Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  We took Matie fishing later that day, and Ernest landed a 525-pound marlin. He himself had weighed 202 pounds that morning—he had to get down from that, he said, faulting my not-so-delicious prebirthday cake and the birthday dinner as he noted his weight on the wall. He’d written sixty-three thousand words of his novel. He had, as yet, no title.

  The following Monday, July 31, I banged out the last words of my journalist-in-Prague novel, which I was calling A Stricken Field. I read some of the pages to Matie with all the pride and joy and relief that comes at that moment when you’ve finished writing and no one has yet declared the thing sludge, and you haven’t just the moment before read Hemingway. I told Matie I thought I would take the thing to New York myself, and then Collier’s wanted to send me to the Soviet Union. I told Ernest the New York bit, but not the rest, not yet. He was kind enough not to point out that what I’d finished was just a draft, that it wasn’t close to New York ready, a fact I would come to realize myself after that first bit of euphoria.

  Ernest wrote his sons at camp late that August that Otto Bruce would pick them up and bring them on the train to Wyoming, where he would meet them. I didn’t know what he’d arranged to “make it right” with Pauline, and I was reluctant to ask.

  He and I crossed from Cuba to Key West—in a sea so rough that Ernest had to stand all night to keep the boat right—to find the Whitehead Street house empty except for the peacocks and a gaggle of their chicks. We drove on to St. Louis, where he dropped me to visit Matie and prepare for my Russia trip while he carried on to Cody, Wyoming, for a visit with his ex-wife, Hadley, and her husband, Paul.

  When Hitler marched his filthy boots into Poland September 1 and all of Europe went to war, I was still in St. Louis, having had to postpone my Russia trip on account of a bad flu. Before I would be well enough for the assignment, though, the Soviet Union—which had stood with us against the Fascists in Spain—attacked Finland, and took Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, leaving only the poor, brave Finns holding the line, and the assignment to Russia no longer on offer for me.

  Ernest and his boys were at the L Bar T when the news of war came. Pauline, newly arrived in New York from her European extravaganza, flew to join them, arriving in the rain with a sore throat and a fever. It was awful, by all accounts. It came to a head somehow when Pauline went to unpack her clothes and found the buttons of one of her new Paris suits had melted into a waxy mess—a discovery that left her bawling dreadfully while poor Mouse tried to comfort her.

  Ernest had Otto Bruce take Mouse and Gigi and their mother to her parents’ home in Piggott, Arkansas, and he called me.

  “Well, it’s done,” he said.

  “The war,” I said, afraid to take any other meaning before it was offered.

  He said, “Yes. And the other too.”

  The Sun Valley Lodge, Sun Valley, Idaho

  SEPTEMBER 1939

  With copies of A Stricken Field in Matie’s hands and in the mail to Teachie for safekeeping (both sworn not to show it to a soul), I flew to Billings, Montana. Ernest picked me up in a convertible overloaded with guns and fishing rods and sleeping bags, and we set off together the five hundred miles over unpaved roads beyond Craters of the Moon National Monument, in a darkness so complete that anyone with any sense would have turned back, headed for the Sun Valley Lodge. The new mountain resort near the whopping metropolis of Ketchum, Idaho, improbably offered fine dining and dancing to big-band music, along with hunting and fishing, tennis and horses in the summer, skiing in the winter, two gorgeous circular swimming pools from which steam poured upward when it was chilly, and none of the crowds to go with such a swanky resort as yet.

  We settled into a two-room corner suite with fireplaces and mountain views—room 206—and into Ernest’s life. We wrote in the mornings, and hunted duck and pheasant or fished in the winding creeks when the work was done. We took horses up into the mountains, along with sandwiches and a bottle of wine. We had dinners with Fred Spiegel, who’d driven ambulances with Ernest in Italy and whose family owned a catalog business out of Chicago that had been terrifically successful despite the Depression. Fred’s wife was swell, and so was Tillie Arnold, the lodge photographer’s wife. I was glad to have women friends, glad Sun Valley was that kind of place, where little notice was paid to differences in social standing that might well have separated us in Chicago or St. Louis.

