Call Me Zelda (35 page)

February 1948

I had the dream again—the dream in which Zelda and I are swimming in Bermuda, the night she saved me. Only, in the dream, after she places me on the beach, Zelda goes back out into the water and swims until the sea claims her.

I awoke in a panic, covered in sweat, and felt a tugging at my arm. It was my twelve-year-old daughter, Sara.

“What is it, honey?” I asked.

“I heard something,” she said. My daughter’s large gray eyes were so like mine, it startled me. Like Zelda’s, when I first met her. I thought for a moment about that day, all those years ago, and how drawn to her eyes I was because they mirrored my own. I glanced at my bedside table at the picture of Zelda and me.

“Mommy,” said Sara.

I shook my head, clearing away thoughts of Zelda, which had been coming with more and more frequency. I was starting to worry that it was a sign. Peter would undoubtedly think so.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “What did you hear?”

“Listen,” she whispered.

Will adjusted himself in his sleep, but didn’t wake. I slipped
off the covers and took Sara’s hand. We walked into the hallway and I glanced around, half expecting to hear Romanian violin music or the pounding of ballerinas. Why did I still think of them all as ghosts in this house? Especially since Will and I had owned it for years, and I’d remained in contact with Sorin. I’d even taken Will to a concert several years after we got married, when Sorin came as a guest violinist to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

I did hear something. It sounded like voices in the front room. I stopped and listened.

“Oh, it’s just the radio,” I said. “We must have forgotten to turn it off when we went bed.”

She smiled and I led her back to what was now her room—the former living room of my apartment that Will had built into a private bedroom when the babies started coming. She crawled into bed and I tucked the covers up around her ears.

“You’re not too old for tuck-ins yet?” I asked.

“No, Mommy,” she said with a sleepy smile.

I pulled the covers up around her ears. “There. Snug as a bug.”

Sara closed her eyes and I sat at her bedside, smoothing her hair until she drifted off to sleep. My heart was full of love for her and for her sleeping thirteen-year-old twin brothers, Ben and Will Junior, in the rooms above us that used to hold the ballerinas.

The grandfather clock in the foyer bonged the two o’clock hour as I walked down to the front room. I switched off the radio, but was thoroughly awake, and did not relish the prospect of going back to bed and staring at the ceiling through the dark, dwelling on my dream.

I glanced around the room at the mess of my family with half a sigh and half a smile. Sara’s little scrunched-up tubes of paint were scattered about the corner where her easel held a
painting of the beach at the Eastern Shore, where we now took the children every summer. I could make out the faint sketch of a horse at Assateague Island to which she intended to add color tomorrow.

Will Junior’s sheet music lay scattered on the floor around the base of the piano, where we’d moved it to the front room years ago. I bent over and began to straighten the pages, leaving his recital piece on the stand, but shoving the rest in the bench. Just as I was about to lower the lid, I noticed Sorin’s “Anii” peeking out of the bottom of the pile. I slipped out the old, crumbled paper and smiled to myself. The haunting melody stirred my memory, urging my fingers to play. I knew I could not or it would wake everyone, so instead I placed the sheet back on the top of the pile in the bench so I would not forget to play it another day. Maybe I’d play it for one of my patients.

For the past three years, I had worked part-time as a music therapist with shell-shocked soldiers at Walter Reed, the army hospital where I’d met Will all those years ago. Once the kids were in school, my passion for helping wounded veterans had led me back to Walter Reed during the recent World War. When Will wasn’t working at the paper, he also spent a great deal of time with the soldiers. He knew how lonely recovering from the physical and mental wounds of war could be, and he wanted to help in the effort any way he could. I had thanked God every night that his leg injury from the first World War had prevented him from joining the action, but I knew there would always be a part of him that regretted he couldn’t help in the fighting. I felt the same about my nursing.

At Walter Reed, I worked in the music therapy program under the training of Miss Frances Paperte—a pioneer in the field and a former singer with the Chicago Opera. I played the piano for soldiers at all stages of recovery, and was making wonderful progress with many of them. It was a beautiful thing to witness
the healing power of music, the way it could lift a man out of his present and his past and let him exist in a totally separate and peaceful place, a place he could learn to access when the nightmares, memories, and terrors became too much to handle.

I hummed the melody of “Anii” as I collected little Ben’s baseball bat and ball, and placed them in the basket by the front door. When my oldest twin wasn’t in school, no matter what the weather, Ben was outside from dawn until dusk, covered in dirt, with only his quick white smile flashing for us.

They were good children, and I reflected as I often had on my gratitude for this second chance at life I’d been given. Immediately following my thoughts and prayers of thanks, however, came the nagging guilt of being away from Zelda, and the painful remembrance of my time caring for her, when I never really felt as if I’d helped her. In my obsessive looking back I couldn’t help but think it was my support of Zelda’s transfer out of Phipps that did her real harm. At the time I’d thought it would be good for her family and would help her adjust to life. I realized that I had been gravely mistaken. Of course, Scott’s financial trouble and his hatred of Dr. Meyer had played a large part in his pulling her out of Phipps, but as her nurse I should have pushed harder for her return.

With heaviness in my heart, I walked over to the bookshelf, pulled out the box containing letters from Scott and Scottie, and sat on the sofa to read them. Scott had corresponded faithfully with me until his death in 1940 of a heart attack at age forty-four. He had abused his body too long with alcohol, and I prayed that his soul was at rest. Scottie had been good enough to pick up where he left off a few times since his death to fill me in on Zelda’s progress.

