Mrs. Hemingway (13 page)

Ernest continues with his own story upstairs. She goes back inside to get the second bedroom ready for the Murphys.

 • • • 

In the boys' room Fife throws Ernest's clothes in the laundry, amazed at the stink. Shirt after shirt comes up from the suitcases like nets of fish. Loose paper is everywhere, including one of her telegrams:
Come back darling, the studio is ready and there's an abundance of food
. Spare pens, a gas mask, a newspaper from when he'd docked in New York. A bottle of whiskey rolls across the floor, not a drop left. At the bottom there's a wrapped package from one of her favorite boutiques. A gift! What a return to form this is for Ernest.

Inside the wrapping paper is a blue dress, quite lovely, with two pockets on the lap and cross-stitch on the front. Really, the happiness of the past week, it's almost outrageous. She's never felt so high—aside, perhaps, from the time they were sneaking about Paris, when she would wait for the touch of his hand below the table at a dinner party. It had seemed, to Fife, as if Hadley saw Ernest as an astonishingly amusing party guest, but had never really expected him to stay long past dessert. It was as if Hadley had never felt that Ernest was hers; whereas Fife has never felt Ernest was ever anybody else's.

When she had come home from the hundred-day exile, Fife and Ernest were the talk of Paris. When they walked into the Closerie des Lilas or the Select, it made her feel special: to be Ernest's fiancée, his almost-wife. That vertiginous happiness: it reminded her of a party trick her father used to do when she was small. Very carefully she would step onto his hands from a raised table and he would carry her like that, on his palms, displaying her to a crowded room of aunts and uncles, like a statue on a plinth. Her father would shout, “Hold it!” when she wobbled, but she would soon fall off into the waiting arms of her mother. But while she was up there she loved to see the glowing cheeks and clapping hands of her family. And that's how she felt with Ernest: adored, and elevated, but with the faintest feeling that she could, at any time, lose her footing.

 • • • 

Fife hangs Ernest's gift next to the feathered dress and goes back into her sons' room. Ernest's work case is now the only one left. Friends have been bored stiff every time Ernest tells the story of how Hadley lost all of his work—stories! Carbons! His first novel! But the consensus is that nothing sacred had been lost. Ernest had moved on to such great work that people almost thought the loss rather a stroke of good luck. It had sharpened his writing.

But just as soon as Fife gathers the laundry she drops it back on the bed and walks over to that suitcase. The glass of the chandeliers sounds in the breeze. She's not supposed to touch his work case, not after Hadley. But the sounds of Ernest's typing travel from the toolhouse and she watches her hand pull back the zip. The case eases open.

Inside are pages of notes. A Loyalist rag. His horsehair shaving brush. Two paperbacks on war. Then there's another book and Fife's heart starts to race. The title is
The Trouble I've Seen
. The writer's name is embossed in gold. And her hands begin to shake.

A wire paperclip holds a photograph of Miss Gellhorn to the flyleaf. It's a press shot. There is the curved Picasso nose and the same apple cheeks. It feels outrageous that a photograph of this woman might be inside her house. Fife smacks the book shut then thinks again. She slips the portrait from the clip and turns it over, where the studio's name is watermarked against its backing. On this side there is Martha's handwriting. And the words are devastating.

 • • • 

The rain has the sound of static as it hits the car roof, as if the water has electrified the air. Knowing how treacherous Key West roads can be, Fife takes them slowly. She won't let her timely death release him. She didn't say to Ernest where she was going or even that she was leaving. She's dying for him to worry.

The air is chaotic with rain, salt, fish; the clouds low and edgeless, barely higher than the fog. Palm leaves buckle under water. Tarpaulin sags over conch shacks. People run under tented jackets. The roosters that so provoke her as they cock about the roads stay by the shops, their cold eyes surveying the wash. Mud, thin as sauce in the downpour, flies out from her wheels. When Fife nears the ocean she sees the whitecaps of the waves splash over the pier. Maybe a hurricane is coming. She drives out to the sponge docks and the empty open-air market. Along the roads the black mangroves and buttonwoods are lashed by rain.

Fife drives past the bordellos and hair-straightening shops; the women stare moon-eyed at the rainstorm outside. All she can think is how she hates this jerkwater town. She hates her husband. She hates Martha Gellhorn. The ice cream parlors are packed with islanders and tourists who have escaped the storm, but the thought of fruit ices—sweet soursop, sapodilla, sugar-apple—makes her feel nauseous. Fife drives, wondering what on earth she is meant to do.

