Save Me the Waltz: A Novel

by Zelda Fitzgerald

  “Look, Bonnie,” David called, “there’s an old friend of yours!”

  Arienne, subduing a technical maze of insolent turns and arrogant twists, represented a pink cupid. Damp and unconvincing, she tenaciously gripped the superhuman exigencies of her role. The workman underneath the artist ground out her difficult interpretation.

  David felt an overwhelming unexpected surge of pity for the girl going through all that while the spectators thought of how wet they were getting and how uncomfortable they were. The dancers, too, were thinking of the rain, and shivered a little through the bursting crescendo of the finale.

  “I liked best the ones in black who fought themselves,” said Bonnie.

  “Yes,” said the boy, “when they were bumping each other it was far best.”

  “We’d better stay in Montreux for dinner—it’s too wet to drive back,” suggested David.

  About the hotel lobby sat many groups with an air of professional waiting; the smell of coffee and French pastry permeated the half gloom; raincoats trickled in the vestibule.

  “Bonjour!” yelled Bonnie suddenly, “you have danced very well, better than in Paris even!”

  Sleek and well-dressed Arienne traversed the room. She turned like a mannequin, exhibiting herself. A slight embarrassment covered the gray honest meadow between her eyes.

  “I am sorry I am so dégouttante,” she said pretentiously, shaking her coat, “in this old thing from Patou! But you have grown so big!” She fondled Bonnie affectedly. “And how is your mother?”

  “She too is dancing,” said Bonnie.

  “I know.”

  Arienne freed herself as quickly as she could. She had given her drama of success—Patou was the chosen couturiere of the stars of the ballet; only the finest sack-cloth was sewed by Patou. Arienne had said Patou. “Patou,” she said, emphatically.

  “I must go to my room, our étoile is waiting for me there. Au ’voir, cher David! Au ’voir, ma petite Bonnie!”

  The children were very dainty about the table, and somehow not an anachronism in this night place that had had music before the war. The wine barred the table with topaz shafts, the beer protested the cold restraint of silver mugs, the children giggled ebulliently beneath parental discipline like boiling water shaking the lid of a saucepan.

  “I want the hors d’oeuvre,” said Bonnie.

  “Why, daughter! It’s too indigestible for night.”

  “But I want it, too!” wailed the boy.

  “The old will order for the young,” announced David, “and I will tell you about Prometheus so you will not notice that you are not getting what you want. Prometheus was tied to an immense rock and——”

  “May I have the apricot jam?” interrupted Genevra.

  “Do you want to hear about Prometheus, or not?” said Bonnie’s father impatiently.

  “Yes, sir. Oh, yes, of course.”

  “Then,” resumed David, “he writhed there for years and years and——”

  “That is in my ‘Mythologie,’ ” said Bonnie proudly.

  “And then what?” said the little boy, “after he was writhing.”

  “Then what? Well——” David glowed with the exhilaration of being attractive, laying out the facets of his personality for the children like stacks of expensive shirts for admiring valets. “Do you remember exactly what did happen?” he said lamely to Bonnie.

  “No. I’ve forgot since a long time.”

  “If that is all, may I please have the compote?” Genevra politely insisted.

  Riding home through the flickering night, the country passed in visions of twinkling villages and cottage gardens obstructing their passage with high sunflower stalks. The children, wrapped in the bright armor of Bonnie’s father’s car, dozed against the felt cushions. Safe in the glittering car they rode: the car-at-your-disposal, the mystery-car, the Rajah’s-car, the death-car, the first-prize, puffing the power of money out on the summer air like a seigneur distributing largesse. Where the night sky reflected the lake they rode like a rising bubble through the bowl of the mercurial, welded globe. They drove through the black impenetrable shadows clouding the road like fumes from an alchemist’s laboratory and sped across the gleam of the open mountaintop.

  “I would not like to be an artist,” said the little boy sleepily. “Unless I could be a trained seal, I wouldn’t,” he qualified.

