Beautiful Exiles Page 9

  It wasn’t late—not yet the 9:00 p.m. wire deadline—but I was asleep in my bed in my relatively safe back room, exhausted from the time at the front and the writing afterward, when Ernest barged in.

  “Stooge, read this, will you?” he demanded, thrusting pages at me as I blinked against the sudden light.

  “Scrooby,” I said, “I think I liked it better when you locked me in all by myself.”

  “I’ve been writing like hell since we got back.”

  Writing like hell.

  I sat up, registering the thud of a shell in the distance, its whistle mercifully far away. I took the pages from him. I thought to ask if he meant to watch me while I read, but of course he did, and there was nothing to calling him out about it. Anyway, I could see from the first line that he’d pulled his heart out and carved it into little bits.

  It was a long article—too long to squeeze down and send by cable before nine.

  “Bring me a whiskey, will you, Bug?” I asked.

  By the time he returned with the whiskey, I was crying in the way I had been so careful not to cry in the hospital, in front of the boy. Ernest had delivered the conversation with Raven in all its rawness: the poor kid’s vulnerability but also, as movingly or more so, Ernest’s own. He wrote the truth of it, the sick relief we all felt on seeing someone like Raven. That boy was the one who’d taken it; we hadn’t taken it ourselves.

  He handed me the glass and asked if I’d finished. I took a big slug of whiskey, and, as he paced back and forth across my little room, I read on, heart-wrenching words about how that boy would have been honored for his sacrifice in prior wars, and how in this war there were no honors, no medals. The only things soldiers would take away from this Spanish war were their physical scars—blindness or missing limbs, missing lips—if they were lucky enough to survive it.

  I finished, and I reread the last sentence aloud, about how changed war was now, and how, from it, you could learn just about as much as you could believe.

  “You don’t like the ending?” he said. “I thought—”

  “I love every word.”

  He plopped down at the edge of my bed and gathered me in his arms like a toddler who just pleased his mother with a crayon self-portrait.

  “I’m going to mail it to those sons of bitches!” he said.

  “Of course you are.”

  “It’s a fine piece, isn’t it, Stooge?”

  “It’s a fine piece,” I agreed.

  He kissed me on the forehead, like he so often did, and I saw that he meant to kiss me in a different way, his eyes in the night as solid as the moon, and the night was cold, and there was nothing at all between us but the bedding, and the gunfire was awfully near, and before I could see whether I wanted him to kiss me or not, he kissed me on the lips. I thought I ought not to kiss him back. There was Pauline to think about, and maybe Pauline wouldn’t mind the daughterly affections, but she wouldn’t like this. But I thought of the boy too—Raven who had no lips. And already it was done. It was done and I felt it but good, and I wanted to kiss him back, I wanted to sink into the comforting alive touch of skin to skin.

  I pulled back, all the selfish-scum admonitions puddling.

  I asked, “Aren’t you ever afraid, Bug?” Knowing he was even as I said it, from the story he’d written, the words he’d chosen to tell how relieved we all were that Raven wasn’t us.

  He reached out with his big, dirty hand, but gently, as if I were that crumpled farmhouse at the Morata front that had been so charming.

  “You collect the fear, Daughter,” he said, “and you pour it into the story.”

  I dipped my head against the selfish scum and the St. Louis rules and the second kiss I could see he meant to begin. One kiss was an unguarded moment. One kiss could be a mistake. A second kiss would mean something that couldn’t be taken back.

  “Without the fear, Daughter,” he said, “what would we have to write?”

  “What would we have to write?” I repeated, wondering how I’d never seen the truth of it until he’d said it. Wondering how he could be such a goofy Scrooby and such a dear, wise old soul at the same time, so warm and so full of the juice, of wanting to do what he could to make the world bearable and doing it so gloriously with his words and with his running across fields of machine-gun fire when he was already Ernest Hemingway.

  “I suppose that’s part of why I’ve come to Spain, Mookie,” he said, and he put his dirty fingers to my chin, tilting my face to meet his gaze. “To see I haven’t lost my nerve for war.”

