Guests on Earth: A Novel

by Lee Smith

  “But you’re recovering nicely all the same, aren’t you, dear?” she went on. “Just look at these roses in your cheeks!” She pinched my cheeks, hard. “Where there’s life, there’s hope, as the good fellow said.”

  “Who was this good fellow?” I had never had the nerve to ask her before.

  “Never you mind!” She plopped down on the bed and set to unwrapping her scarves, then removing her voluminous coat.

  The supervising nurse appeared at my door with two aides right behind her. “Twenty minutes!” she said sternly, then smiled at me and disappeared.

  Mrs. Hodges ignored her entirely. “Here now,” she said to me. “Made you a African, I have!” drawing an enormous knitted afghan from one of her bags.

  I burst into laughter. “Oh, it’s just lovely!” I cried. “And so warm! How did you ever remember that blue is my favorite color, Mrs. Hodges? Thanks so much.”

  “Well, you sound all right, too,” she announced somewhat grudgingly. “We’ve been that worried, I’ll tell you. Me and the girls, such a drama when they brought you in, hospital transport and whatnot. It gave us a turn, I will tell you. Last we heard, you had up and married a opera star and gone traipsing all over Europe. Where’s he now? This famous husband of yours?”

  “He’s gone,” I said quietly.

  She peered at me. “I see. Well, Mr. Hodges is gone, too, dead and buried, bless his soul, though I must say it’s simpler without him, no more ‘What would you like for supper, Dear?’ nor hairs in the sink nor listening to all those baseball games so loud on the radio.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Well, life does go on!” She slapped her thighs. “I’m still here, and so are you. Might as well make the best of it!”

  The longer she stayed, the better I felt. “I am just so glad to see you,” I told her sincerely. “I wish you had come sooner.”

  She snorted. “Ah, no chance of that around here these days, dearie. They run this hospital like the army, they do. Gates and badges, rules and regulations, patient plans and whatnot. You have never seen so much red tape! I’m well out of it, I’ll tell you.”

  “Out of it—what do you mean?”

  “Oh, they sacked me first chance they got, them of the new regime. Said I don’t have the required degree, the proper credentials. Credentials!” She spat out the word. “As if working here for a quarter century added up to nothing! Why, the minute Himself stepped down, I was out the door before you could say ‘jack sprat.’ And he did nothing to contradict them, nothing to save me—nothing! Of course now, she may have been the one behind it, the culprit; she’s been jealous of me all along, she has . . . but we’ll never know the truth of it, will we? It’s a mystery, as the good fellow said. Oh, they held a little reception in my honor, gave me a silver bowl and a steam iron. A silver bowl and a steam iron, for twenty-five years of service! It’s an uncaring bunch, I’ll tell you, a gang of accountants. I’m well out of it, I expect, Missy, if the truth be told, yet there’s times I miss it, too—the old days, I mean.”

  “Is everything changed, then? What about the gardening, and the walking, and the recitals?”

  “Oh, they go on right enough, now we’ve got famous for them. This new gang can’t change his program through and through. He’s still around, you know, still right here in Asheville with Mrs. Carroll, when they’re not sashaying off to Florida, that is. Oh, they like the sunny sands these days, the tropical breezes, they do. She’s got a hat with a red hibiscus on it, still putting on airs, same as ever. You watch yourself, Missy, when you go over there. She’s put out with you something terrible.”

  “She is?”

  “Just you be careful,” Mrs. Hodges intoned. “Watch yourself.”

  Something clicked in my foggy mind; I knew she was right.

  “You’re retired, then?” I asked.

  “Heavens no, child.” She drew herself up on the bed. “On the contrary, I have become in-dis-pen-sa-ble!” She stretched the syllables out one by one. “At the Grove Park Inn, no less,” she added, enjoying my surprise. “Oh yes! It was Moira’s idea, but I must say they pounced upon it, the management, popped me right into Housekeeping where I run a tight ship, I’ll tell you. A ton of laundry we do every day. A ton! And that’s not counting holidays, mind you. ‘I don’t know how we ever got along without you, Evelyn!’ That’s what Mr. Potts, the Manager himself, said to me just last week. He’s a prince, I will tell you! And Moira’s admirer, as well.”

