19

We spent the exceptionally, ridiculously, unendingly frigid winter of 1921–22 in the company of an assortment of Scott’s old friends. My drawl, never a problem in New York, was a hindrance here. “Would you repeat that, dear?” was a regular refrain. And if I said something like “If I never see another snowflake, it’ll be too soon, I swear!” someone was sure to ask, “Is ahswayah a Southern term? I don’t think we have that one here.”

The women allowed me into their bridge groups, though, and invited me to join their committees—Lord, you never did see so few women create so many committees! They extended every courtesy whether they wanted to or not, unwilling to lose their connection to F. Scott Fitzgerald even if his wife was, unfortunately, a foreigner.

Scott’s mother, however, always treated me like I was an orchid she’d discovered blooming in her parlor. Sadly, Scott was far less fond of her than she was of me. He thought her old-fashioned and eccentric and absentminded—the very qualities that made her so dear. His father was old-fashioned, too, but Scott thought him benign, like an old pocket watch that keeps time and has style but isn’t worth much.

Whenever Scott and I weren’t, say, out riding in horse-drawn sleighs and then rewarding ourselves afterward with hot toddies, we worked together on a musical revue, Midnight Flappers, for the Junior League’s April fund-raiser. Scott wrote the script and was also the director; I was choreographer and, of course, would be one of the flappers—if I could get rid of all my leftover roundness, which, although I was nursing Scottie, stubbornly stuck with me as if I needed the fat to keep me warm. Scott and I collaborated so well and had so much fun that my irritation with him about the baby’s name faded and then disappeared. She was Scottie; this seemed self-evident before long, and I was glad we hadn’t named her Patricia.

She was a happy, indulged, adored infant. Nursing her was demanding but rewarding, too, most of the time. Scott had a bad habit of inviting friends up to our place without first seeing whether I’d welcome company. The commotion—and my goodness, between Scott and his former nemesis Sinclair Lewis and their third musketeer, Sherwood Anderson, there was always commotion—would wake the baby. She would want me, not the nanny Scott had hired, and so I’d have to go off and nurse her back to sleep. I’d hear the others talking and laughing, carrying on without a thought for me, for my having to go from gay socialite to milk producer in the space of a baby’s cry. Fierce as my love was for my baby girl, it was no antidote for resentment.

Scottie was not even four months old when my monthly, which had returned, sort of, in January, went missing again. I couldn’t be pregnant; my sisters had told me I’d be safe as long as I was nursing! But the doctor, after confirming what I hoped was not true, shrugged and told me, “The only sure method of prevention is abstention, and of course no husband can be expected to agree to that for long. Congratulations, Mrs. Fitzgerald, and give my best to Scott.”

For the next couple of weeks, while we planned a trip to New York to see friends and celebrate the March 4 launch of The Beautiful and Damned, I kept the news to myself and chased my thoughts around and around inside my head, unable to be happy about my condition and miserable about that unhappiness. I just could not imagine celebrating Scottie’s first birthday, still eight months away, by giving her a baby brother or sister. I couldn’t stand the thought of gaining so much weight again. I couldn’t see my way through the tall grass of sleep deprivation and milk-engorged breasts, couldn’t face the prospect of managing the needs of two wonderful but helpless, demanding little beings, even with the nanny’s help. I longed for my prepregnancy body and had just begun to wean Scottie in preparation for my being gone two weeks in New York.

Judge me harshly if you will—God knows I’ve spent the ensuing years judging myself that way—but I decided to assert my right to control my own fertility, as Margaret Sanger liked to say, and told Scott how it had to be.

“I can’t do it, Deo, the timing is all wrong, I’ll be awful to everyone if I do it, I just know I will. It would spoil our lives, we’re hardly getting started, I don’t want to be a baby-making factory, I just can’t.”

He didn’t want that life either; he said, “Yes, all right, I understand,” and the look of terror he’d worn the day I’d said, “I’m pregnant,” changed to relief.

While we were in New York, Scott gave an interview to a reporter from the New York World, who, having read Scott’s flapper stories and now the novel, wanted his opinion about women in Prohibition society.

“I think that just being in love and doing it well is work enough for any woman,” Scott said. “If she keeps her house nicely, and makes herself look pretty when her husband comes home from work, and loves the fellow and helps him and encourages him, well, I think that’s the sort of work that will save her.”

