Beautiful Exiles Read online

  After cocktails, we moved across the hall to the narrow dining room with its pale-yellow walls and white-painted trim, all those arched doorways that would bring in sunlight if it weren’t winter and dark. Pauline, as we settled into studded-leather chairs at the heavy wooden table, described the changes she and Ernest were going to make to the gardens.

  “We want to replace the wood with stone and put in a swimming pool where Ernest’s boxing ring is now. The first saltwater pool on—”

  “You want to do it all, Pauline,” Ernest interrupted. “You want to drag in diggers and pavers to assure I’ll have no peace in which to write for a good long spell. You ought to be a happy wife for your happy husband, Fife. You ought to leave me to my work.”

  Thompson said soothingly, “Pauline tells me the room you’re building for the kudu heads you bagged in Africa is going to be something.”

  “A man could waste a whole lifetime choosing stone and cabinetry,” Ernest said. “A man could waste a whole life here in Key West when he ought to be doing something about the real world.”

  “Darling,” Pauline said.

  “Spain is the place a writer needs to be now. I’ve got to get to Spain.”

  Perhaps he meant to vex Pauline by wading through all that blood at the dinner table. I wondered sometimes if he didn’t include me in these dinners to vex her too. He sat me to his right, and he would lean toward me and speak in a low voice that Pauline, at the table’s far end—with the Thompsons closing rank on either side—had to strain to hear.

  Pauline said to me, “He’s already arranged ambulances and paid two men to fight in Spain—don’t you think he’s doing enough, Martha?”

  Looking to enlist me in keeping Ernest in Key West.

  I did want to be agreeable. I liked Pauline fiercely, and she’d opened their home to me, included me almost as family. But I never have been terribly good at saying what wants to be said if I don’t think it’s right.

  Ernest said, “You can’t woo Stooge here to your side, Pauline. She’s already lectured a few thousand snobs at Rockefeller Center on the need for writers to ‘dramatize, advertise, and sell democracy’ to their readers lest we end up like the Nazis.”

  Pauline tilted her tiny face up to the chandeliers she’d brought from Paris as if to a crucifix in an ancient church with wooden pews and padded kneelers, white lace draped over her head. Ernest softened as the seconds clicked by without her chiding him again about Spain.

  Thompson said, “The Republicans aren’t any saints, old man.”

  “Sure the Republicans aren’t saints,” Ernest agreed, the Republicans in Spain being the ones any reasonable person would be rooting for. Five years after the Spanish shrugged off the tyranny of king and Church to elect their own government, Francisco Franco and his Fascist forces marched in to attack the new Spanish Republic, and now the good Republicans were all in against him in a civil war. “They shoot priests and bishops, I grant you that,” he said. “But why does the Church stand with the oppressors?”

  “The Church isn’t in politics,” Pauline protested.

  “Everyone is in the politics of Spain, Pauline,” I said. “In Stuttgart this summer, the Nazi papers went on and on about the ‘bloodthirsty rabble’ attacking ‘the forces of decency and order,’ calling the properly elected Spanish government ‘red swine dogs.’ And the Nazi papers have one solid value: whatever they’re against, you can be for.”

  “If the choice is between exploited working people and absentee landlords, my sympathies are with the people, with the Republicans,” Ernest said.

  “Even if you do shoot pigeons with the landlords and drink their booze,” Pauline said.

  Ernest laughed mightily at himself, and said, “Even if I do, Fife. Even if I do.”

  Pauline said to me, “Really, Stooge, don’t you think Ernest is doing enough for Spain?” The nickname offered with something that wanted to be humor and warmth but came out as distaste. Already I understood that Ernest reserved his most offensive nicknames for those he liked best: one childhood friend was “Barge” and her poor sister “Pudge” or “Useless,” and his sisters were “Nunbones,” “Masween,” and “Ted,” and even his publisher, Charles Scribner, was “Scribbles,” although Ernest made me promise that if I ever met Charles Scribner I wouldn’t call him Scribbles to his face.

  “Pauline,” I said, “the Fascists herded eighteen hundred Republican prisoners of war into a Badajoz bullring and opened fire with machine guns. If that repugnant madman Hitler really sends two divisions to support them, we’ll have all of Europe in war, you can bet on it.”

