Villa America (40 page)
Authors: Liza Klaussmann
“They think he’ll get better?”
“What do they know?” Gerald asked, slamming his glass on the table and standing suddenly. “What could they know about life and the terms on which someone is prepared to meet it?”
Owen said nothing, just watched Gerald pacing the room. He stopped in front of the French doors and stared out at the terrace, now covered with dead leaves from the linden tree. Minutes passed.
“We’re selling the house,” Gerald said finally. “Patrick will never be able to live at sea level again.”
Owen rose, went over to him, and stood behind him, not touching him.
“I’ve written the advertisement for the agent,” Gerald said. “I think it’s pretty good. Of course, it can never say what really went on here…never describe…”
Owen put his hand on Gerald’s shoulder. “G.…”
“No,” Gerald said, turning, something desperate in his eyes. “I can’t. Not anymore. It’s all gone. I have nothing left for anyone else.”
Owen looked at him.
“It was all…” Gerald waved his hand around in a gesture that encompassed the room, the terrace, the tree. “It was all invented. It was the best part, but it wasn’t real.”
Gerald began to shake, and Owen held him, held his long, lean body until it was still again.
“I saw your paintings,” he said quietly. “I saw
Portrait.
I saw
Wasp and Pear
.”
Gerald looked at him, not understanding. “Those,” he said. “Oh. I can’t even remember those.”
“They’re good,” Owen said.
“No, they’re nothing. They mean nothing. I won’t ever do that again.”
Owen wasn’t certain if he meant painting or something else.
Gerald looked back out across the garden, towards the sea.
“Patrick sits on a balcony all day, looking at the mountains. That’s all he’s allowed to look at,” Gerald said. He drew a deep, wavering breath. “So that’s all I look at too.”
Owen recognized this, what Gerald was doing. He’d seen it before, in the war. In the men who refused to jump. Complete self-immolation.
“Do you know what he says to me about the view, in his serious, small-boy voice?” Gerald asked, his eyes wild, darting. “He says: ‘Melancholy skenery, Dow-Dow.’ That’s what he says.” Gerald gripped Owen’s arm hard. “Jesus Christ—my son.” And then he sank to the floor, sobbing.
Owen sat while Gerald slept on the sofa, and the afternoon hours slipped by. He put his hand in Gerald’s and held it, the way Gerald had done for Owen once. He listened for sounds from Honoria, in case she might need something. He didn’t know what a little girl might need; he just knew he had to be watchful. But Villa America was silent.
Then, when the sun began to dip down low in the sky, Gerald woke, sat up slowly, unfurled himself, disengaged his hand.
“There’s something I have to do,” Gerald said. “I have to go to Juan-les-Pins to see Scott and Zelda. I have to keep a promise I made to their daughter. To Scottie.”
“I can stay and look after Honoria, if you’d like.”
“Vladimir is supposed to be here,” Gerald said. “I told him to take my paintings away. Perhaps you could stay until he comes?”
“Yes,” Owen said. “I can do that.”
Gerald rose and disappeared upstairs. In the living room, Owen could hear water running through the pipes, the sounds of doors opening and closing, and hushed whispers. After a while, he heard footsteps descending the stairs and Gerald reappeared, dressed in fully pressed, beautiful evening clothes, a top hat in one hand and a silver cane in the other.
He walked over to where Owen was sitting and looked at him. Then he bent down and kissed Owen on the lips. A long, almost chaste kiss. Just the feeling of Gerald’s flesh pressed against his own. Then Owen tasted salt in his mouth, tears, and Gerald said softly, almost too quietly for him to hear: “I’m sorry, my love.”
Then he was gone.
Gerald held Scottie close to him as he drove, kept her tucked under one arm. He could smell her little-girl smell, warm skin, soap, starch from her dress. He thought of Honoria. It wasn’t the same smell; Honoria smelled like Sara somehow, blood and love bound together in the skin. But the warmth, the stillness of the girls was the same.
“Would you like to hear about the lighthouse again?” he asked.
Scottie looked up and nodded.
“Well, as you know, you can see its light shining into your room at night, can’t you?”
“Yes,” Scottie said.
“And you know about the fairies.”
More nodding.
“Would you like to hear about them again?”
“Yes, please, Dow-Dow.”
Gerald felt a piercing of his heart. “Well,” he said cheerfully, “the lighthouse is run by a band of very special fairies. Sailors’ fairies, actually. They live there and their job is to turn the light on at night and help guide the ships safely into the port.”
“Are they good fairies?” Scottie asked, a little suspicious.
“Of course they’re good fairies,” Gerald said.
The hills were shrouded in darkness as they drove along the coast towards Cap d’Antibes.
“Some people say that they are girl fairies who have fallen in love with sailors and every night they turn the light on, hoping their beloveds will return to them.”
“Like princesses?”
