The house, now, as the LaSalle slowed for the drive, looked the same, the barbered lawn and box hedges, the white-pillared porch. She leaned across him, dipping her head to check the upstairs windows. The last time she was home was over a year ago, the summer before last, for her birthday. By the end of the visit she’d stopped talking, spending all of her time in the garden, wearing her father’s old straw boater and filling her present of a sketchpad with messy studies of flowers her mother cooed over, saying she’d love a framed one for her birthday.
The car stopped. She’d gone quiet, after all the chatter, and when he offered his hand, she took it. Sara was already out. Still, she didn’t move.
“Ready?” he asked.
“I am,” she said, nodding as if to convince herself.
Flanking the steps were leftover poinsettias, and a pinecone wreath adorned the front door, which opened before the driver could get it for them.
Leaning on her cane, Mrs. Sayre tottered out, a knit shawl draped over her shapeless housedress. She’d had Zelda late in life, and by the time Scott met her, her face bore only the slightest resemblance around the mouth. Since the judge had died, she’d become frowzy and heavyset, her cheeks gray with liver spots, eyelids sprigged with moles, a state his own mother didn’t live long enough to attain. With her bifocals and rat’s nest of ashen hair she would have seemed a pitiable opponent if he didn’t know how expert she was at wielding her helplessness.
“There’s my baby,” she said.
“Mama,” Zelda said.
Mrs. Sayre closed her arms around her, pulling her to her bosom, rocking side to side. “I was afraid I’d never see the day.” She said it for everyone to hear, a bad actress, and he wished he could get back in the car. “What in the world happened to your face?”
“It was my fault. We were playing tennis and I tripped over myself.”
“I don’t know why they have you playing such a dangerous game in the first place. I think they need to look after you better, that’s what I think.” She fixed on Scott as if she’d just noticed him standing there. “Thank you for going out of your way. You don’t know how much we appreciate it.”
It had been the plan all along, and the “we” was calculated, but he was a diplomat. “My pleasure.”
“I wish Scottie could have come.”
“Me too.”
“How is the darling?”
“Very well. She sends her love.”
The judge would have shaken his hand and ushered him inside, regaling him with the political intricacies of his latest case, but Mrs. Sayre held on to Zelda as if she were her nurse. He and Sara trailed them to the parlor, where a Christmas tree shimmering with tinsel stood by the fireplace. Hanging from the mantel were stockings embroidered with the names of the Sayre children. Even in death her brother Anthony was represented. Not Scott. Later, when they went upstairs to get settled, he discovered Freeman had installed him in Anthony’s old room in the back hall, as if he were a lodger.
For Zelda’s sake as well as his own, he resolved to absorb these slights with Christian largesse. When Mrs. Sayre held forth on how Zelda’s old beaux were prospering, or brought up the debacle of her last trip to Baltimore, or told, as a joke, the story of Zelda running naked around the country club pool as a child, he reminded himself that in five days he would be in New York, lunching with Max and Ober.
The centerpiece of the visit was Christmas dinner with her sisters Rosalind and Marjorie and their families. As if he might redeem himself through good works, he volunteered for every chore and errand, riding around town in the front seat with Freeman, drawing stares until the man asked him, plaintively, if he wouldn’t mind sitting in back. In chastised silence he watched the signs and storefronts scroll by. The city was hers, its soul inscrutable to a northerner. More than any place they’d lived, the streets were overlaid with memories, one past folded atop another. A trolley stop, a park bandstand, a Confederate field gun guarding a square—everywhere he went he was met with the empty stage sets of their courtship.
Though she was encouraged to revisit her favorite places, Zelda didn’t go out. She scuffed around the house in her moccasins like a prisoner, playing casino with her mother and listening to the phonograph while Sara polished the silver. Her only job was to make the place cards, which her mother fawned over as if she were Picasso. She napped in the afternoon, on her narrow bed in her old room, decorated with the painted fans and paper roses of the war years. Her bookshelves were filled with nursery rhymes, her closet with frilly organdy dresses. Curled up with her face turned toward the wall, she might have been a girl again.
