I went to Lincolnshire for a piece on the absurdly young boys of the British Bomber Command. Less than a quarter of them could expect to survive the war, and they knew it already; it was thick in their private jokes and their slang and the way they waited so intently for the drone of returning aircraft even when it wasn’t their turn to go. As I watched them, I thought of Bug’s piece back in Spain about the boy Raven from Pittsburg who’d lost his eyes and his lips. I thought to apply to go on a bombing run myself, but I wasn’t that brave.
When I got back to London, even before I’d finished the piece on the bomber crews, I learned that a shy, young Scot I’d befriended had not returned. I was haunted by thoughts of him as I wrote, and I cried and cried when I was done writing, and I wrote Bug a letter saying what a deep impression those boys had made on me and how impossible it would be to understand if I hadn’t met them myself.
I wrote a story that three Polish men in London told me, about secret schools that had operated in Warsaw, educators who taught one hundred thousand Jewish children in violation of the law, with no doubt that they would be shot if caught. I wrote about fourteen-year-old boys who were working in factories so that older men could fight, and Dutch refugees who now met in a London club, and doctors in a burn unit in Sussex determinedly trying to save soldiers and bombing victims from the fate of Raven from Pittsburg who’d fought in Spain. They were all terrifically compelling stories, and I was glad to write them, but, except for the bomber command, it wasn’t really war reporting. And even the bomber command piece was only like accosting a passerby on the street for five minutes, with no possibility of settling in for long enough to understand them deeply and truly. The censors probably would have stricken out the more deeply and truly anyway, but at least I would have tried.
I wrote Bug long, affectionate letters saying that everyone asked about him, and of course I agreed that he was of best use where he was now, but, really, if that changed he would come, wouldn’t he? He would understand the war better than anyone, and write it better, and without him writing it, no one would see it as clearly as it was. I even suggested he pitch a series of stories to Collier’s—never mind that that would undermine my position with the magazine. I would have said anything that might persuade him he ought to take a share in this.
In January, Liana was published. The movie and theater deals hadn’t come through, but the reviewers were absolute darlings. The Washington Post said I’d come of age artistically. The New York Herald Tribune talked about the novel’s “splendid sultry grace.” And no one but no one said anything about miscegenation, or even found fault with my mulatto protagonist.
In the middle of the month, Ernest wrote me that after his current patrol on the Pilar was over, he would batten down the boat and the house and come to England. I wrote him that I was leaving London “to visit Herb Matthews”; I’d found a pilot to smuggle me to Algiers, where I would stay with the ambassador-in-waiting Ginny had introduced me to, and see Bumby, who would be on leave there for the weekend. From the north of Africa, I could cross to Italy, where the Allies had gone ashore in September and had ever since been meeting fierce resistance. But I could come back to London or he could come “visiting with me,” and if he would let me know when he was coming, I would arrange it all. I couldn’t have been happier.
Italy
FEBRUARY 1944
On the roller-coaster roads of Italy, it seemed forever to be hailing on us, and I was dodging American military press officers, who would have taken me into custody and sent me home had they realized I was there, to boot. A French transportation officer took me under his wing, driving me through rubble pile after rubble pile of what had once been charming little Italian villages, with mines occasionally detonating around us, and burned-out trucks and dead animals and blood-soaked bandages everywhere. We joined a regiment of Sardinian soldiers transporting supplies to the Allied troops at the front and bringing back the dead, which they tied on the backs of their mules. We visited a tent hospital, and spent a night in a cellar with an American major, a French doctor, a dinner of military rations, and music on the radio from Berlin. We dodged shells from German batteries, and watched Allied planes bomb Monte Cassino, and I went in search of Ginny Cowles, who had abandoned her job in London and was dodging the military police as much as I was or more, having found her way to the American sector in Italy. I wrote like hell too, and it was some of the best writing I had ever done, stories about these brave boys who deserved to have their courage recorded in the headlines, who deserved to be known and applauded, supported, remembered.
I might have stayed there forever if not for Bug, but despite his January letter saying he would be coming to join me, the letters that followed were increasingly morose. The day after he finished his tour, he wrote that it was done and said again that he would join me in Europe, but this time he claimed himself an old horse forced over the jumps. He made out that it was my fault that he’d ended his patrols and that I’d deprived him of a novel about it in the bargain because now the journalism would erase what would be a very fine story from his head.
He demanded by cable whether I meant to be a journalist or a wife in his bed, and he began to charge me with abandoning him these five long months, never mind that the entire time I’d been gone, he’d been out on the Pilar, or preparing to be, waiting to be—more than happy to abandon me if I’d stayed in Cuba. The specific choice of the word “abandon” from a man who could choose his words was not lost on me either. His divorces had both been granted on grounds of abandonment, although it was Ernest who had done the abandoning of Hadley and Pauline. I couldn’t believe he could mean it. That was just the darkness talking, the darkness or the booze or both. He’d said he was coming, and when he did it would be like Spain again: good and accomplishing and loving.
March began without any word that Ernest had gone to New York yet, and it would take him two weeks in New York to get travel papers.
