Mrs. Hemingway (23 page)

Mary stepped away from the little group: she was made from tougher stuff than to be spooked by the games of Miss Martha Gellhorn. Or whatever her name was.

Later that night Mary noticed the fur stole had been left on the back of a chair. Typical that an outsider wouldn't know any Londoner would kill for such a warm-looking thing. Mary pulled her hand down one of the foxes—the pelt felt like a dog's. In its mouth the teeth were sharp.

“Oops,” she heard someone say behind her. Mary turned, feeling her face warm, as if her express intention had been to steal the cape. “That's mine,” Martha said. “Shouldn't leave things lying about I suppose.”

Martha picked up the fox, clasped it with an invisible hook just above her breast, and flashed a set of white teeth as she left. “
Ciao
,” she said, and made her way out of the Chelsea apartment. The Poles followed, close behind her.

 • • • 

Ernest arrived at lunch ten minutes late, full of apologies but unhurried. Like his wife, he was gloriously tanned. He was bigger than Mary remembered him from their first meeting; just this side of portly. In his face one could see the character of his misuse; it was probably booze—the poison of all correspondents in London.

“That's a fine suit, Mary,” he said, seating himself opposite.

“Thank you,” she said. “I made it from a suit of my husband's.”

Ernest brushed the tablecloth of dust. On the linen were the lines from her thumb while she had sat there waiting. “He's in London?”

“Only rarely. Hence he had no need of the suit.”

Ernest smiled. “So you took it to your tailor and attacked it with some scissors? Hardly a way to treat your ex-husband's things.”

“It would be an excellent way to treat my ex-husband. However, he's not my ex-husband. Noel Monks is my husband still.”

“Noel Monks? Of course,” he said, as if it didn't surprise him that she remained married. “I met him in Spain.”

Mary already knew this. Noel had written her, when she had told him she was lunching with Hemingway, that he remembered Ernest from Spain as a loudmouth and a bully. But the man sitting across from her didn't seem like either of those things now. In fact, she was amused to see that he was the one who looked a little nervous. He opened the menu upside down and turned it around again with a comic little moue. She wondered what he would make of the food here.

He put down the card. “I have the feeling you like the war, Mary.”

“Not at all. You can't like something like this.” She gestured over to a building, long ago damaged, where a half a yard of curtain still flapped at the gashed window.

“Female war correspondents. Like taxis. None for miles, then they're everywhere.”

“The troops never complain.”

“No. I can't imagine they would with you.”

“Or your wife.”

There was silence for moments as Mary concentrated on the menu. Ernest had a patrician air to him, but a slight hesitancy, too, as if he were unsure of just what he should be doing in this city of mutton broth and bomb damage. The waiter arrived and took their orders. Ernest took a long while to decide and made the man wait, idling on the curb, while the cars pumped their exhausts into the heat.

“Do you know her? My wife?” he said, once the waiter had gone.

“I met her at a party a couple of months ago. She wouldn't remember me—we made only a very brief acquaintance.”

“She'd be irked to find other women doing just the same thing as her.” Ernest ran his finger along the serrated edge of the knife. “Martha made her crossing over here on a boat stuffed with dynamite. That's how much she loves war. Willing to be blown apart just to see others blown apart. My wife: she has some notions.”

“She cut an impressive figure, certainly.”

“Whose was the party?”

“A friend from the
Herald Tribune
.”

“Was she with anyone?”

Mary shook her head. If Ernest wanted to find out whatever the Polish pilots meant to Martha Gellhorn that night it was up to him. Mary shifted in her seat; her mother had sent her a new garter belt which was a little too loose after her years spent in hungry England. Accidentally she knocked his foot with hers and she felt herself flush. “Sorry.”

But Ernest was someplace else. “My wife has a very fixed idea about how she wants her life to look. And it almost always involves people engaged in acts of superlative violence. She's not happy unless somewhere in her proximity some poor bastard loses his life. Well. One man's loss is another woman's profit.”

“So why did you come here?”

“Nagged into obedience.”

“Ernest Hemingway: nagged into obedience. What a notion.”