Anthony’s room, too, belonged to another time, with his crusty baseball glove and tarnished diving trophies and stale cigar box of marbles. At night, alone in the cold bed, Scott fended off visions of his final minutes—the window and the long drop. In Saint-Raphael he’d had a nightmare in which he’d fallen off a cliff, or been pushed, going over backwards, flailing as if he might right himself. He and Zelda had been fighting, and their hotel balcony perched above the rocks, so it made sense. Still, every night he dreaded the sensation. He couldn’t imagine it being a relief.
Not quite arbitrarily, Mrs. Sayre had chosen the twenty-fifth for Christmas. In the morning a fire blazed on the hearth and they watched Zelda spill her stocking out on the carpet. He made sure she’d taken her pills so there wouldn’t be any problems, and felt like an accomplice. Along with the walnuts and oranges and candy canes, Santa had left her an expensive set of charcoal sticks. She held them up for all to see, smiling for the camera, and Scott, who hadn’t been asked to contribute, was jealous. Sara gave her a sheer lilac scarf she knotted about her throat and wore for the rest of the day. From her mother she received a set of tea-rose silk pajamas and a chenille bedspread with matching hand-appliquéd pillowcases, and a gold charm bracelet, and a box of chocolate-covered cherries, and, lastly, carried in by Sara from its hiding place in the library, sporting only a red bow, a full-sized easel—none of which she would be allowed at Highland.
“That’s for your studio when you come home,” her mother explained. “I was thinking we might do something with the solarium.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“Merry Christmas, Baby.”
“Yes, thank you,” Scott said. “That’s overly generous.”
“Don’t think we’ve forgotten you.” Her mother handed him a present the size of a book but lighter, rigid as glass beneath the silver wrapping paper.
“You haven’t opened any of yours yet,” he protested, but tore away the foil to reveal a framed picture of the judge and Mrs. Sayre, Zelda, Scottie and himself dressed for church with the LaSalle in the background. It might have been Easter: Zelda and her mother held lilies. Scottie, in a blinding white pinafore, barely came to his waist. It had to have been ten years ago, before the Crash, and struck him as a non sequitur. He had no idea why she was giving it to him now. “Thank you. It’s very nice.”
“Look on the back.”
As if captioning the picture for posterity, she’d listed their names and Easter, 1928.
“That was the last time we were all together for a holiday.”
Was the implication that this was his fault, or was it a general lament? There was nothing he could say to rebut her, so he showed it to Zelda.
“Look how darling Scottie was,” she said.
“She’s still darling.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know.” He was being oversensitive, reflexively. He would always defend Scottie from her, as he did his best to protect her from her mother.
“Thank you again,” he said, and when they were done, put it upstairs with Zelda’s self-portrait.
The day was given over to the production of dinner, which consisted of Mrs. Sayre sending Sara in to check on Melinda the cook every fifteen minutes. Following a longstanding traditi
on, they were having goose. By midafternoon, when Zelda went up for her nap, the fat was crackling in the pan and the whole house smelled richly, recalling the holidays at his grandmother’s. Mrs. Sayre worried that they’d put the bird in too early, but, as with most of her fears, it was a way of making people obey her, and nothing came of it.
The sisters and the branches of their respective families arrived all at once, as if they’d caravanned together. The judge and Mrs. Sayre had had Zelda so late in life that most of her nieces and nephews were older than her. While Mrs. Sayre presided from her rocker, their children gathered in a ring around the tree while Zelda played Santa’s elf, doling out presents. Scott stood back between his brothers-in-law, with whom, over the years, he’d been summarily paired at garden parties and golf outings. As the two nursed their bourbons, Scott sipped his ginger ale. Usually they talked football, but the season was over. They were both lawyers who worked at the Capitol, sound, calculating men more interested in what was happening down the corridor than in Europe, but the menace had grown impossible to ignore. Country by country, strike by strike, the Communists were undermining the system. He thought of Dottie and Ernest, conjuring their arguments, but there was no point here, and soon enough the talk turned to Hollywood, which, having never been, they saw as a charmed and glamorous fairyland. They asked him the same questions everyone did, as if, between briefs, they read the scandal sheets: Was Gable shorter in person? Did Garbo really not speak to anyone off the set?
