Just come back.
G.
Mr. Gerald Murphy
Savoy-Plaza Hotel
767 Fifth Avenue
New York
November 1928
M. Owen Chambers
Chambers Field
La Fontonne
Antibes
France
Dear Owen,
We have just arrived in New York and I am currently sitting at the desk in our rooms looking out over Central Park, the trees bare and grim. I have an awful sense of déjà vu, images from a childhood nursery and the loneliness and the bleakness of that house where in a top room I sat at a small desk by myself arranging stories in my head of a happier life.
The happier life I am now dreaming of resides with you, back in Antibes. Images of these past months are seared on my brain and I keep them locked up and take them out and turn them over only when I need to remind myself of what I’m doing all this for. If I’m completely honest, there is also an enormous sense of guilt and foreboding. How will I tell Sara? How will we arrange our life? As you know, I cannot leave her and the children. But I must be honest with her. She is my best friend and my wife. And these lies are poisonous, and a prison for us both. I know she must be told.
Monty Woolley once said to me that there are many ways to live one’s life. It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. For his wisdom and his trouble, I gave him the cold shoulder. But now I wish I had listened more carefully. I have always been good at arranging things, but this is one fantasy I don’t know how to bring about. I am afraid of destroying everything I spent my life building, but I am also afraid of not actually living my life.
It is strange being back in America, knowing that we will be here for four months—the longest period since we left seven years ago. And in Hollywood, too. I wonder what we will make of it.
Before we set sail I received a letter, a poem, really, from Archie, from his new home in Conway. He wrote:
This land is my native land. And yet
I am sick for home for the red roofs & the olives,
And the foreign words & the white of the sea fall.
“How can a wise man have two countries?”
How can a man behold the sun & want
A land far off, alien, smelling of palm trees,
And the yellow gorse at noon in the long calms?
How indeed? I am a man who wants two countries. Your love, your body is a country to me, a land far off now.
Tonight we will dress in our finery and go off to see Phil Barry’s new play, Holiday, and Don Stewart’s acting debut. Then tomorrow, we board the Super Chief for Hollywood and the studios and the madness of filmmaking that awaits us.
Scott insists that King Vidor is a serious man, despite his profession, and that my work on Hallelujah! will also be taken seriously. King says he wants his story of black sharecroppers to be authentic and that my help with the score and photography will be indispensable, but I have heard enough about the movie business to take that with at least several grains of salt. Vladimir, however, feels very optimistic about his role as a production assistant. God help us.
How are things on your end? I wonder if you have your running water yet or if “Antibes Time” is rolling as slowly as ever.
Tonight I will be thinking of you, of lying with you, of holding your hand, and of my fingertips feeling the place at the base of your neck. I will be thinking of all of us, too. Of the treasure hunt we went on, your happiness and the happiness of the children, and of Sara’s beautiful face on the deck of the Honoria, when it seemed possible that we could live together, that perhaps joy could be assembled out of a variety of parts, that we could build our own instrument of precision. Of all the days since you’ve come back, that is my favorite. Do you think of it too?
Do not forget me. I will return.
G.
1929
Honoria leaned her hot head against Dow-Dow as the train rattled along the tracks. She’d been dreaming they were already there, home, but then she’d awoken to the movement and Dow-Dow’s hand feeling her forehead.
The doctor in Paris had been kind, but Dow-Dow had looked funny after he came out of his office, and he’d made the taxi driver stop at a telegraph office before they went on to the Gare de Lyon. He said he’d only cabled to tell Mother that they’d arrived safe and sound. And that they would all be together again soon.
Honoria didn’t want to go back to Switzerland, where they’d already been for a month, which seemed like forever. Back to that place full of sick people, the Hotel Palace, huge and dark and dull-looking. Where Patrick was so ill he couldn’t get out of bed and they all had to be quiet as mice all the time. Where Dow-Dow was always angry and sad, and Mother looked like a piece of string pulled too tight. Where Dottie Parker tried to cheer them up but always ended up slurring her words and crying a little when she thought no one was looking.
And it was cold all the time, because tuberculosis patients like Patrick had to sleep in an unheated room, the doctors said. And his room was next to their rooms.
Dow-Dow wasn’t around during the day very much; Honoria would spy him sometimes on the balcony where Patrick spent his days outdoors, bundled up. Or she would see her father slipping by, carrying things for Patrick—a chamber pot, fresh pajamas, another blanket—wearing what he called his Swiss peasant outfit: brown britches and a green felt apron with a wonderful bronze chain.
Sometimes she would hear him yelling at the doctors. And once, when she hid behind Patrick’s sickroom door, she saw the doctors giving Patrick the gas injection, a huge needle, the fattest Honoria had ever seen, pushed into his armpit, and Dow-Dow just stood there crying. It was to collapse the bad lung, immobilize it, and stop the spread of the TB, she’d heard her father tell Dottie. Patrick had only one good lung, and they didn’t know how long that one would last.
