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Mrs. Hemingway

Page 5

by Naomi Wood


  “But twenty-one? Twenty-five would have been disappointing. Twenty-one is an outrage. You must be barely out of college.”

  Ernest shrugged and poured her a gin with lemon on the rim of the glass. He sunk a green olive in there too.

  “Is there not a mixer?”

  “Gin tastes better straight.”

  “Are you a Princeton man?”

  “No. I served in Italy.”

  “Did you see much action?”

  “My leg was shot up before I could see much.”

  “That’s terrible.”

  “Not so bad. I fell in love with a nurse in Milan. She was called Agnes. That was worse.”

  Hadley laughed and tried not to seem too interested. His beauty only seemed to underline how frozen she had felt these past few years. But tonight she felt reckless and bold. She wanted to be drunk nearly all of the time if this was how it felt. “And is your heart still in Milan, Mr. Hemingway?”

  “Not anymore, thank God. Please,” he said, “call me Ernest.”

  “What do you do now?”

  “I’m a writer.” His eyes momentarily followed a pretty girl down the length of the corridor before they came to rest once more on her. “Or trying to be.”

  “What kind of thing do you write?”

  “Short stories, sketches. Mostly articles. I’m a journalist by day.”

  “Do you enjoy it? Earning your keep that way?”

  “It just keeps me from writing what I really want to write.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “A novel. Something strong. With the fat boiled off.”

  She laughed. “I’d like to read something you’ve written.”

  “Do you write? Is that why?”

  “Not at all.” Hadley had never said this before, but she decided that this stranger would make the perfect first audience. “But for a long time I wanted to be a concert pianist. I tried very hard at it. Every day I practiced. Sometimes I’d have to lie down on the carpet for fifteen minutes of every hour because I was so tired from practice. There’s a cost you have to pay, to write, to sing, to play. I don’t think I was strong enough to pay that price.”

  Ernest smiled at her. “No one ever tells you that: that there’s no method. Writing’s a lawless place.” Someone shouted her name but Hadley didn’t want to move away from him. “Someone’s calling for you.” He stood close to her. That he might be interested in her was almost impossible, but it seemed as if he was.

  “My mother died two months ago.” She had no idea why she had to say this.

  “Oh”—and his smile disappeared—“I’m sorry.”

  ‘No, I’m sorry. It’s just … I’ve nursed her these past months. And I haven’t been out much, on account of that.” Tears felt close but she wouldn’t allow them. “I feel a little out of the scene. I feel like you might have to wipe the dust off me.”

  “I’d wipe the dust off you.”

  Hadley smiled into her gin, pleased to her toes.

  “Were you close?”

  “No. She was obsessed with politics and suffrage. She didn’t have much time for me.”

  “You’re not a modern woman then?”

  “I am modern, but maybe in a traditional way. Does that make any sense?” Ernest nodded. Hadley cleared her throat and finished the gin. “Our talk has ended up rather grim. That’s my fault. What I meant was it’s nice to be with friends. It was a relief when mother died. I know that sounds awful. But the house—being inside it every day— it was killing me.”

  “Hadley!” The record had stopped. Her friend beckoned her over. “Come and play!”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Go on, Hash. Can I call you that?” Ernest took her by the elbow back to the piano. “The whole party’s demanding it!” Ernest placed her gin on the piano top with all the other half-empty glasses smudged with lipstick. He bent down to her ear. “My mother’s a musician. She’d like to meet you.” He smiled. “Just play what comes to mind.”

  “I only know classical,” she said, feeling rather stunned. She hastened to pull down her dress when she sat at the stool. Hadley tried to think of a song that wouldn’t sink the mood. Eventually, she settled on Bach, a sonata. It seemed to make people rueful, but in a romantic rather than melancholic way.

  As she played she thought how all of the happiest times in her life had been with music. Often, in the afternoons, when her mother would take a nap and her yellow mouth would fall open in laboring breath, Hadley would take a walk around St. Louis, keeping her eyes to the sidewalk, listening to women her own age talking about men, housework, a new pair of gloves. When she got home she would stuff a towel into her mouth to prevent her mother hearing the lonely sobs from the bathroom. Then, in the afternoons, she played the piano, and momentarily, all that sadness lifted.

