Zelda (52 page)

By the end of the summer it was clear to all concerned that Zelda’s condition had taken another downward turn. As early as July the doctors were finding it futile to get her to discuss her illness, and her behavior fluctuated wildly between violence and seclusiveness. She would have nothing to do with the other patients. There was no longer, even on Scott’s part, any pretense about her ability to pull together a collection of her writings. In August he spent an hour and a half with her. “She seemed in every way exactly like the girl I used to know. But, perhaps for that reason, it seemed to both of us very sad and she cried in my arms and we felt that the summer slipping by was typical of the way life is slipping by for both of us.” He wanted to believe that Zelda could be back with him on any basis for at least part of the time, and he was willing to have her living with him taking rest cures or visiting clinics when it was necessary to do so, rather “than have her remain for long years of our lives in hospitals on the faint chance that when she came out she would suddenly become completely social.”

Scott visited Sheppard-Pratt frequently, and Dr. William Elgin, Zelda’s doctor, says it is Scott whom he remembers more clearly; he felt that it was really Scott whom he treated. While Fitzgerald said he came to discuss the cost of Zelda’s treatment, he talked about himself. Eventually, he talked about everything. Zelda, on the other hand, was completely uncooperative and inaccessible. She left the impression of being colorless, a “blob,” with everything about her
slowed down. Her face was expressionless. “Once she condescended to tell me something about a painting. Usually her paintings were blobs—lines and squares. This one was simple—a streak of brown at the bottom, a blue streak in the middle and a little brown object up in the corner. I asked her what it was about. She said, ‘Oh, that’s a table in Spain.’ I must have looked puzzled, for she then said, ‘Seen from the coast of the United States.’ “Dr. Elgin laughs. When asked if Zelda was perhaps putting him on or inviting his own response, he says that in those days he wouldn’t have thought of that.

As usual Zelda spent Christmas with Scott and Scottie, but it was a sad reunion in the small row house in Baltimore, for they shared the knowledge that she must return to the hospital. Nineteen-thirty-five began with no reprieves for Zelda, no brighter future for the Fitzgeralds. Always now there was the pungent aroma of gin about Scott. The entries in his Ledger grew more despairing: “…work and worry…Zelda seems less well.… Debts terrible…Zelda very bad on return. Terrible worry…Zelda in hell.”

Zelda’s letters to Scott were talismans of their past, lucid and touching. If her mind was broken, the spell it cast was not. Her life was now truly that of an invalid, and her mood was locked in elegy, confined to remembering. Her letters became her refuge, shared with Scott alone. “Wouldn’t you like to smell the pine woods of Alabama again? Remember there were 3 pines on one side and 4 on the other the night you gave me my birthday party and you were a young lieutenant and I was a fragrant phantom, wasn’t I? And it was a radiant night, a night of soft conspiracy and the trees agreed that it was all going to be for the best. Remember the faded gray romance.”

She read magazines and books to fill her time, and even people in advertisements looked enviable to her, for they were “so young and soignées in the pictures.” Her letters were filled with wishing.

It seems rather Proustian to be rambling these deep shades again so close to La Paix. It makes me sad.… And I think of your book and it haunts me. So beautiful a book.

I wish we could spend July by the sea, browning ourselves and feeling water-weighted hair flow behind us from a dive. I wish our gravest troubles were the summer gnats. I wish we were hungry for hot-dogs and dopes and it would be nice to smell the starch of summer
linens and the faint odor of talc in blistering bath-houses.… We could lie in long citroneuse beams of the five o’clock sun on the plage at Juan-les-Pins and hear the sound of the drum and piano being scooped out to sea by the waves.

Once when Scott came to visit her and she was desperate about the hopelessness of her condition, she ran from him toward railroad tracks that separated the grounds of Sheppard-Pratt from La Paix. Scott raced after her and caught her by the wrist moments before she would have thrown herself beneath the rushing train. It was not the only instance of attempted suicide.

Summer, another summer has gone—faded and wilted—and why can’t we spend the fall together? After all, we might as well be taking care of each other.

