Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  Del rejoined us in mid-April—Good Friday, which was only good that year if you liked a four a.m. sunrise over refugees carrying almost nothing on account of leaving their homes in a terrible rush. We’d already spent days being strafed by Fascist planes as we wove between boxes of dynamite set to blow the stone bridges in the event of a Republican retreat. It was all so bleak, and yet we picnicked on mutton and tomatoes and onions at a communist headquarters in the middle of a vineyard, and when a shell landed not more than a football field away, someone said, “That sort of shooting isn’t serious,” and poured more wine. Hemingway was as happy in this bleakness as I’d ever seen him, and I felt happy too.

  On the way to Tortosa on the Ebro Delta, Herb, Del, Ernest, and I watched for nearly an hour as twelve German planes flying in perfect formation bombed and bombed and bombed the same single company of Republicans, who had no antiaircraft with which to defend themselves. We crossed the swollen yellow river on a great steel bridge, and we turned left onto the Valencia highway, toward Ulldecona, wondering now where the war could have gone. Motorcycle couriers raced by, but even they didn’t seem to have any idea what was going on.

  We stopped in an olive grove with four other journalists as in the dark as we were, but a quartet of soldiers huddled over a map up the road enlightened us: the Fascists had broken through the government road, cutting off the Republicans. Not wanting to be trapped by the Fascists, we hightailed it back toward our sturdy bridge, counting and making notes as thirty-three silver Italian Fascist bombers flew overhead, again in perfect formation. A clear blue sky too. Fine bombing weather.

  The sky in the direction of the bridge was soon clouded with smoke and dust. But with no alternative, we retraced the newly bombed roads to find our sturdy bridge now a pile of rubble largely buried in the rushing river. The only way across was a rickety footbridge soldiers were trying to fortify.

  Del said, “It won’t take the car.”

  Herb said, “Without the car, we’re done for.”

  I said, “Those bombers could return any minute.”

  Ernest said, “We’ll be the easiest target that ever was if we’re crossing that bridge when they do.”

  A mule cart set off across the thing. We watched it for a minute.

  We had no choice but to go, and to go fast.

  Ernest and Herb climbed out of the car to lighten us, and Del let out the clutch, and we followed well behind the mule cart, which rattled the wood planks ferociously.

  There was a hole nearly as big as the car in the middle of the bridge, out over the river. I tried not to look as we approached it.

  I kept making notes, writing down each detail so I could write it well. I was Bug’s brave girl again, and he was my funny trench buddy, and I was a good swimmer, I told myself. I was an awfully good swimmer.

  Marseille, France

  MAY 1938

  Back in Madrid without, thankfully, having to survive a fall from that bridge or a dip in the river, I cabled Collier’s that I meant to write a piece about the refugees we’d seen on the Barcelona Highway—a young woman with a canary, an old one holding a single chicken cradled like a child, a mother putting on makeup in a compact mirror for no reason I could imagine, but it seemed an act of bravery. They answered that the story would be stale by the time it could be published, and requested I go to France, England, and Czechoslovakia, for a take on the imminence of war. It killed me to leave a real war in Spain and decent people fighting for their liberty for something less, but all eyes were on the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia and Hitler standing at its border. At least I had Ernest’s and Herb’s company as far as Marseille, on the south coast of France.

  “Don’t leave me for the Czechs, Mookie,” Ernest said on our last night together. “They’re just a bunch of lousy Germans who can live without you.”

  “The Czechs aren’t the Hitler lovers the Austrians are, Bug,” I said. “They’re mostly decent folks who want to be left in peace.”

  “Come to Madrid with Herb and me.”

  “I don’t have anyone to write for there. I don’t even have the damned papers to travel back to Spain, and I sure don’t have the stuff it would take to cut through the red tape.”

  “Let’s go to Paris, then. What’s Prague compared to Paris?”

  “I want to. You know I want to,” I said, which was both true and not. I felt the same darkness descending as he did, for Spain and for us, and I wondered if I would ever see him again if we split up now.