  I BEGAN TO see how all this had transpired. I remembered my first lunch at the Grove Park years before, that lengthy lunch in the grand dining room where I had seen Mr. and Mrs. Fitzgerald sitting together at the banquette against the wall, like dolls in a store window. Suddenly my mind filled with questions.

  “What about Mrs. Fitzgerald?” I asked. “She was moving back to Montgomery, I believe, about the time I left for Baltimore.”

  “Ah, now there’s a sad story!” Mrs. Hodges announced. “A regular trag-e-dy!” She made the tsk-tsk sound with her mouth.

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “He died, you know.”

  I leaned forward in my chair. “Who?”

  “Mr. Scott Fitzgerald, the drunkard himself. The whore-monger, the adulterer, the seducer of rich young wives. The famous writer.” Her scorn for him contorted her face. “Oh, it was in all the newspapers, very prominent, I’m surprised you missed it.”

  “But when did this happen?” My heart was racing now.

  “1940,” Dixie said from the doorway.

  Her clear voice surprised me so much that I nearly tumbled from my chair. Caught up as I had been in this terrible news, I did not know how long she had been standing there, listening.

  Now Dixie moved swiftly and gracefully across the room, offering her hand to Mrs. Hodges in a practiced gesture, with a little bow. “I am Dixie Calhoun,” she said, “from Thomasville, Georgia. I am a patient here as well. In the short time I have known her, Evalina and I have become great friends.”

  “You don’t say! Pleased to meet you then, I’m sure!” Always impressed by any display of manners or class, Mrs. Hodges grasped Dixie’s slim, elegant hand.

  “And I just love F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am his biggest fan!” Dixie seated herself right next to Mrs. Hodges on my bed. “So now you have to start over, right from the beginning, and tell me all about him. You didn’t like him much, did you? I can tell by your voice. Oh, I know he was a drinker, everybody knows that. But everybody is a drinker, aren’t they? I mean, everybody Southern, everybody smart. They all drank and drank, Zelda and Scott and all their friends. I’ve read all about them. And I knew that Zelda was insane. But I certainly didn’t know that she’d ever been here, at Highland, my goodness! I just can’t believe it.” Dixie clapped her hands and scooted closer to Mrs. Hodges. “Now, tell. Tell, Evalina.” She turned to look at me. “ I can’t believe you didn’t even know about his death.” Dixie took my hand and held it, as if we were little school friends. “It was 1940,” she prompted Mrs. Hodges.

  Mrs. Hodges opened and closed her mouth several times, but finally she couldn’t resist Dixie; nobody ever could. “Oh yes, well, he’d been out there in California for some time, not a penny to his name, living in sin with a chorus girl, a real low-life, a Brit she was—”

  “A journalist,” Dixie added primly.

  “A gossip columnist,” Mrs. Hodges corrected her, “who looked exactly like our own Zelda when she was a young girl. I’ve seen the photos, mind you, exactly like poor little Zelda when he appeared in that uniform and plucked her up from the bosom of her family and married her. Oh quite dashing, he was! Why Zelda never even had the benefit of an education, poor thing! Plucked her up and married her and dragged her off to New York City and got her on the bottle just like himself. She didn’t know what hit her, is what I think. Fast company and no fixed address. Receiving friends in the bath and swimming in the nude. She never had a chance.”

  Dixie raised her perfect eyeb
rows. “Now wait just a cotton-picking minute. I’ll bet Zelda didn’t want to go to college. Belles don’t go to college, everybody knows that being a belle is a fulltime job. First she was the wildest girl in Montgomery, and then she was a belle—and this is something I know something about, believe me!—being a belle alone is enough to kill you . . . or ruin you, if you survive, which I’m trying to do right now.”

  We both stared at her.

  She blushed and went on. “And then he appeared, Scott Fitzgerald, like a lover from a dream, like the answer to a question, and that was it. That was just it. They were a pair, like this.” She held up two fingers, pressed together.

  Mrs. Hodges snorted. “I’d say he ruint her. He ruint them all. Criminal, it was. Just criminal.”

  “But he was a wonderful writer, you must admit,” Dixie said. She turned to me. “Didn’t you just love The Great Gatsby?”

