Beautiful Exiles Read online

  ALSO BY MEG WAITE CLAYTON

  The Race for Paris

  The Wednesday Daughters

  The Four Ms. Bradwells

  The Wednesday Sisters

  The Language of Light

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Meg Waite Clayton LLC

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503900837 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1503900835 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781503949270 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1503949273 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  First edition

  For Dad,

  who inspires me, always

  For Chris,

  my favorite Hemingway fan

  and

  For Mac, this is our book,

  but then they all are, yours and mine

  CONTENTS

  Catscradle Cottage, Wales 1994

  PART I

  Key West, Florida DECEMBER 1936

  Key West, Florida DECEMBER 1936

  Key West, Florida JANUARY 1937

  Key West, Florida JANUARY 1937

  New York, New York FEBRUARY 1937

  Paris, France MARCH 1937

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain MARCH 1937

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain MARCH 1937

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain MARCH 1937

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain APRIL 1937

  Madrid, Spain APRIL 1937

  A Village on the Jarama River, Spain APRIL 1937

  A Hospital near the Morata Front, Spain APRIL 1937

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain APRIL 1937

  PART II

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain APRIL 1937

  Madrid, Spain MAY 1937

  Paris, France MAY 1937

  The White House, Washington, DC JULY 1937

  New York, New York AUGUST 1937

  Madrid, Spain SEPTEMBER 1937

  On a Lecture Tour in the United States JANUARY 1938

  Marseille, France MAY 1938

  Le Lavandou, France AUGUST 1938

  Paris, France OCTOBER 1938

  PART III

  Paris, France NOVEMBER 1938

  New York, New York JANUARY 1939

  Key West, Florida JANUARY 1939

  Havana, Cuba FEBRUARY 1939

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba APRIL 1939

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JULY 1939

  The Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho SEPTEMBER 1939

  Helsinki, Finland NOVEMBER 1939

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JANUARY 1940

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba MARCH 1940

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba APRIL 1940

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JUNE 1940

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JULY 1940

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba AUGUST 1940

  The Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho SEPTEMBER 1940

  Sun Valley, Idaho OCTOBER 1940

  The Trail Creek Cabin, Sun Valley, Idaho NOVEMBER 1940

  PART IV

  Hong Kong FEBRUARY 1941

  Wong Shek, China APRIL 1941

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JUNE 1941

  Sun Valley, Idaho OCTOBER 1941

  Texas DECEMBER 1941

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba JANUARY 1942

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba APRIL 1943

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba AUGUST 1943

  London, England NOVEMBER 1943

  Italy FEBRUARY 1944

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba MARCH 1944

  On a Dynamite Transport Crossing the Atlantic MAY 1944

  Liverpool, England MAY 1944

  London, England JUNE 1944

  London, England JUNE 1944

  Paris, France AUGUST 1944

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Catscradle Cottage, Wales

  1994

  We start with the oldest—letters mostly. My son reads Matie’s words to me (“Martha, dearest”) and mine to her, thin blue airmail homing birds of love. He reads from my exchanges with editors and with H. G. Wells and Eleanor Roosevelt (me at my ghastliest, even if she never would say so), correspondence I doom for the most part to large brown envelopes bound for the archives in Boston. This little writing cottage has become too much for me and my fading eyesight, however fierce an old lady I might be, so my son is helping me clear it out, reading every letter for a paragraph or two, and often to its end, before I decide its fate. When he extracts a crinkly airmail sheet and reads, “‘Dear Mookie,’” though, I take it from him and set it to the fire in the grate, and watch the page blister blue and red until it falls to ash. I don’t need to see the ink to know the signature: “Your comrade, E.,” in the early days, or later, “With love, your Bug” or “your Bongie.” Bongie—one of several nicknames we called each other interchangeably. But I was never really his Bongie, even if I meant to be, or wanted to be, or tried. I was only ever Martha Ellis Gellhorn, even after I became Mrs. Ernest Hemingway.

  PART I

  Key West, Florida

  DECEMBER 1936

  It was a bright stinking mess of a time, the winter I met Ernest. Dad had been dead a year that Christmas, my twenty-eighth, and while Matie was bearing it, the blue of her eyes was faded and the gray in her blond hair suddenly overwhelmed. She hadn’t wanted to spend the holiday in St. Louis without Dad, of course she hadn’t, but we were going mad with boredom in Miami. So we set off in the car toward a little seaside town whose name on a tour bus captured our imaginations. Key West. My brother drove, with Matie beside him and me buffeted in the open-window back seat, as we crossed the long stretch of bridges to the end of the earth: a place that was delightfully decadent and decaying, with folks content to do nothing but fish for sea turtles and crack coconuts, to gossip and sweat on the worn porches of charmingly colorful white-frame houses, and on beaches fishy with the sweetness of The Odyssey, Moby-Dick, the little mermaid who can’t bring herself to slay the prince to save herself.

  “Surely we can’t pass by a place called Sloppy Joe’s without a peek inside, can we?” Matie asked. Already, we’d climbed the lighthouse for the view and picnicked on the beach, brushed the sand from our toes, piled our sweaty selves back into the car to look for a place where I could wash the wind-tangles from my hair in a cooling bath. But I was never one to deny my mother anything, any more than she denied me. Dad, he’d been the denying one.