  “I would,” said Bonnie. “They will be having supper when we are already asleep.”

  “But,” protested Genevra reasonably, “we have had our supper.”

  “Yes,” Bonnie agreed, “but supper is always nice to be having.”

  “It’s not when you’re full,” said Genevra.

  “Well, when you’re full you wouldn’t care whether it was nice or not,” said Bonnie.

  “Why do you always argue so?” Genevra settled in cold withdrawal against the window.

  “Because you interrupted when I was thinking what would be nice.”

  “We’ll go straight to your hotel,” suggested David. “You children seem to be tired.”

  “Father says conflict develops the character,” said the older boy.

  “I think it spoils the evening,” said David.

  “Mummy said it ruins the disposition,” contributed Genevra.

  Moving about the hotel rooms alone with David, Bonnie approached her father.

  “I suppose I should have been much nicer?”

  “Yes. Sometime you will realize that people are more important than digestion, even.”

  “They should have made me feel nice then, don’t you think? They were the company.”

  “Children are always company,” said David. “People are like almanacs, Bonnie—you never can find the information you’re looking for, but the casual reading is well worth the trouble.”

  “These rooms are very nice,” reflected Bonnie. “What is that thing in the bathroom where the water squirts out like a hose?”

  “I have told you a thousand times not to touch those things! It’s a sort of a fire extinguisher.”

  “Do they always think there’s going to be a fire in the bathroom?”

  “Very seldom.”

  “Of course,” said Bonnie, “it would be too bad for the people, but it would be fun to see the excitement.”

  “Are you ready for bed? I want you to write to your mother.”

  “Yes, Daddy.”

  Bonnie sat in the still parlor with its deep majestic windows facing the sepia square, composing.

  Dearest Mummy:

  As you will see, we are back in Switzerland——The room was very big and quiet.

  ——It is very interesting to see the Swiss! The hotelman called Daddy a Prince!

  The curtains waved just softly in the breeze, then lay still.

  ——Figurez-vous, Maman, that would make me a Princess. Imagine them thinking anything so silly——

  There were enough lamps for a room to have, even a big chic room such as this,

  ——Mademoiselle Arienne had a Patou dress. She was glad about your success——

  They had even thought of putting flowers to make the room so much prettier at her father’s hotel.

  ——If I were a Princess, I should always have my own way. I would bring you to Switzerland——

  The cushions were hard but very pretty with their gold tassels hanging down the chair legs.

  ——I was glad when you were home——

  The shadows seemed to move. Only babies were frightened of shadows or of moving things at night.

  ——I have not many experiences to relate. I am making myself as spoiled as I can——

  There couldn’t be anything hiding in the shadows. They just appeared to move that way. Was that the door opening?

  “Oh—oh—oh,” shrieked Bonnie in terror.

  “Sh—sh—sh,” David reassured the child, holding out the promise of warmth and comfort to his daughter.

  “Did I frighten you?”

  “No—It was th
e shadows. I am sometimes silly when I am all by myself.”

  “I understand,” he soothed. “Grown people are too, very often.”

  The lights of the hotel fell somnolently over the park opposite; an air of waiting hung over the streets like a flag lying about its staff without a breeze.

  “Daddy, I want to sleep with my lights on.”

  “What an idea! There’s nothing to be afraid of—you’ve got me and Mummy.”

  “Mummy is in Naples,” said Bonnie, “and if I fall asleep you will surely be going out!”

  “All right then, but it’s absurd!”

  Some hours later when David tiptoed in, he found Bonnie’s room dark. Her eyes were much too tightly closed to be unconscious; she had arranged a small crack in the door to the living room to compromise.

  “What’s keeping you awake?” he said.

  “I was thinking,” murmured Bonnie. “It is better here than with Mummy’s success in Italy.”

  “But I have success,” said David, “only I got it before you were born so it just appears the natural order to you!”

  Insects reverberated in the trees beside the silent room.

