by Paula McLain
“When does it mean something? When everyone finally gets smashed to bits?”
“Is this what’s gotten into you today? It doesn’t concern us in the least.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Of course not. You don’t catch infidelity like the measles.”
“You like him, though.”
“I do. He’s a good painter. He wants to come by here tomorrow and do my portrait. Yours, too, maybe, so you’d better find a less troubled face by then.” He smiled lightly and went back to his book.
Outside the rain picked up and the wind canted it sideways, so that the boats in the harbor tipped dangerously.
“I’m hungry,” I said.
“Then eat something.” He didn’t look up.
“If it would stop raining, we could eat in the garden on the flagstones.”
“It’s going to rain all day. Just eat something already or be quiet.”
I walked over to the mirror and studied myself impatiently.
“I want to grow my hair out again. I’m tired of looking like a boy.”
“You don’t,” he said to the book. “You’re perfect.”
“A perfect boy. I’m sick of it.”
“You’re just hungry. Have a pear.”
I watched him with his head bent over into his book. He’d been letting his hair grow, and now it was nearly the same length as mine. We had begun to look a bit alike, in fact, just as Ernest said he wished we might, long ago on a star-hung rooftop in Chicago. But we wouldn’t look this way for long. In a few months I would feel and see the roundness at my waist. It was unavoidable.
“If I had long lovely hair, I’d tie it up at my neck and it would be silky and perfect and I wouldn’t care about anything else.”
“Hmmm?” he said. “So do it.”
“I will. I’m going to.”
There was a pair of tiny nail scissors on the bureau under the mirror. On impulse, I took them up and trimmed a little hair under one ear, and then the other.
He watched me and laughed curiously. “You’ve lost your mind, you know.”
“Maybe. Now you.” I went over and straddled his waist, then snipped away at the hair under his ears until it matched mine. Tucking the hair into my shirt pocket, I said, “Now we’re just the same.”
“You’re a strange one today.”
“You’re not in love with any actress in Paris, are you?”
“God, no.” He laughed.
“Violinist?”
“No one.”
“And you’ll stay with me always?”
“What is it, Kitty? Tell me.”
I met his eyes then. “I’m going to have a baby.”
“Now?” The alarm registered immediately.
“In the fall.”
“Please tell me it’s not true.”
“But it is. Be happy, Tiny. I want this.”
He sighed. “How long have you known?”
“Not long. A week, maybe.”
“I’m not ready for this, not nearly.”
“You might be by then. You might even be glad for it.”
“It’s been a hell of a few months.”
“You’ll work again. I know it’s coming.”
“Something’s coming,” he said darkly.
The next few days were tense and difficult for us. Some part of me had hoped that Ernest’s arguments against a baby only went so deep, and that as soon as he knew one was really coming, he’d be happy, or at least happy for me. But he didn’t seem to be budging an inch in my direction. Our days looked very much the same as before, but I felt the distance between us and wondered how we’d bridge it to find each other again.
Then, in the midst of my brooding, a new guest arrived at the Pounds’ villa. His name was Edward O’Brien, and he was a writer and editor staying in the hills above the town, near the Albergo Montallegro monastery. Ezra had heard he was there and invited him down for lunch.
“O’Brien edits a collection of the year’s best stories,” Pound said, making the introductions out on the terrace near the tennis courts. “He’s been doing it since the war.” Turning to Ernest, he said, “Hemingway here writes a damned good story. He’s really very good.”
“I’m gathering material for the 1923 edition now,” O’Brien said to Ernest. “Do you have anything on hand?”
It was only luck that he did. Out of his satchel, he pulled a ragged copy of the jockey story, “My Old Man,” which Lincoln Steffens had since sent back. He handed it over to O’Brien, and then told an abbreviated story of how his work had been lost. “So this piece,” he said dramatically, “is all I have left. Just this last thing, like a small piece of the prow of a ship that’s rotting at the bottom of the sea.”