  Did we see Hemingway first, or did he see us? People do turn to the light of a door opening in a dark bar, and our pupils were shocked by the contrast from brutal sun and hard road to dim light and soft wood, melted-ice-dampened floors and bottles of Campari, whiskey, rum. A huge bartender welcomed us from behind a long curved bar, while at one end of the place, patrons returned their attention to a rowdy pool game, with money on the rails to make it real. Another man nearly as large as the bartender rose with effort from a chaos of papers on the bar. Grubby white T-sh
irt. Dingy white shorts held up by, of all things, a length of rope. He made a surprising racket in the few steps it took to reach us, to add his voice to the bartender’s welcome.

  “Ernest Hemingway,” he said.

  A slow bead of sweat trickled down my spine to settle into the fabric of my black sundress, already damp from all the time pressed to the car seat and no better for the time on the hot sand. Matie touched a hand briefly to my shoulder, a reminder to stand up straight and never mind my gawky tallness, as I tried to square the rope belt and the shoeless feet with this man’s asymmetric widow’s peak that was, indeed, Ernest Hemingway’s. I knew that hairline, and the sad, seductive eyes too; I’d awoken every morning at Bryn Mawr to those eyes staring down at me from a photo tacked to my dorm room wall.

  “I’m Edna Gellhorn, and this is my son Alfred,” Matie said to Ernest Hemingway. “And this is Martha.”

  Just “Martha,” not “my daughter, Martha.” You can see how that might have left Hemingway taking my brother and me to be newlyweds fresh off a yacht, but I was lost in thinking, Ernest damn Hemingway, who ought to be out catching an impossibly huge marlin off the coast of Cuba, or shooting some heartbreakingly wild creature in Kenya, or writing from Paris where, in the years I’d lived there, I’d forever hoped to catch a glimpse of him the way any writer hopes for a glimpse of her literary hero. He and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose photo I might have hung in place of Hemingway’s if only his looks were as grand as his writing.

  “Nothing ever happens to the brave”—I’d used Hemingway’s words as the epigraph for my already-wanting-to-be-forgotten first novel, What Mad Pursuit. Words spoken by his Great War ambulance-driver protagonist in A Farewell to Arms, to which the nurse he had fallen in love with responds simply that they, too, die.

  My brother told Hemingway we were here on vacation for the weather, and Matie said St. Louis was unbearable this time of year. I dug frantically through the wordy bit of my brain for something more worthy, but already Ernest Hemingway had turned away from us, to the bartender.

  “Skinner,” he said in a conspiratorial tone that rang of true friendship, companions in size, perhaps, “how about some Papa Dobles for these friends of mine from St. Louis?”

  These friends of mine. He’d known that would charm us, and I saw that he knew it, and still I was charmed. Charmed and relieved that we hadn’t already lost his attention. Sure, this Hemingway looked more Matie’s generation than mine, but something in his clumsiness was outsized and dear, like watching a Balaenoptera musculus—a great blue whale—emerge from the sea.

  As Skinner squeezed four perfect grapefruit and eight clean limes one by one into a rusty blender and topped them with a frightening amount of rum and a maraschino drizzle, Hemingway said, “I knew St. Louis in my youth. All the women in the world worth knowing come from St. Louis.” Both his wives had gone to school there, he said, tossing off the fact of abandoning his first young love for a richer, more sophisticated second with discomfiting ease. “And my friends Bill and Katy Smith,” he said. “A fine city, St. Louis.” Then he too talked about the weather, but in a Hemingway sort of way, telling a grand and gory tale of a hurricane that destroyed half the buildings in the Keys and swept away hundreds of veterans living in rehabilitation camps.

  The rumble of the blender cut through the story before he could blame President Roosevelt for the deaths of those veterans and, in the process, get Matie’s dander up. In the pause, I noticed a sawed-off pool cue on the wall behind the bar.

  “Skinner and his pool cue, oh! But don’t they belong in Havana?” I asked, remembering something in a newish men’s magazine that my brother had pointed out to me, one of a series of “letters” that Hemingway sent from exotic places—this particular one describing a bartender who kept a pool cue handy for banging heads when fights broke out.

  “Havana?” Hemingway said.

  “You were fishing in Cuba,” I said. “‘A Havana letter’? In Esquire?”

  “I was fishing in Cuba while poor Skinner was back here in Key West, working his magic with the booze.”

  Skinner swished drinks into glasses and handed them around. It was hard to see a man as big as he was ever needing that pool cue. It was hard to rehang that pool cue here in Key West, when it was so set in a dive bar in Havana in my mind.

  Hemingway gathered his papers and journals and mail and moved them aside in a jumbled pile he set on the far barstool. “Sit before you decide you don’t want to disturb me or some bunk like that,” he insisted, pulling out a barstool for Matie, then one for me. He lowered himself onto a seat that didn’t quite contain him, his dark gaze still focused on my mother, but I imagined myself at the edge of his vision, I imagined him wrapping a story around Matie and my brother and me, dedicating us to a page and a book and the immortality of his prose.

