Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The censor was done butchering my words, and the military police dispatch riders had set off, and I was jotting in my journal for my own sake when one of the officers announced, “In just fifteen seconds the invasion news flash will go out into the world.”

  9:31 a.m.

  He raised his arm, and when he dropped it, the MPs unlocked the doors, and we went out into a brand-new world.

  I told my taxi driver the news. He didn’t believe me. I talked to some colored soldiers at Westminster Abbey. An old woman selling Red Cross pins. I was getting scared by then, afraid for Bug, who had no right to my heartache, but still he was my Bug and I was his Mookie, and it wasn’t like he’d taken my particular spot on that crossing ship. No women journalists had been allowed to be part of the invasion reporting. Nineteen women accredited to cover this war, at least six of us with more experience than half the men, for pity’s sake, and all of us barred from doing our jobs for no reason but our sex.

  Bug on his way there, though. Bug who would scoff at me for wallowing in self-pity on account of rules that could be broken. He might already be in France, getting the real juice, the story from the ground. He might already be taking another bit of shrapnel in the leg in this Second World War, to add to what he’d collected in the first. Bug could be brave; I’d seen that. He could be the old Hemingway if he wanted to be.

  I headed for the south coast of England, for one of the embarking ports, making my plans as I made my way, to hell with the rules.

  I suppose I did look around for Ernest when I arrived at the coast. I suppose some part of me wanted to see him safely back in England, while a bigger part was afraid to see him return so quickly to safety when there was a war to report. If his flirtation with Mary Welsh hadn’t already collapsed our life together, his walking away from covering this invasion when I’d been denied the chance surely would.

  At the docks, an MP stopped me, wanting to know my business. I’d anticipated this. I pulled my press credential from the damp wool of my uniform and handed it to him.

  “I’m to interview the nurses before they set off,” I said, nodding toward six nurses boarding a painfully white ship that sported bright new red crosses when every sensible ship on the water was some shade of gray a German bomber might just miss.

  “A lady journalist,” the MP said.

  “Here to cover the women’s angle, the nurses and the Red Cross gals.”

  “All right, then, but don’t dawdle. You don’t want to end up in France yourself,” he said as he handed my credential back.

  The ship’s deck as I boarded was a chaos of boxes of bandages and plasma bottles, canisters as big as beer kegs filled with blood. Everywhere, the crew scurried about, moving medical supplies to the operating room, blankets to the hundreds of bunks that would cross the Channel empty, but would not return that way.

  I found a loo before anyone could determine that I had no business on the ship, and I locked myself in.

  In the dark of the bathroom, I thought of the soldiers already on the French coast, already dying, and Ernest there too. I took three deep breaths in the wet-wool stink of the tiny bathroom, thinking with any luck I’d be there soon, and trying to silence the gut crunchiness, longing suddenly to be hiding with my thirteen-year-old best friend in the abandoned coats outside our fortnightly ballroom dancing class back in St. Louis. As I listened in the darkness for the ship to weigh anchor for the French coast and the war, I tried to imagine Bug as a boy like those boys who never did ask me to dance. I tried to imagine Ernest Hemingway as a boy who imagined himself a boy still, another boy I might forgive.

  After we’d cleared the harbor and I was sure they wouldn’t turn back on account of one stowaway journalist, even a female one, I emerged from the loo. It was rainy and cold, and I was afraid as hell, and I joined everyone else in sweating out the fear with healthy doses of whiskey.

  At dawn, we sailed to the Normandy coast, the first hospital ship to arrive. No one gave a damn who I was—not the merchant navy men or the doctors or the nurses, who were all American and just arrived from home—as long as I kept my guts inside me. We were all far too concerned with the planes overhead, and the gunfire, and the shells bursting in the water around us, and getting the job we’d come to do done.

  We anchored at Omaha Red, where bulldozers scooped through the sand to detonate mines while guns fired at Germans on the high bluff and the swollen gray-skin sacks of what had once been American soldiers floated by. Landing craft began pulling up to our ship, delivering the wounded. The operating rooms on board kicked to life.

