Call Me Zelda (42 page)

“Oh, here’s Nurse Anna now,” she said, snapping me out of my thoughts. “Your face just turned six shades of gray. Yes, Scott talks to me. No, it is not a voice in my head. And no, you don’t need to worry about me.”

I couldn’t help but smile. “Am I so easy to read?”

“An open book.”

We sat on a nearby bench overlooking the mountains and talked for an hour, as if not a day had passed. Zelda told me that she lived modestly off of the annuity Scott’s executor and friend had set up for her. Her demeanor was peaceful, and her Southern drawl had reasserted itself in her root surroundings. Her language hadn’t lost any of its vivid color, and she still twisted her hands all over each other while she talked. I could have stayed there all day, but I began to sense the presence of the diaries in the nearby bag. They were so close, I could almost feel them quivering to be placed into her hands, reunited with their author, but something else held me back. Was it my fear that our calm meeting would be disturbed? I decided that I had to show her soon, but I thought it might be best done alone, in her room.

“Zelda, I have something for you, but we should go
somewhere private before I share it with you,” I said. “Could we go to your room?”

“If you’d prefer the sterile, barred room at the tower top, certainly, but it’s so much more pleasant out here.”

“I would actually prefer the room.”

She looked at me and saw my earnestness. It struck me how, in spite of the wear in her face and in her body, her eyes were totally unchanged. She could have been nineteen, staring at me from those large, active eyes. She blinked slowly, as if she understood that what I had for her might stir a strong reaction, and nodded.

“Do I need to prepare myself mentally?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I think it will do you a great good.”

She looked at me for a moment more, then turned, picked up her watercolor off the easel, and started back for the house, with me following.

I
watched Zelda’s pink dancing slippers as I trailed her up several flights of stairs, and I had to catch my breath at the top. She looked back at me without a touch of fatigue.

“I’m used to it,” she said. “We hike five miles a day up and down mountain slopes.”

I nodded, and followed her down a corridor that, as she’d promised, took on the sterility of the psychiatric environment. None of the charm from the lobby was on this floor, and I could feel drafts as we walked down the hall. We passed a woman shrieking in a room that appeared to be locked, and an orderly knocked into me on his way to the room.

What was Zelda really doing here? Wasn’t she disturbed by those more troubled than herself, or was she simply putting on a good face for me? No, when Zelda was agitated it was impossible for her to wear any countenance but agitation. That I knew for sure.

When we arrived in her room, she propped her watercolor of the mountain against the wall, motioned me in, and shut the door behind us. Though the room was small and white, the view faced the mountains, and there were items around it that made it distinctly Zelda’s: great vases stuffed full of flowers, canvases propped on all available surfaces, a pale pink tutu resting upright in the corner like a ghostly ballerina. While I took it all in, Zelda sat on the bed, closed her eyes, and breathed in and out three times. Then she opened them.

“Okay, I’m ready.”

My hands trembled as I placed the bag on the floor and reached inside.

I heard her gasp.

She knew what the books were before they were in her hands, and she began to cry. I worried for a moment, but when I looked at her, she did not seem frantic, only very, very moved. Her hands trembled as I placed the books in them. She ran her fingers over the worn brown leather covers.

“Anna, how did you…Where did you…”

“Westport, in a cellar crawl space. I’m sorry, but they are terribly decomposed. I had hoped you’d be able to actually read them.”

She met my eyes.

“You crawled in the dirt for me? Where else did you go and leave your life for me? You went other places, didn’t you?”

“Delaware, Princeton, New York.”

She touched the diaries again, one by one, then stood to embrace me.

“I don’t deserve this,” she said. “I made my life and I wrecked it. I don’t deserve redemption.”

“You do,” I whispered. “I have something else for you.”

I turned and pulled the scrapbook I’d made out of the bag and we walked over to the bed, where we spent the next hour or
more poring through photos, sighing, laughing, and crying. I told her about the haunt at Ellerslie, and how I had imagined Scott appearing to me beside the sign to Princeton, leading me to safety.

“It was him,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

I waved her off.

“You believe what you want,” she continued, “but he tells me when trains will be late, when Scottie will write, and when I’ll have visitors. He told me you’d come this week.”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, and redirected her to the album and the picture of the Princeton boys at the bar.

“They wanted you to know that they love you,” I said. “They are going to read
Save Me the Waltz.
”

She clapped her hands in delight. “I always stirred up the Princeton boys. It’s because they know a good Southern girl when they see her.”

After reading my scrapbook, she carefully began to work her way through her old diaries. When she was able to see the words, she read aloud from newspaper clippings and ran her fingers over faded dance cards, photos of old beaux, and letters from Scott. Some of the pages were in decent shape, but most were rotten. While turning pages in her debutante diary, she stopped when she got to a dried corsage of pressed nasturtiums, and her face grew serious. I know she was thinking of the day that Scott called her a faded lapel flower, and maybe she felt it was true, but she did not speak of it. Instead, she turned the page, and a picture of the country club in Montgomery was before us.

