Fiction Ruined My Family - Jeanne Darst [98]
. . .
DR. RENNIE: Would life for you as a creative artist compensate you for your life without Mr. Fitzgerald, if you were given the opportunity to really go on for the next twenty years and be an outstanding woman writer of this country, doing it alone? Would that mean enough when you were sixty?
MRS. FITZGERALD: Well, Dr. Rennie, I think perhaps that is a sort of a silly question.
DR. RENNIE: No, I do not think so.
MR. FITZGERALD: Why is it a silly question?
MRS. FITZGERALD: How can I tell what it would mean?
MR. FITZGERALD: Suppose I said, “I am going to sacrifice you, that is what I am going to do at any cost, I have got to develop my personality.”
MRS. FITZGERALD: That is what you have said all along, and that is what you have done.
DR. RENNIE: No, he has not.
MR. FITZGERALD: Suppose I said, “I am going to sleep with every pretty woman I see, because that will make me better able to write short stories.”
MRS. FITZGERALD: You have said even that to me. . . .
She basically says she’d rather be institutionalized than conventionally married:
MRS. FITZGERALD: . . . I want to be able to say, when he says something that is not so, then I want to do something so good, that I can say, “That is a God damned lie,” and have something to back it up, that I can say it.
MR. FITZGERALD: Now we have found rock bottom.
DR. RENNIE: I think we have.
MRS. FITZGERALD: And I think it is better to shut yourself up in an institution than to live that way.
The thing just gets more and more interesting and zingy and, well, fun. I can understand why my father is drowning in the Fitzgeralds; they are wild and talented and fascinating. His discoveries about Zelda’s gynecological history and how Scott destroyed her could be major. He’s definitely onto something, I’ll give him that.
When my uncle Jim died in St. Louis recently, my father’s reaction was fairly stoic, which wasn’t that much of a surprise; they were not on speaking terms for most of my life, but at the end, when both their wives were gone, I think they found some empathy for each other. My dad was there for Uncle Jim when Aunt Ann died, and Uncle Jim had been giving Dad some money before he died, “for the Fitzgerald project.”
When my dad got back from the funeral, I called and asked him how it was, and he was perfunctory; he gave the names of the cousins who were there and who had a good line and who was sullen, and then he jumped back to the project.
“Jean-Joe, I’m off to Rockville, Maryland, this weekend to copy the diaries of a secretary of his, Laura Guthrie Hearne. He met her in Asheville, North Carolina. She was a fortune-teller who then went to Columbia and became his secretary. Oh, he paid her some miserable sum, but anyway, her diaries have a year of working for Scott in there, and I’m going to head down and photocopy the diary. Fitzgerald’s downfall was he liked to drink with these people who were keeping detailed records of their time with him. My book should really be called Don’t Drink with Diarists.”
His obsession is charming when you’re talking to old friends who know him and think he is a lovable eccentric father; it’s downright dangerous when you’re driving to Connecticut on Christmas Eve in the freezing rain and can’t roll a window down to let out some of the words that are coming at you in an endless stream, threatening to use up all available car oxygen; and it’s maddening when you want him to be fucking normal for five minutes, that is, when you want him to be a person who can understand the difference between an unsavory literary obsession and conversation. Someone who can understand why you might be rankled that this topic seems more important to him than anything and anyone including his daughters, including his wife. My solo show ran about an hour, me talking for sixty minutes, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to perform it without an