Call Me Zelda (19 page)

“Nurse Anna, look at you! Togged to the bricks. I think I want to marry you!”

“Get in line,” I teased.

Zelda laughed her deep, warm laugh, but when I turned around to face her she looked very serious. She stared at me with an expression of sad confusion on her face.

“Why aren’t you married?” she finally said.

Her question killed all of the happy energy in the room, but it was too direct to ignore, and how I wished I could have ignored it.

“I am married,” I said.

She stared at me for another interminable amount of time before she spoke. “Where is he?”

Lincoln beeped the horn.

“Let’s talk about this later, huh?” I said, painting a false smile on my face.

“I want to talk now,” she said.

“No,” I said, a little sharper than I intended. “No, I would love to, but this night is about you and a gift I’d like to give to you.”

Her face hardened and she pursed her lips. This was not going as I’d planned.

“Now, don’t pout,” I said with a lightness I did not feel. “Here, I have one more surprise for you. An accessory you haven’t used in far too long.”

I turned back to the closet and opened the box on the shelf inside of it, carefully removing its contents and spreading the gorgeous blue feathers of the fan before turning to her.

She gasped and covered her mouth. “My fan,” she stammered. “Where did you find my fan?”

“Scott had it on the table when he was writing late one night when I stayed over. I asked him about it and he told me that it was the first present he bought for you when you were a young debutante and you adored expensive, decorative, unique gifts.”

She took the fan from my hands while tears ran down her cheeks, cutting wet lines in her powder.

“Now, don’t cry,” I said. I picked up one of Scott’s handkerchiefs from the table and walked over to blot her tears. She continued to stare at the fan, seemingly oblivious to my presence. I was glad and hoped she wouldn’t ask me any more questions.

I held her face in my hands and directed her gaze back to mine.

“Let’s go,” I said. “We don’t want to be late.”

I
felt a mixture of emotions raging inside of me. Zelda was very quiet on the cab ride, and nestled trembling into my
side. I didn’t know whether she was scared, excited, or both, so I put my arm around her and squeezed her shoulder for reassurance. She clutched the fan with white knuckles and didn’t speak.

Her eyes grew wide when we arrived at the Maryland Theatre. It was a grand place in Hagerstown, Maryland, with an opulent facade, a thick velvet red curtain, ornate balconies, and seating for more than one thousand. Lincoln opened the car door for us and told me he’d be just around the side of the theater sleeping if I needed him. I would be sure to pay him extra for working late tonight.

When I led Zelda into the lobby, she seemed to shrink into herself even further. It was rather stuffy with the mobs of people, the heavy scents of women’s perfume and cigarette smoke, and laughter and noise filling every space we turned. I was finally able to navigate through the loitering theatergoers to a side staircase, where we showed our tickets to an usher. He led us to the box nearest stage right and I felt like royalty as we stood above the glamorous crowd. The lights flickered almost as soon as we sat down, and within moments we were plunged into darkness.

Zelda’s hand reached for mine and clutched it. It was sweaty and she continued to tremble. The stage lights gradually turned on and highlighted Zelda’s nose and forehead. Her eyes and the hollows of her cheeks remained in the shadows, giving her a cadaverous look, and I felt my spirits sink. Zelda was supposed to be gay and animated, not like a woman living in a nightmare. I began to sweat and pondered leaving with her. When the orchestra started and the warm, round voices began, Zelda’s face suddenly turned to a smile, and I felt relief wash over me.

“
La Gioconda
,” she whispered. “Oh, Anna.”

Yes,
La Gioconda
, the tragic opera of a woman who
sacrificed herself for her lover’s happiness, the story of blindness and sight, misunderstandings, and the cruelty of fate. The opera included the “Dance of the Hours,” the song playing when Zelda danced at the Montgomery country club the first night she’d met Scott. Zelda clutched her fan with one hand and my hand painfully with her other. I felt trapped by her, but didn’t dare move. I was afraid to break the spell.

When the “Dance of the Hours” began, Zelda laughed out loud. Several of the people in the rows below us looked up and then back at the stage. My heart raced.

“Anna,” she said with her voice at full volume. “Anna, it’s my dance!”

I managed a stiff smile and put my finger to my lips to encourage her to speak in a whisper. She ignored me and turned back to the stage.

She began to move her feet in time to the music, and alternated between short bursts of laugher and terrible strangled sounds like sobs. To my horror, she released her grip on me, stood in the box, and began to dance. The usher was there within moments and pointed to the chair. Zelda put her thumb on her nose and wiggled her fingers at the man, but did sit down.

I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and began planning how I was going to get her out of the theater without making a scene. Luckily, the song ended and it was as if a curtain closed on her features. Her face took on the look of a statue, and she barely moved for the rest of the act.

As the final act began, I noticed tracks of tears on her face. She placed the fan on her lap and began to twist her hands and rock back and forth. I knew I needed to get her out of the theater.

“Zelda, let’s go before the crowds,” I whispered as I placed my hands around her shoulders.

“Not yet,” she said, again at full volume. “Don’t you see?”

Her face contorted and she began to shake her head and weep.

“Gioconda will sacrifice herself for him,” she said. “For them. She will allow him to be free and will kill herself; watch.”

