If F. Scott Fitzgerald Had Married Ginevra King Instead of Zelda Sayre

Midsummer sunlight dappled the afternoon lawns like gold leaf spilled from a chapel scaffolding, a rare extravagance in this suburban land of comfortable near-affluence. The man on the porch watched as three children pursued their games from right to left and back again, oblivious to lines of property or propriety. It was hard to imagine that somewhere, an armistice had been signed that would redefine the Old World and anoint the New; the second war to end all wars, perhaps this time for good—but such things were distant indeed.

Here in St. Paul, more immediate matters beckoned. "A cocktail with the mail, darling?" He glanced up and smiled at once, deeply. The lioness in autumn, her claws ever as sharp but retracted, never domesticated but forever surrendered to the one who had tamed her.

"Perhaps just a lemonade," Scott replied. "You know daytime drinking makes me fuzzy, and I'm hoping to attend to the broker's statements yet before dinner. Mustn't let those things pile up." His thoughts went briefly to the tidy pile on the corner of the oaken desk in the study, not the finest room but his favorite in this, the largest house on the block by half, and even then more modest by far than might have been merited.

"Ever the responsible one," Ginevra trilled, and they laughed together, a carillon that resounded long after she'd taken a seat beside him and passed him the day's correspondence.

Scott riffled the assorted envelopes like a gambler little concerned with losing spreading his cards. "Here's one from Perkins at Scribner." Now his brow furrowed ever so slightly, betraying the trace of a care as he scanned the dense typescript. "Says the latest draft of 'An American Idyll' still lacks tension."

"Oh poo," with a dismissive clatter of ice. "Why must it always be tragedy and epic grandeur with that one?"

He smiled. "Maybe if I give Buck a dead wife or a sick child or something. Darken it up a little. Or make him a drunk—that always works for O'Hara."

"You know what I think. Selznick would give his right arm to have you back in Hollywood. 'Follies of 1937' is still paying his cigar bills, and you know people would eat up another 'Smiling Detective' picture right about now, what with the fighting over and all."

"I wouldn't even have to go West. I could just mail it in from here," Scott murmured, already distracted by the return to the yard of the frolicking pack, the youngest and oldest his own, the one in the middle belonging to the Communist down the street. He wondered again whether he minded, and decided as always that he didn't. Half the old Princeton crowd had gone Red lately anyway, even Bunny Wilson, who'd once seemed so sensible—but Scott hardly knew him since he'd taken up with that questionable Russkie who taught English at Wellesley. Never mind—it would pass soon enough, like an ill-considered flirtation forgotten even before the hangover had lifted from the petulant bender that had sparked it in the first place.

Ginevra, watching as well the warm-blooded manifestation of their union at play, swirled her now-drained glass before taking a melting cube into her warm mouth with an ease that spoke of the talents never far from either of their minds. "You know what I think. You're too good for that novelizing business anyway. Just the other day I was reading about some poor man it drove to suicide, an American living in Paris. One of those Modernists—Hemington or something. Just never got his big break."

"More where that came from," Scott replied absently, his mind now on the 'Smiling Detective' story suddenly taking shape—the first and third acts already taken care of, only a few second act complications to toss in. Maybe he'd brew a pot of coffee after dinner ... but it would keep until tomorrow. He turned to face his wife just before she turned to him, catching the instant in which she'd thought to do so, reading the frankly uncomposed tenderness in her rose-shadowed cheeks and loving cup lips.

At the point of the moment about to happen, the mood was intercepted but not broken by the thundering of yet school-shoed feet on the porch steps. "Father!" cried Marjorie, throwing herself in his lap. "Mother!" said her older brother at the same time, with only a trace of a twelve-year-old's self-consciousness, simultaneously relishing his last season of boyish abandon before adolescence would dictate reserve. A flurry of reckless grass-stained affection and they were gone again.

Scott turned to his bride, no longer young but eternally new. "I can't imagine a happier life," she blurted, her cheeks suddenly reddening as if reflecting the first salvo of Independence Day fireworks.

"I was just thinking the same thing," said Scott. "I love you, Ginevra."

"I love you too, Scott."

They pulled closer together, and their eyes drifted half-closed as the light slowly faded in a twinkling of fireflies and crickets, all the world's wonder and optimism gathered here within the warmly worn paint-faded porch. For here in this neighborhood of nothing to prove, none ever mourned the stories unwritten, and none but a fool would begrudge the contentment that stayed the hand. And somewhere in the southland three years hence, an asylum fire claims one soul less.