Beautiful Exiles Read online

  There was nothing more to do but give all the cash I could spare to Gustav Regler’s wife and assure her that I would sit on the steps of the White House with a protest sign draped over me until Roosevelt insisted the French set her husband free.

  I cabled Ernest that I was on my way. Only I got tripped up about a visa to Portugal—the same delay and delay and delay as when I’d tried to get from Paris to Spain that first time. And when that was finally sorted out (after more waving of President Roosevelt’s letter), it wasn’t clear the French airlines would fly. By the time I got to Lisbon, the weather I’d so counted on in Finland had turned true enemy. The Clipper had stopped running, even those big Pan Am flying boats unable to get anywhere on account of the weather. “ASHAMED DISAPPOINT YOU,” I cabled Ernest. “MISERABLY UNHAPPY.” It was January 2, 1940. A new decade had begun, and I was alone in Lisbon, my sole companion the promise I hadn’t kept.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JANUARY 1940

  I arrived back in Cuba, finally, to the sea a calm azure and the sky a sharper blue dotted with puffs of soft white, and to Ernest looking an absolute mess. I’d been a little crushed when he hadn’t been there to greet me from the flight, even though I’d told him to stay home and write and I would come to him, I would find him as I did: sitting in his club chair by the drinks cart with his first scotch of the day, counting the words he’d written. But it wasn’t his first scotch, I didn’t think, and his hair was long and scraggly except where it wasn’t, where it seemed thinner than when I’d left. His rope belt was tied around a larger girth—weight gain I hoped I’d find recorded on my bathroom wall, but looking at the slop of him, I feared I might not. He hadn’t showered, perhaps not for days.

  “Bongie, you can’t find your way to the barbershop without me?” I teased, offering my warmest smile as I dropped my pack on the floor and pulled the door closed behind me.

  He looked up at me. He didn’t smile. He said, “I won’t have it cut until the novel is finished.”

  I went to him and kissed him on the cheek above the scruffy beard.

  “We’re becoming superstitious?” I said. “Because that sounds to me like an excuse to bother me for leaving you alone on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Two months and sixteen days.”

  “I know, Bug, I know,” I said, moved by the precision of his words. I couldn’t have said how long we’d spent apart, with so much going on that one day bled into the next. But then he was a counter, a keeper-tracker of numbers. His weight every morning, even when he was hungover, even when it was much higher than he wanted to know. His daily word count each afternoon over his first scotch. He had taken to reporting both tallies in letters to anyone who would listen. Max Perkins worried this daily counting suggested Ernest might end up in a loony bin, but if your roots were in journalism that had to be cabled at a cost of so much per word, it made sense to be in the habit of counting. And it gave Bug a sense of control over the things he struggled to control: his weight, the progress of his writing, my absence from him.

  “I didn’t mean to be gone so long, Bug,” I said. “You know I didn’t.”

  “You stopped in Washington.”

  “That was for Gustav Regler. You can’t fault me for that.”

  “You stopped in New York.”

  I took in the room around us, supposing the whole of my Finca Vigía would look a mess too if it weren’t for Reeves and the rest of the staff. But the French doors gave up clear views to the gardens, the books tidily lined the shelves, my club chair cushions were freshly plumped, and the drinks cart sported at least as many bottles as it ever had. If the pool pump was on the fritz, well, the pool pump was a full-employment opportunity for the next-door neighbor boy who took care of it.

  “I stopped in New York only for a minute, only to praise the gang at Collier’s so they would keep hiring me if . . .” If Ernest’s novel wasn’t finished and published in pretty short order; he had no income while he was working on the novel except a bit of royalties from earlier books that went to Pauline. “If we want to go somewhere to do the journalism again,” I said.

  “Two months and sixteen days, and me in the middle of a novel that was going so well.”

  I gently fingered his unruly hair. I meant to love even the things he did to vex me.