The people just below us shushed her, but she continued to cry. The beautiful, melancholy sounds of the woman about to take her life filled the theater, interlaced with Zelda’s sobs. I felt as if my heart were being torn open, and I could feel the tears on my own cheeks. I tried now to pull her from the box, and mercifully, the usher was back and helped me to carry her out and down the stairs. Zelda suddenly started screaming about her fan and I realized we’d dropped it. I left the poor man with my mad patient and took the stairs two at a time back to the box, where the fan lay in a tangle on the floor. I could barely see through my tears as I raced back down the stairs and out to the street. The usher held Zelda like an orderly at Phipps while she wailed and scratched at his face.

“There!” I shouted, pointing at the taxi waiting at the other end of the long alley.

I stumbled to the door and threw it open, startling Lincoln awake as I pushed Zelda into the backseat. I closed the two of us in and screamed for him to drive, and he complied.

Zelda sobbed during our entire trip back to La Paix, up the walk, through the front door, up the stairs, and into her room. Lincoln helped me every step of the way. I was so grateful that Scottie was sleeping at her girlfriend Peaches’s house.

Lincoln stood next to the bed with his hat in his hands while I injected Zelda with a sedative and her cries turned to whimpers.

“I don’t think I should leave you like this, Anna,” he said.

“I’ll be all right now. It’s best if you go. I’m sorry.”

He looked from Zelda to me with worry, then started for the door.

I realized I hadn’t paid him, so I chased him down the stairs and gave him twenty dollars from my wallet. He looked at the bill and shoved it into his pocket. It was the first time he’d ever taken my money without a fight.

I closed the front door, locked it behind him, and slid down to the floor, placing my head in my hands.

My God, what had I done?

FIFTEEN

October 1932

Peter and I walked down the stairs just off the breezeway behind the church and into the crypts and caverns below the Baltimore Cathedral. He dragged a match against the brick to light his cigarette, and deposited it in a pile of rubble in a hole in the wall. I found it dark and creepy under the church, but Peter enjoyed watching the progress on the architectural reinforcements going on underground. The ceiling was so low, we practically needed to stoop.

“You were right,” I said.

“Are you referring to your tenure with the Fitzgeralds?” he asked.

I laughed. “My tenure. Yes, if that’s what you’d like to call it.”

“I hate to say it, but you do look awful.”

“Thanks, Pete.”

“You know I say that out of concern,” he said. “When I first caught sight of you in the pews I didn’t recognize you. Dark circles under your eyes. An overall worn look about you.”

“Enough,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

We paused in the mausoleum full of dead bishops and
cardinals, their caskets ordered in rows in the walls like safe-deposit boxes at the bank.

“You’ll be buried here someday,” I said.

“Ha,” said Peter. “Their coffins would spring out if the likes of me were slid in there.”

“I hate to admit it, but you look swell.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I feel swell.”

“I’m very glad to hear it.”

We walked deeper underground and Peter flipped on a crude light without a fixture, illuminating parts of some passages while leaving others in eerie shadows. It looked like an abandoned subway tunnel, and I half expected a train to come roaring toward us from the dark brick arches. I breathed in the musty underground air, and turned back to Peter. “Why did you bring me down here?” I asked.

“So I could smoke.”

“Oh, I thought you were going to give me a lesson on the necessity of building a foundation as it relates to faith and mental health.”

“That, too, but since you seem to understand the moral, there’s no need to waste air.”

“Then how about a lecture about putting people like the Fitzgeralds on pedestals and arranging one’s entire life around their well-being when they are just as regular and broken, if not more so, than you and me.”

“Couldn’t have said it better myself,” he said as he exhaled. “But truly, the more I think about it, the more I don’t think that about you. You are a giver. It doesn’t matter who is in your care.”

I stopped and looked away from him at the dark arches of brick that held up the massive cathedral: simple pieces of rock piled one on top of the other to support an entire building. I caught the white stare of two stone angel statues facing us from the tunnel to our left, and shivered.

“So you don’t want to tell me I should leave my work with the Fitzgeralds at once, and find a nice man who will marry and keep me so I don’t have to work?”

“No, Anna. Not anymore.”

I cocked my head to the side and gave him a look of suspicion.

“You need to stay on with them,” he said.

“Do you think I should recommend that they take her back to Phipps, at least on a part-time basis?”

“Do you think it would benefit her?”

“It depends on the hour you ask me. When I see her chewing her nails, expending her manic energy on meaningless tasks, and arguing with her husband, then yes, I do. But when I see Zelda share a hug with her daughter, or walk in the garden, or sit next to Scott with her feet up talking about the old days while he writes, I can’t imagine her anywhere else.”

“Then she probably should not return to Phipps. And if she did, you’d be out of a job.”

“I’m aware of this.”

“Just keep at it, Anna. This is right.”

“Where is this coming from?” I asked. “You just told me I look horrid.”

“You do.”

“Then why do you think I should stay on with them?”

“Because it recently occurred to me in prayer that you are exactly where you are supposed to be.”

“Do you care to elaborate?” I asked.

He started walking again, and I fell into step with him.

“Not really,” he said. “You’ll just ignore me anyway.”

“Probably, but I’m burning with curiosity. At least help me satisfy that.”