Mrs. Hemingway (21 page)

“I know who you are, Miss Gellhorn,” Mary says. She puts her knapsack on both shoulders and smiles, as if she is completely at ease in the company of her lover's wife. “You don't remember me, do you?”

Martha feels forced onto the back foot; she thought she would be the one to steer this. “Remember you?”

“We met in Chelsea. Earlier this year.”

Martha realizes where she has met her: not in Madrid or New York, but in London. They were introduced at a
Herald Tribune
party but Martha had been too busy pressing a couple of Polish pilots for information to pay much attention to her. The only thing she remembers about this woman is that she had taken a particular interest in her fox stole—but their meeting that night couldn't have lasted longer than a few minutes. And she had never entertained the idea that Ernest might be fashioning this woman for a wife. Martha and Mary, she thinks: biblical sisters, war reporters, and now companions in Ernest's shareable bed. And so the sorry wheel turns again.

Mary lights a cigarette and stands with one hand on her elbow. She looks biddable—as if her whole body were ready to do whatever was desired. How Ernest would enjoy that. “How long has it been going on?”

Mary shrugs. “I don't know what you mean.”

“Don't play the innocent.”

Mary gazes at her shoes but she looks far from culpable. “Ernest said you were very much out of the scene. He said he was alone in London, and that he'd been alone for months.”

“Seventeen days I was away!”

“You didn't look so alone at the party where we met.”

“That is immaterial. I want to know what has been going on.”

“We've had lunch and drinks, that's all.”

“What kind of overtures is he making you?”

“I hardly think it's your business.”

A group of students approach, ringing their bicycle bells and wearing ski hats despite the August temperatures. They're chanting one of the Liberation songs and some of them, inexplicably, have toilet brushes that they pump into the air with abandoned glee. Martha wants them quickly out of here; her temper is high and she wants answers. They wheel past, forcing Martha and Mary to the side of the shop front.

“Does he talk to you of marriage? I assume he does.”

Mary nods. It might be the shade of the building, darkening her features, but she finally has the decency to look a little guilty. “He's not serious.”

“Oh, he's deadly serious,” says Martha. “I have no doubt that he will very swiftly want to marry you. Is that what you want?”

“Marriage? To him? I don't know.” Mary looks at her other hand with some misgiving. “The problem is,” she says, “I'm already married.”

Martha notices, now, the wedding band on Mary's finger. Suddenly she has the desire to burst out laughing. How absurd! How
perfectly
ridiculous! Hurrah for Ernest, since once more, in a new decade, cuckolds and fools are made from each and every one of them.

One of the students prods a toilet brush in her direction. He frowns, mimicking her expression, and then he traces a smile on his own lips. Involuntarily, she laughs.

“Well, that
does
tend to complicate things,” she says to Mary. At least, Martha thinks, Mary might have a little more sass than the virgin brides of Hadley and Fife.

“Look, Martha. Can I call you Martha?”

She nods. Mary gestures over to a bench just vacated down the side street. The two women sit next to each other rather awkwardly, a little far apart. “Martha, what I'm trying to say is that I wouldn't have stepped on your toes if I thought you were still about. Ernest made very firm insistences that
you
were finished with
him
. Not the other way around.”

Her temper, which had felt hot and sharp just minutes ago, has lifted, and she listens to Mary's words of truth. She does not want to be married to Ernest anymore. All around her are thrilled Parisians, crammed in at the balconies above them, wearing homemade flags, and kids perched in trees and streetlamps. The occupation is over, and Martha can't find it in herself to deliver the bruising to Mary she'd come here to give. Instead, she feels an urgency to be honest. Mary, a reporter herself, might even understand this strange predicament: of loving this man but wanting, even more than that, absolute liberty.

Martha sees a little girl up in a tree, with scuffed knees and blonde hair, searching for General de Gaulle. It reminds her of when she was a little girl, and how she had once hid herself in the ice man's cart until long into the night. When her parents found her she could only reply that she had wanted to see the world. Motion. Flight. Martha had always craved it.

“I'm sorry for coming across abruptly before,” she says to Mary. “I didn't mean to be an ass. I was upset. You see, I have only just become acquainted with your relationship with my husband . . . with Ernest. And it has come as something of a shock.”

