Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Read online

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  ONCE AGAIN

  TO

  ZELDA

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part II

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part III

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Part IV

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Part V

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  December 21, 1940

  Afterword

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Montgomery, Alabama

  December 20, 1940

  Dear Scott,

  The Love of the Last Tycoon is a great title for your novel. What does Max say?

  I’ve been thinking that maybe I’ll brave an airplane ride and come to see you for New Year’s. Wire me the money, if you can. Won’t we be quite the pair?—you with your bad heart, me with my bad head. Together, though, we might have something worthwhile. I’ll bring you some of those cheese biscuits you always loved, and you can read me what you’ve written so far. I know it’s going to be a wonderful novel, Scott, your best one yet.

  This is short so I can send it before the post office closes today. Write me soon.

  Devotedly,

  Z~

  If I could fit myself into this mail slot, here, I’d follow my letter all the way to Hollywood, all the way to Scott, right up to the door of our next future. We have always had a next one, after all, and there’s no good reason we shouldn’t start this one now. If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn’t that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.

  The postmaster comes, keys jingling, to lock up. “How are you, Miss Sayre?” he says, despite knowing that I’ve been Mrs. Fitzgerald since 1920. He is full-blood Alabama, Sam is; Sayre from him is Say-yuh, whereas I have come to pronounce those trailing soft consonants somewhat, after living away for so long.

  I tuck my hands into my sweater’s pockets and move toward the door. “I’m just about right as rain, Sam, thanks. I hope you are.”

  He holds the door for me. “Been worse. Have a good evenin’, now.”

  I have been worse, too. Far worse, and Sam knows this. Everyone in Montgomery knows this. I see them staring at me when I’m at the market or the post office or church. People whisper about how I went crazy, how my brother went crazy, how sad it is to see Judge Sayre’s children spoil his legacy. It all comes from the mother’s side, they whisper, despite Mama, whose main crime is that she came from Kentucky, being as sound and sensible as any of them—which, now that I think of it, may not be saying much.

  Outside, the sun has sunk below the horizon, tired of this day, tired of this year, as ready as I am to start anew. How long before Scott gets my letter? How long ’til I get his reply? I’d buy a plane ticket first thing tomorrow if I could. It’s time I took care of him, for a change.

  It’s time.

  That commodity, once so plentiful that we spent it on all-day hangovers and purposeless outings with people I’ve long forgotten, has become more precious than we ever imagined it could be. Too many of our dear ones are ruined now, or gone. Nothing except luck protects you from catastrophe. Not love. Not money. Not faith. Not a pure heart or good deeds—and not bad ones either, for that matter. We can, any of us, be laid low, cut down, diminished, destroyed.

  Take me, for example. Until moving here to live with Mama this past April, I endured six years in a series of sanitariums in order to heal my broken brain and fractured spirit. Scott, meantime, straggled through a bunch of different hotels and inns and towns, always nearby me—until Hollywood beckoned again and I urged him to go. His luck hardly improved: for three years now, he’s battled liquor and studio executives. He had a minor heart attack earlier this month.

  Though I suspect he has someone out there, he writes to me all the time, and always ends his letters, With dearest love … My letters to him are signed, Devotedly … Even now, when we haven’t shared an address in six years, when he’s probably shining his light on some adoring girl who surely thinks she has saved him, we’re both telling it true. This is what we’ve got at the moment, who we are. It’s not nearly what we once had—the good, I mean—but it’s also not what we once had, meaning the bad.

  Mildred Jameson, who taught me sewing in junior high school, calls to me from her porch as I pass. “Say, Zelda, when’s that fella of yours coming back for you?”

  We’re celebrities in this town, Scott and me. Folks here have followed our doings all along, clipping articles about us, claiming events and friendships that are as invented as any fiction Scott or I ever wrote. You can’t stop the gossip or even combat it, hardly, so you learn to play along.

  “He’s writing a new movie script,” I tell her, which is sexier than the truth: he’s done with the studios—for-ever, he says—and is working only on the book.

  Mildred moves to the porch rail. “You can’t spend another Christmas apart!” Her gray hair is set in pins and covered by a filmy scarf. “Tell him to hurry up, for goodness’ sake—and tell him to put that handsome Clark Gable in the picture. Oh, my, I do love Rhett Butler!”

  I nod and say, “I’ll tell him.”

  “Make certain you do. And tell him to be quick about it! We aren’t any of us getting any younger.”

  “I’m sure he’s working as fast as he can.”

  At a dinner we attended for James Joyce, in Paris back in ’28, Scott lamented Gatsby’s lackluster sales and his slow start at writing a new book. Joyce told him that he, too, was making slow progress on a new novel, which he hoped to complete in three or four more years.

