Beautiful Exiles Read online

  “If I am to die in an air raid,” he answered, taking my hand again, “I would like to be remembered most as a dapper dresser. Your problem is you care more about word choice than fashion. You think writing will bring an end to suffering. You are more stupid than a herd of mules!”

  “You self-congratulating little cynic!” I laughed. “Never mind that you’re just here to make your own fame and fortune on the back of the poor Spanish!”

  It was all in jest, and yet it poked at something that was true: that his pictures and my words—the only weapons we knew how to fight with—were lousy worthless against Hitler’s guns and planes and men.

  I stayed in Barcelona and wrote about the refugees until I was too tired in the head to write anything but sludge, even with Robert Capa and Herb Matthews to shame me into writing my heart out as best I could. I had no heart left. My heart was already splattered all over the streets, rotting with the corpses in the bomb craters everywhere in Spain.

  There was nothing to do then but go home and find a quiet place—a fiction-writing place, perhaps Bug was right about that—where I could sort through the voices battering my heart. I left with Robert Capa, who was as sick and exhausted as I was, and if Ernest wanted to make a fuss over our traveling together while he was sharing Pauline’s bed, that was fine with me. We headed for Paris, where we each hoped to find a way to let our badgering voices speak to the world. I hoped only that my words might speak in the way that his photos really did, despite all my saying how silent they were.

  Matie and my brothers and I, along with my older brother’s family, spent Christmas together in St. Louis, with Ernest calling from Key West so often that I forever had to be vigilant for the telephone’s ring.

  “I should have done it as a novel rather than a goddamned play,” he said, all torn up about The Fifth Column. “Those hacks in New York are making it so cheap we’re going to have to mark it down to the 4.95 Column. They want to make the thing a foolproof success, by which they mean ‘take out anything that hasn’t been done before.’”

  “It is a lot of money, Bug,” I said. Fifty thousand dollars.

  “They’ve spent as much on a helluva lot of lesser plays.”

  It was all such a mess: his mess of a play, our mess of a relationship, and, worst of all, the mess of Spain, which daily brought increasingly bleak news. I felt the darkness of that stirring the words in my head, making everything I put on the page the wrong dope.

  Ernest pleaded for me to meet him in New York, where he was going to spend a week revising the damned play himself. Matie pleaded for me not to go, invoking Ernest’s wife and his children, asking whether I was the kind of woman to come between a man and his family.

  “You don’t really even want him to leave his family, Martha,” she insisted. “You’d regret it if you were the cause of that.”

  “If it wasn’t me, it would be someone else, Matie. It always has been.”

  “And that makes you feel better?”

  She took a letter from the secret drawer in her desk—the hiding place she’d used so often as a suffragette scheming to make public statements and arrange protests. The letter she handed me was in my own handwriting, from Paris the prior May.

  “I want you to read it carefully, Martha.”

  “It’s my own letter, Matie! You don’t think I know what I wrote?”

  “I want you to read it carefully.”

  I took the thing from her, and I read it, to indulge her.

  “What does it say about you and Ernest, Martha?”

  “It says he loves me but there is nothing to be done about it. I don’t need him to do anything about it, though. I don’t need him to leave his family. I don’t need to be a wife. I have enough on my hands being a journalist, and I’d be such a rotten wife, Matie, you know I would.”

  “It says he loves you, that you both believe he loves you,” Matie said gently.

  “I do believe it,” I insisted. “And so does Ernest.”

  “And yet it says nothing about you loving him.”

  I read the letter again.

  “Are you sure you do love him, Martha?” Matie asked. “Because this time it’s different; there are children involved. If he loves you beyond all measure, and you love him in the same way, and there is nothing left of his marriage, well then, maybe. But this time there are children whose needs must be put first.”

  Not saying “selfish scum”—that was my father’s phrase—but meaning it, or nearly.

  “This time you’d better be awfully sure of your own feelings,” Matie said.

