Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Not enough, Scrooby?” His entire earnings for the prior year had been $6,000, which just paid Pauline’s $500 per month if you didn’t back out taxes first.

  He said, “My friends on the coast tell me they can get us more, Mart.”

  “You might lose the deal altogether, though. Aren’t you afraid of that?”

  “We can always take the offer,” he said. “They’ve already shown us they want it badly enough to pay a hundred thousand dollars, and we haven’t yet admitted that we want the money badly enough to sell for that.”

  “But, Bug, people change their minds. People get their backs up and when they decide ‘fuck you,’ you can’t always lure them back to the table, and we don’t even need money for anything but books.”

  “And places like this.”

  “Don’t be silly, Bongie; this place isn’t costing us a cent.”

  “We need a new icebox in Cuba,” Ernest said. “I’d like new binoculars and a sleeping bag. And there’s the Finca Vigía, and food and booze.”

  “The booze bill, that is a big one,” I agreed, managing a laugh even though I felt like hell from the damned flu. “But between the book and a hundred thousand dollars for the movie, we’d have enough for a helluv an icebox and the rent and the rest of it even if neither of us ever did another journo piece again in our lives.”

  The book wasn’t even published yet, but the Book-of-the-Month Club had decided to double its first printing to two hundred thousand copies. Scribner, too, was already going back to print.

  “Not the rent, Mook.”

  “Your half of the rent.”

  “Not the rent, Mook,” he repeated, for no reason I could imagine, unless he was trying to say that after we were married I would be expected to cover all the rent for the Finca, rather than just my half.

  “All joking aside, Bug, with a hundred thousand dollars, you could write novels for the rest of your life and pay Pauline and never have to worry about any damned thing you want in this whole world.”

  “Except the booze,” he joked.

  “Yes, well, Bongie, but you prefer the cheap stuff, and I can go without.”

  He wrote to Friede the next morning that he had damned well better take the $100,000.

  After Max Perkins sent him thirty advance copies of the book, Ernest sent the first one to Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, inscribed “with affection and esteem,” then hired a boy to package the others and mail them to the people who might do the book the most good. When Scott wrote back admitting to envy, Ernest read the note aloud to me. And he couldn’t wait for the reviews to arrive by post then; he called a reporter friend of his and made him read the first reviews over the phone. I listened as Ernest gleefully asked, “He said that? Read it again.” Quite some time into the call, he handed the phone to me and made the poor fellow read the reviews a second time. The New York Times, using Ernest’s favorite word of praise, “true,” called it the best book Ernest Hemingway had written, and the Saturday Review of Literature deemed it one of the best novels of the decade.

  Ernest’s divorce from Pauline became final November 4. We called Matie with the news, Bug with the phone first, answering her hello with, “Hello, Mother! It’s done, finally, and I’m all set to marry your marvelous daughter, and all we need to complete the deed is your lovely presence. I’m arranging for you to fly in tomorrow morning.”

  The two spent several minutes negotiating Matie’s flight schedule, with the result that Matie would arrange her own flights to come that Wednesday, which she insisted was the soonest she could get to Sun Valley.

  Matie’s first words to me after Ernest handed over the receiver were, “Martha, do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, of course,” I said with more bravado than I felt. I meant for my response to sound to Bug like the answer to some other question: Did I have a dress to wear? Did Ernest have a proper suit?

  “I thought from our conversations while you were here in September and from your letters since then that you were going to wait,” Matie said. “I thought you would give it some time. I thought you were having second thoughts. You were having second thoughts.” She put the receiver down—the long-distance charges be damned—and returned a minute later to read to me from my own letters: my feeling trapped, my preference for engagement over marriage, my fear of what marriage with Ernest would mean. She said, “You write that you have no privacy, and that you have to do things for Ernest’s sake that you don’t want to do. Nothing matters more to you than getting this Collier’s assignment to China, that’s what you write here. And if you get it, it will be a showdown, because Ernest doesn’t want you to go.”

