Mrs. Hemingway (16 page)

“You look like you've just pulled your pants on and are about to take them off again.”

“You might have just hit upon my plan.”

But now her mother and brother were listening again and Ernest changed the subject. “Have you ever known war, Martha?”

She shook her head.

“I think you might like it. I met a woman like you in Italy in the Great War. She was a nurse at the Milan hospital.” He paused for a moment as if lost in the memory. “I imagine you'd like living on the knife-edge.”

“Did you enjoy it?”

“Some of it. Some of it was terrible. I remember after a munitions factory blew up and we were sent to recover the bodies. There was hair everywhere, tufts of it, clinging to the wire. The dead had faces like blown-up balloons. Lumps of flesh with bits of bone, that's all they were after the hit.” Ernest's eyes had gone hard and smooth. “It took three days to clean up. I vowed that I'd never think war a good thing after that. And I don't. But there are good things about it for writers: it makes every minute seem a million bucks and all you want to do is kiss all the women you meet and hunt for the truth and write good words. Think you could do it?”

“Aside from kissing all the women, yes, I think I could.”

“I'm going to the war in Spain. You should think about it. Where will you go after Key West?”

Martha shrugged. “Back to St. Louis.”

“Both my wives are from there. You're from a noble trad-ition.” His eyes search her face. “The Blonde Peril. That's what they'd call you on the Front Line, Miss Gellhorn.”

 • • • 

Ernest insisted Martha eat with them that evening back at the villa. When they walked up to its gates, she was followed by the memory of her shyness that morning, hiding behind the brick wall.

Pauline Hemingway sat through supper pinched about the mouth and drunk but in a sour way. When Martha addressed her as Pauline, Sara Murphy practically spat out her bean soup. “Dear girl,” she said, “nobody calls Pauline
Pauline.
It's
Fife.
From Pfeiffer: her maiden name”—she gestured to Ernest—“before she married this wretch.”

“What do you think of Key West?” asked her husband, Gerald.

“I think it's the best thing I've found in America.”

“I daresay,” said Sara into her wineglass.

“If all the world were sunny there'd be much less trouble going on.”

“There's a Midwesterner for you,” Ernest said. “Hadley was the same.”

Fife flashed her husband a look.

“What lovely flowers,” Martha said, nodding at the arrangement in the center of the table. “What are they?”

“Poinsettia,” said Fife a little sadly.

“Do you know the florists in Paris used to dye their flowers to make them brighter?” This was Sara. “I remember the streams in the gutters. Like rivers of blood some days.”

“I lived in Paris,” said Martha.

“What were you doing there?” asked Gerald.

“I was a journalist.”

“For whom?” asked his wife.

“Anyone who'd have me. Often
Vogue
. I had to feign an interest in the French hemline.”

“Fife was a reporter for
Vogue
too!” said Ernest.

Fife offered a thin smile. “Pass the salt please, Gerald.”

During the meal Gerald kept on trying to make things jolly while Fife refilled everyone's glasses with miserable vigilance. Martha got into a wonderfully heated argument with Ernest on the merits of Proust while Sara Murphy positively glared at her throughout.

By the time his wife plunged the knife into the roast chicken, Ernest had positioned his hand on the inside of her now very warm thigh. Martha had quickly removed Ernest's hand before answering the question “Leg or breast?” with only the minimal amount of choked laughter.

At the end of the meal two little boys came into the room wearing heavy pajamas that looked sweltering in the heat. “Aha!” said Fife. Her face completely lost its watchfulness and became open and clear. It was at this point that Martha saw, for the first time, the woman's beauty. “We thought we heard mice upstairs, but it turned out it was you two!”

She tickled the little one's tummy and put the biggest boy onto her lap. Fife looked up at Martha from the crook of her boy's neck. And just minutes after positioning his hand on her thigh, Martha watched Ernest look at his wife with love.

The little boy climbed onto his father's lap. “Papa, who's this?”

“This, Gregory, is Miss Martha Gellhorn.” Ernest leaned over to her. “I would ask you to shake his hand but as you can see . . .” The little boy had his thumb in his mouth.

Martha laughed.

