Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Read online

  At the wide circular fountain where Court Street joined Dexter Avenue, I leaned against the railing and shook my unruly hair to get the water out. A few soggy automobiles motored up the boulevard and streetcars clanged past while I considered whether to just chuck my stockings and shoes into the fountain rather than wear them wet. Then I thought, Eighteen, in twenty-six days, and put the damn things back on.

  Properly clothed, more or less, I went up the street toward the Red Cross’s new office, set among the shops on the south side of Dexter. Though the rain was tapering off, the sidewalks were still mostly empty—few witnesses to my dishevelment, then, which would make Mama happy. She worries about the oddest things, I thought. All the women do. There were so many rules we girls were supposed to adhere to, so much emphasis on propriety. Straight backs. Gloved hands. Unpainted (and unkissed) lips. Pressed skirts, modest words, downturned eyes, chaste thoughts. A lot of nonsense, in my view. Boys liked me because I shot spitballs and because I told sassy jokes and because I let ’em kiss me if they smelled nice and I felt like it. My standards were based on good sense, not the logic of lemmings. Sorry, Mama. You’re better than most.

  Some twenty volunteers had gathered at the Red Cross, most of them friends of mine, who, when they saw me, barely raised an eyebrow at my state. Only my oldest sister, Marjorie, who was bustling round with pamphlets and pastries, made a fuss.

  “Baby, what a fright you look! Did you not wear a hat?” She attempted to smooth my hair, then gave up, saying, “It’s hopeless. Here.” She handed me a dish towel. “Dry off. If we didn’t need volunteers so badly, I’d send you home.”

  “Quit worryin’,” I told her, rubbing the towel over my head.

  She’d keep worrying anyway, I knew; she’d been fourteen when I was born, practically my second mother until she married and moved into a house two blocks away—and by then, of course, the habit was ingrained. I looped the towel around her neck, then went to find a seat.

  Eleanor Browder, my best friend at the time, had saved me a spot across from her at a long row of tables. To my right was Sara Mayfield—Second Sara, we called her, Sara the First being our friend serene Sara Haardt, who now went to college in Baltimore. Second Sara was paired with Livye Hart, whose glossy, mahogany-colored hair was like my friend Tallulah Bankhead’s. Tallu and her glossy dark hair won a Picture-Play beauty contest when we were fifteen, and now she was turning that win into a New York City acting career. She and her hair had a life of travel and glamour that I envied, despite my love for Montgomery; surely no one told Tallu how long her skirts should be.

  Waiting for the meeting to start, we girls fanned ourselves in the airless room. Its high, apricot-colored walls were plastered with Red Cross posters. One showed a wicker basket overflowing with yarn and a pair of knitting needles; it exhorted readers, “Our boys need SOX. Knit your bit.” Another featured a tremendous stark red cross, to the right of which was a nurse in flowing dress and robes that could not be a bit practical. The nurse’s arms cradled an angled stretcher, on which a wounded soldier lay with a dark blanket wrapped around both the stretcher and him. The perspective was such that the nurse appeared to be a giantess—and the soldier appeared at risk of sliding from that stretcher, feet first, if the nurse didn’t turn her distant gaze to the matter at hand. Below the image was this proclamation: “The Greatest Mother in the World.”

  I elbowed Sara and pointed to the poster. “What do you reckon? Is she supposed to be the Virgin Mother?”

  Sara didn’t get a chance to answer. There was a rapping of a cane on the wooden floor, and we all turned toward stout Mrs. Baker, in her steel-gray, belted suit. She was a formidable woman who’d come down from Boston to help instruct the volunteers, a woman who seemed as if she might be able to win the war single-handedly if only someone would put her on a boat to France.

  “Good morning, everyone,” she said in her drawl-less, nasal voice. “I see you’ve found our new location without undue effort. The war continues, and so we must continue—indeed, redouble—our efforts for membership and productivity.”

  Some of the girls cheered. They were the younger ones who’d only just been allowed to join.

