Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [96]
“Tell Jim I’m coming by around eleven next Wednesday without a doubt and with the goods.”
A little over a year later, my father called me when I was at the playground near our house in Los Angeles. Nick was watching our son, Hudson, now fourteen months, and I was watching the two of them as my dad talked enthusiastically about Zelda’s abortion for the 129th time. “It was this D-and-C, you see, that was the key to her collapse. Scott really got her into a corner about it, and she ended up having six miscarriages after it. There was another, almost criminally irresponsible, operation in Rome, allegedly to repair damages from 1922, which didn’t help at all. This irreparable damage was absolutely central to her breakdown.”
My cell phone was going in and out, so I couldn’t hear very well, and I asked, “What was that?” My father, thinking I asked, “What is that?” proceeded to explain to me what an abortion is. “They take this hook-shaped metal instrument and scrape out the fetus . . .” I watched my son play in the drizzle.
“The Princeton Library has the transcript of Zelda and Scott’s session with an analyst at their home in Maryland in 1933. It’s about one hundred and fourteen pages and let me tell you, Jean-Joe, it’ll just break your heart. I spent about three days hand-copying it there and got it down very well, I believe, verbatim, from the stenographer’s record—”
I woke up. “They had a stenographer in their therapy session?” Now, that’s fancy.
“That’s right.”
My mind jumped to the image of a stenographer getting down some of my better lines in arguments with my husband. I liked these two more and more.
“Zelda had a shorthand way of talking and of course Scott understood every word. Her mind made leaps that simply left a lot of people behind. She’d say of an attractive woman, ‘She’s got beautiful legs, therefore kids,’ meaning, Her husband can’t keep his hands off her, leading to more children. But some people didn’t get her. In that way—and I don’t mean in some crazy way—she was like Mama.”
This was as close as I’d ever heard him come to connecting Mom to Zelda. It was unlikely he’d get any closer to what all this meant, why he was chasing the story of Zelda’s demise through an abortion he felt was forced on her by her husband. My father may feel responsible not just for my mother’s life but for her actual death. He was the one who found her, and he said when she died that if he had gotten there sooner she would have survived. More to the point for me is that my alcoholic-depressive mother didn’t want help, but he can’t talk about that; what he can talk about is what Scott did to Zelda. When we were little he seemed to admire Fitzgerald, and then as things went bad with my mom he focused on Fitzgerald’s plagiaristic ways—from Zelda, from Joyce, from Keats. Now his focus is on how Fitzgerald completely destroyed his wife through an unnecessarily dangerous abortion in 1922 at the Plaza, which he chose over a safe hospital in order to protect his reputation, as he was about to publish The Beautiful and the Damned. His opinion of Fitzgerald has plummeted; it feels like every time you talk to him it’s gone down even further. I didn’t say anything when he mentioned Mom, not that you could distinguish this silence from any previous silence in calls with him.
He sped past mentioning my mother, and the rain started coming down harder on the playground as Nick gave me the “Let’s go” eyes. If it’s difficult to get a word in with my father, it’s Sisyphean to get off the phone with him. When you finally do manage to say “Dad? Dad. Dad!” he’s already speaking your side of the conversation, saying the things that you need to say: “I know, that rain is really coming down now, you’ve got to go. I can hear that baby needs you, and I know I’m boring the hell out of you. Quickly, though, how’s things? How’s the writing?”
But there’s never enough time for the present. We spend so much time in 1922 that today, the babies who