us what you’re feeling.

  —Tell us what you’re thinking.

  —Are you angry / hurting / fearful / sad?

  I told them nothing. I was blank.

  * * *

  Phipps wouldn’t take on such an uncooperative patient. Scott consulted Dr. Forel, and then off I went to Craig House, an institution in Beacon, New York. Another long train ride to nowhere, I thought.

  At first, all I could see—when I was alert enough to see anything at all—was a landscape of frozen, barren everything. I welcomed the slow, sucking haze of sedation. I lay prostrate for the team of nurses who prepped me for my insulin-shock therapy, anticipating the bliss of absence that would follow the convulsions. I didn’t speak to anyone; what was there to say?

  Spring was breaking, though, and soon the ground began to shiver with shocking-white snowdrops and agonizingly blue gentians that, the moment I noticed them, demanded I render them with watercolors.

  “I’d like paper, paints, and brushes—and an easel,” I told Dr. Slocum, my new dungeon master, when he came by on rounds one morning.

  Startled, he said, “Beg pardon? You can speak?”

  “You’re a sharp one,” I told him, and I even tried out a smile. “Those flowers outside are beautiful, see? I have an itch to put them in a picture.”

  He glanced out the window, then back at me. “Suppose you get dressed and come tell me more about this itch when I finish my rounds.” So I did, and during that first session we struck a deal: painting supplies in return for the sort of conversational minutiae psychiatrists thrive on.

  As the weeks went by, within those minutiae I tucked my requests for milder sedatives, and fewer insulin treatments, and biscuits with peach preserves. My days began to look like a lady of leisure’s; Craig House was resort-like for patients who didn’t have to spend their days sedated, or bound to their beds, or both. Plenty of new friends and recreation, little stimulation. I could only guess at what it was costing Scott to keep me there.

  “I’d like permission to do some writing,” I said one morning, when I’d been there for about a month. I told Dr. Slocum, “I have some short-story ideas nibbling at my brain.”

  He tented his fingers on his ample stomach. “It’s important that you not overtire yourself.”

  “Maybe I could substitute golf and massage for writing, then.”

  He smiled wanly. “Here’s my concern, Mrs. Fitzgerald: your illness was at its outset preceded by a rise in ambition—”

  “That’s not what this is,” I said. “Probably my husband hasn’t mentioned this, but he’s heavily in debt. I was thinking I could sell some stories, maybe an essay or two, maybe some of my artwork—but only to help pay for my treatment. Think of it as the equivalent of a woman taking in sewing to help meet expenses. I can’t sew worth a damn, but I can draw and paint—and write—well enough to earn what I would with piecework or alterations. I really need to be able to help out in what ways I can.”

  “Yes, well, admirable as that is, your husband was quite clear about his expectation that we continue the restriction. You yourself have told me that your greatest battles with him have been about your wish to write another book.”

  “Because he’s wrong, and the other doctors were wrong; I feel better when I write.”

  “But inevitably you’re disappointed in the outcome and feel worse. The drawing and painting are clearly therapeutic; pursue that as your economic contribution and all will be well.”

  “Will it?” I asked. And then I threw myself into the effort with all the determination I’d once put into my dancing.

  * * *

  “‘Parfois la Folie Est la Sagesse,’” I said, reading from one of the brochures the gallery had printed for my exhibition. Sometimes madness is wisdom. Scott and I were alone in my room on an afternoon when most of my fellow residents were having massage. “It looks real good, Scott. Real professional.”

  “It does. This just might be everything you’ve waited for, darling. Finally you’ll get all the recognition you’ve longed for and deserve.”

  The art gallery, a space in uptown Manhattan, would show my work for the entire month of April. We’d met the gallery’s owner in Antibes years earlier; he’d been wild about my Girl with Orange Dress and always believed I ought to have a showing. Scott had seen to most of the details, as enthusiastic about this as he’d been about the Junior League production we’d done back in St. Paul.

