Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  We did buckle down to write in a way we hadn’t done since Ernest had finished For Whom the Bell Tolls. I started a simple, unambitious novel that had nothing to commend itself except that it was what I could write. Ernest began some stories, which he set aside to write an introduction to an anthology titled Men at War. And we entertained more visitors than ever. Howard and Slim Hawks came to talk about the For Whom the Bell Tolls film, and Ginny arrived in her gold jewelry and her spiked heels and her swanky Boston accent that were all even more out of place in Cuba than they had been in Madrid, and more welcome too.

  The moment we opened the Finca door to Ginny, she demanded to know what I might be doing about the war.

  “Really, you do mean to go cover it now that we’re in it,” she repeated again to both Ernest and me over drinks in our living room.

  “They’re refusing to accredit women,” I answered before it could grow awkward with Ernest.

  “Never mind that we were responsible for every good bit of work to come out of Spain,” she said, touching my arm and laughing. And then, with an apologetic glance at Ernest, she said, “The three of us, I mean.”

  Ernest poured himself another from the drinks cart, and freshened Ginny’s and mine, and started in on a reminiscence of one of the morning breakfasts Sidney Franklin used to make.

  “Sure, that was great fun,” Ginny said, “but the question is what are we all going to do now?”

  I said, “It’s complicated.”

  “Of course it is, I know it is, that’s why I’m here,” Ginny said. “Well, of course I came to see you happily married and all that. You know I love you both and wish you the best.”

  “Even if you did write that book about us,” Ernest said, referring to Ginny’s Looking for Trouble about all the correspondents together in Spain.

  “I was more than fair to you in the book, Hem,” Ginny said.

  She’d stayed in Europe since Spain, for the most part, covering the war. She was a roving correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, moving about Europe to see the lights go out one by one. She’d been in Berlin when Germany marched into Poland. And what I’d heard about Paris was true: she’d arrived when the Germans were just seventeen miles outside the city and everyone else was fleeing toward the South of France, which was still free at the time. But now that we were in the war, the rules for which US citizens could go where had changed, and for all her gallivanting around on behalf of British newspapers, Ginny was still an American.

  “I’m sure you’re already working your influence with the Roosevelts to get a spot for yourself, Marty,” she said. “I thought I would see if you couldn’t get me a dance card too.”

  With a glance at Ernest, I said, “Well, it’s complicated in a lot of ways.”

  “You got to China, though. Rumor has it you not only got there, but you got everywhere you wanted to go, that the president gave you a letter demanding everyone in the whole world had to take you wherever you wanted to go and tell you whatever you wanted to know.”

  Ernest said, “Yes, and the damn thing prohibited anyone from giving her the China Rot too, and we see how that went.”

  He told her all about my contracting that god-awful fungus, and the gloves and the ointment. He poured himself another drink, and refreshed Ginny’s and mine, and he made a lewd joke about how we’d had to have sex with my hands far enough from him to save him from the stench.

  Ginny mercifully skated past the joke as if he hadn’t said it.

  “But really, Marty,” she said, “when did you talk to Mrs. Roosevelt? Or did you talk to the president himself? How long do you suppose it will be until your accreditation comes through?”

  I could hear in her voice the desperation I felt. I thought of Josie Herbst, who’d gone to Spain to escape a failed marriage, but I was only just married, and Ernest was faithful to me when he might not be, and that meant something, for him to be loyal. It wasn’t all on Bug either, this not going to war. There was a part of me that was reluctant to open myself up again to the possibility of snake wine and China Rot.

  “Ginny,” Ernest said, “are you losing your touch? It hasn’t been three years since you could bat those dark lashes of yours at some poor unsuspecting minister of propaganda and end up in an intimate chat with Il Duce himself.”

  “Sure I can still do that, Hem, but I have to get close enough for them to see my lashes. It’s fine for you; I’m sure you’re already packing your bag for the next ship to Africa. But Marty and I have to get close enough for someone to see us flirt.”

