Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Read online

  “What, do you think my mother is illiterate? Southern women can read.”

  “No, of course. I’m impressed, is all. A Gypsy character—well, that’s just terrific. I’m a writer, you see. In fact I’ve got a novel being read by Scribner’s right now—they’re a New York City publishing house.”

  I didn’t know publishing houses from Adam. What I did know was that he held himself differently from the other boys—other men, I thought; he had to be in his twenties. And his speech had that dramatic flair you find in people accustomed to playacting in theater, as I was. When you’d spent so much time performing onstage, the habit bled into your life. Or, possibly, it was the other way around.

  I said, “I thought you were an officer.”

  “My secondary occupation.”

  “There’s not one bit of South in your voice, Lieutenant; where’s home?”

  “Princeton, before my commission,” he said. “I did prep in New Jersey. My childhood was spent in Minnesota—St. Paul.”

  “A Yankee in every single way.” I glanced beyond him; thirsty as I was, now I hoped my partner might forget to return.

  “Yes—though I’ve developed quite an affection for the South since my assignment to Camp Sheridan. A growing affection, in fact.” In those captivating eyes was what Mama would call “an intention.” A spark, or sparkle; a glint or gleam. The fairy tales I’d read throughout my childhood were full of such words for such looks.

  I said, “Well, that should make you more popular in these parts.”

  “I’m hopeful.”

  He smiled then, and I felt that smile like a vibration moving through me, the way you might feel if you walked through a ghost or it walked through you. “Hopeful,” he repeated as the orchestra struck up a waltz, “and compelled to ask you for this dance.”

  “Well, I am waiting for that nice fella from Birmingham to get back with a whistle-wetter. It is so blazing hot. I don’t know how you all can stand to wear all that”—I indicated his uniform—“and not want to just strip down and jump into some creek.”

  “I think it’s because creeks are lacking somewhat in music and beautiful young women. Dancing, I’ve found, provides a good distraction from the discomfort of all this wool. Won’t you help a fellow out?”

  He offered his hand. How could I refuse? Why would I want to?

  “I suppose it would be a service to my country,” I said, just as the Birmingham boy returned with my drink. I took the glass from his hand, downed the punch, then returned the glass, saying, “Thank you so much,” and let Scott lead me off into the ballroom.

  He danced as well as any of my partners ever had—better, maybe. It seemed to me that the energy I was feeling that night had infused him, too; we glided through the waltz as if we’d been dancing together for years.

  I liked his starched, woolly, cologned smell. His height, about five inches taller than my five feet four inches, was, I thought, the exact right height. His shoulders were the exact right width. His grip on my hand was somehow both formal and familiar, his hand on my waist both possessive and tentative. His blue-green eyes were clear, yet mysterious, and his lips curved just slightly upward.

  The result of all this was that although we danced well together, I felt off-balance the entire time. I wasn’t used to this feeling, but, my goodness, I liked it.

  Two hours later, we stood facing each other in the pink glow of a driveway post lamp while the Club emptied out behind us. Any second now, Eleanor would come out, and then her daddy’s driver would be there to ferry us home in the old phaeton I’d once decided to drive myself. I was twelve at the time, and the horses nearly ran away with me before the whole thing went sideways and I was flung into a hedge.

  “Tell me more about this book business,” I said. “I’ve never known anyone who could write more than a news article—well, Mama wrote a short play once, but that hardly counts ’cause it was a musical and it only ran some fourteen minutes—it was for a charity ball, we’re always having charity balls here, do y’all do that, too, up North?”

  He laughed. “Do you want to know about my novel, or St. Paul’s society habits?”

  “The novel! Both! Tell me every single thing about every single thing until El drags me off.”

  “How about this: I’ll send you a chapter, and you can see for yourself what I’m about. Then you’ll be able to say you were among the first to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s phenomenal first book.”

  “F. Scott?”

  “Francis—after my cousin Francis Scott Key—The Star-Spangled Banner?”

  “Not really!”

