Zelda

by Nancy Milford

  She also wrote Scottie such directives as this:

  Right things are the best things to pursue and to do, by the nature of their being. A thing is right to do because it contributes the most constructive possibility; is right because the concensus of the best authorities have endorsed it; and is the right course because it is the most spiritually remunerative of any possibility—Knowing the right there isn’t any alternative—because right is that which is most spiritually advantageous and all souls seek betterment. The purpose of life on earth is that the soul shall grow—

  So grow—by doing what is right.

  Zelda began to live more and more exclusively within these circles of Tightness, altered only by remembering. Within a few months she was writing Scottie: “Time passes: the japonica still blooms and the garden has been expectantly promisory with jonquils and the peach trees bud.… These rainy twilights are glamorous and sorrowful and make me wish that I weren’t too old to remember tragic love-affairs.” Her life was peopled with memories. The editors of The American Mercury wrote to her asking permission to reprint “Crazy Sunday” in a collection of their best work. They offered her $50. She told Scottie: “Scott would have been so pleased; it is good that he is still remembered. I wish that my reams of epic literature would spin themselves out to a felicitous end. I write and write and have, in fact, progressed. The book [Caesar’s Things] still makes little sense but makes it very beautifully and may find a reader or two eventually.”

  Sometimes she got tired of making the best of everything, of having to be a financial wizard to keep herself off the rocks on $50 a month, and at those times she would admit to Scottie that her family in the South was “oppressive and I am sick to death of hypochrondia and the simplicities of the poor. Maybe a few months in the mountains will give me a more sociable attitude.” It was during such periods as these that she would think back on her life with Scott.

  I always feel that Daddy was the key-note and prophet of his generation and deserves remembrance as such since he dramatized the last post-war era & gave the real signifigance to those gala and so-tragicly fated days. He tabulated and greatly envied foot-ball players & famous atheletes and liked girls from the popular songs; he loved gorging on canned voluptés at curious hours and, as you have had many controversial run-ins with, was the longest & most exhaustive conversationalist I ever met. He loved people but was given to quick judgments and venomous enmities: I had few friends but I never quarreled with any; save once with a friend in the Paris Opera whom I loved. Daddy loved glamour & so I also had a great respect for popular acclame. 1 wish that I had been able to do better one thing & not so give[n] to running into cul-de-sac with so many.

  Her moods did not lift easily, and when her life seemed to her useless, only faith gave her respite. She wrote Mrs. Ober:

  I used to feel desperately sad in the hospital when I thought of time going by and my being unable to turn it to any account, then I reconciled myself and had to accept with grace the implacable exigences of life. I would not exchange my experience for any other because it has brought me the knowledge of God. Revelations of His Divine presence are a greater honor than any which the world could give; a greater beauty and a more compelling inspiration.

  She bought two doves and sat before the cage listening to their sounds, “wishing that somebody would send me a Valentine.”

  When Zelda learned that Scottie’s husband was returning from active service she offered advice about decorating a home. She told Scottie to avoid “imitation decorator’s items.” Pewter pots, earthenware jugs, calico curtains, gingham table cloths and plain white Fiesta-ware dishes were more “engaging” and cheaper. “There isn’t any real reason why sheets should be white: pink sheets would be most entertaining and one could sew the strips together with narrow embroidery.… Don’t buy all the spoons and sauce-pans which one always seems to need.… They breed under the kitchen sink if left to themselves.…” She suggested “croissants for breakfast” to make the meal more interesting for a man, “unless they’re like Daddy who not only wanted an egg every day but the same egg every day.”

  At the beginning of 1946 she returned to Highland. Landon Ray, the athletic director, remembers one of their hikes together there, when they walked up and across Sunset Mountain near the Grove Park Inn. As they walked it began to rain, a light spring rain, “but she had no complaints about her own discomfort. She seemed to enjoy just being there. Once we made camp the first thing we did was to build a fire. Zelda went for wood and I remember stopping while I was talking to one of the other people and just watching her going through the deep laurel and wet briar selecting the best pieces for kindling. The hike was a sort of test of mettle.” That vignette formed his final memory of Zelda—a disheveled and middle-aged woman bending in the dim light and rain, alone and searching for wood.

