Beautiful Exiles Page 12

  One afternoon, we bumped into Lillian Hellman at the censor’s office. The playwright had just arrived in Spain that very day, and was clearing remarks she was to give in a radio talk from Madrid that night. Ernest told her we were cooking up some beef he got from a bullring, and she’d better come, it was the only time she would see beef in Madrid. So she joined us at Herb and Del’s penthouse, arriving with tins of sardines and pâté and the same bitterness to me she’d shown on the ship. She was treated to a rare piece of beef and an absolutely raw Ernest, and she promptly set to her chosen sport for the evening, which was to make me look ridiculous.

  “You mean to go home to talk about what’s already done when you might stay here and write about what’s to come?” she asked, helping herself to more of the red wine, which was the only part of the meal other than her own canned goods she found tolerable.

  My St. Louis manners were all that kept me from pointing out that I’d spent a helluva lot of time in Spain by then, and she’d just arrived, and yet she chose to sit here, drinking with friends, rather than having a look at a war she was to tell the world about by radio five minutes after she finished her sardines. A chauffeur was to pick her up from the apartment and take her straight to the broadcasting facilities.

  “You can deliver passion in your writing about it, Lilly, sure,” I said, “and maybe folks will read it, or maybe they’d rather read the funnies page. But it’s something to call it out as special, to sell tickets and make it an event. It’s something to hear about it from someone who’s actually been here.” Not going light on the “actually been here” bit, to tell the truth.

  Ernest said, “And Marty here, she can quack as well as anyone.”

  He was drunk. He’d started drinking back in the room, and he’d tried to get me to drink with him, and he’d wanted to have sex too, but I’d only just finished cleaning up.

  “I am an awfully loud duck,” I agreed, trying to keep the hurt from my voice and remembering how hurt he’d been when I’d kept my clothes on rather than falling in bed with him. “And I can flap and I can fly.”

  “And lay rotten eggs,” Ernest said.

  Lillian yipped her thin, little laugh, with her thin lips and her gummy smile.

  “Marty here has lost her cojones,” Ernest said. “She wants to be seen as a war reporter, but she’s afraid of getting hurt.”

  “Bug!”

  “She means to go back to safety, to money grub at Spain’s expense, telling everyone she’s been such a brave girl and they should open their pocketbooks for her.”

  “It’s for the cause,” I said. “The money we’re raising with the lectures will all go to the cause.”

  “Except the most of it that will pay for your first-class trains and your fancy hotels and probably a new fox stole.”

  We were saved from ourselves by the beginning of a bombardment, which we all rushed out to the terrace to see—all of us except Lillian, who sank into the sofa and buried her head between her knees, crying in fear.

  The sight of the night bombardment was something, a fireworks show over the Telefónica, with shells bursting everywhere and the dust starting to kick up, reaching us even from the distance of the terrace. We didn’t speak about it. We just stood there and watched the bombs fall until the apartment phone rang, with Lilly still trembling on the couch.

  It was the radio station calling to say the broadcast had been canceled, as the streets weren’t safe. She should tell the chauffeur when he arrived. But when the car showed up, Lillian gathered herself to go.

  “Lillian, don’t be an idiot,” Ernest said.

  “It may be my only chance to do this,” Lillian said, as if she hadn’t just been wetting her panties over bombs that weren’t even hitting the building.

  “Ah, a woman with cojones,” Ernest said. “You won’t head home the minute you’ve been fitted for a fur and shoes.”

  In the privacy of our rooms back at the Florida, I put on the Chopin mazurka Ernest loved, thinking it might soothe us both, saying as I set the needle to the record, “I don’t blame you for being cranky, Bug. I know you’re hurt about the reviews, but you can’t—”

  “I can’t?” he said as the piano notes tinkled in their quick minor tone. Then, shouting, “I can’t! I can’t I can’t I can’t! That’s all any woman is good for, to keep me from doing the things I need to do!”

  I accidentally knocked the Victrola’s arm, which skittered off the record and began scratching out an awful static.

  He said, “You start all lovey and tender-taking-care-of-me, and the next thing I know your claws are all in my talent!”

  “I do no such—”

  “You do! You fuck my talent!”