  “Oh yes. Besides which, F. Scott sounds weightier, don’t you agree? Authoritative.”

  “Absolutely.” I nodded. “Why, I respect you more already and I haven’t read a word. Imagine how much I’ll admire you when I’m done. And then once it’s an actual book…” I let the sentence hang like that, allowing his imagination to fill in the rest.

  I wanted him to tell me more about how he’d done it, written a whole entire novel, and about what he liked to read, and I wanted to tell him what I liked to read, and then we could talk about things from those books. India, for instance; I’d been reading Kipling since forever. And Joseph Conrad’s made-up Costaguana, from Nostromo—had he ever heard of it? Where exactly did he think it was? Tarzan of the Apes—had he read that one? Africa, now that was a place to talk about!

  “The ‘actual book’ part may be a while, yet,” he said. “Alas. I’ll lend you something else in the meantime, though, if you like. Do you enjoy reading?”

  “I’ll read most anything. My friend Sara Haardt just sent me the strangest story, Herland, it was in a magazine, and it’s about a society that’s made only of women. I wouldn’t like that much.”

  He grinned. “Good news, all.”

  None of the boys I knew had much interest in books. For them it was football and horses and hounds. I looked at Scott there in the rosy light, his hair and skin and eyes aglow with joy and ambition and enthusiasm, and was dazzled.

  “Here she is,” Eleanor said, slipping her arm around my waist. A linebacker-size fella was with her. “I thought maybe you’d snuck off like last time.”

  Scott said, “Snuck off? Had I but known—”

  “To smoke,” El said the moment after I pinched her. “She’d snuck off to smoke with a couple of the older girls.”

  “Older than…?”

  “Seventeen,” I told him. “I’m seventeen ’til July twenty-fourth, that’s twenty-six—well, nearly twenty-five, really—days from now, given how it’s closing in on midnight. Twenty-five days, and then I’m eighteen.”

  “After which time she’ll be far less annoying, I hope. We don’t smoke much,” El assured him. “But it’s good for preventing sore throats.”

  “It’s good for making you feel good,” I said, “which is why the law and my daddy have always been against women doing it.”

  “Who are you, by the way?” El asked Scott. She pointed at her companion and said, “This here new friend of mine, who is about to be on his way, is Wilson Crenshaw Whitney the Third.”

  “Scott Fitzgerald, the one and only,” Scott told the two of them. Then, looking at me, he added, “Who very much wishes he didn’t have to do the same.”

  “I purely hate that I have to go home,” I told him. “If I wasn’t a girl—”

  “—I wouldn’t insist you allow me to phone you tomorrow. All right?”

  “There’s my consolation, then,” I said. The phaeton was rolling to a stop in front of us. I followed El to its door, adding, “Judge Anthony Sayre’s residence. The operator will put you right through.”

  * * *

  The morning’s scattered clouds had, by afternoon, formed themselves into great towering columns with broad anvil tops while I lay on my bed, diary open, pencil in hand. I had one ear attuned to the thunder that might spoil my evening plans, and the other waiting for the telltale three short rings that indicated a telephone call for our
residence. Scott still hadn’t phoned, and now I was almost certain that he wouldn’t. He’s all words, no substance, I thought. Writers are probably like that.

  Tootsie appeared at my bedroom door. “Teatime. Katy’s got lemon pie, or tomato sandwiches—and I have gin.”

  “So Mama has gone out.”

  “Baby, I’m twenty-nine. Not exactly a schoolgirl, Lord.”

  “Yet you still wait ’til Mama’s gone to pour a drink.”

  “I try to be considerate. Anyway, it’s Daddy we need to worry about most … and God help me if he ever sees me smoking. I’m goin’ to muddle up some mint and raspberries to go with that gin. Are you game?”

  “Okay, sure.” I glanced at my diary, where I’d been writing about the morning’s Service League work. We volunteers had served doughnuts and coffee to soldiers at the train station canteen, and a married officer had taken an obvious shine to me. Though I knew I was supposed to discourage his interest, I flirted with him anyway. He was attractive and funny, and what harm was there in it? He was nothing more than a way to pass the time until we finished, until I could return home, until that charming lieutenant phoned.