She knew Mother was trying hard to keep them happy and distracted. She’d had their dogs brought up from home. Well, really it was Dottie who’d driven all their things, including the animals, from Villa America all the way to Montana-Vermala in her shiny green car, because Mother and Dow-Dow had to go on ahead for Patrick. And now there was also a pet monkey named Mistigris, and Dottie had brought them a parrot, which took big bites out of Dow-Dow’s ear and made them all laugh. Mother said Ernest and Pauline would come up for Christmas and that Ernest would teach them how to ski and they could shoot a goose and go on mountain adventures. But it didn’t feel like happy news.
Honoria knew, at almost twelve, that it was her job to help Mother and not complain, but she hadn’t felt very well herself lately. Still, it hadn’t been all bad. They had just celebrated Mother’s birthday with a cake and champagne. Honoria was allowed to have a sip. And Dow-Dow toasted Mother, and then they entwined their arms and drank their champagne as if they were drinking from the other’s glass. And then Dow-Dow kissed Mother very gently. And there were doctors and nurses there, and they all clapped, and even Patrick smiled.
Although, later, when Honoria asked when they would be going home for good, Mother had answered: “Not just yet.” And she’d known that that meant not for a long time. And she also knew then that Patrick would die. Even if Mother and Dow-Dow didn’t believe it.
Owen was waiting for them at Villa America. He’d gotten there early, long before they were expected to arrive, and had been sitting in Gerald’s studio looking at his work and reading and rereading the letter from Hollywood, the one he had begun to carry with him everywhere, like a talisman.
Gerald was returning today from Montana-Vermala, where the Murphys would now stay indefinitely, in a sanatorium atop an Alpine glacier, while they waited to see if Patrick would live or die.
Gerald had stopped in Paris to bring a feverish Honoria to a specialist there, to see if she’d been infected with TB as well. They believed Patrick had contracted it in America. Where they never should have gone. And now they were on their way to Antibes. To close down Villa America.
/> It had been eight months since the letter from Hollywood had been sent. And in eight months, it had all come crashing down, and Owen found himself waiting, waiting still, while this horror played out. Owen turned the letter over in his hand. It was strange, he thought, looking at the words on the page, a message from the past.
Mr. Gerald Murphy
1737 Angelo Drive
Beverly Hills, CA
United States
February 1929
M. Owen Chambers
Chambers Field
La Fontonne
Antibes
France
Dear Owen,
Well, we’ll be making our way back to New York shortly and from there, finally, to Villa America. It can’t be too soon, as I think you must have gleaned from my previous letters. Still, I feel like every day I am struck anew by the inauthenticity of where we have been stranded these last months.
Home to the Skippety Crickets Cake Shop, Le Naughty Waffle Drive-In, Barkies Sandwich Shoppe (complete with the huge drooping head of a dog atop the sign), and a chain of grocery stores disturbingly named the Piggly Wiggly Stores. And oh, the doughnuts—or do-nuts, as they like to call them here. This is the pinnacle of what our country can produce.
Dottie Parker and Bob Benchley have been instrumental in keeping us somewhat compos mentis, for they, too, are feeling the strain of living in this god-awful way station of life.
Six weeks was all it took to do Vladimir in. I’m not sure if he has made his way from Paris to Antibes yet, but when he does get there I am certain he will regale you with his feelings on the subject. A “moral desiccation” is how he described his ailment.
We have just concluded a visit to Sara’s sister Olga and her husband, Sidney, in Carmel, which cheered Sara considerably. The two haven’t seen each other in a while, and Hoytie isn’t a very good advertisement for sisterly love.
We all stayed in their log cabin and it made a wonderful change from the holocausts we endured at Marion Davies’s house and the work on the ghastly Hallelujah!
Resigning from that film may have been the best thing I have done for the saving of my Irish soul. A month into production, they had it so full of “Lor’ sakes!” and “Oh, no’m, Miss Georgia, you can’ts eat dem chitlins” and banjos a-strummin’…well, they might just as well have put the cast of one of Cole’s musicals in blackface and had done with it.
Since my last letter there has also been disturbing news from two different quarters. First, Pauline wrote to tell us that Ernest’s father committed suicide in December. We then received a strange letter from Ernest, full of bravado on the subject but also darkly hinting at his own similar demise. I still don’t know what to make of it. But it rattled us.
Second, it seems Esther is getting married. The gentleman in question is John Strachey, an English politician. I had only just received a long letter from Noel detailing my sister’s obsession with Natalie Barney when Esther herself rang up to tell me of her impending nuptials.
It has made me think about a lot of things, all the complicated strands of our familial ties. I realize that I have perhaps been hard on her over the years, most likely because her proclivities rubbed up against my own personal concealments.
But now that she is doing what I would have urged her to do, I am heartbroken for her. I feel her life is a very sad one, the work left undone, the book she never seems able to finish, the love unconsummated or unreturned, and now this flight even farther from herself, from her true nature. Esther, an English politician’s wife? Can this really end happily? You are the only one to whom I can tell the whole truth of my feelings about this.
Then again, maybe she knows what she’s doing. Perhaps this is her arrangement of life. As for myself, I don’t want any more disguises, not to the people that matter. And you and Sara and the children are all that really matter to me.
