Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Bug,” I said, “I think we’re done here.”

  “Without actually seeing the war beyond this staged bit, Mrs. Bongie? And, sure, you’ve gotten sick, but I haven’t yet, and even for you there’s still the cholera.”

  We watched for another minute, the soldiers moving so surely in their fake assault.

  “Cheer up, Mook,” Ernest said. “You’ve done your bit like a champion. You can’t be blamed if there’s no war to be seen.”

  Wong Shek, China

  APRIL 1941

  After a rainy stop in the village of Wong Shek, with the usual Chinese officers hosting the usual extravagant banquet—competitive wine drinking and toasting of soldiers, none of whom were invited to the party—we headed back the way we’d come on our toy ponies. The send-off at the Chris-Craft was as extravagant as the drunken bacchanal the night before, made all the longer by a two-hour wait for a missing soldier who was to travel with us. And the return trip was even longer and more cursed than the trip in had been, all of it for nothing more than so many sodden nights and dreary days, and a single fake attack. We consoled ourselves with the promise of our accommodations in Chungking—the private home of a Chinese diplomat we were to be given on account of my being friendly with the Roosevelts, in the city that, being the working capital of free China, must have something to say for itself.

  “A real bathroom and real beds,” I said.

  “Clean sheets. Hot food. Mosquito nets.”

  “Or, better yet, no need for mosquito nets.”

  The prospect got us through forty-three long hours on account of the rope attaching us to the motorboat getting caught in its propeller, bringing us to a dead stop, and a flood on the road to Shaokwan that necessitated us carrying on in the boat. I covered the greasy sampan bunks with Keating’s powder. We ate almost nothing, but Ernest found us a bottle of pink wine, which we drank from our collapsible cups atop the boat, watching the crew work to untangle us.

  “Bug, what’s that in the bottle?” I asked as he tipped the last bit into my cup.

  “In what bottle?”

  “In the wine bottle, Bongie. It looks like . . .” My stomach flipped up inside itself: it looked like a snakeskin.

  Ernest said, “Well, if he looks like a snake, it’s because he is a snake, but don’t worry: he’s too dead to have drunk much.” He grinned at me. “If you vomit, Mook, I’m afraid I’ll have to write a piece about it.” And while I was still too busy being revolted to say a word, he said, “I thought you’d prefer it to the bird wine. I couldn’t tell whether the cuckoo bird in that bottle was alive or dead. It’s hard to tell with bottled birds, and anyway, the snake wine is said to stop hair from thinning. I might take a bottle home for Perkins.”

  I set my collapsible cup on the boat roof beside me. He finished his own glass, then set to drinking mine.

  We watched as our crew finally untangled the rope from the propeller and the motor leapt back to life. This had been, I thought, both the longest and most interesting twelve days of my life.

  “Finally. The worst is over,” I said.

  “You go on hoping,” Ernest said.

  What followed was twenty-five more hours in the absolute filth and cigarette stench of a “first-class” train compartment to Kweilin—a place of magically rounded mountains and romantic mists and a hotel with the promising name of “The Palace,” which had fine porcelain toilets unconnected to actual plumbing, dead bedbugs smashed to the wall, and live ones everywhere else.

  “If only I had a pistol,” Ernest said.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Those bugs are too slow to be a challenge.”

  “Ah, but they’re tiny—that makes ’em tough to hit.”

  I used the last of my Keating’s powder on the bed. Ernest assured me that the floor would be the safer bet.

  We delivered a message for our plane to fetch us in Kweilin, only to find two days later that the message had made it no further than the man to whom we’d handed it. The plane that finally did come to take us to Chungking, a Douglas DC-3, was carrying Chinese cash in stacks so large and worthless that we sat on them the whole flight. The path from the airstrip to the long-awaited diplomat’s house was a long, impossibly steep stairway to a muddy collection of drab cement buildings and shapeless shacks. But then there was the house: large and lovely and welcoming.

  We opened the door and stepped into a sitting room with varnished tables and plush armchairs and sofas—and three Chinese thugs who squinted at us through a drug-eyed fog. Every bit of the place was filthy with their hair oil and their hair. The sheets and pillowcases and the pink satin bedspread were as stained as the sofas, and the fine porcelain toilets were overflowing.

  “No rubber, no tires,” Ernest said, and he laughed. What else was there to do? “What say you we see if there’s any decent booze at that bar we passed?”

  He must have found someone to speak to before we went out to the bar, because while we were drinking someone changed the linens and cleaned the bathroom. They didn’t, unfortunately, clear out the thugs, who, we concluded, were there to spy on us as surely as we were there to spy on them.

  The next morning, we met the Chinese finance minister, who insisted on keeping us company for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, often bringing along a wife whose black satin dress buttoned from collar to knee with button-sized diamonds. She had ruby and emerald buttons as well, but no sapphires, as they wouldn’t stand out against the velvet.