  I turned back to the Victrola, lifting the arm to try to save the needle, which was already ruined, thinking the only fucking I ever did was in service of his ego, to keep him from falling too deep into the dark sludge pit of having no war to write about.

  He grabbed my arm so tightly that it hurt.

  “Let go of me!” I demanded, pushing hard on his chest that he was so proud of, then raising my knee for his more precious parts.

  He backed away faster than you would have imagined he could after all that booze.

  “Your damned talent that you spend making a fool of me in your play?” I said. “Sure, that’s talent, ‘Working: Do Not Disturb.’ A hero that is you all fine and noble, while the leggy girl that’s me is the worst thing that ever happened to any man on earth.”

  He swung at me but missed, instead clipping the bedside lamp. It crashed to the floor in a terrible rumble of shattering porcelain and smashing shade and the tinkle of the light bulb going dark in a thousand pieces all at once.

  We looked from the lamp to each other in the dim light.

  “Oh shit, what kind of idiot Bug will I be without even a light to impale myself on?” he said.

  And we started laughing, the fever broken.

  “Be careful, Mookie,” he said. “You don’t want to step on that glass with your scarred little toes.”

  “I still have my shoes on.”

  “Damn, even your shoes? I’ve been trying to get you out of your clothes all day, and I’ve made no progress at all?”

  We laughed again, and he came to me and kissed me.

  “I’m sorry, Bongie,” I said. “I’m a jungle beast, I am. I’m just a jungle beast and the juice is sour and I . . .”

  I touched the side of his face. He was all scrofulous, Gellhorn style, and lovable, really, he was. And I knew how it was to have the writing terrors, and I said, “I do love your talent, Bug,” which was the truest way I could say it. I loved his talent always, even when I didn’t much like the rest of him. I wanted to be a part of his talent. I wanted to climb inside it and wallow in the good of his words. I wanted him to be writing some marvelous new A Farewell to Arms but with a Catherine who was the bravest girl he ever knew, braver than him, and me writing a The Trouble I’ve Seen about the fine people of Spain, and the two of us reading each other’s work and talking about the writing, making it better together. I wanted the two of us to be climbing into bed at night and snuggling and kissing, and getting up in the morning with the juice to write, to make the whole world see that a bigger war was so close it was painful, that if they didn’t pay attention to what was happening in Spain and what that madman Hitler was doing, and his buddy Mussolini too, we would all be done for but good.

  The day before my twenty-ninth birthday, Ernest and I went down to the Fifteenth Brigade headquarters at the old mill at Ambite to celebrate the anniversary of the International Brigades’ arrival in Madrid. We went with Herb Matthews and two poets we knew, and I wore woolen underwear for the onslaught of speeches and toasts, red wine, photographs, and film. When Bug took his glasses off for the camera, it touched me to see him be so publicly vain, and I thought I really did love him and he really did love me and it was just everything else going wrong—the Republican prime minister establishing a secret police with s
ecret prisons and secret payrolls while the Fascists took all of the north of Spain.

  Back in Madrid that night, we went from a street parade to a party thrown by some Russian friends who poured us too much vodka, and on to the Alianza to drink more and to sing and dance until three in the morning. Happy birthday to me.

  I slept well past noon, and woke hungover, and not even the gorgeous flowers or the caviar and pâté en croûte Herb brought me that evening, nor the champagne and Château d’Yquem Bug opened, could relieve the pall of the news that greeted us: the word was out about Ernest and me back home. Matie would know. Pauline would know, too, if she cared to.

  By the time Pauline cabled that she was coming to Spain for Christmas, it seemed hardly to matter. I supposed I ought to leave Ernest to his good, indulging wife. I supposed I ought to go home before my speaking tour to see Matie, to bask in the St. Louis horrors that beckoned now as some kind of relief. I thought I’d like to lie in bed and have Matie put her hand on my forehead, to go to Creve Coeur Park and read poetry. But St. Louis would be no good for me, and if I were reading poetry by a waterfall when another Máté Zalka died, I would never forgive myself.