I slipped out, then, for my appointment with a doctor who I’d heard was discreet and reliable for all types of “women’s troubles.” He supplied me with those little yellow pills I’d once been so opposed to.

*   *   *

“I’ve got it!”

Scott rousted me from sleep a week later with a shake. “You won’t believe this, Zelda. It just came to me in a dream.” He switched on the lamp and grabbed his notebook and pencil from the bedside table. “It’s brilliant. A clerk who wanted to be a postman has delusions of becoming the president…”

Seemed to me that Scott was the one with delusions.

“Three acts,” he said, scribbling some notes. “Broadway will love this.”

I was still rubbing the sleep from my eyes when he said, “This is going to make our fortune—I’ll never have to write for the slicks again.” He tossed the notebook back onto the table. “Good-bye, Saturday Evening Post! Good-bye, Hearst’s! A successful Broadway show will pay residuals for years—it’ll make me a millionaire before I’m thirty, Zelda.”

He jumped out of bed and grabbed the notebook. “We’re going to have to move back to New York, of course.… Go back to sleep, darling, see you in the morning.”

*   *   *

In late March I came home from a Women’s Committee for the Betterment of St. Paul meeting to find the nanny—who’d insisted we call her Nanny—waiting for me near the door with Scottie in her arms. I reached for the baby, but Nanny held on to her and said in her stiff, Norwegian-accented English, “You have a message from Mr. Harold Ober.”

“I do? You must mean Mr. Fitzgerald.”

“No,” she huffed. “I make no such mistake. The number is on the notepad.” She pointed toward the parlor as if sending me to my room, despite her being less than a year older than I was.

Scott had insisted we hire this sort of girl. “Ludlow once told me his nanny could cut his meat just by scowling at it. All the Fowler kids were terrified of her, which really kept them in line.”

“She’ll give the baby nightmares.”

“She’ll give the baby rules and structure—all the things you and I do so poorly.”

Now I told Nanny, “All right, thanks. I’ll just take the baby and—”

“Her diaper is soiled,” Nanny said, already moving down the hallway. “We can’t possibly let you hold her in this state.”

No, I thought, watching Scottie recede, her wide eyes staring over Nanny’s shoulder, we can’t possibly. We can’t possibly put up with Battleship Nanny very much longer.

In the study, I phoned Harold, wondering what he could possibly want with me. It had to be something to do with Scott—but what? Scott was in touch with Harold often and had most recently been discussing the play, which he was calling The Vegetable.

Harold got on the phone. “Thank you for returning my call so promptly. Burton Rascoe, an editor from the New York Tribune, phoned me this morning to see whether you might be interested in writing a review of The Beautiful and Damned for them.”

“Sorry, am I hearing you right, Mr. Ober? They want Scott’s wife to review his book?” I’d never heard of such a thing.

“That’s it, yes. He thinks readers would love to have something from you personally, having heard so much about you.”

“I’ll guess you told him that I’m not a writer.”

“I don’t think he’s too concerned. If it’s rough, they’ll clean it up. They’ll pay you fifteen dollars for your trouble—and I’ll forgo my ten percent. You could get a new pair of shoes, or a bag or such. My wife always loves an excuse to buy a new hat. What do you think?”

“I’ll do it!”

“Oh—all right. Good.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?”

“I assumed you’d want to ask your husband first.”

“He’ll adore the idea, don’t you worry. Tell me what this Rascoe fella wants and when he wants it, and I’ll get right to work.”

As was often true while we were in St. Paul, Scott was spending his day with Tom Boyd at Kilmarnock, Tom’s renowned bookstore. Tom and his wife, Peggy, had become pretty good friends of ours—there was Tom, a fella who was all about books, and then Peggy, pregnant with her first at the same time I was pregnant with Scottie, so we were pretty well matched. Both Boyds were aspiring writers when we met them, and Scott gave Peggy a whole lot of good advice that she put to work in a novel, The Love Legend, which Scott recommended to Max Perkins and which Max had just agreed to publish.

Tom was doing a wonderful job with publicity for Scott’s book: newspaper ads, posters, and even a short reel that was running at the movie houses. Scott, ever determined to influence the what and the how and the when, wrote to Max to say that Scribner’s ought to do something more with advertising than they’d done in the past. Scott was worried that even though reviews had been good—even Mencken had admired it—sales of The Beautiful and Damned might fall short of the sixty thousand copies Scott had projected.