“Well, that’s very poetic,” O’Brien said, and he took the story up the hill to consider it.
When he’d left, I said to Ernest, as quietly as I could, “I wish you hadn’t talked that way to O’Brien. It makes me sick to my stomach.”
“Maybe that’s the baby, then.”
“Are you angry with me?”
“Why would I be?”
“You don’t think I’ve done this on purpose?”
“What, lost the manuscripts?”
I felt as if he’d slapped me. “No. Fallen pregnant.”
“It’s the same in the end, isn’t it?”
By that point, our whispering had gotten fierce, and it was clear to the other two couples that we were in the middle of a serious argument. They began to drift discreetly toward the house.
“I can’t believe you really mean that,” I said, my eyes hot with tears.
“I’ll tell you what Strater says. He says no other writer or even painter—no one who makes something with all their soul—could ever have left that valise on the train. Because they’d have known what it meant.”
“That’s cruel. I suffered for those pieces too.”
He sighed loudly and shut his eyes. When he opened them again he said, “I’m sorry. I’ve promised myself not to talk about it. It won’t do any good anyway.”
I stormed off in one direction and he went in another, and though by the time dinner was served everyone in our party seemed intent on pretending they’d overheard nothing, I knew perfectly well they had and thought it best to just come clean.
“We wanted you very fine people to be the first to know we’re having a baby,” I said, reaching for Ernest’s hand. He didn’t pull away.
“Well done,” Shakespear said, rising to embrace me warmly. “I thought you seemed more substantial,” she whispered into my ear.
“Damned good show,” Mike said.
“Yes, yes,” Pound said. “It’s the happy fate of the monkey.”
“Ezra!” Shakespear said sharply.
“Do I lie?”
“Congratulations,” Maggie Strater said and hugged me. “We monkeys have to stick together.”
The next afternoon, we watched the three men play tennis. Ernest was a terrible player, but this didn’t stop him from doing it with force. He swung his racket wide and hard around, like a golfer. Mike hit a lovely shot that skimmed the net and fell nearly at Ernest’s feet. He missed it anyway, and then cursed loudly and foully and threw his racket to the ground.
Maggie cringed. “He’ll get used to the idea of the baby eventually,” she said. “Mike did.”
“Of course he will,” Shakespear agreed. “His pride will take over at some point, and then he’ll believe it was all his idea.”
“I’m not so sure,” I said.
I actually had a terrible feeling about the way Ernest was tangling up the lost manuscripts with the coming baby in his mind. If he felt—even in his darkest, most remote recesses—that I was capable of trying to sabotage his work and his ambition, how would we ever recover? Broken trust could rarely be repaired, I knew, particularly for Ernest. Once you were tarnished for him, he could never see you any other way.
I felt very low indeed until Edward O’Brien drove down th
e hill full of extravagant praise for Ernest’s story. It was splendid and he wanted to publish it, even though it would break with the series’ tradition of selecting from pieces that had already been published in magazines. Not only that, he wanted to lead the edition with the story and include it in his introduction; he felt that strongly about it.
O’Brien’s timing couldn’t have been more perfect; he answered my prayers and Ernest’s too. His confidence, which had been sorely lacking, had a new boost and there was something solid to aim for and look forward to. Everyone who mattered would read his story when the collection was published. His name would mean something. He hadn’t, in fact, been toiling for nothing.
The next morning when I woke, Ernest was at the desk by the window and he was writing.
We had two more weeks in Rapallo and they passed fruitfully for both of us. Ernest seemed to be less threatened by the baby, probably because the words had come back, and he felt the pulse of them. I wasn’t as anxious about the future because Ernest was himself again, buoyed up by all he wanted to accomplish. I could finally be happy about the baby. The only thing that marred the experience at all was Ezra’s taking me to one side as we were leaving. “You know I’ve never been keen on children. That’s another matter. But in this case, with Hem, I think it would be a terrible mistake if you tried to utterly domesticate him.”