  Ginny and I were alone the next day when she again brought up the subject.

  “Collier’s has contacted me about doing something for them, sure,” I admitted.

  “You have to start now if you want to get in this thing,” Ginny said. “The US military has its hands in, and they’re making it clear they think war is no place for a woman.”

  “That’s the thing, though. No one will let us anywhere near the front, Ginny, and I haven’t got any sideshow where I might go unnoticed as a woman, and it’s too late for me to change my sex, however much I might like to have done it when I could.”

  Ginny didn’t laugh. “But if we don’t step in now,” she insisted, “there will be no place for us to step into, Marty. You know the Roosevelts. You’re the best one to raise it.”

  I thought of Ernest and me in China, how good he was even when it was unbearable, especially when it was unbearable. If I just kept working on him, now that we were in the war, he would want to go. But I couldn’t explain that to Ginny any more than I could have explained about that stupid argument we’d had the night before she arrived, one that erupted out of nowhere but ended with him blaming me for having missed the Sinclair Lewis speech again, and me saying I was so sick of hearing about that damned speech, and him slapping me. It wasn’t much of a slap, but it made me so mad that I slapped him back, except he backed up and I missed, and the whole thing was so funny that we’d ended up laughing about it together, thankful to be laughing.

  “When anything happens and Ernest and I want to go very badly, then I guess maybe I can arrange it,” I said. “But what sense is there in fretting about it in advance? It’s going to be a nice long war, and they’re eventually going to want to make it popular, and they’ll sure as hell need us then.” Which was what Ernest had taken to saying to me.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JANUARY 1942

  I spent the rest of that winter writing dreadful poop and overseeing a drunken gardener, a crazy maid, and a cook who liked to announce the moment our guests were seated for lunch that there would be no meal today. Ernest repeatedly assured me that a writer needed a house in which to write and this was just the cost of having it. He spent the time writing slightly better poop, and badgering everyone involved in his war anthology to get it right, and worrying not one moment about the garden or the house or the meals except to feed the cats—so many now that when he brought the salmon out to feed them, they swarmed like snakes in a pit. And all the while the Japanese dominoed down the Far East, encircling Hong Kong, bombing the Philippines, taking Thailand, the Dutch East Indies, Burma. I wanted nothing more than to throw two clean pairs of panties, a few tins of meat, and a bar of soap in a pack and head off to war.

  The threat of Nazi submarines in the Gulf of Mexico also grew—Operation Drumbeat, their target the bauxite coming from the British and Dutch Guianas in South America, although we didn’t yet know that. No bauxite, no aluminum. No aluminum, no airplanes. No airplanes, no way to defend ourselves.

  By May so many ships were at the bottom of the Caribbean that shipping along the north coast of Cuba was halted until convoys could be established. Late in June the Navy called for patriotic yachtsmen and small-boat owners like Ernest to chip in their boats and their crews to the effort to root out the submarines. Ernest began working with the first secretary of the American embassy to try to get the Pilar involved. At the same time, he enlisted the oddest
collection of bartenders, pelota players, wharf rats, and priests to his “Crook Factory”—furtive-looking strangers forever in our garden, and sometimes moving into the house—to collect intelligence on foreigners who might be working with the Nazis in Cuba. The Crook Factory’s most enthusiastic activity in the service of the war effort seemed to me to be drinking our booze, but the new US ambassador to the island included Ernest’s spy reports verbatim in his own to the State Department, or so Ernest said. And I did like the impromptu dinners with the gang from the embassy.

  The boys arrived on the Clipper, and we celebrated Patrick’s fourteenth birthday with a jolly little party in which Ernest tried to pretend he wouldn’t prefer all his sons to stop aging long enough for this war to be over. Bumby, visiting for ten days between his spring and summer terms at Dartmouth, had joined the Marine Corps Reserve, which would allow him to finish college if he could do it in two and a half years, after which he would train as an officer.

