Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald

by Therese Anne Fowler

  I went to him and sat on the bed’s edge. “No, I don’t want to go back. Just don’t forget your lines.”

  “Which lines?”

  “That you did it all in order to win me.”

  14

  As it is in the South, in New York City the buildings have names. And as it is in Society, some names carry more import than others. Our destination for George Jean Nathan’s cocktail party was a high-society building named the Royalton, which was a hotel and residence, both.

  The Royalton’s marble columns were imposing, to say the least, but the massive, studded red-ocher doors offset the somberness like a ruby brooch on a widow’s collar. We stopped on the sidewalk and considered those doors, which had no windows. They made the hotel seem an exotic fortress of some kind; the building might otherwise have been mistaken for a bank, or …

  “It’s like a Greek prison or something,” I said. “He lives here? You wouldn’t think a person would choose a place like this voluntarily.”

  Scott said, “New Yorkers are a different breed from anyone you’d have come across in the South—and I’m told Nathan’s a species unto himself.”

  And so he was, as I saw after the doorman allowed us entry and directed us upstairs. George Jean Nathan had dark, expressive eyebrows and a knowing look about him. At almost forty, he was a tall, slender panther of a man in his fine black suit and glossy black shoes. His hair was almost as dark and as slick as his shoes. Seeing him there in the open doorway, I had a better idea of why this man lived in this building.

  “Welcome!” he said, and waved us inside.

  Scott shook his hand. “Scott Fitzgerald. It’s such a pleasure to finally meet the man who now gets to say he discovered me. Meet my wife, Zelda.”

  “You were so thoughtful to include me tonight,” I said.

  “My God, Fitzgerald,” he said, taking my hand but looking at Scott, “you’re good, but I had no idea you were this good.” He kissed my hand and asked, “How long have you and the new wonder boy been wed?”

  “Three weeks tomorrow.”

  “Three weeks! What’s he doing dragging you out to this miserable place during your honeymoon?” He took me by the arm. “I’m so sorry, my dear. Let me get you a cocktail to help you manage your obvious disappointment.”

  As George led me away, I glanced over my shoulder at Scott. He looked surprised, but also pleased. I lifted one shoulder, Who would’ve thought? and then waggled my fingers, See you later.

  George said, “Zelda, Zelda. An exotic name for a girl who looks like sweet cream at sunrise. You’re not from here.”

  “Nope,” I said, assessing the other guests while he mixed a gin rickey. Scott and I were possibly the youngest people at the party, and just about the only ones who weren’t dressed in black. My ivory georgette dress was about as opposite as you could get, in fact, which made me happy. “I’m Alabama-born, so a transplant here—but I think I could enjoy growing some roots.”

  “Then you like what you’ve seen of Manhattan?”

  “It’s a grown-ups’ playground, isn’t it?”

  “These days. Before the war—before this Eighteenth Amendment Prohibition business, really—most of that playground was confined to Broadway. What you found if you went out uptown were blue bloods with yappy dogs and trailing furs, men and women with their noses upturned at the very idea of adults committing … shall we say revelries.”

  “I haven’t been uptown much. But I have been to Greenwich and Broadway—a few times, now—”

  “So I’ve read. Your husband can’t keep his clothes on, while you enjoy swimming in yours at Union Square—”

  “These gossip writers, they don’t miss anything, do they?” I laughed. “They got the bit about Scott paddling in the Plaza’s fountain the other night, too.”

  “You two are so obviously noteworthy that I believe they’ve assigned a scout to trail you. Why, I imagine someone here tonight will be tattling on you in print tomorrow.”

  “I guess I ought to consider giving people something worth reading about, then.”

  George held out one hand to me and gestured to the center of the room with the other. “Shall we get started?”

  The evening passed in a blur of new faces, laughter, flirtation, dancing, and liquor. The only time I wasn’t holding a glass was when I was in some man’s arms, moving to the new jazz music of Ben Selvin or Art Hickman’s Orchestra being played on the grandest phonograph I’d ever seen or heard. It had no visible horn and was contained in a finely carved, hand-painted cabinet. George Jean Nathan took all of his interests seriously, that was plain enough.

