Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Your juice is running like you just harvested the whole grove of mangos all at once, Bug,” I told him one night as we walked hand in hand along the Prado in Havana, where we sometimes liked to go after a good day. We’d written until two p.m. We’d played a bit of tennis. I took a dip in the pool while Ernest watched from a patio chair, pretending to read. Then Ernest shed his shorts and T-shirt for decent slacks and a collared shirt, and I pulled on his favorite little black dress, my hair still wet.

  “The whole world is going to drink this novel of yours up in one big gulp,” I said as we strolled.

  “Are they, Mook?” His eyes as wanting-to-believe as the puppy we passed on the wide boulevard, the little dog playing under an oak tree beside an old lady reading a newspaper she’d bought from the news-and-lottery-ticket boys.

  It might have made me jealous, how beautifully Ernest was writing, but how can you be jealous of something as gentle and soothing and good as the wind blowing in the palms outside our bedroom window?

  “The damned critics will ruin it,” he said. “The damned critics are out to slay me.”

  I pulled him closer as we walked, letting go of his hand to take his arm and leaning my head on his shoulder. “Not this one, Bug.”

  “They don’t know the real gen when they see it.”

  “They’ll know this,” I said, trying to push out the one bit of uneasiness I felt, the little fear that he might stick a knife in me with Maria, the Spanish girl his Robert Jordan hero falls for, the way he stuck a knife in me with the Dorothy ninny in his Spanish war play. “Don’t think about the critics,” I said. “Just keep on pouring the juice until the jug is empty. Do you know how it will end, the old miracle?”

  “Do we ever really know how a thing will end until it does?”

  A flock of negritos circled in the sky above us, little black finches looking for just the right laurel tree in which to settle for the night.

  He said, “Do we even know how we will end?”

  I said, “Sure enough we’ll end up dead like everyone does. The timing is the only thing.”

  “And what you do with the time.”

  “And what you do with the time.”

  “We write well together, Mookie.”

  “We write well together, Bug.”

  “Let’s go out on the Pilar tomorrow, after we’re done with the writing.”

  “I could swim while you fish.”

  “You’ll scare the poor fish with your goggles, Stooge! You scare me!”

  I wore motorcycle goggles when I swam in the sea, so that I could make friends with the bright, tiny fish trying to avoid the larger ones Ernest liked to catch.

  “I thought you liked the goggles,” I said. “I thought they were sexy.”

  “You’re sexy in them,” he said. “It isn’t the same thing. You aren’t more sexy in them, you’re just sexy enough to still look sexy in hideous goggles.”

  “That might be the swimsuit,” I said.

  “That might be the swimsuit. I like the swimsuit, although I like even better the little black dress,” he said, fingering the fabric. “I like taking off the little black dress. Why don’t we go home now, and take off the black dress? Then tomorrow we can go out on the Pilar with the sexy goggles.”

  “Let’s have dinner first,” I said.

  “Let’s have a drink at the Floridita,” he said. “And then we’ll go home and take off the dress.”

  “A drink and some dinner tonight,” I said, “and tomorrow we’ll write as well as we wrote today, and we’ll pack a picnic supper and spend the evening on the Pilar.”

  Ernest received a cable from Pauline that May suggesting he come to New York for the Joe Louis–Tony Galento heavyweight match, for Patrick’s birthday.

  “You should go,” I said. “Mousie would be so pleased.”

  But the cable was too late. He couldn’t get a flight that would reach New York before the fight and the birthday were over.

  “She might have told me in time for me to be there,” he said. “She goes about doing whatever she damned well pleases, and no writer in the world could write fast enough to keep up with her spending.”