  Mrs. Baker nodded, which made her chin disappear into her neck briefly, and then she continued, “Now, some of you have done finger and arm bandages; the principle of the leg and body bandages is the same. However, there are some significant differences to which we must attend. For any who have not been so instructed, I will start the lesson from the beginning. We start, first, with sheets of unbleached calico…”

  I squeezed rainwater from my hem while Mrs. Baker lectured about widths and lengths and tension and began a demonstration. She handed the end of a loose strip of fabric to the girl sitting nearest and said, “Stand up, my dear. One of you holds the bulk of the fabric and feeds it through as needed—that person is the rollee. The roller’s thumbs must be on the upper aspect of the fabric, the forefinger beneath, like so. As we proceed, the forefingers are kept firmly against the roll, thumbs advanced for maximum tautness. Everyone, up now and begin.”

  I took a loosely tied bundle of fabric from one of several baskets lined up along the floor behind me. The fabric was pure white at the moment, sure, but it would soon be blood-soaked and covering a man’s whole middle, crusted with dirt and irresistible to flies. I’d seen photographs of Civil War soldiers suffering this way, in books that depicted what Daddy called “the atrocities done to us by the Union.”

  It was my brother, Tony, seven years older than me and now serving in France, who Daddy meant to educate with the books and the discussions. He never shooed me out of the parlor, though. He would wave me over from where I might be picking out a simple tune on the piano and let me perch on his knee.

  “The Sayres have a proud history in Montgomery,” he’d say, paging through one of the books. “Here. This is my uncle William’s original residence, where he raised his younger brother Daniel, your grandfather. It became the first Confederate White House.”

  “So Sayre Street is named for us, Daddy?” I asked with all the wonder of my seven or eight years.

  “It honors William and my father. The two of them made this town what it is, children.”

  Tony seemed to take the Sayre family history as a matter of course. I, however, was fascinated with all of these now-dead relatives and would continue to ask questions about which of them had done what, when. I wanted stories.

  From Daddy, I got tales of how his father, Daniel Sayre, founded a Tuskegee paper, then returned to Montgomery to edit the Montgomery Post, becoming an influential voice in local politics. And Daddy told me about his mother’s brother, “the great General John Tyler Morgan,” who’d pummeled Union troops every chance he got, then later became a prominent U.S. Senator. From Mama I came to know her father, Willis Machen, the U.S. Senator from Kentucky, whose friendship with Senator Morgan was responsible for my parents’ meeting at Senator Morgan’s New Year’s Eve ball in 1883. Grandfather Machen had once been a presidential candidate.

  I wondered, that day at the Red Cross, if our family’s history was burdensome to Tony, oppressive, maybe. And maybe that was why he’d married Edith, whose people were tenant farmers, and then left Montgomery to live and work in Mobile. To be the only surviving son in a family—and not the first son, not the son who’d been named after the grandfather upon whose shoulders so much of Montgomery’s fate had apparently rested, not the son who’d died from meningitis at just eighteen months old—well, that was a heavy yoke.

  Untying the calico bundle, I redirected my thoughts and handed Eleanor the fabric’s loose end. “I had a letter yesterday from Arthur Brennan,” I said. “Remember him, from our last trip to Atlanta?”

  Eleanor frowned in concentration as she tried to form the start of the roll. “Was it thumbs under, or forefingers under?”

  “Fingers. Arthur’s people have been in cotton since before the Revolution. They’ve still got old slaves who never wanted to go, which Daddy
says is proof that President Lincoln ruined the South for nothin’.”

  Eleanor made a few successful turns, then looked up. “Arthur’s the boy with that green Dort car? The glossy one we rode in?”

  “That’s him. Wasn’t it delicious? Arthur said Dorts cost twice what a Ford does—a thousand dollars, maybe more. The Judge would as soon dance naked in front of the courthouse as spend that kind of money on a car.”

  The notion amused me; as I continued feeding the fabric to Eleanor, I imagined a scene in which Daddy exited the streetcar in his pin-striped suit, umbrella furled, leather satchel in hand. Parked at the base of the broad, marble courthouse steps would be a green Dort, its hood sleek and gleaming in the sunshine, its varnished running boards aglow. A man in a top hat and tailcoat—some agent of the devil, he’d be—would beckon my father over to the car; there would be a conversation; Daddy would shake his head and frown and gesture with his umbrella; he would raise a finger as he pontificated about relative value and the ethics of overspending; the top-hatted man would shake his head firmly, leaving Daddy no choice but to disrobe on the spot, and dance.