  I hardly saw Scott, until toward the end of the party when he found me in the midst of a conversation with two stage actresses whose primary concerns were cold cream and lice. He took me by the hand and led me over to meet a man he said was “the finest literary mind in the country.”

  “Finer than either of those two’s?” I asked as we crossed the room. “I’m not sure that’s possible.”

  “The one who was on your left gets three hundred a week.”

  “Dollars?”

  “Yes—and probably love notes, too.”

  “Wait,” I said, pretending I was about to turn around. “I need to get me the name of her cold cream.”

  The finest literary mind belonged to a man with a sober, somber round face that was framed by neatly combed dark hair parted severely in the center. His scalp was actually white, I thought, assessing him through a happy gin haze.

  He appeared to be close in age to George, but worlds away in joie de vivre. He sat sedately in an armchair in the corner farthest from the phonograph, and at this point in the evening, when most of the men had mussed hair and had shed their jackets and loosened their ties, this man was as tidy as he must have been in front of his mirror earlier. He had a serious mouth and serious eyes. I wondered if he had a woman in his life. I wondered if he’d ever had one.

  “Zelda, this is Mr. Henry Mencken. He’s co-editor, with Mr. Nathan, of The Smart Set.”

  I sat down on his chair’s arm. “I sure do appreciate you taking such a shine to Scott’s stories. He’s awfully good, isn’t he? It’s so nice that people are finally taking notice and paying him so well for all his hard work. It’s important that artists get recognition and money, don’t you think? Otherwise, how else can someone like Scott afford to buy his wife a dress like the one I’m wearing?”

  “I don’t disagree,” Mencken said, looking amused. “The trouble for the artist lies in the temptation to mistake the public’s tastes—and thus their money—as a measure of actual value.”

  “So then, whose tastes matter?” I asked. Scott put his hand on my shoulder.

  “The intellectual’s. Someone who understands art—the history of it, its meaning to mankind.”

  “By ‘mankind’ you mean intellectuals,” I said. Scott’s grip tightened.

  Mencken nodded. “I sound like a snob, I realize. Bad habit. I don’t even have the formal education of this fellow, here.” He indicated Scott.

  “Princeton didn’t give me much—”

  “Except fodder for your novel, not to mention your newfound fame,” Mencken quipped.

  I said, “A thing can be popular and good. Scott’s book proves it.”

  “How old are you?” Mencken asked.

  “Almost twenty.”

  “Let’s have this debate when you’re thirty,” Mencken said.

  Scott took my arm and practically pushed me up onto my feet. “Mr. Nathan supplied some really fine gin tonight, didn’t he? Come, darling, dance with your husband.”

  * * *

  “What’d you think of Mencken?” Scott asked me in the morning. Or possibly it was afternoon; I wasn’t sure.

  I got up and shuffled to the bathroom. My mouth was dry. My eyeballs were dry. Dull, thick pain crept through my head.

  “He seems kinda scary if you ask me,” I said from the toilet. “I like George a lot better.”

  “And Geo
rge likes you. Everyone likes you,” Scott called. “Bring me some aspirin, would you?”

  “Long as you like me, I don’t care about everyone.”

  When I returned, Scott was sitting up in bed. He had a cigarette in one hand and a pencil in the other. A notebook was open on his lap. “There’s not a finer man alive than Mencken, I mean that. He’s got the keenest eye in literature—he’s a natural. Taught himself everything he knows.”

  I gave Scott the aspirin bottle. “That’s all well and good but he’s so damn serious. Didn’t it seem like he’d rather be most anywhere else than at a party?”

  “Nathan says Mencken’s anti–New York, only comes up when he begs him to. Says he tells Mencken there’s no way he can get the pulse from his place in Baltimore. I told Mencken I’d send him a book, and he said he’s got a copy, isn’t that something?”

  “And?”

  “He hasn’t read it yet. He thinks, though, that he’ll have a look at it soon, and he wants me to send The Flight of the Rocket when it’s out for review next winter.”