She signed this

For I am yours forever—whether you still want me or not—

and I love you

Finally she admitted to one of her doctors that she thought her condition was hopeless; she intended to take her life. He tried to tell her that as an agent of society he could not allow her to do so. Furious, Zelda asked how he justified taking such an attitude when he knew the pain of her existence. Throughout June, July, and August she persisted in whatever ways were open to her to try to harm herself. She refused to talk about herself to anyone on the staff—her letters to Scott were her only release.

It is summer time and past time—and I am very young when I didn’t care.… I wish I had been what I thought I was; and so debonnaire; and so debonnaire.

I think of boat houses in Atlanta with scaffolding and big dead moons and a drink behind the boats. I thought I was happy, or, at least, there was some pleasurable sense of things being in the world to conquer.… You have been so good to me. My Do-Do. I wish I had not caused so much disaster. But I know you will be happy someday.

Over and over, endlessly repeating those tokens from a time irretrievable, Zelda tried to apologize for the destruction of their life together. She clung to the remnants of that life with what little hope she had to spare. Sometimes it ran out.

My dearest Sweetheart:

There is no way to ask you to forgive me for the misery and pain
which I have caused you. I can only ask you to believe that I have done the best I could and that since we first met I have loved you with whatever I had to love you with. You are always my darling. I want you to be happy again with Scottie—someplace where it is bright and happy and you can have some of the things you have worked so hard for— always all your life faithfully.
You are
my dream; the only pleasant thing in my life.

Do-Do my darling! Please get well and love Scottie and find something to fill up your life—My love,

My love     My love

In February and again in May, 1935, Scott had taken trips to North Carolina for his health and for his peace of mind. He wanted to be alone and he wanted to sleep. He spent part of the spring in Tryon and Hendersonville, and on May 11 back in Baltimore he wrote Perkins, “Zelda is in very bad condition and my own mood always somehow reflects it.” He drank heavily in spurts and then laid off for a few weeks; he had always said that he drank to help him write, to stimulate himself, but he no longer even pretended that those were his reasons. That May an x-ray showed a spot of tuberculosis on one of his lungs and he returned to North Carolina to rest. What he suffered from was as much a collapse of his belief in himself as it was tuberculosis.

Zelda was not coherent during most of this period of Scott’s absence, but once when she surfaced for a few days she wrote him: “What
is
my business is that, under the circumstances, I do not see how you can reasonably expect me to go on unworriedly spending God-knows-how-much-a-day when we haven’t got it to spend. You must realize that to one as ill as I am, one place is not very different from another and that I would appreciate your making whatever adjustments would rend your life less difficult.”

Scott must have understood that his life would be less difficult if he could detach himself somewhat from Zelda. He was no longer faithful to her, but his few affairs thus far had been desultory and even rather dull. Clearly the women did not interest him much or for long, and one suspects that he enjoyed the excitement of the game, the chase, more than the possession of the women themselves. As he once admitted to a friend, “With a woman, I have to be emotionally in it up to the eyebrows, or it’s nothing. With me it isn’t an affair—it must be the real thing.… Silly, isn’t it? Look at all the fun we miss!”

During the summer of 1935 he met Mrs. Laura Guthrie Hearne in Asheville. Mrs. Hearne was making her living telling fortunes at the elegant Grove Park Inn where Scott was staying. She remembers being dressed in a red gypsy costume with spangles across her forehead when they met: “He was incognito and didn’t mix with the other guests. He called himself, if I can remember correctly, Mr. Johnston, and had just taken the cure at Tryon. I didn’t know who he was and simply remember taking the hand of a shaky young man. Oh, there was such weakness in that hand of his. It was blotched and trembling.” She did such a convincing job of telling Fitzgerald’s fortune that he revealed who he was. Writers and artists fascinated her and she told him that she was keeping a diary that she would like to show to him for his opinion. They became friends and when he could not find a secretary he hired Mrs. Hearne.

She remembers his bouts with insomnia vividly. “Scott never wanted to sleep. He would think up any pretext to keep me with him.” He had begun to drink a lot again, first beer and later hard liquor. “Thirty cans of beer a day; Scott smoked all the time, Sanos, I think. He said he drank to heighten his sensibilities.… He never wanted to be alone.

“He talked a lot about Zelda. She was his invalid. And he always asked himself if he had caused her breakdown. He was haunted—he could not sleep and he could not eat. All he would take was mashed potatoes or a little rice with gravy. He’d fall asleep suddenly, right at dinner or while he was talking to you. It was the strangest, most pitiful thing to see.