  “The book is everything to me too, you know that,” I said, wondering if he was growing his hair because of the balding, because the balding made him nervous in the same way that Yeats’s death had. “It’s part of the reason I went to Finland, so we’d have money while you write the book.”

  He took his nearly empty glass from the drinks cart and poured himself a healthy dose of booze, straight up, and slumped back into his chair. I was too tired from the travel to drink, but I poured myself a glass of the damned stuff and came and sat on his lap, and clinked my glass with his. I removed his glasses and kissed him real now, a long kiss on the lips I’d so missed. He tasted of the whiskey, which might have been better than if he hadn’t.

  “Don’t be a silly Scrooby,” I said. “It’s done and I’m home.”

  The sun settled behind a cloud, dimming the room and the glasses in our hands, the alcohol, and Ernest’s face as he studied me. It was a look I recognized, a decision to roust himself from his crankiness.

  “I think ‘silly Scrooby’ suits me,” he said. “I thought you loved ‘silly Scrooby.’”

  I laughed, and I said everything suited him, and I set my drink on the cart and gently unbuttoned his shirt to slide my hands over his sturdy chest.

  “I need a shower,” I said in my huskiest voice. “Want to join me?”

  We were still lying on the warm, after-sex messy sheets, when he said, “You won’t leave me again, Mookie.” Not a question, but not exactly not one.

  “I won’t leave you ever again until the book is done.”

  He grinned and said, “Unless I tire of you and boot you for someone with blonder hair and longer legs.”

  I didn’t think he meant the words to hurt the way they did, not consciously.

  “I won’t leave you unless you tire of me and throw me off the Pilar to the sharks,” I promised.

  “You and your silly swimming googles,” he said.

  I stood and went to his writing desk, took a piece of paper and a pen, and dated the page. I wrote “GUARANTY” in large block letters at the top, and I put it in writing: I, the undersigned Mrs. Martha Bongie Hemingstein, guaranteed never again to brutalize him in any way, not with weapons or words, and I recognized that such a fine writer as himself could not again be left for two months and sixteen days. I signed it and I put two lines for the witnesses, under which I wrote “Judge R. R. Rabbit” and “Judge P. O. Pig.”

  And we had a good laugh, and I wrote a second guaranty, promising that after we were married I would never leave him for any reason, and a third that I would never divorce him as long as he was a good boy.

  There were eight huge pink orchids growing out of my ceiba tree at the front of the Finca, and Ernest was averaging five hundred words a day and weighing under two hundred pounds within weeks of my return. He was searching the Bible and Shakespeare and the Oxford Book of English Prose for a title, daily coming up with one that was just the thing only to toss it away the next morning. The weather had turned cold—nothing like Finland, but Ernest hadn’t been in Finland. He took to writing in our nice, warm bed in the mornings, whether I was awake or not.

  One morning I woke to find him standing at my desk, with a letter I’d gotten from Allen Grover in hand.

  “Bug?” I said. “What are you doing?”

  “You didn’t tell me you saw Grover in New York on your way to Finland.”

  “What the hell, Hemingway?” I said. “You’re reading my mail?”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you saw Grover?”

  “I most certainly did tell you.”

  “But not this way. Not the two of you at his apartment, listening to the radio.”
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  “He had a radio. Of course I listened! How else was I supposed to get news of the world?”

  I threw off the covers, climbed from bed, and took the letter from him. “Do I read your mail, Hemingway?”

  “I don’t get mail from men I’ve been to bed with.”

  “No, only wives and ex-wives.”

  “I’m happy to have you read my mail, Mook. I have nothing to hide.”

  “Nor do I,” I said, feeling violated even though it didn’t matter, I really did have nothing to hide.

  We played tennis most afternoons, and we cut back on the drinking, confining ourselves to one good Saturday drunk a week and not much else. He needed a night to let off the steam lest he overheat in the writing and blow the whole thing to bits, he said. So we’d go into town and start with absinthe, followed by a good bottle of red wine at dinner and, when we were already starting to be pretty juiced, vodka with the pelota players. Ernest did pretty well at the handball game even drunk, although none of the players was sober, there was that. Then we’d finish off with whiskey and soda, and, more often than not, wake the poor souls who lived on the streets we wandered with our singing. We tended to sing with strangers and whores, and none of us could carry a tune.

