Beautiful Exiles Read online

  He’d roped me into his obsession, weighing me on his scale every morning.

  “Even if it does, Mr. Woppenstein Pig,” I said, not feeling piggish but understanding that he did and that he wanted my company in this as in everything but his writing. “I’ll be your good wifey-pig, and I’ll read every word you write, and I’ll proclaim each one stinking brilliant, you know I will.”

  “You make me so happy, Mrs. Heminghorn Pig,” he said. “You make me so damned happy, so able to write.”

  But there was no offer of pages to read as my reward. The closer he got to the end of his novel, the more reluctant he was to share it. He took to burying his new pages in a desk drawer under other papers, like some rodent stocking up for winter. I imagined he laid a hair across the drawer like a bad British spy so that if I passed the desk too enthusiastically he could prove that I’d been snooping. And our whole life now was about his writing. I couldn’t write crap in the peace in which he loved to write.

  It was my own fault. Where he had gobs of discipline, I had great clots of sloth. I could learn from the way he sat down every morning to write. But I needed to be excited about a thing to do the writing. I needed to go out and find some ghastly trouble and stew myself in it night and day, collecting it all in notebooks for after the excitement was done. I couldn’t write the way Ernest wrote, taking a pile of clean white paper on one side and rolling it through a typewriter and stacking it neatly on the other side, day after day after day without any excitement at all to bring the juice on. So my whole life boiled down to helping him and trying to write without the juice. My life boiled down to waiting for Ernest to be finished with the book so that it would be my turn, and we could sign contracts with NANA and Collier’s and set off toward something dangerous and awful and terribly damned fun.

  But I was happy to share his family. Afternoons and evenings, Ernest and the boys and I played tennis, and we were marvelous tennis players, or we thought we were. We fished on the Pilar. We shot birds. The boys took me as part of their gang, as obedient to their father’s wishes as they themselves were, and I took them as part of my family, and I thought this was just the perfect way to be a mother, with boys who were already nice boys with little chance of ruin by a reckless mother, with none of the body misshaping or bad-child risk that might come with a Gellhorn brood.

  One night not long after Bumby arrived, when the house was put to bed and Ernest and I were snuggled together, me going on about the grand shooting we’d all done that day, I asked if there wasn’t a lighter gun for poor Gigi.

  “A lighter gun than Mousie’s?”

  Gigi didn’t yet have his own gun, so he used his brother’s. The poor kid had to sit and balance that heavy thing on his knees just to aim it straight.

  “He topples backward from the recoil every time he shoots, Scrooby! It’s all I can do not to laugh, but of course that would be the end of his affection for me.”

  Ernest laughed and said, “But Gigi wouldn’t take a smaller gun if we had one to give him. His manhood would be questioned by a smaller gun.”

  “His eight-year-old manhood?”

  Ernest laughed and laughed.

  “You do like them, don’t you, Mook?”

  “I do love them, Bug. There are no finer boys anywhere on this big earth. You produce a fine brood, you do, Ernest Hemingway.”

  He said, “We might have a daughter someday. I’d like a daughter.”

  I lay perfectly still for a moment, listening to the breeze in the palm outside the open window. “A daughter, Hemmy?” I said finally.

  “One who would grow up to have golden hair and long legs, long brains, and pluck to spare.” He stroked my hair. “One who would be a better shot than her mother, though!”

  We might name her Abigail June, I thought to say, but still I could not say the name of that poor baby being denied syphilis treatment for want of twenty-five lousy cents per shot.

  The next evening, when we went out for target practice on the negritos that sang so gloriously as they headed from the fields to the laurel trees in Havana, I shot a hawk. He was a beautiful creature, and I was sorry the moment I saw him drop, even while Ernest and his sons cheered at my prowess with a gun.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  APRIL 1940

  Hitler stomped into Denmark and Norway with no fight from the Danes and next to none from the Norwegians that April. Ernest and I only learned of it four days later, when the newspapers arrived on the mail boat. That was fine for Ernest, who was in his novel and who wanted no distraction. Me, I put maps up on our walls so I could keep track of the war as carefully as Ernest kept track of his word count and his weight and, now, my weight too.