The food arrived. Ernest looked at the brown broth with its potatoes the size of coins. It came with a slice of toast. “Why didn't I stay at home? That's a good question.” He chewed on the bread as if they had turned the flour with sand. Then he broke off a corner and threw the crumbs to a pigeon. Its wings sounded like an eggbeater.

“Careful. I nearly faced an English firing squad because I threw out moldy cheese.” Her sandwich, with merely the suggestion of corned beef, tasted wonderful; she hadn't eaten anything decent in weeks. She tried not to devour it too quickly, but when she looked up Ernest seemed pleased, as if he liked to see her appetite. “Your wife has a rather fearless reputation.”

“And doesn't she just let you know it.” Mary raised her eyebrows and remembered her friend's words:
Their marriage is on the rocks, hers and Hemingway's
. “There's only so much room in a marriage. Even less when the two people are me and Martha Gellhorn. You don't write, do you, Mary?”

“Only journalism.”

Ernest looked pleased with her answer. His dark eyes watched hers while the people inside the restaurant watched him: this famous writer who'd come to Europe to work out the score. He ate his soup with little interest and the conversation moved on to the war. She knew, then, that the tenor of their meeting would be work, though she had, as she had left her apartment, felt there was something else afoot in this invitation to lunch with Ernest Hemingway. She told him about fleeing Paris in 1940, her retreat down to Biarritz, the boat back up to England. She told him of the bombing of London: of houses ripped apart, an armchair dangling off one building with the Sunday suit still folded on the back of it. The way, in the beginning, when people were still frightened by the sirens, women would run to the shelters with soapsuds in their hair. The fog of grit everywhere. The inability to keep clean. Of the joy of inheriting a jar of peanut butter with a cupful of oil on the top. “
Oil!
” she said. “It meant I could actually fry something!”

Ernest wrote down her suggestions for remedial reading. As she finished her sandwich she wondered if he might sign something for her. She'd be able to sell it afterward to one of the booksellers at Cecil Court. What might she trade it in for? A lemon perhaps. Or even an egg! She kicked herself for not bringing one of his books. She had a copy of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
back at the apartment. The dedication, she'd noticed, was for Martha Gellhorn. She wondered how long ago that had been.

When the plates were cleared Ernest produced a whole lovely orange from his bag. Passers-by looked at him with horror, as if he held a human head. “For you,” he said, offering her the fruit. “As a thank-you for all this,” he said, gesturing at his notes. “For helping me not look like an ass in front of our esteemed colleagues.”

The color of the fruit was almost an outrage. Mary lifted it to her nose. Its smell was heartbreaking. “There'll be a riot if I peel it here,” she said, looking at the pedestrians on Charlotte Street. “I'll be court-martialed for public agitation.”

“We could take it back to your apartment. Have it there.”

So here it was; she should not have doubted herself. It couldn't have just been about work, not when a man and a woman lunched together. But then she remembered Martha's words from the party that night as Mary had picked up the fox.
That's mine
. Mary looked at Hemingway who was, strictly, still that woman's, whether their marriage was
on the rocks
or not. “I don't think Mrs. Hemingway would like that.”

“I don't think Mrs. Hemingway would care.”

With great reluctance Mary handed him back the orange. “That may be so. But perhaps my husband might.”

Ernest unbuckled the straps of her satchel and slipped the fruit into the bag. “All yours,” he said, and then he might have said something like “As am I” but he said it into his napkin, cleaning his beard, and she knew she'd probably misheard him.

“Thank you, Mr. Hemingway,” she said, smiling. “I can't tell you how long it's been since I ate an orange.”

“You can, if you like, call me Papa. Everyone else does.”

Mary laughed. “Sure. Papa it is,” she said, and Papa, indeed, looked pleased with her approval.

 • • • 

Back home she washed off the cork and lipstick and sat down at the table, excited. She had put off her deadline so that she could come home to eat the fruit immediately. When she dug her nail into the skin, she dipped her nose into its spray. It smelled of paradise. Wordlessly she thanked whichever god had brought Ernest Hemingway into her life and, in the hot spring day of London, with the war in all probability ending, and ending for all the right people, she sunk her teeth into a world suddenly and inexpressibly sweet.

