Save Me the Waltz: A Novel

by Zelda Fitzgerald

  “He wanted to marry me. I had many beaux.”

  The old lady looked at her daughter as if she expected a protest. She was more beautiful than her children. There was much integrity in her face. Surely she had had many beaux.

  “There was one who wanted to give me a monkey. He told my mother monkeys all had tuberculosis. My grandmother looked at him and said, ‘But you look very healthy to me.’ She was French, and a very beautiful woman. A young man sent me a baby pig from his plantation, and another sent me a coyote from New Mexico, and one of them drank, and another married Cousin Lil.”

  “Where are they all?”

  “Dead and gone years ago. I wouldn’t know them if I saw them. Ain’t the trees pretty?”

  They passed the house where her mother and father had met—“at a New Year’s ball,” her mother told her. “He was the handsomest man there, and I was visiting your Cousin Mary.”

  Cousin Mary was old and her red eyes cried continually under her spectacles. There wasn’t much left of her, yet she had given a ball on New Year’s.

  Alabama had never pictured her father dancing.

  When she saw him in the casket at the end, his face was so young and fine and humorous, the first thing Alabama thought of was that New Year’s ball so many years ago.

  “Death is the only real elegance,” she said to herself. She had been afraid to look, afraid of what discoveries she might make in the spent and lifeless face. There was nothing to be afraid of, only plastic beauty and immobility.

  There was nothing amongst the papers in his bare skeleton office, and nothing in the box with his insurance premiums except a tiny moldy purse containing three nickels wrapped in an ancient newspaper.

  “It must be the first money he ever earned.”

  “His mother gave it to him for laying out the front yard,” they said.

  There was nothing amongst his clothes or hid behind his books. “He must have forgot,” Alabama said, “to leave the message.”

  The State sent a wreath to the funeral and the Court sent a wreath. Alabama was very proud of her father.

  Poor Miss Millie! She had a mourning veil pinned over her black straw hat from last year. She had bought that hat to go to the mountains with the Judge.

  Joan cried about the black. “I can’t afford it,” she said.

  So they didn’t wear black.

  They didn’t have music. The Judge had never liked songs save the tuneless “Old Grimes” that he sang to his children. They read “Lead Kindly Light” at the funeral.

  The Judge lay sleeping on the hillside under the hickory-nut trees and the oak. From his grave the dome of the Capitol blotted out the setting sun. The flowers wilted, and the children planted jasmine vines and hyacinths. It was peaceful in the old cemetery. Wildflowers grew there, and rosebushes so old that the flowers had lost their color with the years. Crape myrtle and Lebanon cedars shed their barbs over the slabs; rusty Confederate crosses sank into the clematis vines and the burned grass. Tangles of narcissus and white flowers strayed the washed banks and ivy climbed in the crumbling walls. The Judge’s grave said:

  AUSTIN BEGGS

  APRIL, EIGHTEEN FIFTY-SEVEN

  NOVEMBER, NINETEEN THIRTY-ONE

  But what had her father said? Alabama, alone on the hillside, fixed her eyes on the horizon in an effort to hear again that abstract measured voice. She couldn’t remember that he had ever said anything. The last thing he said was:

  “This thing is costing money,” and when his mind was wandering, “Well, son, I could never make money either.” And he had said Bonnie was as pretty as two little birds, but what had he said to her when she was a little girl? She couldn’t remember. There was nothing in the mackerel sky but cold spring rain.

  Once he had said, “If you want to choose, you must be a goddess.” That was when she had wanted her own way about things. It wasn’t easy to be a goddess away from Olympus.

  Alabama ran from the first drops of the bitter drizzle.

  “We are certainly accountable,” she said, “for all the things manifest in others that we secretly share. My father has bequeathed me many doubts.”

  Panting, she threw the car into gear and slid off down the already slippery red clay road. She was lonely at night for her father.

  “Everybody gives you belief for the asking,” she said to David, “and so few people give you anything more to believe in than your own belief—just not letting you down, that’s all. It’s so hard to find a person who accepts responsibilities beyond what you ask.”

  “So easy to be loved—so hard to love,” David answered.

  Dixie came after a month had passed.

  “I’ve plenty of room now for whoever wants to stay with me,” said Millie sadly.

  The girls were much with their mother, trying to distract her.

  “Alabama, please take the red geranium for your house,” insisted her mother. “It doesn’t matter here any more.”

  Joan took the old writing desk and crated it and shipped it away.

  “But you must be careful not to let them fix the corner where the Yankee shell fell through my father’s roof—that would spoil it.”

  Dixie asked for the silver punch bowl, and expressed it to her home in New York.

  “Be careful not to dent it,” said Millie. “It is made by hand from silver dollars that the slaves saved to give to your grandfather after they were freed—you children may choose what you like.”

  Alabama wanted the portraits, Dixie took the old bed where she and her mother and Dixie’s son had been born.

  Miss Millie sought her consolation in the past.

  “My father’s house was square with crossing halls,” she’d say. “There were lilacs about the double parlor windows, and an apple orchard far down by the river. When my father died, I carried you children down to the orchard to keep you away from the sadness. My mother was always very gentle, but she was never the same, after.”