 • • • 

Saint Mary, Star of the Sea, the only Catholic church in Key West, is a white building with high walls. Inside she wets her brow, genuflects, then sits at a pew. The air in here is velvety next to the loose stuff outside. One of the stained glass windows is a crude Virgin and Child: it reminds her of the portrait from Piggott, and the painting in Chartres.

How vehemently in a French church had she prayed for one husband to leave his wife! And now Fife may well be losing the same man in her own church. It seems to her that these are, now, the irreducible components of marriage: theft, possession, recompense. And Ernest's affair with Martha: this may well be her reckoning.

On the back of Martha's photograph was her hand-writing. Much worse than the dedication was the date:

Nesto,

Be mine forever!

Marty. May 27, 1938
.

Just weeks ago. She was a fool to think it could have ever been over between them.

This church is so much smaller than the French church where she had asked God for Ernest Hemingway. Ambitions have narrowed along with these walls. Now, she only wants Ernest to love her, or to stay, even if he does have these passing affairs. Outside, the world is baptized in a spring rainstorm. Fife marvels at the depth of her unhappiness.

What do you want of me, she asks God, as she sits on the moth-bitten pew and looks up at her Christ. Atonement? Have I not atoned for Hadley? Must I accept Martha now as my just punishment? I am sorry, she says, oh God, I hurt.

In the quiet of the church the only offering she can give Him is sorrow.

 • • • 

When Fife gets home it's as if everything has changed. The bedroom is full of afternoon darkness. She switches on a few lamps but the pools of light do little to wake the room. In the wardrobe there is the blue dress. She will incinerate his gift in the fire can outside. Or take a pair of scissors to its skirt. She doesn't want it, not when she knows Martha and Ernest were together not less than a fortnight ago. Down the dress are mother-of-pearl buttons. When she looks at them closer she realizes they have melted onto the cotton. To the touch they are cold and ridged. Something about the ruined buttons makes her want to burst into tears.

“Ernest?” she shouts down the staircase.

Isobel answers from below: “He's gone out, ma'am.”

Fife throws the dress back to the wardrobe. Clouds stack in the sky outside. She fixes herself a drink under the cook's silent watchfulness. But Fife won't say anything because Isobel won't say anything. Why does this woman never talk? It's infuriating the way her servants treat her.

Fife knocks back the drink and bounds up to the toolhouse. She rattles the door. No reply. She goes in anyway. The garbage overflows with the play's discarded drafts. Lottery tickets and magazine wrappers litter the floor. The typewriter is black and gleaming, its shape a curled-up cat. On the shelves are Ernest's books. Fife plays with the idea of slipping one of the signed books from the shelves. She could do it to poor
Nesto
. She could open the window and throw the play's pages to the cats. Or make one call to Cuzzemano and have it all, conveniently, lost. After all, maybe Hadley had done the same thing. Maybe that story about the valise being stolen was just another piece of fiction and Hadley had tossed the case to the garbage. When Ernest wanted, he could do an outstandingly good impression of a shit. She could imagine how much a woman might want to teach him a lesson.

Fife sees the papers on his desk, piled up neatly next to the typewriter, the title page on top. The play is called
The Fifth Column
. When she turns to the next page there are only four words on it. My God, she thinks, he's done it: he has broken my heart.

To Marty
, it reads,
with love
.

 • • • 

In the bathroom upstairs the mirrors butterfly her face. She looks like a child in the reflection, twinned with depthless images of herself. An infinite number of wronged women stare back at her with doleful black eyes. Her short hair, black as tar paper, blanches her face. Her head begins to ache.
Nesto
. She only wants her husband. If she does not have him, she'll kill herself, or him. She takes a sleeping pill and swallows it dry. All she wants is to stop thinking. She steadies herself on the cold ceramic of the sink, as if to hold on against the brain's whirring circus: the whole tottering lot of them—Fife, Martha, Hadley—a wheel of wives and mistresses, mealy grins and doughy skin and wet holes all just waiting for the joy of being fucked by Ernest.

