Mrs. Hemingway (11 page)

“He got blind to drown out Mother's voice. God knows I would have done the same.” Ernest paddles at the water then looks up at his studio, as if the answer might lie in his work, or his ability to write through it. “All that worrying about money. Why not ask me for help?”

“There were so many years when you didn't have a dime.”

“He knew you did. Your family could have bailed him out of life's biggest fixes.”

“Please.” Fife rolls onto her back to feel the sun on her. She won't tolerate his habitual carping about her family's money. It doesn't make any sense, not when he feels no guilt about using great bags of it. “There's no one to blame. It's just sad. That's all.”

The water gives a sucking noise as Ernest pulls himself up to the pool edge. “I don't think she should come. Now's not a good time.” He wraps himself in a towel and wetly pads to the kitchen. The sound of chopping ice comes from inside the house. Two p.m. Cocktail hour.

 • • • 

When he returned from his father's funeral a decade ago, Ernest spent his evenings working. Sometimes, when Fife went to his study with a gin and tonic at the end of the day, she caught him looking at the page with so much sadness that he might have been staring at his father's dead face. To have died in such a manner. To be the son of a suicide; it seemed to dispossess Ernest of the idea of himself. He would take the drink and then give her the half smile he used when it was only just the two of them. But his mind was another place altogether.

A package arrived some time after Ernest's return. Their address was written in a firm Midwestern hand. Wrapped in brown paper with his mother's schlocky bows, the package sat in the den for days. After some time Fife saw the box's base was wet, a dreadful smell coming from it. He had to either open it or throw it away, she said, but it could not remain in here forever.

When the package was finally opened, they found the source of the stink. Ernest lifted a dripping chocolate cake from the packet, its icing blued with mold. He raced with it into the kitchen, dropping great chunks of it as he went. But an altogether different object had been warming under the cake this past week.

Ernest read the note aloud. “‘You said you wanted it, so here it is. For you and Pauline. Enjoy. From your loving mother, Grace Hemingway.' I guess she meant the cake.” Ernest picked up the handle of a gun. “Not this.” It was a Civil War handgun: a Smith and Wesson. Mold furred the trigger that had last held his father's finger.

“It stinks,” he said. And he went back to the kitchen to clean the gun of Grace's cake.

Fife wonders where he has put that gun, where it sits in Ernest's collection of arms. It would look small next to the long shots that killed bison, lion, elk; this tiny thing that had killed his father.

 • • • 

In the shadows, in the garden, the scent of citrus spills. Dusk is coming. She follows the smell of lemons into the kitchen. The gin and tonics stand blue on the countertop. She hears him quickly closing a drawer in the dining room.

“You're up,” he says, coming into the room with his edgy grin. “I've already sunk a couple of these. Post meridiem. Now we can break out the strong stuff!” He chases the ice cubes in the glass with a long spoon.

Out in the hall is his fishing gear: rods, the live-fish box, and the hat he likes to wear on
Pilar
. He takes a drink then says, as if there hadn't been a break in their conversation: “Hadley's father shot himself as well, you know.”

“I know,” she says, following him back into the dining room, placing her hand, cold from the iced drink, on his neck.

“She was only thirteen. Put the gun behind his ear while still in his nightshirt. We are a cursed generation. All these children without their fathers.”

He holds her hand against him.

“You're not a child anymore, Ernest. You're a father now. So,” she says, thinking if she can steer his thoughts back to work she'll be able to snap him from this dangerous melancholy, “tell me about this play.” She lays out a spread for them, of hams, cheeses, grapes, and pineapple. They drink their cocktails and then one more each as Ernest tells her about his character, stuck in Madrid, faced with a rather large decision to make.

