Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Read Online Free PDF Page B

options.”
    “Just as I intended. I’ve got to run.” He grinned as he backed away. “I’ll phone you with the details!”
    As we watched him hurry up the street, Sara said, “What a lovely gesture—too bad you’ll have to disappoint him.”
    “Too bad I’ll have to disappoint Mama, you mean, when I tell her that her party is off—but I’ll make sure Scott invites her and the Judge, and maybe she can still do the cake.”
    *   *   *
    Upon hearing my news in the parlor after dessert that evening, Daddy said, “That boy obviously lacks good judgment. He hardly knows you. Where did you say he’s from?”
    I hadn’t said, and wasn’t about to. “He did three years at Princeton before leaving to join up, and now he’s serving at Camp Sheridan.”
    Mama said, “He’s enthusiastic, I’ll give him that.”
    “He is,” Tootsie agreed. She was working a needlepoint American flag; I’d teased her earlier about turning into Betsy Ross. She said, “When he phoned this morning and I told him Zelda was out, he insisted that he had to know her whereabouts. ‘It’s extremely urgent!’ he said, as if his very life depended on it.”
    “Frivolous is what he is—probably too much money and not enough sense. You see that a lot in carpetbaggers. Don’t be surprised if it comes out that his people are actually from the North.”
    I said, “ I think he’s terribly romantic, and it’s my birthday after all.”
    Daddy reached for his cognac, the single drink he would allow himself, and only on Friday nights. “Be that as it may, your mother—”
    “—understands the appeal of a handsome suitor,” she said, and smiled fondly at Daddy, which was enough to persuade him to relent.
    *   *   *
    On the night of my birthday, the party took place in one of the Club’s parlors, a high-ceilinged room lighted by a wide crystal chandelier overhead and smaller crystal sconces along the walls. For the occasion, I’d persuaded Mama to shorten a spring-green, scoop-necked silk dress so that the hemline would stop midcalf. I wore it with a new narrow-brimmed straw hat and a pair of sleek high heels like some I’d seen in Picture-Play . “Tell me more about this boy,” Mama had said while pinning up the dress, but I put her off. “You just have to meet him,” I said. “Then you’ll see.”
    I loved the Club, it being the site of so many entertaining times, but the gaslights seemed a throwback now that electric lights were being used in all the modern buildings. Its elegantly shabby Oriental rugs and its creaking floorboards and its silent, colored staff were the antithesis of modern, too, and proudly so. This was my daddy’s South, my daddy’s club—not literally, but it might as well have been.
    Now Scott stood in the center of the room, hands raised, and announced, “Ladies, gentlemen, welcome to Miss Zelda Sayre’s eighteenth birthday fête! I’m Scott Fitzgerald, your host and Miss Sayre’s most ardent admirer.”
    He looked distinguished in a nicely cut pearl-gray suit. His tie was pale blue with gray stripes. His eyes, grayish green in that light, reminded me of the rare icicle in Montgomery, or a pebbled creek’s rushing stream in early spring. They revealed his intelligence in a way that made me want to dive inside his head and swim in its depths.
    My friends cheered, and then Scott went on, “Jasper, our bartender, has created a drink in Zelda’s honor. I described her to him, and this gin-and-soda-and-apricots concoction is the result. You’ve got to try it, it’s outrageously good.”
    “How about all this?” Sara Mayfield whispered, watching Scott consult with Livye, who was at the piano. “He’s wild about you, isn’t he?”
    “I guess he is.” My chest was strangely tight.
    “This must be costing his whole month’s salary. Does he have family money?”
    “I have no idea. He went to Princeton, so I suppose there’s some.”
    “How old is he?”
    “Twenty-one,” I