Beautiful Fools Read online

  Copyright

  This edition first published in hardcover in the United States and the United Kingdom in 2013 by Overlook Duckworth, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2013 by R. Clifton Spargo

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  ISBN US: 978-1-4683-0760-3

  For Anne

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  February 12, 1932

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Acknowledgments

  FEBRUARY 12, 1932

  SOME MEN, NO MATTER HOW MUCH TIME AND ENERGY THEY EXPEND on other men, no matter how deeply they invest themselves in rivalries with peers, can only discover their true selves in the company of women. Scott Fitzgerald was such a man, and for that reason he spent an inordinate amount of time listening to women, even those he didn’t know, believing that in their conversations he would learn something about himself. Just now, seated across the aisle from two working-class Irish women, the older of whom kept using the younger one’s name at the beginning or end of every few sentences, he jotted down fragments of an argument. Mother and daughter, most likely—they debated a topic of mutual concern, except the daughter never once returned the personal address. On first glance the mother might have been fifty-nine or sixty, but, no, she was working-class and not all that well kept, so subtract a few years. One minute she was peremptory, haughty, conducting herself as someone used to getting her way; the next she was docile and supplicating, aware that her wishes could not prevail.

  “What are you writing, Scott?” From the seat nearer the window Zelda raised herself, eyelids heavy, having nodded off for a few minutes but now pulling upright to grab at the corner of the Moleskine notebook he tucked inside his jacket. “Is it about me?” In her voice the old touch of paranoia, the worry she could not master. Asleep for only a short while, she did not trust the world to have remained the same. For all she knew he’d reached his limit while she napped, vowing once and for all to be rid of her.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” she said, and the remark startled him.

  “Wouldn’t what?”

  “I’m not sure what I meant.” She mulled it over for several seconds. “Give up on me, I suppose. I wish you wouldn’t.”

  “Zelda, no one’s giving up on you.”

  They had come to the decision to check her into the hospital together, cabling Dr. Forel, who thought she might do best back in Switzerland, but when Scott saw the panic enter his wife’s eyes at the prospect of a return to Les Rives de Prangins clinic, he promised Forel she hadn’t backslid quite so far. No, all she required was a restful month, maybe two, in which to regain her equilibrium. So Forel recommended the Phipps Clinic in Baltimore, familiar territory, a city they already knew, where Scott might establish residence without much trouble.

  “I want you to understand I’m only doing this so you’ll stop worrying about me,” she started to say, her words swallowed by the squeal of metal on metal, the shrieking release of air announcing yet another station. It bothered him, this habit she had of seizing the most inopportune moments for intimate conversation, as if there were no difference between things you could say in a railway passenger car and things that ought to be whispered, if ever, in a church confessional.

  But is it really so odd she should choose this moment to speak of such matters? Only consider the situation from her perspective. Over the past few weeks she has been convinced for hours, sometimes days on end, that this time round the voices won’t be silenced, this time they won’t cease until they’ve wrung from her every last ounce of soulfulness, rendered her incapable of retrieving the self she has twice salvaged these past two years. There were stretches of clarity during which she couldn’t remember the hallucinations, or her own desperate words, or why she allowed Scott to label her “sick” and submit her to evaluation by so-called experts altogether hostile to the premises by which she wished to conduct her life. But what galled her most, what stayed with her, were the broken promises. Almost two years ago she’d entered Prangins voluntarily, expecting to be released within weeks, only to be kept there against her will for sixteen long months, not knowing if she would ever be allowed to leave. A year and a half of her life stolen from her. She vowed during the fourth month of imprisonment never again to surrender her freedom without a fight. Here she is today, seated beside a husband mired in an alcoholic tailspin altogether as self-destructive as her own slow unraveling, and yet no one arrives to propose stowing him in an asylum. No one so much as notices that as he sits there primly, playing the role of jailor and deliverer, there is alcohol on his breath. Every time he turns his head she can smell it on him, the sweet, pungent stench of his own ruin.

  What happened to her wasn’t so unusual. With Scott two thousand miles away, gone for weeks on end, working on that movie in Hollywood that was never going to get made, Zelda remained in Alabama with her family, her mother and sister watching her every move, her father dying under the mask of his terrible dignity, leaving her with graveside thoughts of how she was like him and also (she hoped) not like him. “Please tell me what normal looks like under those circumstances,” she pled on her own behalf. “Please tell me how you’re supposed to grieve without knowing how far inside the pain you can venture before everybody starts barking, fussing, trying to determine whether or not you’ve lost your mind.”

  “It’s always so exhausting,” she remarked, as he shifted in his seat, “for you too, I suppose, when I start to go crazy.”

  “Zelda, don’t be so dramatic, please. You’ll be fine.”

  “Oh, I can stop if I concentrate. It’s only your constant worrying that wears me out.”

  “Would you like it better if I didn’t care?”