  So I stayed with Ernest, and I tried to hide the darkness away as Dad forever made it clear I should, the way Ernest often seemed to think I should as well. So many times I just wanted to curl up in bed and cry, like when the secret police came for Ilsa Kulcsar from the foreign press office, charging her with living with one man when she was still, technically, married to another (as if she’d pretended anything else), or when my Russian military adviser friend Mikhail Koltsov showed me the cyanide pill he carried always, lest he live to give the Fascists proof of Russian soldiers fighting with the Republicans. It had become impossible to look away from what I suppose we’d known all along but couldn’t bear to see—that, indeed, the Republicans weren’t any saints.

  A few days after Pauline’s cable, in the midst of another shelling, Ernest abandoned a lunch with the chief of the new secret police—a scoop for him—and hurried through the mud and splatter of shells to make sure I was safe.

  “Marry me, Mookie,” he said the moment he found me. “Tell me you’ll marry me.”

  He meant it this time. He would leave Pauline for me. It was there in his big brown eyes and square, sturdy chin and furrowed brow, in the panic that he might have lost me before he could truly ask me to spend my life with him.

  The thing is, you can’t say yes to a man who has two young boys at home hanging in the balance unless you’re dead sure, and maybe not even then. I ought to have said no from the beginning, but we were in Spain in the middle of a war, with all the needing to live every minute just in case there weren’t many more, and I knew he would never leave Pauline without being sure of me, and there was safety in that. That was how I loved him. I loved him for his words and what they could do, how I could help him through it and he could help me—but without any threat to Pauline and Patrick and Gigi, or to his life back in Key West.

  “You can’t ask me that, Bug,” I said gently. “It’s not fair to ask me that when you can’t mean it. It’s not fair to Pauline or to Patrick and Gigi.”

  He flinched at the sound of his sons’ names, but the certainty in his eyes didn’t waver.

  “It’s not fair to me to make me be the reason for you leaving them,” I said. “It’s not even fair to yourself.”

  I left Madrid alone this time. I went to Paris, where I quickly became sick with the abundance of overrich food and the tasteless indifference to the plight of Spain by everyone I met. I retrieved my latest royalty check for The Trouble I’ve Seen from my French bank, and I divvied up the list of expenses I’d kept track of, and I sent my share to Ernest with a short letter saying that the royalties came from the best thing I’d ever written and paid for the best thing I’d ever done in my life, which was to go to Spain. I wrote him again from the Normandie, headed home in a foul cabin in which I was, nonetheless, trying to write. I wished a Merry Christmas to Pauline and him. I’d wanted it to be done one way or another, and now it was.

  On a Lecture Tour in the United States

  JANUARY 1938

  “Both Sides of the World,” we’d decided to call my lecture tour, which the Post Agency had booked for twenty-two cities. I’d thought folks might balk at a twenty-nine-year-old insisting on her view of how the world should be run, but crowds showed up in Milwaukee and Montclair, in Newark, at the Des Moines Women’s Club, at the Sheldon at home. I tried to make each and every one of the people who attended—conservative Midwesterners and East Coast liberals alike—understand that Spain was the one single place in the world where Fascism might be wrestled down into the grave it deserved. Some audiences asked me silly things like whether I thought women should marry and why I didn’t wear hats, and their obliviousness to what was happening in Spain was often astonishing. I wanted to put a copy of “Men Without Medals,” just out in Collier’s, in their hands, and say, “Look here, just read, for God’s sake, will you?” and refuse to say a word until everyone had finished reading and looked up. It was impossible, trying to make people see before the end of a one-hour lecture what so few really cared to face.

  At the Nineteenth Century Women’s Club in Chicago on February 3, a woman in pretty pearls and steel-rimmed glasses came up to tell me how very much she’d enjoyed the speech. Grace Hemingway. I wondered how Ernest’s mother could have kept hidden in her tidy white hair and generous smile the horns and fangs her son claimed for her.

