Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

At some point someone told me that, unimaginably, Gerald and Sara had lost their oldest boy, Baoth, to meningitis. Then my sweet Sara Haardt got it, too, and between that and the tuberculosis, she’d given up her fight. Then poor Patrick Murphy succumbed to his tuberculosis two years later. Death was everywhere. Tootsie, bless her, saw that I had become eighty-nine pounds of incoherent despair, so she bullied Scott into breaking me out and moving me to a hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, where one of Newman’s cousins had been treated with good results. Scott had been spending time in the area off and on—for lung treatments, that’s what he said—but meantime hunting hounds with his friend James Boyd, or luxuriating in the rustic elegance of the Grove Park Inn. If North Carolina was a suitable escape for him, he’d reasoned, maybe it would do me good as well.

  Highland Hospital was no luxury mountain resort. They had their regimens of drugs and shocks and reeducation. When I was finally capable of noticing my surroundings, I hated myself for being a burden to Scott, who insisted on living in the area in order to see me as often as he could, and too often still drank himself into oblivion in between times. He’d turned forty and, in his pathetic, diminished state, had given an interview to the New York Post that persuaded all who read it that he was absolutely ruined.

  Highland did something right: in time, I gained back the weight I needed, played a great lot of volleyball, went hiking in the hills, and started painting again. When Scott got an offer to work in Hollywood once more, the money and I both persuaded him to go. “You can do this,” I assured him, praying I was right.

  By early ’38, I was stable as ever, and I stayed that way. I also stayed there at Highland because the doctors insisted that the improvement was temporary. They told Scott I needed to stay put indefinitely—for careful monitoring and control, they said, while Tootsie and Mama were saying what I thought: that for Highland, just as it had been for Prangins, it was all about the money. Scott, though, was terrified by the prospect of having to tend me when he was barely in control of himself. He elected to believe the doctors.

  With my ability to see and think and feel restored, what I saw was that even in Hollywood Scott was still stuck—and growing desperate. He was drinking often but working only intermittently, had no money at all, couldn’t sell what little fiction he wrote, hardly saw Scottie, had few friends, little hope, and, during a catastrophic trip we took to Cuba in April last year—he got so sick and so drunk that I had to take him to the hospital in New York afterward—the saddest eyes I’d ever seen except in my mirror. “I’ll never leave you, Zelda,” he said.

  What I thought when I saw him being wheeled off was He’s such an extraordinarily brilliant person that it would be terrible if he let himself do nothing in the end.

  What I felt was that same terrible lump in my throat that I’d felt in 1919 right before I’d cut him loose.

  Knowing what I had to do, I found a way out of Highland myself. If it involved coercing a certain Dr. Carroll, whose own crimes against certain patients were far worse than my little blackmail plan, well, that was between the doctor and myself. For the first time in a decade, both Scott and I were free.

  And now, I wait.

  DECEMBER 21, 1940

  Montgomery, Alabama

  Tootsie is here for the holidays. She and Newman are staying at Marjorie’s, so as to keep things simple for Mama and me. We sit together on the porch swing while Mama naps; this is the most pleasant time of day, we agree. I’ve just filled her in on what’s happening with Scottie, and Scott. “I’m hoping he’ll wire me money for a trip to see him,” I say. “Maybe I’ll move out there. Maybe I’ll try my hand at scripts.”

  “Hmm” is her reply. “Well, I can’t help noticing how relaxed you are. You sound good, you look good—though a decent haircut would improve the whole package. Do you feel as serene as you look?”

  I knock my head with my fist. “Shock therapy. Calms the wild beast.”

  “It’s more than that. Without Scott, you’re—”

  “Balanced?” Tootsie nods and I say, “I know. I figured that out a good while ago, at Highland.”

  “Then why ever would you want to change anything? Life here is just about perfect.”

  “Scott’s remade, as much as I am. I think all the chemicals we’ve put through our systems have finally washed the devil out of us both. It’ll be different from now on.”

