Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (4 page)

“The ‘actual book’ part may be a while, yet,” he said. “Alas. I’ll lend you something else in the meantime, though, if you like. Do you enjoy reading?”

“I’ll read most anything. My friend Sara Haardt just sent me the strangest story,
Herland,
it was in a magazine, and it’s about a society that’s made only of women. I wouldn’t like that much.”

He grinned. “Good news, all.”

None of the boys I knew had much interest in books. For them it was football and horses and hounds. I looked at Scott there in the rosy light, his hair and skin and eyes aglow with joy and ambition and enthusiasm, and was dazzled.

“
Here
she is,” Eleanor said, slipping her arm around my waist. A linebacker-size fella was with her. “I thought maybe you’d snuck off like last time.”

Scott said, “Snuck off? Had I but known—”

“To
smoke,
” El said the moment after I pinched her. “She’d snuck off to smoke with a couple of the older girls.”

“Older than…?”

“Seventeen,” I told him. “I’m seventeen ’til July twenty-fourth, that’s twenty-six—well, nearly twenty-five, really—days from now, given how it’s closing in on midnight. Twenty-five days, and then I’m eighteen.”

“After which time she’ll be far less annoying, I hope. We don’t smoke much,” El assured him. “But it’s good for preventing sore throats.”

“It’s good for making you
feel
good,” I said, “which is why the law and my daddy have always been against women doing it.”

“Who
are
you, by the way?” El asked Scott. She pointed at her companion and said, “This here new friend of mine, who is about to be on his way, is Wilson Crenshaw Whitney the Third.”

“Scott Fitzgerald, the one and only,” Scott told the two of them. Then, looking at me, he added, “Who very much wishes he didn’t have to do the same.”

“I purely hate that I have to go home,” I told him. “If I wasn’t a girl—”

“—I wouldn’t insist you allow me to phone you tomorrow. All right?”

“There’s my consolation, then,” I said. The phaeton was rolling to a stop in front of us. I followed El to its door, adding, “Judge Anthony Sayre’s residence. The operator will put you right through.”

*   *   *

The morning’s scattered clouds had, by afternoon, formed themselves into great towering columns with broad anvil tops while I lay on my bed, diary open, pencil in hand. I had one ear attuned to the thunder that might spoil my evening plans, and the other waiting for the telltale three short rings that indicated a telephone call for our residence. Scott still hadn’t phoned, and now I was almost certain that he wouldn’t.
He’s all words, no substance,
I thought.
Writers are probably like that.

Tootsie appeared at my bedroom door. “Teatime. Katy’s got lemon pie, or tomato sandwiches—and
I
have gin.”

“So Mama has gone out.”

“Baby, I’m twenty-nine. Not exactly a schoolgirl, Lord.”

“Yet you still wait ’til Mama’s gone to pour a drink.”

“I try to be considerate. Anyway, it’s Daddy we need to worry about most … and God help me if he ever sees me smoking. I’m goin’ to muddle up some mint and raspberries to go with that gin. Are you game?”

“Okay, sure.” I glanced at my diary, where I’d been writing about the morning’s Service League work. We volunteers had served doughnuts and coffee to soldiers at the train station canteen, and a married officer had taken an obvious shine to me. Though I knew I was supposed to discourage his interest, I flirted with him anyway. He was attractive and funny, and what harm was there in it? He was nothing more than a way to pass the time until we finished, until I could return home, until that charming lieutenant phoned.

I asked my sister, “Tootsie, how’d you know you were in love with Newman?”

“Oh-ho!” She sat down next to me. “Who is he? Tell!”

Katy called up the stairs, “Miz Rosalind, what’d you all decide?”

“What did we decide? Pie?”

I wrinkled my nose.

“The sandwiches,” Tootsie yelled. “And rinse those berries for me, would you?”

“Yes’m.”

Tootsie turned back to me. “Now tell.”

“Nothin’
to
tell. I guess I ought to be aware of what to look for, is all. The signs of true love, I mean. Is it like in Shakespeare?” I sat up and took Tootsie’s hands. “You know, is it all heaving bosoms and fluttering hearts and mistaken identities and madness?”

The sound of the phone ringing downstairs made my heart leap.

“Yes,”
Tootsie said with wide eyes, holding tightly to my hand as I jumped up. “Yes, it is
exactly
like that. Gird yourself, little sister.”

3

In mid-July, Sara Haardt and I were just leaving a Commerce Street hat shop when I heard a man call my name.

“Miss Sayre! Hello!”

Scott waved as he walked toward us through a throng of young women who turned to watch him. He tipped his hat and smiled at the women as he passed. Even dressed in civilian clothes—white shirt, blue sweater vest above crisp, cuffed brown pants—he seemed exotic, rare, desirable. I’d seen him twice since our first meeting, once when he brought me the typescript chapter from his novel, and then again after I’d read it. Both meetings had been too-brief exchanges of smiles and compliments enacted over cheese biscuits (Scott) and melon (me) at the diner, while Eleanor and Livye looked on from a booth nearby. Tempted as I was to clear my dance card and devote my weekends to this handsome Yankee interloper, as Tootsie called him, it was hard to know whether I should take his attentions seriously.

“How nice to run into you,” I said when he reached us.

“Do I give too much away when I confess it’s no coincidence? Your sister said I might find you here.”

“Well, gosh, we’re flattered, aren’t we, Sara? Oh—Sara, meet Lieutenant Scott Fitzgerald of Princeton University. This is Miss Sara Haardt, of Goucher College. Suddenly I feel undereducated—not that I have any use for college. I could hardly sit still long enough to finish high school.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Miss Haardt.”

“She’s brilliant, don’t let her fool you,” Sara said.

I pointed to the store’s window display. “Woman of the world that she is, Miss Haardt has been tryin’ to educate me on what up-to-the-minute ladies are wearin’ on their heads these days—which apparently is not these big feathered confectionaries you see here.”

Scott said, “I’d have to agree. The New York City shops were all showing smaller, less ornate styles last time I was there.”

“A fella who knows fashion!”

“I’m observant, that’s all. Writers have to be.”

Sara, tall and wiry and far plainer in appearance than in intellect, said, “Are you a writer, then?” She did this as innocently as you please, as if I hadn’t already told her everything I knew about him.

“Since about the time I could hold a pencil.”

“How fascinating,” Sara said. “I do a little writing myself. Zelda and I were on our way to get lunch; why don’t you join us, and you can tell us all about your work.”

“I’d love to, truly, but I have to get back to Camp Sheridan.” He turned to me. “Before I go, though, Miss Sayre—Zelda, if I may—I recall you saying a time or two that your birthday’s next week. If you’ll permit me, I’d like to arrange a little party at the Club in your honor.”

“You would? I don’t know what to say—”

“Say anything you like, except don’t say no.”

I laughed. “That narrows my options.”

“Just as I intended. I’ve got to run.” He grinned as he backed away. “I’ll phone you with the details!”

As we watched him hurry up the street, Sara said, “What a lovely gesture—too bad you’ll have to disappoint him.”

“Too bad I’ll have to disappoint Mama, you mean, when I tell her that her party is off—but I’ll make sure Scott invites her and the Judge, and maybe she can still do the cake.”

*   *   *

Upon hearing my news in the parlor after dessert that evening, Daddy said, “That boy obviously lacks good judgment. He hardly knows you. Where did you say he’s from?”

I hadn’t said, and wasn’t about to. “He did three years at Princeton before leaving to join up, and now he’s serving at Camp Sheridan.”

Mama said, “He’s enthusiastic, I’ll give him that.”

“He is,” Tootsie agreed. She was working a needlepoint American flag; I’d teased her earlier about turning into Betsy Ross. She said, “When he phoned this morning and I told him Zelda was out, he insisted that he
had
to know her whereabouts. ‘It’s extremely urgent!’ he said, as if his very life depended on it.”

“Frivolous is what he is—probably too much money and not enough sense. You see that a lot in carpetbaggers. Don’t be surprised if it comes out that his people are actually from the North.”

I said, “
I
think he’s terribly romantic, and it’s
my
birthday after all.”

Daddy reached for his cognac, the single drink he would allow himself, and only on Friday nights. “Be that as it may, your mother—”

“—understands the appeal of a handsome suitor,” she said, and smiled fondly at Daddy, which was enough to persuade him to relent.

*   *   *

On the night of my birthday, the party took place in one of the Club’s parlors, a high-ceilinged room lighted by a wide crystal chandelier overhead and smaller crystal sconces along the walls. For the occasion, I’d persuaded Mama to shorten a spring-green, scoop-necked silk dress so that the hemline would stop midcalf. I wore it with a new narrow-brimmed straw hat and a pair of sleek high heels like some I’d seen in
Picture-Play
. “Tell me more about this boy,” Mama had said while pinning up the dress, but I put her off. “You just have to meet him,” I said. “Then you’ll see.”

I loved the Club, it being the site of so many entertaining times, but the gaslights seemed a throwback now that electric lights were being used in all the modern buildings. Its elegantly shabby Oriental rugs and its creaking floorboards and its silent, colored staff were the antithesis of modern, too, and proudly so. This was my daddy’s South, my daddy’s club—not literally, but it might as well have been.

Now Scott stood in the center of the room, hands raised, and announced, “Ladies, gentlemen, welcome to Miss Zelda Sayre’s eighteenth birthday fête! I’m Scott Fitzgerald, your host and Miss Sayre’s most ardent admirer.”

He looked distinguished in a nicely cut pearl-gray suit. His tie was pale blue with gray stripes. His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek’s rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.

My friends cheered, and then Scott went on, “Jasper, our bartender, has created a drink in Zelda’s honor. I described her to him, and this gin-and-soda-and-apricots concoction is the result. You’ve
got
to try it, it’s outrageously good.”

“How about all this?” Sara Mayfield whispered, watching Scott consult with Livye, who was at the piano. “He’s wild about you, isn’t he?”

“I guess he is.” My chest was strangely tight.

“This must be costing his whole month’s salary. Does he have family money?”

“I have no idea. He went to Princeton, so I suppose there’s some.”

“How old is he?”

“Twenty-one,” I whispered. “He’s a writer; he’s already written a novel. I read part of it, and it’s awfully good. He plans to be famous.”

“There are worse things to plan on.”

“The Judge says anyone who’d throw a party like this for a girl he just met must be frivolous.”

Sara looked over at Daddy, whose stiff posture and expression said he was there under duress. She said, “There are worse things to be.”

The music began, and then Scott joined Sara and me. “I’ve persuaded your friend Miss Hart at the piano, there, to play us a fox-trot. Shall we dance?”

“Seeing as you’ve gone to all this trouble, I s’pose I’d better say yes.”

“Is she always this fresh?” Scott asked Sara.

“Hold on to your hat, mister,” was Sara’s reply.

A little while later, he told a story about a train trip he’d taken from Princeton, across the country through Chicago to St. Paul. In his telling, the land was blanketed in sparkling diamonds, his vivid fellow travelers were wise or funny or sad, the cities were cornucopias spilling over with ambition and industry.

He’s so worldly,
I thought. Whereas I was the opposite, having never been farther from home than the North Carolina mountains.
Worldly, but just as warm and eager as a golden retriever
 …

I was about to ask him whether he didn’t have golden retriever in his bloodline somewhere when Daddy pulled me aside.

“Baby, it’s time you made your good-byes.”

“It’s early.”

“Regardless. Mr. Fitzgerald asked us
three
times to have one of those cocktails. He might show a bit more restraint.”

I thought the cocktail was well worth the attention Scott was giving it—not that I could let Daddy know this. I laughed and said, “No, I’m pretty sure he won’t.”

Daddy’s eyes narrowed. “I’m certain you gave him your regrets as well.”

“Yes, sir,” I lied. “Well, I did have a
sip
of champagne—so’s not to be rude to our host. I’d hate for anyone to think you didn’t raise me right.”

He wasn’t fooled. “It’s plain he’s unsuitable; I won’t have you wasting any more of your time with this boy.”

Mama said, “Now, Judge, it’s her birthday,” and laid her hand on his arm.

“I’d really like to stay, Daddy,” I said. “All my friends are here. How would it look if I left so soon?”

He thought this over, then sighed heavily, as if his being sixty meant invisible forces like time or gravity pressed harder on him nowadays. “
Tootsie
will escort you home, then,” he said, eyeing Scott, who was now using empty champagne glasses to build a tower atop a table. “Are we clear about that?”

“Yes, Daddy—but he’s a good person, you have to get to know him better is all. Things are different now than when you were our age.”