Nonfiction by William Sterling Walker
art by Peachboy
A Fitzgerald Weekend
William Sterling Walker
It may not have been, as I had assumed, my friend and fellow New Orleanian, Vance Philip Hedderel, who had coined the term “graving”—the high school practice centered around haunting cemeteries (particularly on Halloween night) with a group of like-minded, macabre folk to play, drink, prank and generally scare the bejesus out of each other. After all Vance and I are enthusiastic drinkers and we love cemeteries. Instead, it may have been my late friend, Donald Freeman, who told me he used to sit and smoke pot in the Seventies on a park bench in the Jewish section of the Natchez City Cemetery, a bluff which afforded a spectacular view south to a bend in the Mississippi River called Under The Hill where he once served cocktails at the notorious, eponymous Saloon.
In any case, often when I visit Vance in Arlington, Virginia, we go on a graving expedition of some sort. On a recent weekend, I accompanied Vance to see our mutual friend, the vocalist/actress Barbara Papendorp, perform in what turned out to be a splendid production mounted by The Rainbow Theater Project at the DC Arts Center of Clothes For A Summer Hotel, a memory play by Tennessee Williams from 1980 about F. Scott Key Fitzgerald’s last visit to Zelda Fitzgerald at a North Carolina sanitarium. Clothes is the most lyrical of Williams’s late plays and is a personal favorite. Little performed now and undeservedly so, it was his last play produced on Broadway in Williams’ lifetime, and I was excited to see it. In fact, this production was more innovative and intimate than the production I saw in New York in February of 2010.
Unbeknownst to me, Vance had devised a commemorative graving expedition to celebrate our Fitzgerald weekend and that morning on a very cloudy and gray Saturday—the perfect day for a cemetery visit—he announced our pilgrimage and packed a picnic of pre-mixed cocktails in Bonne Maman jam jars (recycling) for the short-ish drive to Rockville, Maryland. We easily found coordinates for Old St. Mary’s Cemetery [(39° 4′ 56″ N, 77° 8′ 44″ W) and arrived around noon. We located the Fitzgeralds’ grave site, as it was surrounded by ancient tombstones of members of the Scott and Key clans (though not Frances Scott Key who is buried in Frederick, Maryland).
And there we toasted to Scott, Zelda, and their daughter, Scotty, who is buried in an adjacent grave. Scott’s favorite liquor was gin. Vance had chosen for us an individually batched and bottle-numbered, Ransom Old Tom Gin (88 proof), a darling of the craft cocktail craze. Apart from its taste, Vance’s choice turned out to be an excellent and appropriate one, as this gin’s distillation was conceived by mixologist and historian, David Wondrich, as a recreation of the Old Tom Gins beginning from nearly two centuries ago and popular until Prohibition. Ransom is definitely not a London dry gin. Rather, Ransom is aged in wine casks which impart a delicate topaz color and has a very junipery taste, with lots of spice notes. You can almost smell the essence of Dorothy Parker in every sip. It’s a perfect gin for pre-Prohibition classic cocktails like the Tom Collins.
Scott Fitzgerald enjoyed his gin with soda and lime and so did we. We carried a bottle of Pellegrino out to the gravesite, and before toasting, we topped off each of our jam jars with a lime slice, a ball of ice, and achingly chilled gin with a splash of soda.
We were not the only gentlemen callers for the Fitzgeralds of Rockvillle. On that Saturday, we found the following offerings left for them on the marble slab engraved with the last sentence from The Great Gatsby: a bottle of Bombay Gin (London Dry), a bottle of Gibson’s Gin (also London Dry), a rhinestone broach, seven pennies and two Eisenhower silver dollars (in plastic sleeves), potted plants and plastic flowers, a pair of men’s reading glasses, assorted lipsticks, red pens and yellow highlighters, and a roll of Smarties candy.
According to Wikipedia, “[a]t the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church [had] denied the family's request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic Saint Mary's Cemetery. . . . Fitzgerald was instead buried at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald died in 1948, in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina, she was originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. . . . In 1975, their daughter Scottie successfully petitioned to have the earlier decision revisited and her parents' remains were moved to the family plot in Saint Mary's.”
As I read this to Vance in the car as he drove us to Adams Morgan to see the performance, I thought of Don, not only because he would have appreciated our visit to the Fitzgeralds’ graves. He, too, loved to drink and was an enthusiastic visitor of cemeteries. In 1989, when Don died of AIDs-related pneumonia in New Orleans at age of 35, the rector of his home Episcopal church in Natchez, in honor Don’s service as a tenor in the choir, invited the family to bury Don’s cremains in a beautiful, contemplative spot in Trinity Church’s inner courtyard. But shortly after his interment, the trustees of the church objected and ordered the rector to have him disinterred. He was reburied later the same month in the Episcopal section of Natchez City Cemetery.
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
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William Sterling Walker’s stories have been anthologized in Best American Gay Fiction 2, Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, and With: New Gay Fiction. His debut collection of short stories, Desire: Tales from New Orleans, was a Lambda Literary finalist.