  When my editor at Collier’s called to see if I might go to Finland, I wasn’t sure. I did want to cover the poor brave Finns holding the line against Russia; I did want to understand how the good Russians I’d known in Spain could be part of something so brutal. And it would have been silly to turn down the money, especially with Ernest having to enlist Pauline’s own family to try to get her to be sensible about the financial end of their split. Ernest had been more than generous with Hadley, giving her all the royalties from A Farewell to Arms and Bumby all the support he would ever need, but Hadley had had nothing, while Pauline could make King Tut look like a pauper if only she would be reasonable. The thing about leaving Ernest for Finland, though, was that he did so poorly when left on his own.

  As we lay in bed, looking out the window to the moonlit mountains, which made me think of the mountains where I crossed the border into Spain, I said, “The Russians and the Finns toe to toe at the border, Bug,” trying to tempt him into getting NANA to send him to Finland too.

  He twirled a lock of my hair, still damp from an evening swim. “You don’t much care who is fighting as long as there is someone at it, do you, Mook?”

  “The same could be said of you.”

  “But I like my fighters contained in a boxing ring.”

  “You don’t, though. You’re just like me, Bug. You could come too. We could go to Finland together.”

  “I have the novel to finish.”

  Outside, the moon was tucking itself in behind the mountains. Good night, moon.

  “Is this something you really want to do, Mookie?” he asked. “If you really think so, you go and I’ll stay, and I’ll join you if I can, and if not we’ll meet back home.”

  “Back home at the Finca Vigía.”

  “Back home at the Finca Vigía. With this little Collier’s egg laid in your nest, you’ll be able to settle in to write stories without a worry. You won’t have to do the journalism anymore.”

  “But I love the journalism.”

  “You won’t have to leave me if you don’t want to. And if you do, I’ll wait quietly at home, like a good wifey-wife.”

  I looked to a sky thick with stars over sharp mountain peaks, trying to gauge whether he meant it or was just being as reasonable as I’d had to be for the whole of our relationship.

  “I hate to leave this paradise, Bug,” I said.

  “It’s an awfully fine place, isn’t it, Mookie? We might have our wedding here.”

  “After the divorce is final.”

  “In the spring. It will be done in the spring, and we’ll have a fine, big wedding, and when Collier’s asks you to run off and abandon me, you’ll have the excuse of being married.”

  “I’ll say my husband and I work together.”

  He laughed and he said, “Yes, I believe you will.”

  By the time my travel papers came through, though, his tone had changed. “What old Indian likes to lose his squaw with a hard winter coming?” Smiling as if he were joking but with a hangdog look in his eyes.

  Tillie Arnold thought it foolish for me to leave. “What if Ernie changes his mind, Mart?” Ernie, they liked to call him at the Sun Valley Lodge, which reminded me of Herb Matthews in Spain, and that boy Raven at the hospital in Madrid.

  I said, “Then I’ll have been glad to know he’s that fickle before it’s too late.”

  Her question did give me pause, though. I thought to tell her about the money, that we needed the money, but Ernest would have hated that.

  “I can’t possibly pass up the opportunity, Tillie,” I said. “Anyway, it’s in my blood, and I have t
o do it. But I know I have you to tend to Ernest for me while I’m away”—words I casually worked into a conversation with another friend too, making light of it but leaving no doubt that I was relying on them to keep him busy enough that he wouldn’t look for anyone new. And as we were saying our goodbyes before Ernest took me to the airport, I hit the point one final time. “You two keep an eye on this clown for me, will you?” I said. “Remind him to bathe and shave every now and then.”

  “Never you mind, Mook,” Ernest said. “I’ll be a very good boy while you’re off covering the war.” And he was, I suppose, although even before I set off out of Hoboken on a Dutch ship, he’d rechristened our rooms “Hemingstein’s Mixed Vicing and Dicing Establishment” and reverted to poker and craps. He told everyone who would listen that he was “stinko deadly lonely,” but he kept writing. When Ernest was writing, nothing got in his way.