Late September and the air has turned chill. In the early mornings the sagebrush in the valley wears the rabbit fur of frost. This past week Mary has given up on sorting Ernest's papers: his letters lie abandoned in the study.

Instead Mary walks in the hills, following gopher tunnels and fox prints. Soon the hills will see snow, but for now they are dark, like the pelt of a great cat they might have shot in the African veldt. The sky is gray, a pool of still water.

Sometimes she walks out to the woods: the leaves of the cedar and birch are just on the turn. Fall has come so quickly and the forest is all mustards, rust and blood. Having loved its beauty so intensely, it amazes her that Ernest is blind to it now.

The press calls continue, despite the fact that in each interview Mary gives the same words without fail:
Ernest was cleaning the gun when it accidentally fired
. Then that pause: the lull of disbelief, before they try to push her in the minutes granted them.
Ernest was an expert marksman
, they say,
what was he doing up so early, at that time in the morning?
Shooting duck, she replies, the words always the same. They were going to shoot duck that morning.

The previous night, Ernest had sung to her with a mouthful of toothpaste.
Tutti mi chiamano bionda
 . . .
Ma bionda io non sono!
He had learned the song from gondoliers in Venice. As Mary folded her clothes she smiled to hear him sing the nonsense lyrics. Increasingly, now, he was in a good mood. The writing seemed a little easier.

Porto i capelli neri!
were the warbled words that came from the bathroom.

Mary called to him from her bedroom. “What shall we do tomorrow, lamb?”

“How about a little duck shooting?”

“Excellent idea.” That Ernest wanted to be out of the house, moving in the air, getting things done, was a very good sign. Perhaps she might even encourage him to polish off one of these Paris sketches, tell him they should send them off to his publisher. She wanted him to feel again the world's affirmation; it was this that would keep him well. He'd published so little this decade since the
Old Man
; no wonder he felt washed up.

Ernest came into her bedroom to kiss her good night. He'd become tender and affectionate these last few days. She felt his tongue slip briefly into her mouth for a smooch—he still tasted of toothpaste. “Good night, lamb. Sleep well.”

From his bedroom she heard him say, “Good night, my kitten!”

And then he carried on singing his song, his voice a big brassy baritone, his Italian still wonderful from the war.
Tutti mi chiamano bionda . . . Ma bionda io non sono!
The words became a hum as he tidied away the things in his room.

Mary closed her eyes, contented. At last, she thought, he's come back. Tomorrow they would have a day of shooting duck and she'd cook him his favorite meal, and she'd tell him caressingly how the world was going to go crazy for the memoir of Ernest Hemingway. She'd nuzzle into his white hair and perhaps in the evening, after a bottle of very nice wine, they would make love. Then the door had shut and cut off the sound of his voice and she had fallen asleep thinking of what the day held for them tomorrow.

And the next sound she heard was the gun blast.

 • • • 

Mary doesn't care that the journalists don't believe her. They don't need to. She couldn't give a fig for the opinion of a
Times
staffer. Why on earth would Ernest be in such high spirits the night before? Why would he have so carefully cellophaned the leftovers? Or bought the lottery ticket for the next week's draw? Or left plans for vacations they were going to take, or left his letters in such a state, if not because he would be there, in the weeks to come, to sort it all out? He hated the sloppy way his father had taken his exit; he wouldn't have done the same. He wouldn't have chosen to leave her so alone.

Shooting duck, she says, to whoever it is, and the conversation is killed there. Mary remembers her own journalist's training from the war: push the subject off his prepared script and you'll get the true story. And so she says the same words again and again. She will not veer.

 • • • 

At the lake Mary watches the ducks and heron on the water. She breathes in the scent of the forest floor as waterbirds approach; they like to push it as far as they can with her. She lets a partridge, all fat-bodied and russet, peck around her walking boots. If her husband were here he would shoot it and have it for lunch. But she has no appetite for hunting now; all of their guns are locked away.