  He and Pauline were already arguing about the boys, whom she had taken to New York to outfit for a summer camp she’d arranged without consulting him. “I thought I was so good not to bother you,” she’d written. “Also, sweetie, I didn’t just shove the children in camp to be rid of them as you seem to think.” But after the plea for his company for Patrick’s birthday, he didn’t hear from Pauline for such a long time that he finally called her, only to find that she had experienced some rectal bleeding while in search of a summer rental in Nantucket (the cost of the Key West mansion alone not high enough, apparently, he said). She’d returned to New York for a battery of tests.

  Ernest made arrangements to fly to join her. I divvied up our expenses as I had after Spain and counted myself glad that I was independent, that I would never burden anyone else with whatever summer house I might want to rent.

  “Here’s the split,” I said. “The final accounting in case you don’t come back.”

  Before he could get away, Pauline’s tests all came out negative. “Just a burst vein in her tight ass,” Ernest joked.

  Pauline suggested she and Ernest go to Europe together with a grand little group of friends; she thought it might be the last chance to go before war broke out. “Our last chance to go,” she wrote. He responded that Hitler knew there was everything to gain with war scares and nothing to gain by war, but if the German leader kept lighting matches to show how many powder barrels he had open, something would blow. He declined to go with her on the excuse of his writing, though, and she sent the boys off to summer camp and sailed for Europe with her pals. She wrote that she wished he were coming, and she sent along a clipping of a stout old couple, the man in a kilt, boarding a ship, saying by the next opportunity to go they’d look like the enclosed. “Don’t worry, sweetie, and write well,” she wrote. “There’s nobody like you.”

  She had already spent everything in their joint account by the time she sailed.

  Ernest set about selling the film rights to To Have and Have Not, to raise the money to cover Pauline’s trip.

  Ernest wanted to spend his fortieth birthday that July 21 writing his novel.

  “It’s nothing, a birthday,” he said the afternoon before. “If I can write a good novel, that will be something to celebrate.”

  “You’re writing a very good novel, Bongie.”

  “I have to write a good one.”

  “A horridly scrofulous novel, on grey paper with blunt type.”

  He laughed, and he said he could tell Matie’s arrival was imminent, and I closed my eyes for a minute, remembering how much I’d loved climbing on the tram on sunny afternoons, hauling sandwiches and eggs and lemonade and Matie’s volume of Robert Browning to the lake at Creve Coeur.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind her coming on your birthday?” I asked, not that there was much to be done about it now if he did. Matie was to arrive in Havana the next morning, and it had taken me all I had to persuade her to visit Ernest and me.

  “The only thing sweeter than having one Gellhorn here to celebrate my birthday is having two,” he said. “But she won’t mind if I write?”

  “Matie will mind if you don’t write, Bug. She wants to be no trouble. She wants us both to write.”

  We went out on the Pilar only after we’d finished the writing that day before his birthday. I said we could fish, I would fish with him, but he said the fishing was only for Saturdays and Sundays now, that he couldn’t have the temptation of fishing luring him away from his writing. So we took books to read and a picnic dinner with a prebirthday cake I’d made myself, not a terrible cake. We floated on the water and read for what was left of the afternoon, just sitting side by side on the deck with our books open and the quiet lap of the sea against the hull. When the sky bruised up and the light grew long, we set aside our reading and po
ured ourselves a bit of good red wine, and spread out the picnic and the cake.

  “Some days the going is so tough,” he said.

  “I know, Scrooby, but it really is a horridly scrofulous novel.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “The passage with Robert Jordan talking with the old Spanish lady—”

  “Pilar.”

  “Right, Pilar.” Like his boat. “Where Robert Jordan is talking to Pilar about his father—it’s so funny and moving at the same time, Bug.” It was a brilliant passage, really. Jordan explains to the old Spanish woman, Pilar, that his father, a “Republican” back in the United States, had shot himself. Suicide. The old woman—thinking a Republican in the United States was similar to the Spanish Republicans, the bravest of whom would kill themselves rather than give up information to Fascists—asks if Jordan’s father was tortured, by which she means by his political opponents. And Robert Jordan agrees that, yes, his father was tortured—by his own demons, but he doesn’t tell her that. How could Ernest take something as bleak as a son talking about his father’s suicide and make it funny?

