Mrs. Hemingway (26 page)

“Oh, Ernest,” she said, taking his hand. “It's
glorious
.”

The trees sounded with enough noise to make an aviary. He led her up the broad stone steps, pointing out the pool and the ancient ceiba tree, then bringing her into the living room with the animal heads studding the walls. “It's as if I'm Elizabeth Bennet,” she said.

“How's that?”

“This might just be your Pemberley, Hemingway.”

“Remind me, do Darcy and Miss Bennet marry?”

“She's very suspicious of him. Then she sees his house and is persuaded otherwise.”

“You like the house?” She nodded. “A good sign, then.”

Cats wrapped themselves around her ankles.

Ernest left her to unpack in her room. Mary opened up the furniture to see the insides of things. The bureau drawers came out nicely on their rollers; everything smelled of wood and was empty and clean. Fresh roses were on the bedside table and the vines outside the windows were as heavy as drapes. This room, she knew, had probably been Martha's.

Mary lay on the bed in her underclothes. As she watched the ceiling fan turn she wondered if she might just be crazy. She had given up her job at
Time
, given up her apartment in London, given up on her gentle husband, to be in this paradise of lemon light and hot sweet air. When Ernest was good he was entrancing, but when he was on the sauce he could be vile. She wondered, too, what might be her purpose here. Manage the staff? Go fishing and shooting with Ernest? No longer would she be a correspondent with her own stories and salary. A bird of some exotic description cawed outside. Would she have enough to do?

Knocking came at the door. Mary raised herself, looking for a gown or robe. She felt a little nervous of him. After six months of close but independent living in Paris, here they were in Cuba, as if they were man and wife. “Would you like a swim, Mary?” he said behind the door.

“Just a minute.” She changed into her bathing suit and checked herself over in the mirror. She was as white as paper; her skin hadn't seen real sunshine since the Liberation. She held the robe at her chest and opened the door.

Ernest stood holding a bowl in his hands. “Peaches in champagne,” he said, offering them to her. “Soaked overnight. A real humdinger.”

The spoon he held clattered to the floor. He picked it up, gave it a lick clean, replaced it back in the bowl, and whispered in her ear. “I'm too excited to see you.”

At the pool, when she disrobed, he gave her the most enormous smile—a grin, she would later learn, that was reserved for when he'd hooked a fish and it turned out to be a real monster. As she started to do laps, smelling the frangipani and eucalyptus wafting over, and seeing the palms over a mile away in Havana, she let out a sigh. This might be Pemberley, indeed.

 • • • 

An hour after the wedding Mary slammed shut the door of the convertible. “I wanted to stay, Ernest.” It was a half-hour trip back from Vedado to the Finca, and Ernest screeched out of the Spanish mansion.

“Not with those clowns.”

“Clowns! They're our friends!”

“Marjorie was drunk. Didn't you hear her slurring?”

“
You're
drunk, Ernest.”

The wedding toasts had gone well, back at the house of one of their friends, until Marjorie had made some dumb joke about Mary taking Ernest for all he was worth: royalties, options, books, and more, and Ernest had savaged the poor woman and pulled Mary out of the apartment by her wrist.

As he drove toward the sea a herd of goats moved in front of the car, their hapless shepherd following and uttering expletives in Spanish. “Biblical times we are living in!” Ernest shouted, to whom she didn't know, but the shepherd evidently thought the invective was aimed at him, and he started shouting back in Cuban Spanish so thick—something about Ernest being the mother of something, or was it his mother was something else?—that even Ernest couldn't understand him.

Around them came people on bicycles and motorbikes, able to weave in and out of the goats; all the while the Lincoln stayed by the Malecón. The sequins of her wedding dress bit into her skin, and the orchid corsage gave off an alarmingly sweet smell.

By her side Ernest was getting hotter and angrier. No wind upset the palms. He'd be a fool if he thought he could manhandle her like this in front of their friends. He was a sauced brute; what a fool she had been to marry him. “Drive me back. At least let me enjoy my wedding day even if my husband won't accompany me in it.”