And so here it was, I thought, a ready-made invitation to put my informal writing education to work, and in such a way that would benefit Scott and me both. I was thrilled to be able to help.

With paper in hand, I found Nanny and told her, “I’ll be in the den. I’m not to be disturbed.”

“No, certainly,” she said. “We would not think of such a thing.”

I kissed Scottie’s blond fuzzy-duckling head, then went to work.

Though my writing experience was limited to diaries and letters, I was sure this assignment had been ordained and I was more than up to the task. After paging through the novel to remind myself of its particulars, I framed an idea in my mind and started writing it down.

The words seemed to flow directly from my brain through my neck and arm and fingers, right through the pencil and onto the page. This was so much fun! So easy! Who wouldn’t want to be a writer? I had the whole thing drafted by the time Scott came home.

“Deo, look at this,” I called when I heard him come in. “I’m reviewing your book for the Tribune—the New York one. Harold Ober called. They’ll pay me. Read it and tell me what you think.”

“I think I’d like to take off my coat and boots.”

“Fine, all right,” I pouted, then went out to the foyer. After he’d put his things away, I thrust the pages into his hands. “It’s funny, and I did what you and everyone always do when you’re reviewing each other’s books—it’s not afraid to be kinda critical, ’cause nobody would take it seriously if it’s all glowing praise. Right? You always say it’s the balance of praise and thoughtful criticism that makes folks curious to decide for themselves.”

He’d taken the pages but his eyes were still on me, and he had a bemused smile.

“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Just listen to you. Next thing I know, you’ll want to be Dorothy Parker.”

“Nah, she doesn’t have enough fun. Read it! I’m sure it’s awful, but I think it’s kinda brilliant, too.”

Scott sat down at his desk and I paced the room while he read. His face revealed nothing. When he was done, he laid the notebook flat. “All right: it’s got some pacing hiccups, and we’ll need to address punctuation a little bit, but it’s quite remarkable—your writing voice is almost precisely your spoken voice, even in essay form. How long did you work on this?”

“Just today. This afternoon. Since about three o’clock.”

Scott sat back in the chair, a mixture of emotions playing across his face. “Huh. Well, I guess you’ve found yourself a new hobby. I’ll call Harold tomorrow and see what else we might cook up for you.”

*   *   *

The review ran two weeks later—and, soon after, spurred a request from Metropolitan Magazine for a flapper essay by me, then another request, from McCall’s. I confess to feeling an outsize thrill when I saw the headline, “Friend Husband’s Latest” by Zelda Fitzgerald, wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald, followed by the two thousand words I’d written, observations I’d made, quips I’d thought of, criticisms I’d noted and had refined with Scott’s help. Scott was proud of me, too; we bought two dozen copies of the paper and sent clippings to all our friends.

Sara Haardt, now living in Baltimore, wrote in reply,

Zelda, my dear,

I can’t tell you how much this pleases me! You, my lovely friend, are finally utilizing another of your many talents and being rightly recognized for it. Plus, I’m so glad to see you and Scott in such harmony. You give me hope for something similar in my own life one day. Meantime, I have just placed a story in a Richmond journal, The Reviewer, which I will send to you with much joy upon its publication. I always said we could make our own ways in this men’s world.… My love to you, Scott, and the baby~

Sara

When my fifteen-dollar check arrived, I took it to the bank personally and asked the teller to please pay it out in one-dollar bills—not to make it seem like more money, but to make the counting out of it last just a little bit longer. Like having fifteen little bites of chocolate cream pie even though you could’ve finished off that slice in five.

“What will you buy?” Scott asked, when we were outside on the slushy sidewalk. “My first sale was thirty dollars, remember? I sent you a sweater.”

“No, a feather fan. And you got yourself some white flannel pants.”

“Are you sure?”

We’d come to the street corner. “Yep,” I said, surveying the nearby shops.

“What’ll it be for you, then? Matching white flannel pants?”

I turned to him and smiled. “Only if I want to get us thrown out of the country club.”

“We should do it.” He took my gloved hands in his, and I felt like we had stepped back in time, to those Montgomery days right after the war had ended. Scott’s face was ruddy from the cold, and his eyes were as bright as I’d seen them lately. “Come on, I bet you’ll look good in pants—and we’re moving back to New York anyway, right? Let’s show St. Paul what we’re really made of.”