  Maybe she had played the nurse with more morbid gusto than she knew. It wasn’t just her mother keeping her inside that stopped her—she could have slipped away in the evening. Something else in her had given up—years ago really. She’d given up on friends and dancing. The only men she had talked to all this time were her brother-in-law and the grocer at the end of the street, who would look at her over the pale rounds of the oranges with pity. She thought about what that word meant. Spinster. And whether, at twenty-eight, she might be called that now.

  Hadley neared the end of the sonata. Ernest hadn’t become transfixed with her hands at the keys or become mesmerized by her playing, nothing like that. Instead, he looked surprised when she laid down the lid.

  “Put on another record, someone,” she said. “It’s too sad for a party.” But then the room burst into applause, and Hadley felt pleased. She had done well.

  When the party ended Ernest walked her out onto the sidewalk. Rain made the roads slick and the yellow leaves had been stamped into the sidewalk by the tread of boots. Ernest stood shyly with his hands in his pockets.

  “That’s a fine cape you have on,” she said, tugging his collar.

  Ernest looked rather bashful. “Women say that.”

  “It’s a hit, is it? You look …” she laughed, thinking of the word: “ducal.”

  “Can I walk you home?”

  “You could, but you’ve already done it. I’m staying here tonight.”

  He slipped an arm around her and kissed her. It was more chaste than she had imagined, just the press of his lips on hers. “How long are you in Chicago?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “We have three weeks then.”

  They made promises to see each other again after she returned home. She wrote him a letter, telling him how finding him felt like liberation; like jailbreak. She decided she was going to get out of the Midwest. She was going to break free—of St. Louis, and her mother’s ghost—with or without Ernest Hemingway.

  11. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  Mercifully the evening has lost the day’s heat. The last of the day’s light comes from the sun dipping behind the trees and ends on the terra-cotta tiles in the shape of the villa’s windows. “I remember this,” Ernest says as he sees her in the dress she wore to the Chicago party. The fabric pulls over the width of her hips but it still fits. “I forgot how lovely it is.”

  Conscious of the ultimatum she has set down, they are being nice to each other. “I’d never shown my knees before. And my hair was long, remember?”

  He fixes his cuffs at the window. “I remember.”

  “I hated it when it was cut in New York. I felt too much like a boy. But you liked it. And I knew how much your father would have hated it, which helped.” She goes over to the dressing table. “He despised bobbed hair.”

  Hadley pulls her hair back now, brushing it with three firm strokes on either side. “Your mother never said anything about it. She was always more tactful than we thought,” Hadley says. “She chooses her battles, like you.”

  Ernest looks at her quizzically, but doesn’t comment.

  The earrings clip her lobes and she loosens them so the
y don’t squeeze. Lightly, she applies a blush and eyeliner as a friend in Paris has taught her to do. In the mirror she looks fine but still can’t escape the image she has of herself as a handsome peasant who should feel grateful for rolling around with the aristocrats of the village for a precious few years. There is still much good to him, but it’s this summer; it’s made everyone so bad. She can feel it in herself and in Fife: how quickly they are moved by petulance or glee. Mascara spikes her lashes. It might be the first time she has worn makeup this vacation.

  Hadley inspects her reflection. She wishes the bones of her chest might protrude a little, or that her cheekbones would rise from her face. She imagines that, after a divorce, she might stop eating and her friends in Paris might shake their heads and talk among themselves, saying she is worryingly thin. How delighted she’d be, to be worried about like that.

  “What do you mean I choose my battles?” Ernest asks from the bathroom.

  “Why did you never yell when I lost the suitcase?”

  He comes back into the room. “This is what you want to talk about? Now?”

  “Yes.”

  He gives a sigh. “I thought the worst had happened. I thought maybe you’d fallen in love with somebody else, or that you didn’t love me anymore, or that I was losing you. Then you were crying and wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.” He stops at the window where she stood that morning, looking down at Fife’s bedroom, thinking today was going to be like all of the others spent here.