  We lunched with the Chinese president, Chiang Kai-shek, and the beautiful Madame Chiang, a couple everyone in America felt they knew on account of the two being Time magazine’s People of the Year a few years back. Madame Chiang came to the door to receive us without the fanfare of servants announcing us. She wore a Chinese dress and diamond earrings and no more than a hint of lipstick on a face that was cream colored and oval, and absolutely smooth. Her English was a damned sight better than my own thanks to a father who’d been educated in the United States and her own years at Wellesley, and she chain-smoked like I did, menthol cigarettes she kept in an ebony case. She translated for her husband, who honored us by receiving us without his teeth—a dubious honor if not an outright affront, it seemed to me. Still, our simple lunch turned into a three-hour interview, and we returned the next day for a tour of their private air-raid shelter and a further chat with Madame Chiang, this time in stone chairs in a sunken garden just coming into spring.

  The whole encounter left me uneasy, though. I suspected Chiang himself understood our English perfectly well, that the language barrier was a charade the two used to allow them to communicate in a language we couldn’t understand. They grilled us far too intently about what aid the Russians might be receiving from the United States. And while they called their Japanese invaders “a disease of the skin,” they called their Chinese communist allies “a disease of the heart”—by which they meant the greater threat to their personal power, which was of far more importance to them than improving the lot of the Chinese people, or even ridding their country of the Japanese.

  The worst of it, though, was that when it came to writing about them, we had to stuff down our disgust at “the Empress of China,” as Ernest dubbed Madame Chiang, and her Chinese-leader husband, and present the two tyrants as bastions of a democracy they had no interest in. It wasn’t that I wrote anything untrue but that I chose the convenient truths and discarded the rest. They were a corrupt pair, but they were allied against Hitler and the Japanese, and if I hadn’t seen on my own my patriotic duty to present them in the best possible light, my editors at Collier’s would have made sure I did.

  For the same reason, I couldn’t write at all about the one person I found to admire in China, which was the communist leader Mao Zedong’s second-in-command, Chou En-lai. We’d been brought to him by a woman in a man’s hat and trousers who approached us in the Chungking marketplace and, after we’d wandered the city long enough to slip our minders, blindfolded us and put us in a rickshaw that took us to a sm
all, whitewashed room with nothing but a table, three chairs, and Chou En-lai himself. Chou was thoughtful and eloquent, intelligent and charming. He was perhaps the only person we’d met in China who gave two whiffs and a puff for the good Chinese. But we couldn’t write about him at all, lest any good thing we might say cause a rift between the two Chinese factions, which needed to stay united to defeat the Japanese.

  I managed in Chungking to contract China Rot, which, in case you don’t know (I didn’t), is a nasty business in which the skin between your fingers oozes yellow pus and blood. It’s contagious as hell, and the treatment involves a thoroughly disgusting-smelling ointment and gloves of the type you might wear if you were welding, or stoking a coal fire, or hoping to win the Miss Ugly Contest with your hands alone.

  “I warned you not to wash,” Ernest said.

  I was so sick—with the China Rot and the dysentery and the vast abyss between what I saw and what I could report—that I couldn’t make a scheduled flight to Chengdu. Ernest made the trip for me, and returned with photos of a hundred thousand workers building a mile-long airstrip in Szechuan Province, to receive B-17 bombers it was our understanding Roosevelt never meant to send to the Chinese, who, at any rate, had no pilots who could fly them. The Chinese peasants were building the airstrip from nothing and with no machinery, using manpower alone to pull concrete rollers weighing three and a half tons.

  “Don’t count China out yet,” Ernest said, and he told me enough about it for me to add a few paragraphs to my Collier’s piece.

  We began to put together what we knew of China for the debriefing: that for the cost of two battleships, we could fund the Chinese for another year of war they might otherwise not survive, time we could use to build our own naval fleet for the inevitable dual-ocean war; that a Chinese civil war was inevitable but might be postponed through dialogue between Chiang and Chou En-lai; that if we were going to send planes to China, we ought to send pilots to fly them. Our information seemed unlikely to make any difference. America was growing increasingly isolationist in our absence, gathering for anti-war demonstrations and peace rallies, and by and large sticking foolish heads in American sand.

  I was still wearing the damned China Rot gloves when we left China, flying from Chungking to Rangoon, Burma, where I would carry on alone to tour efficient naval installations in Batavia in the Dutch East Indies and luxuriously disastrous ones in Singapore. Ernest had just poured a full measure of gin into his collapsible cup when the flight turned into a helluva flight, with the wings surely about to break off and a crash inevitable. I gripped tightly to my seat with my awkward gloves, racked with guilt that I’d nagged Ernest until he’d agreed to join me for this nightmare when he might have been back in Cuba working on a fine new book. Ernest held his collapsible cup of gin as if it were the chalice that would save us.

  When the plane, by some miracle, found smoother air, Bug smiled happily. “I didn’t lose a drop! The gin shot out of my cup and hit the roof, but I caught it on the way down.”

  I laughed and laughed. “God, no wonder I married you,” I said. “World champion gin catcher that you are.”

  I reached out to touch him, to say all the things I’d been thinking as the plane bucked.

  He said, “Don’t you dare put those diseased hands on me!”

  I looked at him, shocked, and we both laughed again, and he said, “And to think, I might have made the mistake of borrowing your soap. You did leave that thing back at that dump of a house, didn’t you?”