  “Honestly?” she asked, catching herself, making sure she didn’t say anything that might prove irrevocable. They have uttered such words before, each of them many times. Even now she could trace the damage, if she cared to.

  The train came to a halt, the departing passengers lining up at the front of the car. Still others stood before their berths, shuffling and twisting to face one another, yawning, stretching indolent limbs as newcomers filed down the aisle in search of empty seats.

  Zelda clutched at his sleeve, asking him how long she would have to stay at Phipps and if afterward they could travel to Europe as a family. The three of them—Scott, Zelda, and their daughter Scottie—could have dinners in Montparnasse and make a study of how Paris was changed since the mid-1920s when they’d known it so well. Except this time, unlike the miserable return three years ago, they wouldn’t mind the changes so much, since they were older,
wiser, sobered by life. In the final years of the twenties they had indeed gone back to find their once-cosmopolitan city a travesty of its former grandeur, the cafés reeking of decades of spilled alcohol, the salons populated by hackneyed hangers-on, everything they stumbled on seeming gaudy, motley, or crass. So Zelda had dedicated herself to the regimen of ballet, one last chance to become more than an amateur, all hopes distilled into a passionate crush on her mentor, Madame Egorova, and, oh, if after that she couldn’t remember details, maybe she just didn’t wish to remember. Suffice it to say she pushed herself to the dire end while foreseeing it clearly, knowing full well how much it was going to cost her, this love of dance.

  “If the novel earns what it should,” he said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t visit Paris.”

  “We’ll have room to move about,” she mused without glancing his way, as if talking to herself, “and do the things we were going to do. We could purchase the home I’ve bought for us a thousand times in my head, which I’ve decorated and redecorated as many times, the one secure place I always wanted and we’re probably never going to have. I could take up ballet again—”

  Scott twisted in his seat, studying her, warning her without words that she was straying beyond permissible bounds.

  “Yes, Scott, I was only speaking hypothetically,” she said in a spirit of concession, and then, taking a deep dancer’s breath and heaving cheerfulness into her voice, added, “I’ve decided to concentrate my energies on becoming a writer such as yourself and Ernest. Someone who spends his time observing life pass him by and puts poignant remarks on the page about the many activities, such as fighting in wars or killing bulls, he himself cannot do.”

  “True enough,” Scott said, “writers are like parasites.”

  “Please don’t become melancholic on my account.” She waited on a reply and when it wasn’t forthcoming resumed. “About Paris, then, where will we live this time? Maybe, if I were well enough, you could cut down on the drinking.”

  Here was the reliable reprimand, the fight for not only power but first principles. Hadn’t his drinking and antics provoked her mad search for a vocation of her own because what they’d built wasn’t sound enough? And if she pushed too fast, too hard, pressed her body to do things it had never done, stretched her mind to the breaking point, wasn’t he in the end the cause of it all?

  The train was in motion again, passing under a viaduct, the percussive roll of its wheels amplified and played back against the funnel-like walls. When they emerged from beneath the overpass, the voice of the older woman across the aisle could be heard distinctly. “Listen to me, he was always so fond of you, but you could never believe him after that one night, not that I entirely blame you. Don’t you see, Clara, you’ll put me in a bad sit—”

  “You imagine I care,” the younger woman cried, facing forward. Several passengers in the berths near the front of the car jerked their heads, fixing rubbernecking stares on the two women.

  “You know what,” the older woman said, her voice heavy with exasperation. “You’re sick; your memories and thoughts are so twisted, it’s shocking.”

  A nearby passenger rose from her seat, seeking out the conductor in order to direct his attention to the ruckus. The conductor looked over the woman’s shoulder as he listened, eyeing the two women, and a minute later he made his way toward them.

  “Isn’t it dramatic?” Zelda whispered. “What’s your theory as to the cause of the row? I’ll tell you my surmise. The older one is a stepmother, and the younger a victim of incest by the hands of the father. Though the stepmother tried her best to protect the girl from violence, she nevertheless failed to do what a guardian ought to have done.”

  “Zelda, you shouldn’t speculate so wildly.”

  “Oh,” she said, a mischievous smile lighting her face, “now I recognize the girl; she is to be my roommate for the next several weeks at the Phipps Clinic at Johns Hopkins. She and I and perhaps several other crazy people on this train are on a journey to be cured of our neuroses and dementia praecox and assorted afflictions of the soul. We’re all of us on a pilgrimage.”