  Mookie. Offered as casually as if we were already lovers. He wasn’t just the kind of man who could stick in your guts if things went bad, though; he was the kind who could rip them out and leave them on the street for the whole world to trample. And things would go bad. There was always the closer look, and things always went bad for me, and if I had an ounce of sense I would pack my soap in my knapsack and find my own little corner of war, as far away from Ernest Hemingway as I could get.

  But I was already falling. Not for Bug, exactly. Not for the whole Ernest Hemingway. I didn’t imagine I could ever bear the guitar playing and the bad singing, the drinking, the need to be Ernest Hemingway the hero. And maybe I was just falling the way I always fell, except with Bertrand. Maybe I was falling for his idea of me, for the way I could wrap myself up in his confidence in me. But this one little bit of him that surfaced in this story of Raven, yes. That I already loved.

  PART II

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  APRIL 1937

  It wasn’t yet dawn, but Ernest, Ginny, and a few others were huddled in Ernest’s suite making plans to film at Fuentidueña when the first shell hit the hotel. I woke in Ernest’s bed to the smell of cordite and blasted granite dust, the high-pitched screams of women, the lower-pitched but no less frightened calls of men, and Ernest pulling me to my feet.

  We all tumbled out of the room into a scene by Dante: Pieces of masonry fell through the skylight. Shattering glass sprinkled the banisters and the floors and the chairs in the lobby. Hot mist and dust. The clamor of guests. Even the staff was in a panic as the boom of guns continued outside.

  Journalists crowded out into the atrium, most still in nightclothes, many in the company of the kind of women who would leave with more money than they’d arrived with the night before. A barefooted Dos Passos peered out his door, and Josie, with her nightclothes plastered to her skin, shot out from hers just as Ernest smoothed the dust from my sleep-tousled hair.

  “How are you, Josie?” Ernest asked brightly.

  She opened her mouth, but no sound emerged. She ducked back into her room and closed her door as if when she opened it again she might be greeted with a different morning altogether.

  “Very considerate of the bloody water tank to take the shell for those of us who’ll miss its warm water,” Del said, eyeing my nightclothes as we folded into the stream of dazed hotel guests flooding the stairs, headed down to the lobby.

  At the bottom stair, someone said to me, “Voudriez-vous un pamplemousse, Mademoiselle?”

  A funny fellow in a blue satin robe handed a grapefruit out to me as if this were exactly why I’d awoken, to share a predawn grapefruit with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  He bowed to me, then turned to Ginny and, bowing again, repeated, “Voudriez-vous un pamplemousse, Mademoiselle?”

  “My first shelling,” he said, as if the eating of grapefruit to mark a baptism by shelling were as natural as champagne to mark a new year. He’d brought two cases from Valencia. I supposed the weight of the grapefruit in his hands kept them from trembling.

  Another journalist held a coffeepot. It was empty, but one of the hotel staff filled it. A clerk toasted bits of stale bread on a hot plate. The maids began sweeping the glass from the chairs and floor.

  Josie reappeared, sinking into her favorite wicker chair, dressed now but still uncharacteristically frazzled.

  Ernest poured a full snifter of brandy and set it in
her hands. He couldn’t just give it to her and leave her to recover her composure, though: he began to lobby her to persuade Dos Passos to stop poking into the disappearance of José Robles. “You need to talk to Dos, Josie,” he insisted. “The fool can’t go around questioning the motives of the government. He’ll end up in prison awaiting trial himself, like Robles certainly is unless he’s off with some dame.”

  Josie took a healthy slug of the brandy. “He’s dead.”

  “Who?” Ernest asked.

  “Robles.”

  “José Robles is dead?”

  If José Robles was dead, then his own Republican government had executed him, and they’d done it in secret, without a trial. If José Robles was dead, then the Republican government Ernest had risked his life for had summarily executed a patriot and friend.

  “José Robles is dead,” Josie repeated.

  “Bullshit, Josie! How can you know that?” Ernest demanded.

  “Shot,” Josie said in a low whisper. “Executed as a spy for the Fascists.”