“I'm sorry,” says Mary.

Sitting beside this woman, a woman to whom Ernest has already dedicated a poem, Martha recognizes Mary suddenly for what she is: her ticket out of here. This morning she saw that Ernest won't let her break things off if there's any chance he's going to be alone. What he fears is loneliness, and whatever brutish thoughts he has when he is left untended. Only if he is assured of another wife will he let his present wife go. “All I want is to be shot of it,” Martha says, slowly, to Mary. “I want my own name in my passport. You're right. I don't want to be Mrs. Hemingway anymore.”

“Would you so little recommend it?”

“Marriage to Ernest?” Martha laughs. “No, that's not true. I have had,” and she says this without a shadow of a lie, “the most wonderful time. It's just over—for us that is. It's the end of something, that's all.”

Mary nods and offers her a smoke. Lips that have shared Ernest's now share an American-issue cigarette. Martha looks to the wide leafy boulevard where, she imagines, tanks will soon pass, and everyone will sing in ecstasy for their freedom. “Any advice?” Mary asks, saying the words into the smoke. “If it were to happen, that is.”

“I don't know . . . Enjoy yourself?” Martha smiles. “It's not every girl who gets to call herself Mrs. Hemingway.”

Mary laughs. “All a bit strange, don't you think? Us sitting here discussing this?”

“Oh no,” Martha says. “Paris is where this sort of thing happens to Ernest, where women knit together his fate. He thinks he is the one making all the choices.” She finishes the last of the cigarette and presses it under her boot. “He is not.”

They sit awhile watching the preparations, then Mary makes her excuses, saying she has copy to file before returning to cover the parade. They walk down the Élysées together, Mrs. Hemingway and Mr. Hemingway's mistress. Before they say good-bye, Martha remembers the look Sylvia Beach gave her at the bookshop this morning. “May I ask, Mary,” she says, just as they are about to part, “have you been to Shakespeare's with Ernest this trip?”

“The bookshop?” Mary asks. “Yes.”

“Did Sylvia ask who you were?”

“I think Ernest just said I was a friend. Why?”

“No reason,” Martha replies. “What's the piece you were doing, earlier on?”

“Just a quickie on Paris fashion for
Time
.”

Martha smiles.

“What?”

“Looks like our stars have aligned again.” Martha scraps the idea for the article; she'll let Mary get there first. They push through the crowds and stop off at the tobacconist to see if they can get more cigarettes. Martha holds out the door for her and lets the other woman in.

Mary is waiting in the Ritz lobby when Martha arrives, having made her way through streets of celebrating Parisians. Mary's cheeks seem drawn tightly against the bones; there is none of the mischievous woman she had met earlier this afternoon—whom she had thought she would never meet again.

“Mary.” Martha sits down next to her. “Whatever is the matter?”

Earlier that evening, just as Martha was about to sink into a bath after what had felt like the most emotionally hectic day, she had received a distressed call from Mary at the Ritz. “You've got to come here,” Mary said. Martha's heart beat hard, remembering the little gun propped against Ernest's bureau. “Ernest is losing it. Please, head over straightaway!”

Now Mary sits quite still on a sofa in the lobby. The Ritz is eerily quiet compared to the noise coming from outside. “Oh, Martha,” she says, biting on her lip. “I don't know what to do!”

Martha steers her to the bar. She orders Mary a stiff drink and then one for herself. “Tell me slowly what happened.”

Mary takes a large draft of the Scotch. “When I came back home this afternoon after meeting you, I found Ernest in the lobby having an enormous argument with a man called Harry Cuzzemato.”

“Cuzzemano. Go on.”

“Ernest was accusing him of all sorts of things. Theft, harassment, how he'd hounded him for that suitcase. The poor man shook like a leaf. Eventually I managed to pry him off Cuzzemano's neck. When we got back to the room, I got him to lie down.”

Mary's hands still shake—she will need to fare better than this if she's to put up with Ernest's moods. Martha has known him to swing from tenderness to tyranny in the course of only a few minutes.

