39

See us living in a columned behemoth of a house called Ellerslie, a plantation, almost, in the Delaware hamlet of Edgemoor. Three full floors of great, square, high-ceilinged rooms defy me to furnish them sufficiently. We pay only $150 a month to rent this twenty-seven-room Greek Revival home on a hill overlooking the Delaware River, though we’ll spend nearly that much each month in winter to heat it.

Beyond our royal lawn, the river flows past, broad and brown and silent, unconcerned with the little party gathered at its bank on this afternoon, the twenty-first of May. It’s 1927, but could be a hundred years earlier or a thousand or three; the river doesn’t know or care. It doesn’t care, either, about the dramas playing out among the people at this picnic, or about the one taking place in the sky far to the northeast, where Charles Lindbergh is attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean to Paris with a single engine in a single flight.

If the river has a soul, it’s a peaceful one. If it has a lesson to impart, that lesson is patience. There will be drought, it says; there will be floods; the ice will form, the ice will melt; the water will flow and blend into the river’s brackish mouth, then join the ocean between Lewes and Cape May, endlessly, forever, amen.

Who’s listening, though? See us on the river’s bank, our picnic blankets outspread on the clover. Here are Scott’s parents, Molly and Edward, looking amazed at what their boy has acquired; here are Carl and Fania Van Vechten; here is a fellow Southerner, critic and novelist James Boyd; here are Lois Moran and her mother—who are the fêted guests because we have been away from Hollywood for two entire months and Scott is badly in need of a fix-up, a dose of the girl whose “absolutely platonic affections” have for him become paramount. Does anyone besides the two of them and me know this is the case? The river says, Who cares? but I’m too distracted to pay it any mind.

The blanket is checkered in a picnic-proper red-and-white design. The ice bucket is kept filled by a pair of colored women, who Edward eyes with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion. His world has always been white. We are post-sandwiches and pre-dinner, so our time is occupied with gin martinis and croquet.

Lois wears gingham and acts the innocent, as if the floorboards outside her bedroom don’t creak mere minutes after I wake in the night to an empty bed.

Scott is in a Brooks Brothers poplin suit that’s far sharper than the man inside it, the man who, only a few days earlier, wrote his agent that his novel, still only two chapters long, will be finished in July. This is the same man who, when July arrives, will interrupt his wife at the ballet barre she installed against his wishes to say, in a trembly panic, that he is on the verge of something horrible—either nervous breakdown or death. This he’ll do three times before August ends, and then to prevent further frights he’ll switch to a lower-nicotine cigarette and forswear the gingham girl. He’ll try to quit drinking and will succeed for two days, until he declares that the world is far too raw and bright for him to be able to settle down and work—he needs a little something to soften it and steady him. A new bad habit will be born, along with a series of stories for the slicks and lots of letters to his great good friend Ernest—but no novel. In winter, he’ll attempt to give a speech at Princeton, but will appear at the podium drunk and mute; he’ll arrive home—where his sister-in-law Tootsie is visiting—still crying tears of mortification, then fight with his wife about her breaking the liquor cabinet’s lock, and bloody her nose in the process.

My dress for this picnic is as brown as the river. As much as I’m succeeding in imitating the river’s appearance, I haven’t been able to assimilate its wisdom—and won’t, not until years later. Right now I’m the woman who, in an attempt to escape her husband’s life, has begun taking ballet lessons three days a week. She’s not needed at home; her husband directs the maids and the cook and the governess that both she and her daughter despise. And so the woman studies books about art and works on paintings in between dance lessons, then works on essays and stories when her painter’s eye is spent, and if any hours remain between these activities and sleep, she passes those hours in as thorough an alcoholic haze as can be achieved without ending up horizontal. Guests will come and go and come and go. Her husband will do the same. She will dance and paint and write—and many remarkable things will come of her efforts: beautiful painted furniture and lampshades that delight her daughter; publication, interviews, opportunities, acclaim. These are the good things she’ll hold on to later, when she’s in the thick morass of the bad.

The sight of one of the maids standing on the porch and waving a dish towel gets our attention. “It was on the radio!” she calls. “Mr. Lindbergh just landed his plane in Paris!”

We foolishly look up at the sky past the treetops, as if we can see the plane, see it descending lower, lower, then disappearing from our sight. It is the end of an astonishing journey, I think. All done now, nothing more to see.