  Tootsie looks skeptical. “If you believe that’s true, I’ll try to do the same. But I have to tell you, I’ve never forgiven him for abandoning you at Sheppard Pratt. When I found you there”—she shudders—“you were nearly dead, Zelda. Do you remember any of that?”

  “Not in any linear way, but I have impressions.”

  She takes my hand. “What was it like?”

  “Do you recall the African river Aunt Julia used to talk about, the one she’d learned of from some tale her granddaddy told?”

  Tootsie shakes her head, so I tell her what I remember from Aunt Julia’s story, which she told like this:

  “In the deep, wet, tangled, wild jungle where even natives won’t go is a mystical, dangerous river. The river’s got no name because naming it would make it real, and no one wants to believe that river be real. They say you get there only inside a dream—but don’t you think of it at bedtime, now, ’cause not everyone who goes there be able to leave!

  “That jungle canopy, it so leafy true daylight can never break in. The riverbank, it be wet muck thick with creatures that eat you alive if you stay still too long. To miss that fate, you gots to go into the black water. But the water be heavy as hot tar; once you in, it bind you and pull you along, bit by bit, ’til you come to the end of the land, and then over the water goes in a dark, slow cascade, the highest falls in the history of the world ever.

  “There be demons in that cascading water, and snakes, and wraiths that whisper in your ears. They love you, they say. You should give yourself to them, stay with them, become one of them, they say. ‘Isn’t it good here?’ they say. ‘No pain, no trouble.’ But also no light and no love and no joy and no ground. You tumble and tumble as you fall, and you try and choose, but your mind be topsy-turvy and maybe you can’t think so well, and maybe you can’t choose right, and maybe you never wake up.”

  “It felt like that,” I tell Tootsie, “even after you got me out and Scott moved me to Highland. I couldn’t choose. I couldn’t shut out the wraiths.… But you would say, ‘Hang on, sweetie,’ and Scottie would say, ‘I miss you, Mama,’ and Scott would hold me, just hold me and say nothing at all.”

  Tootsie snorts. “Scott was useless the whole while.”

  “Scott was in the river, too.”

  * * *

  Today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. The light’s already fading when I go to the closet for my coat. “I need some exercise,” I tell Mama, who’s got the radio on and is listening to news about the Germans bombing Liverpool again. This new war makes me heartsick. What is wrong with the world? Isn’t there enough trouble, sadness, injury, death, in everyday life?

  “Where will you go?” Mama asks. “It’ll be dark soon.”

  “Just for a walk. I’ll be back in time to help with supper.”

  My walks are my favorite part of being here in Montgomery. At first, they were my escape from Mama’s too-watchful eye. If I so much as frowned, she worried that I was slipping back into depression. “I’m fine,” I’d tell her, hiding my irritation because I know she worries that I’ll end up like our poor Tony.

  Now I go more for the pleasure of getting to revisit my past. There is the courthouse, so timeless in appearance that it’s the most natural thing in the world to imagine my father inside, hard at work to understand and delineate some finer point of law before tidying his desk and shutting off the light, then catching the streetcar for home.

  There is the building where the Red Cross had its office during the Great War, which everyone now calls the First World War. Not one of us, back in 1918, would have believe
d that only twenty years would pass before the Europeans would be at one another’s throats again.

  There is Eleanor’s house, where I am a giddy girl who is unconcerned about women’s rights and too concerned about romance.

  And there is the corner where Scott proposed to me. Suppose I’d gone home that night and decided that, no, I stood to lose more than I might gain by taking such a risk? In that alternate world, there might be no Paradise, no Gatsby, none of the hundred or more published stories that readers so love. Ernest Hemingway might yet be poor and little known. And my life, it would look like Marjorie’s: safe and predictable and unexceptional and dull. Even now, I wouldn’t choose differently than I did.