  While Zelda was at Highland, on April 26, 1946, Scottie’s first child was born. Zelda had been certain Scottie would have a son and couldn’t resist crowing with pleasure when it turned out she was right. Immediately after the birth of Timothy Lanahan, she wrote Scottie: “Aren’t you wonderful! What a good idea to have a 7½ lb. boy! I don’t feel any older, but I suppose I should put strings on my bonnets.” Five days after Timothy’s birth Zelda sent Scottie another letter telling her she had been to see a movie of George White’s Scandals. She felt dated; “it brought back our honey-moon in New York. They sang ‘Bowl of Cherries’ & I remembered our peregrinations through the lights of Broadway with Geo. Nathan so many years ago.” It was wonderful to be a grandmother: “I haven’t been so beaming in years and I can’t wait to hold him and see how he works.… Continue to be good and eat your ice-cream and you will be well and at home in no time.…”

  To Ludlow Fowler she wrote: “It is completely incredible to me that one of my generation should be a grandmother; Time is no respector of convention anymore and goes on as if behaving in a rational manner.… Down here the little garden blows remotely poetic under the voluptes of late spring skies. I have a cage of doves who sing and woo the elements and die.…”

  At the end of the summer Zelda went East to see her grandson for herself. She went on from New York to visit the Biggses in Wilmington. Mrs. Biggs recalls that she had picked some berries for the center of her table because she thought Zelda might like them. As Zelda passed through the dining room she stopped by the table and said, “There are berries on your table!” Mrs. Biggs didn’t know what to say and waited. “They have thorns. The crown of thorns. Christ wore a crown of thorns. You must get rid of them immediately!” Not wanting to disturb her. Mrs. Biggs threw the berries out quickly, but for a moment she was afraid of Zelda.

  On Zelda’s last evening at the Biggses’ they were all sitting on a porch waiting to leave. Mrs. Biggs remembers: “John mentioned that it was time to catch the train back to Montgomery. Zelda didn’t seem to pay any attention and we stressed it a little more obviously. It was late. Perhaps we’d better get into the car, and so forth. Zelda said we didn’t need to worry, the train would not be on time anyway. We laughed and said, perhaps, but it was a risk we didn’t intend to take. ‘Oh. no,’ she said, ‘it will be all right. Scott has told me. Can’t you see him sitting here beside me?’ “The Biggses were speechless, neither knowing what to say or do. At last Judge Biggs insisted that they leave. “When we got to the station we had a half hour wait. The train was going to be late.” It was in an uneasy silence that they waited together until it came.

  Mrs. Ober was on the train, since Zelda had persuaded her to visit Montgomery. She remembers the trip with mixed feelings; she had gone for Scottie’s sake, not for Zelda’s. She liked Mrs. Sayre enormously. “She was a marvelous woman, big and comfortable. She was very protective about Zelda; she was her baby, after all. I remember asking her about the South during the Civil War, and she answered me, ‘Darling, just read Cone With the Wind.’ “Zelda would not always get up in the mornings; when she did finally make her appearance they would all have their “me
at” breakfast, which consisted of ham and sausages and bacon and grits and delicious hot cakes. They would eat again at mid-day for the last time, because the maid went home after that. “Zelda,” Mrs. Ober thinks, “played her mother’s protectiveness for all it was worth, played on it all the time. I don’t think Mrs. Sayre ever understood Zelda.” When they all talked together Zelda would reminisce about being a girl in Montgomery, and about her life with Scott.