  I asked my sister, “Tootsie, how’d you know you were in love with Newman?”

  “Oh-ho!” She sat down next to me. “Who is he? Tell!”

  Katy called up the stairs, “Miz Rosalind, what’d you all decide?”

  “What did we decide? Pie?”

  I wrinkled my nose.

  “The sandwiches,” Tootsie yelled. “And rinse those berries for me, would you?”

  “Yes’m.”

  Tootsie turned back to me. “Now tell.”

  “Nothin’ to tell. I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like in Shakespeare?” I sat up and took Tootsie’s hands. “You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?”

  The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap.

  “Yes,” Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. “Yes, it is exactly like that. Gird yourself, little sister.”

  3

  In mid-July, Sara Haardt and I were just leaving a Commerce Street hat shop when I heard a man call my name.

  “Miss Sayre! Hello!”

  Scott waved as he walked toward us through a throng of young women who turned to watch him. He tipped his hat and smiled at the women as he passed. Even dressed in civilian clothes—white shirt, blue sweater vest above crisp, cuffed brown pants—he seemed exotic, rare, desirable. I’d seen him twice since our first meeting, once when he brought me the typescript chapter from his novel, and then again after I’d read it. Both meetings had been too-brief exchanges of smiles and compliments enacted over cheese biscuits (Scott) and melon (me) at the diner, while Eleanor and Livye looked on from a booth nearby. Tempted as I was to clear my dance card and devote my weekends to this handsome Yankee interloper, as Tootsie called him, it was hard to know whether I should take his attentions seriously.

  “How nice to run into you,” I said when he reached us.

  “Do I give too much away when I confess it’s no coincidence? Your sister said I might find you here.”

  “Well, gosh, we’re flattered, aren’t we, Sara? Oh—Sara, meet Lieutenant Scott Fitzgerald of Princeton University. This is Miss Sara Haardt, of Goucher College. Suddenly I feel undereducated—not that I have any use for college. I could hardly sit still long enough to finish high school.”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Haardt.”

  “She’s brilliant, don’t let her fool you,” Sara said.

  I pointed to the store’s window display. “Woman of the world that she is, Miss Haardt has been tryin’ to educate me on what up-to-the-minute ladies are wearin’ on their heads these days—which apparently is not these big feathered confectionaries you see here.”

  Scott said, “I’d have to agree. The New York City shops were all showing smaller, less ornate styles last time I was there.”

  “A fella who knows fashion!”

  “I’m observant, that’s all. Writers have to be.”

  Sara, tall and wiry and far plainer in appearance than in intellect, said, “Are you a writer, then?” She did this as innocently as you please, as if I hadn’t already told her everything I knew about him.

  “Since about the time I could hold a pencil.”

  “How fascinating,” Sara said. “I do a little writing myself. Zelda and I were on our way to get lunch; why don’t you join us, and you can tell us all about your work.”

  “I’d love to, truly, but I have to get back to Camp Sheridan.” He turned to me. “Before I go, though, Miss Sayre—Zelda, if I may—I recall you saying a time or two that your birthday’s next week. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to arrange a little party at the Club in your honor.”

  “You would? I don’t know what to say—”

  “Say anything you like, except don’t say no.”

  I laughed. “That narrows my options.”

  “Just as I intended. I’ve got to run.” He grinned as he backed away. “I’ll phone you with the details!”

  As we watched him hurry up the street, Sara said, “What a lovely gesture—too bad you’ll have to disappoint him.”

  “Too bad I’ll have to disappoint Mama, you mean, when I tell her that her party is off—but I’ll make sure Scott invites her and the Judge, and maybe she can still do the cake.”

  * * *

  Upon hearing my news in the parlor after dessert that evening, Daddy said, “That boy obviously lacks good judgment. He hardly knows you. Where did you say he’s from?”