  “Was it so awful in Naples?” he pursued.

  “Well,” hesitated Bonnie, “I don’t know how it was for Mummy, of course——”

  “Didn’t she say anything at all about me?”

  “She said—let me see—I don’t know what Mummy said, Daddy, only she said her piece of advice that she had to give me was not to be a backseat driver about life.”

  “Did you understand?”

  “Oh, no,” sighed Bonnie gratefully and complacently.

  The summer quavered down from Lausanne to Geneva, trimming the lake like the delicate border of a porcelain plate; the fields yellowed in the heat; the mountains across from their windows yielded up no more details even on the brightest of days.

  Bonnie played in sibylline detachment watching the Juras wedge their inky shadows between the rushes at the water’s edge. White birds flying in inverted circumflex accented the colorless suggestion of a bounded infinite.

  “Has the little one slept well?” asked the people recovering from long illnesses who painted the view in the garden.

  “Yes,” answered Bonnie politely, “but you must not disturb me—I am the watcher who tells when the enemy is coming.”

  “Then can I be King of the Castle?” called David from the window, “and cut off your head if you make a mistake?”

  “You,” said Bonnie, “are a prisoner, and I have pulled out your tongue so you cannot complain—but I am good to you anyway,” she relented, “so you needn’t feel unhappy, Daddy—unless you want to! Of course, it would be better to be unhappy, perhaps!”

  “All right,” said David, “I’m one of the unhappiest of people! The laundry has faded my pink shirt, and I’ve just been invited to a wedding.”

  “I don’t allow you to go out visiting,” said Bonnie severely.

  “Well, then, I’m only half as unhappy as I was.”

  “I won’t let you play any more if you act that way. You’re supposed to be sad and homesick for your wife.”

  “Look! I dissolve in tears!” David draped himself like a puppet over the wet bathing suits drying on the window ledge.

  The bellboy bringing up the telegram seemed rather surprised to find Monsieur le Prince Américain in such an unusual position. David tore open the envelope.

  “Father stricken,” he read. “Recovery doubtful. Come at once. Try to save Alabama from shock. Devotedly. Millie Beggs.”

  David stared trancelike at the white butterflies fluttering under a tree with crooked branches elbowing the ground impassively. He watched his emotions sliding past the present like a letter dropped down a glass chute; the telegram cut into their lives as decisively as the falling blade of a guillotine. Grabbing a pencil he started to write out a telegram to Alabama, decided to telephone, and remembered that the Opera was closed in the afternoon. He sent the wire to the pension.

  “What’s the matter, Daddy, aren’t you playing any more?”

  “No, dear; you’d better come in, Bonnie. I’ve had some bad news.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Your grandpa’s dying, so we’ll have to go to America. I’ll send for Mademoiselle to stay with you. Mummy will probably come straight to Paris to meet me—unless I sail from Italy.”

  “I wouldn’t,” advised Bonnie. “I’d surely go from France.”

  They waited distractedly for word from Naples.

  The answer from Alabama fell like a shooting star, a cold mass of lead from the heavens. From voluble hysterical Italian, David finally deciphered the message.

  “Madame is ill in the hospital since two days. You must come here to save her. There is none to look after her though she refuse us your address, still hoping to be well alone. It is serious. We have no one to count on but you and Jesus.”

  “Bonnie,” groaned David, “where in the hell have I put Mademoiselle’s address?”

  “I don’t know, Daddy.”

  “Then you’ll have to pack for yourself—and be quick.”

  “Oh, Daddy,” wept Bonnie, “I just came from Naples. I don’t want to go!”

  “Your mother needs us,” was all David said. They caught the midnight express.

  It was a little like the Inquisition at the Italian hospital—they had to wait outside with Alabama’s landlady and Madame Sirgeva till it opened its doors at two o’clock.

  “So much promise,” moaned Madame, “she would perhaps have been a big dancer in time—”

  “And Holy Angels, so young!” murmured the Italian.

