Fiction Ruined My Family (29 page)

While Dad had been studying Fitzgerald since my adolescence, and working on a nonfiction book on him for at least ten years before my mom died, this Zelda stuff began really picking up steam after my mother died. It didn't parallel their marriage directly—I don't believe my mother had any abortions—but I wondered if it could be a symbol of the guilt my father felt for the suffering she endured as a writer's wife, as his wife. About a year after Mom died, their friend Tom Eagleton died and my father flew to St. Louis to attend his funeral. A day or so after Eagleton's funeral, Dad had my mother's ashes buried in Calvary Cemetery at the Darst family plot. When he got back it was natural to ask if he missed her. He responded as if he was a lecturer who had stumbled on his way up to the podium: “Oh, thanks for asking, Jean-Joe. Now, have I told you about my latest findings in the Fitzgerald letters at the Princeton University library?”

 

 

 

The Christmas when Hudson was first born, before we went back to L.A., the whole family except for Julia was at Eleanor's in Connecticut; Christmas is the only time all of us are ever together and I had wanted to take some pictures. Hudson, ten days old, was sleeping in his car seat carrier next to the tree. It was tempting to nurse a sentiment of “first Christmas with Mom gone” and “I have a brand-new baby that Mom will never know,” but I caught myself, because Mom wouldn't have been here at Eleanor's house for Christmas even if she was alive, and she might not have met Hudson until he was two and a half anyway. There was some truth to those sentiments but it wasn't the full truth. Still I felt close to Eleanor and Katharine in a new way. They were happy that I hadn't missed out on being a mom and we seemed connected now as mothers, though they still made jokes about my capabilities and saw me as a die-hard spaz. At one point that night, as I finished putting a diaper on Hudson and turned my back to throw out the old one, Katharine undid the tab and refastened it.

“It was too tight,” she said, looking at me as if to say, Sorry, but it was.

I wanted a memory I could keep of all this, but I couldn't find my camera, and I wandered around the house looking for it. A blind woman had lived in the house before Eleanor and her husband, and apparently there were cords running up and down the stairs and through rooms when Eleanor bought it. Whenever I was there I tried to picture a blind woman navigating a three-story, five-bedroom house using only some cord. Seems like you might just want to throw in the towel and get a ranch at a certain point if you were blind, but maybe that's just my laziness. I popped my head into the dining room, where my brother-in-law Jim and my father were still sitting at the table having a grappa, and I caught “. . . so her uterus was scraped.” I yanked my head out of the room and headed into the kitchen, where Katharine and Eleanor were doing dishes.

“He's on the abortion thing again,” I said.

“Yuck!” Katharine said. “Can't he give it a rest? It's Christmas, for Christ sake.”

Eleanor rubbed a platter with a cloth. “Yeah, I mean, he could wait until Halloween next year, and he could tell all the kids in New Canaan his abortion stories. That'd be fun. Maybe he could work the fall fair with me this year. Actually, we need some new booths. He could work the Great American Abortions Booth.”

 

 

 

To Dad, he's simply talking about books. He's been after Jim to represent him in negotiations with Bill Gates. He wants to contact Gates because he's heard that Gates is a big fan of Fitzgerald and
The Great Gatsby
, and that he has the last line from
The Great Gatsby
lining his library in Redmond, California. My father wants to see if he'll back putting the real Gatsby mansion, on Sands Point, in preservation. He wants Jim, a partner in a firm in New York who sees my family as a bunch of loser English majors, to broker a deal with Gates's people, who will surely want to own and preserve the real Gatsby mansion. He's constantly calling Eleanor's house asking, “Now, is Jim going to be in the office tomorrow?”

“Yes, Dad, he is.”

“All right, well, let him know I'll be by tomorrow with my dossier on Fitzgerald, and let me tell you it is going to knock Gates's socks off.”

“Fine. Go by anytime.”

“Say about two-thirty?”

“Anytime, Dad.”

My father hasn't made it in yet to meet with his legal team, hungry young lawyers out for their first kill on a meaty literary preservation/landmark contract. He usually calls Eleanor a few days later to apologize for not stopping by the office.

“Will you give Jim my apologies? I'm coming by next Wednesday for sure. I just need to put the finishing touches on this thing.” If my father ever concocts a personal fragrance, I think its name should be “Finishing Touches.”

“Tell Jim I'm coming by around eleven next Wednesday without a doubt and with the goods.”

 

 

 

A little over a year later, my father called me when I was at the playground near our house in Los Angeles. Nick was watching our son, Hudson, now fourteen months, and I was watching the two of them as my dad talked enthusiastically about Zelda's abortion for the 129th time. “It was this D-and-C, you see, that was the key to her collapse. Scott really got her into a corner about it, and she ended up having six miscarriages after it. There was another, almost criminally irresponsible, operation in Rome, allegedly to repair damages from 1922, which didn't help at all. This irreparable damage was absolutely central to her breakdown.”