“Not like princesses, exactly,” Gerald said, smiling down at the pink, frothy princess’s dress Zelda had sewn for Scottie to wear on this occasion. “Because fairies are magical.”
“Oh,” Scottie said, as if this explained everything. “Do they sing?”
“Do they sing? Well, they
do
sing. But their voices are so high and sweet that humans can’t hear them.”
Gerald made the turn on the boulevard de la Garoupe and began the ascent up the Chemin du Calvaire.
“We’re getting close,” he said, running his hand over her hair, thick like Zelda’s, but silkier, smoother. A little cap. He thought of Patrick’s hair, fine like his own, these days always damp and lank, sticking to his feverish skull.
Sometimes, when Patrick was sleeping, he would slide his palm under his head and feel its shape and its weight. His small son’s agonizing weight, all the bones, like a bird’s, and organs and flesh, none of it heavy enough yet.
He pulled the car up next to the stone lighthouse, cut the engine, and looked at Scottie. The white beacon circled, lighting up their faces in flashes as it swept by. The area was cloistered by
pins maritimes,
which spread themselves around an old chapel off to the side. Notre Dame des Amoureux.
“Are you ready to go find the fairies?” Gerald asked, leaning over her and releasing the door handle.
Her eyes, wide as saucers, were fixed on the lighthouse. She swallowed and nodded.
Gerald got out and put on his hat, adjusting it tightly around his crown. He gripped his cane and pulled his shoulders up, straightening his spine for this one last act of magic that he would perform here.
He walked around and lifted the little girl lightly out of the car, set her on her feet. He then took her hand and they began walking.
They approached the entrance, and Scottie stopped. Her sweaty hand gripped his own so tightly.
“Is everything all right?”
She looked up at him, that childhood expression of panic that signaled either fear or the need to pee painted on her face.
“You know what I think,” Gerald said. “I think the fairies might be busy.” He picked her up, and her arms went around his neck. “I think we should sit on that wall over there, and that way we can watch from close by.”
He carried Scottie over to the wall and they sat, hand in hand, and watched the beacon sweep like clockwork across them, across the car, the chapel, the pines, the hills of Cap d’Antibes, the Baie des Anges, all the way into the empty bedroom of a small child.
Dorothy Parker
Hotel Palace
Montana-Vermala
Switzerland
January 1930
Mr. Robert Benchley
The New Yorker
25 West 45th Street
New York, NY
Well, Fred, still here on this god-awful glacier trying to keep it together while the Murphys go to hell.
They are solemnly turning these rooms in the sanatorium into Heidi’s grandfather’s cabin, all reindeer skins and cuckoo clocks and other horrible decorations that are meant to make you want to run out and yodel atop the highest peak. All this forced merriment, all this goddamn bravery, well, it just about breaks your heart, Fred.
Last night, as we all sat at the table, up to our teeth in mufflers because it’s so goddamn cold, Gerald spoke of you, Fred, and of their other friends, everyone they’ve left behind in their real world, and then he said: “That’s all right. No, that’s all right, though, because when I think of them, my heart is full.” Ahh, Mr. Benchley…I don’t know if I can stand it.
And I don’t know how long Gerald can bear it either. He’s pouring every bit of life he has into making that child well. There’s something in his refusal to acknowledge that the boy is ill. But there’s something else too. I’m not sure exactly what’s eating him, but it began before, during this summer in Antibes, and it’s also connected with his giving up painting. He won’t even have it mentioned now.
Poor Gerald (and those lights are out in the Hippodrome, Mr. Benchley, when you think of Gerald Murphy as “poor Gerald”).
There isn’t anyone in the world worth a damn except you, Mr. Benchley, and the Murphys. I didn’t know that until now…
Donald Ogden Stewart
Chalet La Bruyère
Montana-Vermala
Switzerland
September 1930
Mr. Philip Barry
12 Washington Square
New York, NY
United States
Dear Phil,
I hardly know what to write about what I’ve found here in the Murphys’ Switzerland. Bea and I came to visit on the understanding (in the form of a letter from Sara) that Patrick was improving. What we’ve found, instead, is that they are biding their time in a Magic Mountain resort with death hovering just outside, waiting to undo the two people who have been our models of how to live.
Sara and Gerald (along with Dottie Parker) have installed themselves in a chalet—much better than the awful Hotel Palace, which is no hotel at all but a place of dying. They’ve also taken over a house in the village and turned it into a bar (heartbreakingly called “Harry’s Bar,” after the one at the Ritz where we all spent many happy hours getting sloshed).
On any given evening you can find a Munich dance band and people lighting cigarettes with embossed matches that Gerald had printed God knows where, and rattan furniture…And the worst is late at night, sometimes, Sara and Gerald take over the piano and sing, and it’s like a shadow passing over your grave.