  I read the news when I was meant to be writing. I wrote letters. Every time I tried to write fiction, I was left wanting to chuck it all and run off to Europe, where the danger was real and the writing would be about something bigger than myself. That was all trying-to-be-too-damned-noble, of course. I wanted to go to war every minute I was writing just so I could run about with the other overwrought loonies and think myself sane. I wanted to go to war so I wouldn’t have to learn and think and write and discipline myself into five hundred words a day.

  On May 10, Germany invaded Belgium, France, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. That worm Neville Chamberlain resigned as the British prime minister, and Winston Churchill stepped in. When I came home from the mail boat with the newspapers—May 15, the news old and stale and still stinking lousy—Ernest set his writing aside, and took the papers, and read.

  “Fuck this whole fucking Nazi mess,” he said, and he left without telling me where he was going, although not in a huff.

  He came home a bit later with the radio I’d been nagging him to allow me to buy.

  “So we can have the war news screeched loudly and to the minute,” he said.

  It was a pretty radio, a Detrola in the shape of the arch of a stone cathedral, with a beautiful, warm clock face; inlaid wood trim and turned-spool feet; and a sturdy speaker and dials. As he set it on our living room bookshelf, by the door where there was a plug and it would be just out of the sunlight, he said, “You need to write some happiness, though, Mart. If you write only disaster, you’ll soon become disaster girl, with a byline everyone will put down on account of not being able to stand a world so bleak.”

  I turned on the radio and began searching with the dial.

  He said, “They’ll charge you with the great sin of manufacturing catastrophes just to have something to write.”

  I found a station—CBS, with Elmer Davis delivering in his warm Hoosier accent the news of May 15 as it was happening: General Winkelman surrendering Amsterdam to the Nazis, who had also crossed the Meuse River into northern France, while, in America, we worried ourselves with some new kind of stockings made of nylon rather than silk.

  “Christ,” I said.

  “Christ,” he agreed.

  We talked for a long time about the war, then, and what was to be done about it, whether Roosevelt would take us into it, and whether we thought he should. We were a country of fools like everyone else, we decided, and so of course we would get in. It was just a matter of when.

  “Clearly, I don’t need to manufacture disaster as long as that brute is running roughshod over all of Europe,” I said. It was evening and we were having dinner, neither of us having written another word. We’d brought our plates to the club chairs in the living room, and we were listening to the evening newscast, more or less the same news: Amsterdam and France, and the new nylon stockings.

  “What the hell is nylon?” Ernest asked.

  “They use it to make toothbrushes.”

  He laughed because we needed to laugh. He laughed, and I laughed, and he poured us a second drink, and he said, “If you ever wear toothbrushes on those legs of yours, Mook, I will definitely toss you off the Pilar to the sharks.”

  “Don’t be silly, Bongie,” I said. “I don’t wear stockings at all.”
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br />   After the news was over and Ernest had turned the dial off, I said, “We should be there, like we were in Spain.”

  Ernest said, “After the book is done, Mookie. It’s almost done. There will be time after that. There will be more than enough war to last.”

  Outside, the negritos were singing their way back to Havana. Perhaps a hawk somewhere too, one I hadn’t killed.

  I supposed Ernest was right about the risk of my becoming a disaster-girl writer, so I put together a proposal to write a happy bunch of pieces that would be nearly as vacuous as nylon stockings. Local rabbit hunts in Cuba, or eighteen ways to cook cassava, or the lodge dances with our very rich and very famous Sun Valley friends. When my editor at Collier’s replied that there was too much going on in the world for anyone to be writing about the life of a vegetable, I signed my response “the lucky vegetable.”

  Several times a day, I turned on the radio, and updated my wall maps.

  After just two days, Ernest stomped in from his writing desk, demanding, “How am I supposed to write this damned book if I’m forever bothered by the news?” He pulled the plug, silencing Edward R. Murrow and his World News Roundup.