  “I’d like that old daguerreotype, Mamma,” said Alabama. “Who is it?”

  “My mother and my little sister. She died in a Federal prison during the war. My father was considered a traitor. Kentucky did not secede. They wanted to hang him for not upholding the Union.”

  Millie at last agreed to move to a smaller house. Austin would never have stood for the little house. The girls persuaded her. They ranged their memories on the old mantel like a collection of bric-a-brac, and closed the shutters of Austin’s house on the light and all of himself left there. It was better so for Millie—that memories should be sharp when one has nothing else to live for.

  They all had bigger houses than Austin’s and much bigger than the one he left to Millie, yet they came there to Millie feeding on what she remembered of their father and on her spirit, like converts imbibing a cult.

  The Judge had said, “When you’re old and sick, you will wish you had saved your money.”

  They had, someday, to accept the tightening up of the world—to begin someplace to draw in their horizons.

  Alabama lay awake thinking at night: the inevitable happened to people, and they found themselves prepared. The child forgives its parents when it perceives the accident of birth.

  “We will have to begin all over again,” she said to David, “with a new chain of associations, with new expectations to be paid from the sum of our experience like coupons clipped from a bond.”

  “Middle-aged moralizing!”

  “Yes, but we are middle-aged, aren’t we?”

  “My God! I hadn’t thought of it! Do you suppose my pictures are?”

  “They’re just as good.”

  “I’ve got to get to work, Alabama. Why have we practically wasted the best years of our lives?”

  “So that there will be no time left on our hands at the end.”

  “You are an incurable sophist.”

  “Everybody is—only some people are in their private lives, and some people are in their philosophy.”

  “Well?”

>   “Well, the object of the game is to fit things together so that when Bonnie is as old as we and investigates our lives, she will find a beautiful harmonious mosaic of two gods of the hearthstone. Looking on this vision, she will feel herself less cheated that at some period of her life she has been forced to sacrifice her lust for plunder to protect what she imagines to be the treasure that we have handed on to her. It will lead her to believe that her restlessness will pass.”

  Bonnie’s voice drifted up from the drive on the evangelistic afternoon.

  “And so good-bye, Mrs. Johnson. My mother and father will be very pleased and glad that you have been so kind and delightful about the nice time.”

  She mounted the stairs contentedly. Alabama heard her purring in the hall.

  “You must have had a wonderful time——”

  “I hated her stupid old party!”

  “Then what was the oration about?”

  “You said,” Bonnie stared at her parent contemptuously, “that I was not polite the last time when I didn’t like the lady. So I hope you are glad now with how I was this time.”

  “Oh, quite!”

  People can’t learn about their relations! As soon as they’re understood they’re over. “Consciousness,” Alabama murmured to herself, “is an ultimate betrayal, I suppose.” She had asked Bonnie simply to spare the lady’s feelings.

  The child played often at her grandmother’s house. They played at keeping house. Bonnie was the head of the family; her grandma made an agreeable little girl to have.

  “Children were not brought up so strictly when mine were young,” she said. She felt very sorry for Bonnie, that the child should have to learn so much of life before it began for her. Alabama and David insisted on that.

  “When your mother was young, she charged so much candy at the corner store that I had an awful time hiding it from her father.”

  “Then I will be as Mummy was,” said Bonnie.

  “As much as you can get by with,” chuckled her grandmother. “Things have changed. When I was a child it was the maid and the coachman who argued about whether or not I could carry a demijohn into the church with me on Sundays. Discipline used to be a matter of form and not a personal responsibility.”

  Bonnie stared intently at her grandmother.

  “Grandma, tell me some more about when you were little.”

  “Well, I was very happy in Kentucky.”

  “But go on.”

  “I can’t remember. I was much the same as you.”

  “I shall be different. Mummy says I shall be an actress if I want, and go to school in Europe.”

  “I went to school in Philadelphia. That was considered a long way then.”

  “And I shall be a great lady and wear fine clothes.”

  “My mother’s silks were imported from New Orleans.”

  “You don’t remember anything else?”

  “I remember my father. He brought me toys from Louisville, and thought that girls should marry young.”

  “Yes, Grandma.”

  “I didn’t want to. I was having too good a time.”

  “Didn’t you have a good time when you were married?”

  “Oh, yes, dear, but different.”

  “I suppose it can’t be always the same.”

  “No.”

  The old lady laughed. She was very proud of her grandchildren. They were smart, good children. It was very pretty to see her with Bonnie, both of them pretending great wisdom about things, both of them eternally pretending.

  “We shall be gone soon,” the little girl sighed.

  “Yes,” sighed her grandmother.

  “Day after tomorrow we shall be gone,” said David.

  Out of the Knights’ dining room windows the trees put out down like new-feathered chicks. The bright, benevolent sky floated across the panes and lifted the curtains in billowing sails.

  “You people never stay anywhere,” said the girl with the shanghaied hair, “but I don’t blame you.”

  “We once believed,” said Alabama, “that there were things one place which did not exist in another.”