He closed his next letter “So long, Bong,” with a finality that was despairing. I read it standing with my back against a good tall boulder, with the rong cararong rong rong of machine guns not far ahead. I slid down to sit, and read it all the way through again, looking for other words or other meanings, a suggestion that he was just trying to provoke me. He was reneging on his promise to come and trying to make it my fault.
I folded the letter into the tiniest square, and I tucked it into the back pocket of my trousers, trying not to think this might be the last letter I would ever get from him, working out how long it would take me to get back to Cuba, and knowing it was too long. Was there already another woman in my bed? There wouldn’t be, of course there wouldn’t be; there was no one in Cuba to entice him. But there had been that woman he’d had the affair with before he met me, the one who used to drive too fast in those stupid games of chicken that The Swede had told me about. She was from Cuba, the wife of a wealthy American living in Cuba, who maybe lived there still or maybe didn’t but maybe some other beautiful, vulnerable woman did.
I would go back to Cuba now, I decided.
But there was no point in going back to Cuba to straighten us out. I loved him and he loved me, but I couldn’t live his life there, or I couldn’t live only his life there without some of my own life living too, and he wouldn’t live mine or even let me live it. Wouldn’t or couldn’t, the result was the same.
A few days later, Collier’s devoted a column to me in which Bug described me as a journalist who got to a place, got the story and wrote it, and came home. The coming home part was the best, he wrote. And something about the words made me think that it wasn’t over at all, that if I went back for him, I might blast him from Cuba and bring him back with me, to the only kind of life where we had ever been truly happy together for more than a few weeks at a time.
The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba
MARCH 1944
Ernest was impossibly changed when I got home to Cuba. After always weighing himself and marking h
is weight on the wall every morning, trying to stay very close to two hundred pounds, he was now a good 220, and with a beard peppered gray. I told him he looked marvelous, but the truth was the beard and the weight made him begin to look like an old man. My beautiful Finca was a mess too, full of drinking buddies who never bathed.
He was perfectly lovely and admiring when we were in public, telling everyone I was his Marty, and I’d just come back from covering the war, and wasn’t I as beautiful as I was smart? But he would wake me in the middle of the night to rage at me like some beast caged to craziness, faulting me for everything in the world he could find that was wrong when what he was really angry about but wouldn’t say was that he hadn’t uncovered three dozen German submarines. He’d spent so much money on the Pilar that he’d run through even the movie money from Bell, and had to ask Max Perkins to advance him $2,000—money he would be owed as soon as the sales of cheap editions of some of his books were published.
“The goddamned government thinks I ought to pay for the whole goddamned war with my taxes alone,” he ranted.
“Honestly, Bug,” I said, “a person can’t owe more taxes than the money he makes.”
“What the hell would you know about it? Five hundred dollars every month to that bitch Pauline whose daddy owns one half of America and her uncle the other half. The boys’ schooling. This place you can’t even be bothered to come home to.”
“The Finca is bought and paid for,” I reminded him.
“Not the chauffeur and the cook and the maid and the gardener.”
“For which I pay half, and I didn’t ask for the chauffeur or the cook.”
“I’m not the one buying every piece of furniture on the island, paying to have the place painted that ridiculous pink.”
And of course all that submarine hunting cost nothing, nor your good, solid year of hangovers, I thought. But I didn’t want a knock-down-drag-out. I was exhausted from the trip—exhausted the way a person is after she’s been running on war adrenaline for months and no longer is. And it wasn’t exactly fair anyway. Ernest actually had received a very lovely letter from the ambassador commending him for his highly confidential—and risky—intelligence activities. He was beautifully unaggrandizing about it too, asking our editor at Collier’s, whom he did tell about it, not to tell anyone else. He ought to have been happy, with that honor and with his book having sold three-quarters of a million copies, more than any other novel except Gone with the Wind. But none of that improved his mood for more than a minute, and then he was back to the foul, berating, blaming, waking-me-up-to-rant brute I no longer recognized.
It didn’t help that Bumby, his own son, said that I was now the writer in the family. Bumby was only being kind to me, but it didn’t help at all.
Word started getting back to me about tawdry stories Ernest told when he was out drinking, stories about me that his bar buddies liked to repeat all over Havana. He wrote Matie the most humiliating letter too, telling her he thought I was paranoid but then had decided after all that I was just plain selfish and spoiled.
“My mother?” I said.
“Is it too much to want a wife in my bed at night and not somewhere else having higher adventures than mine at so many thousand fucking bucks a pop?”
It was outrageous, him calling me out for the money I made, which was much of what we had to support us, but I bit those words back, saying instead, “What could you possibly have expected Matie to do except call me up concerned that you might already have buried me under the pool pump, Bug?”
“I thought she might talk some sense into you! I thought she might tell you to give up the bitchy, selfish-scum business and be a wife!”
Selfish scum. He knew exactly how devastating those words would be, and he said them anyway.
“No matter,” he said. “I’m leaving for Europe.”
“Bug,” I said, thinking just for that minute that maybe there was still something to put back together, some little piece of our love that could survive this.