  I organized two cabin boys in bright-red jackets to make corned beef sandwiches for anyone able to eat. I carted water. I translated for French soldiers who could still say what was wrong with them, and commanded “ruhig”—“quiet”—to the German POW wounded whenever the doctors asked me to.

  That night, the crew paid me the kindest thank-you I could have imagined, taking me ashore with an ambulance crew to collect casualties, whom we would take back to the ship at first daylight. We waded through waist-high water and hiked up a narrow path cleared of mines, with red flares lighting our way. The world was rich with the smells of sweet grass and cattle and gunfire and burning rubber, and overrun with the sound of gunfire, racrong carong carong.

  Our path led to a village where even the church had collapsed like a paper bag. Lines of Germans—scrawny, undersized members of the “master race”—marched off to POW enclosures and to their fates without the bother even of having to answer my questions on account of the Geneva Convention prohibiting me from haranguing them.

  We loaded bandaged and bleeding and burned boys onto stretchers and carried them down to the beach. We brought up more empty stretchers and returned again.

  Not long after dawn, we boarded the ship again and set off back toward England, trying to keep our cargo alive long enough to get them proper help.

  Back in London, in reward for my work and for risking my life, I was taken into custody by military police and confined to a nurses’ training camp outside London. If I behaved myself, they might allow me to cross the Channel again when the nurses in the camp were ready to go. If I didn’t behave, I’d be shipped back home.

  To be honest, that arrangement didn’t suit me.

  After I’d finished two long pieces for Collier’s, one on the hospital ship and one on the German soldiers I’d been unable to question, I quietly rolled under the perimeter fence of the nurses’ training camp and found my way back to London, where I began searching for a way to get back to the war.

  I wrote Matie, wanting her to know I was okay and that I was looking for a way to get to Italy. Not even a sleepy censor who might not see that I had no clearance to go anywhere, though, would let through specific plans for anyone to go to any specific location, lest the Germans learn that the soldiers they were shooting at were actually there. So I wrote Matie that women correspondents here were being treated too much like violets and so I thought I’d be better off returning to my old haunts, where I’d been before I went home to Cuba. I kicked myself for not establishing a secret code with her like I had with Ernest, and hoped she would know that “old haunts” meant Italy. I told her Ernest had gone in with the first invasion wave, and he’d been very brave, and I wasn’t seeing much of him as he had masses of his own pals, but I was happy as a goat.

  The fact is I was dead tired and sad as hell. I’d been stripped of my military accreditation, my travel papers, and my ration entitlement on account of having stowed away on the ship, and I had no way to get anywhere. But I struck up a friendship with an RAF pilot who was returning to the Italian front, who knew me only as Marty and not even as Gellhorn, much less Hemingway. I made up a story about a fiancé in Naples. I did feel a little guilty about suckering the poor kid, but it got me to Italy.

  There, I joined a band of Polish soldiers who’d been the heroes of Cassino and weren’t much bothered by an American gal breaking rules.

  I spent the next month
of the war foraging for ducks and geese with the Poles, liberating bottles of Chianti, swimming when we weren’t warring, and trying to make the soldiers famous. In order to do so, I got very good at sweet-talking every wireless operator I could find into helping me get my work back to the United States, never mind that every one of them might as easily be arrested for helping me as I might be just for doing my job.

  Collier’s was happy to run my pieces, just as they’d run my D-Day bits despite my trip to get them being unsanctioned. My D-Day piece ran with Ernest’s, in an issue with his name on the cover as their special correspondent and a photo of him surrounded by laughing soldiers on the crossing boat. His beard in the photo was so long he might easily be mistaken for St. Nicholas, and he held a pair of binoculars in his hand as if to scout the enemy positions himself. His face was carefully turned, but still the beginning of the scar where his stitches had been was visible. I wondered if anyone had honestly managed to be that jolly on their way to war. And then I heard the truth about his piece: despite its self-aggrandizing suggestion that it might just have been Ernest himself who’d led the soldiers on his landing craft to recapture Fox Green beach, the details about the landing boats being shaped like coffins and the shells sounding like a punching glove, Ernest hadn’t actually gone ashore at all.