  “The soap?”

  “The diseased soap.”

  “Of course,” I said. And I shifted my pack away from him lest he catch a whiff of the warm honey smell of acacia, and I remembered that day in Madrid, the miracle of the branch of fresh yellow blooms in that hospital where Bug never did like to go.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JUNE 1941

  Despite it being far and away the critics’ favorite, For Whom the Bell Tolls did not receive the Pulitzer Prize. It was a rough blow, especially as the committee declined to honor any book of fiction that year. It wasn’t that another book had been judged better. It was that Ernest’s book had been judged not good enough.

  “If I’d won that thing, I’d think I was slipping,” he claimed, and he took to disparaging Max Perkins for having sold only half a million copies of the novel in six months, sure that if Max had really been supportive, it would have sold even more and, anyway, why hadn’t Max airmailed him updates, it being only eight days from New York to Hong Kong by airmail. I felt so bad for him that I didn’t even give him what for for having written to me while I was in Singapore that he had three Chinese girls in his hotel room and knew exactly what to do with them. Maybe he did and I was a fool, but I’d seen the spread between Hemingway the man and Hemingway the myth, and I knew how dark he got when left alone.

  On the way back home to Cuba, we stopped in Key West for Patrick and Gregory, on summer vacation again, and for the Pilar. Ernest sailed across, fishing on the way, while the boys and I flew ahead to a home with a leaky roof, a broken pool pump (again), and an insurmountable mound of mail in which, somewhere, there was a check for Ernest’s royalties for the half-million copies of Bell.

  I turned my attention to putting the finishing touches on the stories to be included in The Heart of Another, a ghastly, boring task of weeding out enough commas to fill that five-foot Ali Baba jar back in China, and to writing a piece for Collier’s about the Nazis in Cuba, only to have my editor respond that the piece I wrote, which was the piece he had asked me to write, wasn’t at all the piece he wanted to have. Bug talked about writing his memoirs, a chance to pay back Gertrude Stein for that nastiness about him in her damned Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, he claimed. But the idea seemed pretentious even to him, and anyway, he wasn’t done living, and he’d only ever threatened to resort to memoir when he couldn’t find the juice to write anything else.

  Nothing I could say would dig him out of the hole he insisted on continuing to dig that summer. Every cent he made went to someone else, he complained, mad about the taxes he would have to pay thanks to the great success of Bell, and intent on staying in Cuba long enough to claim nonresident status in the United States to minimize them. “When war breaks out and anyone asks whether I did my part,” he said, “I can say I paid for the whole damned business.” He fumed at Scribner, which had deducted from his royalty check the full cost of defending a spurious plagiarism suit. He obsessed about the For Whom the Bell Tolls movie. He reread and reread and reread the very few reviews that hadn’t praised the novel, careening between wanting to tell the bastards a thing or two about writing and wondering if they were right. When he was in his cups, he said he had no better book in him than Bell, and if it couldn’t win him anything—despite all his success, he’d never won a prize for his writing—he never would.

  I was both relieved and worried every time he took the Pilar out, his mood whenever he returned ruled by the size of the marlin he’d brought in. He spent the days when he wasn’t on the boat listening to my radio, torn between relief that the country was finally realizing we couldn’t just stick our heads in a bucket and worry for Bumby. The military draft at this point only applied to twenty-one to twenty-eight-year-olds, and Bumby was only seventeen, but he would be eighteen in October, and if we entered the war, who knew what might change?

  On Labor Day, we gathered around the Detrola to hear the president’s radio broadcast: “We shall do everything in our power to crush Hitler and his Nazi forces.” Three days later a German submarine fired two shots at one of our destroyers, the Greer. The torpedo missed, and the event was reported as a case of mistaken identity. I was recovered from the China trip by then and already sick again of watching the world going to hell while Ernest and I sat in Cuba getting drunk and indulging in loud, furious rages at each other.

  I said, “Maybe writing something about it will make a difference or maybe it won’t, Bug, but we damned well should
try.”

  “What happened to being done with travel? What happened to sitting in one place for five minutes and writing a decent book?”

  “I’d be happy to sit in one place for five minutes! You’re the one dying to pick up and move to Sun Valley.”

  “To see my sons!”

  “They couldn’t come to Cuba?”

  “But Christ, you love Sun Valley, Mart.”

  “But I don’t, Bug. Have you not heard a word I’ve said about it all summer? I hate that place like holy hell. I’m nothing but your wife, and I’m bored with myself there, more bored even than I am here. It’s dull as pavement and twice as heavy on my soul.”

  “You don’t even think a journalist changes anything,” he said.

  “I want what we had in the beginning, Bug. I want to be a part of what happens. Nothing happens here.”

  “Plenty happens. And you don’t really want war.”

  “I do, though, if it’s there anyway. I want explosive and loud and hard and laughing.”

  “And dead, Mart? You want dead?”

  “Yes! Yes, fucking yes. I would rather be dead from something exciting than dead from boredom, wouldn’t you? I hate this faint goodness in me that’s all I can find in Sun Valley. I would rather have China Rot miserable than Sun Valley bored.”