Call Me Zelda (29 page)

“It’s important for you to know how much she loves you,” I continued, “and how much she wishes her mind weren’t ill so she could be a better mother.”

The distinct sound of a vase shattering pulled me to my feet.

“I have to go. Try to sleep, Scottie.”

“I will,” she said.

I closed her door and hurried down the stairs, bracing myself as if entering a war zone. When I reached the bottom of the stairs and stepped into the front room, Zelda stood in front of a pile of her paintings with her arms out as if protecting them from Scott and Cary. Her eyes were wild and her hair unkempt, and she had removed all of her clothing.

“I will not allow the two of you to rape me for profit!” she shouted.

“You wanted this!” yelled Scott.

Cary backed to the doorway and drained his glass. “I thought you’d agreed on this,” he said. “If Zelda doesn’t want to do it, I don’t want to force her.”

“This is an outrage,” said Scott. “I had Cary come all the way down here to schedule the showing that
you
wanted and now you’re changing your mind? That is not how a professional behaves.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “And are you supposed to be the professional, you sniveling, hacking, drunken scribbler?”

“A fine insult coming from you, a dried-out, washed-up, wrung-out lunatic!”

Zelda grabbed a plant on a stand near her and heaved it at Scott, narrowly missing his face. The pot shattered and sprayed dirt and glass all over the wall and rug. Then she crumpled to the floor and began to sob. I hurried across the room, throwing a blanket on her from the couch nearby, and trying to persuade her to go to bed.

She suddenly turned and stared at me with eyes blackened by enlarged pupils.

“You should have let me drown,” cried Zelda. “Then I could have gone to Ben and Katie.”

It seemed as if all sound ceased, and I could hear only the noise of my heart pumping blood through my body. Zelda was
mocking me like someone possessed, pretending to speak in my voice, ridiculing my deepest hurt. I stood and backed away from her, and the sound returned in a rush with her cruel words.

“If I’d died, I could have been with them,” Zelda continued, in her grotesque ridicule of me. “Instead of living this miserable, hollow life with only a madwoman and an out-of-tune piano for company.”

I was vaguely aware of Scott begging Cary not to leave and promising they’d be ready for the show in March. The door closing. Scott coming back in the room, trying to drag Zelda to her feet. Yelling at me to get the sedative. Zelda continuing to howl, suddenly screaming apologies to me.

I stumbled to my bag and grabbed the needle, removed the top, and allowed the sedative to fill the syringe.

I returned to the scene where Scott sobbed over Zelda. I pushed him away and then jabbed the needle into Zelda’s thigh.

I
pounded on the door of the rector’s quarters behind the cathedral, shivering in the cold, keenly aware that it was three o’clock in the morning and I was alone on the streets of Baltimore.

“Dammit,” I said, and banged harder, ignoring the pain in my knuckles from the freezing door and the below-freezing air.

I noticed a rat dart from a nearby bush to the alley and wrinkled my nose in disgust.

As I began to pound again, the door opened and I nearly fell in. Peter stood before me with his hair unkempt and dark hollows under his eyes.

“Jesus,” he said. “If I didn’t answer, the dead cardinals surely would have.”

He pulled me in and wrapped me in a hug. He smelled of sleep, of nicotine, and faintly of incense. I inhaled and allowed
myself to cry for the first time that night. He closed and locked the door, and led me through the ornate foyer to the kitchen in the back of the house.

“Sit,” he said, while he filled a teapot with water and lit the burner. “What happened?”

“Zelda is back at Phipps.”

He placed the pot on the burner and looked at me. “Oh, shit. What happened?”

“I don’t even know where to begin,” I said.

“How about you start with Bermuda? You never did fully explain your trip.”

“It was such a tease,” I said. “Everything seemed to be going well. Then Scott got sick and Zelda started slipping.”

“Then you returned and she lost it.”

“A little more each day,” I said. “It came to a head tonight, when Scott had his New York gallery owner friend over to discuss an exhibit of Zelda’s paintings. She changed her mind and said they couldn’t use her work. It would expose her too much.”

“I can understand that,” said Peter.

“Well, yes, but she’s been pushing for it for so long, it was a rather abrupt about-face.”

“Ah.”

“So she and Scott began to quarrel, and Cary left, and she lost it.”

“What exactly does that mean?” he said.

“Screaming, crying, throwing things. But something else happened tonight that really disturbed me. It was as if she were possessed.”

Peter’s eyebrows knit together. The teakettle started to whistle, making us both jump. He placed two tea bags into two teacups and poured hot water over them; then he joined me again at the table.

“How so?”

“It makes me sick what she said. It was like she was pretending to be me.”

His face grew even more horrified. “What did she say?”

I explained to Peter how I’d told Zelda about Ben and Katie, and that night when I almost drowned in Bermuda. Then I told him what Zelda had said.

“Anna,” he said gravely, “are you okay?”

I wrapped my hands around my teacup and let the warmth seep into my hands until my shivering stopped. “I think so,” I said.

“I wish I could have been there. At least to see what we’re dealing with. At most, to put a cork in her mouth and douse her in holy water.”

“I think her problems require more than holy water,” I said.

He did not reply.

“Deep down,” I said, “I know that Zelda didn’t have any control at that moment.”

“That doesn’t change how awful it must have been for you to hear her say that.”

