Call Me Zelda (40 page)

As I passed out of New York and into Connecticut, the buildings transitioned to houses, which stretched farther apart, until nature became the view out my window. I felt united to myself again, specific, no longer anonymous, and somehow complete. I wished I could talk to Peter and tell him of revelations and inspiration and catharsis, but that would have to come later.

So off I went to Westport, Connecticut, my last stop before Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, to the house where they’d lived, and the final place where Zelda remembered the diaries.

I soon noticed blue-and-white hyacinths peeking out of the ground around well-tended houses and on tidy yard borders, and realized that it was March, and had been for several days. Soon it would be spring and Easter. The world reborn.

Before long, I pulled up to the house: 244 Compo Road South.

It was charming and tidy, almost rigidly so, with a trim lawn leading to a freshly painted gray-shingled colonial. The trees possessed manicured symmetry, and an American flag waved in the breeze. Neat clusters of daffodils were spaced about
the yard in an orderly fashion. It was so ordered, in fact, that I could not imagine Scott and Zelda ever living here.

I was suddenly overcome with melancholy. This house could not possibly hold any of Zelda’s spirit in it, and most certainly would not contain her diaries. I gripped the steering wheel and stared at the house, searching for a sign of life or something that would let me know it was okay to disturb the quiet with my knock and my strange queries. With a heart full of trepidation, I forced myself to get out of the car and walk up the front path. This was, after all, the entire point of my trip. I couldn’t stop now.

The door was painted crimson and shone in the morning sun. It did not look as if it had ever been touched by human hands. Did Zelda really run in and out of this front door, half-clad in bathing gear with revelers and critics at her heels, hoping for a bit of her attention? Did Scott really make a fool of himself with drunken friends in front of her parents here?

I abandoned my musings in favor of action and knocked on the front door. In a moment, a tall, slender man with a crew cut stood in front of me. He had an air of distracted efficiency that his polite smile did not quite hide.

“May I help you?” he asked.

“Yes, sir, I’m Anna Brennan. I’m afraid I have a rather strange request….” I let my voice trail off and waited for him to invite me in, but he did not extend an offer, so I continued. “A friend of mine lived here many years ago, and I think—while this will sound very strange—she might have left something of sentimental value here. In the basement.”

For some reason, I did not wish to speak of Zelda with him. It felt like a violation of her privacy. I also didn’t want him to think I was some crazed fan of Scott’s, so I held back.

He looked perplexed. This was clearly not a man used to
strangers appearing on his doorstep. I imagined anyone who wanted to see him made an appointment. I could almost see him processing the information and imagined him trying to find a suitable way to turn me away.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m certain there is nothing in the cellar but a few boxes of my old military artifacts. Everything else has been cleaned out and swept away. There was an old record collection, but we gave that away years ago.”

“Is it possible there are some unexplored corners where something might have been overlooked?”

He gave me a patronizing smile, as if I were a child. “No, I’m quite sure I haven’t overlooked anything. I’m sorry I couldn’t help. I hope you haven’t come a long way.”

I felt my hopes sinking. I had come so far and couldn’t let him turn me away so easily. As he nodded and began to step back to close the door I again spoke.

“Please, sir, I actually have come a very long way, and it would mean so much to me to at least be able to tell her I checked for her. You have no idea how it would buoy her spirits.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, all trace of a smile leaving his face. “I keep a very neat home, and I would know if there was something in the basement that did not belong to me. And if it is in the basement, then it actually does belong to me, because I own this house, so there is still no need for you to poke around. Now, good day.”

He began to close the door but I shot out my hand and stopped it.

“It is nothing of monetary value, I assure you,” I said, losing my polite tone, “but of a very sentimental value. It’s just the diaries of a young woman, but if I could give them back to her it might help her with her rehabilitation.”

His face turned red and I saw how shocked he was that I
would put my hand on his door and prevent him from closing it. I drew it back to my side and tried to appear less aggressive.

“Look,” he said, “I have no idea who you are or what you’re looking for, but you certainly are not welcome to coerce your way into my house and go prying around in places where you will not find anything.”

My frustration crystallized around my heart and head, making me feel stiff and frantic. I couldn’t force myself into his house, but he had to let me look. I could not bribe him as I had with the caretaker of Ellerslie, or flirt with him as I had at Princeton, but my God, I had to get down in that basement. I began having wild thoughts of sneaking back at night and breaking into the house, but I realized how crazy that was and that I just needed to accept that I was not welcome. It wouldn’t matter even if he did let me inside. I would not find her diaries.

Not ever.

My eyes misted over with tears and I looked down at my hands. I had to try once more, and then I’d go. I could feel Zelda’s need for me, with or without her past, and I knew it was time to answer her call. I cleared my voice and tried to steady it before I spoke.

“My friend is Zelda Fitzgerald. She was married to the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, and they lived here for a time, many years ago. She is schizophrenic and alone, and would like to see some of the memories she preserved for herself on the pages of her diaries. The last place she remembers anyone seeing them was in this house. In the basement. In an old box. I know they probably are not there, but it would be a real act of kindness if you would just accompany me into the basement, allow me to walk around and then leave.”

I heard a sound in the hallway leading to the front door, and
saw a woman about my age holding a vase of cut hyacinths. She set the vase on the hall table and walked up behind the man, placing her hands around him and smiling out at me.

“You are a friend of Zelda Fitzgerald?” she said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“How sadly it all turned out for the Fitzgeralds,” she said. “I believe my father rented this house to them in the twenties. Please come inside.”

