Call Me Zelda (22 page)

In December, Scott had to again return to Hopkins for help with his drinking. He dried out for a few weeks, but was soon back home to poor habits, insomnia, and generally disruptive behavior. We avoided him as much as possible by staying in the little hobby room upstairs, where Zelda worked on a set of paper dolls for Scottie.

Zelda spent hours hunched over the dolls—the little Fitzgeralds—decorating them with rich detail and color and cutting them to perfect precision, as if she were trying to remake her own family. Rubbing her strained eyes, which hurt from the effort, but continuing on, Zelda poured herself into the dolls as an expression of her deep but often inexpressible love for the child. I hoped that one day Scottie would recognize these exquisite and unique works of art for what they were.

I was there the day Zelda presented the dolls to Scottie. Scottie’s face lit with such pure and absolute delight that I had to
struggle to hold back my tears. Scottie hugged Zelda and gave her the sweetest and most heartfelt thanks, making me ache for my own daughter, inspiring me later that night to dig out my photographs of Katie and place them around my apartment, hidden no more. My relief was profound.

When Zelda finished the dolls, she began another writing project.

“What’s this one?” I asked.

“I’m calling it
Scandalabra
,” she said. “It’s a play. If he doesn’t want me to write novels I will write a play.”

If nothing else I admired her dogged stubbornness and determination to express herself.

“Do you feel up to writing for me?” I asked.

She continued to write, and nodded her head. “Yes, I think I’m ready again.”

“Good,” I said.

“But only if you tell me first.”

“Tell you what?”

“About your husband.”

Fair enough
, I thought.

She put down her pencil and reached for my hands.

“I don’t know you, Anna, and you know me inside and out.”

I looked down at my hands.

“It’s not that I want to keep things from you,” I said. “It’s just that psychiatric nurses are trained to separate our emotional lives from our patients’ so they don’t get confused. Dr. Meyer would agree. We should not burden the patient in any way. You don’t need any of my baggage weighing you down.”

“To hell with Dr. Meyer and all of them,” said Zelda. “We aren’t in a clinical setting anymore. You are a part of my life, whether you like it or not. You are more my friend than my nurse. You have to treat me like a friend.”

And our lives are connected
, I thought.
Inextricably.

“Very well,” I said.

“Let’s go outside,” she said. “It’s so tight in here. It might help your words if they can breathe the fresh air.”

I nodded.
Yes, that would help.

T
he grounds of La Paix were covered in a light dusting of snow. The ground crunched under our boots, and we walked arm in arm under the naked deciduous trees by the frozen reservoir and empty tennis courts, our breath mingling in steamy clouds around our heads.

“It was cold like this at the base hospital in France the day I lost him,” I began. But no, that wasn’t the right place to start. I needed to start here, in Baltimore, in the fall of 1917, when all the young men went to war and I worked as a nurse at Walter Reed General Hospital.

“No, let me start at the beginning,” I said.

Zelda stayed quiet, seemingly allowing me space to gather my thoughts, build my story, figure out the parts I wanted to tell, the important parts, the ones I could speak.

“I always knew I wanted to be a nurse. I never flinched from patching hurt animals or wounded little brothers. While I trained, the world was at war, and America teetered on the brink, so after nurse training school, I worked at Walter Reed so I could serve my country.

“One of my favorite patients, Will, was a doughboy wounded in his first battle in France. He was recovering from several shots to his leg, but he’d be all right. Every day he told me about his fiancée, when they’d get married, and to stop loving him so much because he was taken. I’d tease him and tell him that with his baby blue eyes and blond crew cut, he was too young to get married and might be mistaken for the ring bearer.

“I was more outgoing then,” I said, “having never experienced a single heartache aside from watching my mother grieve
a couple of miscarriages. I flirted with him and all of my patients, and I was a general favorite.”

“Still are,” said Zelda.

“Thank you,” I said. “Anyway, one day I pulled back the curtain and said, ‘Is today the day you’re willing to throw your girl over so we can get married?’ as I did every day, and this man with a huge grin that gave me butterflies in my stomach stood at Will’s side. ‘I don’t know about Will,’ said the soldier, ‘but I’d sure love to.’ Well, I was just as red as a rose, but I gave him my best ‘get in line’ line and tended to Will, while trying to pretend that the soldier with the crinkled eyes and tanned skin and mischievous smile wasn’t in the room laughing behind me and heating me up from two feet away.

“I soon found out that man’s name was Benjamin Howard and he was two months away from shipping out. He and Will were best friends and had grown up in southern Maryland. They couldn’t wait to get back to the farms and waterways after the war. He hung around Will and me like a fly, but it wasn’t until an autumn dance that I fell in love.”

“Oh, how romantic,” said Zelda. “Keep going.”

“Ben had been asking me out for weeks and I kept saying no. I didn’t want to get all wrapped up with a man about to be sent to his death, though I didn’t tell him that. But he continued to come every day. One morning in late November, Ben showed up with a bouquet of calla lilies and a smile that fully cracked through the wall I’d put up between us, and I surrendered.

“‘One date,’ I’d told him, and he was over the moon. I tried not to let on that I was, too, but later, he told me that he knew I loved him long before I admitted it to myself.

“That night was magical. An early snow fell. Young men in uniforms, young women with shiny eyes and hearts swollen with love for them and their country, the wartime energy pulsing off
all of us. After the dance, we walked along the Baltimore Harbor holding hands and watching the snowflakes dissolve into the glassy black water. We stared at each other for a long time with all the world spinning around us but barely there until he finally said, ‘Anna, may I kiss you?’ I smiled at him in encouragement and felt his mouth on mine, and knew without a doubt that it wouldn’t be just one date. That these were the only lips I’d kiss forever.”