She seems to be holding it together for both of them. He’s not well, Phil. It’s like all the air has been sucked out of him. But he soldiers on. And she keeps him from cracking up entirely. Sara is everything we always thought she was, and more now.
When I think of
Holiday,
of that fine play you wrote (and which I nobly starred in), I can’t believe how far things have gone in the other direction. How much of Gerald was in Johnny Case, and how much of that man, with his insouciance, who mixed “just the juice of a few flowers,” has been wiped out, or at least obscured for now.
Last night, Sara and Gerald sang “An die Musik” at the piano, and Bea had to get up and leave. The memory of that—of the once blithe, sparkling Murphys from Antibes singing sweetly into the face of death—will remain one of the most frightening of my life. But, Phil, it will also remain a memory of the Murphys at their most beautiful, at their most courageous…
Archibald MacLeish
Fortune Magazine
Chrysler Building
New York
January 1931
Ada MacLeish
Uphill Farm
Conway, MA
My darling Ada,
It can’t be too soon until I get back to you and our farm and our garden. I am beginning to wonder how I ever let Henry Luce seduce me into this god-awful job of reporting on all the squalid desperation that our government and the stock market and fate and even the weather is now inflicting on this country’s citizens. It can make a man sick to his very bones, the despair. But enough. You’ve heard this diatribe before and no doubt you’ll hear it again. I miss your voice singing in the music room, making me feel as if not all the lovely things have been leeched out of this place we call America. Because there is you.
I did not see Gerald on his trip here after all. He skulked around like Lon Chaney in
The Phantom of the Opera.
Instead, I received a letter. And what a doozy it was. Of course, I
think
I know what he’s saying. But does one ever really know about another person? I wish you were here to read it over my shoulder. But I am including the most relevant parts:
I owe you an apology for avoiding you when I visited New York last. It was a cowardly thing to do, and I’m sorry if I hurt you. But you see, in one moment, in one infected breath, my whole life changed—all the joy, all the things that went into making it a life have been sucked out. And I find myself more a cutout than a living, breathing man.
I do not say this because I pity myself; I have only myself to blame. I have concealed myself, my true nature, from almost everyone who loves me, and now when I need strength and nourishment from those friendships, I cannot receive it, because I haven’t been honest. I am coming to realize that I have not had one real, honest, full relationship in my life.
I have been aware of my defects since the age of fifteen, when I made a deal with life: I would fight these defects, scotch them as best I could, and in return, life would look the other way. Not for one second have I been free from the feelings of those defects. Despite all the beautiful things that filled my world, despite Sara. But I tried my best to find a way. Now, though, life has broken with me, and my shortcomings seem to be all I have left. I am morally bankrupt.
So, not seeing you or Ada on that visit was a way of preserving our friendship, the way
you
see it, of keeping it safe from my own realities. I hope you can understand that. That you can understand what I am trying to tell you.
One more thing. Don’t worry about anything I’ve said. Everything is perfectly all right. Frankly, I am long since bored by my own unhappiness.
So, my love. Put your fine mind to that. I will be back soon…
Scott Fitzgerald
Les Rives de Prangins
Lake Geneva
Switzerland
September 1931
Ernest Hemingway
L-Bar-T Ranch
Wyoming
Dear Ernest,
I am waiting at the clinic to take Zelda away from this place, this clinic that has been our home for a year. She is so much better. Not only am I
told
this but I
feel
it too, and Dr. Forel says that her condition
may
be kept on an even keel if she avoids conflicts. I will do my best to help her with that, but she has always had her own will in these things. Are these conflicts of ours continually to be laid at my doorstep?
From here we will motor to Paris and hope to recover or rediscover some of that which sustained us in our early, happier years together.
We have recently returned from a visit to the Murphys at a house they took for the summer in Bad Aussee, Austria. A great big hunting lodge sort of establishment, with sanded floors and animal heads (though not a patch on your specimens). And we swam in the lake and rode bicycles like madmen. It was, overall, a wonderful time and Zelda handled everything beautifully, except at the end. And of course I got blamed for that.
There was a situation over the bathwater, where it seemed the nurse was bathing Scottie in the dirty water left over from the Murphy children. Zelda looked calm, but it was up to me to kick up a fuss, and it turned out that it was bath salts in the water, not dirt. But the damage was done, and Zelda spent the night locked in a circle of thought about Scottie falling ill. I took her away very early, before anyone was up. I hope we can just forget about it and that it won’t prove something that will prey on her mind later down the road.
How did I find the Murphys? I found them better than you described from your visit at Christmas. But, well, they are different and they are the same. Sara is as beautiful as ever and she has real courage, always taking the hardest road even when all her resources are spent. But I believe her resources
are
spent, and I’m not talking only about money.