  I hadn’t said, and wasn’t about to. “He did three years at Princeton before leaving to join up, and now he’s serving at Camp Sheridan.”

  Mama said, “He’s enthusiastic, I’ll give him that.”

  “He is,” Tootsie agreed. She was working a needlepoint American flag; I’d teased her earlier about turning into Betsy Ross. She said, “When he phoned this morning and I told him Zelda was out, he insisted that he had to know her whereabouts. ‘It’s extremely urgent!’ he said, as if his very life depended on it.”

  “Frivolous is what he is—probably too much money and not enough sense. You see that a lot in carpetbaggers. Don’t be surprised if it comes out that his people are actually from the North.”

  I said, “I think he’s terribly romantic, and it’s my birthday after all.”

  Daddy reached for his cognac, the single drink he would allow himself, and only on Friday nights. “Be that as it may, your mother—”

  “—understands the appeal of a handsome suitor,” she said, and smiled fondly at Daddy, which was enough to persuade him to relent.

  * * *

  On the night of my birthday, the party took place in one of the Club’s parlors, a high-ceilinged room lighted by a wide crystal chandelier overhead and smaller crystal sconces along the walls. For the occasion, I’d persuaded Mama to shorten a spring-green, scoop-necked silk dress so that the hemline would stop midcalf. I wore it with a new narrow-brimmed straw hat and a pair of sleek high heels like some I’d seen in Picture-Play. “Tell me more about this boy,” Mama had said while pinning up the dress, but I put her off. “You just have to meet him,” I said. “Then you’ll see.”

  I loved the Club, it being the site of so many entertaining times, but the gaslights seemed a throwback now that electric lights were being used in all the modern buildings. Its elegantly shabby Oriental rugs and its creaking floorboards and its silent, colored staff were the antithesis of modern, too, and proudly so. This was my daddy’s South, my daddy’s club—not literally, but it might as well have been.

  Now Scott stood in the center of the room, hands raised, and announced, “Ladies, gentlemen, welcome to Miss Zelda Sayre’s eighteenth birthday fête! I’m Scott Fitzgerald, your host and Miss Sayre’s most ardent admirer.”

  He looked distinguished in a nicely cut pearl-gray suit.
His tie was pale blue with gray stripes. His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek’s rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.

  My friends cheered, and then Scott went on, “Jasper, our bartender, has created a drink in Zelda’s honor. I described her to him, and this gin-and-soda-and-apricots concoction is the result. You’ve got to try it, it’s outrageously good.”

  “How about all this?” Sara Mayfield whispered, watching Scott consult with Livye, who was at the piano. “He’s wild about you, isn’t he?”

  “I guess he is.” My chest was strangely tight.

  “This must be costing his whole month’s salary. Does he have family money?”

  “I have no idea. He went to Princeton, so I suppose there’s some.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Twenty-one,” I whispered. “He’s a writer; he’s already written a novel. I read part of it, and it’s awfully good. He plans to be famous.”

  “There are worse things to plan on.”

  “The Judge says anyone who’d throw a party like this for a girl he just met must be frivolous.”

  Sara looked over at Daddy, whose stiff posture and expression said he was there under duress. She said, “There are worse things to be.”

  The music began, and then Scott joined Sara and me. “I’ve persuaded your friend Miss Hart at the piano, there, to play us a fox-trot. Shall we dance?”

  “Seeing as you’ve gone to all this trouble, I s’pose I’d better say yes.”

  “Is she always this fresh?” Scott asked Sara.

  “Hold on to your hat, mister,” was Sara’s reply.

  A little while later, he told a story about a train trip he’d taken from Princeton, across the country through Chicago to St. Paul. In his telling, the land was blanketed in sparkling diamonds, his vivid fellow travelers were wise or funny or sad, the cities were cornucopias spilling over with ambition and industry.

  He’s so worldly, I thought. Whereas I was the opposite, having never been farther from home than the North Carolina mountains. Worldly, but just as warm and eager as a golden retriever …