  With the boys and the Crook Factory chaos and the cats all in our little six-room house, everyone coming and going at all hours and always this hokey secrecy and everyone refusing to bathe for fear of washing off their manliness, I was left with no quiet to write, and Ernest too was left far less well off than he imagined. We had frightful rows about absolutely everything. About money. About sex. About whether we were entirely too slovenly or entirely too compulsively clean. We argued about whether we were writing and why or why not, and whether we were writing what we ought to be. I thought we should go to Europe or the Far East to cover the war rather than dying of boredom on this unchanged little island while all of Rome and the rest of the world burned. But I was selfish scum, somehow, to want that. I was such selfish scum that one night, in front of poor Gigi, Ernest screamed at me, “You dry, little cunt! I’ll be read long after the maggots have finished with you!”

  Unable to get accredited to cover the war in Europe as I was still, unfortunately, female, I pitched an idea to Collier’s to cover the U-boat war in the Caribbean—an assignment that exacerbated Ernest’s crankiness. He still hadn’t received clearance to use the Pilar to hunt German submarines. My tour was delayed by hurricane warnings, but I finally set off on a thirty-foot, single-sail potato boat with a barefoot crew and no life preservers or navigation equipment. I took with me not much more than a supply of canned beans and crackers, a Superware Sanitary Pail (yes, for that), an umbrella, writing supplies, a copy of Proust I would ultimately pitch overboard, and a heart that rose like those lovely negritos that roosted in the Havana trees.

  The first day, I was eaten alive by a swarm of red ants that had climbed aboard for the journey, and in fighting them off, I lost my umbrella to the sea. By the end of the second, I was sunburned all to hell, at which point torrential rain soaked me while a crazy sea left me queasy and hanging on for life. But I settled in, finally, moving along the islands, sometimes swimming naked among hummingbirds flitting in the palms. I saw no German submarines even when I flew on patrol, but I did visit an internment camp in Haiti where Germans worshipped Hitler as surely as if they were Nazi generals, never mind that they’d left the motherland so many years before that they could only have learned about the master race in a correspondence course. I survived three horrific days of hurricane weather before finding my way to Suriname in the Guianas, where I talked myself in and out of restricted areas, dressed for a dinner served in a gold mine in the jungle, and visited a French penal colony where poor, dead-eyed skeletons in striped pajamas cut wood until they collapsed from exhaustion or disease.

  I was doing my bit for the war with Collier’s, and Ernest was carrying out his intelligence work and making short patrols within easy reach of Havana while he waited for Navy Intelligence to clear him for longer ones. He was editing his thousand-page war anthology meant to inspire would-be soldiers, and reviewing the movie script for For Whom the Bell Tolls. Absent from each other, we wrote gushy letters and missed each other miserably, except for one or two letters written when Bug was in his cups.

  He took his sons with him as crew to investigate alleged German sympathizers resupplying submarines, sending Patrick and Gregory into a cave no one else could fit into, a suspected drop point—which I would have told him was lunatic if I’d been there. If the space was that small, how could it be used for a drop point, for heaven’s sake? But I wasn’t there, and maybe he’d figured out for himself that it wasn’t dangerous and only let his sons think it was. They were his sons, not mine, and anyway, little Gigi, at nine, beat twenty-four grown men in a shooting contest, so maybe he was better equipped than anyone for the job.

  Ernest’s crew began target practice in the Gulf Stream, using machine guns and hand grenades and satchel charges. He monitored coastal traffic, investigated floating debris, and looked for U-boats on the surface, although of course U-boats rarely surfaced when he was out, the Pilar not being outfitted for night patrols.

  I soldiered on, hampered by censorship rules that left me in the dark about everything, including the seventy-one ships sunk in the two months I toured Haiti, Puerto Rico, St. Barts, Antigua, and the rest. Without Ernest to convince me to be reasonable, I continued on to South America, where I set off in a hollowed-out log to explore the far reaches of the Saramacca River. I was stoned by villagers. I broke my wrist. I contracted dengue fever, my ankles so swollen that I assumed I had elephantiasis that was permanent.