  For my part, I mingled with anxious passengers heading home to Europe—forty-five on a ship built for over five hundred—all of us eating boiled cardboard and sleeping on pygmy beds with mattresses of nails. We kept queer hours. Who could sleep on a ship that routinely passed by dead bodies floating about in their life vests? (Life vests inappropriately named, I thought, but I didn’t dare say it aloud.) Who could sleep while negotiating seas thick with the new German magnetic mines, the ship’s radio forever rattling with the news of sinkings even in the neutral zone? There was no way to claim one’s neutrality to balloon-sized mines floating in the choppy water. There was no way even to see them in the fog.

  Somehow, I arrived in Antwerp, and flew out the next morning—November 29—to Stockholm, and then on to Helsinki and a hotel room with a view of the blackout paper securely taped over window glass. I cabled Ernest and Matie both that I’d arrived safely. The next morning at precisely 9:15, before I’d even managed breakfast, the warning sirens sounded the approach of Russian planes.

  Helsinki, Finland

  NOVEMBER 1939

  The Russians bombed the Helsinki airport that first morning, but the planes over the city itself dropped only leaflets saying, improbably, “You know we have bread. Why do you starve?” The clouds settled in then, and the Finns went about their business as if the cement sky could protect them from a Russian air base only fifteen stinking miles away.

  I was taking a late lunch when the planes came again, unseen on account of the clouds until they dived and dumped their bombs. I’d never felt that kind of explosion before, not even in Spain. I’d never seen that kind of smoke rolling right down the street.

  People yelled, “Gas!” and of course I’d left my gas mask back in New York. I was done for. I pulled the little passport picture of Ernest from my purse to say, “Goodbye, Bongie.” I wished I had a photo of Matie too. I felt like I’d always worried I would end up feeling with Bug—with my guts ripped out and tossed into the street. It was the damned Russians doing the stomping, though, and in stomping on my guts, they would stomp Bug’s too.

  But no one was coughing the poison-killing-you cough. The whole damned attack was all over in a minute, the planes gone and no one dying from the poison gas, which wasn’t gas at all but only rubble dust from the bombs.

  I took my bar of soap from my pack, and I washed the war from my skin, and I dried the soap and put it back in my pack, feeling as alive as anything. God, I did love covering war when it wasn’t killing me. I could write a thousand words in five minutes and I could make it jell, I could make every word of it something to pay attention to.

  I set off through glass-strewn streets with two Italian journalists, one of whom looked very like Randolfo Pacciardi, but both of whom were Fascists my old back-seat friend would have despised. There were so few journalists in Finland that I had to take the company I could get. We found big apartment buildings burning like the fires of hell, and the Finns marvelous about it, not crying or running but rather leaning their backs into dousing fires and digging out.

  The few foreigners remaining in Finland took to panicking and shoving off any way they could. There were no planes and the Russian fleet was blocking passage by ship, but they left Helsinki for safer ground. A friend who wrote for the British papers banged on my door at two a.m. one morning, saying, “There will be gas in the next few hours, love. Best skedaddle with me now.” I’d already arranged to go out to the countryside at seven thirty with my Italian pals, though, and that was soon enough for an eight thirty bombing; I told him a girl needed her beauty sleep, and I didn’t wake again until eight fifteen—at which point I did hurry like hell. I was the only one left in the hotel except the good concierge, who of course wouldn’t leave until the last guest had. My Italians, who’d been waiting for my call to wake them, fetched me for a walk in the countryside in the snow. There was no gas that morning either, it turned out, despite all the scurrying about to get out of its way.

  I wrote Ernest that I loved him like a mad hatter, and that the book was the thing, that he was me and his book was my book and nothing mattered more, and he was to keep writing and I would do my business here, and I would get back as soon as I could. I suggested he open the Cuba house as a Christmas present to me, and I would come wallow in the sun and be glad to be home. I’d be there by the end of the year, I promised, and if I wasn’t, he could abandon me for some more loyal love.

  Ernest wrote Max Perkins that I was getting shot in Finland so he could finish his book. He wrote the Spiegels after they left Sun Valley that he couldn’t eat or sleep for worrying about me. And he left Sun Valley himself for the holidays in Key West, ignoring Pauline’s warning that he wouldn’t be welcome even for Christmas with his sons.

