Read Careless People for Free Online Page B

give her a bath, [Fitz] began to become a little worried and even huffy.”
    If there was no other way to add a bit of fun to the proceedings, Zelda was reportedly quite willing to take off her clothes. During their honeymoon, Zelda and Scott went to the
Follies
and the
Scandals
, and, moved perhaps by a spirit of homage to such titles, insisted on laughing loudly at the wrong parts and once began undressing in their seats. The writer Carl Van Vechten, whom they met that autumn, became very fond of both Fitzgeralds, but he felt a special affection for Zelda: “She was an original. Scott was not a wisecracker like Zelda. Why, she tore up the pavements with sly remarks.” Scott “was nasty when he was drunk, but sober he was a charming man, very good looking, you know, beautiful almost. But they both drank a lot—we all did, but they were excessive.” Fitzgerald was also known for his truculence when drunk. Of the Playboy Ball in April 1923 Wilson remarked: “Fitz blew up drunk, as usual, early in the evening and knocked Pat Kearny unconscious in the lavatory.” As H. L. Mencken observed: “Unfortunately, liquor sets him wild and he is apt, when drunk, to knock over a dinner table, or run his automobile into a bank building.”
    At the beginning of the Fitzgeralds’ marriage Alec McKaig recorded in his diaries their reaction to some well-meant advice: “Suggested to Scott and Zelda they save—they laughed at me. Scott said—to go through the terrible toil of writing man must have belief his writings will be eagerly bought forever. Terrific party with two Fitz . . .” A month later McKaig tried again to urge caution: “Evening at Fitz. Fitz and I argued with Zelda about notoriety they are getting through being so publicly and spectacularlydrunk. Zelda wants to live life of an ‘extravagant.’” After a year of marriage, Zelda became pregnant and they moved back to St. Paul to avoid bringing a baby “into all that glamor and loneliness” in Manhattan. By January 1922 Fitz was writing to Edmund Wilson that he was “bored as hell” in the Midwest; nine months later, they were returning to New York.
    Fitzgerald was writing a play that he was sure would make their fortune, a satire of America’s accelerating faith in success stories; it made sense to be near Broadway producers to try to get it staged. Scott and Zelda told each other that they were ready to settle down and be responsible. Their assurance of this intention was that they would stop going out with members of the opposite sex to make each other jealous. With this praiseworthy plan for married life, Scott was confident he could do some serious work at last. His latest collection of short stories,
Tales of the Jazz Age
, would be published by Scribner’s in a few days, on Friday, September 22. And meanwhile Fitzgerald thought he might also get to work on the new, extraordinary, beautiful, simple, intricately patterned novel he had promised Perkins to write.

    T hroughout the week following the discovery of their bodies, details emerged daily about the murder of Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills. Hall had married a wealthy woman from South Carolina whom the
Times
said had inherited a fortune of a million dollars from her mother. Frances Stevens Hall had two brothers, one of whom, Willie Stevens, lived with her and the rector, and was locally known to be “eccentric.” Eleanor Mills, “a slight and pretty woman,” was ten years younger than Edward Hall. Their bodies had been discovered early Saturday morning by a couple the
Times
reported as “two children.” On the night of the murder, a woman in alight-gray polo coat had been seen entering the Hall mansion in the small hours, a detail made much of in the press. Soon Mrs. Hall admitted that she had been out looking for her husband the night he disappeared, and had been wearing just such a coat: “