  “Years,” Scott kept saying afterward, never anticipating that nine strange and tumultuous ones would pass between Gatsby and his next. And now again it’s been six, but I am persuaded that he’s going to finish this novel soon. After everything he’s been through, every disappointment, every insult, this novel will restore him—not only to his readers but also to himself.


  The other day, he wrote to me:

  I’ve found a title: The Love of the Last Tycoon. What do you think? Meanwhile, I finished Ernest’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. It’s not as good as his last, which explains why Hollywood’s giving him over a hundred thousand for it. Together with the fifty grand he’ll make for it being the first Book-of-the-Month selection, he’s really rolling in it like we never were (though we did put on a good show). Quite a change from when all he could afford were those awful rooms over the sawmill in Paris, isn’t it?

  Ernest. Scott thinks we are all on an even keel nowadays, he and Hemingway and me. He said the new book came to him inscribed, To Scott with affection and esteem. He was so pleased. What I might have replied, but didn’t, is that Hemingway can afford to be magnanimous; why wouldn’t he tread the high road now that we are all in the places that, by his measure, we’re supposed to be?

  Scott went on,

  I just came across my Montgomery Country Club membership card from 1918, issued to Lt. F. S. Fitzgerald … do you remember that guy? Bold and dashing and romantic—poor soul. He was wildly in love with writing and life and a particular Montgomery debutante all the lesser fellows said was ungettable. His heart still hasn’t fully recovered.

  I wonder if we’re completely ruined, you and I. That’s the prevailing opinion, but you’ve had eight pretty good months since you left the hospital, and my outlook’s improving too. Haven’t touched a drink since last winter, can you even imagine that?

  But Zelda, what wouldn’t you give to go back to the beginning, to be those people again, the future so fresh and promising that it seems impossible not to get it right?

  Lord help me, I miss him.

  I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, who thinks Scott’s beyond washed-up and I’m about as sharp these days as a sack of wet mice, Look closer.

  Look closer and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.

  PART I

  If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?

  —T. S. Eliot

  1

  Picture a late-June morning in 1918, a time when Montgomery wore her prettiest spring dress and finest floral perfume—same as I would wear that evening. Our house, a roomy Victorian on Pleasant Avenue, was wrapped in the tiny white blooms of Confederate jasmine and the purple splendor of morning glories. It was a Saturday, and early yet, and cloudy. Birds had congregated in the big magnolia tree and were singing at top volume as if auditioning to be soloists in a Sunday choir.

  From our back stairway’s window I saw a slow horse pulling a rickety wagon. Behind it walked two colored women who called out the names of vegetables as they went. Beets! Sweet peas! Turnips! they sang, louder even than the birds.

  “Hey, Katy,” I said, coming into the kitchen. “Bess and Clara are out there, did you hear ’em?” On the wide wooden table was a platter covered by a dish towel. “Plain?” I asked hopefully, reaching beneath the towel for a biscuit.

  “No, cheese—now, don’t make that face,” she said, opening the door to wave to her friends. “Nothin’ today!” she shouted. Turning to me, she said, “You can’t have peach preserves every day of your life.”

  “Old Aunt Julia said that was the only thing keepin’ me sweet enough to evade the devil.” I bit into the biscuit and said, mouth full, “Are the Lord and Lady still asleep?”

  “They both in the parlor, which I ’spect you know since you used the back stairway.”

  I set my biscuit aside so as to roll my blue skirt’s waistband one more turn, allowing another inch of skin to show above my bare ankles. “There.”

  “Maybe I best get you the preserves after all,” Katy told me, shaking her head. “You mean to wear shoes, at least.”

  “It’s too hot—and if it rains, they’ll just get soaked and my toes’ll prune up and the skin’ll peel and then I’ll have to go shoeless and I can’t, I have my ballet solo tonight.”

  “My own mama would whip me if I’s to go in public like that,” Katy clucked.

  “She would not, you’re thirty years old.”

  “You think that matter to her?”

  I thought of how my parents still counseled and lectured my three sisters and my brother, all at least seven years older than me, all full adults with children of their own—except for Rosalind. Tootsie, we call her. She and Newman, who was off fighting in France, same as our sister Tilde’s husband, John, were taking their time about parenthood—or maybe it was taking its time about them. And I thought of how my grandmother Musidora, when she lived with us, couldn’t help advising Daddy about everything from his haircuts to his rulings. The thing, then, was to get away from one’s parents, and stay away.