Hadley said she would commit to a divorce if they agreed to one hundred days of separation. On day seventeen of her exile, Fife found herself in the family car being driven back to her old home. Mrs. Pfeiffer had begun her spiel on the station platform, only pausing to direct the driver to her daughter's trunks. On the drive home her mother had really found her stride: Fife must, at all costs, avoid sundering a union God Himself had made. Hellfire and brimstone were waiting for her in the Ever After if she would insist on this path. “Your mother will wear you down,” Ernest had warned, begging her to spend Hadley's required exile elsewhere. “You won't come back to me and then I'll be all alone.” Fife had only laughed at the absurd-ity of that notion.

She tried to keep busy: learning Spanish and keeping up her French and doing exercises to keep herself toned. On day zero she was determined that Ernest would think her more beautiful than ever before. She walked around the town and cycled when she could, anything to avoid her mother.

Fife tormented herself with how easily Ernest might run into Hadley in Paris, stay on at their apartment for a glass of wine, play with Bumby, be entreated into staying the night . . . and then the rest of his lifetime. She was banned from seeing Ernest, but Ernest was not banned from seeing Hadley. Maybe his wife had been far more cunning than either of them had ever given her credit for. Jinny was her eyes and ears in Paris. She told her sister to see Ernest as much as she could.

Late into the separation Fife took her old bicycle onto the mud roads to the west. Outside, she saw the trees only as swatches of color, the sky gray. All morning she had felt wretched. Her mother's words accompanied each turn of the bicycle wheel:
You have broken a home. You have trespassed against God. You have sinned.
In the cotton fields she tried to out-pedal her mother's admonishments but they would not go away.
Marry Ernest and you cannot pay back the price of this sin.
She rode through the town square, past the liquor store where she and Jinny used to flirt with the owner for thimblefuls of rye.
Let Ernest be a father to his child and a husband to his wife.
Back home she abandoned the bike at the porch.

Each room in the house that afternoon was unlit and the air hung motionless. “Mother?” She checked the chapel—often she might be found offering a daytime devotional—but her mother wasn't there. No noise could be heard in the rest of the house.

Shadows settled on her things in her room. It was as if someone had been going through her possessions. In the sewing room a reading lamp was still switched on. On the table where her mother kept her tapestries was one of Ernest's books:
The Sun Also Rises.
The book was open and facedown, but had not been started. Instead, it was creased at the dedication page.
This book is for Hadley and for John Hadley Nicanor.
Little Bumby's real name.

Outside, the sage brushed against the boarding. A moth was in the reading lamp, its wings fluttering against the soft cloth shade. Fife held on to Ernest's book, and the moth beat its wings faster. It sounded like blood beating in her ears. Above her mother's sewing things there was a portrait of the Virgin and Child: a look of fierce calm in Mary's eyes.

For Hadley and for John Hadley Nicanor
.

Fife then regarded herself with terrific shame. All summer they had acted horribly, as if only the three of them were involved. But what was going to happen to Bumby?

Her mother must have heard her sobbing because minutes later she hurried into the room and held her as she wept. Fife felt heartsick for everything and everyone: herself, Ernest, Hadley, Bumby. She said
I can't, I can't, I can't, Mama, I love him, I love him, please, please don't make me.
She could feel how she shook in her mother's firm embrace, as if she were experiencing a delirium.

From then on, Fife woke with a quiet horror of herself. Even the sight of a feather on her mother's church hat reminded her of the gentle menace of that dress. For days she did not write to Ernest but stayed in bed, knowing what she had to do, and thinking at the same time how awful it was to do it. She thought about all the days at
Vogue
when she went home instead of seeing the Hemingways: how miserable those nights were. And now she would have to stay in Piggott and marry some man from the country club. The portrait of the Virgin now hung above the bedroom bureau. Mary and the baby stared at her, a vigil for the penitent. Her mother was right. But how could she go on living without him?

When she wrote to Ernest now the words were only about Hadley: her kind open face, how savage they had been, the sheer lunacy of Antibes. She remembered with revulsion how she had contemplated slipping between the sheets with them in their marriage bed. Oh, Europe had deviled the lot of them!

But if Fife could stay in America, perhaps it wasn't too late. If she never saw Ernest Hemingway again, she thought, she might not do the devil's work. Still, she crossed out Hadley's hundred days on the calendar: fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six . . . The Virgin and Child stared down at her. Reproach was in her eyes.

