Flappers: Six Women of a Dangerous Generation (24 page)

In the case of Westport, they simply hadn’t moved far enough from their problems. Just fifty miles away from New York, it was too easy for them to travel by train or car back into the city, and too easy for the city to come to them. Many Friday nights a group of friends would arrive bearing bottles of gin, and the ensuing party would drag on until early the following week. Day after day, Scott and Zelda awoke to sleeping bodies scattered around the house and garden, to a mess of bottles and overflowing ashtrays.

Scott had not reduced his drinking as he had hoped: in one night alone he spent $43 (now about $500) on alcohol. Nor had Zelda settled. A Japanese servant called Tana had been hired to run the house, and once the novelty of swimming and sea air had worn off, Zelda had little to occupy her. She distracted herself with a very attentive George Jean Nathan, and even though she was flirting mostly out of a desire to outscore Nathan’s ‘other blondes’ (he’d had affairs with Anita Loos and the actress Ruth Findlay), Scott reacted badly. When Zelda smooched with Nathan at a party, or lunched alone with him in New York, he suspected betrayal, and far from finding peace together in Westport, their quarrels grew stormier, swollen by alcohol and unexamined feelings of anxiety and resentment.

One night they rowed so violently that Zelda swore she could not spend another minute with Scott. She ran down to the railway line and began weaving down the tracks towards New York. She was half hoping, in her bleary exhilaration, that a train would come roaring out of the darkness, but she knew, of course, that Scott would come running after her. The drama of their quarrels was becoming addictive; the drama of their reconciliations even more so. After the incident, Zelda wrote with almost delirious ardour to Scott: ‘Nobody’s got any right to live but us … I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper – if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me – I still would want you,
I know.
’
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For Scott, the rows and reconciliations were also necessary to his fiction. His new novel
The Beautiful and Damned
was a portrait of the failing marriage of Gloria Gilbert and Antony Patch. These characters were recognizable as him and Zelda: a couple determined to seize the happiness of the moment, but fatally unable to draw the line between extravagance and dissipation, between romanticism and narcissim. Gloria and Antony’s failures might add up to something far uglier than the Fitzgeralds’, their egotism might be more selfish and unlovable, but their characters were still drawn directly from experience. Lines from Scott and Zelda’s arguments went into the novel, and so too did near-verbatim chunks of Zelda’s letters and diaries. The Fitzgeralds were not Gloria and Antony yet, but the fictional couple were a warning of what their future might be.

By the autumn they were back in Manhattan, renting a small apartment on West 59th Street. Here, for the first time in her life, Zelda was responsible for maintaining some kind of domestic order, and she realized she had neither aptitude nor interest in it. It was frankly astonishing to her how quickly the chaos accumulated – dirty clothes, empty bottles, papers and books in teetering piles, dishes left over from meals they had ordered in from a nearby delicatessen.

She’d been wondering vaguely about embarking on a creative pursuit, building on her schoolgirl talent for painting or writing. She might follow the example of her sister Rosalind, who had written a society column for the
Montgomery Journal;
closer to hand was the poet Edna St Vincent Millay with whom Edmund Wilson and John Peale Bishop had recently become besotted.
*
Millay was a rival for Zelda, both lovely and accomplished, but still another woman’s talents were not sufficient to drive her to any serious exercise of her own. The mess in the apartment was too oppressive for her to sit down at a table and work; and with the snap of winter in the air, it was too much fun to be outside in the city, getting her hair done in a 5th Avenue salon, or shopping for new clothes. Zelda was confident now about what suited her new Manhattan self, and she took pleasure in scouting the streets and store windows for the perfect garment. The fur coat with which she fell in love that autumn cost a shameful $750, but she nagged at Scott until he let her buy it.

