Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  “Travel safely, Mrs. Bongie-Pig-Welcher-Heminghorn,” Ernest said.

  Welcher, slipped occasionally into my nicknames lately, even though I wasn’t welching at all: he had my spot at Collier’s. But we did that, we called each other names we didn’t really mean: Mr. Hideously-Fat-Pig. Mrs. Warp Fathouse. Mrs. Representative of Righteousness and Peace. And Ernest was good at war. He’d been good in Spain. He’d been so much better than I in China. And he was going to Europe because I wanted him to.

  “Travel safely, Mr. Bongie-Pig-Submarine-Snooper-Gellingway,” I said, and we kissed one last time. “I’ll see you at Big Ben.”

  On a Dynamite Transport Crossing the Atlantic

  MAY 1944

  We traveled in a convoy, for protection from German subs, in a fog so thick that the old boat blew its foghorn night and day, proclaiming to all wandering in the fog around us, “Hell, don’t run into us! Don’t you know how easily we go boom?” As you can imagine, since the ship was a dynamite transport, no smoking was allowed on deck or anywhere else. The sweet captain made a small exception for me, allowing me to smoke in my cabin as long as I did so over a big bowl of water. I kept so close to that odd ashtray that there was no relaxation in it, but still I smoked my two packs a day.

  As you might not have imagined, there were no lifeboats on the ship, and only sludge for food, and shockingly little booze.

  The first week, the fog never lifted except occasionally just enough to show how wobbly the convoy was getting with no one able to see anyone else. The days all blended into the nights and into the days again. It was freezing as hell, but still I made myself walk around the deck for a few hours between my long sleeps, trying to amuse myself by making up stories, and taking skimpy notes in a journal. I read too—a first novel written by a boy I knew in St. Louis, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover—and I wrote letters. I spent a little time every day with the captain, cobbling together little bits of conversation and glad of the company. It wasn’t as lonely as it sounds. It was sleepful and healthful and thoughtful and writingful and readingful, and nothing-to-do-ful, which I needed more than I had realized.

  At the end of that first week (which might have been six days or eight days or ten, it didn’t much matter), the fog lifted to reveal the most dramatic icebergs, not just tidy little peaks rising from gray sea but monstrous bird wings and soaring arches and giant whale tails, and one block of ice that looked quite a bit like Ernest’s good friend Mr. Scrooby in repose. I watched the boats of the convoy lining themselves back up into a nice tidy order in the sunlight, and I wondered if there was enough sunlight in the world to line Bug and me back up like that. I felt so ashamed and guilty, because I had thought and thought and thought about it all that time I was walking and watching the sea, and I never could see that there was. He was a rare bird, wise and wonderful, and a glorious writer, but he was bad for me.

  He was bad for me, or just wrong for me, and maybe it had never worked, or maybe it had worked in the beginning, and I was the one who’d changed. I didn’t want to break his heart, and I didn’t want to break my own heart either, but I couldn’t think of him anymore without the dread and the darkness. I needed to gather up what was left of myself and glue it back together with whatever sticking paste I could find, filling especially the cold, hollow dead spots, and I needed to try not to let it all get wet again until I was good and solid, and maybe not even then.

  Liverpool, England

  MAY 1944

  I rose at four in the morning the day we were to reach England, even though I’d been up late the night before writing a story. My mind, after the icebergs, overflowed with stories, all that emotion and love and loss pouring out of me through the only exit I allowed it, for what good was crying too much over something that was done? It was the way stories came to me, not during a thing but after, as I was letting go. I stood in darkness that morning and watched the land emerge from the night, and I felt gloriously free, suddenly, and nearly happy, and resolved. There was nothing left to do but the landing at Liverpool and the train to London.

  Ernest had been in London for two weeks, time enough to check into the Dorchester Hotel, in the very room I’d vacated for all I knew. Already he’d managed to land himself in St. George’s Hospital—not to report on the war wounded but as a patient himself. I learned of it from journalists at the docks in Liverpool. Apparently the first news had reported him dead, news I was grateful not to have heard.