  Passing the post office, I think, again, of following yesterday’s letter to Scott. I might miss Montgomery when I’m gone—it has become dear, after all—but I’m willing to sacrifice life here once more if it means I get a shiny new one with Scott. He’s forty-four now, and I’m forty, which are not quite the unimaginably old ages we’d once believed they must be. We can start anew.

  Finally I’m back at Mama’s little house on Sayre Street, where she’s lived for several years now. I’m just in time to make it inside before full dark. She worries if I’m not in by dark—which amuses me no end, since it never troubled her when I was young. She’s scared of pretty much everything on my behalf. If it’s cool out, she fears I’m going to catch cold; if it’s hot out, she fears I’m going to get overcome with heat prostration; if it’s raining, I’m risking pneumonia; if it’s sunny, I’m risking a burn. Too much walking will tire me out, she says. “Why do you persist in going for miles and miles?” She keeps encouraging me to take up knitting; my modernist paintings trouble her.

  Scottie, meantime, is at Vassar and doing quite well despite her upbringing. To hear her tell it, her childhood was replete with wonderful nannies and terrific friends and fascinating teachers. She is a student of the world, as fluent in French as she is in English. Her voice is seasoned with Southern—my hope is that this is all she’ll have inherited from me. No, I take that back: I hope she’s got my capacity for forgiveness, and her father’s, too. We sure don’t have anything else of value to pass on to her.

  She’s staying with Harold Ober and his wife and son for her break from school, but she’ll be here for Christmas. My sweet little lamb, all grown up; this feels somehow both so right and so wrong.

  The smell of frying pork greets me when I enter the house. “Mama, I’m back!”

  There’s no reply, so I leave my sweater on the doorknob and go to the kitchen. Mama’s sitting at the table with her folded hands pressed to her mouth. Her eyes are damp.

  “What’s the matter?” I ask. “More bad news? You should stop listening to the radio. There’s nothing we can do and it’s just so upsetting.”

  “A man phoned while you were out,” she says. “A friend, he said … a friend of yours—”

  “Harold? Was it Harold Ober? Is it Scottie?”

  She shakes her head. “Not Harold.”

  “Who, Mama? Is Scottie all right? She was going to a dance in Poughkeepsie tonight—is it about the dance? Did something happen? It’s icy there—”

  “No, she’s fine.” Mama waves her hand, shooing away that particular worry. Then she says, “It’s Scott.”

  “Scott phoned?”

  “Scott died, Baby. A heart attack. Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.”

  * * *

  See me sitting in Montgomery’s empty Union Station on a cold, late-December morning, when most of the town’s residents are home wrapping presents, baking pies, singing along to carols on the radio. I’m the woman alone on the long wooden bench, there in the middle of the waiting room. Pine garlands with glossy red ribbons make the balcony railings festive. High windows display a steely-gray sky. The arrivals platform is thirty feet away from me, through the stained-glass archway, right outside the doors.

  My brothers-in-law Newman and Minor have stayed outside to keep the local reporters at bay. Those reporters, who’ve been calling the house and stopping by, want to see the weeping widow. They want newsworthy statements—something to supplement the lengthy obituary that ran yesterday, naming F. Scott Fitzgerald as Montgomery’s favorite adopted son. Well, here’s all I have to say, all that matters, a truth that’s so simple but, for me, profound:

  Scott is gone.

  I’ve had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we’re acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I’d collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. “Gone?” I would whisper, to no one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed—but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward. And then in the morning, I called my daughter and delivered the awful news.

  Now I sit in the station remembering the suit I wore when I waited in this lobby twenty years and eight months ago, on a spring morning when the train would take Marjorie and me to the grandest city on the planet, to a young, prospering fella who’d imagined and arranged a romantic, imprudent existence for himself and his bride. Now I wear widow’s black from the soles of my shoes to the crown of my simple wool hat. Now Scott—Scott’s remains, I should say (oh God, that sounds so wrong), are traveling by train to Maryland for the funeral next week. Now the train will deliver my daughter, our daughter, a girl who’s left with only her mother to depend upon.