  In this vision I allowed my father the dignity of being at a distance from my vantage point, and facing away from me. In truth, I hadn’t yet seen a man undressed—though I’d seen young boys, and Renaissance artwork, which I supposed were representational enough.

  “Speaking of nakedness,” Eleanor said, leaning across the table to take the end of the bandage from me, “last night at the movie house, an aviator—Captain Wendell Haskins, he said—asked me was the rumor true about you parading around the pool in a flesh-colored bathing suit. He was at the movies with May Steiner, and asking about you, isn’t that sublime? May was at the concession just then, so she didn’t hear him; that was gentlemanly, at least.”

  Sara said, “I sure wish I’d been at the pool that day, just to see the old ladies’ faces.”

  “Were you at the dance last winter when Zelda pinned the mistletoe to the back of her skirt?” Livye said.

  “You should’ve been down here with us on Wednesday,” Eleanor told them. “Zelda commandeered our streetcar while the driver was on the corner finishing a smoke. We just left him there with his eyes bulging and went rolling on up Perry Street!”

  “I swear, Zelda, you have all the fun,” Sara said. “And you never get in trouble!”

  Eleanor said, “Everyone’s afraid of her daddy, so they just shake their finger at her and let her go.”

  I nodded. “Even my sisters are scared of him.”

  “But you’re not,” Livye said.

  “He barks way more than he bites. So, El, what’d you tell Captain Haskins?”

  “I said, ‘Don’t tell a soul, Captain, but there was no bathing suit at all.’”

  Livye snorted, and I said, “See, El, that’s what I like about you. Keep that up and all the matrons will be calling you wicked, too.”

  Eleanor reached for a pin from a bowl on the table, then secured the bandage’s end. “He asked whether you had a favorite beau, who your people were, what your daddy did, and whether you had siblings—”

  Sara said, “Might be he just wanted some excuse to make conversation with you, Eleanor.”

  “In which case he might have thought of one or two questions about me.” Eleanor smiled at Sara fondly. “No, he’s most certainly fixated on Miss Zelda Sayre of 6 Pleasant Avenue, she of the toe shoes and angel’s wings.”

  Livye said, “And devil’s smile.”

  “And pure heart,” Sara added. I pretended to retch.

  “He said he’s not serious about May,” Eleanor said. “Also, he intends to phone you.”

  “He already has.”

  “But you haven’t said yes yet.”

  “I’m booked up ’til fall,” I said, and it was true; between the college boys who’d so far avoided military service and the flood of officers come to train at Montgomery’s new military installations, I had more male attention than I knew what to do with.

  Sara took my hand. “If you like him, you shouldn’t wait. They might ship out any day, you know.”

  “Yes,” Eleanor agreed. “It might be now or never.”

  I pulled my hand from Sara’s and lifted another pile of fabric from the basket behind us. “There’s a war, in case you haven’t heard. It might end up being now and then never. So what’s the use?”

  Eleanor said, “That hasn’t stopped you from seeing a military man before. He’s awfully handsome.…”

  “He is that. When he phones again, maybe I’ll—”

  “Chatter later, ladies,” Mrs. Baker scolded as she strolled by, hands clasped behind her back, bosom straining forward like a warship’s prow. “Important though your affairs may be, our brave young men would appreciate your giving their welfare more speed and attention.”

  When Mrs. Baker was past, I tilted my head and put my forearm to my eyes, mouthing, “Oh! The shame of it!” as if I were Mary Pickford herself.

  2

  That evening, the Montgomery Country Club’s high-ceilinged ballroom was filled to capacity. Along with the young men and women from the town’s top families were a handful of chaperones and dozens of uniformed officers who’d been given honorary memberships while assigned to nearby Camp Sheridan or Taylor Field. Those fellas would soon be joining their army and air corps brothers in the skies or on battlefields in places like Cantigny and Bois Belleau—but right now they were as youthful and happy and ready for romance as anyone there.