  “Anyway, never mind,” I said as I went for the back door, sure that my escape was at hand. “Long as no one here sees me—”

  “Baby!” I jumped at Mama’s voice coming from the doorway behind us. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, “where are your stockings and shoes?”

  “I’m just goin’—”

  “—right back to your room to get dressed. You can’t think you were walking to town that way!”

  Katy said, “S’cuse me, I just remembered we low on turnips,” and out she went.

  “Not to town,” I lied. “To the orchard. I’m goin’ to practice for tonight.” I extended my arms and did a graceful plié.

  Mama said, “Yes, lovely. I’m sure, however, that there’s no time for practice; didn’t you say the Red Cross meeting starts at nine?”

  “What time is it?” I turned to see that the clock read twenty minutes ’til. I rushed past Mama and up the stairs, saying, “I better get my shoes and get out of here!”

  “Please tell me you’re wearing your corset,” she called.

  Tootsie was in the upstairs hallway still dressed in her nightgown, hair disheveled, sleep in her eyes. “What’s all this?”

  When Newman had gone off to France in the fall to fight with General Pershing, Tootsie came back home to live until he returned. “If he returns,” she’d said glumly, earning a stern look from Daddy—who we all called the Judge, his being an associate Alabama Supreme Court justice. “Show some pride,” he’d scolded Tootsie. “No matter the outcome, Newman’s service honors the South.” And she said, “Daddy, it’s the twentieth century, for heaven’s sake.”

  Now I told her, “I’m light a layer, according to Her Highness.”

  “Really, Baby, if you go out with no corset, men will think you’re—”

  “Immoral?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I don’t care,” I said. “Everything’s different now anyway. The War Industries Board said not to wear corsets—”

  “They said not to buy them. But that was a good try.” She followed me into my bedroom. “Even if you don’t care about social convention, have a thought for yourself; if the Judge knew you left the house half-naked, he would have your hide.”

  “I was tryin’ to have a thought for myself,” I said, stripping off my blouse, “and then all you people butted in.”

  Mama was still in the kitchen when I clattered back down the stairs. “That’s better. Now the skirt,” she said, pointing at my waist.

  “Mama, no. It gets in my way when I run.”

  “Just fix it, please. I can’t have you spoiling the Judge’s good name just so you can get someplace faster.”

  “Nobody’s out this early but the help, and anyway, when did you get so fussy?”

  “It’s a matter of what’s appropriate. You’re seventeen years old—”

  “Eighteen, in twenty-six more days.”

  “Yes, that’s right, even more to the point,” she said. “Too old to still be a tomboy.”

  “Call me a fashion plate, then. Hemlines are goin’ up, I saw it in McCall’s.”

  She pointed at my skirt. “Not as high as that.”

  I kissed her on her softening jawline. No cream or
powder could hide Time’s toll on Mama’s features. She’d be fifty-seven on her next birthday, and all those years showed in her lined face, her upswept hairdo, her insistence on sticking with her Edwardian shirtwaists and floor-sweeping skirts. She outright refused to make anything new for herself. “There’s a war going on,” she’d say, as if that explained everything. Tootsie and I had been so proud when she gave up her bustle at New Year’s.

  I said, “So long, Mama—don’t wait lunch for me, I’m goin’ to the diner with the girls.”

  Then the second I was out of sight, I sat down in the grass and pulled off my shoes and stockings to free my toes. Too bad, I thought, that my own freedom couldn’t be had so easily.

  * * *

  Thunder rumbled in the distance as I headed toward Dexter Avenue, the wide thoroughfare that runs right up to the domed, columned state capitol, the most impressive building I had ever seen. Humming “Dance of the Hours,” the tune I’d perform to later, I skipped along amid the smell of clipped grass and wet moss and sweet, decaying catalpa blooms.

  Ballet, just then, was my one true love, begun at age nine when Mama had enrolled me in Professor Weisner’s School of Dance—a failed attempt to keep me out of the trees and off the roofs. In ballet’s music and motion there was joy and drama and passion and romance, all the things I desired from life. There were costumes, stories, parts to play, chances to be more than just the littlest Sayre girl—last in line, forever wanting to be old enough to be old enough.

  I was on Mildred Street just past where it intersected with Sayre—named for my family, yes—when a sprinkle hit my cheek, and then one hit my forehead, and then God turned the faucet on full. I ran for the nearest tree and stood beneath its branches, for what little good it did. The wind whipped the leaves and the rain all around me and I was soaked in no time. Since I couldn’t get any wetter, I just went on my way, imagining the trees as a troupe of swaying dancers and me an escaped orphan freed, finally, from a powerful warlock’s tyranny. I might be lost in the forest, but as in all the best ballets, a prince was sure to happen along shortly.