Read Call Me Zelda Online

Authors: Erika Robuck

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical

Call Me Zelda (6 page)

BOOK: Call Me Zelda
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My mom sucked in her breath and shook her head. “A terrible shame.”

“What’s a shame, Janie?” asked my father as he walked into the room wearing his red flannel jacket and wiping his hands on a brown towel. His fair gray hair was wispy from the breeze.

“Anna was just telling me that Zelda Fitzgerald, the famous writer’s wife, is at the Phipps Clinic!”

“Which writer?” he asked. “The one who wrote that
Sun Rises
book?”

“No, Paddy, the man with the flapper wife.”

“Oh,” he said, clearly unimpressed and uninformed as to whom exactly we were talking about. He gave me a kiss on the cheek.

“Your nose is cold,” I said. “How long have you been out in that shed?”

“He wants the chimes ready for Spring Fest,” said my mother.

My father had been a boilermaker for many years, and in his retirement he now devoted his time to making copper wind chimes. It was a hobby he’d picked up from his father but couldn’t devote his full attention to until now. I always associated the sober, beautiful sounds of wind chimes with my family home. Their music sat behind many days of beauty and heartbreak in my life. I couldn’t help but think of Katie, and rubbed my temples.

“Are you okay?” asked my dad.

“Is it a headache?” asked my mother.

“No, I’m fine,” I said. “I guess I just need some coffee.”

They met each other’s concerned gazes and then looked back at me. My mother seemed to want to probe the matter further, but my father clapped his hands and announced that it was snack time. She was clearly uneasy, but resigned herself to dropping the subject.

“Perfect,” she said. “And then I’ll let Anna read Peter’s letter from Rome so she can hear the good news.”

W
ith my mother resting for the afternoon and my father at the market picking up ingredients for dinner, I pulled on my boots and opened the door to the backyard. I wanted some time in the wind shed, as we called it, before the bustle of evening dinner preparations. The ground was muddy from the melting snow, and the air smelled fresh. I stuffed my hands in my pockets, feeling the sharp edges of Peter’s letter.

I enjoyed the way my boots stuck in the icy mud. They made a pleasant squelching sound over the patter of the thaw dribbling
from the trees and running into the little streams that threaded through the woods. The sounds reminded me of my childhood—a happy childhood—spent amidst the tulip poplars and maples with Peter trailing me on our adventures. They also reminded me of how Katie had hopped along the paths, chattering like a finch. I could almost see her small form leading me to the wind shed.

Just shouting distance from the house, the wind shed was an old barn my father had converted to a workroom. As one walked nearer to it, the worn dirt path from a thousand trips my father made back and forth turned to oyster shells we’d collected from our summer visits to Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

The barn itself was dark brown and had two large doors directly across from each other that my father left open most of the time to create a wind tunnel. It was along the beams running from one doorway of the barn to the other that he hung his wind chimes, which played perpetual scales in response to the breezes blowing through the doors.

I felt my shoulders relax as I drew nearer and walked under them, and thought that Zelda and our patients would benefit from the healing sounds of the chimes. Perhaps I’d bring some back to the clinic.

My father had left the woodstove burning for me. I sat on the old upholstered chair next to it and fished Peter’s letter from my pocket.

February 5, 1932
Dear Mom & Dad,
Buona sera!
The bells of St. Peter’s are announcing the evening with so much drama and romance I could
almost trade in my collar for a girl to kiss. But not for now. I have wonderful news about my future assignment that I’ve known about for some time but could not share until the official announcement.
The Archdiocese of Baltimore has approved my installation at the Baltimore Cathedral! I’m overwhelmed with happiness to be so close to you and to Anna, because I love you all and because I love your cooking, and hope to be fat as Friar Tuck by the fall on soda bread, corned beef, and cabbage.
In all seriousness, before I return I’ll be on a pilgrimage to San Giovanni Rotondo, where I hope to meet the holy man, Padre Pio. The Vatican issued an official decree not to revere him as many around him have done due to his nonconformity, but you know authority telling me not to do something only hastens the time in which I do it. I’ve written to my dear friend Aldo, who lives there, and he has assured me the man is no grifter. At the very least I’d like the good padre to hear my confession and hope some of his reverence wears off on me, since, as you well know, irreverence is my one and only deficit of character.
I can hardly wait to see you all, and I pray for your well-being daily. I don’t want to alarm you, but I’ve had some recent bad dreams about Anna, and I sincerely hope she is in a good emotional state. Please kiss her for me and tell her
that her pesky younger brother will be home soon to remind her what a troublemaker she used to be and how I’d like to see a bit of that again.
Con affetto,
Pietro

I was more than a little troubled by his words. I tried to mute my worry by concentrating on my happiness over his return to Baltimore. I hadn’t seen him since Christmas of 1930, and felt his absence acutely. To have him so near would be a great gift to us all.