  By the time I arrived in London, the story of Ernest’s little escapade was everywhere: he’d gone to a party at Robert Capa’s place in Belgrave Square and then caught a lift back with another partygoer, who, being as drunk as Ernest or even more so and driving at three in the morning and in the blackout, had promptly crashed them into an emergency water tank at Lowndes Square.

  I found my husband sitting in bed in his hospital room, turban-headed in gauze and surrounded by champagne and whiskey and by pals keeping him company in the drink: Robert Capa, whom I still adored despite his hosting the party that left Ernest in this state, and Irwin Shaw and Bill Walton and that American wife of Noel Monks’s who wore the sweaters with nothing underneath. I watched from the hallway, wondering how none of them—not his drinking buddies and not even the nurses hurrying to and fro out in the hallway with me—had the sense to suggest that a fool with fifty-seven stitches in his head and a concussion and two bum knees in the bargain might better lay off the booze for a day or two. But no one could tell Ernest Hemingway how to live if he didn’t want to hear it, or, mostly, even if he did.

  “So I’m sitting on the plane and we’re waiting for some last passenger to show,” he was telling the gathered apostles, “and this actress gal—I’ll remember her name in a minute, I would have it, but this damned bandage is sucking the juice from my brain, or maybe it drained out with the blood. God almighty, who knew a head could bleed so damned much from a little bump on the windshield?” He laughed, and everyone laughed with him. “So this actress gal, who apparently thinks a schedule is nothing and the whole world is built to wait for her—”

  “Don’t I know some women like that?” someone interrupted, and everyone laughed again, even the sly little Mary Welsh.

  “Is there any other kind of woman?” Ernest said, and again everyone laughed. “Except you, of course, small friend,” he said to Mary Welsh.

  Shaw and Walton looked from Ernest to Mary Welsh, and I did too. “Small Friend” or just “small friend”? But Ernest was forever calling his friends by nicknames.

  “So this pretty lady comes up the boarding stairs, finally, with a little box she’s carrying so carefully you’d think it was filled with Baccarat champagne glasses filled to the brim with Dom. Well, it turns out—whatever her name—it turns out she’s taking hard-boiled eggs to her favorite ration-deprived Brits, and they’re frozen so they’ll last the two days it takes to fly across the Atlantic, right? Eggs on a goddamned flight across the Atlantic, can’t you see it? The first rough air we hit . . .” And he started laughing, and everyone laughed with him, and I stood watching it all, remembering that turbulent flight in China.

  “You ought to have offered to hold them for her, Bongie,” I said. “You who can catch booze on the bounce off an airplane ceiling right back into your highball glass without losing a drop.” God, what a funny moment that had been.

  He looked up at me, his expression that of a boy caught in a misdeed, something more than the drinking, which he wasn’t embarrassed about even with all those stitches. Everyone else looked too, and Robert Capa grinned a welcome.

  I said, “I leave you alone for two weeks, Ernest, and you turn into a Turk?” and I laughed, trying to make light of it all.

  It struck me then, the guilt in his eyes. I hadn’t been able to fly with him; I’d been left to three weeks in the fog on a dynamite ship because his plane would take no women. And yet here was this funny story about this egg-carrying actress on the plane.

  He quickly gathered himself and said, “I knew y
ou’d get here, Daughter—”

  “I’ve just come off three weeks on a dynamite ship that threatened to blow up all the way across the Atlantic,” I interrupted. “You might think twice about claiming to have arranged that for me when you flew here on a lovely airplane.” Only barely able to keep from sticking his nose in the fact of that damned actress.

  “I was going to say,” he said to everyone else in the room, then back to me, “that I knew you’d get here, Daughter, because this time you’d so nicely arranged that I would.”

  Being kind in public.

  I went to Ernest and kissed him on the forehead below his bandage, relieved not to be humiliated in front of all these people and doing the wifely thing so as to avoid humiliating him.

  “You see what a thing a marriage is, friends,” he said to everyone else. “My wife can laugh at me, but I’m not allowed to laugh back.”