  “A helluva showdown”—that was what I’d written.

  I did like being engaged. Being engaged made me feel forever young. I didn’t know how I could marry, though. That was what I’d written. I’d written that I loved Ernest but I didn’t know how I could be married to him.

  All that letter writing, though, had been before the dedication in For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  I said, “Well, of course we’ll wait until you get here, Matie,” not wanting to give Ernest even a hint of what Matie was saying, or what I’d written her.

  Ernest, after we’d hung up, said, “We can do it twice. We can quietly marry this afternoon, and when your mother arrives, we’ll pretend we haven’t already done it, and we’ll do it again.”

  “Bug! We can’t do that!”

  “I’ll get Cooper to put on a dog collar and do the honors the second time.”

  “Really, Bongie.”

  “Your mother might have been here already.”

  “Don’t be silly. It isn’t like we’ve been able to marry for more than a minute.”

  “She might have come and waited.”

  “She came and waited in Cuba.”

  He groused about that, but he agreed, finally, to sit tight until Matie arrived. He did leave me feeling, though, that I was making him wait until New Year’s Day to tear off the Christmas wrap.

  Matie took her time getting to Sun Valley, but wasted no time when she got to the lodge. She sat us both down in our suite with its view of the snowcapped mountains, and she laid out in detail all the reasons we ought to wait.

  “It won’t look right, the two of you marrying with the ink on Ernest’s divorce barely dry,” she said.

  Ernest said, “The fact that Pauline was a selfish bitch and dragged it out forever is no reason for Marty and I to wait.”

  “Ernest, really,” Matie said with a pointed look at me, “you can’t talk like that about a woman you loved enough to marry. And there are the children to consider. The children need time to get used to this.”

  “The boys love Marty,” Ernest said. “If I don’t tie your daughter down pretty quickly, Bumby will move in on his old papa and try to steal her away from me!”

  “Really, Ernest, be serious,” Matie insisted.

  “I am being serious. You should see how he moons around Marty! The more she swears, the deeper he falls.”

  “There’s the drinking,” Matie said. “There’s the arguments and the crashing cars and the storming out on one another. The both of you. Your tempers.”

  Ernest crossed his arms over his chest, his face losing the glow of good-willed tolerance.

  “Martha will never be a decent wife, Ernest,” she said.

  “Mother!” I protested.

  “But you won’t, Martha. You don’t even want to be. You’d rather go off to the Burma Road than get married.”

  “And I’m smart enough to know not to put her to that choice,” Ernest said, trying to be light about it, but still with his arms crossed.

  “He’s coming to China with me, Matie,” I said. I’d gotten the Collier’s assignment after all, and Ernest had finally given up on trying to talk me out of it and instead arranged to do some pieces for PM magazine on China so he could get a visa too.

  Matie said to Ernest, “You haven’t been a bachelor in twenty years, and it t
errifies you.”

  “Matie!” I slid one hand across Bug’s folded arms and took his hand in mine lest he take a swing at my mother, even though I didn’t actually think he would.

  “Neither of you has thought this through far enough even to know whether the law here will recognize Ernest’s divorce from Pauline.” Matie’s voice was calm and matter-of-fact. Not “Ernest’s divorce,” but “Ernest’s divorce from Pauline,” as if to suggest to us both that Pauline was the real wife, or perhaps that this wasn’t the first time he’d left a wife, and perhaps it wouldn’t be the last.

  “In Idaho?” Ernest said.

  “Not every state recognizes the legitimacy of a divorce granted in another state. It will do you no good to try to marry in a state where you think you’re divorced but the state disagrees. Think of how that would look in the headlines.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Ernest demanded. He stood, suddenly as angry as I’d ever seen him, at least when he was sober. “This is an ambush?” He looked to me now. “You’ve dragged in your mother to suggest maybe we can’t even do this, is that it?”

  “Ernest, be reasonable,” Matie said.

  Ernest stormed out of the suite, slamming the door.