As I flipped through the letters, my mood darkened. The pages told of Zelda’s stay at Sheppard Pratt, where she would not allow my visits and where Scott had written that she’d tried to
take her life by running out in front of a passing train. They described her sudden religious fanaticism and belief that she could talk to the dead. The letters took a more positive tone once Zelda had been transferred to Highland Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Their rigorous regimen of outdoor exercise seemed to suit Zelda. Scott had written that her letters had become less erratic, and she was even able to attend Scottie’s graduation from the Ethel Walker School in 1938.

The next year, Zelda’s silence had been particularly painful to me, since that was when I’d written to her about the death of Lincoln, and then my mother. Within one week of each other, I had lost my dear friend and my beloved mother, and it made me so sad that my children would never get to know her well. She had contracted a terrible kidney infection that had led to blood poisoning. We had taken her to the hospital, but once it was clear that the infection was beyond the doctor’s control, she had asked to go home. I had spent her final days at her bedside with my brother and my father, while Will kept the children at home. The end was mercifully quick for her, but left us all numb and stunned. I couldn’t believe almost ten years had passed since then.

I realized I was crying when a tear wet the last letter I held from Scott. It was dated November of 1940, one month before his death. It was from Hollywood, where he had spent his final years, and in it he spoke of his pride in Scottie and his new novel, which he thought would resurrect his career and help his finances.

The last few letters were from Scottie. She told of her marriage and children, and of how Zelda lived with her mother in Montgomery between hospitalizations at Highland in Asheville. It did appear that Zelda experienced more calm than upset in recent years. Her paintings were shown in art museums, Scottie continued to write, and she had even helped at the Red Cross at home during the Second World War. I often wondered whether Scott’s death had freed her in a way so she could live on her own,
according to her own wishes, and preserve the memories of the good time they had had together.

I put the letters back in the box and on the shelf while I thought of Scott’s funeral. I had attended the burial in Rockville, Maryland, to honor him, but mostly because I longed to see Zelda. I’d imagined running to her, embracing her, and our tearful reunion being full of apologies, sadness at Scott’s passing, and news of the years gone by. But my fantasy was never realized. Zelda was not stable enough to attend the funeral.

As I moved to turn off the light and head back up to bed, I noticed a pile of mail on the floor next to the coatrack. One of the children must have brought in the mail earlier and dropped it there. I leaned over to pick it up, and quickly flipped through it, when the third envelope almost made me faint.

Zelda!

I tore open the envelope from Highland Hospital and raced through the words as fast as I could.

My Dear Anna,

Listen to me.

I must begin with apologies. I can never say sorry well enough for my silence through these years.

How can I explain? I was so raw and injured when I entered Craig House that I felt like I’d been skinned. I literally felt like all the flesh had been torn from my body. Even the wind hurt. How could I let anyone in until the scab formed?

Then it fell off over and over again while I was at the hell of Sheppard Pratt, and even the years after, and— Oh, enough of that bloody metaphor.

All is not well.

I’ve lost my face and my grace, and all that’s left is the faded, bloated lapel flower.

It occurred to me today that all trace of my youth is gone and will never return to me. The hall clock ticks so loudly, taunting me about the damned relentlessness of time. The sweet nights on the Riviera, dancing with my ballet instructor, dinners with the Murphys, fights with Ernest Hemingway, the party that lasted for five years and ran from New York, to Paris, to Italy, and back—it’s most definitely over. Hemingway is on his fourth wife, Scott’s old editor (and mine!) Max Perkins has died, and Katy Dos Passos was decapitated in a terrible car accident. It’s all I can see when I close my eyes.

Scott often comes to me in the drainpipes or on things ice-green like his eyes—I see his eyes everywhere like T. J. Eckleburg’s, watching me, judging me, crying for me. I’d do anything not to see his eyes on a snatch of leaves or a dinner napkin, and just see them as they were, looking out from his pale face over lips that would press into me.

Oh, God, I didn’t mourn him this hard just after he died, but now I feel like I’ll burst over it.

Anna, you must find me those damned diaries. Scott told me. He said if I just hold them and burn them I can get fixed up. I keep trying to remake them but I can’t. I need the real thing. When I ask, he won’t tell me where they are, but they must be in Delaware, or New York, or Connecticut. Somewhere.

I know I ask an impossible task of you. If you can’t find them, just bring me yourself. Even if just for a day. I need one pure face from my past with no stain to show me that life isn’t all misery.

Write and tell me when you’ll come.

Please come to me.

Zelda

I didn’t realize how tightly I was clutching the paper until the words ran out, and it was just me, alone in my front room, in the middle of the night. I began pacing. After all these years! Zelda had reached out and grabbed my heart with her fist and I didn’t know how to separate myself from her, or whether I even should.

The creak of the floorboards called my attention to the doorway, where Will stood, rumpled from sleep, with a look of concern on his face. “What is it?” he asked.

I couldn’t speak, so I handed him the letter from Zelda with a shaking hand. His eyes darkened as he read to the end of the page. He sighed when he finished and looked at me.

“I have to,” I said.

I could see he wanted to protest. He glanced around the room at all of the kids’ things. It would be hard on him working, taking care of them alone for a little while, worrying about me. I knew he also resented Zelda, in spite of my excuses for her silence. He knew how much pain she had given me over the years, and Will only wanted to protect me.

But just the same, he looked back at me and nodded.

TWENTY-EIGHT