  Everyone laughed, but not so comfortably now.

  You might have thought the room would have cleared for a wife who hadn’t seen her husband to have a few minutes alone with him, and Capa did stand to go, but Mary Welsh took a bottle of booze and refilled Ernest’s glass, and Shaw and Walton stayed with her, and Ernest didn’t ask anyone to leave.

  It was just as well. I couldn’t possibly tell Ernest while he was in the hospital that he no longer had to worry about a wife who laughed at him. I wondered if he saw the truth in my eyes, and I supposed he might. I supposed that was why he kept his little entourage around him—because he saw what might come if we were left alone to get it all over with. And I thought of that poem Matie and I used to read by the waterfall at the lake at Creve Coeur, Browning’s “Life in a Love”:

  Escape me?

  Never—

  Beloved! While I am I, and you are you,

  So long as the world contains us both,

  Me the loving and you the loth,

  While the one eludes, must the other pursue.

  I made the excuse of exhaustion on account of the travel, and I returned to the hotel room I’d taken, my own room under Gellhorn rather than Hemingway. I could be the good wife for a day or two more while Ernest was in the hospital, but I would do it in my own space and in my own name.

  London, England

  JUNE 1944

  After two days of Ernest humiliating me in front of his drinking buddies whenever I visited him at the hospital, reducing me to tears and embarrassing our friends, he arrived back at the hotel room, apparently surprised to find no evidence of me there.

  “Mookie,” he said when he called my room.

  “Ernest,” I answered.

  “My head hurts, Mook.”

  “You can’t keep crashing it into things and expect it to remain your friend.”

  “But I haven’t ever crashed my head before, except that once in Paris when I pulled the skylight down on myself. Remember that?”

  That had been with Hadley, or maybe Pauline.

  “There’s that scar under your beard too,” I said.

  He laughed and said, “You can’t blame me for that one. That was that damned horse in Wyoming.”

  It had bolted through a thicket with him in the saddle. That too had been before me.

  “Oh, Mook,” he said. “I’m a faithless dolt, I am. But I have a very scrofulously comfy bed in our very comfy room, and where are you?”

  “Bug,” I said. I looked out the window, to the spring green of Hyde Park. No one was strolling, only people hurrying one way or the other, or that was the way it seemed. I just didn’t know where to begin, and I knew this wasn’t a conversation I should start over the phone, with Ernest alone in a cold hotel room and just home from the hospital too.

  “Sure,” he said, “sure you need a quiet place to write. Okay. But you’ll forgive me for being such a bad Papa Bongie, won’t you? I know I’ve muffed it miserably.”

  “Damn, Bug,” I said, wanting to ask about the actress on the plane when he’d told me it would take no women. Wanting to hear the actress was just a fiction. But it wasn’t the kind of detail you could make up: an actress carrying frozen hard-boiled eggs on an airplane across the Atlantic. And it didn’t matter, really.

  “I’ve made us a reservation at the Grill Room,” he said. “I’ll come collect you.”

  I said, “I hear they have terrific boiled eggs.”

  “Boiled eggs?” he said. “Well, I don’t know about that. But if there are boiled eggs to be had in London, I suppose they do.”

  “Bug,” I started, “Bug, I . . .”

  “I’ll come collect you,” he repeated.

  “I need to finish what I’ve got in the typewriter,” I said. “How about eight o’clock?” He could pick me up, and that would give us some time alone together, and I needed the time alone with him to lay it all out, to make him see that we weren’t good for each other, that he was good, and I was good, but we were lousy as hell together.

  “All right, sure. Eight,” he said. “I’ll collect you for dinner at eight, then, Mook.”

  I finished my writing—notes about my funny conversations with the dynamite-ship captain and smoking over that bowl of water, and how London had changed even in the few months I’d been away, or maybe it only seemed to me it had, having now the perspective of Italy. After I was done, I cleaned up, and then I waited.

  When Ernest didn’t show up and didn’t show up, I began to wonder if I’d misunderstood. But, no, he’d been very specific about “collecting me” for dinner.