  He could tell from the tone of her voice that there was nothing truly precipitous in these speculations. She was playing with her own story, imagining it as dispersed among the masses and somehow less terrifying for its typicality. Today was one of her good days, and there hadn’t been many of those since the middle of December. No telling how long the clarity would last, of course. The break had been building since the onset of the holidays and when it caught up to her these past few weeks it overwhelmed her with predictable brutality. Scott had observed the irregularity in her behavior on his return from the West Coast. She would start down wild trails of thought, obsessing over the smallest details, unable to relinquish arbitrary desires, no matter how contrary to common sense they were. As a Christmas gift for Scottie she re-created the world of their travels on the scale of model trains—a tour of the globe from Rome to Paris to New York, wooden and papier-mâché constructions of St. Peter’s Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building, all positioned along the Lionel train tracks encircling the Christmas tree. Weeks and weeks of desperate craftsmanship went into the gift, as she distracted herself from her father’s final absence from the world by attending to the minutiae of the models. Though she was far inside the disease by the time he returned from California, their reunion brought about a détente. For a while she was happy and spoke magnificently in the collective—We will do this, we will do that—but at the end of a trip to Florida in early January they quarreled and the next day she was kneading the tender skin above her eyes in an effort to roll back the spikes of pain that nibbled at tranquillity, her vision newly troubled by halos, also a sudden tightness in her lungs that manifested in wheezing breaths; and there appeared on her lovely cream skin a patch of eczema, starting at the neck, spreading like poison ivy down over her shoulder, across her breasts, upward to the shadow line of her round, China-doll jaw.

  On the return trip she admitted defeat, but only to him. “Oh, Scott, I’m broken again.” When they arrived in Montgomery she pretended he’d invented it all, claimed never to have said any such thing, wishing to expose him to her family as her cruel jailor. It might have worked, except the eczema was by then climbing her cheek, contradicting her declarations of health and autonomy. For an entire Sunday afternoon she waded imaginatively through the bare grass of a field that ran behind her parents’ estate and accused Scott of being brutal for not letting her fulfill her wishes, as though it never occurred to her that it was the dead of winter. In her mind’s eye she saw her dancer’s callused feet and strong naked calves sporting in the grass and it was always summer. She spent whole days languishing in nostalgia, settled on the porch, remembering the soldiers stationed in Montgomery who’d once come to her door attired in military costume, also the dozens of local boys who’d religiously courted her. She was susceptible to visions—of Judas Iscariot, Napoléon, Jeanne d’Arc, and the Spanish artist El Greco, whom Scott loved so much and she thought merely another Mediterranean mystic. Her visitors told her secrets: Judas was Christ’s favorite for several hours after the betrayal; Jeanne had always suspected the voices she heard were from the devil.

  Since leaving her mother’s house in Montgomery, Zelda had been positively exuberant, not in itself cause for concern, but Scott had to watch her all the same. She wished to gossip about the two women across the aisle, but he interrupted to report that he was headed to the dining car for some coffee, would she like anything, and she reminded him that she rarely drank coffee.

  He reclaimed the seat next to his wife. Across the aisle the berth was empty, the two Irishwomen nowhere in sight. For several minutes Zelda remained silent, eyes clamped shut in fake sleep, until she leaned forward, yawning, extending her arms in exaggerated languor into a fully stretched Y, turning to him with mouth half open, a shy smile on her lips. Expressing no curiosity as to the whereabouts of the two women, she instead commented on his
shoes. “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I like your new shoes.” She knew how to play to his vanity. “You strike such a fine figure in the world, Scott.

  “Sometimes I see you from afar as if I didn’t know you and my heart runs fast like a young girl’s as I entertain a perfectly meretricious thought. ‘Oh, how handsome he is,’ I say to myself, ‘a stranger come to seduce me.’ Then I take a second peek, embarrassed not to have recognized you, ‘Oh, but it is only my husband,’ reprimanding myself for the intent to cheat on the good solid you who stood by me when I was cracked and doubted I could ever again fake wholeness. Poor you, I think, to be married to a sexually tawdry wife who is ready to run off with the first man she sees, regardless of his station in life, owing only to his handsome face. He could be a waiter for all I care.”

  “Which should I find more flattering,” he asked, “your dutiful loyalty to a tired old partner or the flash of excitement I now and then inspire from afar?”

  “You needn’t be so analytical, I only meant to compliment your shoes.”

  “Which you, of course, helped pick out.”

  They had discovered the shoes, independently, months ago, in an advertisement in Esquire, Scott lifting the magazine after Zelda laid it down, then asking minutes later what she thought of the two-toned leather brogue shoes the man in the photograph was wearing. She uttered a small cry of joy, delighted by their like-mindedness, having instructed herself that if he commented on the pair of Florsheim shoes, she would have to buy them for him at Christmas.

  “Still, you’re the one who wears them well,” Zelda observed, “and now I’ll be able to imagine what you are like in the wide world while I am tucked away in the insane asylum.”

  There was such excitement in a pair of new shoes. You looked down at your feet and detected the shine on them, unblemished, undiminished, and it was the beginning of experience all over again, the promise of falling in love, the thrill of imagining what he would be like under his clothes. After that came the worry. How long could the newness last? So you kept track, wondering at what point the shoes would no longer be mistaken as freshly purchased, at what point they would require polish to restore their luster so that you might venture onto the streets with a pair of shoes that looked as good as new—except you would know better.