The barn was suddenly filled with darkness from a cloud passing over the sun, and the chimes began to clang in a frenzy from a passing wind. The woodstove could not compete with the sudden return of winter elements, and I was no longer comfortable in the shed. I stood and walked to the doorway facing the woods and saw that it was not a single cloud, but a bank of clouds that threatened winter rain. I shoved Peter’s letter into my pocket and hurried back to the house.

A
fter dinner, I sat by the fire with my parents talking of Peter’s good news. We all avoided the closing of his letter and what it implied, and instead focused on how happy we were that he was coming home.

“I see that even the influence of the Holy See has not tamed your brother,” my mother said with a mixture of exasperation and pride. “I hoped his study in Rome would…sober him a little.”

“God likes him crazy,” my dad said, much to my amusement. “Otherwise he woulda made him serious.”

“They must think highly of him to install him in such an
important parish,” I said. “Peter will probably end up pope one day.”

The room was quiet for a moment, but then we all had a good laugh. Peter dated girls every summer he was home from the seminary to “get it out of his system.” He smoked. He drank. He loved to dance. He seemed far more youthful than his thirty-two years, though he could be profoundly spiritual and insightful.

“We should introduce him to Zelda,” said my mother. “I bet he could help her.”

“He’d probably encourage the behaviors that led to her downfall,” I said. “I would be interested to hear what he has to think.”

“His theory would be outlandish, for sure,” said Mother, “but probably accurate.”

“Amen to that,” said my father.

We all sat watching the fire burn out, and I noticed my mother starting to nod off. My father saw her too. He looked at her with such tenderness that I felt a wave of emotion I had difficulty containing.

“Dad, would you like me to help you get her to bed?”

“No, honey,” he said. “I’ll just sit here with her for a bit longer. She’ll wake in a little while and then I’ll take her.”

He spoke from experience.

“Well, good night, then,” I said.

I walked down the hall, running my hand along the faded Sears, Roebuck flowered wallpaper, to the room that had been mine as a girl. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow, but I did not sleep the peaceful sleep of my youth. Instead I dreamed that Zelda called for me over and over in the night from her room at the clinic, and Peter called for me from a dormitory in Rome, and my mother called for me from down the hallway, and
Katie called me from the wind shed, and Ben called to me but I didn’t know where he was.

T
he flickering light of a dying bulb inside the apartment of the Romanian violinist tapped its Morse code on the sidewalk outside of my building. I started up the front stairs as Lincoln drove off, but felt too anxious to go inside and shut myself in my apartment for the night. I thought a quick walk around the block before the darkness really set in would calm my nerves.

I’d always been one with a vivid and morbid imagination, which I attributed to the profusion of Poe tales my mother had read to me and Peter as children. I enjoyed visiting Poe’s grave several blocks away and fancied myself connected to the dead writer the way Peter probably felt connected to his dead saints. I did not worship Poe, only imagined I saw him around street corners, cemetery gates, and in and out of the stacks at the Enoch Pratt Free Library.

The street had a heavy Poe sensibility about it that night in the winter dark, and more than once I considered turning back. My eyes scanned the sidewalks and avenues, seeking students or symphonygoers, Fords or trolley cars, but except for the smell of smoke from fires burning in row house chimneys, the city seemed vacant.

I pulled my coat close around me and noticed the weight from my overnight bag and pocketbook heavy on my shoulder. I shifted them to the other shoulder and turned down Madison Street. I hesitated a bit and stepped slowly over the uneven cobblestones. Mr. Poe would have made note of the fog that seeped into the alleyways and doorways in the yellow glow of the street lamps. I suddenly felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand.

It made no sense to turn back, because I was equally as far
from my apartment on the other side of the block. I continued walking, but at a quicker pace. The wind blew with great intensity through the streets between the buildings, and I cursed myself for my poor judgment.

The sound of footsteps behind me interrupted my thoughts. I stopped and turned my head, but all I saw was the pattern of low light and deep shadows between the lampposts. Did I see movement in the pool of darkness at the corner? It was most likely a rat. They seemed to be getting fatter as the depressed city grew thinner.

Whether it was a rat or not, I wanted to get home. A distant siren wailed from another neighborhood, sending chills up my arms. Out of instinct, I made the sign of the cross over myself as my mother taught us, to pray for those in danger. As the siren died, I heard footsteps again. This time I was sure.

My heart began pounding in my chest. I hesitated a moment, but I did not want to turn around again. Fortunately, I was nearing the corner to the last section of block before my street. I increased my pace but didn’t run. Hopefully it was just someone out for an evening stroll.

In the winter.

At night.

The footsteps also quickened.

BOOK: Call Me Zelda
8.89Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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