  I called his room, finally. When there was no answer after I let it ring and ring, I imagined him sitting in the restaurant downstairs, drinking already, I supposed, wondering if I’d stood him up. I must have misunderstood.

  I went on down to the hotel’s restaurant, telling myself we could talk afterward if I could keep him from drinking too much. He was there, at the table he’d reserved for us, his broad, hunching back to the door. The bandages were gone, but the long shaved patch in his bullheaded noggin matched the white of his sideburns and beard, which were just visible, and the stitches looked dark and angry. He was laughing—the harsher laughter that signaled he was heading beyond happy drunk, if not already there. Bent toward him across the table, attentively laughing, was a small, curly-haired brunette with sharp eyes the blue of her thin sweater that shared every detail of Mary Welsh’s breasts.

  I slipped away quietly, and I found Ginny, and we curled up in her room where Ernest wouldn’t find me if he came looking, and I wouldn’t have to know if he never did.

  London, England

  JUNE 1944

  For three long days, Ernest and I communicated only through notes passed through his brother, sixteen years Ernest’s junior and presumably on his way to the invasion of France with the army, although of course that operation was hush-hush. Ernest bounced from blame to remorse to heartbreak and anger. I tried to keep my responses measured, with little success. He was seeing Mary Welsh, or he wasn’t; what did it matter to me? But pride is a funny thing.

  On the fourth morning, I awoke to a shadow looming in my doorway, saying, “It’s happening, Mart,” in a familiar voice.

  Ernest? But, no, his last note had said he was leaving London for a bit.

  I said, “Don’t be silly, shadow-man, waking up good Christians like this.”

  “No, really,” the shadow said, disappearing already as I scuttered out of bed.

  Ernest’s last note. He was Collier’s war correspondent now.

  I dressed quickly and hurried to the Ministry of Information, where a hundred of us were ushered into a conference room lined with armed military police, the doors locked behind us.

  “This is awfully cloak-and-dagger,” I said to the chap beside me—an Australian reporting for one of the Sydney papers, whose editors were so pissed with the censors that they’d run pieces with blank spaces to show how much text was chopped. I tried to imagine how that must have looked, a diversion to keep my mind off of Bug.

  At the front of the room a staff officer said, �
��This is it.”

  A corporal passed a handout—a communiqué from Eisenhower—as the staff officer outlined the naval and air operations for the invasion of France, which had just begun. I listened like hell while reading the sheet at the same time. I’d like to say my insides hadn’t gone all crunchy, but the one thing I do stick to is the truth, even if it’s just my own truth I can tell.

  “You’ll have a half hour to write your copy,” the staff officer told us, and he pointed our attention to the typewriters they had on hand for us. “You’ll file them here, in this room, and you’ll turn them over to the censors here, and when the censors are done with everyone, we’ll send them off with military police dispatch riders, who will deliver them to the cable companies. You’ll wait here until the military determines the news can be released and the cables are gone.”

  “You’ll be handing the news-breaking to the damned Krauts, that’s the dinkum oil!” my Australian-journalist companion objected.

  “Yes, we will do,” the staff officer agreed.

  “But the Germans will control the story,” the journalist insisted. “They’ll tell it like they’ve won the battle even if we take Paris by midafternoon.”

  “The Germans will be kept in the dark as long as possible,” the staff officer said. “They won’t have a way to know what we’re hitting them with or where until they’re hit.”

  Every journalist in the room mumbled frustration in the same accepting tone.

  Me, I grabbed a typewriter and pounded out a thousand words a minute. I had sludge for brains, though, and it was all drivel. You can’t write the real stuff when you’re locked in an airless room a whole channel away from what you’re pretending to cover. You can’t write the real stuff when you’re only making words out of someone else’s words.

  When I had the best I could do in front of a censor and his blackout marker, I flipped my blond hair and smiled. “So what was your personal brand of heroism before the war?” I asked him. Yes, I’d learned well from Hemingway, who would have laughed if he’d seen me flattering the guy. But if this really was it, Bug was on a ship headed for France. And this was it.