  I took the letter President Roosevelt had given me instructing everyone to step aside and let me go wherever I wanted to go, and I set off for the front. A chauffeur in military garb drove me out over icy roads and mined bridges, through unending forests and always with the flashes of guns like fireworks in the predawn dark. It was the first big night operation of the war, and I had the orchestra section to myself, serenaded by Finnish pilots hardly out of their school uniforms, and in the company of captured Russians too. That was something. If I had to be in a bombing zone, at least I was getting a story no one else would have—a war in the arctic, where the weather was your friend or your enemy. Three million Finns defending their homeland might have some tiny chance against 180 million Russians fighting only for two lousy strategic positions, if only the weather and some awfully good luck might turn up for the Finns.

  Well before Christmas, I was back in Helsinki with the goods to write three terrific pieces—and no way to get home.

  Ernest arrived in Key West to find that Pauline had sent away the help and set off for New York, leaving the boys in the charge of a nanny they abhorred. Their mother had told them to wait for their father to fetch them for Christmas in Cuba but hadn’t bothered to share the plan with Bug. He stayed long enough to pack up his belongings, everything but his French racing bicycle in the basement—one of the his-and-hers bicycles he and Pauline had ridden on the dirt roads of the French Camargue for their honeymoon, now rusting beside its mate, the wheels melting into the stone floor. He stored everything in the basement of Sloppy Joe’s, and by Christmas Eve, he and Bumby, Mouse, and Gigi had loaded the Buick onto the ferry to Havana.

  I was eating in a Helsinki restaurant with only a paperback propped up against my water glass for company when an American military attaché I knew asked to join me.

  “Anyone with any sense is leaving this place, you know that, right?” he said.

  “And yet here you are having this dreadful fish. It is fish, isn’t it?” I poked at the food, longing to be on the Pilar again, swimming in my silly goggles while Ernest fished. You know when you leave to cover war that just because you get there doesn’t mean you’ll get home, but you can’t think about that or you’ll never go. You go, and you pretend bravery even to yourself, insisting on going back to sleep when you ought to leave for the countryside in case of gas, because if there’s a ris
k of gas, what the hell are you doing there? Yet you have to be; it’s what keeps you alive. It’s hard enough for a man in this business, when the whole world expects you can cover a war. A woman has to fend off the doubts of the whole world along with her own certainty that she is in so far over her head that her lungs are filling. A woman who wants to be taken seriously has no choice but to brave the possibility of gas.

  “So what keeps you here?” I asked.

  “Me?” he said. “Oh no, I’m not staying. I’m evacuating on a flight to Sweden.”

  “There’s a flight to Sweden?”

  “Sure there is. Tonight. You want to come? I’d have asked, but I didn’t think—”

  “Christ, yes!” I answered before he could say anything about maybe there not being a seat for me. “Don’t you move. Don’t go away.”

  I abandoned my plate and rushed out of the restaurant, returning in minutes with my pajamas and a bottle of whiskey.

  He laughed and he said, “You’ve been through an evacuation before, I guess.”

  I said, “I am a pro.”

  I spent Christmas in Sweden, writing my damned heart out while I waited for a ship to Lisbon, Portugal, where I could catch the Pan Am Clipper to Cuba with my tush intact, my pride in full bloom, and my promise to be home for the new year kept. I was still in Sweden when I got the news that Gustav Regler, our German novelist friend from Madrid who’d taken a bullet in his back while trying to stop the Fascists in Spain, was being held as an enemy alien in France.

  The trip to Paris was no picnic, I can tell you that. I arrived feeling like a used tissue, grimy and abandoned. But the city, all dusty white with a powdered-sugar covering of snow, was reviving.

  I harangued everyone I could collar to free Gustav Regler. I waved my letter from the president around as if it were the French constitution and I the duly elected president. All those administratoramuses did listen on account of the letter but with pasty expressions and flaccid promises to “look into it”—as if “it” were a pair of eyeglasses they might put on their ugly noses to see the thing reasonably. They could not have cared less about a German communist, even an anti-Nazi one who’d nearly died trying to save Spain.