“Finally he fell asleep and I decided to type up a poem he wrote me. I thought he'd like to wake up to a gift.” The whites of Mary's eyes are silky with fear. “And because it was written on
lavatory paper
, Martha. When I showed him the typed poem, he seemed pleased. He began to read it aloud then he stopped: he said I'd missed something. Then he said it was just a couple of lines and that we could check it. I didn't know what to say! I'd thrown the paper into the wastebasket as soon as I'd finished. I ran back to my room but the bin was empty. The maid smiled when I asked her, saying, ‘Don't worry, Madame, the papers will not reach the Sûreté.'

“I had to tell Ernest the original had been lost. But Martha, he's been down there ever since! Scrambling through the garbage, convinced he's going to find it. He won't listen to me. You've got to talk to him.”

Mary finishes her drink and Martha chases hers down too.

 • • • 

Objects emerge from the cellar dark: prewar suitcases left by tourist refugees, folded flags, old menus, jars of mustard, and bottles of vinegar. Lined along the wall are dusty bottles of champagne—so in his twelve-hour stay Ernest hasn't completely decimated the supply. Martha calls out his name. There's no response.

She winds her way around the cases and calls out to him again. He must be down here if Mary says he is. She imagines him squatting behind one of the valises, his breath rifling the air, his eyes more adjusted to the dark than hers. She doesn't want to be scared out of her wits just because Ernest thinks it would be a good practical joke to frighten her. She tries to calculate how much he might have had to drink since the champagne at noon. “Ernest! For Christ's sake: answer me!”

She notices a line of gray light at the side of the cellar and follows it outside.

A man stands with his hands deep in the garbage cans. Somehow, among the empty wine bottles, broken wooden crates, slimed scraps of food, Ernest still has the air of a man in touch with the gods.

His hands drop from the trash cans, greased and mucky. He cracks that hobnailed grin. He isn't alone: two of the hotel staff stand some way up the alley, too respectful of Monsieur Hemingway to intervene. He's the Ritz's sweetheart. How must he seem to them, she wonders, only hours after rescuing the hotel with his
martini-tour-de-force
, now up to his elbows in the muck of rich men? “Marty.”

“What are you doing, Ernest?”

“I've missed you so much, Rabbit.” The words slur over each other. His arms hang uselessly. A ripe smell of garbage comes off him. She leads him to the curb where they can sit.

Martha doesn't say anything until he's calmer. “Are you all right?”

He stares at his hands. “Mary lost the poem.”

“I know.”

“Where is it, Rabbit?”

“You know all documents are burned if they're thrown away.”

He looks at her. Mania pushes into his eyes. “Nazi swine, what if they stole it?” He puffs himself up then he almost rolls on the ground before managing to stand. Like a bear with a sore toe, he crashes about the alley, kicking a tin can against the wall. “What if Cuzzemano has it? He's been down here, I know it, trying to find anything he can. He would have these damn hands if he could chew them off!”

“Ernest, please. I doubt Cuzzemano has a deal with the chambermaid.”

“Then it's that bitch's fault—Mary! For throwing it away.” Ernest kicks at a crate and the hotel staff turn. “She called you here?”

“Yes.”

“Are you my wife anymore, Rabbit?” He comes to sit on the step again and looks at her with those watery drunk eyes. He puts his hands on her knees as he had done that night in Cuba.

“I can't be your wife anymore.” Now her voice is full of tenderness, because she is the one letting him go.

“But I want you to be. I'm cockeyed lonely without you.”

“You have Mary now.”

“What is Mary to me? She doesn't even want me. Not for good.”

“How do you know that?”

“Let's call it my built-in shit detector.”

A woman laughs on the street by the hotel. Then a man says something and the night watchmen laugh too. “What do you want me to be?”

“My wife.”

“I'm a correspondent. I don't want to be just a wife.”

Ernest stands, holding out his shirt to make breasts. He minces around, his voice falsetto. “
Oooooh! I am Martha Gellhorn and I am the only woman war reporter around!
” At this he lets the breasts go, then grabs at a mop and pail leaning on the garbage cans. He puts the pail on his head and the handle about his chin. He jabs the mop toward her. “Well I am a knight errant and I will win you back!”