“I’ve signed up to do a piece for Collier’s on the RAF pilots.”
“Collier’s?” I repeated. “But, Bug.” I swallowed down the fear and rage and despair. “Collier’s can only have one war correspondent.”
“The military doesn’t want women in Europe.”
“They don’t, sure, but that didn’t stop me from getting to Italy.”
“You suggested it, Mart. You suggested I pitch the series to Collier’s, and I did.”
“Well, yes, but—”
But that was when I was still in Europe and wouldn’t have to find a way to get back there; I could have stayed and figured the work part of it out somehow, like I had in Spain, in Czechoslovakia, in China. That was before, when I thought there was something left to save, when I would have given up even my own position as a journalist for him to join me.
Ernest said, “You were the one who hooked me up with that Roald Dahl.”
“The air attaché at the British embassy.”
“Right. I set it up through him, like you suggested. Like I said, the piece about the RAF pilots, like you suggested, Mart.”
“About the night raids in Germany.”
“The piece you damned well beat me into doing! I wasn’t the one who wanted to go; I wanted us to stay here. But, no, you have to do it your way. So I’m fucking doing it your way, right? They’ve got me on a plane to London.”
“But you could write that piece for anyone. You could write it for NANA. You could have any job you want.”
“You told me to pitch Collier’s. It was your fucking idea. Your. Fucking. Idea. Are you reneging on it now, for Christ’s sake?”
“But I’ve written twenty-six pieces for Collier’s. I’ve hardly written for anyone else in seven years. And you could write for anyone.” Repeating it and repeating it, unable to demand he back out of the assignment he’d already taken, and at my suggestion too—I couldn’t deny that. But hoping to God he would volunteer to back out of it.
“I leave for New York April 23,” he said. “I’ve arranged the tickets.”
“April 23?” I repeated.
“You won’t be satisfied until I’ve been killed at war, so, fine, I’m off to do it for you. A man with three kids can’t leave them with nothing just because his wife is crazy as hell. But you won’t let it go until I’ve done it, so I’ve got us tickets to fly to New York and on to London to get myself killed.”
Got us tickets. So he did mean for us to go back together, then. He did mean to sort this out somehow, and if he did, well then, that was okay. It was what I’d been asking for, the two of us going off to war, where we could be happy together again.
The problem, of course, was how I would get from New York to London. I could still write for Collier’s from London, if not as their war correspondent, if I could get back to Europe. But Ernest hadn’t actually sorted out how I would get beyond New York. He’d managed to find himself a seat on a seaplane to Shannon and then on to London, but it had been arranged by the British military, and, he assured me, no women were allowed on board.
The first thing we did after we checked in to the hotel in New York was put my name on the American Export plane passenger list for another flight. Hemingway, not Gellhorn, on the idea that it might matter. But there weren’t many other flights, and I kept being shoved further and further down the list in favor of someone with more reason to be on it than being the wife of Ernest Hemingway. I couldn’t get another position as a war correspondent myself on such short notice because I was a woman and one thing had become very clear: no women were going to be allowed to cover the invasion of France, whenever it did happen. The rumor was that even Helen Kirkpatrick, whom the US newspapers had elected as their single representative on the committee planning the invasion press coverage, would not be allowed to go.
I went down to Washington for a weekend at the White House on the excuse of getting the president to put in a word for me. Ernest was very busy, and I said of course he oug
ht to stay in New York. The truth was I didn’t really imagine I could ask the president to bother about my flights, I wasn’t that ridiculous, but I needed a break from the stress of trying to keep a happy face. Bug did still love me, I knew that, and I did still love him, and maybe we weren’t wrong for each other. Maybe it was just the time, the stress on his part of having a wife in London where folks were dying every day from the bombs, and all the panic on my part that I would miss the invasion of France.
I returned to New York before the end of April, writing Mrs. Roosevelt how refreshed the weekend had left me. If I missed the invasion, I assured her, well then, Ernest could tell me all about it—as if it weren’t only the want of getting to Europe to experience the invasion firsthand that kept me dragging my broken soul out of bed. There was nothing for it, for a wife to be wanting the job her husband had. I’d seen that reproach even in the First Lady’s eyes, and if she thought so, then everyone would, especially as what Bug was telling anyone who’d listen was something close to true—that I was such a good wifey-wife to have seen that he ought to go to London in my place.
I made a backup plan, thinking maybe this could be like Spain, with Ernest going ahead but me getting there too, and him squaring everything away for me in the meantime. With Allen Grover’s help, I arranged transport on a Norwegian freighter carrying dynamite, a twenty-day passage that left New York before Ernest’s seaplane but would get me to London two weeks after him. Bug saw me off—me and forty-five Norwegian crewmen, only two of whom could cobble together a short sentence in English, and me with just three Norwegian expressions I’d jotted down in my notebook before we left: vennligst for “please”; takk skal du ha, which seemed to me a helluva lot of trouble for “thank you,” but I did want to be polite; and kan jeg få en drink? Bug had suggested that last one, which is exactly what it sounds like, and mercifully easy to remember.
Beautiful Exiles Page 30