  “It’s so funny, and it’s so moving, and the funny doesn’t cheapen it,” I said. “The funny takes it to another level. It makes it even more moving.”

  Ernest basked in this for a moment. It was what he liked to hear, the specific ways in which his work was extraordinary. It’s what all writers like to hear.

  He said, “I’ve never written harder nor steadier.”

  I said, “I’m good for you that way.”

  He took a sip of his wine and a bite of the cake and he looked across the water, as if to judge whether he needed to tend the wheel.

  He said, “I mean to jam it through before war comes.”

  “I know, Bongie. I know.”

  “The war is coming, and it’s going to be like no other.”

  “There’s no stopping it. No one listens.”

  I wondered if we would go ourselves, eventually. I wanted to go. It was what I did best, it turned out, writing about war.

  I said, “So the thing to do until then is write our novels.”

  He said, “This novel is the most important thing I’ve ever done, Rabbit.”

  The nickname sat between us as we stared out at the soft light bluing the water, the sun below the horizon now, but with a residue of light lining the far edge of the sea. Rabbit. It was what Bertrand de Jouvenel used to call me, his love name for me. It was what Ernest’s new hero called Maria, the Spanish girl in the novel. Sure, one of the characters in my own novel shared some characteristics with Ernest, and another experienced some of the things I’d experienced in Prague. But Rabbit? Conejo, Robert Jordan called the girl. In Spanish—a language Robert Jordan must have known pretty well, since he’d been a Spanish professor before he joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade to fight in Spain—rabbit was slang for “cunt.”

  Home in bed together, the birthday cake brushed from our teeth and our faces, and only the sex to be done with, Ernest said, “We could do this forever, Mookie. We could spend our mornings writing and our afternoons playing tennis or fishing, and our evenings eating in Havana or on the Pilar or right here, at our own scrofulous table.”

  “Scrofulous, Gellhorn-style.”

  “Our magnificent, with overtones of delightful, table.”

  “And a pinch of silly.”

  “Maybe without the silly. Scrofulous, Hemingstein-style: magnificent with overtones of delightful, but no silly.”

  “You and I and your family,” I said matter-of-factly. It didn’t bother me, really, but I thought he shouldn’t pretend.

  “You and me and the boys, when the boys are on vacation from school.”

  “You and me here, at Finca Vigía?”

  “Or wherever else you’d make me move my typewriter,” he said.

  “And your scale.”

  “And my scale.”

  “We’d have to stay here, Bug, on account of your daily weights on the wall. We could take the scale anywhere, but if we left here we’d have to leave behind the wall.”

  “You and me here at Finca Vigía. Mr. and Mrs. Heminghorn.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Gellingway.”

  He laughed and he said, “I’m forewarned, aren’t I? I’ll be known as Mr. Bug Bongie Stooge Snorter Gellingway!”

  He pulled me to him, and we snuggled the way I liked to snuggle, just together, just close.

  “I’ll make it right with Pauline when she’s back from Europe,” he said. “Mouse and Gigi will be at camp, so I can make it right with her and then pick up Mouse and Gigi at camp and take them out to Wyoming, to the L Bar T, and I can make it right with them there. Bumby is going out west with Hadley and Paul. I could have him meet me there too.”

  “You’re sure, Bug?”

  “I’m sure, Mookie. Aren’t you?”

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JULY 1939

  Matie arrived at ten thirty the next morning, Ernest’s birthday, for a two-week visit. When he finished writing for the day, he drove my mother all around the island, showing it off to her and showing her off to his friends. We had a birthday dinner in Havana, with most of the talking done by Ernest and Matie. He loved my mother even then, loved her more than me, I sometimes thought—and with good reason, as she was far more lovable. But much of what they talked about was me: what I’d been like as a girl, and how I took that with me everywhere.