  “Actually I’ve never read it,” I said. Somehow—in Canada, perhaps?—I had lost my early habit of reading, enslaved by my love for Joey and exhausted by my jobs. Suddenly I was filled with longing for books again. “But I will read it,” I said. “Right away.” At that very moment, a part of myself flew back to me, landing as gently as a butterfly on my head. I touched my hair, short as a boy’s.

  “Well. As I was saying—” Mrs. Hodges wanted to get on with it; she wanted to be the expert. “We did hear all about it here, of course—the details of Mr. Fitzgerald’s death, you know. And it is sad, I suppose, though no more than what you’d expect, a man like that. The facts are these. He was out there writing movies, and books, and whatnot, and then he had his first heart attack in a drugstore, Schwab’s, I think they said it was, fell out in the floor like a tree. But they doctored him up after that until he was all right for a time, though dizzy, mind you. That’s when he moved in with the floozy, in a first-floor flat, so that she could take care of him. And it wasn’t long before he suffered the next attack, after taking her to see a film. I don’t know what the film was, mind you. But the very next day he was just sitting calmly in a green armchair eating a chocolate bar and waiting for the doctor to come when suddenly he jerked up, staggered across the floor, and grabbed at the mantelpiece, then fell flat down in the floor, looking elegant as always. Wearing a gentleman’s cashmere sweater and the customary bowtie. Forty-four years old, dead as a doorknob.”

  “Doornail,” Dixie said.

  Mrs. Hodges peered at her.

  “The expression is, ‘dead as a doornail,’ ” Dixie said.

  “You’re a pert one, you are!” Mrs. Hodges said to Dixie. “Smart, too. Wouldn’t think it to look at you neither,” she said as if to herself.

  Because you’re so pretty, she did not say, but I already knew this. Smart girls didn’t look like Dixie; they looked like me, big-eyed and thin and pale.

  Dixie flushed a deep pink, which made her look even prettier. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “What about Mrs. Fitzgerald?” I asked. “Wasn’t she in Alabama? How did she take it? “

  “Ah yes, there she was down there in the hot Deep South with that mother, reading her Bible, painting her paintings, working with the Red Cross and digging in the dirt—oh, she still loves her gardening, mind you, her flowers, always has, always will. She got onto it here with old man Otto and never did give it up. ’Tis a great source of strength for her somehow. Himself was correct about that. Camellias and roses in Alabama, peonies here—peonies big as plates! Bone meal, this is her secret. That bed of peonies out by the entrance, that’s all due to her.”

  “Wait a minute! She’s still here? Still? After all this time?” Dixie asked.

  “Oh, she’s been in and out, back and forth, of course, poor thing. She will never leave this hospital entirely, not that one. She was back here in 1943, as I recall, after her daughter got married. Now that was just too much for her, a quiet lady by then, New York City and all that, and who can blame her? A city is hard on the nerves. She stayed with us till February of 1944, that time, and was back again in 1946. I remember the date for she was here when her first grandchild was born, Tim, it was, ah, she was that excited. I remember it well. I knitted him a little yellow robe and a cap with a tassel on it and took it to her and she said, ‘God loves you, Mrs. Hodges, and I do, too.’ ”

  “My goodness,” Dixie said. “She’d gotten very religious, then?”

  “And is to this day, I’d expect. They all do, after a while, the mentals. It overtakes them all.”

  “Why is that, do you think?”

  “I couldn’t rightly say, Miss,” she answered. “It’s a good question, mind you.”

  “You like her, don’t you?” Dixie said. “You like her a lot better than you liked him. But I have a question for you. Let’s put her husband aside for a minute. Don’t you think Zelda was sick, then, I mean really sick? You make her sound like she wasn’t sick. “

  “Oh, she was sick, all right,” Mrs. Hodges said darkly, “and she’s still sick, I’ll wager. She’ll be back, mark my words. But I don’t think she was schizophrenic, not for one bloody moment, pardon my French, I don’t. I think she didn’t fit in, that’s all, and they didn’t know what to do with her. Not her family, and not Mr. Fitzgerald either. None of them knew what to do with her. She was too smart, too or-i-gin-al. She was too wild and she drank too much and she didn’t fit in. That’s the bare bones of it. And that’s enough. That’s the case with half of them, the women that comes here. They’re too privileged, too smart . . .”

  The color disappeared from Dixie’s face.

