Read Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Online

Authors: Therese Anne Fowler

Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Historical

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2 page)

BOOK: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
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“Anyway, never mind,” I said as I went for the back door, sure that my escape was at hand. “Long as no one here sees me—”

“Baby!” I jumped at Mama’s voice coming from the doorway behind us. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, “
where
are your stockings and shoes?”

“I’m just goin’—”

“—right back to your room to get dressed. You can’t think you were walking to town that way!”

Katy said, “S’cuse me, I just remembered we low on turnips,” and out she went.

“Not to town,” I lied. “To the orchard. I’m goin’ to practice for tonight.” I extended my arms and did a graceful plié.

Mama said, “Yes, lovely. I’m sure, however, that there’s no time for practice; didn’t you say the Red Cross meeting starts at nine?”

“What time is it?” I turned to see that the clock read twenty minutes ’til. I rushed past Mama and up the stairs, saying, “I better get my shoes and get out of here!”

“Please tell me you’re wearing your corset,” she called.

Tootsie was in the upstairs hallway still dressed in her nightgown, hair disheveled, sleep in her eyes. “What’s all this?”

When Newman had gone off to France in the fall to fight with General Pershing, Tootsie came back home to live until he returned. “
If
he returns,” she’d said glumly, earning a stern look from Daddy—who we all called the Judge, his being an associate Alabama Supreme Court justice. “Show some pride,” he’d scolded Tootsie. “No matter the outcome, Newman’s service honors the South.” And she said, “Daddy, it’s the twentieth century, for heaven’s sake.”

Now I told her, “I’m light a layer, according to Her Highness.”

“Really, Baby, if you go out with no corset, men will think you’re—”

“Immoral?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe I don’t care,” I said. “Everything’s different now anyway. The War Industries Board said not to wear corsets—”

“They said not to
buy
them. But that was a good try.” She followed me into my bedroom. “Even if you don’t care about social convention, have a thought for yourself; if the Judge knew you left the house half-naked, he would have your hide.”

“I was
tryin’
to have a thought for myself,” I said, stripping off my blouse, “and then all you people butted in.”

Mama was still in the kitchen when I clattered back down the stairs. “That’s better. Now the skirt,” she said, pointing at my waist.

“Mama, no. It gets in my way when I run.”

“Just fix it, please. I can’t have you spoiling the Judge’s good name just so you can get someplace faster.”

“Nobody’s out this early but the help, and anyway, when did you get so fussy?”

“It’s a matter of what’s appropriate. You’re seventeen years old—”


Eight
een, in twenty-six more days.”

“Yes, that’s right, even
more
to the point,” she said. “Too old to still be a tomboy.”

“Call me a fashion plate, then. Hemlines are goin’ up, I saw it in
McCall’s
.”

She pointed at my skirt. “Not as high as that.”

I kissed her on her softening jawline. No cream or powder could hide Time’s toll on Mama’s features. She’d be fifty-seven on her next birthday, and all those years showed in her lined face, her upswept hairdo, her insistence on sticking with her Edwardian shirtwaists and floor-sweeping skirts. She outright refused to make anything new for herself. “There’s a war going on,” she’d say, as if that explained everything. Tootsie and I had been so proud when she gave up her bustle at New Year’s.

I said, “So long, Mama—don’t wait lunch for me, I’m goin’ to the diner with the girls.”

Then the second I was out of sight, I sat down in the grass and pulled off my shoes and stockings to free my toes. Too bad, I thought, that my own freedom couldn’t be had so easily.

*   *   *

Thunder rumbled in the distance as I headed toward Dexter Avenue, the wide thoroughfare that runs right up to the domed, columned state capitol, the most impressive building I had ever seen. Humming “Dance of the Hours,” the tune I’d perform to later, I skipped along amid the smell of clipped grass and wet moss and sweet, decaying catalpa blooms.

Ballet, just then, was my one true love, begun at age nine when Mama had enrolled me in Professor Weisner’s School of Dance—a failed attempt to keep me out of the trees and off the roofs. In ballet’s music and motion there was joy and drama and passion and romance, all the things I desired from life. There were costumes, stories, parts to play, chances to be more than just the littlest Sayre girl—last in line, forever wanting to be old enough to be
old enough
.