  As my brother cleared the chair overrun with Hemingway’s work for himself, Hemingway raised his glass to Matie and me and said, “Welcome to my little corner of hell.”

  He focused on Matie as he took a sip—not his first drink of the afternoon, or even his second. (Custer, taking a last stand in paint above the bar, surely frowned.)

  Matie said, as easily as if Ernest Hemingway were anybody, “My son is just finishing medical school, and my daughter—surely you’ve heard of her new book, The Trouble I’ve Seen?”

  “Mother,” I said.

  Ernest turned to me, so close beside me that I could almost hear the thought swirling in his expression: Matie’s daughter. I lit a cigarette before he could offer to do so, or fail to offer. Daughter was a disappointment to him somehow, or writer was, or both.

  “The Trouble I’ve Seen—sure, I’ve heard of that, haven’t I? About the Depression?” he said, not recalling exactly, but grabbing from the title and something like memory. “Tell me so I’ll know a bit about it, Miss Martha Gellhorn, daughter of the lovely Edna.”

  Hemingway smiled at Matie as Skinner placed a glass ashtray in front of me.

  “It’s not my book, really,” I said quietly, the only way I could speak about the stories I’d collected trudging around the Hoovervilles—tumbledown shacks and tents surrounded by scum-covered water, open sewage ditches, flies and mosquitos and rats and miserably scrawny cats and dogs and goats, even more miserably scrawny sick people. There was nothing to do but try to give those people what little I had without offending their dignity, and write out the rage of it.

  “It’s a novel, but the stories are real, sure enough,” I told Hemingway. I’d written it as fiction to protect these people who were so ashamed, always blaming themselves. “A little girl digging through slop and filth in hopes of finding a handcart wheel. A mother making a feast of canned salmon for her daughter. A—”

  I stubbed the half-smoked cigarette out in the clean ashtray, trying to avoid making an utter sobbing fool of myself in front of Ernest Hemingway. A baby, I meant to say, but I never could get that word up through my cottony throat. That baby, just four months old, was paralyzed with syphilis, but the doctors refused to give her shots for want of twenty-five lousy cents. I’d emptied my pockets at that hospital for that tiny, dying infant with her big, hopeful name: Abigail June.

  Hemingway said, “It’s a thing, to write about something that sticks to your insides like that, isn’t it? It’s the only way any of us should ever write, with a sharp shard lodged between our tickers and our spines.”

  My brother said, “One reviewer likened Marty to Dostoyevsky, Dickens, and Victor Hugo—all of them—and her photo was on the cover of the Saturday Review of Litera—”

  “I’ve read all your books, Mr. Hemingway,” I interrupted, quite sure that if I were Ernest Hemingway, I would run but fast from this crazy family who imagined their writer-daughter deserved mention to him. “A Farewell to Arms, that one was something.” The ambulance driver better delivered than the nurse, but still a moving story. “After I read it, I quit everything and grabbed my typewriter and set off for France.”

  Ernest sai
d, “That’s a fine thought, my work encouraging girls to drop out of school.”

  My brother said, “Marty didn’t need encouragement. She’d already dropped out. Don’t let her fool you, sir.”

  “Sir?” Ernest turned to me and said, “If you call me ‘sir,’ Marty, I’ll have to ring up the good new King George and demand my Grand Cross star.” He laughed then. He laughed, and he threw back the rest of his Papa Doble, and he raised his empty glass to Skinner.

  “College would just have prepared me for some scratchy bore of a desk without so much as a window view,” I said. I’d been rotten at the world of clothes and lipstick colors, dates with Ivy League boys, gossip and secrets kept for the sake of seeming to be someone better than the other girls. I left college to write—and maybe I didn’t always write, and maybe when I did, my first novel was all college-girl sex and nonsense (Dad’s verdict all along), but my second was better; it was the best I could write.

  “A fine, good girl like yourself, you’ll be working on a new book?” Ernest asked.

  “I’m not for anything if I’m not writing, Mr. Hemingway.”

  “Ernest,” he said.

  “Ernest,” I repeated, thinking that, in the end, the writing was the only thing that saved me, that kept me from being sucked down into the sludge pit of darkness and doubt. Wondering if any small bit of Ernest Hemingway might be the same way, if a writer as successful as he was ever questioned his words, his worth, the cost of what it took to pour all of yourself into a book that people might just abandon, half-read, on a chair in a bus station, even with a whole long journey to pass.

  I found myself telling him about my writing then, because he really did seem to want me to. After I’d finished The Trouble I’ve Seen, I’d pitched a hundred million ideas to Time and the New Yorker and anyone else with a printing press, hoping to write pieces about what was going on in Europe. For years already, Hitler had limited the number of Jews who could attend university or practice medicine or law or appear on stage, but in September of 1935 he’d stepped it up a horrid notch with the Nuremberg Race Laws. All my pitches were for nothing, though. No one cared. So I scraped together passage to Paris (where everyone was glum for having to make their own beds at the fancy hotels), and on to Stuttgart and Munich. The hateful Nazi thugs there left me so furious, though, that I’d come home to write it out in a new novel, a German pacifist thing.