  “Matie, he dedicated the book to me,” I said quietly, lest he might be standing on the other side of the door, listening.

  “That isn’t a reason to marry him, Martha.”

  “I can’t not marry him now, Matie,” I said, beginning to cry. “He dedicates the book to a woman who stands him up at the altar? Think how humiliating that would be for him.”

  “Just put it off, Martha. Just give it time.”

  “How can I do that, Matie? You’ve seen how he is. I could hardly make him wait for you to arrive. He’s no good at waiting when he wants a thing. He’s no good at getting less than exactly what he wants exactly when he wants it.”

  “But, Martha—”

  “I do love him, Matie. I do love him. And he does love me.”

  “That doesn’t mean you should marry him.”

  “You’d rather I live in sin?”

  “I would.”

  “Mother!”

  We both turned to a sound beyond the door, but it was just the maids passing and disappearing.

  “He’s going to go to China with me, Matie,” I said in a lower voice. “How many men in this whole world would set aside their own ambitions even for a minute to let me follow mine?”

  Matie said, “You can live in sin in China as easily as you can in Cuba.”

  “Mother.”

  “Maybe the divorce isn’t effective in Idaho. You might buy some time just by making sure of that, at least.”

  Ernest left me a note that night, charging me with ratting on our plans. He’d conceded to everything I wanted: the quiet wedding with no church anywhere in sight, just a justice of the peace. No press but Robert Capa, whom I adored and who adored me and would never let anyone run trash about us with his photos. The trip to goddamned China when he’d like to go home and start a new book. He was giving me everything I wanted because the only thing he wanted was for me to be happy, and what I was giving him in return was a good, sound busted heart.

  The apology was all on me this time. I found him in the bar, and I told him Matie was just being a silly Mother-Bongie worrier, and of course I had no intention of ratting on our very finely made plans. I was sure the laws of Idaho wouldn’t get in our way, but we could sort that out the next day. I had a drink with him, and another, and he told me I’d better keep loving him, as he’d already bought me a Winchester double-barrel shotgun for my thirty-second birthday, just two days away.

  “What would I do with a double-barrel shotgun bought for a gal who decided she didn’t love me anymore?” he said, and I saw the darkness and the hurt awful in his eyes.

  “Bug, I do love you,” I said. “I do love you, and I understand you, and you understand me, and we deserve each other, the good and the bad.”

  I kissed him, there in the bar, trying to make a chip in the darkness.

  “If we can’t find a justice of the peace to marry us in Idaho, we’ll just go to some goddamned other state,” he said.

  “Of course we will, Bongie,” I said.

  And when he ordered another drink, I put my hand high on his thigh and I caressed him, and I told the bartender not to bother with the drink, that I had other plans for him. I said it with just a hint of sexy, so that Bug would feel the pride of having a woman he thought was more beautiful than she actually was declaiming publicly that she wanted him in her bed. Just a very small bit of sexy so that anyone who might hear would still imagine me a good woman rather than a slut.

  “Well, all right, then,” he said. “All right.”

  We climbed in bed back in our suite and we made love, and it wasn’t any better for me than it ever was, but I let him think it was like I always did, and he held me afterward like I liked him to. This would be enough, I thought. There never would be any more for me than there ever had been with Ernest or any other man, but that was my own difficulty, that didn’t have anything to do with love. And after he was asleep, I climbed from our bed and went into the sitting room where Matie had tried to talk us out of marrying. I opened the curtains to the moonlight on the mountains, and as I watched the stars make their slow, steady progress through the black of the sky, I let the tears come.

  The Trail Creek Cabin, Sun Valley, Idaho

  NOVEMBER 1940

  Robert Capa arrived in Sun Valley the day after Ernest threw me a birthday party at which I’d somehow managed to drink the least of anyone and yet suffer the most. He came to shoot a picture biography of Ernest for Life magazine. He stayed for our prewedding party at the Trail Creek Cabin, a little log cabin where we had a simple gathering with dinner by candlelight and dancing. It was just Matie and a very few friends, and Capa standing on a barstool for a good angle on Ernest, who looked handsome and happy in a jacket and tie. Spent flashbulbs popped off the camera like shells from the big guns in Spain. We both loved Capa, so it was okay, really, it was.