“Garbo’s actually very smart,” he told them, and spun a yarn about her knowing six languages and walking in on her talking with an Armenian tailor in Metro’s wardrobe department in his native tongue. It was a naked fabrication, for their sake. While he’d never met her, he knew, as Photoplay did, that they wanted him not to dispel but to deepen the mystique.
The children weren’t interested in the adults’ gifts, and Mrs. Sayre sent them off to the library with Sara. Zelda started to follow, till her mother called her back. He was afraid they’d have a repeat of the morning, but her sisters’ presents were practical—a camel sweater, wool socks, a pack of linen handkerchiefs. Scott had gotten them French perfume and golf balls and, on Freeman’s recommendation, their favorite pralines, accepting in return a leather-bound journal and monogrammed pen and pencil set he coveted on sight.
Dinner went equally well. To Mrs. Sayre’s surprise, the goose was perfectly juicy. Along with the teetotaling Sara, he and Zelda refrained from the champagne punch, while the rest of the adult table gradually dissolved into a sloppy jollity. He hadn’t wanted to come, but as Zelda laughed along with everyone and the candles cast their wavering shadows across the walls, he was glad he could give her a real Christmas.
A grateful guest, he made the mistake, the next day, of seeking out her mother and thanking her for inviting them. The whole time he’d pointedly avoided being alone with her, knowing she’d use the opportunity to plead her case, but it was their last day, and while part of him wanted to make a clean escape, he needed to offer her that courtesy. They sat on opposite sides of the fireplace, she ensconced in her rocker, he on a low ottoman, a peasant attending a dowager queen.
“I have to say there’s a world of difference,” she said. “I can’t remember her ever doing so well.”
“That’s the effect of the medication.”
“It’s working.”
“She doesn’t seem subdued to you?”
“She seems happy. It’s been an absolute treat having her.”
“I’d like to see how she does with a lower dosage.”
“I thought you’d be thrilled, after the last time.”
“I want her to be well but also to be herself.”
“She’s more herself than she’s been in ages. She’s been wonderful company, that’s what I’m going to tell Dr. Carroll.”
“That’s fair.”
“I think this is progress.”
Rather than quarrel with her, he strategically retreated. In their own ways they both wanted the best for Zelda, and yet discussing her fate with her mother seemed a betrayal, partly because she seemed less interested in Zelda’s well-being than in possessing her again. His position was just as entrenched, based as it was on resentment, if not outright dislike. As long as she was sick, he was convinced that if he let her go home she would never get better. But, as her mother in her Pollyanna optimism couldn’t bring herself to argue, if she was never going to get better, wouldn’t she be happier at home?
That night he helped Zelda pack her bags, and the next morning lugged them down the stairs and outside over Freeman’s protests. He expected a teary parting scene, but after her pills she was bemused, leaving her mother wet-eyed and sniffling on the porch, waving her cane as they backed away. In the LaSalle, she watched the fields roll by without comment, slouched against him as if she were tired. The bumpy flight over the Smokies didn’t faze her, or the winding drive up the mountain. They might have been going anywhere.
“Oh, too bad,” she said, looking out at the rhododendron. “The snow’s all gone.”
“I thought you didn’t like snow.”
“I like it here. It reminds me of Switzerland.”
The old places, she meant, Gstaad and St. Moritz, not the clinic with its caged staircase and white-tiled baths. Why was the past so keenly double-edged, or was it the present, being middling and empty? He tried not to think of Sheilah, of his life waiting in L.A.