  By October, 1946, Zelda, who had caught cold in New York, was on the edge of another collapse. She wrote Anne Ober that she would despair were it not for the knowledge “that God can help me if He so wills—thus I live; hoping to find grace and knowing that no agency of man can be of any assistance.” In November her asthma returned. It kept her from sleeping half the night, and “evil spirits plague the other half. I beseech the Lord until I do not see how God could in justice ignore my plaints—still I do not progress.” She felt herself growing old “enveloped in dreams and lost in yearnings’ and she fretted about her graying hair and her increased weight. Still, she held on. She painted bowls for Scottie depicting the various places they had lived during her childhood; Zelda said they would form “a real saga of your life.” She asked for a photograph of Scottie’s first house, or of the church she had been married in, for the salad bowl. She etched trays for the Biggses and the Obers. And when she could she received those few visitors who came to see her.

  Paul McLendon met Zelda for the first time in 1941, when he was in high -school in Montgomery. He was a friend of Livye Hart Ridgeway’s son, and Livye Hart and Zelda had been friends since girlhood. In his freshman year at the University of Alabama his roommate was crazy about F. Scott Fitzgerald and was trying, according to Paul, to run himself out as Fitzgerald had. When he learned that Paul had met Zelda he pressed him for details. A little embarrassed that he could remember none, Paul decided he would call on her the next weekend he was home. He did, and thereafter became a frequent visitor. Paul wanted to be a writer, and brought his stories to Zelda for criticism. After one such afternoon’s talk, Zelda wrote him, “I am not au-courrant with the affairs & morals of our day and live, indeed an anachronism.…” But she was deeply troubled by a story he had written and she wanted to know: “What happened to you? Young men once believed in the Sunday school picnic & the Constitution of the United States. I grievously lament that so much of contemporary literature should present such bitterness and misgiving.…” Still, whatever her doubts were, she gave him good direct advice about his story. She said it could use more atmosphere and she suggested he write it twice more, then send it off to Harper’s Magazine. At the end of her letter she asked him to “Be good.”

  A few months later, when Paul told her about a novel he wanted to write and about his fears that it might draw too deeply upon the lives of people close to him, Zelda, who understood such problems all too well, told him that “the world is fair game to the greedy themes of the literary-minded. It is difficult to make one’s close associates realize that all things are meat to a writer’s imagination and that interpretation & transpositions are the biggest part of his game and are not always transgressions of devotion.… I’d just go on & write & explain to my friends later, you’ll probably have to apologize anyway.” She also said she wasn’t looking forward to winter that year and she asked him if it was not too late for a picnic in the park together: “—The woods are a romantic idyll at this time of year over which I dream & reminisce.”

  Paul realized that Zelda enjoyed his company partly because he brought her into contact with a younger world than the one in which she lived with her mother. Mrs. Sayre, who suffered from rheumatism, rarely left her house any more. Her snow-white hair was worn in braids about her head and she was always seen sitting in a rocker on her front porch wearing long cotton housedresses and solid Aunt Pittypat shoes. She was, however, an alert old woman with a tart wit and she enjoyed nothing better than talking with the cronies who gathered around her in the afternoon. But it was a restricted world for Zelda, who often spent long hours indoors listening to her record player. Once after Paul had invited her for a day at Tuscaloosa she replied: “…please forgive and ask me later again and I will be so happy to share with you the idyll of youth She said she was ill and harassed by “evil spirits” from the “spirit world (which really do not deserve a trip to a university.)… — Please let me come some other time.”

  Usually when Paul came to visit, Mrs. Sayre would stay chatting for a few minutes with them both as if to make sure that everything was all right and then leave him and Zelda to their long conversations. But one afternoon Mrs. Sayre told him Zelda couldn’t talk to him that day, and she asked him to keep her company on the porch. They were talking when suddenly a cry came from inside the house. It was a low wail, like that of a wounded animal, rather than a human cry. In an instant the cry stopped and then a door slammed shut violently. Mrs. Sayre and McLendon were silent. Then Mrs. Sayre said, “You know I’ve had that door facing replaced three times.” McLendon left shortly afterward.