  Mrs. Hodges stood up, groaning and heaving. “But you will be out of here right enough, both of you, not to worry. I can tell. I can always tell.”

  “How’s that?” Dixie asked.

  “Ex-per-i-ence!” she hooted. “There’s no substitute for experience, a thing they do not know, them with the little clipboards and memos and such.” She put on layer after layer of her wraps. We stood up, too.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” Dixie said, recovering herself and her perfect manners. “I hope I will see you again.”

  “Oh, you will, Miss. There’s no doubt about it. And in the meantime . . . the in-ter-im, mind you, why don’t you see what you can do with our poor little Evalina’s hair?”

  Dixie smiled. “I’ll do my best,” she said.

  “Good-bye, then.” Mrs. Hodges half smothered me in her woolen hug. “I’d best be on my way. I’ve got my duties waiting at the Grove Park Inn—you’d better believe it—with two big weddings coming right up this weekend!”

  “WHAT DID YOU mean, exactly?” I asked Dixie the very next afternoon as we made our way down the sidewalk along Zillicoa Avenue to the bus stop, arms linked for balance, bundled up against the cold. I was not sure where my own coat had come from, a green wool loden that I rather liked.

  She glanced sideways at me, a question on her pretty face beneath her fur-lined hood.

  “What did you mean when you said that being a belle is enough to kill you, or ruin you if you survive?”

  Dixie laughed her tinkly, self-deprecating laugh. “Why, I was more of a belle than anybody!” she said. “Don’t you know it? I made my debut at the Gone with the Wind Ball in Atlanta when the movie came out. They had this great big premiere.”

  I stopped dead still to peer at her. “You’re kidding!” Even caught up in my own world as I had been then, I had seen the famous film; a whole gang of us from Peabody had gone down to New York on the train for it, then ended up sleeping in the station overnight because it had lasted so long—four hours!—and we had missed the last train back that evening.

  “Oh yes,” Dixie went on. “I won a contest. Well, I almost won it.” She was smiling. “I was the first runner-up in the Scarlett O’Hara look-alike contest. This girl named Margaret Palmer won first place, so she got to lead the Grand March—escorted by Clark Gable and wearing one of Vivien Leigh’s Scarlett costumes from the film—but I walked right behind her.”

  “Who was
your escort?”

  “I swear, I can’t even remember his name!” Again, the tinkly laugh. “He wasn’t a real date, I’d just met him five minutes before it started. He was the son of the lady who ran the Junior League, so it was all a put-up job. But you do see what I mean—it don’t get more belle than tha-yat!” She was using her fake, ironic Southern accent.

  I had to laugh. “I guess not,” I said.

  The chilly wind blew at our backs, pushing us along. Two men were up on ladders attaching Halloween decorations to the streetlights, a black cat or a witch on a broomstick beneath each globe. Holidays were taken seriously at Highland, where we celebrated everything we could.

  “Good afternoon, girls!” one of the men called out. I knew he had noticed Dixie.

  “Y’all be careful up there!” she called back, and we all laughed.

  I envied Dixie her belle’s charm, a quality very useful in the world, I had noted, having none. In fact, this was the reason I had invited her—dragooned her, to be exact—to come along for tea with Mrs. Carroll this afternoon. I needed all the moral support I could get. The engraved notecard had been delivered to me two days ago, with its familiar handwriting, precise as calligraphy. I had been expecting it. I might as well get it over with, I knew, even though I was terrified, remembering Mrs. Hodges’s warning.

  We ran for the bus and then enjoyed the long ride up Merriman Avenue past Beaver Lake to an exclusive-looking neighborhood. I was not surprised to find the Carrolls’ large home one of the most imposing, all glass and dark wood in the modern style of Frank Lloyd Wright.

  The huge door flew open just as I lifted the heavy brass knocker.

  Mrs. Carroll had been waiting.

  “Evalina! My little Evalina! My dear! I am so glad to see you. Come in, come in—” Here was a new tack; all her former coldness and disapproval seemed to have vanished overnight. Mrs. Carroll had dressed to the nines for this mandatory occasion, in a tailored midnight blue wool suit with a diamond brooch and earrings—and of course, the ever-present high heels, her legs still beautiful in sheer silk stockings. Her pale blonde hair was perfectly coiffed in a new, bobbed fashion; her makeup was flawless.