Free Zelda by Nancy Milford

they’ve always seemed so inappropriate— —but I love to see this shining there so nice and white like our love— And it sorter says ‘Soon’ to me all the time— Just sings it all day long.” That Saturday night she wore it to a dance at the country club to everyone’s astonishment. “You can’t imagine what havoc the ring wrought,” she reported. “A whole dance was completely upset last night—… I am so proud to be your girl—to have everybody know we are in love— It’s so good to know you’re always loving me—and that before long we’ll be together for all our lives—”
    Opinion in Montgomery was, however, by no means as simple as Zelda expressed it to Scott. Privately more than one swain wondered just how long their long-distance romance would endure. Zelda was not known for the longevity of her amours and Scott had already been gone for more than a month. The Sayres did not consider Zelda seriously engaged to Scott, and among themselves hoped that she wouldn’t be. Although Mrs. Sayre genuinely liked Fitzgerald, her notes to Zelda about impoverished writers unable to make their way took the effect they were intended to. Fitzgerald was a charming and attractive but uncertain young man; he had not graduated from Princeton, he was Irish, he had no career to speak of, he drank too much, and he was a Catholic.
    Still, their correspondence flourished. Zelda wrote Scott that she hoped his mother would like her. “I’ll be as nice as possible and try to make her—but I am afraid I’m losing all pretense of femininity, and I imagine she will demand it—” Then, because he wanted to know exactly what she did with her time, she told him about a “syndicate” she and Eleanor Browder had formed: “…we’re ‘best friends’ to more college boys than Solomon had wives—Just sorter buddying with ’em and I really am enjoying it—as much as I could anything without you— I have always been inclined toward masculinity. It’s such a cheery atmosphere boys radiate— And we do such unique things—” The day before, a good friend of hers from the University of Alabama, John Sellers, was short of his return train fare. Zelda helped him collect what he needed by dressing up in long skirts, with a floppy old hat pulled low over her eyes, and carrying a tin cup at the railroad station while they begged for alms. She washaving a grand time “acquiring a bad name,” as she put it, and thrived on the sensation she created.
    As though to pacify any reaction to her cutting up, she added in one letter: “… every night I get very loud and coarse, and then I always wish for you so—so I wouldn’t be such a kid—” But this did little to assuage his feelings about her adventures, and wild letters again crossed between New York and Montgomery. Zelda was obviously having fun, and even as she assured him of her love she was also writing him: “The Ohio troops have started a wild and heated correspondence with Montgomery damsels.… I guess the butterflies will flitter a trifle more—It seems dreadfully peculiar not to be worried over the prospects of the return of at least three or four fiancées. My brain is stagnating owing to the lack of scrapes— I haven’t had to exercise it in so long—” And in her fashion she added: “Sweetheart, I love you most of all the earth—and I want to be married soon—soon— Lover— Don’t say I’m not enthusiastic— You ought to know—” But Scott was beginning to wonder; April began and he visited Clothilde in New York in order to search for a suitable apartment for himself and Zelda.
    Meanwhile Zelda was growing impatient in Montgomery; she was tired of waiting for Scott to make his fortune, and her petulance began to show in her letters. Writing about a woman she knew, she told Scott that all women “love to fancy themselves suffering— they’re nearly all moral and mental hypo-crondiacs—If they’d just awake to the fact that their excuse and