  Pauline said, “But surely the world would be better served by Ernest writing his novels.”

  Ernest said, “A man could get a hundred stories in Spain.”

  “Your editor is standing by to read the Cuban rumrunner manuscript,” Pauline insisted.

  “There’s no hurry, there’ll be war enough to last a good while,” he conceded. “And it’s cold as a corpse in Madrid right now.” He laughed again, a signal that we were all meant to laugh with him, and I did laugh. I laughed even as I wondered why the thoughtful soul I knew from the garden—the fellow who talked about how important it was to have time to fail, who lamented that there was so little time to do anything with war looming in Europe—disappeared with the predinner cocktails.

  Pauline, with a disingenuous smile, said, “Do what you want, Ernest. You always do.”

  Leaving me wondering if the rumor The Swede had told me was true, that Ernest was having an affair with the twenty-two-year-old wife of a wealthy American living in Cuba. Ernest, according to The Swede, drove his mistress’s sports car in games of chicken, with her refusing to say “slow down” even when Ernest drove the car off the road. Pauline was a smart girl, though. She’d been a journalist before she married Ernest. She’d written for Vogue. She would see what there was to see unless she chose not to. Pauline was a smart girl who was choosing not to see so many things: how close we were to war, how much we needed to live the sun and the laughter and the love as terribly fast as we could before it was all gone.

  “As soon as I finish the novel, then, sure, Spain is the place to be,” Ernest said. “Until then, I’ll keep sending the damned money.”

  “That’s swell, Ernest,” Pauline said, her hardening mouth turning her pretty face ferociously ratlike. “Do go put your life at risk for a bunch of cranky Spaniards while Patrick and Gigi and I die of worry. And Hadley and Bumby too.”

  Ernest stood, bumping his chair back loudly and muttering under his breath, “Oh, muck this whole treacherous muck-faced mucking existence.” He tousled Patrick’s hair, saying, “You never worry, do you, Mousie, even if Gigi does.” He tousled Gregory’s hair too, then walked out through the arched doorway, headed, I supposed, back to Sloppy Joe’s and his drinking friends.

  I’d just finished reading the last pages of Ernest’s Cuban rumrunner novel—a typescript with corrections in his rounded handwriting—and I was sitting beside him on the garden bench, telling him how swell it was, when he leaned toward my dipped face and kissed my forehead, just a brush of lips on skin.

  “You’re a good daughter,” he said.

  I felt his gaze on me, his eyes a soft brown where Dad’s had been an unyielding blue, his voice low and unaccented and warm where Dad’s had been Germanic and strident and as unforgiving as the stone Pauline wanted to lay throughout this lovely yard.

  “I’m not a very good daughter,” I said lightly, adding a spunk I didn’t feel.

  “You’re a fine daughter, Stooge,” he said seriously, as if he could see inside me, as if he knew more about me from reading my pages than I meant him to know.

  “I never do the things I’m meant to.”

  He leaned forward and scooped up a passing cat. “That’s someone else’s idea of you. The thing is to be a true person. The thing is to tell it true like you see it.”

  “I’m good at true, Ernestino, but true only gets me called ‘selfish s
cum.’”

  “Selfish scum?”

  My father’s charge, along with an insistence that if I wanted to write I ought to do it now instead of, as he scolded, “capitalizing on your yellow hair.” And so I had written, four months holed up in New Hartford doing nothing else, and even Dad hadn’t been able to put down that second book of mine, The Trouble I’ve Seen.

  “Not by anyone whose opinion matters, Daughter,” Ernest said.

  He pushed the disfigured cat from his lap, and he lifted my chin to meet his gaze as I was still thinking about Dad, thinking he hadn’t lived even for me to get back to St. Louis to say how sorry I was for the slime I used for a brain and for being twenty-seven already and having produced only two stinking books.

  We both turned then to the sound of something shifting on the path across the garden. The cook stood by the kitchen door with a dish towel in her hand. The fact of her startled me, but Ernest seemed not the least surprised, and paid her no attention.

  “You’re a good daughter and you must stop worrying about your book so much,” he said. “You’ve got it all dark in your head. Just write it, Daughter. Just sit down and write.”