  “Doesn’t that scare you?”

  “Scare me? A review from Mencken … it’s what writers live for. The honor of getting even an evisceration—”

  “He wouldn’t do that to you. He admires your work, if not your wife.”

  “Oh, I think he admires you—your fearlessness, at least. He’s right about art, though. The most important work is too erudite for the masses.”

  “And for me, too, apparently, since I don’t know what erudite is.”

  “Which is quite all right.” Scott caught my hand and tugged me onto the bed. “You have other charms.”

  15

  April 27, 1920

  Dearest Second Sara,

  I was delighted to get your high school graduation announcement. Soon you’ll be free as a lark! And it’s no surprise to me at all that John Sellers has taken a shine to you—he sees what we’ve all seen in you all along: you’re sweet and clever and have as much innocent sex appeal as three Lillian Gishes. Mind you, there’s no need to rush into anything. Do like I did and wait until you know you’ve found your one true love.

  New York is the most astonishing place, I must say, and Scott’s popularity increases daily—it’s truly impressive to behold. I’m just amazed, and so proud of him. He gets at least a dozen fan letters every week, from readers all ’round the country. And reporters are now starting to want to talk to me, can you imagine? What will Montgomery say about Tallu and me both being famous? You’ll have to let me know, ’cause I’m sure Mama will refrain from telling me anything that might swell my head.

  Do come see us this summer. I think we’re going to take a place in the country so that Scott can get his next book done. Much love in the meantime,

  Z~

  * * *

  Scott spotted her first: “Oh, darling, there she is: she is the one.”

  If we were going to live in the country, we would need a car. The beauty that caught his eye, here at the downtown sales lot, was a 1917 Marmon, a sleek, convertible red sports coupe. Scott waved to a salesman, then climbed inside.

  While he talked to the salesman from the driver’s seat, I examined the car’s spoked wheels and wide running boards and the keen, leaf-patterned hood ornament. Then I got inside the red-leather-dressed interior next to Scott. He was holding on to the wooden steering wheel with one hand and stroking the wooden dashboard with the other. Nickel-plated gauges and levers and buttons filled the dashboard.

  The salesman said, “Her first master was a Manhattan playboy. I’ll let her go for the same price as a new, sedate 1920 sedan—how about that?”

  “Let me just talk it over with the missus.”

  The salesman nodded and left us alone.

  “It all comes down to materials,” Scott told me. “The rich know this. Sure, we can get a newer car for the same price, but it won’t look or drive like this one.”

  “We can afford it, right?”

  “Our great friend Myra Harper’s going to pay for it,” he said, referring to the money he’d just gotten for selling movie rights to another of his short stories, “Myra Meets His Family.”

  I ran my hand across the sun-warmed seat tops. “Wow, our very first car. It’s almost like we’re grown-ups.”

  * * *

  After a week of motoring about the countryside looking at houses for rent in a half dozen towns between Rye and Bridgeport, we fell in love with a gray-shingled house in Westport, Connecticut, about forty miles from Manhattan.

  The house had a wide, deep front porch that reminded me of home, and sat on a road a few hundred feet away from the ocean—a happy fact that fascinated me to no end. I’d never seen the ocean before then, never seen any body of water larger than a big lake. Not much farther away was the Beach and Yacht Club, where we would get a summer membership. We thought it was the perfect setup for both of us: Scott would have the space and peace he needed for work, and I would have the beach, the club, and the ocean, and miles of old country roads to explore on foot or by bicycle. We told the real estate agent we’d take it through September, then we returned to Manhattan to pack our trunks.

  On our first night in the house, we pulled two weathered rockers close together and sat outside on the porch, wrapped in blankets and drinking champagne by candlelight. The air smelled of salt, and cool, damp earth. We could hear the rhythmic boom of the surf.

  “I always imagined the war would sound like this,” Scott said. “Like heavy guns firing in the distance. Back then, even as I was sure I was going to war, I never saw myself in the action—and then I never was in the action.”