  “It’s a bother, I’m sure, Hemingway,” I said calmly, “to be troubled by the news of the French dying en masse trying to defend what’s left of the free world while we sit here drinking daiquiris and catching trout.”

  He looked hurt. Well, I’d meant to hurt him. All that was going on in the world, and still every morning he got up and weighed himself and pulled on his pants and sat down to write.

  He gathered himself the way he could, though, and smiled sheepishly, and stuck the plug back into the socket. He turned the volume down just a little. “Not trout, Mookie,” he said lightly. “Trout are freshwater fish.”

  “How the hell would I know? It’s not like I ever catch a damned thing.”

  “But you don’t care to, Mook,” he said gently. “You never care to.”

  I turned back to my map, pulling a pin and sticking it fiercely into a new position. I didn’t begrudge him his magic. I loved that he had the magic; it was when I loved him most, when he had the magic and the words were coming, and he couldn’t be bothered with anything else. But there was no me in his magic, and the way the magic came to him wasn’t the way the magic came to me. I had to go out and find it. I had to live in the world, not holed up in a quiet corner with a cook and a pool and cats to rub against my legs. I had to live in the world, and if there was trouble anywhere in it, I needed to have my boots filthy with it, to be stewing in the trouble until the words boiled out of me.

  Ernest watched me as I moved my map pins: the British and the French troops falling back toward Dunkirk. I squared my shoulders, lest he think he might come to me and touch me. I would collapse if he touched me, or I’d belt him, or both.

  After a moment, he muttered to himself that all writers were crazy, but none more so than the female kind, and he went back to his desk and wrote much longer into the day than usual, while I spent the afternoon writing with the radio on, producing only four lousy paragraphs that I tore up in the end.

  When he was done writing for the day, he poured himself a drink as he always did, and he counted his words as he sipped it, and when he was done counting, he squirreled away his pages, as he now did at the end of each day.

  “I might ask Pauline to read the draft when I’m done with it,” he said at dinner that night.

  I chewed a lousy bite of roasted potato going to mush in my mouth.

  “If you can get Pauline to read it, Scrooby, well then, have at it,” I said as lightly as I could manage after a full day of fuming at the news while Ernest’s typewriter hummed happily in the other room.

  “She’s a fine editor,” he said. “She may be the best editor I know.”

  I set my fork down slowly. I was tired. I was cranky from the writing or the not writing, and I was cranky from the war that Collier’s was forever dangling in front of me, but I’d promised when I’d come home from Finland that I wouldn’t leave him again.

  “Fuck you, Hemingway,” I said finally. “Fuck you and your fucking secret manuscript and your stingy love. Go back to Pauline if you want to. Let her spend all of your money and all of hers too on a life that means less than nothing. Poland burns and you put a marshmallow on a stick and throw a damned party. Amsterdam burns and you take the party onto the canals. Paris is going to fucking burn, and when they tell us about it on the radio, you’ll just turn the thing off and go back to banging your damned typewriter keys, one more lovely paragraph about a war that’s already lost. You do that. You do that with Pauline. I don’t give a shit.”

  I stormed out, and I walked and walked, and I walked farther and faster, the humidity and the exercise plastering my cotton dress to my bare legs. I walked until the anger settled into something tolerable, until I’d decided the thing to do was to wire Collier’s that I would be in New York in two days, ready to head for Europe and the war.

  When I came back to tell Ernest I was leaving, he was gone.

  Fine, let him go off on a big stinking drunk with anyone who would drink with him, and since he was forever proving his manliness by standing everyone for drinks with money he didn’t have, he would have company the whole night long and I wouldn’t have to put up with him in my bed. I stripped off my sweaty dress and dove in the pool, and I swam naked until I was cool all over, until I was shivering from the cold.