  Key West, Florida

  JANUARY 1937

  On sunny Saturday afternoons when I was a girl, Matie and I used to climb on the clanging, swaying streetcar, hauling picnics of sandwiches and eggs, fruit and lemonade, and her volume of Robert Browning poetry, headed for the lake at Creve Coeur. Creve Coeur—“broken heart”—is named, or so the story goes, for some poor brokenhearted fool of a girl, or for the shape of the lake itself, if you like that better. Legends are all about what people think they like to hear, and nothing about the truth.

  For me, Creve Coeur wasn’t at all about broken hearts, but rather about found ones. My mother’s heart, when we were home, was so often distracted by all the problems of the world that needed fixing, but it was all for me alone those afternoons we settled beneath a willow tree by the waterfall and peeled our eggs. The tree limbs drooped comfortably around us in our secret little world, and the lighthearted plip plip plip of the waterfall splashing over the layered rock made background music for the poems Matie would read, “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister”—Gr-r-r—there go, my heart’s abhorrence!—because the sounds of the words always made us giggle. “Will you write me a ‘scrofulous French novel / On grey paper with blunt type!’” she liked to ask me, and I always answered that I would write her a horridly scrofulous one, and I’d “double down its pages at the woeful sixteenth print,” too, surely I would.

  “What is ‘scrofulous’?” I once asked.

  “Well, sweetie, scrofula is a disease, a tuberculosis of the lymph nodes in the neck. And scrofulous means . . . well, I suppose it means diseased, but here the poet means morally diseased.”

  “Full of bad words?”

  “I suppose so.”

  I said, “But it oughtn’t to mean that!”

  Matie laughed, and she asked, “What ought ‘scrofulous’ to mean, Martha?”

  “It ought to mean marvelous. It ought to mean magnificent with an undertone of delightful, and a pinch of silly!”

  Matie laughed again, and she said, “Scrofulous, Gellhorn style: magnificent with an undertone of delightful.”

  “And a pinch of silly.”

  “And a pinch of silly,” she agreed.

  There was never any hurry to those afternoons. There was blue sky and just-right sun and Matie listening to me like I was all there was, letting me have words mean whatever I thought they should. In the spring, there was the sweet scent of lilies of the valley, and violets blooming as heart shaped as the lake. I always wanted to pick them, to make love bouquets for Matie, but she insisted I leave them be.

  “They’re to be seen, not owned, like every beautiful thing in this world, including you.”

  To her, I was beautiful, and I was to Ernest too. Legs up to your shoulders in that sleek little black dress—that was his first impression of me back in Key West, I learned years later. Heels that emphasized your height when most girls would slump. Blond hair and high cheekbones and a sensuous mouth in a schoolgirl face. Yes, you knew how men were.

  But I didn’t know how men were. Does any woman?

  That winter in Key West, I was still all queer and scrambled about my looks and my body and sex. I’d gotten it twisted up in a tangle of morals and fear and Matie’s little phrases—“how like animals”—which I’m sure were meant to keep me a good girl but had the opposite effect. The one real love I’d had by then, Bertrand de Jouvenel, hadn’t helped. Bertrand was as twisted up about it as I was, as sure you would be too if your stepmother seduced you when you were a shy, bookish sixteen, even if you didn’t remain her “little leopard” for five years, even if your stepmother wasn’t Colette, who would write about it so the whole world gasped. I was twenty-one when I met Bertrand, which seemed so old to have done nothing at all with my life, and he was twenty-seven and married, but in the French way—living apart from his much older wife, who had taken another lover—and I fell for him in that giddy schoolgirl way that is all adrenaline and hormones without an ounce of sense. Bertrand made me laugh; I suppose he was the first man who really did, and if there is anything better than a man who makes you laugh, I don’t know what it is. By the time my first novel was published in 1934, the press had me made out as some fascinating Madame de Jouvenel, and Bertrand and I did think of ourselves as married, even if his wife refused to give up the social standing that came with being a de Jouvenel, even if in the end I would get what a gal gets for wanting everyone to call her lover her husband, for imagining the fact that his wife took another man long before he took me was the same as her meaning to give him a divorce.