“He spoke of his tragedy; he made a fetish of their love and called it the mating of the age. She was the golden beauty of the South and he the brilliant success of the North.”

Mrs. Hearne was certain that he used his attachment to Zelda “to protect himself from permanent arrangements with other women.” She says: “Scott Fitzgerald was beautiful; sober he was charming, but he was not faithful to Zelda. There would be this glint in his eye and he would tell me long lists of women he’d taken, but of course I never knew what to believe. He used to say to me, ‘Zelda can’t understand that I’m a great writer.’ “

Staying at the inn at the same time was a pretty young Southern married woman who recognized Fitzgerald and pursued him. Soon they were involved. His emotional stamina was exhausted, and the last thing he wanted was to become embroiled in an ardent and
lengthy affair. He made this quite clear to the girl. Mrs. Hearne, privy to their affair, made copious notes on the romance. “At first he didn’t love her and then when the affair was no longer possible, her husband returned, he decided he did. They had unbelievable scenes together. She adored him and he tried to get rid of her.” Finally, somewhat callously, he apparently used a letter from Zelda to break off the affair. He enclosed it in a letter he had written to the young woman. “The tough part of the letter is to send you this enclosure—which you should read now [a loving, dependent letter from Zelda].… There are emotions just as important as ours running concurrently with them—and there is literally no standard in life other than a sense of duty.… You once said, ‘Zelda is your
love!’
(only you said ‘lu-uv’). And I gave her all the youth and freshness that was in me. And it’s a sort of investment that is as tangible as my talent, my child, my money. That you had the same sort of appeal to me, deep down in the gut, doesn’t change the other.”

Back in Baltimore in September he wrote Mrs. Hearne that he had seen plenty of people hurt when they were thrown over, “but I never saw a girl who
had so much
take it all so hard. She knew from the beginning there would be nothing more, so it could scarcely be classed even as a disappointment—merely one of those semi-tragic facts that must be faced.” To another friend he would admit quite candidly, “… it’s done now and tied up in cellophane and—and maybe someday I’ll get a chapter out of it.”

By the end of October he was able to see Zelda once or twice a week. He wrote Mrs. Hearne that she was better. “What she has been through troubles me—compared to her troubles mine seem like so much froth, except in so far as I have shared her suffering.” Slowly Zelda had given up trying to kill herself and as winter came and passed she retreated deeply into herself. She spoke to no one; she no longer wrote to Scott. In the spring of 1936 she began to say that she wanted to leave the hospital. She believed that she was under the control of God and was working with Him to teach mankind certain things He had ordained to her. The end of the world was coming and she wanted to leave to preach this doctrine. The doctors had, she told them, destroyed her soul.

A member of her family came to visit her. Zelda was found dressed entirely in white, weighing less than a hundred pounds; she looked like a desperate angel. She had dropped to her knees by the side of her bed in prayer. When she noticed her visitor, she
stood and faced her expressionlessly. Very quietly, in a singsong voice, she asked her visitor for two things. Would this person look after Scottie, and could she have a candy bar?

Clearly Zelda was not getting better. And therefore Scott, who had decided to make Asheville his home base and who wanted her near him, asked that she be released. Zelda left Sheppard-Pratt on April 7, 1936. Scott took her to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, the following day. He wrote in his Ledger, “Me caring about no one and nothing.” He had written the Murphys about his decision the week before.

…Zelda now claims to be in direct contact with Christ, William the Conqueror, Mary Stuart, Apollo and all the stock paraphernalia of insane-asylum jokes. Of course it isn’t a bit funny but after the awful strangulation episode of last spring I sometimes take refuge in an unsmiling irony about the present
exterior
phases of her illness. For what she has really suffered, there is never a sober night that I do not pay a stark tribute of an hour to in the darkness. In an odd way, perhaps incredible to you, she was always my child (it was not reciprocal as it often is in marriages), my child in a sense that Scottie isn’t, because I’ve brought Scottie up hard as nails (perhaps that’s fatuous, but I
think
I have).… I was her great reality, often the only liason agent who could make the world tangible to her—