  “But he’s no more a Fascist spy than we are!”

  She drained the brandy and stood and smoothed her dress, and walked away, leaving Ernest trying to piece it together: Why kill Robles? Why entrust the secret that it had been done to Josie Herbst instead of to Ernest Hemingway?

  Dos Passos appeared, with shoes on his feet now but still wearing his plaid robe. Ernest, unable to fathom how to break the news to him that his dear friend José Robles had already been executed by the good Spanish government, disappeared just as Dos caught sight of us.

  Dos Passos raised one brow toward his balding pate, offering me a chance to deny that I’d spent the night in Hemingway’s room, or to explain it as something other than what it was. I looked away lest he learn the truth about José Robles from the pity in my eyes, but looked back as quickly so that he wouldn’t misread my compassion as shame. My own little bar of soap was still beside my own sink in my own bathroom, but that was a truth that would tell a lie on a morning already overrun with them.

  “Congratulations on Collier’s,” Dos said.

  Collier’s had just accepted my piece about the bombing of Madrid and the play at the hospital, the actor apologizing for forgetting his lines. They wanted to see more too. Bug thought I should insist they pay me better, but I’d accepted what they’d offered and spent the first of it on the best damned champagne in Madrid. If I were as sensible as I made myself out to be in the piece, I’d have gone to my own bed alone, and early, but I’d drunk far too much champagne instead, and when Ernest told me I was even more beautiful when I was successful, I felt beautiful, and I let him kiss me the way I let him kiss me the night I read his Raven piece. When he touched me, I touched him back, and when he lifted me up, I let myself be carried to bed. I was lousy rotten at sensible.

  “They mean to call the piece ‘Only the Shells Whine’ rather than my title, ‘High Explosives for Everyone,’” I told Dos Passos, wanting to say too that they weren’t otherwise editing the piece, they were running it just as I mailed it to them, but not wanting to brag.

  “Collier’s. That’s big,” Dos said. “Well, be careful, Marty. It’s dangerous, you know.”

  He didn’t mean the war, or writing for Collier’s.

  “Nothing at war is as clear and simple as in peace,” I said, wondering if he was the kind of man who would tell Pauline he’d seen me leaving her husband’s room in my nightclothes, or the kind who understood that I was no threat to Hemingway’s marriage, that I was the kind who hid in coatrooms, while Pauline, like the Marquise de Jouvenel, would hold a husband simply by refusing to give him up.

  Madrid, Spain

  MAY 1937

  A few nights before I meant to leave Spain, Randolfo Pacciardi invited me to dinner. It was invigorating to flirt casually over greasy lamb and red wine in tin cups with someone who knew what it was like to be here at the Spanish front. And I badly needed invigorating. The darkness was creeping in at the edges, where thrill ought to take up all the space. The darkness forever came when I could see the end of a thing. I couldn’t wait to leave Spain, and I couldn’t bear to leave it, and the closer I came to leaving, the stronger both feelings became.

  I hesitated when Randolfo suggested a walk out near one of the fronts after dinner. As often as I toured “his front,” this time seemed more fraught. But surely I was being unreasonable: timid in my final days here at war, or nervous around a man I did find attractive, or both. But Randolfo was so insistent that it finally seemed easier just to climb into the back of his car with him, his driver and orderly already in the front.

  I accepted a tin cup of red wine from the bottle he brought along to keep us warm. Before I’d finished it, the driver pulled the car to a stop.

  Randolfo topped off our cups, and he hopped out as his driver opened my door for me.

  “Shall we see the front at night once then, before you leave us?”

  I’d seen the front at night by then, and he knew I had. He had given Ernest and me the passes and had assigned the boy and the car to take us up to the front, the trip when we met Raven about whom Ernest had written so movingly that I’d fallen hard for him. But every time at the front was its own time.

  We set out in the dark, sipping the tinny wine and talking about the war. Randolfo did most of the talking, and I did most of the listening. Men do think a girl is clever and fine if she does nothing more than ask questions and nod at answers, and clever and fine gets a girl who wants to report a war what it’s hard to get any other way: access and information. Yes, I was leaving Spain, but I was already planning my return.

