8
PARTISAN REVIEW
familiar Montgomery and the Judge's protection must have taken
considerable courage.
How unequipped she was to cope with New York was evident the
moment she arrived; she got off the train at the Pennsylvania Station
in white tennis shoes and a white sweater and skirt which set off by
contrast her high southern rouging- an incongruous and brave
figure. Fitzgerald, sensitive as always to such things, was appalled by
her appearance and immediately called in an expert, his old St. Paul
friend, Marie Hersey, who was in school in New York. "My God,
Marie," he said to her in an anguish of social distress, "You've got
to help me! Zelda wants to buy nothing but frills and furbelows and
you can't go around New York in that kind of thing; you go shopping
with her." So Marie went shopping with Zelda and tactfully guided
her to a Patou suit. "There was a rippling sun along Fifth Avenue
the day it was bought," Zelda remembered fifteen years later, "and
it seemed very odd to be charging things to Scott Fitzgerald. The
thing was to look like Justine Johnson at the time and it still seems
a fine way to have looked. The shopper was two days out of Alabama.
From the shop we went to tea in the Plaza Grill."
On April 3rd they were married in the rectory of St. Patrick's
cathedral; Ludlow Fowler, one of Fitzgerald's college friends, and
Zelda's sister Rosalind were the only others present. After the cere–
mony the priest said to them: "You be a good Episcopalian, Zelda,
and, Scott, you be a good Catholic, and you'll get along fine." It
was, Fitzgerald always remembered wryly, the last advice he ever had
from a priest. During their honeymoon they lived in their "rooms"
at the Biltmore. They went to
Enter Madame
"and the actors were
cross because our tickets were in the front row and we laughed ap–
preciatively at the wrong places and uproariously at the jokes we made
up as the show went along." They went to the midnight roof and
"thought the man was real who straggled into the show dressed like a
student and very convincingly got himself thrown out." Ludlow Fowler
had them to dinner and Zelda, who had never seen a house with a
private elevator, asked him which floor his apartment was on.
There were many parties, and then, for the week-end of April
25, they went down to Princeton to chaperone the house-party at
Cottage Club. It was a case of the halt leading the blind, and the halt
got into the serious trouble- how much is not even yet entirely clear.