“Miss Gellhorn's a writer. Like Daddy. And a very good one at that.”

“You know in Germany they'd have to join the Hitler Youth at ten?” Gerald said.

“Ridiculous,” said Sara. “I would never let Patrick go.” The Murphys shared a look and Martha wondered what it meant. Gerald put his hand over his wife's and squeezed it. Sara's look was frozen somewhere.

“Hitler's a madman,” Gerald said. “He belongs in the bughouse. We're lucky to be here.”

“Lucky,” Sara said. “Yes. Lucky, lucky.”

“I think you've had enough fun for tonight, boys,” Fife said. She gave her eldest a kiss which was promptly wiped away.

When they left, Fife called in the cook to clear away the dishes. After Papa Dobles, white wine, and a whole day of sunshine, Martha felt just about in danger of falling off one of Mrs. Hemingway's exquisitely made dining chairs. And with the perfect timing of the rainstorm, it meant she could easily refuse coffee.

 • • • 

The next day Martha showed Ernest some of her work as they sat in the garden surrounded by exotic flowers for which she had no names. Fife had taken her on an exhaustive tour of the garden and Martha had hummed along, aiming for some genuine enthusiasm, but it was as if Mrs. Hemingway didn't understand that all of these things might have more importance to a woman in her forties than one in her twenties.

Ernest went at the story she gave him with a black pen, showing her what words could be lifted. “The bones,” he said, following one of the sentences with his finger, as if helping her to read it: “That's all you need.”

They were a cozy little family over the next few weeks. He edited her work, reading passages aloud so that they could hear the rhythms. In their conversations she felt valued and important: someone with whom to discuss ideas and test the weight of things. There might have been flirtation, but nothing more than was ordinary between men and women who looked good and wrote well.

More often than not Mrs. Hemingway spent the day indoors or up at the toolhouse. She said she didn't like the heat.

One morning Martha stepped into the house for a glass of something cold. “Bring me one too!” Ernest shouted and she noticed a shadow pass the toolhouse window.

In the kitchen she poured herself a lemonade and wandered over to the photographs of the Hemingways, neatly set out in their frames on the side table. There were lots of pictures of their sons, as well as the boy from the first marriage, Bumby. She wondered what Ernest was like as a father: probably absent most of the time and then, when present, exhilarating.

At the end of the table was a group shot with Ernest in the middle. Martha recognized Gerald and Sara and Fife, who looked rather startled in the magnesium flare. The other woman must be Hadley. Ernest had told her that they'd spent a holiday together in Antibes: wife, husband, mistress; the whole kit and caboodle. To Martha, it sounded as if they were all knocked out of their heads. This situation, she felt, did not even compare. After all, she was bedding down with a handsome Swede she'd found at her hotel. And even if Ernest did have romantic feelings for her, she did not have any for him. Martha replaced the strange photograph back on the side table and wondered why Fife allowed it in the house.

Then from another room came the sound of weeping.

In the living room the curtains were closed and at first Martha could only see the animal skulls. Then she saw Fife on the sofa, facing the cushions. A big pile of
Vogue
magazines piled up behind her. When Mrs. Hemingway turned around, her eyes were raw and hopeless. “For God's sake,” Fife said, very slowly, “why are you
still
in my house?”

Outside, where the white light sang again in her eyes, Martha said to Ernest, “I think you need to see to your wife. I think she is upset.”

The next day she had herself well shot of Key West, of her Swede, of the Hemingways. It had not been her intention for Ernest to catch up with her for steak and fries and a bottle of merlot in Miami. Nor had it been her intention to start what began in Spain.

Martha heads south on the Champs-Élysées toward the Left Bank and Shakespeare and Co. If Ernest's been anywhere in Paris, he'll have been to rue de l'Odéon to find a good book.

Where the Louvre meets rue de Rivoli, there is a barricade at one end smoking, just visible in the streaked light of the summer morning. When Martha draws close she sees the dam is made up of bedsteads, park railings with roots still attached, and a door with its handle scorched. There are holes in the ground where cobbles have been lifted for the barricades. On the wind is the smell of the lavatory. A man motions for her to stop. He has a leathery face and an easy snarl. “Can I pass?”