  “He said he was getting better,” Scottie had protested when I called. “He sent me Sheilah’s old fur coat, and we were— Oh, Mama,” she whispered, and the whisper was swollen with tears. “I wasn’t supposed to—”

  “Shh,” I said, tears filling my own eyes again. “It’s all right. I knew. I didn’t know her name is all. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “He chided me about how I would write my thank-you note—before I’d even begun to think of writing it!”

  I smiled a little. “Always looking ahead.”

  “How can he be gone?” she asked me. “It just feels impossible, doesn’t it?”

  It does. It feels as if, when the train pulls in this morning, Scott will step off it, then stride through the doors and wrap me in his arms. He’ll kiss my wet cheeks and say, “What’s this? Did you think I wasn’t coming back?”

  “Yes. Wasn’t that silly of me?”

  “Lingering side effects,” he’ll tell me, and tap my forehead gently. “Not to worry. I said I’d never leave you and I meant it. You know me, Zelda. I’m a man of my word.”

  And he was. Anything that didn’t happen—for us, for him—turned out that way despite his best efforts.

  Here’s the train’s whistle now, for the crossing at Court Street, and here’s the rumbling that hails the train’s approach. I know when I see Scottie, I’ll see Scott’s face in hers. The past lives in the present, just like he always said, like he always wrote. There’s comfort in the thought.

  And then when Christmas is done—a strange, somber event it’s going to be—Scottie will board the train again, this time bound for Maryland. Again, she’ll be traveling alone. All the worriers around me fear I’m too fragile to endure Scott’s funeral, and I’ve chosen not to fight the current this time.

  There’s no need for me to be present; I’m not saying good-bye.

  AFTERWORD

  Upon Scott’s death, Zelda directed his lawyer to have Scott interred in the Fitzgerald family plot at St. Mary’s Church in Rockville, Maryland, which he had said was his wish. The church, however, wouldn’t allow this, as Scott was a lapsed Catholic at his death. He was buried instead at the Rockville Union Cemetery.

  Together with Max Perkins, Zelda then put Scott’s manuscript and notes for The Love of the Last Tycoon into Edmund “Bunny” Wilson’s hands for editing. In late 1941,
Scribner published it as part of a volume that included The Great Gatsby and the five short stories that Perkins felt were Scott’s strongest works. Titled The Last Tycoon, the book was well regarded by critics, beginning an F. Scott Fitzgerald renaissance that would be helped along by paperback Armed Services Editions of Gatsby and “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” which were distributed to servicemen during the Second World War. Soon after, Bunny Wilson compiled Scott’s essays in a 1945 collection called The Crack-Up, and Dorothy Parker edited a collection titled The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald. These efforts led to others, ensuring Scott’s membership in the literary canon he always believed he should be part of, as well as sales of some twenty million copies of The Great Gatsby alone, to date.

  Because Scott was in debt when he died and because it would be some time before his work would earn more than negligible royalties, Zelda and Scottie had only the thirty-five thousand dollars from his life insurance policy with which to fund Scottie’s studies and support Zelda indefinitely. Her monthly income from the trust established by Scott’s Princeton friend and lawyer John Biggs, who administered the estate, was not quite fifty dollars, which was supplemented by the thirty-five dollars a month she received for being a veteran’s widow. Zelda, therefore, continued to live with her mother in Montgomery. She maintained relationships with a great many friends, including Sara Mayfield, the Murphys, the Obers, and Ludlow Fowler, traveling to visit them and others as often as her budget would permit.

  Severed for good, however, was Zelda’s connection to Ernest Hemingway, who was becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol and suffered worsening periods of depression. His opinion about the Fitzgeralds grew ever more critical in the years that followed, perhaps as if to push back against Scott’s returning popularity. Though biographers and researchers have shown that the unflattering stories Hemingway wrote about the Fitzgeralds in A Moveable Feast consist of half-truths and outright fictions, they persist in popular culture as truth. Ernest Hemingway committed suicide in 1961.