Call Me Zelda (3 page)

“You’ll take good care of her,” he said. It was not a question, but a reassurance to himself.

“Yes, sir,” I said. “The very best care.”

His face relaxed and he even smiled. I saw a hint of what he must have been in his younger days. He kept his gaze on mine and reached for my hands.

“Thank you,” he said.

With that, he was gone.

I walked out after him and watched him move down the hall and out the doors. The afternoon slipped in for a moment, then was shut out. Everything in the ward seemed different now, and I no longer felt its calming presence. The Fitzgeralds stirred something in me that had been dormant for a long time, and I was not prepared to face it.

A
n hour later, I returned to Mrs. Fitzgerald to reassess her vitals and begin a relationship with her. It was Dr. Meyer’s philosophy that people with mental illness needed a comforting place of physical and emotional calm to work out their disturbances. He was revolutionary in the practice at a time when sanitariums often involved starched areas of decay and neglect, overcrowded dormitories polluted with the noise of people with not only mental illness, but all forms of physical handicaps, sexually transmitted diseases, or simple homelessness.

But this was not a public institution. It was an expensive private clinic connected to a research hospital, for those with the means to afford it. The wall hangings and tapestries were warmly colored and calming. There were moldings, chandeliers, and various rooms of amusement for billiards or bridge. It had the look of a posh hotel, and I’d felt an enormous sense of relief since I’d begun working here, years ago. The schedule and routine framed my existence in small, manageable blocks the way Walter Reed General Hospital had done at the start of the war, and the clean, muted environment soothed me.

Until today.

With Mr. Fitzgerald gone, at least the air seemed lighter. Mrs. Fitzgerald was standing at the window when I knocked and opened the door. Her bags were open and she looked as if
she’d brushed her hair and washed her face. She continued to hold the papers.

“White February, with the crispness of a paper envelope,” she said in her graceful Southern drawl, nodding to the snow-sprinkled garden outside her window. “Sugarplum fairies were playing in the bushes there, but your knock scared them off.”

She gave me the smile one would give a child. I returned it, relieved to see her lightness and feel my own.

“It’s the white uniform,” I said. “Intimidating.”

Mrs. Fitzgerald’s smile touched her eyes, and she regarded me warmly, seemingly happy that I played along. This was a very good sign and one I’d not expected.

“He’s gone,” she said. “My husband?”

“Yes, Mrs. Fitzgerald, he left to tend to your daughter.”

“But he can’t really leave if we don’t drop his name, can we?” she said. “Call me Zelda.”

Her gentle voice, which had been so light just moments before, grew as sharp as an icicle. I’d meant to address her formally and as a lady of some position, but she clearly resented the shadow his name cast.

“I’d be glad to call you Zelda,” I said. “I’m glad we can cut the pretense. I’m Anna, and I’ll be your nurse while you stay with us.”

“‘Had I on earth but wishes three, the first should be my Anna,’” said Zelda. “Robert Burns. The poetry of ballet is something to consider but seems so far from this cold, weary desert.”

Her thoughts flitted through her mind and out of her lips in a tumble I had trouble following, though her words suggested her brilliance.

I needed to reassess her vital signs, and she allowed me to lead her back to the bed, but the shift from personal to professional conversation once more set the emotional barrier between us. She wouldn’t look me in the eye, but kept her gaze fixed at the window.

I slid her blouse open to listen to her heart and noted her prominent collarbones and the eczema that continued to splotch her skin. She suddenly grimaced, then broke into an enormous smile. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder at what she saw, but was greeted with only the window. Her face must have been reacting to a film of memories I could not yet access.

“Your blood pressure is much improved, as is your pulse,” I said.

She blinked and directed her large eyes at me, again unnerving me. She slid her gaze over my face and down my arms to my hands, where it lingered there a bit.

“Long, graceful fingers with short blunt nails,” she said. “The hands of a piano player. Chopin, Debussy, Beethoven.”

Patients rarely noticed me so closely, and commented on me even less, so her scrutiny felt strange, though not unpleasant.

“I do play a bit. I used to a lot,” I said, allowing my thoughts of Ben to hover at the edges of my consciousness, teasing me. I had a sudden memory of him behind me as I played, his fingers along my collarbone, his arms lifting me off the bench, my hands in his hair—

I snapped the memory shut, but a faint heat remained in my neck. She saw the flush, stood abruptly, and walked back to the window, again recoiling from me.

I was astonished by the height of her perception. It was clear that she read others well—maybe too well. Dr. Meyer would not be pleased. He often spoke to us about the emotional sensitivity of his patients to the feelings of others. I had never seen anything to this degree, though.