I was on Mildred Street just past where it intersected with Sayre—named for my family, yes—when a sprinkle hit my cheek, and then one hit my forehead, and then God turned the faucet on full. I ran for the nearest tree and stood beneath its branches, for what little good it did. The wind whipped the leaves and the rain all around me and I was soaked in no time. Since I couldn’t get any wetter, I just went on my way, imagining the trees as a troupe of swaying dancers and me an escaped orphan freed, finally, from a powerful warlock’s tyranny. I might be lost in the forest, but as in all the best ballets, a prince was sure to happen along shortly.

At the wide circular fountain where Court Street joined Dexter Avenue, I leaned against the railing and shook my unruly hair to get the water out. A few soggy automobiles motored up the boulevard and streetcars clanged past while I considered whether to just chuck my stockings and shoes into the fountain rather than wear them wet. Then I thought,
Eighteen, in twenty-six days,
and put the damn things back on.

Properly clothed, more or less, I went up the street toward the Red Cross’s new office, set among the shops on the south side of Dexter. Though the rain was tapering off, the sidewalks were still mostly empty—few witnesses to my dishevelment, then, which would make Mama happy.
She worries about the oddest things,
I thought.
All the women do.
There were so many rules we girls were supposed to adhere to, so much emphasis on propriety. Straight backs. Gloved hands. Unpainted (and unkissed) lips. Pressed skirts, modest words, downturned eyes, chaste thoughts. A lot of nonsense, in my view. Boys liked me
because
I shot spitballs and
because
I told sassy jokes and
because
I let ’em kiss me if they smelled nice and I felt like it. My standards were based on good sense, not the logic of lemmings.
Sorry, Mama. You’re better than most.

Some twenty volunteers had gathered at the Red Cross, most of them friends of mine, who, when they saw me, barely raised an eyebrow at my state. Only my oldest sister, Marjorie, who was bustling round with pamphlets and pastries, made a fuss.

“Baby, what a fright you look! Did you not wear a hat?” She attempted to smooth my hair, then gave up, saying, “It’s hopeless. Here.” She handed me a dish towel. “Dry off. If we didn’t need volunteers so badly, I’d send you home.”

“Quit worryin’,” I told her, rubbing the towel over my head.

She’d keep worrying anyway, I knew; she’d been fourteen when I was born, practically my second mother until she married and moved into a house two blocks away—and by then, of course, the habit was ingrained. I looped the towel around her neck, then went to find a seat.

Eleanor Browder, my best friend at the time, had saved me a spot across from her at a long row of tables. To my right was Sara Mayfield—Second Sara, we called her, Sara the First being our friend serene Sara Haardt, who now went to college in Baltimore. Second Sara was paired with Livye Hart, whose glossy, mahogany-colored hair was like my friend Tallulah Bankhead’s. Tallu and
her
glossy dark hair won a
Picture-Play
beauty contest when we were fifteen, and now she was turning that win into a New York City acting career. She and her hair had a life of travel and glamour that I envied, despite my love for Montgomery; surely no one told Tallu how long her skirts should be.

Waiting for the meeting to start, we girls fanned ourselves in the airless room. Its high, apricot-colored walls were plastered with Red Cross posters. One showed a wicker basket overflowing with yarn and a pair of knitting needles; it exhorted readers, “Our boys need SOX. Knit your bit.” Another featured a tremendous stark red cross, to the right of which was a nurse in flowing dress and robes that could not be a bit practical. The nurse’s arms cradled an angled stretcher, on which a wounded soldier lay with a dark blanket wrapped around both the stretcher and him. The perspective was such that the nurse appeared to be a giantess—and the soldier appeared at risk of sliding from that stretcher, feet first, if the nurse didn’t turn her distant gaze to the matter at hand. Below the image was this proclamation: “The Greatest Mother in the World.”

I elbowed Sara and pointed to the poster. “What do you reckon? Is she supposed to be the Virgin Mother?”

Sara didn’t get a chance to answer. There was a rapping of a cane on the wooden floor, and we all turned toward stout Mrs. Baker, in her steel-gray, belted suit. She was a formidable woman who’d come down from Boston to help instruct the volunteers, a woman who seemed as if she might be able to win the war single-handedly if only someone would put her on a boat to France.

“Good morning, everyone,” she said in her drawl-less, nasal voice. “I see you’ve found our new location without undue effort. The war continues, and so we must continue—indeed, redouble—our efforts for membership and productivity.”

Some of the girls cheered. They were the younger ones who’d only just been allowed to join.