I was happy to hear that the works at the field are going according to schedule and that you will have a decent and fit place to live in before long. Although I wonder if anything will ever be as beautiful as that run-down barn and the plaid blanket and your coffee hot from the gas burner. Promise me that you’ll keep them and bring them out once in a while.
I wonder—sometimes with optimism, and sometimes through blackness—how everything will turn out for all of us. Is it possible for three people to share love? My God, I hope so. Because if happiness truly exists, I believe we have all deserved some piece of it.
Until I see you, I am sending all my love,
G.
The November air inside the unheated studio had made Owen’s fingers go numb and he fumbled a bit as he folded the letter back up and put it into his pocket. He thought of a time long ago when he used to take a horse and cart out before the sun had even risen and deliver milk and eggs to people on an island that used to be his home. The way that the cold used to freeze smell so that the world became almost odorless.
In front of him, two paintings were propped up. The first was Portrait, the one Gerald had written to him about in Berlin.
There was a ruler running down the center, dividing it in two. To the left was a huge eye. To the right, a footprint. Below, lips. There were also three fingerprints. All these, he knew, were from Gerald’s own body, meticulously copied and enlarged on the canvas.
But there was also something else. In the left-hand corner, next to another, smaller ruler, was a profile. Owen’s profile.
I wonder if I measured every inch of you and added it up what it would come to. Would I know you any better if I could add the sum of your parts?
Owen put his hand over his eyes. Sometimes he wondered why he had ever come back. It wasn’t that he’d been so happy in Berlin, but this…
He supposed he knew; it was the possibility, however slim, that everything might turn out right. It was Gerald’s belief in this dream of some sort of paradise for them all.
Spring and summer had passed in a haze of sex and love and the potential of what might happen afterward. They’d talked about loving Sara, about telling Sara. Sometime. Sometime in a future that would never arrive. He couldn’t believe he’d ever thought such a fantasy could really come true, that there could be a resolution with no responsibility, no pain. It was crazy. Worse than crazy. It might have brought bad luck.
And now. Well, if he looked at himself now, he saw a man who wanted to steal a father away from his family while a child’s life hung in the balance. That’s what had come out of all this. That’s what he had become.
He took his hand away from his face and forced himself to look again at the second painting, Gerald’s latest, Wasp and Pear.
A ripe green pear, split in two, one half showing its core, a seed, the other half its skin. And a huge and intricate wasp with curving wings fastened to it, hooked into it with its mouth, feeding on its sweetness.
Was he, Owen, the wasp? Sara and Gerald, the two parts of the pear? He felt sick. Perhaps, if he was honest, that’s all he’d ever been. To Charlie and Flora, to Sara and Gerald, to Quentin. An unthinking, insentient creature that fed on the insides of fuller people. Carrying with it, in its tail, death and pain.
Sometimes, lately, he wondered about that boy he’d killed in the tunnel. What if it had been the other way around; what if he had died and the boy had lived? Would the boy have gone on to do better than him? Be a better person than he was? But Owen hadn’t died. He’d lived. And these people had brought him back, cut open the cocoon he was living in. And a wasp had flown out.
What disgusted him most, though, was that despite knowing all this, he had hope. It grew like a weed when nothing else would grow, defying inhospitable weather, an insult to the real crops that withered before they even had a chance to take root.
Owen was waiting in the driveway when their car pulled in. Gerald stepped out first, then reached back in, scooped his daughter up in his arms, and carried her straight past Owen and into the house.
He’d moved quickly enough that Owen hadn’t been able t
o get a good look at him. But when Gerald came back down the stairs, Owen saw that his face had changed. All the features were sharper, older.
“The doctor says she’s been exposed,” Gerald said, looking at him but also looking through him somehow. “She has speckles on her lungs. We’re leaving tomorrow for Switzerland. We’ll know more in a week.”
Owen nodded. He knew he shouldn’t touch him. Didn’t dare. The body that had been his to touch was gone, replaced with another Gerald’s body, one that belonged to someone else.
In the living room, all the white furniture was pale gray in the November light. There was a bronze bucket full of now-dried eucalyptus sitting on the coffee table.
“Would you like a drink?” Gerald asked, as if half remembering an old habit.
“Yes,” Owen said.
Gerald went to the bar. “I don’t have anything fresh,” he said, looking helplessly at the bottles. “Whiskey?”
“Whiskey’s fine,” he said.
Gerald brought the drinks over and sat in a chair opposite him, crossing his legs, arranging his tie, trying to smooth down his crumpled white shirt.
“How’s the business?” he asked Owen. “Is the Panic affecting it?”
“I don’t know yet,” Owen said. “The bank’s not saying anything. You?”
“We’re not sure. Hoytie’s lost her shirt. Our man’s trying to see through the dust. But none of that matters now.”
“And Sara?”
“Not good,” Gerald said. “But she’s being very brave. We’re both…we’re both trying.”
They were silent for a while and Owen wondered if Gerald wanted him there at all. He’d asked him to come in his telegram. But now it felt wrong. “How’s Patrick?”
“He’s a very sick little boy,” Gerald said, looking down at his glass. “And he is so little, Owen. But the stoicism…I’ve never known such patient, private determination.” He stopped. “I’ve never been quiet like that. It’s what will help him survive.”
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