Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [94]
“Tell me, did you get a chance to look at that photocopy I made you of that essay on structural metaphors in Fitzgerald’s short fiction? I know you’ve been busy.” I told him no, not quite, been kinda swamped and stuff but I would definitely get to it.
“What are you reading lately?” he asked, and I paused, shutting the fridge door, picturing the copy of The Happiest Baby on the Block on my nightstand.
“Um, you know, just some, um, Joyce. Dubliners.”
I knew this would make him happy and I wouldn’t be seeing him for a while so what the hell, I thought, as he lit up. “Oh, really? Terrific! Now, tell me, have you read it before? I thought you were just lukewarm on Joyce . . .” he said, beginning a Joyce monologue that would require only head nods and umm-hmms from me for the next twenty minutes.
He gave me a photocopy of Hudson’s namesake, Captain Thomas Hudson’s, honorable discharge notice from the Mexican-American War. He promised to send other historical documents as he digs them up at his house. He gave me a hug and shook Nick’s hand and left. We raced around and somehow made it to the airport and made our flight, but I was a little worried that this episode might be representative of our new life. Getting married and having a baby had done nothing to make me into a calm, organized adult. My dad was never going to be the comforting, elder statesman grandfather. Was this my destiny? I didn’t know. But I was going west (again) and I had definitely expanded.
MY FATHER’S OB-GYN
MY FATHER, despite being a single, nonexpecting, sexually inactive seventy-eight-year-old man, has an ob-gyn. He gets a kick out of saying, in the presence of his daughters, things like “Well, my ob-gyn says it’s fine to eat the occasional piece of bacon after the first trimester.” He was referred by his internist to this obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. Carl Wallace, a man who apparently shares a love of books with my dad. Lately, with the help of his man Dr. Wallace, he’s zeroed in on a hot little piece of information about Zelda Fitzgerald’s obstetric history.
After her second baby, Katharine struggled in her hospital bed to get her new daughter to latch on to her breast while my father sat in the chair to her left, talking animatedly about his new finding: “Turns out the doctor was a man named Lakin. Dr. Lakin apparently performed Zelda’s abortion at the Plaza Hotel in 1922. Now, plenty of biographers have known and written about this secret abortion at the Plaza, but I really think they’ve downplayed it, particularly in Nancy Milford’s book, out of some kind of respect, which is understandable; but here’s what none of them—and I mean none of my competitors—have gotten right: I believe Scott made her have this thing about four months after their daughter, Scottie, was born and it made her incapable of carrying another child to term, which mentally wrecked her. Totally. There was a fix-up job in Rome a bit later, so obviously her womb was ruined by the abortion, and Dr. Wallace says that could very easily drive a woman over the edge. Now, Katarina, let’s have a look at that baby.”
While Dad had been studying Fitzgerald since my adolescence, and working on a nonfiction book on him for at least ten years before my mom died, this Zelda stuff began really picking up steam after my mother died. It didn’t parallel their marriage directly—I don’t believe my mother had any abortions—but I wondered if it could be a symbol of the guilt my father felt for the suffering she endured as a writer’s wife, as his wife. About a year after Mom died, their friend Tom Eagleton died and my father flew to St. Louis to attend his funeral. A day or so after Eagleton’s funeral, Dad had my mother’s ashes buried in Calvary