  He’d crossed on the Empire Anvil. He’d climbed down from it onto one of those coffin-shaped landing craft with his throbbing head and his swollen knees to accompany the soldiers to the left flank of Omaha Beach. The landing on Fox Green went dreadfully, though. The weather was so lousy that the platoons got separated before they reached sand, and the soldiers were easy targets for German machine guns.

  Ernest, the moment German machine gunners found his landing craft, dropped flat to its hull. He clung to the boat’s bottom as the soldiers climbed out and ran for it. He stayed in the landing craft as it retreated. It took him to another ship that was already headed back to England, the Dorothea Dix. He arrived back in port on the south coast the very day he’d left.

  From there, he took his war correspondent accreditation that was denied me, and he returned to the Dorchester Hotel in London, where he remained in a comfortable suite for the next five weeks while 156,000 Allied troops battled stiff resistance across fifty miles of French coastline, facing down German machine guns to take the beaches, and then the cliffs, and then the hedgerows of Normandy.

  Maybe if I’d gone that first day, maybe if I’d lay flat in the landing craft as the rong cararong rong rong of machine-gun fire tried to end my life, I would have returned to London too. But I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to find out, and now I never would.

  Paris, France

  AUGUST 1944

  I was with the Eighth Army in Italy, which was beginning its offensive on the Adriatic, when I heard the Allies had reached Paris. I hitched a lift on a plane to Lyon, and from there caught a ride with four intelligence officers headed for the city on the Seine, where I’d left so many friends years before. We had a wreck on the way, throwing me from the jeep and breaking one of my ribs, but we pressed on and reached Paris. Ernest was already there, in a room at the Ritz, with Mary Welsh down the hall.

  I took a room at the Lincoln, careful to avoid him, and went out walking through a city so largely unchanged that it made me weep. Sure, the Parisians were hungry and cold, there being not much food and even less coal or gas. But the buildings stood unharmed, and the bookstalls on the Seine still offered everything from Sophocles to Gide. The chic Parisian women looked as impeccably coifed as ever, with only their shoes, now wooden soled rather than leather on account of the shortages, much changed. If one thing was missing that had only recently been in abundance, it was anyone who would own up to having ever said hello to a Nazi, much less cooperated with them.

  In the small world of the journalists in Paris, though, it was impossible to avoid Ernest and his drinking parties, and anyway, there was no war to cover in Paris. It had moved on, and I needed to as well. I headed off to Brussels with the troops, leaving Hemingway to tell his stories of how I misused him to his drinking pals.

  To Bumby, whom I had loved and still did, Ernest wrote that he would trade his equity in me for two nonbeautiful wives who might occasionally go to bed with him. He wrote to my mother that he no longer wanted his life smashed up by heartlessness, carelessness, ambition, and selfishness.

  I returned to Paris once more that fall, and he invited me to dinner. I accepted, thinking we might hash out the details of the divorce I kept asking him for in letters that brought no response.

  He dragged everyone he knew along to join us and spent the evening disparaging me so vilely that his entourage melted away out of embarrassment.

  I suggested, when finally we were alone, that it might be best if we divorced. He had been going around with Mary Welsh for some time by then.

  “You bitch,” he responded. “You selfish, scummy bitch.”

  Robert Capa came by my hotel room later that evening, to find me sobbing so fiercely for want of what to do that Dad, may he rest in peace, would have been appalled. Capa had been playing poker and had heard from some of the gang who’d slunk away from our dinner that there had been trouble.

  “Hey,” he said. “Hey.”

  He stayed with me and brought me glasses of water and tissues, and took the grubby ones away until I’d spent myself.

  He lit me a cigarette then, and said, “Phone the Ritz and ask for Mary Welsh.”