Mrs. Baker nodded, which made her chin disappear into her neck briefly, and then she continued, “Now, some of you have done finger and arm bandages; the principle of the leg and body bandages is the same. However, there are some significant differences to which we must attend. For any who have not been so instructed, I will start the lesson from the beginning. We start, first, with sheets of unbleached calico…”

I squeezed rainwater from my hem while Mrs. Baker lectured about widths and lengths and tension and began a demonstration. She handed the end of a loose strip of fabric to the girl sitting nearest and said, “Stand up, my dear. One of you holds the bulk of the fabric and feeds it through as needed—that person is the roll
ee.
The roll
er
’s thumbs must be on the upper aspect of the fabric, the forefinger beneath, like so. As we proceed, the forefingers are kept firmly against the roll, thumbs advanced for maximum tautness. Everyone, up now and begin.”

I took a loosely tied bundle of fabric from one of several baskets lined up along the floor behind me. The fabric was pure white at the moment, sure, but it would soon be blood-soaked and covering a man’s whole middle, crusted with dirt and irresistible to flies. I’d seen photographs of Civil War soldiers suffering this way, in books that depicted what Daddy called “the atrocities done to us by the Union.”

It was my brother, Tony, seven years older than me and now serving in France, who Daddy meant to educate with the books and the discussions. He never shooed me out of the parlor, though. He would wave me over from where I might be picking out a simple tune on the piano and let me perch on his knee.

“The Sayres have a proud history in Montgomery,” he’d say, paging through one of the books. “Here. This is my uncle William’s original residence, where he raised his younger brother Daniel, your grandfather. It became the first Confederate White House.”

“So Sayre Street is named for
us,
Daddy?” I asked with all the wonder of my seven or eight years.

“It honors William and my father. The two of them made this town what it is, children.”

Tony seemed to take the Sayre family history as a matter of course. I, however, was fascinated with all of these now-dead relatives and would continue to ask questions about which of them had done what, when. I wanted stories.

From Daddy, I got tales of how his father, Daniel Sayre, founded a Tuskegee paper, then returned to Montgomery to edit the
Montgomery Post,
becoming an influential voice in local politics. And Daddy told me about his mother’s brother, “the great General John Tyler Morgan,” who’d pummeled Union troops every chance he got, then later became a prominent U.S. Senator. From Mama I came to know her father, Willis Machen, the U.S. Senator from Kentucky, whose friendship with Senator Morgan was responsible for my parents’ meeting at Senator Morgan’s New Year’s Eve ball in 1883. Grandfather Machen had once been a presidential candidate.

I wondered, that day at the Red Cross, if our family’s history was burdensome to Tony, oppressive, maybe. And maybe that was why he’d married Edith, whose people were tenant farmers, and then left Montgomery to live and work in Mobile. To be the only surviving son in a family—and not the first son, not the son who’d been named after the grandfather upon whose shoulders so much of Montgomery’s fate had apparently rested, not the son who’d died from meningitis at just eighteen months old—well, that was a heavy yoke.

Untying the calico bundle, I redirected my thoughts and handed Eleanor the fabric’s loose end. “I had a letter yesterday from Arthur Brennan,” I said. “Remember him, from our last trip to Atlanta?”

Eleanor frowned in concentration as she tried to form the start of the roll. “Was it thumbs under, or forefingers under?”

“Fingers. Arthur’s people have been in cotton since before the Revolution. They’ve still got old slaves who never wanted to go, which Daddy says is proof that President Lincoln ruined the South for nothin’.”

Eleanor made a few successful turns, then looked up. “Arthur’s the boy with that green Dort car? The glossy one we rode in?”

“That’s him. Wasn’t it delicious? Arthur said Dorts cost twice what a Ford does—a thousand dollars, maybe more. The Judge would as soon dance naked in front of the courthouse as spend that kind of money on a car.”

The notion amused me; as I continued feeding the fabric to Eleanor, I imagined a scene in which Daddy exited the streetcar in his pin-striped suit, umbrella furled, leather satchel in hand. Parked at the base of the broad, marble courthouse steps would be a green Dort, its hood sleek and gleaming in the sunshine, its varnished running boards aglow. A man in a top hat and tailcoat—some agent of the devil, he’d be—would beckon my father over to the car; there would be a conversation; Daddy would shake his head and frown and gesture with his umbrella; he would raise a finger as he pontificated about relative value and the ethics of overspending; the top-hatted man would shake his head firmly, leaving Daddy no choice but to disrobe on the spot, and dance.

BOOK: Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
3.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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