  If it was a lot of drinking, at least it was just the one night each week, and we could sleep it off on Sunday and be back at the writing Monday. While I was in Europe, Ernest had gone out drinking nearly every night.

  On March 8, Duell, Sloan and Pearce published my journalist-in-Prague novel, A Stricken Field. The day before it was published, Mrs. Roosevelt, in her My Day column, recommended it as an important book, even using the m word: “masterpiece.” The New York Times, on the morning the novel was released, called it taut and engrossing, and praised my choice to tell the story as fiction, saying if I’d written it any other way it would have told only part of the story. The Herald Tribune put it among the year’s most powerful books, even if the review did mention some unevenness. But all that goodness was undone by what Allen Grover—my old pal who’d just weeks before visited us at the Finca, drinking our booze and impressing our Basque friends with his physique—allowed in the pages of Time.

  In the guise of a review of my novel, what Time reviewed was my private life. They started and ended with Ernest, my “great and good friend” whom I’d returned from Finland to visit in Cuba where, they assured readers, Ernest Hemingway was living—living in my damned home, but never mind that. The nasty piece ended with a footnote suggesting the dreadful Dorothy Bridges character from Ernest’s Spanish war play was inspired by me, as if any character so vacuous needed inspiration from any real woman. The whole thing was so tawdry that I wanted to stick Grover’s head in a great big bucket of manure and slowly drown him there.

  “I told you Grover was a Jew,” Ernest said.

  “A Jew, Ernest?”

  “You know what I mean. In the Shakespeare sense. A bastard who visits on the pretense of being your friend, only to mine your private life and throw it to the goddamned wolves.”

  I dialed Grover’s number and, at his hello, demanded, “Did you come down to visit us just to confirm that Hemmy and I were an ‘us,’ so your magazine could drag us through the muck and take Pauline and the boys along for the slimy ride? I don’t even care for myself, but now those sweet boys are going to hear about it from every damned schoolmate who gives them the stink eye, when Ernest would have had the entire Easter vacation to help them understand.”

  “Martha—”

  “Ernest has been writing a book that is the next coming, I swear it is, it’s the kind of book only a brain as finely tuned as his could give us. But such a finely tuned brain is a delicate thing, and now you’ve yanked his head up from it on account of a tawdry magazine that would sell a friend’s privacy for a lousy buck. And he’s writing the ending too, where even the best writing can fall apart and leave the writer with nothing. Even a writer like Ernest can lose a book at the end if some filthy magazine makes too much trouble.”

  “But I didn’t—”

  “That was no review at all! That was a personal assault worthy of the Hearst papers, a personal assault in the guise of a review that cheapens us all, not just the Gellhorns—God, poor Matie! Do you see what you’ve done to my mother, who is going to have every old biddy in St. Louis waving this in her face? Her daughter’s life played out in print like some sorry movie with the kind of dismal ending every cheap tart deserves, or that’s what they’ll think, them and their puny little quick-to-judge minds.”

  “Martha, be reasonable.”

  “Not just us. You’ve ruined everyone who tries to do this, who tries to write. You’ve cheapened it all, every bit of the goodness that writers do.”

  “Really, Mart, I don’t think you can put the demise of literature on seven hundred words on page eighty-two.”

  “I counted you as a friend, but, oh boy, was I mistaken. You’re a backstabber and a money-grubber and a phony and a spy for the lousy side of this stink.”

  “But I didn’t know anything about it! I swear, Marty—”

  “How dare you drag Mrs. Roosevelt’s name into it just to make it a bigger story, the First Lady wrapped up in a scandalous love affair involving the world’s most famous writer?”

  “I didn’t drag anyone,” Grover insisted. “I’m not the dragger.”

