Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The soldiers made us hot coffee and explained their position and that of the Fascists. If they were heroes, someone else would have to tell you so. I offered cigarettes, again making sure to touch, and I admired their guns, and asked about their sweethearts, their mothers, their homes. They told me about Suicide Hill and took me on a guided tour of their trenches: soldiers manning machine guns, and boys lying with rifles aimed in the direction of the boiled ground and burned olive trees. Some of the guns were so ancient it was hard to imagine they would shoot.

  We spent the night there, the soldiers insisting I have one of the camp cots in the relative safety of the control room.

  “You can’t deprive these boys of this rare opportunity to be gallant for the sake of a beautiful woman,” Ernest said, “and anyway, nobody will sleep at all if you don’t take the cot.”

  There was firing all through the night, and no chirp of birds in the morning, and as we readied to move on, one boy asked me to stop and see his brother, wounded and in a hospital we would pass on the return to Madrid.

  “We’re not going back to Madrid, not yet,” Ernest answered. “You’re not the only boys who need a good, long look at Stooge’s legs.”

  “Of course we’ll stop and see him,” I said. “Your brother. Tell me his name.”

  A Village on the Jarama River, Spain

  APRIL 1937

  Over dinner and drinks at a tavern that night, while another patron played guitar and sang beautifully for his friends, I asked Ernest what it had been like in Italy. “Was it like on that hill with those boys?”

  There was shame in the way his gaze slid away from me, to the singer.

  “When I heard the Red Cross was taking volunteers to drive ambulances, I resigned my position at the Kansas City Star and headed off,” he said. “That was where I learned to write, you know, Stooge, at the Star. They gave me the best lesson I ever had in writing: short everything—sentences, paragraphs, pieces—and active verbs, and everything immediate and true.”

  Changing the subject lest I stumble upon a truth I’d already learned: they wouldn’t let Ernest in the army on account of his lousy eyes. Why do the bits of ourselves we have no responsibility for so often torture us?

  “And then in Italy?” I pressed.

  He took a big slug of whiskey. I took a small sip, then a bigger one.

  “Italy, that was a long time ago,” he said, his gaze again trickling over to the singer and yet fixed in that earlier time. “A munitions factory exploded the day I arrived in Milan,” he said, and he described carting out mutilated bodies and bodiless limbs and heads. His voice was dispassionate, almost dull, as if he could subdue the mountains of emotion with the steady plateau of his voice. “Two days later, I was sent to an ambulance unit in Schio, where, a few weeks later, an Austrian mortar shell struck just feet from where I was handing out chocolate and cigarettes.”

  July 8, 1918.

  “There was one of those big noises, and I felt myself coming right out of my body, a handkerchief pulled from a jacket pocket,” he said. “I floated above myself and then somehow came back and I wasn’t dead anymore, not like I’d been at first, not like the soldier next to me still was.”

  The guitar player ended his song and began another before the applause could even really begin. Ernest drained his whiskey, then waved two fingers at the waitress, calling for another round.

  “Did you pray as a kid, Stooge?” he asked me. “When I was a kid, we knelt down every morning in the first-floor parlor, where Abba Bear—my mother’s father—read to us from Daily Strengths for Daily Needs.”

  The waitress set the fresh whiskeys on our table, setting mine beside my half-full glass and clearing Ernest’s empty as I absorbed this odd, improbable fact offered up as a diversion or an intimacy, I wasn’t sure which.

  After she left us, I replied softly, “I never imagined you as someone who prayed.”

  “When I misbehaved, Papa gave it to me with his razor strop and then made me kneel to ask God’s forgiveness,” he said, laughing now as if he really did find it funny, never mind the deep hurt in his soft brown eyes.

  “Mother liked to dress me up in dresses,” he confessed with the same false bravado. But she dressed his sister in boy’s clothes sometimes too, he said, and they’d held his sister back a year in the first grade so the two of them could go to school together. “No thought of putting me ahead,” he said glibly.