  Ernest had better sense than to climb into my bed in the wee hours when he came home that night. When I awoke, hungover with sadness, he was asleep in the bedroom he wrote in, but he’d left a note beside the radio. It didn’t say “GUARANTY” on the top, but it allowed that he was thoughtless and egoistic and even mean-spirited, that he had been for the whole of the last year or more, that it was due to the pressure of the book, which had to be good or he was finished. He wrote that I didn’t have to marry him if I didn’t want to, that he wouldn’t blame me if I didn’t want to go through with it. He wouldn’t want to marry a selfish ass like himself either, but he loved me and he knew he would never write the same without me. His writing would always be mine even if my writing was no longer his, he wrote. He signed it, “your Bongie who loves you, even if you no longer want to marry him.”

  The note sat atop his Spanish war manuscript. He’d settled on a title: For Whom the Bell Tolls. It came from a meditation written by John Donne, which he’d included below the title.

  I sat in the club chair, with the radio silent and the booze bottles corked, and I read the opening I’d read in the hotel room in Havana fourteen months earlier, and the next chapter, and the next. I read and I read, and when Ernest came in, I looked up at him and I didn’t say a word. He would know by the fact that I was still sitting there—in the same house with him even after the prior night—how good the writing was.

  I read all morning and all afternoon and into the evening, laughing out loud at the funniness, even the funny passages like the bit about Robert Jordan’s father being a “Republican” that I’d read before, and wondering how he could make a story truer than true when it was all made up, and only a little uneasy, still, for whether he would ruin me through Maria the way he had but never would admit to with Dorothy from the Spanish war play.

  He left me there to read in quiet, staying in the bedroom where he liked to write but not even banging on his typewriter keys, not coming out even for a drink at the end of the day.

  The light in the room was fading when I came to chapter twenty-six, to a passage in which Robert Jordan admonishes himself not to kid himself about love, that most people just aren’t lucky enough ever to find it, and he had found it with Maria, and whether it lasted or it didn’t, it was a true thing and he would be lucky even if he died the next day.

  I found Ernest stretched out on the bed in his office, with the carbon copy in his lap. I climbed in beside him, and he set the carbon on the nightstand and put his arms around me. I tucked my head under his chin, and I lay
there shivering, the way in his novel Rabbit lay next to Robert Jordan the night they first met.

  “I’m lucky even if I die tomorrow, Bug,” I whispered.

  “Whether it lasts just through today or whether it lasts for a long life, Mookie,” he said.

  “You’ve never written better,” I said. “Not even the piece about the boy from Pittsburg.”

  “Raven,” he said.

  The boy in the hospital in Spain, whom he’d promised to revisit, but had only ever done so in the piece he wrote. I supposed he was visiting Raven again in this new novel. I supposed he was revisiting the boy he, too, once had been, a boy young and foolish enough to put his life on the line without any real idea what it meant to die.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JUNE 1940

  The living room ceiling of the Finca Vigía collapsed that June. Ernest and I just looked at the mess: soggy plaster on the club chairs and on the booze on the drinks cart and on my precious radio and on my map. He picked up a bottle of the best scotch we had, and he brushed the plaster from the thing and splashed it into two fairly clean glasses.

  “Life with you is interesting as hell, Mrs. Pig Disaster-Girl,” he said, handing me a glass and kissing me the gentle way I liked. “And I wouldn’t trade one ceiling-collapsing day of it for a whole century of warm writing. Do promise you’ll marry me, will you? I know I’ve been a horrible pig. I know that. But I’ll be better, I promise I will. I’ll sit with you every night and listen to the disaster war news, and I’ll be all for going to see it ourselves if you’ll just let me finish the book. I’ll crawl through the mud with the soldiers again, and I’ll watch you be braver than anyone, and I won’t even lock you in your room. But stay with me until I finish?”

  “Only I have to go to New York, and get Matie.”

  “For just a few days.”

  “Yes, only for a few days.”

  The boys arrived the next morning for their summer visit, and it rained, and it rained, and it rained. Ernest, buried in his book, hardly looked up to notice his boys, or the war, or me. He was writing so well, though. He was writing brilliantly.