  “The thing is the work,” I said. “The thing is the work, which means you have to go to Madrid and I have to go to Czechoslovakia.”

  The work, for him too, would always be the most important thing. The work was the only thing that could keep the St. Louis horrors or the Madrid madness or whatever personal darkness you suffered at bay. But Bug’s expression left me feeling disloyal to my favorite trench buddy. It left me thinking that I hated to travel alone, I hated to sleep alone.

  “I suppose I could do the piece on France first,” I said. “I could do the getting through France, and you could go to Madrid, and we could meet in Paris.”

  “Paris! We’ll eat like pigs and drink champagne and make love three times a day. We’ll write our novels, and everything will be fine.”

  “But I do have to go to Czechoslovakia, Bongie.”

  “You’ll go to Czechoslovakia, and I’ll pine for you, and you’ll come back to Paris.”

  “And England,” I said. “I also have to go to England.”

  “And fine ruddy England,” he said. “Maybe Del will join us there. Maybe Herb too.”

  I set off through France alone, winding my car past new tanks on the roads in Burgundy and through new fortifications in the Alps, talking to soldiers and border guards and anyone with a sensible opinion about the threat of war between Germany and France. Ernest set off with Herb for Madrid, where he nearly took a swing at a reporter from the Daily Worker in the lobby of the Hotel Florida just for poking at Ernest’s commitment to anti-Fascism.

  We met again in Paris, where I spent my days bothering every person in the know I could find (and I’d gotten pretty good at finding them) for my piece on the looming possibility of war with Germany, and my nights eating too much and drinking too much with Ernest. It was splendid until it wasn’t, until I started making plans for Czechoslovakia.

  “I’m going to fly, Bug,” I said. “I’ll leave the car here for you.”

  “You haven’t even finished the French piece yet.”

  “I finished it. I sent it to Collier’s.”

  “It was a mess, you said it was, and they haven’t run it. You can’t send a thousand pages and ask them to reduce it for you.”

  “Not a thousand.”

  “‘A five-foot shelf.’”

  “I asked them to cable me comments.”

  Comments and money, because I’d given every extra cent I had to soldiers I’d met on the way out of Spain. They needed it so much more than I did.

  “Why the hell do you want to rush off and leave me for some new piece when the French one isn’t even properly done?” Ernest insisted.

  “Collier’s is paying me a thousand dollars per piece, Bug,” I said. “My daily bread.”

  “Come back to Spain with me. I’ll bake bread for you in Spain.”

  “They’re already unhappy at how long the French piece took, which you know was because I couldn’t bear to wave goodbye to Spain. I promised them the Czech article by June 18 at the latest, and the Brit one by July 10.”

  “Stay here in Paris. You can wallow in bed, and I’ll be the good wifey-wife,” he said. “I’ll go out to the bakery and bring the daily bread back. Fresh baguettes. Croissants. That funny little breakfast loaf with the currants you like so much.”

  But even if I didn’t want to go to Czechoslovakia—even if I didn’t have a contract requiring me to—I couldn’t let myself become dependent on a man still married to his wife, or even a man who wasn’t. I wouldn’t be the same me i
f I leaned on anyone but myself.

  I said, “I don’t know if the Hemingway family could take two good wifey-wives waiting for their lovers to return, Bug.”

  Maybe I meant to provoke him. Maybe I wanted to see him care.

  “Be reasonable, Daughter,” he said.

  “I am being reasonable. It will be just a few weeks, and then I’ll join you in Spain.”

  “We could just go home together,” he said.

  “To be in telephone distance of someone I can’t telephone?” Thinking, Sleeping alone while he sleeps with his wife. “It won’t be forever, Bug.”

  “Don’t count on that!”

  The sudden edge in his voice might have been simple concern for my life, but I could see in his moon eyes the hurt behind the words. I could see the impossibility of him committing to leave Pauline if I wouldn’t commit to being the full-time wife he was offering to be, and the impossibility of me giving up my work or even just putting it second to his.