“No,” I said.

“And did you agree with her?” he asked. “Did you think that about drowning? About seeing Katie and Ben again?”

I thought back to the water, to the moonlight, to the panic. I remembered how badly I wanted to live.

“No,” I said. “Not even for a moment.”

He exhaled and leaned back in his chair. “Will you go back to them?” he asked.

I hovered over the steam lifting off my tea and blew gently on it, weighing his words, though I knew the answer in my heart.

TWENTY-TWO

March 1934

Zelda was my purpose. I could not turn away from her.

But once she was admitted back into Phipps, she was placed on suicide watch, and I was shut out of her life.

Alone and unemployed, I felt as if I’d lost my way. Although ashamed, I begged Meyer to give me back my job. He was apologetic but firm. He took no pleasure in turning me away, or in recommending that I take some time to myself to get on “stable footing,” but he would not yield.

I decided to go and see Scott. I went to the Fitzgeralds’ place on Park Avenue at my regularly scheduled time, but Scott was not there. Isabel greeted me.

“I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said. “But he did leave this copy of
Tender Is the Night
, inscribed for you. He said he couldn’t have finished without you.”

She stepped out of the room and returned with a photograph that she handed to me. “Scott also wanted you to have this,” she said.

It was a picture of Zelda and me sitting on the beach between rain showers in Bermuda. We had our arms around each
other’s waists. The photo moved me and it trembled in my hands.

“Do you think he’ll have any use for me?” I asked. “To help him or look after Scottie, or be here if Zelda gets discharged?”

“I’m sorry, Anna, but to tell you the truth, he’s almost out of money.”

“What?”

“He’s confident that
Tender
will put him on solid financial standing, but I’m worried. He’s not getting nearly as much for his short stories as he used to, and the reviews of the book are mixed. I’m afraid he’s gone out of fashion.”

It was bad enough keeping Zelda safe when he had money. Now, without money, what would he do? Lock her in a public institution?
My God.

“What will he do with Zelda? Or Scottie?”

“He is very committed to giving both of them the best possible care and education, thank goodness.”

I nodded and looked around the room. The study felt empty.

“Where are her paintings?” I asked.

“They’re going to New York for the gallery opening next month.”

“You can’t be serious,” I said.

“Sadly, I am,” she said. “And I think Zelda’s moving, too. Scott is sending her to a private mental care facility called the Craig House. It’s extremely expensive. I don’t know how he’ll afford it.”

I suddenly felt cold and light-headed, and sat down on the nearest chair. I was losing her. Maybe forever. I was embarrassed to find myself in tears. Isabel fidgeted uncomfortably.

“Anna, I’m sorry,” she said. “You have been very good for her. And for all of them.”

Was I? Zelda was on suicide watch. Scott was shipping her away. I had no job. I’d tricked myself into thinking I was living
again when I was simply living through another person. I’d spent more than a decade with a misplaced self, transferred from Ben, to Katie, to Zelda, stretched thin as trapeze wire but with no solid anchors.

What had I allowed myself to become?

I stayed at the house until late that afternoon, when Scott stumbled in from the bar, and persuaded him to let me pack up some of Zelda’s things to send to her. In the passing days, I needled him for details from his therapy sessions with Dr. Meyer, and wrote letters to Zelda that weren’t answered.

Day after day, for no pay, I went to the Fitzgerald home, organized and reorganized as much as I could, and trudged home to my apartment building, where now only dust lay in the front window that used to frame Sorin’s silhouette, and only silence greeted me from overhead, where the ballerinas had long since graduated and no one had filled their space. I renewed my fantasies of traveling, of trying to find Zelda’s diaries, but with no money and no car, that was impossible.

I realized this couldn’t go on. I had to stop going to the Fitzgeralds’ house, and start looking for a real job. I’d saved a decent amount of money while I worked as Zelda’s private nurse, but without any income to replenish it, it was disappearing at an alarming rate.

I’d also reached a new level of disgust with Scott.

I’d been reading
Tender Is the Night
and was horrified to see how he exposed Zelda, like a butterfly pinned on a corkboard. Her madness, her fits, letters she’d sent from the psychiatric clinic in Switzerland copied word for word, conversations with therapists; it was all there, in black and white, for all of their friends and enemies to read and to judge.

In a fit of drunken hysterics one evening, Scott confessed to me that he knew
Tender
had driven Zelda to new depths of despair. He alternated between justifying himself to me and
begging me to call Peter so he could make a confession. The next day I went to the house early and officially resigned, while he was sober. He answered by pushing twenty dollars into my hands and begging me to help him escort Zelda to New York, where he would transfer her to the Craig House, an exclusive and progressive psychiatric facility in Beacon, New York, where there were no locks on rooms, no bars on windows, and a country club atmosphere. She would get plenty of rest and exercise.

I had no idea how he could afford the Craig House, but I hoped it was because his novel’s sales were strong and not because he had borrowed from his agent or editor again. I could tell by the look on Isabel’s face that the latter was probably true.

On March eighth, I escorted Scott to the Phipps Clinic to help with Zelda’s transfer. As I walked through the doors of the clinic, I was filled with overwhelming sadness. I’d worked there for five peaceful years. Zelda’s admittance had shaken me loose from a secure nook in which I’d burrowed myself, and now I could not fit back in.