  “Every summer, we took the steamer from Chicago across Lake Michigan to Harbor Springs,” he said. “There, we caught a train to Petoskey and a dummy train to Bear Lake, then a two-decker steamer around to Windemere Cottage, where I spent summers fishing for perch and pike and bass, and swimming with my sisters.”

  His gaze on the whiskey now. I watched him watch the whiskey, attention he must have felt, but like an animal who finds himself cornered, he sat perfectly still.

  “No giant water bugs in the lake?” I asked finally, trying to answer his tinted humor with my own, recognizing it was my turn to offer up something.

  He looked up, as surprised at the turn of conversation I offered as I had been at the twisting path of his. “Water bugs?” he asked.

  “Thoroughly disgusting creatures that lurk in the ponds around St. Louis. Big as your hand, I swear. If one bites your toes—and that’s what the vile things live for, to take huge chunks out of poor unsuspecting little toes—it’s nasty business.”

  He laughed and he said, “A swimmer like you would let a bug keep you out of a pond?”

  “Of course not,” I said, laughing too—it felt good to laugh after the night with those boys. “But have you seen the scars on my toes?”

  We sipped our whiskeys as the patrons around us sang along with the guitarist, Spanish words that were as rounded as rong cararong rong rong.

  “I spent winters teasing my sisters incessantly,” Ernest said, “giving them nicknames they abhorred.”

  “None of them so bad as ‘Stooge,’ I hope,” I said.

  “You’re in a class of your own, Stooge.”

  I took a sip of my whiskey, which was growing warmer, more satisfying. I thought I ought to stop drinking, but I took another sip.

  “I was called ‘Rabbit’ by an early love,” I offered.

  I wished I hadn’t the moment the confession was out, as he looked at me with great interest, recognizing this as the little crack in my veneer that it was. Rabbit, Bertrand had called me, and I’d called him Smuf, and he took me so completely that he left me nothing of my own use. He was leaving his wife the whole time he was loving me, but he never could finish the task. In the end, I’d called him “the Angel of Destruction,” although he wasn’t the destroyer, really; the destroyer was his wife and my impatience, my bending to my father’s will.

  Ernest said, “I think ‘Stooge’ fits you better than ‘Rabbit.’”

  I slowly spun the whiskey glass with my fingers. He didn’t press me the way I pressed him.

  I collected myself and I smiled, and I said, “What did your dearest friends call you when you were a kid, Scrooby?”

  “Oh no, you don’t! Scrooby is bad enough.” Laughing again that way he did, that way that allowed the steam of emotion a release that neither of us need admit. A graceful exit.

  “I can come up with worse,” I said. “Cottonmouth? Now there’s a nickname that could bring down a writer.”

  “A manly, dangerous snake?”

  “Little Scribbles,” I offered.

  “The thing about those ‘Little’ nicknames, though, Stooge, is that everyone knows they mean ‘Big.’”

  “Giant Water Bug, then.”

  “Giant Water Bug? It’s a helluva name, Stooge, but it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement,” I said, and I offered up in exchange for what he’d said about his father and the leather strop, which had stuck with me, that I’d had that hard time with my dad. Not that he was the one who called me “selfish scum” for loving Ber
trand, but enough that Ernest might draw the conclusion himself.

  “Dad died just over a year ago,” I said.

  “That was the darkness in your mother, in Key West.”

  The room had grown quiet. The singer’s chair was empty, his guitar leaned against the wall.

  “My father had the darkness his whole life,” Ernest said. “He did himself in with a Smith & Wesson when I was twenty-nine.”

  He stood and went to the bar before I could say anything, and came back with fresh drinks, sitting again and saying, “You really were brave out there, Stooge.”

  “Did you have a nickname for the nurse?” I asked gently.

  “The nurse?”

  “The one in Milan.”

  For just a second I was afraid he might slap me, but he only shoved his chair back and stood, grinning in a way I saw was meant to put me at ease but didn’t. He reached for the guitar and began to strum it and sing too loudly.

  The guitar’s owner appeared back in the doorway, understandably alarmed.