“Dinner will be served in the dining room at five thirty,” I said. “Your evening nurse will arrive at five o’clock to introduce herself and escort you there. Tonight you may rest and read if you’d like. Tomorrow we’ll begin counseling with Dr. Meyer and Dr. Squires. Do you have any questions for me before I leave?”

She looked at me and shook her head in the negative.

“Then good evening, Zelda,” I said. “I’m glad to meet you, and I look forward to working with you.”

She continued to stare at me and it was difficult to remove myself from her gaze, but I managed a nod and turned to leave the room.

“Play again,” she said.

I turned back to her. “Pardon me?”

“The piano. You should play again.”

I forced a smile.

“Good advice,” I said. “Thank you.”

She turned back to the window, and I locked her in on my way out.

I
t was waiting for me when I pushed open the door to my apartment. The piano, that is. Stiff, upright, accusing.

A neglected wife
, I thought.

Where have you been?
it said with its posture.

My fingers longed to touch its keys, but sound is memory, so I resisted the urge. I was of no mind to raise old ghosts.

I closed the door behind me and placed my bag on the table next to the door. I could hear pats and thumps from the girls above me, two ballerinas from the Peabody Institute. The muffled melancholy of an opera singer conjured by the point of a needle on a gramophone competed with the scrape of strings on a violin in the apartment below me, where an intense Romanian musician lived.

I had fallen in love with the building in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood on a walk after my shift at the hospital years ago, when my mother had encouraged me to find a place of my own. Its rounded, swirled, and layered woodwork, chimneys, and impressive leaded windows gave it the appearance of a Victorian dollhouse. The little colony of artists felt safe, though I
did feel a bit out of place. When I had asked the landlord whether he was sure a psychiatric nurse fit in with dancers and musicians, he laughed and said I couldn’t be a more welcome addition.

When he’d shown me the room, the piano was the only thing in it. It was covered with a sheet, but its presence was heavy. I flinched when I saw it. He must have seen, because he said, “We can have it moved if you’d like. It’s been in the house forever, though. The last one who lived here was a painter, so it never got used beyond being a prop for canvases.”

“I do play,” I’d said.

“See, you’re a good fit,” he had said. “These rooms were waiting for you.”

I thought of this as I stood by the window and stared outside. Winter’s dark muted the city and left me feeling tired to my bones. Hoping to ward off any illness that might be trying to nestle into my body, I had a bowl of chicken soup for dinner and retired early.

Sleep had long been an antagonist that thrilled as well as tormented me, so I fell into it easily, the way one would opium. The dreams were getting further apart until entire months went by without Ben or Katie in any of them, but I knew from my experiences with the Fitzgeralds that day and the emotions they’d stirred in me that someone from my past would be waiting in my dreams.

It was Ben.

It was the day at the train station when he had to return to the front. Emotion had rendered me speechless all morning. Ben’s eyes were dark and heavily lashed, and his newly shorn brown hair made him look so young. He brushed a tear away gruffly with the back of his hand.

“I’m not doing this to you,” he said. “I have to do it for them.”

This stirred me enough to shake loose the hold on my throat.

“For whom?” I said. “To them you’re just a speck on a map.
A number. To me…” I wouldn’t continue. I couldn’t say it any more.

“If I didn’t go back, I couldn’t live with myself—not with all of them fighting. I have to go back.”

I looked down the platform at the women and men kissing and embracing one another. I saw a man nearby chuck his little son under his chin. He saluted the boy, who saluted back. A brave little soldier for his mother, who struggled with an infant on her hip.

Ben’s eyes followed mine down the platform and rested on the family. We looked back at each other and at once, I understood. I finally allowed myself to hug him.

He felt so warm in his uniform. I buried myself in his neck, clean and shaved. It would soon be covered in grime and stubble. I wanted to press myself into him so I could go with him, but the departure whistle blew, and I pulled away.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

“I’ll be waiting.”

He stepped up into the train and slid into the seat nearest the window. Our lips formed
I love you
at the same moment. This made us smile. He put his hand on the glass.

Then the bomb slid through the air with a scream, destroying the train and everyone before me in a ball of fire and smoke.

I woke up, sweating, with my heart hammering in my chest.

I hadn’t had the dream in so long, and it took me some time to recover, to tell myself that he didn’t get blown up at the train station, to allow the little bird of hope, which had weakened through the years, to continue to flutter in my heart that he might still come back to me the way my daughter never could.

TWO

“I can’t continue with Mrs. Fitzgerald,” I said. Zelda had been in my care for only two weeks and already I could see that I needed to be shaken free from her.

Dr. Meyer regarded me with a sharp eye. When he looked at me I could feel him assessing all the time. I closed my mind and emotions to him as much as possible, willing a sturdy wall of confidence. He mustn’t see my unease. He allowed only those with the strongest, steadiest mental health to work in his ward, and I couldn’t bear to lose my place there.