“And I told Mary she wouldn’t like the hashish, but she said that she must get something out of her hard-earned disillusion, so there she is, in a permanent trance.”
“But it wasn’t the Rajah, I tell you! It was the wife of the man who owns the Galeries Lafayette,” Alabama insisted to the girl who wanted to talk about living abroad.
They rose to leave the pleasant place.
“We’ve talked you to death.”
“You must be dead with packing.”
“It’s death to a party to stay till digestion sets in.”
“I’m dead, my dear. It’s been wonderful!”
“So good-bye, and please come back to see us on your wanderings.”
“We’ll always be back to see the family.”
Always, Alabama thought, we will have to seek some perspective on ourselves, some link between ourselves and all the values more permanent than us of which we have felt the existence by placing ourselves in our father’s setting.
“We will come back.”
The cars drove away from the cement drive.
“Good-bye!”
“Good-bye!”
“I’m going to air the room a little,” said Alabama. “I wish people wouldn’t set wet glasses down on rented furniture.”
“Alabama,” said David, “if you would stop dumping ashtrays before the company has got well out of the house we would be happier.”
“It’s very expressive of myself. I just lump everything in a great heap which I have labeled ‘the past,’ and, having thus emptied this deep reservoir that was once myself, I am ready to continue.”
They sat in the pleasant gloom of late afternoon, staring at each other through the remains of the party; the silver glasses, the silver tray, the traces of many perfumes; they sat together watching the twilight flow through the calm living room that they were leaving like the clear cold current of a trout stream.
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald was born the daughter of a prominent judge in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1900. She died in a fire at the Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1948. Matthew J. Bruccoli, the foremost expert on F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, is the Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina in Columbia. Mary Gordon has most recently published Good Boys and Bad Girls, a collection of essays, and the novel Shadow Man.
The University of Alabama Press
Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380
www.uapress.ua.edu
Front Cover
Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Circus, c. 1938, oil on canvas.
(Collection of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama. Gift of the Artist)
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
1991 by The Trustees Under Agreement Dated July 3, 1975, Created by Frances Scott Fitzgerald Smith.
This work was originally published in Zelda Fitzgerald: The Collected Writings.
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ISBN 978-1-4767-5893-0 (ebook)
Save Me the Waltz: A Novel Page 25