  At the end of May, I set off for Czechoslovakia, and Ernest went home to Key West. I wrote to Matie about it. I wrote the day after he’d sailed that I believed he loved me and he believed he loved me, but I didn’t think there was much to do about it.

  At the Hotel Ambassador in Prague, home to every journalist come to witness Czechoslovakia’s demise, I opened up my room to rid it of the impersonal hotel staleness, and I stood on the balcony amid the sounds of taxi horns and tram bells, the grind of wheels on tracks. The streetlamps came on as I looked across Wenceslas Square and its collection of stores announcing their wares in their funny, inefficient lettering, all those umlauts and accents and hooks. And a knock at my door announced my girlfriend from Madrid, Ginny Cowles, already in Czechoslovakia for the Sunday Times. She clicked into my room in her spikey heels and her gold jewelry and her discretion. She didn’t ask where Ernest was, and I didn’t offer.

  She’d brought a pint of decent booze from which she poured us each a splash, and we stood together on the balcony watching the Czechs come and go, stepping right out across the trolley tracks without a thought about the trams.

  “And to think, we gave up covering a real war in Spain for this,” I said.

  Ginny said, “This one will be real soon enough.”

  “All the brave Czechs at the border staring across the abyss at Hitler’s Nazi flags in plain view,” I said, “while the rest of the world dances the appeasement jig.”

  “Marty, dear,” Ginny said, “you can’t save Czechoslovakia by haranguing total strangers on the evils of Hitler.”

  “I don’t intend to,” I said. “I intend to save it by haranguing the Czech president into having some spine. Someone has to stand up to that vile little German who holds the lightning bolt to ruin us all.”

  And so we made the assault on Czechoslovakia together even more surely than we’d made the assault on Madrid. We watched the social democrats parade down the street, singing and cheering as they passed their president, who observed the whole four-hour-long parade with his cap respectfully in hand despite the sharp sun. We listened to all the insistence that Czechoslovakia had been free in 1490, when its famous town-hall clock first started marking time, and it was free now, and free it would remain.

  We took a car out to Troppau, to see the women in the beet fields and the men making hay and, intermixed with the haystacks, pillboxes with soldiers and machine guns, and anti-tank weaponry. We went to Pilsen to see the munitions factories in full swing. We went the forty miles or so to Theresienstadt and beyond, to see for ourselves the Nazi thugs lined up across the German border.

  There were Nazi thugs aplenty on the Czech side of the border too, though, with Nazi flags displayed shamelessly in the windows in Odersch even as the Czech soldiers patrolled the streets. And the good non-Nazi Czechs had already begun leaving the Sudetenland, packing what little they could carry and setting off to join relatives in Prague or in Brno or in some other place of relative safety they might reach. I wanted to harangue them with demands to know how they could just abandon their homes before the fight was over. But it was a hard charge to make with half their neighbors already cutting flowers with which to welcome the Germans, and the rest of the world strolling by with faces turned away.

  Ernest, on the way home from the airport with Pauline and Patrick and Gigi and a family friend packed into his Ford, drove into an absolute wreck of a vehicle belonging to a WPA worker, knocking it through the intersection. The jalopy flipped, but the driver somehow emerged, unhurt and shouting like a crazy man. Ernest matched the man’s ire shout for shout, the two of them making such a spectacle in the street that a policeman hauled them both off. Ernest’s lawyer (whom he’d portrayed as the shyster Bee-lips in To Have and Have Not) had to get him released, and in the end poor Patrick testified for his father, and the judge gave up on it all, and Ernest bought himself a brand-spanking-new Buick eight-cylinder convertible.

  He added a window air-conditioning unit to his writing room over the garage in Key West and holed up there, away from Pauline’s disappointment and the constant stream of tourists on the street beyond the new wall surrounding the house. He began to put together a story collection in which he meant to include his play about Spain with him as a spy-hero and me as a ninny, the thing he’d called “Working: Do Not Disturb” in Spain but now titled “The Fifth Column.” He took to calling the gang working to produce the play on Broadway “the Jews.” He squabbled with Max Perkins, who didn’t think it a good idea to wedge the play into the story collection. He spent more and more time with the boxers at the Blue Goose Arena, where he claimed himself a one-time “amateur boxing champion,” or the local paper claimed it for him without any support. Not even fishing on the Pilar improved his mood.