  New York, New York

  JANUARY 1939

  I arrived in New York on January 14 only to wake up the next morning to screaming headlines: “Hemingway by K.O. in Big Night Club Card.” Some fool at the Stork Club had rubbed a hand over Ernest’s face, saying, “Tough, eh?” and Ernest had socked him good, and now the newspaper couldn’t help but work in a reminder of Ernest’s fight in Max Perkins’s office almost two years before. Still, for Ernest and me together, New York was like Paris, only more so. We went everywhere together, with only Matie’s admonition to spoil it. We even went to a showing of The Spanish Earth with his and Hadley’s son joining us by cab from the ferry.

  “Bumby,” I said, immediately kicking myself. I’d reminded myself a thousand times to call him “Jack,” because, really, what teenager cares to be known by his baby love name, and a bumbling one at that? “I’m Marty,” I said. “It’s so nice to meet you, Jack. I feel I know you from all the pride your old father here likes to spill about you to all of us who know him.”

  The poor kid just gawked at me as if I were a mirage, which maybe I was if you’d just come down to New York from some boys’ prep school where the closest you were allowed to a woman was a glimpse of some old schoolmaster’s wife.

  Ernest said, “Shatz here”—shatz a German word meaning “treasure”—“is down from Storm King School up near West Point, where not only is he the best damned boxer in the place, he’s also the best damned student. First in his class, and second in the whole outfit. That’s his mother’s influence, of course. Hadley is a fine mother even if I’m something to cast out with the rotten fish and wilted lettuce. My influence would have Shatz here drinking rum by the gallon and cussing out the headmaster.”

  While Bumby rooted around in his chest for his own voice, Hemingway danced a boxer dance and poked at him playfully, telling me what a fine fisherman Bumby was too, and what great friends he was with Edward Albee’s son. “You know Albee, the playwright?” Ernest said to me. “Maybe I should get him to give what for to that gang pulverizing The Fifth Column.”

  Bumby fell into play-boxing with his father, then said, finally, “Some of the ponds at school have trout.”

  “Rainbow trout?” I asked.

  “Brook trout! And the streams have brookies too. But some of them also have rainbows. Do you fish, Miss Gellhorn?”

  “I would certainly love to fish with you, Master Hemingway!” I said, and he blushed from one ear to the other all the way across his grinning face.

  Bumby hardly touched his dinner at the Stork Club for being so busy trying to impress his father and me. We talked about the word out of Spain—Robert Capa had gone back and Herb Matthews was still there; they’d fled Barcelona when the government abandoned it on January 22—which left me without much appetite myself, the guilt of being warm and well fed while my friends were still in Spain doing what I ought to be doing myself.

  “Capa’s editors at Life arranged to get him out with the Americans, but the idiot refused,” I said. “He said he’d take his chances with Herb and the others, never mind that he has no goddamned passport.”

  Bumby giggled at my swearing, which of course provoked me to swear more. “If my swearing means I’ll go to hell,” I whispered to him, “well then, I’m sure there will be better fucking conversation there than in heaven, and if it’s a little warm, I’ll just take off my fur.”

  As we put our coa
ts back on and braced ourselves for the cold night, Ernest asked his son, “Well, how do you like Marty? Should I keep her?”

  Bumby said, “I’ll take her if you don’t, Papa!” and we all laughed.

  He wasn’t Pauline’s son; I suppose that was part of his easy acceptance of me into his life. He was used to a woman other than his mother having his father’s affections. Maybe I wasn’t even the first of his father’s extracurricular loves he’d met. Children do get used to their parents ceasing to love each other as long as their parents love them, and Ernest did love his children, he would always love them. And maybe I hadn’t been quite sure when I wrote that letter to Matie, but I did love Ernest, and I would love his children too.

  The Hemingway and Pfeiffer families were to gather in Key West in early February for Patrick’s confirmation. Ernest’s mother was coming, and Pauline’s parents and her uncle Gus, who was forever giving Ernest and Pauline everything they needed and then some. Ernest thought I should come down for the confirmation; he tried to convince me of it one of our last nights together, as we browsed Fifth Avenue shopwindows full of clothes and shoes and jewelry, furniture and linens.