  Your affair with that cuckolded runt, Dad called that first love of mine. Dad was dead a year by the time I danced with The Swede in Key West, but I carried his disapproval in my head like a tumor. If I led a man on, if I swam with him and danced with him and kissed him, well, I ought to be thinking of my reputation and be a better girl than that. And if I was a bad girl and did what bad girls did, then a man could expect more, and if a bad girl didn’t hand over the goods, then she was a tease. If a girl wasn’t a virgin, then who was she to be playing coy? I was forever feeling I owed men what they wanted, and I suppose some part of me was thinking that if I just found the right man, it wouldn’t be disgusting painful self-loathing. Real pain. Physical pain. And so I did my usual bit with The Swede, paying off my debt for the evenings of dancing and laughter and companionship.

  I woke as I always did, knowing that I didn’t feel the way I ought to feel to wake up in a man’s bed. I woke regretting the lovemaking, regretting everything that hurt and everything that didn’t. Regretting ever having swum with The Swede, and danced with him, and kissed him and let him hold me, and climbed into his bed. Needing to flee from the shame of who I was and who I wasn’t, to be the leaver rather than the left.

  When a family friend offered me a lift as far as Miami, I packed my bags and made my goodbyes to Pauline and Ernest and the boys. And, when I arrived home in St. Louis, I wrote Pauline about how fine her children were, and her husband, too, and herself. I wrote how good she was not to mind having me as a fixture in her home. I wrote that I was producing a dozen pages a day, intent on finishing the book so I could be free to set off somewhere again. I sent her pictures of Bertrand too, even though there wasn’t any point in mentioning my old love except to save Pauline the worry that I might be a threat to her marriage. By then, Ernest had begun calling me from a trip to see his publisher in New York, I supposed because he could talk to me about Spain when he couldn’t talk to her about it, and he could talk to me about the writing without offending the gang he oughtn’t offend in New York. He complained in those calls that the editor at Esquire, which was going to serialize his new novel, was asking foolish questions—although to be honest the questions, when it came down to it, were the kinds of things I’d wondered, like whether there weren’t too many real p
eople being caricatured in his fictional ones.

  “He can sit his sorry ass down and wait until June, I’ve got to get to Spain,” Ernest said. “That’s what I told Max Perkins too.”

  “You didn’t really,” I said into the plain black phone receiver, keeping my voice low lest Matie hear. Max Perkins was his editor at Scribner, an old-fashioned, polite sort who wore vests under his suit jackets, and funny plaid ties done in proper Windsor knots, and was so politely spoken that even men like Ernest would hesitate to say “ass” in his presence.

  “I did,” Ernest insisted. “I told Perkins that if he wasn’t happy about it, to hell with him.”

  Ernest went from Max’s office at Scribner straight to see the general manager at NANA, the North American Newspaper Alliance, which provided syndicated pieces for some fifty major newspapers. He signed a contract for $1,000 a story from Spain and $500 for shorter pieces, a dollar a word when the best journalists in Spain were paid something much closer to nothing.

  Still, he was cranky about Esquire, and he was cranky about Max Perkins, and he was cranky about his sister-in-law, who had an apartment in New York and was on Pauline’s side about him going to Spain. He was all torn up, too, from visiting the son of some dear friends who was dying at a sanitarium in the Adirondacks. Tuberculosis, which the poor kid had been battling for seven years, and the friends’ older son had died two years earlier, from meningitis. Ernest was an odd bird, but very generous, and I did love those calls. I loved hearing him all churned up about Spain and about the writing just when the St. Louis horror was setting in for me, when I was beginning to feel I was the only one who gave a fig about anything other than wearing the right kind of perfectly appropriate dress for the right kind of boringly respectable man.

  Ernest gave a story I’d written—a thing titled “Exile”—to his editor. The publisher, Charles Scribner, wrote himself to say he’d like to run it in his magazine if only I would make it shorter. I tried not to be bothered about his treating my writing as a thing cut and made to order: I’ll have the jacket shoulder a bit more snug, please, the slacks up a quarter inch; I’ll have mine medium rare with a bottle of 1929 Bordeaux. I can hack a journalism piece all to bits, and that’s fine, but fiction is another thing. I’d already let the words age in the barrel. It was time to pour them out and drink.