“If I can get the time off, I’d like us to spend Easter together—you, me and Scottie. We could try Virginia Beach again.”
“That would be nice.”
“I’ll ask Dr. Carroll.”
Whether it was possible or not, he’d wanted to promise her something, as if that might make up for him leaving. He signed her in at the front desk, held her a moment, then stood beside her until a nurse arrived to escort her back to the ward.
“Good-bye, Dodo. Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas,” he said, and, watching her go, wished he were taking her pills.
Mrs. Sayre had already talked with the doctor, calling, apparently, while they were in the air. “It sounds like the visit was a great success.”
“Not exactly,” Scott said, and described how, as the trip went on, Zelda grew more and more inward.
The doctor nodded as if this was normal. They could step down the dosage and see how she responded, though, as with any inhibitor, that would limit its effectiveness.
“But overall,” the doctor said, “it went well?”
He agreed, grudgingly. It was only the next day, in freezing New York, after seeing Max and Ober and stopping in at several of his old haunts on Third Avenue to warm up, that he realized what he should have said. “Fuck you,” he told the bar at large, repeating it with amused and grandiose satisfaction, and then he was out in the street, swinging and being hit in the face, tasting blood. It felt good to fight—it felt true, as if he’d made the right choice, though now it seemed he had several opponents and they were laughing, pushing him around a closed circle, taking turns. Even as he fell, he stuck to his answer.
INFIDELITY
He hated coming home to an empty place, the still silence a reproof. The only mail was an overdue bill from the cleaners. He’d left the stove light on, and the milk in the fridge smelled. At least Bogie was back.
“I’m guessing your mother-in-law’s a southpaw,” he said, turning Scott’s chin to examine the damage.
Mayo said she could put some concealer on his eye, and though there was no hiding his fat lip, he sat for her like an actor in makeup.
Sheilah was disappointed in him, as he knew she’d be, wincing in sympathy as she touched his face. Was it going to be like this every time he went East? She spoke as if there must be an end to it, a hope he’d long ago dismissed, and which, coming from her, seemed unearned and unfair, leading to a brittle stalemate. He didn’t understand
. In Alabama he’d daydreamed of seeing her; now his head ached. She had good news—her agent had arranged an audition for a syndicated radio show, a five minute spot each week—but the mood was ruined. He didn’t tell her his plans for Easter, and she didn’t invite him to stay the night. In a way he was glad.
To regain himself, he wrote. A storm front had blown ashore, blanketing the city, and the weather was perfect for it. Mornings he woke early and put in his hours at the kitchen table, the rain tapping the roof. For years they’d lived on his stories, but sometime during Zelda’s troubles he’d lost the knack for those tales of young love the Post favored. His last few had appeared in Collier’s, who paid half what the Post did, and Esquire, who paid even less. Ober might have set his sights lower, but Scott hadn’t. He still believed he was as good as anyone out there, and when he turned a paragraph he’d been struggling with, he nodded with the satisfaction of a craftsman, lit another Raleigh and forged on.
At the studio he hid from Eddie till his lip healed, having lunch sent in and working late, trading last-ditch revisions with Paramore, who’d taken the opportunity while Scott was gone to rewrite the entire script. Every couple of hours new memos came down from upstairs. Couldn’t Margaret Sullavan be in a wheelchair rather than a bed so the scene would have more action? Did the car have to be a Daimler? Why not a Ford? Next week they started shooting on Stage 11. The sets were already waiting.
“I don’t know why you’re wasting your time,” Dottie said. “Mank’s just going to change it anyway.”
“I’d rather have him change my lines than that bastard’s.”
Alan tossed her a goggle-eyed double take. “You can’t argue with that kind of logic.”
“The Nazis are still the bad guys,” she checked, and Scott remembered Ernest’s warning.
“That’s the one thing we agree on.”
“Then you’ve done everything you can. Time to push it out of the nest.”
“And lay another egg,” Scott said.
West of Sunset Page 16