  “And a good thing, too.”

  “Maybe—but Bunny made it back. And Bishop, and Biggs.”

  “Well sure, but with no B in your name, you’d’a been in trouble.”

  “There you go, reminding me yet again why I love you,” Scott said.

  “The sound makes me think of Mama’s story about when her house in Kentucky got shelled by Union troops. She was five years old, and the war was almost over but not quite. They had to hightail it to someplace in the country, and then they went to Canada, where her daddy was living so’s not to get arrested for his Confederate activities.”

  “He left his family there in Kentucky?”

  “They had a great big tobacco plantation, and a bunch of iron furnaces, and he needed my grandmama to keep an eye on all the business goings-on.”

  “Did he own slaves?”

  “He did, sure. The plantation had six slave houses, Mama said—she and the other kids weren’t allowed inside ’em, though. It’s funny, ’cause I was always in old Aunt Julia’s house, and the only difference was that we paid her for workin’ for us.”

  “Which reminds me: Fowler said he’ll phone you with the name of some agency out here where you can find a housekeeper.”

  “Thank goodness for that!”

  “He’ll know who’s best—the Fowlers have only a little less money than God.”

  “What is it his family does?”

  “Investments.” Scott explained to me about bonds and stock and trading and interest, all of which I followed earnestly and then forgot immediately, retaining only the thought that none of that would ever intrigue me in the least.

  “Anyway,” he said, picking up the thread of our prior topic, “all respect due your grandfather, I can’t imagine ever leaving my family the way he did.”

  “It turned out fine. After President Grant pardoned him—”

  “The president pardoned him?”

  “Well … yes. Who else would’a done it? And when they came back, he was almost nominated for president, and then he got on the Senate, and that’s where he and my great-uncle met, and the two of them got Mama and Daddy together. So, see, if it weren’t for my grandmama keepin’ the business going in his absence, I wouldn’t be here.”

  “Is that how you see it?” Scott laughed. “I’m not sure there’s an actual connection.”

  “Course th
ere is. Everything’s connected.”

  “All those things could have happened even if he’d taken his family to Canada with him.”

  “Not if the Union had gotten control of his land and all. He’d’a been poor then, and you need money for politics. That’s why my daddy’s just a judge.”

  “Just,” Scott said. “He’s one step from the highest seat in the state.”

  “And that’s plenty good if you ask me. If he got any higher-and-mightier, he’d probably grow a beard and try’n elbow Zeus aside.”

  “What story will our kids be telling about us someday, do you suppose?”

  “It’ll be a lot more romantic than two senators matchmaking,” I said. “They’ll say that we were meant to be together no matter what. For us, stars aligned, the gods smiled—prob’ly there was a tidal wave someplace, too, and we just haven’t heard about it yet.”

  “A Homeric epic, it sounds like. Have another glass of champagne and tell me more.”

  * * *

  Ludlow did phone that week with the agency name, but despite my appreciation and despite our need, I was in no hurry to hire anyone, not until we’d run out of clean clothes and used up all the dishes and needed to have the pantry stocked again. We were still honeymooning then, and as glad as we were to be there on Compo Road, neither of us wanted to pop that perfect bubble of happiness we’d been floating in for nearly two months.

  When the inevitable did arrive, I hired us a Japanese houseboy named Tana, all the regular—that is, female—domestics having already been installed in the homes of women who’d made their summer plans in the wintertime. I never have been able to be organized that way. Tana was a quiet and efficient fella who I liked very much, but who Scott and George deviled by pretending that Tana was short for Tannenbaum, and declaring that they believed him to be a German spy in disguise.

  My time was occupied as anticipated: I swam at the club and at the beach; I explored the countryside; I wrote letters to all my friends, to Mama and Daddy, to my siblings, to Scott’s friends who were now my friends, too. I read anything anyone recommended, and I gave a lot of thought to creating new cocktails for Scott and me and for the ever-increasing number of fellas Scott invited over. Ludlow and Alec were practically residents by summer’s end, and we saw an awful lot of George, too.