  I went to the window. All of winter’s dun colors had given way to the brilliant, blissful green of new leaves and new grass. Cows dotted a distant hillside beneath wispy white clouds. “I don’t know, Deo … I’d rather not get my hopes up.”

  “Hope is one thing you deserve to have more of,” he said, coming up behind me. When I turned, he kissed me, kissed me tenderly, kissed me with all the passion and desire we’d used to take for granted.

  Then he eased back, and I said, “Well then, I hope you’ll kiss me like that again.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  He shut my door and complied. We made love then, with quick, sweet urgency, certain we’d get caught, laughing one moment, breathless and desperate the next.

  “God, I miss you,” he said when we’d finished and were buttoning up what we’d unbuttoned. “I miss us, this us—where do these two people live? Why is it so difficult to find them?”

  I looked into those Irish Sea eyes. “I’m awfully sorry” was all I could think to say.

  * * *

  For the exhibit, I would show eighteen drawings and seventeen paintings in all. Some were whimsical expressions of the seventeenth-century French art I’d studied during our time at Ellerslie. Some were tortured-looking ballet dancers—I wanted to show the dancers’ impressions of themselves, not the audience’s impression of the dancers. Some were linear fantasies inspired by Braque and Pablo. I’d painted huge flowers, and lactating mothers. I’d painted Scott with feathers for eyelashes, his head encircled by a piercing crown of thorns.

  For the opening, I was allowed to leave the hospital with a nurse as my travel companion; Scott made sure she had a separate room from us at the Plaza. He had invited every single person we’d ever met plus any and everyone he came across in his daily treks. The Murphys turned out, and Max, plus my doctors, Dos Passos, Dottie Parker, Gilbert Seldes, Bunny, and Henry—who brought the news that Sara was in the hospital with a lung infection, but sent her love.

  Some members of the press were there, too, but few strangers came. The ones who did seemed unsure what to make of such a hodgepodge collection. “What is she?” they murmured, unable to figure out which label to apply. Six or eight things sold, most of them for almost no money at all, then I went back to Craig House.

  Time magazine ran a review and had found a label for me: Work of a Wife, read the headline, and despite the praise that followed in the body of the review, I fel
t myself deflating.

  Work of a wife.

  That was it, W-I-F-E, my entire identity defined by the four letters I’d been trying for five years to overcome.

  Why was it that every time I finally chose, every time I did, my efforts failed—I failed—so miserably? Why was I so completely unable to take control of my own life? Was there any point to it, for me? I’d thought it was Scott I’d been fighting against, but now I wondered if it was Fate.

  When I was young, I’d believed that it would be awful to try and try and try at something only to find that you could never succeed. Now I knew I’d been right: I was not a sufficient dancer, or writer, or painter, or wife, or mother. I was nothing at all.

  Send me someplace cheaper, I wrote Scott. I don’t need all of this and only feel worse staying here knowing I will never be able to offset the expense. Didn’t Hemingway tell you that I was worthless and you ought to save yourself? He was right.

  Upon swallowing this black, bitter truth, I began to shrink, and before long grew so tiny within the world that I

  very …

  nearly …

  disappeared.

  53

  Blackness had poured into my head like hot tar. What came afterward is mostly lost to me, though here’s what I’ve since been told:

  Scott was out of money, so I moved to a grim sanitarium called Sheppard Pratt Hospital in May of ’35. The doctors tried to thin that tar with insulin therapy, or scare it off with electroshock treatments, or blast it from me with pentylenetetrazol, a compound that provokes brain seizures. Still the blackness remained, and I began to see and converse with God.

  Poor Scott had nothing but debt to show for all these efforts to get me well, yet the doctors insisted that the only way out was through, so he consented to more of the terror. He wrote stories when he was able to—but most got rejected or brought far less money than he used to command. He borrowed from the few friends who would still see him, and tried to find his own escape with a lot of liquor and a few women.