“Do you know what they played for us last night during our painting class?” she asked. “
La Gioconda
and the ‘Dance of the Hours,’ and it was as if all time and space dropped like stage curtains and rose on the scene of me and Scott at that country club all those years ago. And just when the magic of that
moment seeped through me, the setting changed again, and my imaginings jumped to you and me in the Maryland Theatre, the night you took me to the show. Except this time I did not leave in hysterics, but allowed the beauty of the music and of what you were trying to do for me to heal the scars, to seep into the injury in my soul like sweet balm, leaving it fresh, clean, and mended. When that painting session and the music concluded, I tell you that is precisely what I was left with—cleanliness, calm, healing. So thank you, Anna. All these years later, your tender medicine worked and I feel such peace.”

I was too moved to respond, but I knew she understood my thoughts.

“And I don’t think I’ll burn these, after all,” she said.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said.

She closed the books and took my hands in hers. “I’m ready to leave Highland and never come back. This is what I needed. Case closed. You may sign my file.”

I smiled at her and pretended to stamp her forehead, and we embraced again.

A soft knock on the door interrupted us. It was the nurse who had welcomed me.

“I’m so sorry to say that visiting hours are over. Zelda will need some time to rest before supper.”

I glanced at the clock on the wall and couldn’t believe I had been there for three hours. The scream of the woman down the hall traveled into the room, and my heart began to hurt. I didn’t want to leave Zelda here. I wanted to take her with me. Urgently so.

“May we have just five more minutes?” said Zelda. “Please, Jane.”

The nurse looked down the hall with nervous eyes and then back at us. “I’ll leave you for five more minutes. I’ll just say I had to take care of our friend down the hallway. Five minutes.”

With that, she was gone.

“Zelda, can you check out now?” I asked. “You’ve checked yourself in. You can stay with me at the inn down the street tonight. We’ll have breakfast tomorrow and I’ll drive you home to Montgomery. Will told me to take as long as I needed.”

She looked away from me and all around the room, and it appeared that she was actually thinking about taking me up on my offer. Then she sighed.

“If we only had more time today, I’d say yes, but I have so much packing to do, and so many good-byes. I can’t just leave. I’m never coming back after this,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

The woman screamed again and the sound went right through my stomach.

“I’m not ready to be done with you,” I said. “Please come with me.”

“I want to,” said Zelda. “I’ll leave with you tomorrow. That will give me time to say my good-byes at supper and pack tonight before they lock the doors and send me off to Luminal land in my sleep. You come first thing tomorrow morning and we’ll go.”

She broke into a huge smile and stood, pulling me up with her.

“Oh, Anna, I can’t wait for you to go to Montgomery. If you can stay a night I’ll take you to all of the sights in town, and we’ll have lemonade with Mother, and visit the old places Scott courted me.”

“I can’t wait,” I said.

I knew it made sense this way, but I hated to leave her. Nurse Jane was back in five minutes, however, just as she had promised. I collected my bag, empty now except for my camera. We all walked together down the long flights of stairs and out to the front porch. I asked Jane to take a picture of us, but to my dismay I had run out of film paper.

“Next time,” said Zelda. “When I’ve had my hair set.”

We laughed, and Jane left us on the porch to say our good-byes, but I could not speak, and my eyes filled with tears.

“It’s just one night,” said Zelda as her eyes also filled. “Tomorrow we set off.”

I nodded.

She leaned in and kissed me gently, and we embraced once more before I started the walk back to the inn. Just before I rounded the turn I looked back. She waved at me and blew me a kiss. Then she bowed like a prima ballerina.

THIRTY-THREE

In the dream, I was back in the garden at Highland, overlooking the forests and mountains, enveloped in warm sunlight. A tiny purple butterfly worked its way over the wildflowers just on the other side of the fence, and a brown hawk glided in a wide, lazy arc over the treetops. Down in the valley, there was a man who looked like a monk. He held up his hand to me and I saw that he had a bloody hole in his palm. The heavy floral fragrance seemed to come from him in a way I could almost see, and as I inhaled, I felt a great peace fill me.

Over the bubbling of the fountain in the garden, I heard the strains of Sorin’s song “Anii.” I turned to try to locate the source of the music, and was surprised to see Scott standing under a wisteria-covered tree, neatly dressed and pressed. He did not see me, because he was gazing anxiously at the house behind us, which instead of Highland Hospital looked a little like the house at Westport and the Montgomery Country Club all at once.

I followed his gaze to the house, and after a moment the door opened and Zelda stepped through rather abruptly, looking surprised. When she saw him she smiled, and the years slipped away and she was in the bloom of her youth. She stepped down
off the back of the veranda and began walking toward him and he toward her, until they were running, and locked in an embrace. He pulled back and put his hands on the sides of her face, kissed her, and hugged her again. I could hear her say, “Oh, my love, my Goofo, my sweetheart.”

The long wail of a siren suddenly grew closer, breaking the stillness, but the Fitzgeralds did not seem to hear. The garden fell away and I bolted up in bed at the inn. It took me a moment to orient myself to this time and place, and register that the siren was passing by on the street outside.

I lay back on the pillow and rolled over, thinking how sweet the dream had been, and began to drift off when a second siren pierced the silence, again screaming past the inn and down the street.

I was thoroughly awake now, and as I stared up at the ceiling in the dark I became unsettled. The sound of a third siren began to approach, and I heard voices on the front porch below my room. Being a nurse, I wondered whether I could be of some assistance in whatever emergency was taking place, so I climbed out of bed, put on my robe and shoes, and left my room.