  “Mouse adores you as much as Bumby does,” he insisted. “And my mother went on forever about what a fine job you did in Chicago on that little speaking tour.”

  I said, “That ‘little’ speaking tour was twenty-two cities, you know.”

  “Your big speaking tour.”

  “And Pauline would love to see me at her son’s confirmation?”

  “Let’s go to Cuba, then,” Ernest suggested. He’d gone to Cuba by himself before, on the Pilar; he liked to get away from the crowded life Pauline had gathered around them in Key West, which was no longer the sleepy place they lit on originally for the quiet that allowed him to write. Cuba offered both excuse and access: he could be in Key West in just a few hours, and back again as quickly, but no one from Key West would come to him.

  “Whatever in the world would I do in Cuba, Bongie?”

  “I have enough stories for a new book, nearly. The three Esquires and the Cosmo—the way I wrote it, not the way they twiddled the thing. And ‘Landscapes with Figures,’ and three long ones I want to write, one about Teruel and another about the storming of the Guadarrama pass, and one about an old fisherman who fights a swordfish all alone on his boat for days only to have a shark eat the thing because he can’t get it into the boat. That last one could be the ticket, it could make the book, but I need to go to Cuba and go out on a skiff, to make sure I don’t give the reader the wrong dope.”

  “The ‘wrong dope’?”

  “I do begin to sound like you, don’t I?”

  “We’re two strands of the same rope, all twisted together now, Bug. I wonder that we don’t hang ourselves.”

  “Cuba, Mookie. When all the time you spent risking your ass in Spain only to have the whole thing go to rot is muddling your brain, the sun there will bake most of the rot out of you, and the rum will sterilize the rest.”

  We’d stopped in front of a shopwindow view of a table set with lovely china and pretty napkins, wineglasses, candlesticks, silver knives and forks and spoons and serving bowls and platters, everything so perfectly matched that it gave me the jitters.

  “I need to write, Ernestino,” I said. “The only thing that bakes the rot out of me is the writing.”

  “They want me to do these lectures in New York and all over the goddamned place, but I’ll tell them I’m not free to lecture.”

  “You don’t need the money?”

  “I’ll tell them nicely, in case I need the money later, for writing the novel. In case I can’t make the stories into a book. I’ll tell them I can’t do the lectures now but I might do them later, and we’ll spend our days in Cuba writing and our nights drinking rum and making love.”

  I put a finger to one of the letters on the store window. “How many nights, Nesto? So I can plan.”

  He set his hand over mine, and we stood looking from the dark sidewalk into the brightly lit display dining room. “A whole lifetime of nights, Mook.”

  “Cuba,” I said. A chance to drag our relationship out in the bright light of daily life, just Bug and me in private, which was something we would never find anywhere in the United States. Not with his fame. Not with the glut of photographers looking to make a living capturing people like us for scandalous headlines. We could try a more normal life together in Cuba without him having to leave his children’s mother. Matie had said it true: If Ernest loved me beyond all measure and I loved him in the same way and there was nothing left of his marriage, well then, maybe. But if Ernest left Pauline for me, I would be beholden, and I was no good at being beholden. I was lousy at being a wife who always put her husband before her writing. I was better at selfish lover, selfish scum.

  “I’m afraid of the writing, Nesto,” I confessed. “It’s all roiling my gut like hell: the pages behind me, the ones ahead.”

  “You’ve been out of the sun too long, Mookie,” he said. “Come to Cuba with me.”

  Cuba. Writing in the daytime and drinking rum at night. Sharing a bed and all of it in a regular way. Seeing if our motors could run together on the plain juice of daily life, without the chaser shot of war.

  Key West, Florida

  JANUARY 1939

  Ernest flew back to Key West on January 24 for the family doings. He called me five days later, answering my “hello” with “Yeats is dead.”

  “I’m sorry, Bug,” I said.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t wait,” Ernest said. “Maybe we should go to Cuba now.”