  “Scrooby,” I said in a gentle, teasing voice, nodding to the man in the doorway, “perhaps you ought to return that guitar to its rightful owner so we can get some sleep?”

  Ernest handed the guitar to its owner as if doing him a favor. “You carry on, son,” he said. “This lovely lady needs me elsewhere.”

  I felt my face flush, but I didn’t rise to defend my virtue. It wouldn’t do to tell him in front of the entire bar that I meant in our separate rooms, and my virtue was a shabby enough thing in any event. My yellow hair. But as we climbed the stairs, I said, “Thank you, Giant Water Bug, for saving me from having to report back to Pauline that you aren’t getting your proper rest,” invoking his wife’s name to defuse any expectation.

  Alone in my own room, I took my soap from my pack and set it at the edge of the tiny sink, and I washed the grit of war from my face and chest and neck, from behind my ears. I shucked off my boots and washed the dirt from my toes, which, despite all the talk about water bugs, were perfectly unscarred. I set my soap out to dry, glad for the lumpy mattress and the pillow and the walls, for the distance from the gunfire, for the booze in my belly, and for the more intimate glimpse of Hemingway.

  We were back at the little supply farmhouse, talking to the soldiers the next morning, when we heard the groaning thud of a shell being launched, the flutter of it growing frantic and high-pitched far too quickly, whistling right at us, spinning. We dove into the trenches. We held our breaths, as if the shell were an animal we might hide from if only we remained completely still. I lay with Ernest on top of me, his weight anchoring me as the whine grew so piercingly loud that the sound alone might kill. The thing exploded in such a terrifying boom that it seemed a part of me.

  By the time we climbed from the trench and shook off the bomb dust, the charming little farmhouse was a pile of rubble, the air full of the sounds of the boys trapped inside. We moved aside stones to try to save them, Ernest and the soldiers and I did. I was immune to it, I told myself. I’d seen this. I knew this. The twisted iron bed left by the shelling at the hotel. The man who lay dusty and headless amid the steam from the broken gas main and the blood steaming through the fingers of the woman brought into the lobby. The terrified little boy hurrying through the square, holding his grandmother’s hand as the hot shrapnel pierced his neck. I didn’t suppose I would have survived this time myself if Ernest hadn’t taught me the different sounds of the guns, and when and how to fall flat. I recognized that debt even as I hauled off one stone and then the next, trying all the while to blot out the voices calling out for their mothers, crumbling my heart into hard little stones as if it were the farmhouse that had been so charming. Keeping myself to myself, careful not to touch these soldiers I’d been so careful to touch as I handed them cigarettes just days before, lest my crumbling heart landslide all of me into a dusty, useless pile.

  A Hospital near the Morata Front, Spain

  APRIL 1937

  On the way back to Madrid, we passed right by the hospital I’d promised to visit, a tired, old building kitted out with American-bought medical gear. “It’s the poor kid’s brother, Bug,” I said when Ernest balked. “You were wounded. You spent how much time in a hospital half a globe away from home? Think what it would have meant to you to have Ernest Hemingway the Writer with a capital W visit you then.”

  “Bug?” he repeated.

  “Giant Water Buggy Bug,” I said. “Huge, nasty, ugly beetle-y thing that eats poor unsuspecting children’s toes.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think ‘Bug’ alone conveys that.”

  “Ah, but you know,” I said.

  He laughed. “All right, then. All right. You always get your way, don’t you? Sure, let’s stop at your lousy hospital for five minutes so you can keep your promise.”

  Love bug. The phrase came to me unbidden. But that was just a nasty thing too, stuck together after mating, even in flight.

  Inside the hospital, the word that Ernest Hemingway was visiting spread like blood from a head wound. Soon, one of the staff was telling Ernest that a boy called Raven was keen to see him. Ernest allowed us to be taken to an upstairs room where this Raven was revealed as a lump of scratchy wool blanket, a scabbed face, bandaged eyes. The boy had been burned by a grenade, but he didn’t mind the pain, he explained in words formed weakly from a lipless mouth. He only wished he could see what his friends were doing in the war.