In the city, everything conspired towards the spending of money they didn’t have. There were trips to the theatre followed by nights in the Jungle Club, a ‘juice bar’ that boasted a pre-Prohibition elegance, with a dance floor and a headwaiter in white tie and tails. There were parties too prolonged and too numerous to count. Scott’s first collection of short stories,
Flappers and Philosophers,
had just been published, and both he and Zelda were caught up in another frenzy of publicity. To their friends they seemed to be everywhere in Manhattan, actively chasing headlines with Zelda’s sexy dancing and Scott’s clowning, with their immoderate kissing and public rows. Their friend, the writer Alec McKaig, observed that behaviour which had seemed admirably spontaneous six months ago now seemed a contrivance to ‘hand down the Fitzgerald legend’.
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Interviewed for the magazine
Shadowland
in January 1921, Scott had emphasized Zelda’s influence on the heroines of his stories. ‘Flirting, kissing … saying damn without a blush, playing along the danger line’,
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she’d been the original model for a type he’d dubbed the ‘mental baby vamp’. However, it was only one month later that Zelda was precipitated into a new and much more adult role.

There had been an understanding between them that they would have children someday. Given his Catholic background and her hazy understanding of fertility cycles, they may have been doing little to avoid it,
*
yet when Zelda discovered that she was pregnant in February 1921, she still felt unprepared. She had few close women friends with whom to discuss subjects like babies and motherhood; and when she realized her new condition the one thing she knew was that she didn’t want to be like any of the ‘little women’ she’d known in Montgomery. She would not give up on her freedom, she would be pregnant in her own way.

Zelda was all defiance when she went home to tell her family the news. The town was holding its annual masked ball, and she intended to dominate the dance floor as she always had. She dressed up in a Hawaiian grass skirt, and as she swayed her hips to the band, she languorously lifted up her skirt to expose her bare legs and silk knickers. Even with the mask she wore, it was clear to the startled Montgomery onlookers that this was the same wicked Zelda they had always known.

She was still that Zelda when she returned to Montgomery later that summer, now evidently six months pregnant. Women in her condition were expected to conceal their bodies as far as possible from public view, but it was hot, and she wanted to cool down in the local pool. With every contour of her swollen belly showing in her bathing suit, Zelda walked defiantly into the water – and felt as much triumph as annoyance when the pool guard ordered her to get out and put on some clothes.

If Zelda was determined to be pregnant on her own terms, she and Scott had initially been determined that their baby would also be born in the most beautiful of places. New York was too hard boiled a city, and back in May they’d gone to Europe to search out a more ‘historic … romantic place’.
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It was their first trip abroad, and they travelled in style, taking a first class cabin on the Cunard liner
Aquitaine.
But once again the fantasy of travel failed to survive the reality. Their first stop was London, where Zelda enjoyed the drama of an evening spent ‘slumming’ in the East End docks, for which she dressed up in men’s trousers and a tweed cap, hoping to catch sight of some Limehouse criminal types. Yet pregnancy was making her feel queasy, restricting her appetite for sightseeing, and Scott proved a reluctant traveller.

He had taken slightly against London, piqued by its lukewarm attitude towards his first novel. Even when they travelled on to Paris, Venice and Rome, Scott found the cities ‘of merely antiquarian interest’, ‘a bore and a disappointment … we know no one here’.
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Although a few years later he would loftily dismiss the crass, uncurious American tourists who began flooding into Europe, on this trip he badly missed the familiar comforts of home. When they returned to America, he suggested to Zelda that they ‘play safe’ and have the baby in St Paul, his own native city.
*

Remarkably, when they travelled to St Paul in September, Zelda was meeting Scott’s parents for the first time. She had long resisted the introduction, out of fear they would disapprove of her, and Scott had never pushed for it. He was slightly embarrassed by his family: Edward Fitzgerald was a man of old-fashioned manners who had muddled away his capital in foolish business ventures; his wife Mollie was as guilelessly loud in her opinions as she was in her taste in clothes. Scott guessed that Zelda would find his parents difficult, as indeed she did. While Edward and Mollie were warmly welcoming, she didn’t care for the fact that Scott’s family were such odd failures. She also took an immediate dislike to their home. St Paul architecture looked raw and ugly to her, and its attitudes remained pettily provincial – when she walked down the street smoking a cigarette, people stared and catcalled.