  One night when he couldn’t find a key to his writing studio, he waved a pistol around, then shot both the ceiling and the door lock, and barricaded himself in the studio. Pauline, unable to reason with him, took the boys to a friend’s house for the night, then went to a party she and Ernest were to attend. When Ernest grew bored of waiting for her return, he found her at the party, where he thanked her for her fortitude by breaking furniture and punching guests.

  My editors at Collier’s hadn’t run my piece on the state of denial in France yet (“too jumpy”), but they ran the Czech piece on August 6. It was a terrific spread, with photos of teenaged girls emerging from a gas-mask drill, and Czech munitions plants and soldiers. The country, no bigger than my home state of Missouri, was now surrounded on three sides by the German Reich, but no one was panicked. That was what struck me about the Czechs: they were just like a patient laid out on the table, waiting for Hitler to do his business.

  By then, Ginny and I had been to England, stopping in every village pub from the Midlands to the Scottish border to harangue random strangers—criminally complacent fools who seemed to a man to squeeze their eyes shut against a war anyone could see was headed right for their white cliffs. I meant to take Ginny to see my writer-friend H. G. Wells, with whom I often stayed in London, but I made excuses lest I harangue him too, for his country’s lifeless aristocracy doing nothing more than grasp tightly to their titles and their bank accounts while pretending Hitler didn’t exist. I was getting awfully good at haranguing, to no good end.

  I went down to Corsica to find some quiet in which to write, but I found only a man drowning on the beach. I returned to Paris, to a little room with a writing desk on a dead-end street near the Arc de Triomphe, where I settled into my fiction as the world settled into rumors of war. If Hitler was madman enough to bomb a city as beautiful as Paris, well then, the whole world was damned but good.

  Ernest and his family left Key West shortly after his and Pauline’s joint birthdays in July, heading for the L Bar T Ranch in Wyoming and a summer of rain and more rain. He read proofs for the short story collection, and Pauline read with him. He worried over what to do about The Fifth Column, deciding finally to ignore Max’s advice about the play and include it with the stories. When
he mailed the galleys back to Perkins near the end of August, his dedication read, “To Marty and Herbert with love.”

  By the end of August, Ernest was on the Normandie for Paris, to join me for a getaway to my favorite stretch of the French coastline between Le Lavandou and St. Tropez. NANA had called him back to cover the boiling brew that was Europe, and we were getting nearly as good at apologizing after we’d been apart as we were at arguing when together.

  Le Lavandou, France

  AUGUST 1938

  Le Lavandou was just a charming little fishing village back then, with nothing to offer but the buoyant blue sea for me to swim in, clean sand on which to let the salt dry on my skin, and a big round moon reflecting on the Mediterranean to light our way home from the local bar in which Ernest and I spent lazy evenings drinking good, cheap rosé. That’s where we were—at a table in the bar, listening to a local saxophone player accompanied by a pianist and trying to forget all the bad in the world—when we first heard the rumors that the French and English were scheming to hand the good Czechs of the Sudetenland to Hitler, in exchange for nothing more than a hollow promise of peace.

  I packed up my swimsuit in my duffel and headed straight for Prague again, to harangue the new head of the US Foreign Service there, while Ernest, who might have accompanied me to report for NANA, went pheasant shooting in Sologne. Maybe he was tired of me, tired of my putting my work ahead of him when he had a wife at home who would always put him first. Maybe he didn’t want to risk Pauline seeing our bylines from the same sinking ship. Or maybe he’d promised his wife that he wouldn’t risk his own neck, a promise that would allow him to hide behind the welfare of his wife and kids. He wasn’t a coward. I knew that. I’d seen him in Spain. Only it did hurt that he declined to go to a place to which any sensible correspondent would beat a path. It seemed the only reason he wouldn’t go was that I did.