  “How dare you drag Bertrand’s name into it, just to put a point on the scandal, to lay the blame for Ernest’s broken marriage at my feet, as if I wouldn’t have lived happily ever after as Madame de Jouvenel if Bertrand’s witch of a wife hadn’t insisted on keeping her husband and her lover both!”

  “I swear, Mart, I had no more idea of the piece than you did until I opened my copy.”

  “Sure, and it’s my lousy luck that Tom was away. He would have stood up for me. He would have been all over your lousy bastard of an editor to pull the piece. Any damned friend I have in this world would have shown some loyalty and put their fucking resignation on page one before they’d let this rotten stink run. But you—”

  I slammed down the receiver. He’d made a fool of me, but, sure, I could survive that; I might even forgive his magazine’s trash of a piece with its making me out to be a whore and finding the filthiest photograph of me to run with it. But he’d made a fool of my writing, or he’d let his magazine do it, painting me as a pathetic hanger-on, with no talent beyond a savant ability to attract the attention of talented men. As if The Trouble I’ve Seen hadn’t gotten me on the cover of the Saturday Review of Literature before I’d ever met Ernest. Unlike Ernest, Time assured its readers, my legend was larger than my work.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  MARCH 1940

  Mousie and Gigi, when they came for their Easter break, quickly settled on calling me “The Marty.” Mouse instructed us to call him Patrick now that he was eleven. He and Gigi palled around in matching checked shirts, Patrick reading away whole mornings by the pool with me—mornings when I was meant to be writing, but, as my partner in crime, he swore not to rat me out even under pain of the rack or water torture or being denied a new book. He measured everything he read by whether it was longer or shorter than his father’s Green Hills of Africa, which wasn’t Middlemarch or War and Peace but was a lot of pages for an eleven-year-old who might just as likely read comics.

  Gigi did not insist we call him Gregory but did make us play dice with him, and for money too. He wooed the dice, blowing on them and saying, “Come on, baby, one more little fever,” which I was to understand meant he wanted a pair of fives, but to be honest I was working so hard at suppressing giggles that it might have meant something else altogether. He never played if he didn’t feel hot about the game, and a nickel was all he would risk even at his hottest, throwing sevens and elevens at will. He was a funny boy who, when he wasn’t wild with gambling, sat quietly watching mother hummingbirds make their square little nests and tend their eggs.

  Bumby joined us in early April. Watching h
im swim and fish and shoot, I imagined how Ernest must have looked when he was sixteen and handsome and strong. Bumby was already into the business of a high schooler planning for college, so we had long, chummy talks about exams and schoolbooks and college boards. “The Bumble,” as I took to calling him, was to be in a play at school, so you could often find him belting out lines in various teenaged versions of adult emotions. He hit his t’s, though, and he would be heard even in the last row of the theater, no doubt about that.

  Ernest and I spent our mornings writing, or Ernest wrote and I snuck off to read with Patrick. I’d written exactly one story since I’d come home from Finland. On a good morning, I managed my five-finger exercises, little bits that didn’t have to be anything at all as long as I was writing something: a character sketch or a description of a place, a snatch of dialogue unencumbered by actual plot. I wanted to be lost in the throes of a fine, big story, like Ernest was with his Spanish war book. He took no note even of his sons—who were only visiting for a few weeks, for heaven’s sake—until he’d finished his writing for the day and counted his words. He believed in himself and his work as surely as if he were the good Lord himself writing on stone tablets. I’d have given my left leg, and my right one too, to write with that kind of assurance. But it was so ghastly hard to write without the threat of a bomb falling on my head. It was ghastly hard to decline Collier’s repeated offers to send me off to have bombs dropped on me in Europe. “No way, no how,” I assured Ernest. “I promised to stay here with my Bongie Pig, and I can keep a promise as long as it doesn’t involve me flying an airplane myself from Portugal in Atlantic storms on New Year’s Eve.”

  “Or even if it does, Mrs. Hundred-Thirty-Pound Pig.”