  “So you were relieved. All I’d lost was your first novel.”

  “Incomparable with losing a wife.”

  “I’m sorry”—Hadley can’t talk about it without the tears threatening to spill—“about losing it.”

  “It’s over now, Hash. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It just seems like it’s been over since that moment.”

  “There were good times after that. Very good times.”

  He smiles at her and she smiles back: good old friends as always.

  As she opens the box for her amber necklace she sees the bull’s ear, cured and no longer bloody. It was given to her last year by a matador who admired her red hair from the ring. The ear is as hard now as the leather of a shoe. She pulls a finger down the hairy ridge of the ear—it was meant to be a lucky charm, and for a while it had worked. It had fended off other women before Fife had come along. Hadley fixes the necklace, closes the box and feels the hasp click.

  “I heard from the publisher,” Ernest says, sitting down on the wicker chair and draining the last of his gin and tonic.

  “About The Sun?”

  “They say I’m nearly there.”

  “That’s wonderful.” But he doesn’t seem pleased. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “It has to be a success,” he says.

  “So what?”

  “So I can afford more than one good suit and one pair of dress shoes.”

  “Of course it will be a success. I know no one else more likely to succeed than you. And besides, we’ve got enough to eat, enough to pay the rent, and our beautiful son who is well, now, and healthy.”

  “And we’ve got rich enough friends to bail us out when necessary.”

  She puts a last fix to her hair and goes over to him. “Don’t say that.” She kneels down so that she is at eye level with him. “It’s the night-time blues. That’s all. One day you’ll be as rich as Sara and Gerald and only then will you realize you don’t need it.”

  He takes her hand and kisses her palm. “You’re too good for me.”

  Ernest has forgotten to correct her when she said “you” rather than “we.” And her heart sinks again, even though he is kissing her now, just like he did on the cold Chicago sidewalk. Suddenly, she knows his decision before he does. Fife will win. It seems inexorable. It freezes her to the spot.

  “Are we going alone?”

  “Yes,” he says very quietly, almost near the door, so that she can barely hear him over the evening hush. “We’ll meet Fife there.”

  “Papa!”

  Bumby’s footsteps rush up the central stairway. They see, first, a small hand move the brocade, then his sandals, still dark knees, and his lovely brown face show up at the doorway. His eyes are sleepy but curious: he is not allowed in their bedroom. “Papa, I got this for you.” He hands his father a red rose from the garden.

  Ernest lifts him up and moves his face along his child’s face. Bumby shies away from the bristles of his mustache. “Merci, mon amour. Now shall I give it to Maman?”

  “Oui,” he says, very decisively, but then his eyes narrow with suspicion. “Where are you going?”

  “To a party.”

  “Can I come?”

  “I think you’re too tired for that tonight.”

  Hadley watches her husband and son: aghast that this could be it.

  Ernest plants him on the floor. “You tell Marie you can have a chocolat chaud after your bath.” He pulls a finger over one of his son’s knees and sees the white trail left. “You’re so mucky! Now look at your mother. Look how pretty she is!”

  “Very pretty,” Bumby agrees.

  “Kiss her good night.”

  Hadley bends over to feel her son’s lips on her cheek. “Good night, darling.” Bumby gives her the red rose and she puts it in the perfume bottle by the mirror. She takes her shawl and wraps it around her.

  “Ready?” Ernest asks, by the door, looking at her.

  “Yes.” And she follows him out into the night.

  12. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  They arrive at the party later than they would have liked; Scott is already very drunk, as is Zelda. They greet everyone to reassuring murmurings: they are so pleased Bumby is through the coqueluche, what a strong boy he is, et cetera. Their friends say how much they have missed them, but they look tanned and golden, and Hadley suspects this might not be quite the truth. Dinner has already been eaten: claws and shells are the leftovers of a bouillabaisse. Sara and Gerald’s kids are evidently still closeted away, just in case the infection has been carried on the Hemingways’ coattails.

