Happily, happily foreverafterwards—the best we could.
—ZELDA TO SCOTT, AUGUST 1936
On Saturday, December 21, 1940, Scott, who had been following the Princeton football games on the radio, settled down into his chair to read about the team in the alumni magazine. Sheilah Graham, who had been his companion for the last two years, was also reading, curled up on the sofa nearby. By all accounts, Scott was happy. No longer drinking, he had settled into a warm and comfortable domestic routine with Sheilah. He was proud of Scottie, and pleased that he could provide her with the kind of education that had meant so much to him at Princeton. Over the last decade, he had learned to live with the grief that Zelda’s illness created, and he took solace in knowing that she, too, had settled into familiar domestic rituals and had her mother and sisters to care for her. Her letters reassured him that she found pleasure in her mother’s house, in its garden and flowers, and in the little southern town in which she had been raised. Most gratifying of all, Scott’s new novel, The Last Tycoon, was going well; out of the thirty episodes he had charted, he had completed seventeen. But that afternoon, Scott stopped reading, stood up, seemed to reach for the mantel, then fell onto the floor. When Sheilah returned after running for help, Scott was dead.
Scott had wanted to be buried near his father and the Keys and the Scotts in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Rockville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. After a brief viewing in Hollywood, his body was sent by train to Baltimore. But because he was no longer a practicing Catholic, church authorities denied permission to lay Scott to rest in St. Mary’s cemetery. An Episcopal minister officiated and he was buried in Rockville Union Cemetery instead. His funeral was attended by only about thirty people, including Scottie, a few of her Baltimore friends, the Obers, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Maxwell Perkins and his family, Scott’s favorite cousin, Cecilia Taylor, and his brother-in-law Newman Smith. Zelda was too ill to be there, and Sheilah tactfully mourned her loss in private.
After Scott’s death, Zelda lived intermittently between her mother’s home and Highland Hospital, to which she returned during periods of relapse. In November of 1947, Zelda returned to the hospital for the last time. At midnight on March 10, 1948, the building in which she lived caught fire, and Zelda and eight other patients perished in the flames. Her body was so badly burned that it could only be identified by her slipper, which was found beneath her. Zelda was buried beside her husband on St. Patrick’s Day.
But the story does not end there. In 1975, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington overruled the earlier decision and the Fitzgeralds’ remains were moved and reinterred in St. Mary’s Church cemetery. The inscription on their stone bears the final words of The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Those who visit the Fitzgeralds’ grave today might remember what Scott and Zelda themselves said about a final resting place when any thought of death was but an imaginative projection into the future. As a young woman of nineteen, very much in love with life and with Scott, Zelda wrote to him enthusiastically in 1919:
Why should graves make people feel in vain? I’ve heard that so much . . . but somehow I can’t find anything hopeless in having lived—All the broken columnes and clasped hands and doves and angels mean romances—and in an hundred years I think I shall like having young people speculate on whether my eyes were brown or blue. . . . I hope my grave has an air of many, many years ago about it—Isn’t it funny how, out of a row of Confederate soldiers, two or three will make you think of dead lovers and dead loves. . . .
Scott liked this description so much he used it nearly verbatim in his first novel, This Side of Paradise. But later he created an affectionate vision of his own about his and Zelda’s grave. After visiting Zelda in the hospital in Baltimore in late September 1935, Scott wrote to a friend:
It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have, even now, closer to her than to any other human being. . . . And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years Zelda + I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought + not melancholy at all. (Life in Letters 290–291)
The Fitzgeralds’ lives were unduly short; and they were tragic, but tragic in the best sense—in the sense that the human heart possesses hopes, dreams, aspirations, and infinite longings that cannot be fulfilled, but the great souls among us continue to desire and strive and work for these things despite all obstacles and failures. Therefore, their tragedy, while it does indeed evoke pity and fear, also inspires admiration and courage. The tragic view is ultimately an affirming one, urging us to love life and to desire it both because of and in spite of its persistent losses.
F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, in the love that they shared and the suffering they endured, in their commitment to each other, their daughter, and their talents, and in the wealth of novels, stories, essays, paintings, and letters they produced in their short lives, have bequeathed to us and to subsequent generations a rich storehouse of intelligence, humor, loyalty, courage, and grace.