“You're French?” he asks.

“American.”

He smiles at her warmly. “But what a fine accent for a little American! What are you doing in Paris?”

“Reporting on the war.” And, she thinks, divorcing a husband. “I'm a journalist.”

“Journalist for whom?”

“
Collier's.
”

He places his hand on her forearm. “Tell them what is happening here,” he says. “Leave nothing out.” Dirt has gathered in his nails, and his hands are black with oil.

She says, “
Vive la France!
” and walks away, trying to wipe off the muck from his touch.

“
Vive les Américains!
” he shouts back.

The source of that latrine smell is just up ahead: a urinal, pulled from the metro, has been lifted onto the embankment of scraps. Its pearled hole gleams with a yellowy wash. Martha walks by it—but when she turns to share the joke with the Resistance man, he's staring openly at her retreating behind. It's not dissimilar to the look in Italy her officer gave her a few weeks ago. Oh yes, she has had her own affairs these past few months. Ernest merely had to bare his teeth and his ex-wives and mistresses would be willingly swallowed whole if that were his pleasure. But she is different from the rest of those women, those lapdog wives.

Soon she's close to the river and can see the oily flash of sunlight on the Seine. On the Île de la Cité there are crowds of people, sitting and drinking on the grass in the shade of Notre Dame. Breakfast picnics have been made from whatever food they have. Accordionists compete against each other for thrown coins. A man in a low-brimmed hat stands on one corner, chanting:
Chocolate, American cigarettes, matches, chocolate, American cigarettes . . .

As Martha walks over the last bridge, she rehearses the lines Ernest will in all probability use on her to win her back. “Rabbit . . . come back to me, we are stronger together . . . we can't live through the horrors without each other.” She thinks of all the hateful things he's ever said to her: the times he's called her worthless, ambitious, on the make, a bitch. She remembers the time he slapped her after she'd driven his Lincoln Continental into a tree, the time he'd cabled her when she'd been on assignment:
ARE YOU A WAR CORRESPONDENT OR A WIFE IN MY BED?
(And she'd written back:
WILL ALWAYS BE A WAR CORRESPONDENT STOP WILL BE A WIFE IN YOUR BED WHEN I CHOOSE STOP YOUR WAR CORRESPONDENT, YOUR WIFE, YOUR MARTHA
.)

She thinks of how, months ago, he had cadged a flight with the RAF over to England, leaving her to make her own way to Liverpool from America on a freighter packed with dynamite. What a kind gift that had been from her dearest husband. Every hour spent on the ocean crossing she had worried the dynamite would blow up. She wasn't even allowed to smoke on the deck. But it was seventeen days to think things over, seventeen days to realize her marriage had come to its end.

After she docked in Liverpool Martha traveled south to London, where Ernest was in hospital. He'd been admitted after an automobile accident, probably motoring along in the blackout like a drunk loon. She had been ready to tell him they were through: that she was sick of his drunken accidents, his misadventures, his precious little care for her, or himself. But for minutes she watched him asleep in the dusty room. A great bandage circled his head and made a thicket of his hair. How tired he looked, poor thing—and how different from the man she had met in Sloppy Joe's, who had charmed her with that electrifying smile over a cocktail named after him. Now, his face was fleshier. He was no longer so handsome; he could no longer turn a room.

Ernest slept under a vase of tulips and Martha pulled a petal from one of the heads, wondering who had brought them. Despite all of Ernest's faults, he was always quick to charm people, quick to love those who were real and honest and genuine. Blood smeared the bandage, and Martha wondered just how he was going to survive himself. And, without having said a word, she slipped away.

Now, as she walks over to the Left Bank, she knows today must be the end for them. As she heads toward Shakespeare and Co., Martha lets all of the other bad memories run their course. Ernest is a great talker; she must not be seduced into staying.

 • • • 

Today, books return to Paris. Two women cart boxes and clothes baskets down to the sidewalk. A man follows them with light fittings, paintings, manuscripts, tables, chairs. Martha keeps herself from view as she watches them go up and down to a third-floor apartment above the shop. The letters of the shop's sign are only just visible:
SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY.
Everyone looks hot and rather happy.