  “Who knew China Rot would ever look so good?” I asked Bug when I was safely home again at the Finca. The cats had taken to leaving their business wherever they happened to be, but the gardener had managed despite his drinking, the cook brought me soup that tasted divine after the travel slop, and Ernest was grateful to have me home again.

  I wrote two pieces for Collier’s about my adventure. Bug wrote heartbreaking letters to Bumby about things like how to swing his arms when he tackled—he was on the Dartmouth football team—when what he really meant to say was how loved Bumby was and how much his father couldn’t bear that he would go off to war. It was a comfort to us both to climb into bed together every night and settle in to love again, and to wake in the morning and step onto Bug’s scale, and write our daily weights on the wall, side by side.

  I went to New York for a bit that October, where I had my hair cut and curled by Monsieur Jacques from Paris after many long phone consultations with Ernest about exactly how he would like it. I had dinner with the editor of the New Yorker, who was a terrible bore but an important one, and with Dorothy Parker, who was, as always, funny as hell. “I love you because your feet are so cold in my bed,” Bug wrote me, “and because you’re the bravest and most beautiful woman in the world.” It left me both wanting to rush immediately home to him and wanting to stay away longer so he would continue to write letters like that.

  I spent a few days with the Roosevelts, where I came down with such a nasty cold that they stuffed me in the Lincoln Bedroom and fed me their dishwater soup but would not bend to what I’d really come up from Cuba for, which was to persuade the president to change the rules forbidding women correspondents to cover the war. I’d have settled for him making just one little exception for me, to be honest. I wouldn’t even have to abandon Ginny, as she’d batted her lashes in the direction of someone who’d found her a position working in London for the American ambassador.

  I returned to Cuba in a bit of a temper, to learn Ernest had finally gotten clearance to change the Pilar from a fishing boat to a Q-boat. After spending all of November having her deck painted green and outfitting her, he set off with his pals for a shakedown training cruise, leaving me to evenings steeping myself in the novels of Henry James and days reading everything I could find about war. I meant to be ready when the president changed his mind.

  In the quiet of having the Finca all to myself, I had the floor repaired where the roots had pushed through it, and planted orange and lime and fig trees, and breadfruit, and I tossed everything I’d written since our honeymoon in the bin and started a new story. It wasn’t
much, just a very small thing about a trophy mistress of a rich white planter, a mulatto girl who falls in love with a teacher. I worked on it for three solid weeks, and at the end of every day I felt exhausted and full of love for the human race, and I saw then how Bug felt on the days he was writing so well, like he was on some beautiful drunk and so happy to return to the cups every morning. There was nothing that could bother me then, not the cats and not the rowdy return of the Crook Factory and Ernest’s nagging about the money I spent on the floors when he’d spent more on booze alone, never mind the cost of equipping and manning the Pilar.

  “It’s just a tiny story, perhaps forty thousand words if I’m lucky,” I said one night as I was in the bedroom and Bug in the adjoining bathroom, putting paste on his brush.

  “A tiny story can be a big story too,” he said.

  “It will be too long for a story and too short for a novel.”

  I pulled off the shift I was wearing and threw on my nightclothes, hurrying to cover myself. It was a hot, muggy night, good for sleeping naked, but I didn’t want what came with that.

  “A novel isn’t made by so many words, Mookie,” he said in his gentle voice that left me feeling a little guilty about not wanting to have sex. “A novel is made by so much story.”

  “But if it’s only forty thousand?”

  “The Sun Also Rises was only sixty-seven.”

  “That’s almost twice as long.”

  “That one of Scott’s about the bootlegger, I think that was barely fifty thousand,” he said, pulling his shirt over his head so the words were muffled.

  “The Great Gatsby? But it didn’t sell anything, Bug.”