 • • • 

A telegram arrived on day fifty-five.
HADLEY HAS CALLED OFF EXILE STOP WHEN CAN I EXPECT YOU? EH
. In his subsequent letter Ernest explained Hadley had gone to Chartres to do some thinking and had decided to cancel the separation. Divorce proceedings were already set in motion; Fife should come back to Paris as soon as she could. This was, Ernest said, entirely what Hadley wanted.

Knowing that it had been Hadley's decision, Fife's shame lifted, quickly and easily. She was going back to France and to home. She was going back to marry Ernest.

Thank God, Fife thought, for Chartres cathedral.

When she saw him again, at the port of Boulogne, she said she would never leave his side again for the rest of their lives. Only later did she wish he might have promised the same.

In the first week of Ernest's return Fife scours the gossip columns. She looks for a “bust-up between our seasoned Spanish reporter and a girl correspondent.” She looks for the story that says the screeching heard from one room in their hotel “was said to be louder than the bombs that fell on Barcelona that day.” The newspapers would never break this story—but sometimes the private lives of celebrities were hinted at, glossed over. Fife looks for the scrappiest piece of gossip—anything to confirm his relationship with Martha is over. There's nothing. This must be a good thing, she decides. Already, this week, she treats Ernest's infidelity with positive retrospection—Martha was just a passing infatuation. Still, she calls Sara Murphy.

Sara's voice sounds even richer on the telephone than it does in person; she has the voice of a movie star. Fife imagines she might be lounging on a divan drinking Scotch and wearing a man's housecoat. In another room Gerald would be painting. Sara has always been as close to her idea of glamour as any of her friends.

“How's Ernest?” Sara asks. “Is he back?”

“He came back Tuesday.”

“Any concussions? Gunshot wounds? Did he blast off his toes and not even realize?” Fife tells her he's completely well. “Really, I have never met anyone so accident-prone. He's always getting himself into these damned scrapes.”

“He's fine. In fact, he's quite the changed man.”

Fife looks into the living room to check Ernest is out of earshot. He is the type of man who can be involved in one conversation and be monitoring another across the table as well. “He's more than fine, actually. He's come back with a sense of . . . I don't know . . . interest, really. As if he's broken it off in Spain.”

“And did he?”

“For all I knew I thought he was out there with
her
. But he's come back with a new . . . ardor. He's so attentive and sweet. Fetching me breakfast in the morning and working hard in the days. He keeps on gazing at the palms as if they mean something. He won't leave me alone. It's magical.”

There is a stiff silence on the other end of the line, then Sara says: “What did he say? When you asked him?”

“About what?”

“If he's called it off with Martha.”

It's irrational, she knows, but she finds it distasteful that her friend would mention this woman to her by name. “I haven't
asked
him if things are
off
with her.”

“Broach it with him then.”

“If we did it would ruin the whole—” Fife was going to say illusion. But it's not illusory, despite what Sara says. “It's like he's come back to repair us.”

Another pause. Is this what she called her friend for? To be disabused of hope? Perhaps Fife was indeed looking for the gallows, and Sara is wheeling out the stocks.

Her friend says: “You
have
to make sure Martha is out of the picture.”

Fife wants to scream. She wants to tell Sara how the brush of a cat's coat against her leg last week only reminded her of how little she's been touched.

“You can't get into this if you're not sure she's out of it. I'm not saying this to hurt you. I'm saying it's going to feel a thousand times worse because Ernest has given you cause to hope. Then what will you do? When he goes back to her?”

Sara is wrong. She is sure of it. Ernest has returned to her from Marthaland.

“It won't happen again. I know it.”

Fife says she'll call them back to confirm details for next weekend. “Don't forget the cereal boxes,” she says, but rather sadly, as if she weren't talking about preparations for a party. Fife replaces the earpiece to the telephone and looks at the receiver nervously, as if it's likely to shape-shift into something beastly and alive.