We stayed up very late one night talking, and even through her own pain, she managed to speak so eloquently on the subject of Zelda. She said: “Zelda has a violence that I sympathize with. I believe she has been thinking terrible, dangerous secret thoughts. Keeping in pent-up rebellions. But who doesn’t?” This she said with those intense, slanted eyes, hair golden brown. Then: “Hers, I suppose, are just more impenetrable.”
Words like that, Ernest. There are so many things I wished at the moment to tell Sara, in return, about herself: That if all her world possessions were taken from her, if she was stripped of everything she loved, everything she’d created, if it was all burned on the pyre of life, she would go on. Because she is part of our times, of who we are. Perhaps I
will
tell her this one day. I tell you only because I know you feel the same. For now, all I can say is that my time with her has gone further to help with the novel, bolstering it, giving it shape…she is in there, by God, in every line.
As for Gerald, well…he sleeps in a separate bedroom, one of the maid’s rooms, all cloistered up, like a monk. But I will never forget his great tenderness in coming to see Zelda at Prangins this past spring. He was the first person, apart from myself and Scottie, that she asked to see. And I know he was terrified, but he was kind and asked her about her basket-weaving and was generally the gentle soul I know him to be. Even if there is—and always will be—something of the hysteric in him.
I do think that his affliction, which we’ve discussed, goes on. I heard some whisperings from the Riviera about that American pilot, the one who was always so silent—morbidly silent, if you want my opinion. You, of course, saw it first. But you’ve always been so right about people. Still, there’s no indication that the connection survived their move to Switzerland, so that’s one thing to be thankful for, if only for Sara’s sake. Christ, the couples this universe makes up for us.
Oh, one last note. Hoytie Wiborg’s visit coincided with ours. God, what a bitch (and I know you always thought her so). One afternoon, I’d agreed to go with the children and Hoytie in the car into town to pick up some supplies. She
insisted
on driving. And then, because she has absolutely no talent for it, she rammed into some Austrian fellow’s car. Well, instead of just apologizing and driving on, she got out and started yelling
“Jude! Jude!”
at the man.
Whether he was a Jew or not, this really got him sore, and he leaped out of his own car and made a run at her. Sadly, Hoytie was too quick and managed to get back in and drive off before anything else happened. But when this little episode was reported to Sara, there were fireworks, as you can well imagine, knowing Sara as you do. She insisted Hoytie track down the man and apologize. We didn’t stay long enough to find out how that one ended. But I knew you’d get a kick out of it…
Vladimir Orloff
Chalet La Bruyère
Montana-Vermala
Switzerland
December 1931
Owen Chambers
Chambers Field
La Fontonne
Antibes
France
My dear friend,
I was happy to get your letter and to hear your flying business hasn’t been destroyed by what seems to be a great tide sweeping over the world and swallowing everyone’s riches. I hope you will remain safe and not take chances in the rising swells.
I understand that you have not written to Gerald. Sometimes he asks for news of you, but I have not known what to say or if one should say anything at all. I would not like to give advice on this matter, only to tell you that I have seen with my own eyes many letters begun, with your name on them, that have ended crumpled in the basket in his solitary room.
I am not a spy but a mere helpless observer. I remember a time, years ago, when I thought you and I had become like two old men on a porch, watching the world go by, with no stake in this game, only a search for peace after the tumult and destruction of war. But I was naive. I see that now, my friend. You were waiting to live, for once truly and fully, and I…perhaps I was just waiting to be swept along on my next adventure.
It is sad here, to see these lives still together but now so divided. I will go away soon, to Normandy where I will pick up the new boat, the
Weatherbird,
named after that piece of jazz music they love so much and that they still dance to from time to time. I will sail her down the coast, through storms, no doubt, to bring her home to Antibes. You will not believe this creation—there is a refrigerator and bathtub below deck. Such comforts, after the simplicity of the
Honoria.
Life changes, does it not?
Villa America will not sell, it seems, and so Sara and Honoria will go down in the spring to stay.
Gerald is just back from America, his father lying cold in the grave. He died as Gerald was crossing the Atlantic. And while this loss seems to have been absorbed in the black hole of his spirit, he is very angry over the inheritance. It seems the company, which is all there is, was left in the charge of Mr. Murphy’s mistress of many years, a one Lillian Ramsgate. She is now president of the company, and Gerald resigned. I wonder at the prudence of this. Only time will tell.
And Patrick…there is the heart of all this. He gets better, then he gets worse. The bad lung is very bad, and he is once again confined to his bed. But he is a brave boy and finds things to keep himself amused. At present he seems interested only in statistics, statistics of any kind: sports, hunting, any sort of probability. It is his battle with death and that probability, I believe, that has brought him to this.
I will be sailing the
Weatherbird
into Antibes at the end of March or beginning of April. I will wire and let you know before I set off. Will you fly your plane over me as I come in, to greet an old friend…?