  “That’s Matie’s fault,” I said. “She’s the one who dragged me to suffragette marches in my formative years.”

  “Seven thousand women,” Matie said proudly, wading into the long-form version of the suffrage protest at the Democratic Convention in St. Louis, in June of 1916. Woodrow Wilson was standing for reelection, and he was progressive except, as so often is the case, when it came to women’s rights. Matie, the president of the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League, organized a protest, placing and paying for ads calling for participation. “Well, we knew how to organize by then,” she said. “We’d managed two years earlier to get fourteen thousand names on a petition to put suffrage on the Missouri ballot. But the South Side brewery wards were afraid women would vote for prohibition, so they voted against suffrage and for the drink. We lost three to one. But three to one, that’s halfway there.”

  “Matie,” I said, “I’m sure Ernest—”

  “Hush, Daughter,” Ernest said. “You mother is telling a story.”

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said.

  “A year later,” Matie continued, “St. Louis got the 1916 Democratic Convention, with the president in attendance—the gift we needed. We lined all of Locust Street from the Democratic Party headquarters in the Hotel Jefferson to the convention in the old Coliseum, the route every delegate had to walk to get from his bed to cast his vote. Seven thousand women from all over the country stood silently in proper white dresses, wearing yellow ‘votes for women’ sashes and holding yellow parasols in a ‘Golden Lane for Suffrage’—a walkless, talkless protest to make the point that we had no voice.”

  “And you were holding a parasol, Daughter?” Ernest asked me.

  Matie answered, “At the Art Museum at Nineteenth and Locust, we made a tableau, one woman representing each of the forty-eight states and the territories, with each woman dressed in white, gray, or black to represent whether the state had granted women the vote, or partial suffrage, or, like Missouri, obstinately refused to budge.”

  I said, “The ones in black had nifty chains on their hands, to make the point so subtly.”

  Matie said, “We had a Miss Liberty wearing a crown and holding a torch high for the whole time the delegates to the convention walked past us. And down in the front, two little eight-year-old girls . . .” Matie smiled at me then, as she always did when she told this story.

  I said, “I represented the future of women voters—without a parasol, much to my eight-year-old disappointment.” And I laughed, and Ernest did too.

  “A scrofulo
us representative of the future of women voters,” he said.

  “Scrofulous, Gellhorn-style,” I said.

  “With a pinch of silly,” he said.

  “With a big dollop of silly!” Matie said.

  “The most unlikely bit of that story, Edna,” Ernest said, “is that our Marty could stand still for any amount of time, much less silently.”

  He and Matie both tumbled into laughter. I liked to see them laughing together. I took it as a sign that Matie was all right with Ernest and me. She might not approve of us living together at the Finca Vigía, but Ernest kept his address at the Ambos Mundos; he kept the veneer of propriety that gave Matie comfort.

  “What was that other girl’s name, Marty?” she asked.

  “Margaret? Maude? Her last name started with a T, I think.”

  Matie said, “Well, little Miss T. stood quietly anyway.”

  Early the next morning, Matie and I went for a walk in the gardens.

  “We might pick some flowers for a vase on the dining room table,” I suggested.

  “They’re to be seen, not owned, like every beautiful thing in this world,” Matie said, just as she used to back in Creve Coeur Park when I was a child. “You’re such a beautiful girl, sweetheart,” she said as we walked along, smelling the flowers but leaving them be. “You could have a nice, handsome young man all to yourself.”

  I leaned over to smell a flower, wanting suddenly to snap its stem, to snap a dozen stems and put them in a vase on my desk, to keep all to myself.

  “He has children, Martha,” she said. “Not just a wife and an ex-wife, but children.”

  “I love his children, and I love that he doesn’t need to have children with me.”

  “This didn’t end well before, Martha.” With Bertrand de Jouvenel in Paris, she meant. “This has never ended well.”