  A line from a Yeats poem came to mind, about making the iron hot by striking rather than waiting for it to heat up. But I answered gently, “It will be just a few more days, Bongie, and there’s Patrick’s confirmation.”

  After we hung up, I went to my mother’s bookshelves and pulled down a collection of Yeats’s poems, and I paged through to find one I’d learned of from Teachie at Bryn Mawr, about treading softly on others’ dreams. I supposed Teachie would die before I did, as my father had, as Matie almost surely would too unless I could manage to get myself killed at war.

  Ernest’s mother—who had stayed at Key West’s priciest hotel on Ernest’s dime for Patrick’s confirmation—returned to Oak Park, and Ernest caught the next ferry to Havana. He’d settled into rooms in the Sevilla-Biltmore by the time I arrived, and taken a room for writing at the Ambos Mundos—a corner room with floor-to-ceiling windows, louvered shutters, and a fabulous cross breeze, with a balcony and a view of the cathedral, the harbor, the sea. “Both worlds,” the hotel name meant. Old and new. Cuban and Spanish. Married and not. The telephones standing silent, no ugly ringing of interruption. No letters or bills. No children or wife or pet raccoons. Just fishing tackle and old newspapers and canned meats at one hotel, and a typewriter, ribbons, and a grand supply of paper at the other.

  I dropped my bags at the Biltmore and walked to the Ambos Mundos, where I took the black wire cage of an elevator up to the fifth floor. I found Ernest stretched out on the bed in the alcove of his writing room, reading over some pages. A half-eaten twelve-pound ham and an empty bottle of rum sat on the bedside table. The sheets were a mess despite the availability of maid service, and the sink in the john was covered with hairs.

  “Hemingstein,” I said.

  “I knew you’d get here, Daughter, because I arranged that you would.”

  “Hemingstein,” I repeated, laughing now at the reference to my arrival in Madrid that first time, “it’s one thing to live in squalor in the middle of a Spanish war, but this is pathetic.”

  He patted the bed beside him, and I stretched my legs alongside his and allowed myself to be pulled into his big bear embrace, his arms around me the way I loved them.

  “I did wash my clothes for you,” he said, nodding to spare khakis and a shirt drying in the fresh air of the balcony, and moccasins drying on the windowsill.

  I said, “You are such a pig, Bug. An adorable pig.
A talented pig. But really.”

  “I’m writing, Mookie.”

  “You can’t allow a maid in for five minutes?”

  “The maid was here yesterday.”

  He meant to finish some stories for a collection that would pay his bills while he dug into a new novel. He was working on a story about a brave young man filming the Spanish war.

  “He sounds like you, only better,” I said.

  “Is there a man better than I am?” he asked.

  “What about the Cuba story you’re here to research? The one about the fisherman and the shark.”

  “After this war story I’m writing. I’m calling it ‘Under the Ridge.’”

  I also meant to write about the Spanish war, a novel, but I soon abandoned it for one about a young American journalist witnessing the fall of the Czechoslovakian Sudetenland to Hitler.

  “A beautiful blond with legs up to her shoulders, I should hope,” Ernest said. “And as brave as you are.”

  I did draw on my own experience in Prague, but my journalist protagonist was far more noble than I was. She was trying to help the Jewish and anti-Fascist refugees in Prague who had been ordered to return to the Reich and its concentration camps. For me, though, it was one thing to write journalism pieces from a place full of great friends with the same reason for being there as you and very little alternative, and it was another to wrestle the abomination that was a novel into submission in a characterless hotel in a warm climate, in a country at peace. Yes, maybe it was the pent-up desires of a decade spent living in hotels in Europe. Maybe it was the irresistible charms of Cuba, or the need for something more than a hotel room in which to test our love. Or maybe it was my excuse for avoiding a story I couldn’t manage to begin well. Whatever the reason, while Ernest settled in to his writing, I set mine aside and began a daily perusal of the Havana newspaper advertisements for real estate.