  “Sister went to Paris last summer. She said there were—well, toilets all along the streets—I’d like to see it!”

  The cacophony of the table volleyed together and frustrated itself like a scherzo of Prokofiev. Alabama whipped its broken staccato into the only form she knew: schstay, schstay, brisé, schstay, the phrase danced along the convolutions of her brain. She supposed she’d spend the rest of her life composing like that: fitting one thing into another and everything into the rules.

  “What are you thinking about, Alabama?”

  “Forms, shapes of things,” she answered. The talk pelted her consciousness like the sound of hoofs on a pavement.

  “——They say that he kicked her in the bust.”

  “The neighbors had to close their doors to keep out the bullets.”

  “And four in the same bed. Imagine it!”

  “And Jay kept jumping through the transoms, so now they can’t rent the house at all.”

  “But I don’t blame his wife, even if he did promise to sleep on the balcony.”

  “She said the best abortionist was in Birmingham, but anyway they went to New York.”

  “So Mrs. James was in Texas when it happened, and somehow James got it taken off the records.”

  “And the chief of police took her off in a patrol wagon.”

  “They met at her husband’s grave. There was some suggestion that he had his wife buried next door on purpose, and that’s the way it began.”

  “So Greek!”

  “But, my dear, there are limits to human conduct!”

  “But not to human impulses.”

  “Pompeii!”

  “And nobody wants any homemade wine? I strained it through an old pair of underwear, but it seems to still have a little sediment.” In St-Raphaël, she was thinking, the wine was sweet and warm. It clung like syrup to the roof of my mouth and glued the world together against the pressure of the heat and the dissolution of the sea.

  “How is your exhibition?” they said. “We’ve seen the reproductions.”

  “We love those last pictures,” they said. “Nobody has ever handled the ballet with any vitality since——”

  “I thought,” said David, “that rhythm, being a purely physical exercise of the eyeball, that the waltz picture would actually give you, by leading the eye in pictorial choreography, the same sensation as following the measure with your feet.”

  “Oh, Mr. Knight,” said the women, “what a wonderful idea!”

  The men had been saying “Attaboy,” and “Twenty-three skidoo,” since the depression.

  Along the paths of their faces the light slept in their eyes like the sails of children’s boats reflected in a pond. The rings where stones kicked from the walk sank, widened and disappeared, and the eyes were deep and quiet.

  “Oh,” wailed the guests; “the world is terrible and tragic, and we can’t escape what we want.”

  “Neither can we—that’s why there’s a chip off the globe teetering on our shoulders.”

  “May I ask what it is?” they said.

  “Oh, the secret life of man and woman—dreaming how much better we would be than we are if we were somebody else or even ourselves, and feeling that our estate has been unexploited to its fullest. I have reached the point where I can only express the inarticulate, taste food without taste, smell whiffs of the past, read statistical books, and sleep in uncomfortable positions.”

  “When I revert to the allegorical school,” David went on, “my Christ will sneer at the silly people, who do not give a rap about his sad predicament, and you will see in his face that he would like a bite of their sandwiches if somebody would just loosen up his nails for a minute——”

  “We shall all come to New York to see it,” they said.

  “And the Roman soldiers in the foreground will also be wanting a bite of sandwich, but they will be too ja
cked up by the dignity of their position to ask for it.”

  “When will it be shown?”

  “Oh, years and years from now—when I have finished painting everything else in the world.”

  On the cocktail tray, mountains of things represented something else; canapés like goldfish, and caviar in balls, butter bearing faces and frosted glasses sweating with the burden of reflecting such a lot of things to stimulate the appetite to satiety before eating.

  “You two are lucky,” they said.

  “You mean that we’ve parted with segments of ourselves more easily than other people—granted that we were ever intact,” said Alabama.

  “You have an easy time,” they said.

  “We trained ourselves to deduce logic from experience,” Alabama said. “By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future. We grew up founding our dreams on the infinite promise of American advertising. I still believe that one can learn to play the piano by mail and that mud will give you a perfect complexion.”

  “Compared to the rest, you are happy.”

  “I sit quietly eyeing the world, saying to myself, ‘Oh, the lucky people who can still use the word “irresistible.” ’ ”

  “We couldn’t go on indefinitely being swept off our feet,” supplemented David.

  “Balance,” they said, “we must all have balance. Did you find much balance in Europe?”

  “You’d do better to have another drink—that’s what you came for, isn’t it?”

  Mrs. McGinty had short white hair and the face of a satyr, and Jane had hair like a rock whirlpool, and Fannie’s hair was like a thick coating of dust over mahogany furniture, Veronica’s hair was dyed with a dark aisle down the centre part, Mary’s hair was country hair, like Maude’s, and Mildred’s hair was like the draperies of the “Winged Victory,” flying.

  “And they said he had a platinum stomach, my dear, so that his food just dropped into a little sack when he ate. But he lived for years like that.”

  “That hole in the top of his head was to blow him up by, though he pretended that he got it in the war.”

  “So she cut her hair after first one painter then another, till finally she came to the cubists and camouflaged her scalp.”