  “Only of course there wasn’t any time,” added Sirgeva sorrowfully. “She was too old.”

  “And always alone, so help me God, Signor,” sighed the Italian reverentially.

  The streets ran about the tiny grass plots like geometrical calculations—some learned doctor’s half-effaced explanatory diagrams on a slate. A charwoman opened the doors.

  David did not mind the smell of the ether. Two doctors talked together in an anteroom about golf scores. It was the uniforms that made it like the Inquisition, and the smell of green soap.

  David felt very sorry for Bonnie.

  David didn’t believe the English interne had made a hole in one.

  The doctors told him about the infection from the glue in the box of the toe shoe—it had seeped into a blister. They used the word “incision” many times over as if they were saying a Hail Mary.

  “A question of time,” they repeated, one after the other.

  “If she had only disinfected,” said Sirgeva. “I will keep Bonnie while you go in.”

  In the desperate finality of the room, David stared at the ceiling.

  “There’s nothing the matter with my foot,” screamed Alabama. “It’s my stomach. It’s killing me!”

  Why did the doctor inhabit another world from hers? Why couldn’t he hear what she was saying, and not stand talking about ice packs?

  “We will see,” the doctor said, staring out of the window impassively.

  “I’ve got to have some water! Please give me some water!”

  The nurse went on methodically straightening the dressings on the wheel table.

  “Non c’é acqua,” she whispered.

  She didn’t need to be so confidential about it.

  The walls of the hospital opened and shut. Alabama’s room smelled like hell. Her foot lay off the bed in a yellow fluid that turned white after a while. She had a terrible backache. It was as if she had been beaten with heavy beams.

  “I’ve got to have some orange juice,” she thought she said. No, it was Bonnie who had said that. David will bring me some chocolate ice cream and I will throw it up; it smells like a soda fountain, thrown-up, she thought. There were glass tubes in her ankle like stems, like the headdress of a Chinese empress—it was a permanent wave they were giving her foot, she thought.

  The walls of the room slid q
uietly past, dropping one over the other like the leaves of a heavy album. They were all shades of gray and rose and mauve. There was no sound when they fell.

  Two doctors came and talked together. What did Salonika have to do with her back?

  “I’ve got to have a pillow,” she said feebly. “Something broke my neck!”

  The doctors stood impersonally at the end of the bed. The windows opened like blinding white caverns, entrances to white funnels that fitted over the bed like tents. It was too easy to breathe inside that tented radiance—she couldn’t feel her body, the air was so light.

  “This afternoon, then, at three,” said one of the men, and left. The other went on talking to himself.

  “I can’t operate,” she thought he said, “because I’ve got to stand here and count the white butterflies today.”

  “And so the girl was raped by a calla lily,” he said, “——or, no, I believe it was the spray of a shower bath that did the trick!” he said triumphantly.

  He laughed fiendishly. How could he laugh so much of Pulcinella? And he as thin as a matchstick and tall as the Eiffel Tower! The nurse laughed with another nurse.

  “It isn’t Pulcinella,” Alabama thought she said to the nurse. “It’s Apollon-Musagéte.”

  “You wouldn’t know. How could I possibly expect you to understand that?” she screamed contemptuously.

  Meaningfully the nurses laughed together and left her room. The walls began again. She decided to lie there and frustrate the walls if they thought they could press her between their pages like a bud from a wedding bouquet. For weeks Alabama lay there. The smell of the stuff in the bowl took the skin off her throat, and she spit red mucus.

  Those agonizing weeks David cried as he walked along the streets, and he cried at night, and life seemed senseless and over. Then he grew desperate, and murder and violence played in his heart till he wore himself out.

  Twice a day he came to the hospital and listened to the doctors telling about blood poison.

  Finally they let him see her. He buried his head in the bedclothes and ran his arms underneath her broken body and cried like a baby. Her legs were up in sliding pulleys like a dentist’s paraphernalia. The weights ached and strained her neck and back like a mediaeval rack.