  I tried to call up the bravery Ernest had bestowed on me in the trenches, to will myself not to cry as I listened to the blind boy from Pittsburg who wanted to be a writer, who never again would be a boy any girl would want to kiss.

  Ernest, speaking toward the boy without looking at him again any more than I was, told the boy what we’d seen at the front. He described it in detail so the boy could imagine it, laughing at the fuss the soldiers had made over me and only realizing as he laughed that the boy couldn’t see me to know whether I was anything to look at.

  “I’ll bring you a radio the next time we come this way,” Ernest promised the boy. “So you can hear all about what your pals are up to.”

  “Maybe John Dos Passos could bring it,” the boy said. “He promised to visit me.”

  Ernest pursed his lips. He said, “I’ll bring Dos to see you when I bring the radio,” as if the idea had been his own to bring along a fellow writer the boy might just admire even more than Ernest Hemingway.

  “Would you really?” the boy asked.

  “I will,” Ernest assured him.

  “Soon, Ernie?” the boy said.

  “Ernest,” Ernest said.

  “I can call you Ernest?”

  “You can call him Bug,” I suggested. “All his closest friends do.”

  “Bug?” the boy said.

  Ernest said, “As soon as Dos Passos gets to Madrid, I’ll bring him to see you. And I’ll bring that radio.”

  “And Sinclair Lewis too?” the boy said, registering the reluctance in Ernest’s voice that Ernest himself refused to acknowledge.

  “Sure,” Ernest said. “Sinclair Lewis too. I’ll get him to bring his Nobel Prize along for you to—” To see, he’d almost said. He looked at the boy then for the first time since that awful initial glance, when we’d both seen that the boy couldn’t see us look away.

  That night, while Ernest and his poker pals were taking each other’s money over a round table and a frayed deck of cards back at the Florida in Madrid, or I supposed they were, I rolled a blank sheet of paper into a typewriter I’d borrowed from Ginny. Hemingway thought maybe I could do it, and that was something, that was a whole hell of a lot. But how was it possible to explain this war? All you could say was one thing happened or another, but that doesn’t really tell the story of the boy from Pittsburg left without lips, or the brother on the hill who might have had a safe life as a doctor or a dentist, or the boys peeling potatoes on the safer ground of a farmhouse only to be buried in stone. I stared at the blank white paper behind the metal holding bar, tr
ying to recall exactly the sound of that shell coming toward us. Not how Ernest would describe it, but how I would. The thud of it launching. The cough and the whistle. The detail. The senses. The shape and cool smoothness of the telephone on the table in the bunker atop the hill. The guilty press of the cot on my back while soldiers slept on the cold ground. All the things Raven didn’t yet know, but would.

  I put my still-dirty fingers to the black keys before I could scrape my guts back inside where they belonged, where I liked to pretend they were all nice and tidy and invulnerable when any fool could see them caught in the tangle of my yellow hair. I couldn’t write about the time at the front. I wasn’t good enough to write that. But I could write about the way the women in Madrid carried on with their shopping. I could write about the silly hospital-benefit play a group of soldiers put on a few days before, a play that couldn’t have been more amateur but still we delighted in it. I could write about how, after the curtain was lowered, the hero came out and apologized for forgetting his lines, and how enthusiastically we applauded him. A crowd can be pretty forgiving when an actor has learned his lines in a trench near Garabitas, in the midst of an attack.

  I would write the piece, and I would revise it as best I could, and I would mail it to Collier’s, maybe. I would let Ernest read it, or I wouldn’t admit the writing to him, but I would write it and I would send it. Collier’s would never publish it, but I did have the letter claiming me as their special correspondent, and theirs was the only publication whose address I had.

  It felt so good, the sentences connecting toward something that might (with a lot more work) become a story worth reading. It was the only thing that didn’t fill me with self-doubt, my writing. Not while I was putting the words down. After it was done, yes, but not while I was writing. The thing was to write my damned heart out, to have a go at doing something that would have made Dad proud.

  The Hotel Florida, Madrid, Spain

  APRIL 1937