  My ballet troupe readied itself behind a bank of curtains. Shoes snug, ribbons tied, skirts fastened and fluffed. Lipstick, rouge—though not one of us needed it, as warm and excited as we were. A final costume check. One more hamstring stretch, ankle flex, knuckle crack. Instructions to spit out our gum.

  “Two minutes, ladies,” Madame Katherine said. “Line up.”

  One of the younger girls, Marie, moved a curtain to peek out at the audience. She said, “Look at all those officers! I sure wish I had the solo.”

  Another replied, “If you were as good as Zelda, maybe you’d get one. Plus, you better quit eating so much cake.”

  “Hush,” I said. “It’s baby fat. Time and practice is all you need, Marie.”

  She sighed. “You look like a princess.” Mama had pinned my wavy hair into as neat a bun as it would tolerate, then encircled it with a garland of tiny tea roses from her garden. The roses were the same deep pink as my costume’s satin-trimmed bodice, and a shade darker than my diaphanous skirt. I was a princess, for right now anyway—and right now was all I ever cared about.

  The orchestra began and I waited anxiously for my cue, glancing down once more to make sure my shoe ribbons were tied, that a bit of my skirt wasn’t tucked into my stockings. Would I remember the one-more fouetté the professor had added last minute? Would the two new girls remember to split the line when I came upstage from behind them?

  When I took the stage, though, all of that disappeared, and I felt so light that I wondered if I’d been specially charmed by one of our Creole laundresses. Or maybe the lightness owed to the fact that I was finally done with school. Maybe it was the energy of wartime, the sensation that all of time was faster now, and fleeting. Whatever the case, my body was supple and tireless. It seemed I’d hardly begun the dance when the orchestra played the final strains and the performance ended to cheers and applause.

  While taking my bows, I noticed the officers at the front of the crowd. Like others I’d met, these fellas were a little older than my usual beaux. Their uniforms, with those serious brass buttons and knee-high leather boots, gave them sophistication that the local boys—even the ones in college—were lacking. The soldiers wore an air of impending adventure, the anticipation of travel and battles, of blood and bullets and, possibly, death, which made them more vibrant and alive.

  A pair of tall boots paler than the others caught my eye. As I straightened, I followed the boots upward to olive-colored breeches, a fitted uniform tunic, and, above it, an an
gelic face with eyes as green and expressive as the Irish Sea, eyes that snagged and held me as surely as a bug sticks in a web, eyes that contained the entire world in their smiling depths, eyes like—

  Something bumped my arm. “Go, Zelda,” one of the young ballerinas said, and nudged me into line for our exit.

  That officer was nowhere in sight when I returned to the ballroom after changing into my dress—corset included in the ensemble; shoes, too—and dabbing on Mama’s own rose perfume. So I danced a tango with a boy I’d known my whole life, then followed it with a half-dozen more dances, a new fella for every new song. Sweaty brows, sweaty hands; sweat trickling down my back as I moved from one partner to the next, indulging no one of them more than another. They were useful accessories, these fellas were. Good dancers. Good company. Nothing more—though I wouldn’t have said so to them. It was far more fun to let them think they had a chance.

  Finally I took a break to catch my breath and get something to drink. As I stood near the doorway, cooling down and waiting for my latest partner to return with refreshments, here came the officer with the fawn-colored boots. Now I noticed the crisp white collar inside his tunic, his softly squared chin, the perfect almond shape of his eyes, and the long, feathery lashes that shadowed them. Oh, my.

  He bowed. “Lieutenant Scott Fitzgerald, hoping to make your acquaintance.” His voice was deeper than I’d expected, with no trace of Alabama or any place Southern.

  I pretended to be shocked by his forwardness. “Without a proper introduction?”

  “Life is potentially very short these days—and your latest partner might return at any moment.” He leaned closer. “I’m wiser than I am impetuous or improper, rest assured.”

  “Well. General Pershing ought to be consulting you on strategy. I’m Zelda Sayre.” I offered my hand.

  “Zelda? That’s unusual. A family name?”

  “A Gypsy name, from a novel called Zelda’s Fortune.”

  He laughed. “A novel, really?”