“I like him the way he is. Surely you believe me.”
“Of course. That’s how you feel now. But mark my words, this baby will change everything. They always do. Just bear that in mind and be very careful.”
“All right, Ezra, I promise,” I said, and moved away toward Ernest and our train. Pound was Pound and given to speech-making, and I didn’t take him seriously that day. I was far too optimistic about everything to heed any warnings, but years later his parting remarks would come back to me sharply. Pound was Pound, but about this one thing he had been dead right.
TWENTY-FOUR
hen we returned to Paris in early April, I was very ready to be home. The trees were newly flowering, the streets were washed clean and hung with fresh laundry; children ran along the gravel paths in the Luxembourg Gardens. Ernest was working with intensity, and though I missed him when he was away, I was happier to be on my own than before.
It sounds funny to say it, but for the first time I had my own project. I took long walks every day for my health and tried to eat well and get plenty of rest. I bought yards and yards of soft white cotton and spent hours sitting in the sun and hand-stitching baby clothes. In the evenings I read the letters of Abélard and Héloïse, a love story that suited me far more than Fitzgerald’s disintegrating Jazz Age couple. I felt hopeful about absolutely everything as spring passed into early summer. My middle thickened and my breasts grew fuller. I was tan and strong and content—more substantial, as Shakespear had said—and began to believe that I’d finally discovered my purpose.
When he wasn’t toiling away in his room on the rue Descartes, Ernest spent a lot of time with Gertrude. She had commiserated when he told her about the lost manuscripts, of course, but was less sympathetic about his concerns over the coming baby.
“You’ll do it anyway. You’ll push through.”
“I’m not near ready,” he said.
Gertrude had narrowed her eyes at him and said, “I’ve never known a man who was. You’ll do just fine.”
“What were you hoping she’d say?” I asked when he relayed the story to me.
“I don’t know. I thought she might have some advice.”
“And did she?”
“No, actually. Nothing beyond ‘Do it anyway.’ ”
“That’s perfect advice for you. You will do it anyway.”
“Easy for you to say. All you have to do is cut and sew baby clothes.”
“That and make the baby, thank you very much. It’s not coming out of the sky.”
“Right,” he said distractedly, and went back to work.
Not long after we returned to Paris, Jane Heap, the editor of the Little Review, wrote asking Ernest to contribute something to the next issue. Among the lost sketches in the valise was a series of vignettes he was collectively calling Paris, 1922. They all began with the phrase “I have seen” and painted memorable and often violent moments he’d witnessed or read about in the past year. One depicted Chèvre d’Or’s ruinous collapse at Auteuil. Another described how Peggy Joyce’s Chilean lover had shot himself in the head because she wouldn’t marry him. Everyone had followed the actress’s desperate story in the headlines, but Ernest’s take on it was more vivid and alive than anything you could find in a newspaper. Whether he’d gotten the knowledge secondhand or not, each piece was graphic and brutal and completely convincing. Ernest believed he’d never done anything sharper or stronger, and Gertrude agreed. He was writing knockout punches.
“You might not want to hear it,” Gertrude said, “but I think your losing everything has been a blessing. You needed to be free. To start with nothing and make something truly new.”
Ernest nodded solemnly, but I knew he was tremendously relieved. So was I.
“I want to take another shot at the Paris vignettes for Jane Heap. But I don’t want to simply revive their corpses. New is new. I’m thinking of pushing them out into paragraphs, so they really begin to move.” He was watching her face carefully as he spoke, feeding off her encouragement. “Each would be less a sketch than a miniature wound up and let go.”
“By all means,” she said, and in a very short time, he was ready to show her a draft that captured the goring of a matador with ferocious intensity. He was particularly anxious to get her take on it because the scene was based on a story she herself had told him about the bullfights in Pamplona. You wouldn’t have known, reading the passage, that he’d never been.