  “Ask for her? Why would I want to talk to—”

  “When Ernest answers,” he said, “I’ll tell you what to say.”

  I followed Capa’s instructions right down to reciting to Ernest the specific details of his relationship with Mary. When Ernest began to rant so loudly that Capa too could hear him, Capa said, “Go ahead and put the phone down now, Mart. I’m your witness. It will be all right.”

  Hemingway and I began divorce proceedings not much later, citing as grounds that I had abandoned him. It would mean that he would get all of the things of our life together, including the Finca Vigía that I had put my heart into making our home. But I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t want anything at all except my name back, and some way forward past the sadness.

  I saw Hemingway only twice after that. Once, in the midst of the Battle of the Bulge, he showed up at the bar of the hotel I was staying in, apparently for the sole purpose of haranguing me in front of everyone about how stupid I was about war and how selfish, even though by then I’d given up everything to him. I left and went to bed early, only to awaken in the middle of the night to a pounding on my door. When I looked through the peephole, Ernest was standing there in nothing but his long johns. He’d inexplicably pulled a bucket over his head and was wielding a mop.

  “Hemingway, you’re drunk,” I said through the closed door. “Go to bed.”

  The second time, he came to my room at the Dorchester in London when I was down with the flu, to finalize the divorce. By then, I’d seen Dachau, and I’d been left with no doubt that I’d done the right thing to come to the war, even if it had cost me my marriage. I suppose I understood, too, that my marriage could not have been saved even if I’d stayed in Cuba and tried to be the Mrs. Hemingway Ernest thought he wanted me to be.

  For a time, I tried to get Ernest to send me a few of my things from the Finca Vigía, but I suppose he meant when I agreed to sign the divorce papers saying I’d abandoned him that he really would like to keep my letters from my mother and my panties and my photographs. I wasn’t always as upstanding as I’d like to have been about it. In frustration, and trying to enlist Max Perkins’s help in getting Ernest to send me some papers I needed, I wrote that I hoped my ex-husband weighed three hundred pounds, that he was a pig, and surely if there was a God he would punish Hemingway by making him fat.

  For a time, friends liked to bring me little bits of gossip about his life: that Mary Welsh was in a state because although our divorce became final just before Christmas of 1945 and her divorce fr
om Noel Monks was final too, Hemingway had not yet married her; that he kept my photograph in the bedroom at the Finca Vigía, explaining to Mary that Bumby and Mouse and Gigi wouldn’t understand if he took it down; that he told Mary he wanted a daughter with my blond hair and long legs, and berated her in language that was familiar to me; that he had a new maid he called Martha, although that wasn’t her name; that long after Mary Welsh finally became the fourth Mrs. Hemingway, in March of 1946, he would show up drunk at one place or another to rail against the fact that I’d abandoned him, or to crow about how he’d left me, or to tell tawdry stories that reflected well on neither of us. I never wanted to hear about him, and I told everyone so—sometimes rudely, I’m afraid—even though, as careful as I was not to disparage him in public, I did sometimes let loose on him with Matie or with Ginny Cowles, with whom I wrote a play about our time together in Spain.

  Although I’d somehow always managed to keep my lovers as friends, I shut Ernest out of the life I constructed. I covered what was left of the war. I settled afterward first in London, then in Washington, DC, where I spent far too much energy spewing my rage against that pig Joseph McCarthy and the lackey senators doing his bidding. I published another novel, an indictment of war titled The Wine of Astonishment, again with Scribner, in 1948. The next year, I adopted a son, and through him I learned the truth I’d long suspected: that I made a horrid mother. I moved to Mexico, and Italy, and Kenya. I returned to England. I had a few major love affairs and a few more minor ones, and a dreadful time with a real romance that I nonetheless don’t regret.

  Ernest peeked back into my life in a small way in May of 1953. Matie and I were packing up the house at l’Olgiata, moving like the nineteenth-century rich to a house I’d taken on Lake Garda for the summer, when she told me Ernest had sent her a manuscript. The Old Man and the Sea.