Fife switches off the lamps in the room. Her headache sounds:
woomph, woomph, woomph.
The bedsheets are so heavy. After this afternoon's storm, the evening slides into a honeyed dusk. She would like a Parisian sky, with nothing in it but cloud, and the rain would be the consistency of sleet. She'd like her marriage not to fall apart in these hot summer nights, with the sweet smell of the banana trees wafting through the hurricane shutters. Outside, the night bugs hit the fly screens.

 • • • 

The next day she looks for Martha's dedication but it's not on his desk. That evening they eat at the Thompsons': crawfish, plantains, Cuban bread. The night is jovial but she can't join in and Ernest looks preoccupied.
Be mine forever.
The date:
May 27, 1938.
Fife skewers the crawfish with her knife and slowly chews. And for the first time since his return, Ernest sleeps in their sons' room.

The Murphys arrive on Thursday with their daughter Honoria: she is a fine girl who resembles her mother. Sara and Gerald are as dignified as ever: tanned, rich, good-looking. Despite everything that has happened they look in such good health, as if the decade since Antibes hasn't left a mark. They leave their taxi in white suits that wouldn't look amiss on a tennis court. “Mr. and Mrs. Diver!” Ernest says, because he knows the reference will vex them: “Welcome!”

Fife whispers a terse “Ernest!” before he helps them with their bags.

After they have unpacked, Ernest, Gerald and Honoria take the boat out; Ernest has found a perfect spot where the sailfish are sweet. His hauls are becoming more and more colorful by the day: bonitos, yellow fish, barracudas, and amberjacks.

The women stay back at the villa to make the costumes for tomorrow night's party. Sara looks like she's going to melt with the joy of the summer heat.

“Your pearls,” Fife says, “you're still wearing them.”

Sara bites into the string. “Of course,” she says. “They need the sunshine as much as I do.” Her friend stays quiet for some time as if reheating by the poolside is a serious business.

Later she brings silver paper and tin cans from her room and they sit under the umbrella assembling their costumes with cereal boxes. “Robots,” Sara says. “For the party.”

“Wonderful.”

“Oh, we're just recycling from one of the Paris parties,” says Sara. “Do you remember that time when Zelda stripped in front of the band, and the trumpeter didn't know what to do? I remember his cheeks ballooning as she took more and more off. Scott didn't know whether he should put a stop to it or join in.” Sara laughs and looks genuinely cheerful. “What did you and Ernest go as?”

“I went as Aphrodite.” And now it's Fife's turn to laugh. “But I didn't go with Ernest. Hadley did.”

“Oh, of course.” Sara fiddles with the costume. “It's so easy to get all the time muddled. It feels like yesterday and yet a long time ago as well. I always assume you and Ernest were together for the whole time in Paris. It felt that way.”

“We were barely there as a couple.”

“The twenties in Paris. What fun.” There is a tinge of irony to Sara's words. To Fife it seems as if that decade had been constant playtime, but as if, too, they had forgotten to look over to the school gates, where the faceless adults were waiting to tell them something grave. “We had a fine time, didn't we? A fine, brainless time.”

Sara sits in the chair with all limbs akimbo for the sun. The poor snowbirds, Fife thinks: starved of light. “We used to be avant-garde and bohemian,” Sara says. “Now I feel washed-up, out of the scene. Where do things happen anymore? Not on the East Coast, that's for sure.”

Fife clips fabric roses to hairpins and weaves them into the long blonde wig. She once dyed her hair blonde, just to catch Ernest's eye. Sara wraps one of the cereal boxes around her chest, measuring for size. She glues the sides together and sets them upright in the sunshine. “These will be our chests. With buttons to make us speak and have things like emotions. Though I fear I already have far too many of them.”

She begins to paint the boxes silver. “Sometimes, you can't believe they're gone,” Sara says, as if from nowhere, but it must never be out of nowhere for her. Fife remembers how strictly the quarantine was carried out during Bumby's
coqueluche
to protect her kids; but Sara's youngest son Patrick had died a year ago of tuberculosis; and her eldest, Baoth, had died from meningitis in '35. Somehow, Sara's mania against germs makes her loss seem even worse than it already is. It makes Fife want to telephone her own boys to just check that they are well. How blessed we are despite everything, Fife thinks, when the Murphys have been so robbed. Thank God, too, for Honoria: who is such a delightful young woman that Ernest has become quite wrapped around her little finger.