  In St. Louis, my morning copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch sported a photograph of Ernest at Teruel, wearing his glasses and his ridiculous stocking cap even though there was a photographer with a camera pointed at him. Vanity, where have you gone? He looked as tired as I felt, which was awfully damned tired; my hair was limp and thinning, my skin and my spirit wan, and I was losing weight like a boxer trying to move to a lighter class, but without the trying. Seeing the photo made me so sad to have left Spain and Ernest, who had by then come home himself. Max Perkins told me that despite all the rot in the papers about how happy Ernest was to be back with his family in Key West, all he really wanted was to return to Spain. Max was worried about him. Rumor was Ernest was drinking fifteen or more scotches a day, while Pauline carried on as if everything was just la-di-da.

  I cut out the photo and wrote a note saying it would grieve me forever not to have stayed in Spain and returned to Teruel with him, and I mailed it off before I could change my mind.

  On doctor’s orders, I canceled the last few tour stops and settled in to Matie’s care and to a new resolve to be a writer, and just that. Matie took me to Florida, for the warmth and the rest.

  On March 4, Ernest came up from Key West to see us. “I’ve missed you, Marty,” he said.

  I said I hoped he had a nice Christmas with Pauline.

  He said, “Pauline couldn’t get papers to get to Spain.”

  “And you didn’t join her in Paris?”

  “No.”

  “But here you are, in Key West.”

  “Here I am in Miami, Stooge.”

  We were in Miami together—Matie and Ernest and I—when we heard the news that the Fascists, who had retaken Teruel just days earlier, were splitting the remaining Republican forces in two. The story was a half column buried on page 11. Ernest and I slept together that night, not for sex but for the warmth and comfort in our despair, and we stayed up half the night making plans to meet as soon as possible in Paris, to return to Spain.

  Before we could sail, Hitler marched into Austria, crossing the border himself at his birthplace of Braunau to crowds waving swastika flags and cheering “Heil Hitler” in the streets. When the little madman himself stepped up to speak from the balcony of the Imperial Palace in Vienna hours later, he proclaimed to a square packed with enthusiastic Austrians the reunification of their country into Germany—the Anschluss—without anyone having fired a shot.

  Ernest arranged a new contract with NANA and flew to New York—wi
th Pauline, but I was tired of caring about that, tired of spending my energy on anything but my work. He sailed on the Île de France on March 18, while I arranged for Collier’s to sponsor my trip and sailed the following week on the Aquitania. I shipped a car for us to use in Spain, and cabled Ernest to meet me in Cherbourg on the twenty-eighth. At the last minute, I added ten words to the cable: “IF ANYTHING EVER STOPS OUR WORKING TOGETHER, THEN FUTURE NIX.” The wording, I see in retrospect, was open to so many interpretations, and prescient too.

  I arrived in France to find Ernest all wrought up about a piece Dos Passos had written for Redbook that Ernest had read on the ship.

  “He hates the communists so much now that he’s attacking—for money!—the good people of Spain. Honest ol’ Dos Passos will knife you in the back for two bits,” he said, “and your sister for four.”

  “Really, Bongie,” I said, “does that matter now? The thing is the good people of Spain being slaughtered while the rest of the world buys tickets and popcorn.” The Spanish Republic was in danger of collapsing within days. The world idled while Germany and Italy sent to the Fascists a new kind of bomb that exploded sideways to make sure as many poor sods as possible were killed. “You’ve got to do something, Ernest,” I said. “You’ve got to yell at everyone until they help!”

  He flew shortly thereafter to St.-Jean-de-Luz to call on the American ambassador to Spain, and maybe it was his doing or maybe it was coincidence, but days later the French opened their border to evacuate the wounded and promised to ship planes and artillery to the Republicans. Ernest caught a night train from there while I set off in the car, both of us headed back to Spain.

  We met up again in Barcelona for the bad grub and dirty rooms of the Hotel Majestic. I did have my own soap, as always, which Hemingway declined to share even though there was no other soap to be had in the whole city, leaving the hotel maids with nothing to do but iron the dirty sheets and remake the beds with them. But Herb Matthews was there to help us drink away the bad news every evening, and to get up before dawn with us and set off across the pink-blossom-dotted hills, Ernest in his driving cap, Herb puffing on his cigar, and me holding tightly to a scarf to keep the dust from my hair in the open car. It was warm and muggy, but the thunder was manufactured, and I’d never seen a world so thoroughly destroyed.