  We got lost, or we seemed to. The idea that this military leader who buzzed around every bit of the Madrid front on his motorcycle might become lost here seemed improbable even as it happened. I couldn’t exactly say that, though. I couldn’t call him straight out on his little game any more than I could call out Ernest for his silly pretenses that made him feel clever or brave or lovable. And there was a thrill, too, to being there in the dark near the enemy lines—perhaps even over them—with a man who was doing the dangerous work of trying to save Spain, rather than just reporting the war.

  Randolfo moved to kiss me. I thought to tell him about Ernest and me, to tell him we were headed to Paris together, where Ernest was to do a bookstore reading. But Randolfo was, like Ernest, the kind of man who was most attracted to women who belonged to other men, so I said simply, “Randolfo,” with a gentle laugh to suggest I understood him to be joking. It’s a tricky thing to fend off the advances of a man you want to keep as a friend.

  After we’d found our way back to the car, finally, I relaxed. How much trouble could I get into with his driver and aide in the front seat?

  Randolfo took my hand and wouldn’t let go. I tried to laugh again, but it didn’t work this second time.

  “Randolfo,” I whispered, “I can’t be falling in with a fellow who is going to get shot before I return to Spain.”

  “I promise not to get shot before you come back,” he said.

  “You’ll make that deal with the Fascists, will you? Give them your men, but not your own skin?”

  “Don’t leave, then. Stay here with me. Stay and enjoy this,” he said, and he pulled my hand to the front of his trousers.

  I yanked my hand away, horrified and repulsed.

  Randolfo leaned close to me and whispered, “So brave about rifle and machine-gun fire, so frightened of sex!”

  He laughed so joyfully that I almost couldn’t bear to remain quiet, to allow the two men in the front to imagine what they might. But I remembered the soldiers laughing that first day Ernest took me to the park, when I’d given them cigarettes. What a girl is doing and what she is seen to be doing don’t always line up, and a girl who protests only draws attention and doubt.

  Back at the hotel, I raced up to Ernest’s room. I didn’t mean to tell him about Randolfo’s advances—I admired Pacciardi for all he did for the cause, and it would only set Ernest off t
o think of another man trying to seduce me—but I wanted to be with him, and to see how the fund-raising broadcast he was doing that evening had gone.

  He was just back himself, with no idea that I’d been out.

  He gave me some copy to read, a new piece he’d been working on, and he poured us each a whiskey. He lit my cigarette, and then one of his own.

  He said, “I ought to marry you, Mookie, now that half of Spain knows about us.”

  He meant as best he could to want to marry me, I saw that. I felt a little flip in my heart at the words, and I might have answered yes despite the fact that he hadn’t phrased it as a question, despite the fact that the sex with Ernest was even shorter and sharper than it had been with Bertrand. But I saw that he didn’t mean it in the way Bertrand had. I saw that he meant it in that easy way of a man making a promise he can’t possibly keep.

  I took a warm sip of the whiskey. I was just one woman in a long string of lovers he poured whiskey and lit cigarettes for, and took to bed only to climb out again and settle in with Pauline, in their shared bedroom in their mansion in Key West that did or didn’t want a new patio, a saltwater pool, a wall around the whole property that would be no bulwark to Ernest’s appetites.

  I said, “I suppose a fellow as important as you are, Scrooby, does need two wives.”

  Ernest looked as if I were the one betraying us by having another lover.

  “Pauline and I are through,” he said. “We’ve been through for years. You’ve seen how it is, Marty. You were in Key West.”

  I closed my eyes to the Key West images: the talks in the garden, yes, but also the family around the table, Patrick’s earnest face as he tried so hard to please his papa, and little Gregory hardly old enough to imagine a father who might not love his mama, even though Hadley and Bumby were proof of the thing.

  “Pauline would have me in a cage for my entire life,” Ernest said, “confined to the iron bars of cocktails and dinner parties and money and comfort no talent could survive.”