The man began to protest, but she gently placed her finger on his lips and winked at him. He seemed to soften from her touch and moved aside for me to step into the foyer.

“I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “I’m so sorry to disturb you. I know how strange this must seem.”

“What, a friend helping out a friend? It doesn’t seem strange at all. Follow me.”

We walked in a line, the woman at the front, followed by me, followed by the reluctant doorkeeper. We passed a handsome office and a feminine sitting room before ending up at a slim door on the back underside of the staircase. The woman opened the door and pulled a beaded cord, illuminating the steep wooden stairs with the yellow light of an ancient bulb. The smell of earth and moisture rose from beneath us, and we started down the stairs.

To the credit of the man, the cellar appeared empty except for three crates, which I presumed were his “military artifacts.” The dirt floor and walls were packed solid. An old sewing machine sat in the far corner of the room near the foundation of a chimney, and along the wall to our left was an impressive shelf of wine bottles. I wondered whether the man had been reluctant to let me in because he thought I’d steal from his wine collection. I met his eyes and he looked away.

“You see,” said the woman. “Though my dear husband was
being very rude, there isn’t much in here. We hope to finish the basement someday in the future, but it’s mostly dirt for now.”

“The old records were on the floor where the sewing machine is now,” he said. “But that’s all we found.”

I gazed around the space and tried not to feel overwhelmed by the sinking feeling growing inside me. I walked over to the sewing machine and looked behind it, but there was nothing of note to observe. I gazed up at the ceiling and around the wine rack, but it was just as the man had said. There was nothing else.

I thought back to Zelda’s story about the diaries. A man with whom she’d developed a serious flirtation, a theater critic named George Jean Nathan, had found and read the diaries during one of their drunken parties late one night. He’d told Scott he wanted to publish them, inciting a rage from Scott that caused him to tear the books away from Nathan, and began a rift that eventually destroyed their friendship. From that point on, Scott told Zelda he had hidden the diaries, but perhaps he destroyed them. After all, by that time he’d used most of the material he’d needed from her early life. He might not have had any more use for them.

I shook my head. “Thank you for allowing me to come down here. I am very sorry I disturbed you.”

“It’s no trouble,” said the woman. “I wish we could have found something for you to take to her.”

“May I take some pictures?” I asked, holding up my camera. “I’m making a new scrapbook for Zelda of places from her past. I think she would enjoy my amateur detective work.”

“That would be fine,” she said. “We’ll just be upstairs. Come on up when you finish.”

The couple went up the stairs, leaving me alone in the cellar. I snapped several pictures of the basement, including the wine rack and sewing machine. I turned to snap one more picture of the staircase when I felt a draft coming from behind it. I peered
around the back of the stairs, and though it was dark, the bulb at the landing above gave me enough light to illuminate a hole in the wall where a piece of plywood rested half across it on a ledge under the opening.

My heart began to pound. I thought I should call the couple upstairs, but then I decided not to. I moved slowly toward the opening, praying that I wouldn’t stumble across any rodents. I took a deep breath and pulled down the board, a little surprised by its weight.

I could see only a couple of inches into the hole, and the rest was covered in shadows. I didn’t want to reach my hands around what appeared to be a crawl space, so I lifted my camera and, using the flash, took a picture of the hole.

I pulled the film from the camera, watching the empty space seep forth from the film paper, eager to see what it would reveal. Amazed as I’d been about the instant developing in this newfangled machine, it could not develop fast enough. I shook the paper in the air, hoping it would somehow speed the process and show me what was in the crawl space.

I looked again. Ever so slightly, I saw the shape of the plumbing at the top of the crawl space taking form. That and something on the floor.

It was a box.

I dropped the picture, put the camera roughly on the ground, and lunged forward, thrusting my hands into the black, no longer caring about rodents or dirt. The box was moist and wanted to give in my hands, but I dragged it toward me and hefted it to the center of the cellar, where I could see what was inside it.

When I saw, I sat in the dirt, unable to support myself. I must have gasped, because the woman was at the top of the stairs in a moment.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

I looked up, her form blurred by my tears, and shook my head.

She walked slowly down the steps and stopped at the last one. “Is it…?” she whispered.

“It is.”

THIRTY-TWO

The trip from New York to North Carolina took two days due to an overheated engine and a flat tire. These both occurred in Virginia, and, mercifully, within a mile of a gas station. I was able to get the car towed and worked on overnight while I stayed in a motel that, though quite shoddy, allowed me to take a hot shower and call my family.

Will Junior answered the phone, and we spoke of the kids’ fun in the big snow in Baltimore. It wasn’t long before Ben wrested the phone from him and said that he couldn’t wait for springtime and baseball. When it was Sara’s turn, she told me she was being a wonderful help to Daddy and that he’d bought her flowers for cleaning up the downstairs. I sent them all hugs and love and promises that I’d see them soon.

Will finally got on the phone and I told him that I’d found the diaries, though they were as badly decomposed as old corpses.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

“I know. I feel foolish for thinking it could have been any other way. The pages are so moldy that they crumbled in my fingers.”

“Were you able to decipher any of it?”

“At first I thought I would try to, but as soon as I read the first date on the page in Zelda’s sprawling, girlish penmanship, I closed the book. It felt like a violation of her.”

Will was quiet for a moment; then he spoke. “Anna, you are the bravest person I know.”