“Oh, how wonderful,” said Zelda. “To feel such certainty. I’ve never felt certainty about anything in my life, except Al Jolson’s music and tomato sandwiches.”

We had a good laugh over that one as we crossed a snow-sprinkled field, leaving boot tracks behind us.

“So we began our happily ever after,” I continued. “We fell head over heels in love, spent as much time together as possible, married at a little church north of Baltimore barely a month after we’d met, had a small reception at my parents’ place in Towson, and spent our first night together at the Belvedere Hotel.”

“Then he shipped out on a boat made of newspaper and sank,” she said.

“No, we had more time together.”

“Thank God. Tell me more.”

“General Pershing was pushing hard for nurses for war field hospitals. I couldn’t stand being away from Ben and thought that if we were at least on the same continent we’d get to see each other again. I had a hell of a time getting approval, because they wanted nurses who were at least twenty-five and I was only twenty-one. My supervisor was able to pull strings, though, because I’d already graduated nurse training school and because I worked at Walter Reed.

“In Ben’s letters, he begged me not to come. Having seen the horrors of war, albeit briefly, Will pleaded with me not to go. My
poor mother and father were a wreck because my brother had enlisted and had also shipped out to fight, but I told them all about love and duty, and they understood.”

The pines and red cedars muted the day and surrounded Zelda and me in cold shadows as we walked through the forest that led to the Turnbull house on the grounds of La Paix. We moved closer together on the path for warmth and for comfort in the chilly air.

“After the long trip overseas, my team of nurses reached France and turned an old hotel into an evacuation hospital. I was unprepared for the horrors I would come to know, but I’d achieved my goal. Later that year, Ben and I were able to coordinate our leave to visit the French Riviera, which became our belated honeymoon.”

Zelda stiffened a bit and I looked at her profile.

“Do you want to hear more,” I asked, “or have you had enough?”

“More,” she said. “But speak quietly, because I can feel his breath on my neck.”

I felt shivers on my arms and stopped walking. Behind us, the path was shadowed and strange.

“Who?”

“Scott,” she said. “Do you hear him? Coming from the knob in that tree? It’s like he’s speaking on a microphone.”

The voices. It was never a good sign when she heard voices, and though I knew what she said was impossible, her surety was unsettling.

“Let’s turn back,” I said.

“No,” she said. “I can’t stand to go to that house until supper. Finish.”

I hesitated, worried that we’d get stuck outside in the dark and that Scott would grow angry. I could also feel the cold in my bones, and I was weary from sharing so much about Ben.

“Zelda, please can we head back?” I said. “I promise to keep speaking, but I’m so cold and tired.”

She did not reply, but allowed me to turn toward La Paix. She hung behind a little, but I urged her forward, and soon we were walking in step on our way back to the house.

“The time away on the Riviera made me half-mad,” I said, threading my arm through hers. “Rather than restore me for a return to the front, leave left me restless, skittish, and fearful. I indulged in runaway fantasies that I started speaking out loud to Ben. At first he humored me, but then he told me to stop. That he would never step away from his duty. We had terrible quarrels. He knew he had to stay and see the fighting through, especially when friends of his with children were doing so. I told him he’d given enough and what about his duty to me. He urged me to return home, but I told him we were a package deal. He didn’t like it, but he went back. And we stayed on.

“The fall of 1918 was brutal. The miserable cold rain, the muddy trenches, gassed soldiers, influenza—it was hell on earth, but every day that I didn’t receive a report that he’d died I counted as a good day. His letters were becoming increasingly erratic and troubling. He seemed to lose his hope and his good cheer, and in the last letter he sent to me, he apologized for keeping us in the war. He wrote that he had been horribly wrong and that he lived in hell for it, and that if it weren’t for his men he’d flee and take me with him. Those were dangerous words to put in writing.”

We stepped out of the woods and walked back over the field as the sun set. The temperature seemed to have dropped ten degrees since we’d started out. I felt my voice stuck in my throat and wished I could stop speaking. But I kept on because I wanted more from Zelda, and I owed this to her.

“His unit fought at Argonne, where thousands died. The armistice was signed at five in the morning on a train on
November eleventh of 1918. I waited for him at the base hospital for weeks, but I never heard from him again. No one did. I received an MIA letter that December. They’ve never found him.”

“No,” said Zelda. She stopped walking. “To this day?”

“Never.” I shook my head. “Ben and more than one hundred thousand others. Lost.”

“My God.” She placed her hand over her mouth. “How can that be?”

“Massive explosions. The nature of modern warfare.”

Zelda trembled against me. I decided that I would not speak of my pregnancy at the time of his disappearance. That would remain my secret, at least for now. So would the five years of heaven on earth I had with that little angel, Katie, who tied me to Ben until pneumonia took her from me.

“And here I am,” said Zelda, “complaining about my husband and egging him on and distracting him like a damned fly when you’d give anything to find yours, either alive and upright or in a grave, so you could finally get some rest.”

I flinched.

“Wait,” she said, “he could still be alive. Did he flee? Is it possible?”

“I’ve always thought so,” I said, suddenly unafraid to speak my deepest hopes to this woman who would not judge me, the only person who would not judge me for my foolish hope. “I never felt the air change the way it would have if he no longer occupied this earth. I interviewed every man left alive and found in his platoon. He was loved by all as the bravest soldier, and yet no one can remember seeing him after he crossed a little peasant bridge. It was as if he vanished into thin air.”

“Have you been to the bridge?”

“Of course,” I said. “My poor brother, Peter, went with me six times. Six times we combed the landscape there. We knocked
on doors. Followed dead leads. Sifted through wards of mumbling, incoherent, shell-shocked soldiers. But we never found him.