Ernest didn't answer but sped off from the last of the goats, nearly decapitating one as he went. He drove far too quickly; she'd be dead before she could file for divorce. “Slow down, for God's sake!”

He sped up and the royal palms in the valley flew past faster.

“Slow down, you maniac!”

Minutes from home the heavens opened. There was no time—and precious little desire for cooperation—in order to roll up the cover. Cuba became one solid raindrop. She held her jacket over her head.

The car screeched to a stop outside the Finca. Ernest's wedding suit stuck to him; Mary was drenched. In the traditional Spanish manner their servants were lined up in uniform outside the villa, each of them holding a small gift. A couple stood with umbrellas, ready to greet the newlyweds. What they did not expect to find was Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, drenched to the bone, and shooting each other murderous looks.

Mary slammed the door and shouted, “Go drink another glass of hemlock, you bastard! Since this marriage has gone about as well as the last one!”

She stormed into the house only to hear in her trail the popping of a champagne cork and the rather lost voice of the gardener saying
Felicidades, Señor y Señora Hemingway . . .

 • • • 

Now the suitcase stood by her shoes, ready for New York.

Knocking came again from behind the door, but gentler this time. “Pickle?”

“I'm leaving.”

“Please open the door.”

“I don't want to speak to you.”

“Mary, I'm sorry for acting like an ass this afternoon. I only wanted to spend the last of our day just with you.”

When she opened the door he wore his kicked-dog expression and held a glass of Scotch. He offered it to her. Only reluctantly did she take a sip and feel the drink's warmth.

“Let's never get married again, kitten.”

“Certainly not to each other.”

With the light behind him he looked older than his years: his hair was going white around his temples. He wore the glasses that his vanity wouldn't let him wear outdoors, though he needed them, she knew, more than he admitted.

Ernest tugged at her dress but she remained still. His eye caught her case. “Pickle, you wouldn't leave me, not so soon? At least stay long enough to get changed out of your dress. You're still dripping onto the tiles.”

Ernest directed her toward the bed and they sat down. “Convince me I haven't left a perfectly good marriage to the shambles of another.”

“My temper, sometimes . . . I'm sorry.”

He smiled at her. He wasn't forgiven, not yet. “Ernest?”

“Yes?”

“Please promise you'll be nice to me.”

“I promise, kitten. I'm so sorry. I'll be better. You'll see.”

“And I want something else.”

“Anything,” he said expansively.

“Take down Martha's damn war map from that room. I can't stand the sight of all those little pins everywhere.”

He laughed and said, “It would be my pleasure.”

Mary gave up on her old life with the ease of sinking into a hot bath. Cold Europe seemed a lifetime away. It made her laugh to think of how madly she had wanted her career to catch up with Martha's. She hadn't even got close—but she had, however, inherited the woman's house. She remembered her haughty words at the party in London:
That's mine
, Martha had said, reaching for the fox tails, holding herself in high regard. Well, Mary thought, looking around at the hibiscus villa, not anymore.

Life in the Finca was a life undreamed of. Mary went about in the hot afternoons exterminating termites, supervising the carpentry, renovating the house. They took long trips fishing off
Pilar
, to Bimini, to Cojímar, bringing back dinners of marlin and dorado. Each morning she took a naked half-mile swim before lunch; in the afternoons were the promises of frozen daiquiris. Vacations in Italy, New York, France, the fiesta at San Fermin, plans for East African safaris. For Ernest's fiftieth they ate lunch in the garden with all of their friends: winter-melon soup, slippery chicken, ice cream in coconut halves.

Afterward, everyone blind, they erected a coconut shy and it was a smooch on the lips from Ernest—men of the party included—who managed to knock down a coconut. Mary used Martha's old Winchester to bag her catch and earned herself three of the longest kisses that afternoon. “Happy half a hundred, lamb,” she said, as she watched Patrick and Gregory, young men now, go at the coconuts.

“You're my guy,” he said, with his arm around her.

What a life of plenty this was! And when he published
The Old Man and the Sea
, after a long time when no one much had liked his stuff, the world once again went mad for Ernest Hemingway. Accolades, sales, and a Nobel Prize; nothing, it seemed, could be improved upon.