  On good days Zelda and he would sit for hours talking about the times she had shared with Scott in Paris in the twenties. He noticed that it was in recollection and reverie that her conversation flowed most easily. But she seemed to him plagued with a sense of repentance. Again and again she would speak or write to him about Divine Purpose, atonement, and forgiveness of sins. McLendon would listen and try to remember. In the winter they sat in front of the fire, in summertime out on the patio at the rear of the cottage. On its walls Zelda had painted colorful murals from scenes of her life with Scott.

  McLendon remembers one of the last times he saw Zelda.

  The time was early, early spring. Flowers were beginning to bloom, though the air was still nippy and the wind brisk. It was a Saturday, and 1 was home from Tuscaloosa for the weekend. I went by to see Zelda, and while there, I told her of a pair of Alfred von Munchausen prints I had seen in a store window downtown, and of how much I liked them. Zelda said that we should walk to town so that I could point the pictures out to her, and then she would paint a similar picture for me.

  Zelda went to her room for a moment, and returned wearing a rather strange collage of attire—a dress length coat of deep blue wool, with gray caracul fur about the collar & cuffs—& on her head, a very dark green felt cloche-type hat—from the crown of which were long streamers of green felt, end-tipped at the shoulders with white felt dogwood blossoms.

  We began our walk to town, and her spirits were soaring—as were my own—the day was beautiful & we were off on a lark. After only a block & a half, or so, there were three children walking toward us on the sidewalk, two girls & a boy—ages about 9, 11, 12. As they approached, Zelda & I were talking, but when we were 3 or 4 yards from them we both saw one of the girls punch the other & say, “You see there, there’s that crazy woman mamma’s been telling us about!” and they passed on by us.

  They continued walking in absolute silence. Zelda had heard the girl and turning to Paul she quietly told him she didn’t feel too well. They could go to town another day. Together they walked back to her little house.

  On March 10, 1947, Zelda wrote to Paul and told him that she was ill, and although she suffered, “He sends His angels to help.…” She said she could see a lone jonquil blooming in her garden. And she was painting to make “pin money with trays & trays & trays.”

  Henry Dan Piper was discharged from the Army at Anniston, Alabama, that same March. He’d gone to Princeton as an undergraduate and while there became greatly intrigued by Scott Fitzgerald’s writing. He decided to take advantage of his proximity to Scott’s widow and to try to visit her in Montgomery. He had only a weekend, March 13 and 14, in which to see Zelda and he wasn’t sure she would want to talk to him. But he telephoned and Zelda immediately invited him to come by at four o’clock that same afternoon for tea. She met him at the door to the cottage and began by apologizing, “I don’t have much to tell you.”

  As Piper took off an old camel�
��s hair polo coat he had bought from Finchley’s in New York while at Princeton, Zelda reached out to touch it and said, delightedly, “Oh, it looks just like Scott’s!”

  Piper was moved by the winsomeness of her gesture and remembers feeling that there was something not only spontaneous about her reaction but very feminine. Watching her as she began to speak, Piper noticed that her hair was darker than he had expected, and graying. She wore black, a plain voile dress with girlish lace trimmings at the sleeves and throat. Her nose was sharp and pointed and she wore a little too much powder. Her mouth was thin-lipped. He says: “Every once in a while her face would grow strained, and the mouth fall away and be lost in a hundred deep lines that decomposed all her lower face and gave her an aged ugliness. She had a strange mannerism of now and then screwing up her eyes into many wrinkles and looking away into space, working her mouth and lips.” As his glance strayed over her he noticed that her legs and hands and fingers were older looking than his first impression of them. Her hands particularly looked gnarled from strain.

  Mrs. Sayre was with them at the beginning of their conversation, but soon retired to the kitchen. Zelda followed her and began bringing out an abundance of cakes and pastries she said she had made herself. There were custards with meringue, small frosted cakes, honey biscuits with curls of sweet butter—much more than they could possibly eat.