Not only did she miss the freedoms of New York, she was also oppressed by her pregnancy. She had always taken for granted the sleek efficiency of her body, the way it felt knit together with ‘delightful precision, like the seeds of a pomegranate’.
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Now she felt hot, hormonal and heavy. When she went drinking with Scott at the yacht club just outside the city, nobody seemed particularly ready to flirt or dance with her; she felt she had become an ‘Alabama nobody’, and the jokes Scott was making about her size, and the hours he was working on the final draft of his novel, made her worry that he no longer found her attractive.
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She would have felt lost in St Paul except for the one new friend that she made. Xandra Kalman, Sandy, was easygoing and sporty, a keen golfer like Zelda, and she offered the reassuring image of a mother who seemed able to enjoy herself unrestricted by her children.
*
As Zelda’s pregnancy came close to term, Sandy offered advice about baby equipment, labour wards and breastfeeding, intimating that it would all be a breeze.

In fact, when Zelda went into labour on 26 October it was long and hard and Scott swore in anguish that he would kill himself if she died. After many hours she was delivered of a baby daughter, yet, exhausted and outraged as she was by the assault on her body, and hiccupping from the anaesthetic, Zelda was still able to put on something of a performance, murmuring dazedly: ‘I hope it’s beautiful and a fool, a beautiful little fool.’
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The line was so perfect it could have been scripted, and it’s not surprising that Scott filed it away for later use. (It would eventually be uttered by Daisy Buchanan in
The Great Gatsby.
) However, for Zelda, bleeding and woozy from the long delivery, it might also have been a register of her disappointment. Both she and Scott had been hoping for a boy, so much so that the name they finally gave their daughter, Frances Scott Fitzgerald, appeared to have been selected with a son in mind.
^†

If Zelda was disappointed over her baby’s sex, however, she was determined to love her, and back in their rented home she spent long hours nursing and cuddling Scottie, pasting mother and baby photographs into her scrapbook. Yet, still, depression gathered. She felt imprisoned by Scottie and the bleak St Paul winter, and when a nanny was hired to relieve the drudgery of childcare, her mood did not improve. The strictness of Miss Shirley’s methods took all the fun out of having a baby: ‘Nanny knows best’ became the unbreakable rule of the nursery, and she tutted at every hesitation or clumsiness when Zelda was handling Scottie.

The little confidence Zelda had possessed as a mother leached away. She was disoriented too by her body’s failure to return to its former slenderness and snap. Fatigue and the cold weather made it hard for her to be outside, yet even with dieting she seemed bewilderingly unable to shift the weight she’d gained during pregnancy. When she overheard a man at a party refer to her as Xandra’s fat friend, she felt a sickening jolt of shame. It was another few weeks before she realized she was, in fact, pregnant again.

Zelda couldn’t imagine having another baby so soon. It was too gross an invasion of her body, and one that would almost certainly prolong her incarceration in St Paul. But, as determined as she was to terminate this unwanted pregnancy, it was not an easy decision. Abortion was strictly illegal in America, and the methods women were forced to use were ugly and dangerous. Of the one hundred to one hundred and fifty thousand abortions that were estimated to take place in America each year, one in six was fatal and many more left women damaged or infertile.
*

One of the superficially less brutal options was an ‘abortion pill’, which could be obtained by mail order, or under the counter of a barber’s shop or drugstore. These were marketed as aids to menstrual health and given blandly euphemistic names, ‘Hardy’s Woman’s Friend’ or ‘Madame Drunette’s Lunar Pills’. Compared to the most physically invasive methods, such as the insertion of metal hooks into the uterus, or an injection of soapy water, they seemed simpler and safer. Yet their ingredients were herbal abortificants – tansy, pennyroyal or savin – that could be dangerously toxic in the wrong combination or dose.

Fatalities among the poor were inevitably higher. Josephine Baker’s younger sister died from a self-induced abortion in 1927, as she sat over a steaming tub of carbolic acid. Yet the statistics were bad for everyone. Iris Tree had six abortions by her mid-twenties, the last of which came close to killing her. Zelda herself had already had one pregnancy scare before she was married, and Scott, terrified for both their reputations, had sent down some pills from New York. Back then, however, Zelda had refused to take them. She had said they would make her ‘feel like a whore’ and obstinately, naively clung to the belief that ‘God or something has always made things right, and maybe this will be’.
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