From the woods she can see a car traveling up her driveway. Its hood points to her house; its only objective could be her home. The sky this morning is so high and wide; the car looks a tiny thing in the expanse of air. Mary's heart drops. Visitors.

Closer up she sees it's an old Ford though there's no driver to be seen now that it's come to a stop outside her house. The car's paintwork is so dented it looks as if it's been stoned by Idaho natives. A man is looking in through one of the living room windows, pressing his hands against the glass. He takes a few steps back to look at the concrete walls and square planes of the house, as if he's scoping out an opponent's bulk. Not much can be seen, at first, between his collar and hat. But when he walks back to the car she sees who it is.

Ernest would be rolling in his grave to see Harry Cuzzemano on his drive.

“Mrs. Hemingway,” he says. He smiles at her as if this is all perfectly normal. He's grown better with age: his weight has softened his face. The scar that was so livid at the Ritz (“Friendly fire,” she remembers him saying in the lobby) has faded, though it still runs down the better part of his cheek. “How good it is to see you.” The press of his hand is soft in hers.

“Mr. Cuzzemano. This is a surprise.” She feels herself observed by him—she supposed she would be much changed since they met in Paris so many years ago.

His face becomes grave. “Mrs. Hemingway. I'm sorry for your loss.”

Mary nods her acceptance.

She's always had an affectionate spot for Harry Cuzzemano, believing him to be the unfortunate target of some of her husband's more wrathful moods. Still, he always seemed to know how to stir Ernest's displeasure. Sometimes he even seemed to court it, like an animal holding out its neck for the catch rope: letters, late-night telephone calls, copies of advertisements in French newspapers detailing the lost suitcase. It seems he would do anything for Ernest's attention; even goad him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought Ernest would have a bead on me before I could even get up the drive. I figured I was safe now.” He says this as if it were an answer to her question.

“Are you on your way somewhere?”

Harry Cuzzemano nods but does not elaborate.

“Where have you come from?”

“The South.”

His blue eyes are so intense Mary finds it difficult to hold his gaze. “Do you want to come in?” she says, because she doesn't know what else to say. Cuzzemano nods and with his long step he walks over to the vestibule door.

“That one's locked.” Mary hasn't yet moved. “We'll go round the back.”

 • • • 

Cuzzemano's expression changes as soon as he steps into the house. It would be uncharitable to think he wasn't moved by being here. It's as if the entire room emits grace.

“The man himself,” he says, immediately taken by the portrait that hangs in the recess of the wall. Ernest stares out into the room: his eyes are like the twin holes of a rifle. The white beard almost reaches the frame; his grin is nearly as wide. She called him Santa Claus when she thought the beard needed a trim.

“It was taken at his sixtieth.”

“You should have seen him as a boy. He had the look of a god.” Cuzzemano is close to the picture. “It has his likeness. Very much.”

Mary wonders what this means, given Cuzzemano hasn't seen Ernest in over a decade. The book collector moves from the portrait to the sofa, padding his lower back with a cushion. His eyes travel the room, taking in the skulls and pelts and books. She'll have to frisk him for paper and silverware before he leaves.

She seats herself on the sofa opposite and is about to ask what she can do for him when Cuzzemano begins speaking. “You know, Ernest took such an instant dislike to me.” His tone is offhand, as if he is returning to the subject of a previous conversation. “Even when he was a nobody in Antibes. He never understood I was trying to do things for him. Find suitcases. Lost novels, poems. Zelda and Scott: they never despised me like Ernest did.”

“Perhaps because you weren't shy on loans for liquor.”

“The Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys. God, how I wanted to be part of it: the golden set, the Riviera gang. Mary, these people . . .” he exhales, “they were part of the elect.”

“What does it matter now, Mr. Cuzzemano? Everyone's gone.”

Cuzzemano's eyes fix on the corner of the table. “When Zelda died in the fire, I couldn't stop thinking about that night in Antibes: Ernest holding her in a fireman's lift and Scott releasing his volley of figs. That night at the Villa America. It was
magical
.”