  We were married on November 21, a Thursday. It was a short ceremony officiated by a justice of the peace, as I’d wanted, although no one would take seriously my desire to be pronounced “writer and writer” rather than “husband and wife.” The deed was done in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railroad some seven hundred miles down the tracks, across the state line into Cheyenne, Wyoming, where Ernest’s divorce from Pauline was recognized. We celebrated with a quiet dinner—roast moose—and it was only after Ernest was asleep that night that I allowed myself to cry again. Maybe they were happy tears or maybe they were sad tears or maybe they were simply tears of relief; I no longer knew.

  We went to New York after the wedding, to arrange the details of my trip to China. We were headed back to Cuba when we heard F. Scott Fitzgerald had died of a massive heart attack, at the age of forty-four.

  “Christ,” Ernest said. “Christ.”

  Scott, only three years older than Ernest, had drunk himself to death, that was the truth of it.

  I thought Ernest might want to go to the funeral, but the news left him too depressed to want to go anywhere but home. So we returned to the Finca Vigía, where the orchids hung like ornaments from the ceiba tree, the crystal on the drinks cart sparkled the sunlight into rainbows, and the pool pump was again on the fritz.

  For my Christmas present that year, Ernest had arranged to buy my beautiful Finca Vigía outright, with $12,500 of the proceeds from For Whom the Bell Tolls.

  “Twelve thousand dollars!” I said. “But, Bug, you didn’t think it was worth even a hundred a month!”

  He said, “I wanted you to know this would be your home forever, Mrs. Hemingway.”

  We were done writing for the afternoon and I was swimming in the pool while Ernest sorted through the mail one afternoon in January—the two of us chatting at the same time about our plans for the China trip—when he opened a large brown envelope and extracted the
first issue of Life for 1941—the issue with Robert Capa’s photos of us in Idaho.

  “Here we are, Mook!” Like a kid. “Come see!”

  I swam to the pool’s edge and hauled myself out of the water, dripping my way toward him as he flipped the cover (Katharine Hepburn looking glamorously upward) and began searching for the spread with Robert Capa’s photos of us in Idaho. And there it was: a full half-page photo of us looking awfully damned happy.

  “Don’t drip on us, Bongie!” Ernest exclaimed. “You’ll look beautiful anyway, but I’ll look awfully goofy with my face made all wavy from pool water dripped on the page!”

  “You look so handsome, Bongie,” I said, and he did, both in that big photo where he was looking at me like I was the top prize he’d just won at the carnival game booth, and in the smaller photo below it, the two of us perched on the railing of our sun terrace at the lodge.

  As I registered the title of the piece—“The Hemingways in Sun Valley: The Novelist Takes a Wife”—he turned the page to a short bit on For Whom the Bell Tolls run with six terrific pages of Capa’s Spanish war photos, and then to a full page photo of Ernest showing off a pheasant he’d shot.

  “I look silly holding the bird like that,” he said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Bongie,” I said, blinking back the memory of all those dead rabbits this dead bird provoked. “It’s the hair that makes you look silly. But look how silly my hair looks in the first photo!”

  He laughed, and he kissed me, putting his hand on my hair so that it came off wet. I dried his fingers gently with my towel, and he turned the page again, to photos of Gary Cooper looking very like Robert Jordan from the novel, and a young Ingrid Bergman (who’d been a star in Sweden but had appeared in only one American film). Cooper hadn’t yet signed to play Robert Jordan, nor Bergman Maria, but the movie rights had sold for the $100,000 Bug had insisted Friede accept, along with a bonus of up to $30,000—ten cents for every copy of the novel, which was selling like frozen daiquiris in hell.