  Fife is nowhere to be seen.

  “We had to eat with the kids before they went to bed,” Sara says. “You have already eaten, haven’t you?”

  Ernest says yes, even though they haven’t. Hadley gives her husband a look, which is meant to say: I’m starving, even if you aren’t. This performance shouldn’t be done on an empty stomach.

  Sara wears so many pearls she looks positively bandaged. Most people—and most of the people here—prefer Sara to her husband, but Hadley has always preferred Gerald. Ernest thinks him a poseur, but it’s precisely this that appeals to her. Both she and Gerald seem miscast for their roles, while the others are pitch-perfect, delivering their lines pat. He is a mortal, like her, among the gods.

  It had been Gerald who had laughed warmly when Hadley, at a café session in Paris, had gaily declared Ernest to be the first American killed in Italy. “Amazing news that the man himself lives and breathes next to you, eh, Hash?” She realized her mistake and blushed. “Wounded,” she’d said quietly. “I meant wounded.” She caught Sara giving Fife one of those looks. But she was thankful it was Gerald who had been on hand to deliver the gentler riposte.

  Everybody is sitting around the table under the linden tree looking relaxed and handsome as spring. “It’s so good to see you two,” Sara says. “Have you been awfully pent up?”

  “It’s good to be out,” Hadley says in her best attempt at neutrality.

  “And Bumby’s completely out of it?”

  “It’s all out of him, thank God. He was just too tired to come.” Hadley wonders why Ernest had to lie about dinner. Her eyes travel the empty bowls; there’s a bread roll left at Scott’s place.

  “Well that’s just wonderful. I can’t wait to be all together again.” Sara squeezes her hand and looks at Hadley, mother to mother. She has an intense stare made more so by her bangs
that come just short of the brows. She is a handsome woman, though not like Zelda or Fife. She isn’t skinny; could not slip, eel-like, into tiny dresses or bathing suits.

  “Fantastic news, eh, Hash?” Gerald emerges from the house with a tray of drinks. Framed by the black satin sofas, white walls, and the vast vases of Sara’s peonies, he could be emerging from a Hollywood set. He could play a leading man, were it not for the creep of baldness. “Cocktails!” he announces, and, as if on cue, he nearly trips on the step down from the house.

  “Do be careful!” Sara says but giggles. She is never mean to her husband.

  The wind carries the smell of the citrus orchard from the bottom of the garden. Heliotrope and mimosa flower by the gravel paths. Gerald puts down the tray of drinks and cookies with a flourish. Ernest looks embarrassed and barricades himself between Hadley and Sara. Gerald kisses Hadley near the lips and Scott goes for another glass.

  “What number is that?” Sara asks.

  “I haven’t drunk a thing all night.”

  “Minus the aperitif before dinner.”

  “And the bottle of wine during it,” Gerald says as he passes drinks around the table.

  “So tell me, dearest Hadern,” Scott says, with the moniker only he uses for her. “What have you been occupying yourself with?”

  The table turns to look at her. “Oh, you know. Reading. Writing endless telegrams to my absent husband. Looking after Bumby, mostly.”

  “She is a doting mother,” Ernest says, looking at her proudly, but then his eyes flit upward toward the house as if he has been, in a moment, transfixed.

  Fife walks from the house smoking a cigarette. A vest plunges from her shoulders. Her skirt is made of black feathers, layer upon layer from the waist, and it resembles the closed wings of a swan. Their spines click against each other as she moves, her feet making no sound, as if she really did advance like a bird of prey under the lounge’s electric lamps. When Hadley turns back she notices her husband is entranced, as if only he has had the wherewithal to spot this goose no one else has thought to shoot.

  “Darling dress, isn’t it?” Sara asks, with a plump wink for Hadley who feels dumbfounded, ambushed. What can an old serge frock do next to this bird’s plumage? Scott offers her a cigarette as if in consolation. She tries to recompose her features. It’s just a dress. Only a dress. And Ernest has always hated women who care too much for their appearance.

 

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