Admirers Offer Prayer and Gin for Fitzgerald

Eight ancient oaks cast the shadows that dapple St. Mary’s Cemetery. It is just a palm-of-the-hand parish burial plot that sits incongruously at one of Rockville’s busiest intersections, where the Pike meets Viers Mill Road.

Yet, while cars shush ceaselessly by, there is a modicum of serenity at the top of this slow, slight slope. When F. Scott Fitzgerald buried his father here in 1931, he wrote that he found it “very friendly, leaving him there with all his relations around him.”

That was before 12 lanes of traffic converged here, before construction of the Jefferson Plaza, a sleek, black-glass office building that gives back a darkened reflection of the automotive parade before it. Fitzgerald hoped to be buried here, but though he died on Dec. 21, 1940, this was not accomplished until 1975 when church officials revised their opinions of his Catholicism. Now he, his wife Zelda and their daughter Frances (Scottie), lie beside his parents.

Fitzgerald would have been 93 two weeks ago, an anniversary that passed with as little notice as most of those before it. A few parishioners wandered over after the 10:30 Mass, a couple who run a downtown soup kitchen stopped by after the 12:15. At 2:30, a Trinity College English major demanded that her boyfriend pull over when he mentioned that they were driving by the grave.

Mostly Locals

“It’s not unusual for people to stop and say a prayer,” says Monsignor Adam Kostick, the pastor, who occasionally finds a melted candle, an empty champagne bottle, a page of Fitzgerald’s prose or a pair of white gloves atop the stone. A tour bus will stop every now and again, but mostly it is local people who come to pay homage.

“I don’t think I would have known about it if I hadn’t gone to grade school at St. Mary’s,” says Tom Puglisi, a systems consultant in his late 20s, who was one of the earliest visitors recently. “I stop by and read the last line of ‘The Great Gatsby,’ ” which is inscribed on the gray horizontal slab that covers the grave: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Puglisi says he never sees anyone at the grave. “These bushes are new, though,” he says, nodding toward two low, round hedges at the foot of the plot. “And I kind of think it is ironic that someone left a bottle of gin behind the headstone.”

The bottle is flat and not so wide that it wouldn’t fit into a gentleman’s suit coat pocket. There is just enough left to get drunk on if you took it down in quick gulps.

The city of Rockville hasn’t made much effort to capitalize on the grave site, perhaps because Fitzgerald, who was originally interred in Rockville Union Cemetery, was associated with the area only in death. There is an F. Scott Fitzgerald Triangle and an F. Scott Fitzgerald Theater, the former having previously commemorated a now-departed Dodge dealership. Mostly though, the writer’s name comes up at the teeming intersection, in much the way John Hinckley’s name comes up near the Washington Hilton.

“It’s sort of part of local folklore,” says Paul Magno, a gentle man in his mid-30s, who lived in Rockville before opening the Zacchaeus Community Kitchen in Washington nearby.

“I’m actually quite fond of Zelda,” says Magno’s wife, Zacchaeus co-founder Marcia Timmel. “When I was young I had theatrical aspirations, and people like Zelda and Isadora Duncan and Tallulah Bankhead really spoke to that part of me that wanted to be a gypsy.

“I used to act summer stock in Asheville, N.C., and we hung out at the Grove Park Inn. That was where he stayed when he came down to visit Zelda after she entered the sanitarium.”

Richard Ross of Silver Spring, Md., mentioned the writer’s name as he shot up Viers Mill Road and found himself escorting Colleen English, the Trinity English major, through the thick grass of the cemetery. English says many of her instructors think Fitzgerald is overrated. “So I don’t really study him,” she says. “I just read him on my own. I particularly like the short stories. I just like his writing style.”

So does Laurie Murphy, a high school student from Gaithersburg. “I like “Gatsby,’ ” she says. “I had to read it in school. Then I ended up liking it. I was kind of surprised.”