My cell phone was going in and out, so I couldn't hear very well, and I asked, “What was that?” My father, thinking I asked, “What
is
that?” proceeded to explain to me what an abortion is. “They take this hook-shaped metal instrument and scrape out the fetus . . .” I watched my son play in the drizzle.

“The Princeton Library has the transcript of Zelda and Scott's session with an analyst at their home in Maryland in 1933. It's about one hundred and fourteen pages and let me tell you, Jean-Joe, it'll just break your heart. I spent about three days hand-copying it there and got it down very well, I believe, verbatim, from the stenographer's record—”

I woke up. “They had a stenographer in their therapy session?” Now, that's fancy.

“That's right.”

My mind jumped to the image of a stenographer getting down some of my better lines in arguments with my husband. I liked these two more and more.

“Zelda had a shorthand way of talking and of course Scott understood every word. Her mind made leaps that simply left a lot of people behind. She'd say of an attractive woman, ‘She's got beautiful legs, therefore kids,' meaning, Her husband can't keep his hands off her, leading to more children. But some people didn't get her. In that way—and I don't mean in some crazy way—she was like Mama.”

This was as close as I'd ever heard him come to connecting Mom to Zelda. It was unlikely he'd get any closer to what all this meant, why he was chasing the story of Zelda's demise through an abortion he felt was forced on her by her husband. My father may feel responsible not just for my mother's life but for her actual death. He was the one who found her, and he said when she died that if he had gotten there sooner she would have survived. More to the point for me is that my alcoholic-depressive mother didn't want help, but he can't talk about that; what he can talk about is what Scott did to Zelda. When we were little he seemed to admire Fitzgerald, and then as things went bad with my mom he focused on Fitzgerald's plagiaristic ways—from Zelda, from Joyce, from Keats. Now his focus is on how Fitzgerald completely destroyed his wife through an unnecessarily dangerous abortion in 1922 at the Plaza, which he chose over a safe hospital in order to protect his reputation, as he was about to publish
The Beautiful and the Damned
. His opinion of Fitzgerald has plummeted; it feels like every time you talk to him it's gone down even further. I didn't say anything when he mentioned Mom, not that you could distinguish this silence from any previous silence in calls with him.

He sped past mentioning my mother, and the rain started coming down harder on the playground as Nick gave me the “Let's go” eyes. If it's difficult to get a word in with my father, it's Sisyphean to get off the phone with him. When you finally do manage to say “Dad? Dad. Dad!” he's already speaking your side of the conversation, saying the things that you need to say: “I know, that rain is really coming down now, you've got to go. I can hear that baby needs you, and I know I'm boring the hell out of you. Quickly, though, how's things? How's the writing?”

But there's never enough time for the present. We spend so much time in 1922 that today, the babies who are alive—his children, me, his fourteen-month-old grandson—never have a chance.

What would I tell my father if we had more than a half a second to discuss my life? It's not that he doesn't care, he does, but it's hard to reach him. He wants anecdotes to pass on to Eleanor or Katharine or Uncle Steve in St. Louis when he talks to them, he wants wit and good lines.

The truth is that I've had a baby and I want to be around my family, my sisters and my dad. I miss my friends. I don't feel I will ever like L.A. I miss walking. I miss laughing about all the things that didn't go your way that day as it seems people in New York do. I miss sarcasm. I miss talking to my friend Rosanna about a painting she's working on and then going out to her studio in Queens to see some stuff she's doing, wishing I could buy one, hinting for her to give me one, which she won't do, she can't afford to give away work. Sometimes I miss day jobs, joking around with this really funny married guy Danny at the DUMBO General Store, hearing about all the customers he'd like to but is not going to have sex with. No one here knows me, I want to tell my dad. Not even my husband. We're still getting to know each other, and the best way to get to know someone is definitely not at three in the morning when your baby won't stop crying for three hours straight and you don't know if he's sick or gassy or simply doesn't like you.

That night my father e-mailed me the document. Once Hudson was asleep, I opened the attachment on my computer. Nick came over and touched my shoulders.

“What's that?” he asked.

“It's a one-hundred-fourteen-page transcript of a therapy session between F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda, and their analyst in 1933 that my dad transcribed by hand. He just e-mailed it.”

The hands came off my shoulders. “Whoa. Listen, I'm going to watch
The Hills Have Eyes
on my computer,” Nick said, slowly backing away from me and the attachment as if we were bears. I opened it up and read it, something I planned on never doing.

Fitzgerald contends that his writing is supporting them and she should not ruin their way of life with her writing. He says she is a society woman and nothing more. She feels this is what he wants her to be. He argues that she cannot write about their life because it is his material: