Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (9 page)

“At any age,” I quipped. “Daddy said, ‘Marry that fine fella Minor Brinson,’ and you said, ‘Yessir.’”

“That’s a bit simplistic. But anyway, there are things you may not know that you
should
know before your wedding night.”

“Did Mama put you up to this?”

“I volunteered, but she thought it was a wise plan.”

“Sure, bein’ that she’s probably forgotten how such things as might happen on a girl’s wedding night actually work.”

“You do have hot pepper running through your veins, don’t you? Where do you get that, do you suppose?”

“From the Machen side, I’m sure. The Sayres are such a dour bunch. Mama was pretty lively before her daddy put a leash on her.”

“Fathers have to look out for their daughters. It’s their duty.”

I considered this. Our father was nothing if not dutiful, and so were my friends’ fathers. Some had softer edges than others, but all of them were without question the heads of their households. I could think of only one exception: Eleanor Browder’s household, where, from everything I’d seen, both parents were equally in charge. Mrs. Browder did not indulge in any of the routine, small deceptions that the other girls’ mothers did—Mama included. She didn’t need to.

In fact, at times Mrs. Browder’s behavior bordered on obnoxious. Once, when I was at Eleanor’s house, Mrs. Browder told us she wished Eleanor and I could trade places with her—that if she weren’t so weighted down with her present duties and age, she would be out encouraging women to vote, and distributing Margaret Sanger’s booklets to middle- and upper-class households, where, she said, the real facts of life needed to be known. “These women somehow believe that only the poor are subject to venereal diseases. Why, I could name a half-dozen of our neighbors who’ve been treated for ‘female disturbances’ that are in fact gonorrhea they’ve caught from their unfaithful husbands, who got it from the whorehouse!”

“Mama, heavens!”

We girls weren’t against this kind of progress, necessarily. Rather, we didn’t feel it concerned us. We weren’t political; we were young and pretty and popular. Neither of us had any desire to be the kind of feminist Mrs. Browder wished to be, a fact the poor woman said she found wasteful and offensive.

Now I asked my sister, “The Judge never gave
you
any trouble, did he? Tilde says you were a model child.”

“My veins run with cool water. Too cool sometimes.” The thought brought a frown. Marjorie had “moods,” Mama had said, and those moods could keep her in bed for days. Whereas I had “fits of temper” lasting minutes, usually, sometimes hours. Tootsie was “hard-nosed, but eventually she sees sense.” Tony was “sensitive.” Only Tilde’s label was complimentary—she was “the cooperative child.”

“Anyway, you were sayin’? About the wedding night?”

“You may be aware, there’s a thing called ‘the marital act’ that happens first on the wedding night, and then, depending on the man, more or less frequently throughout a marriage. Its purpose is reproduction, but a lot of couples believe it’s a … pleasurable thing to do.” Her face reddened. “Men in particular find it pleasurable because their bodies are built … well, more efficiently in that regard.”

I pretended wide-eyed fascination as Marjorie continued the lesson, quietly describing male genitalia and its arousal response, and then outlining what a man did with that aroused genitalia and how a wife was supposed to respond. Finally she paused and looked over at me.

“That is downright fascinating,” I said heartily, then clamped my lips in an attempt to suppress my smile.

Understanding spread across Marjorie’s face. “You devil. You knew all of that already, didn’t you?”

“I’d never heard it explained quite that way, though.”

“Hot pepper,” Marjorie said, shaking her head.

PART II

Everybody's youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald

9

Nothing can prepare the uninitiated for the truth of New York City. For all that Scott had talked dreamily about Manhattan, had told me about Broadway and the Hippodrome and the Gothic grandeur of the Woolworth Building—the tallest building in the world!—for all that he’d described the city as having a soul, of being a law unto itself, I was not prepared for what I would encounter after I got off the train at Pennsylvania Station.

Marjorie and I had traveled the final leg of the journey overnight. Our compartment was spacious with comfortable berths, but even so, my sleep had been filled with strange dreams. In the most vivid of them, I’d been able to fly. I glided over huge fields of pale violet Indian tobacco chanting,
“Lobelia inflata,”
repeatedly, worried that I was going to miss my botany exam. I soared along the tops of incredibly tall pines that grazed my naked stomach and breasts with a whisper-soft touch. All I needed to do to lift off each time was to stand on my toes with my arms outstretched, then bend my knees and spring upward. That little bounce, and then I was free. The air flowed around me as warm and soothing as a bath.

In the morning, I woke disoriented. The feeling would persist indefinitely.

Due to a three-hour delay somewhere in New Jersey, once the train rumbled through a tunnel beneath the Hudson River and came to a stop at Penn Station, we had only an hour to spare before the wedding itself and were already late for our rendezvous with Scott and the priest.

We disembarked onto a huge, glass-enclosed platform awash in brilliant sunshine, then stood awestruck, wordless and still. Passengers streamed around and past us. I was transfixed by the steel trusses that went up and up and up to wide glass panels and the blue, blue sky beyond. That glass-paned ceiling had to be more than a hundred feet high and was neatly segmented into the most pleasing steel arches and rectangular panes. Montgomery had some impressive buildings, but nothing that compared to this.

Still staring upward, I tugged at Marjorie’s sleeve. “At breakfast, did you see any bottle labeled ‘Drink Me’?”

“I didn’t notice any bottles— Oh, like in
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
you mean.”

“Mm,” I said, gazing around us. “Bet there’s a white rabbit here someplace.”

“It’s like an enormous greenhouse.”

I sighed. “It’s like heaven’s depot. A place like this could only be built by angels, don’t you think?”

We followed the last of our fellow passengers up a staircase to the concourse, where the space opened—
exploded,
I thought—into the biggest atrium I had ever seen and could not have ever imagined. Everywhere, steel and glass and arches … The seemingly endless ceiling was broad enough to cover a small town. It was magnificent, and dizzying.

“All the clockworks in my head are just spinning and springing apart,” I said.

Marjorie only nodded. After a moment, she gathered herself and took my hand. “We should have let Tootsie and Newman meet us.”

I was anxious, too, but I knew the surest way to make things worse was to indulge Marjorie’s anxiety. “Scott says it’s easy enough to get a taxicab—there’s so many tourists coming that the drivers line up along the street out front all day long.”

“It can only be easy if you don’t feel as though you’re in Wonderland. This place is a city all by itself.”

Marjorie found a smartly dressed woman and asked for the quickest route to where the taxis would be waiting.

“Through there to the main waiting room,” the woman said while checking the time on the huge clock behind Marjorie. “You’ll see the exits—there are signs, too—and then outside any of them, there’ll be a queue for cabs. You’re first-timers here, I suppose?”

“Yes. My sister’s getting married at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at noon.”

The woman’s eyebrows rose almost to her hairline and I wondered if she could somehow tell I wasn’t a Catholic. I said, “My soon-to-be-husband cleared it with the priest.”

She gave me a quizzical look, then told Marjorie, “Yes, well, go right or left as soon as you’re in the main room—don’t spend all day meandering through here to Seventh. And you’ll want to take this advice to heart: give the cabbie the address as though you’re bored and have done it fifty times. If he thinks you’re green, he’ll run you all over the city before he lets you off.”

We left the atrium through a passageway to the main waiting room, as the woman directed. Even the passageway’s scale—thirty feet across and fifty high, all stone, arched, and with other passageways leading off it—was difficult to comprehend. It was like we’d disembarked into a dream even stranger than the ones I’d had overnight. I was Alice, or I was Jack, who, having tired of using the beanstalk to climb to the giant’s lair, had elected to travel there by train. The feeling was amplified when we came to the stairs leading down into the main waiting room.

The wide, sunlit chamber was domed—how high the ceiling was, I couldn’t guess—and built out of huge blocks of the same rose-colored stone that made up the atrium’s lower walls. It was easily the size of a football field. Lampposts were stationed throughout, their scale ridiculously small in this vast space. The far end of the hall had tremendous arched windows divided by small frames into towers of squares. Stairways led off all four sides.

“In my wildest imaginings…” I began.

“It’s after eleven,” Marjorie said. “We have to move along. Left or right, do you think?”

“How can you be so practical?”

“You’re on a
schedule
.”

“Scott will understand if this makes us later—this stuff is part of the package he sold me to get me out of Montgomery, after all.”

We walked into the hall and were crossing to the staircase that would take us to the exit when I stopped again.

I tilted my head back to see the ceiling from this aspect. Who carved all those hexagons—actually, a hexagon inside a hexagon inside a hexagon—that decorated the entire ceiling? Whose talent with a chisel rendered these tremendous columns? How had it been done? Where did the artists have a large enough work space to chisel the Corinthian curves and leaves that topped the columns?

If Marjorie hadn’t taken me by the arm and said, “You have a wedding in an
hour,
remember?” I might have lain down right there on the floor in order to marvel properly.

Oh, and then outside! The buildings, the people, the noise of engines and whistles and voices, the commotion of cars clattering past! I glanced at my sister; she looked frightened. I laughed and said, “I might never leave.”

*   *   *

I gawked at every single tall building and appealing storefront on our trip across town, then when we came around the block occupied by St. Patrick’s, I gaped at its arched, stained-glass windows. Each was a work of art.

But when the entry and front spires of St. Patrick’s came into view, my eyes filled with tears. I’d never seen a structure that was at once so ornate and so serene. The sight—the complexity of architecture, the graceful, intricately carved spires towering over the street, inlaid with smaller intricately carved spires, all of them topped by crosses—literally stole my breath. No wonder the woman at the station had looked impressed.

The thought of being married in this church felt overwhelming, but fitting, too; I was convinced that ours was no ordinary union. Scott was no ordinary fiancé. How, though, had he engineered
this
?

The sidewalk was crowded with tourists milling around the church. Marjorie said, “I wonder if it’s always like this, or if tomorrow being Easter explains it.”

I spotted Scott at the top of the wide steps, where he waited with Tootsie and Newman and two unfamiliar men, and got out of the car before Marjorie had even opened her purse to extract the cab fare. Scott jogged down to the curb and swept me into an embrace.

“My dearest girl, my bride! We’ve done it, we’ve made it. Can you believe this? What do you think?”

“It’s wonderful.” I pulled back and smiled at him. His eyes were as green as they get, bright with pleasure and pride. “Look at you. My author husband.”

He glowed. “Nearly
ten thousand
sold already, I’m told. And the reviews so far are pretty damn good. Some critics are even saying it’s genius. They’re putting me up there with Byron and Kipling!” His voice caught as he said, “
This,
now, here with you, is the top of the world.”

“I’m so, so happy for you, darling.”

“It’s all because of you.” He kissed my hands. “Because I had to have you.”

Marjorie joined us as the others came down to the sidewalk. Scott turned to the priest. “Father, I’d like to introduce Miss Zelda Sayre and her sister Mrs. Marjorie Brinson. Ladies, this is Father Martin. He’ll be doing us the honor.”

“Delighted, ladies.”

“Pleased to meet you,” I said as I squinted up at the arched entryway, which sat beneath a stone peak that resided under an even grander one. Everywhere, peaks and spires reached heavenward—which, I supposed, was the idea.

“This is the most remarkable church I’ve ever seen,” I said, still looking upward. “How many crosses are on this thing, do you suppose?” I looked back at the priest and smiled. “It’s amazing. I have the sudden desire to become a Catholic.”

“I believe that can be arranged.”

Newman said, “We’re told that the tallest of the spires reaches three hundred thirty feet.”

“Practically to heaven’s door,” Tootsie quipped as she gave me a hug. “You look radiant, little sister.”

I wore a suit the color of the evening sky, onto which I’d pinned the white orchid Scott had ordered for me from a Montgomery florist. He’d said it would keep overnight, and it had. My hat was the same fabric as my suit, trimmed out with gray leather ribbon and a silver buckle. I wore shoes to match and felt, as I’d told Eleanor when I tried on the suit for her, “like a proper lady—which might be the best costume I’ve worn so far in my life.”