“This is exceptional,” Gertrude said. “You’ve reproduced it exactly.”
“That was the point,” he said, clearly pleased to hear it. “But I want to know how bullfighting works firsthand. If I went myself, I could gather material for more sketches. Mike Strater’s keen to go and so is Bob McAlmon. Bob’s got plenty of money. He could front the whole trip.”
“Go,” Gertrude said.
“You should,” I agreed. “Everything’s pointing that way.”
When we got home that night, I asked Ernest if I could read all of the miniatures he’d done so far and was stopped cold by one about his time in Turkey. It was set on the Karagatch Road and described, among other things, a woman giving birth like an animal in the rain.
I handed the pieces back, praising them to high heaven, as they deserved, but also couldn’t help saying, “You don’t have to hide how scared you are about this baby coming. Not from me.”
“Sure I’m scared. How will I work? What will happen to our good time?”
“Not just that. I know you’re worried about me.”
“A little.”
“Please don’t. Nothing bad will happen.”
“How could you possibly know that? Something could always go wrong. I’ve seen it myself.”
“It’s going to be fine. I can feel it.”
“Just the same, I’ve been wondering if we shouldn’t have the baby in Toronto. I could get full-time work at the Star. The hospitals are supposed to be very fine there, and I would have a steady job. We’ll need the money for sure.”
“Aren’t you a good papa already,” I said, and kissed him softly on the mouth.
“I’m trying to want this. To ward off all the troubling thoughts, too.”
“And stuff in as much living as you can before the baby comes?”
“That too, yes.”
The coming weeks brought a flurry of plans about Spain. He met often with Strater and Bob McAlmon in cafés, planning the itinerary, but for whatever reason Ernest always came back from these meetings peevish and irritated with the other men. McAlmon was a poet and friend of both Ezra and Sylvia. He was married to the British writer Annie Ellerman, who wrote under the pseudonym
Bryher. It was very widely known that Annie was a lesbian and that Bob was keener on men than women. The marriage was one of convenience. On and off, Annie had been very involved with the poet H.D., another of Pound’s “pupils,” and although none of this seemed to trouble Bob in the least, it got under Ernest’s skin. I wasn’t exactly sure why. We were surrounded by every combination of sexual pairing and triangulation, so I didn’t think it was the homosexuality that got to Ernest per se. It was more likely the distribution of power. Annie was an heiress. Her father was a shipping magnate who happened to be the wealthiest man in England. Although Bob had money of his own, it wasn’t anywhere near what Annie had, and there was the impression that she kept him on a leash and that he needed her if he was going to go on running his brand-new press, Contact Editions. Bob was dependent on Annie, and Ernest might someday be dependent on Bob, if he wanted to be published. Contact Editions was new but earmarked for greatness and actively looking for the sharpest, freshest writing possible.
Knowing that he should impress Bob meant that Ernest was ineluctably drawn to offend him. By the time Bob, Ernest, and Mike Strater had left for Spain, Ernest and Bob were barely even speaking. The trip became an awkward one in many ways. Bob (with help from Annie) was footing all the bills, and this brought out the very worst in Ernest. He was always critical of the rich and hated to feel obligated. I learned later from Mike that Ernest had also immediately taken over as the “expert” on the trip, lecturing the other men incessantly. He loved bullfighting from the very first moment. In his letters to me, he talked only of the courage of the toreros and the bulls, too. The whole thing was a great and moving tragedy that you could see and feel, close enough to raise the hair on your neck.
When he came back a week later, he was brimming with enthusiasm. He practiced the dramatically flared passes he’d learned in Ronda and Madrid with a tablecloth in our apartment.
He turned parallel to our table, the only bull available for the moment. “There’s an incredible calm as the matador watches the animal come, only thinking of what he has to do to bring him in correctly and not about the danger. That’s where the grace is. And the difficulty, of course.”
