by Naomi Wood
“I still feel the same way about you.” The expression on his face changes completely. She can’t read it. She wonders if it is love. It just might be. “But my feelings for Fife are there.”
“Are they very strong?”
A pause, then: “Yes.”
“Strong enough to end us?”
He doesn’t answer. Hadley walks on a little farther and he follows her. They come to a brightly painted canoe with big red letters: DAME DE LA FRANCE. The warm waves come over her feet and she leans on the boat’s body. She will be the one, then, to set out the terms. “This is what we will do. We will go back to Paris. You will move your things out of the apartment. You can marry Pauline, if that is your wish.” Ernest looks horrified and relieved all at once. “But only after a hundred days of separation. No more, no less. If you want to be with her after that, then you have my blessing. I will grant you a divorce. But you have to prove to me and to yourself that this isn’t a passing affair.”
“Hash.” The tide reaches his feet then pulls away. She rises from the canoe and walks up to the end of the beach. He follows, walking over the sand slowly behind her.
The trees sound out into the night. They walk back to the villa, tracing the same steps they made early this morning when they came out to the raft to swim, to play their game by the rocks, and to hope, while they held their silence, that things could always just continue as they always had been.
Near the lavender, at the villa’s porch, she says: “I’m doing this for us. A hundred days, Ernest. It won’t be long. You’ll work out what you need after that.”
Behind him their three bathing suits hang in the breeze. Upstairs, with the window open, is Fife’s room. They tread quietly into the house alone.
FIFE
13. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.
Fife’s house is splendid. Heads stud the walls: impala, kudu, oryx; their long horns magnificent and as hard as bark. When the shutters are open a breeze comes into the house from the Gulf carrying in the scent of tamarind, frangipani, banana.
Sometimes it feels as if the house is all moving air.
To either side of a divan or dressing table are matching spiked plants and lamp shades. Oriental rugs are just the right side of fraying and where there are no rugs the floorboards cool her bare feet. Ernest’s books—he has written so many here—sit in the cabinets under the chandeliers of split glass. Copies of old issues of Vogue pile on the secretary.
Nearly ninety years ago, slaves built this house. Seven years ago, the Hemingways moved in, with boxes of manuscripts filling the hall; plaster dust falling onto baby Gregory’s crib and his brother Patrick running through the corridors causing mayhem; shutters falling off the balcony; and Fife and Ernest sharing their first kiss under a nest of two birds where the dining room ceiling had fallen in. Her first job was to renovate the gardener’s toolhouse so that her husband could get to work. Writing, Fife knew, would keep her husband going straight.
Fife sits in the garden with a newspaper and a martini. A map of Europe on the paper’s front page has dotted lines and arrows that show spheres of influence, occupying pressures, sovereignties displaced. Europe chews itself like a child with its fist in its mouth.
What she searches for is something written by Ernest from Spain. Fife scans all of the pages. Nothing, not a single article.
Her garden, around her, is a zoo: a spray of feathers might be a peacock or a flamingo, and cats stretch and crawl over everything—she keeps it this way for the boys. During her husband’s foreign correspondence this past year, the garden has flourished. Every time Ernest has gone to Spain—and this is his third assignment—Fife has attacked with great energy the weeds and roots of unwanted things. Now the garden has an unnerving bloom. But she’d let it go to pot if only Ernest might spend a little more time with her in it.
Fife calls out to the servants. Ernest returns tomorrow and she wants the food perfectly fresh for his arrival: she has planned meals of crawfish and avocado salads with chipped-ice daiquiris. Each time he comes back she convinces herself that this is her husband finally returned to her. But months, sometimes weeks, into his stay he soon announces he’s going back again to cover the war in Spain. It is a world, he has told her, of oranges and shoelaces, a city where there is nothing—and she looks around at this house of splendor and wonders about his need for Madrid. But she knows Madrid has nothing to do with why he goes back.
And yet it seems so pointless for her to be in Key West without him, where they live so that Ernest can go out to fish after a morning at the desk. All Fife wants to do is boat out somewhere on Pilar, eat tuna steak, and swim in the coves as they did in the early years of their marriage, with the sun glittering on the sea top and the both of them half-cut on martinis. She longs for their old cherished life as newlyweds.
Closer to the servants’ quarters Fife spies a silhouette in the window though no one answers her calls. She wonders if the help dislike her. Somehow, they seem to know when they’ve been summoned for company, even though all she does is read them the menu for the week. She can bear the look of pity from the grocer over the plantains, but she can’t take it from her own servants.
At least, in Antibes, there were the three of them. Hadley had her; Fife has no one. Here, in this jerkwater island, right at the bottom of the entire country’s landmass, she doesn’t even have his mistress for company. This morning she went to the hair salon just to feel someone’s hands on her.
“Isobel!” Her voice comes out shouting.
Light streams through the same kimono she has kept since Paris, which she wore in their first stolen mornings together while Hadley was still skiing with Bumby. What a simpler time it had been, back when Hadley had been Ernest’s wife, and she his mistress.
Pink bleeding hearts droop over the terra-cotta, crisped up in the heat. Fife powders the dead leaves in the press of her fingers. A kitten arches its back into her offered palm. It’s tiny: nothing but bones and fur and a wet pink nose. It mews, circling her ankle. But when she kicks it her foot finds only air; it has slunk off to the safety of elsewhere.
Martini in hand, Fife climbs the stairs to her bedroom. It feels like her bedroom now; Ernest says he sleeps better alone, especially when he’s writing. Miró’s The Farm hangs above their bed, filched off Hadley in one of the more suspect pieces of divorce loot. Or perhaps it’s on some kind of permanent loan—she has never been sure of their arrangement.
Out on the balcony is the smell of curing tarpon. On Whitehead Street the lighthouse looks out onto the Atlantic and the Gulf. Ninety miles away is Cuba, where they sometimes go for drinking and dancing, where Ernest sometimes goes for peace and quiet, as if he can’t get enough of that on this four-mile island where nothing much happens.
Their home is the grandest on the street: really the only stable residence in what still feels, to Fife, like a shantytown. It towers over the shacks with their broken balconies and boarding, their frames put together with treenails and pegs. She’s seen builders make a house in a day: made from the salvaged wood of wrecked schooners. Were there to be a direct hit their neighbors would be swept away in the winds and the only house left on this lump of rock would be the Hemingways’.
Beyond the high brick wall a woman wheels her icebox, selling slabs of ice for more cents than they’re worth. Sailors follow. She hears hollering before they head up Duval Street, probably aiming for Sloppy Joe’s. A kid is shouting out his wares: two cents a milk can, probably found in the garbage. In comes a fresh blast of the ripe sewers. Key West: Ernest calls it the Saint Tropez of the Poor. Fife calls it the Rock.
Back in her bedroom she closes the shutters to keep out the stink.
Her wardrobe is still full of her marvelous furs. She’d like to resurrect these coats and bundle up against the metropolitan cold. Fife wants to be with her set and move and talk and laugh; she wants to be harassed for her company. The chinchilla skin is right at the back of the wardrobe. She remembers the night she wore it when
she first met the Hemingways. She remembers, over tea, how Mrs. Hemingway watched her husband with a certain kind of awe: as if, even within the marriage, Ernest were still a kind of celebrity.
Fife hadn’t fallen in love with Ernest at that party. Oh, no. It had been by degrees, over a year in Paris in which his wife slowly bowed out—just as she had always done in bridge.
Now she catches the click click click of the dress from the back of the wardrobe. It still gives her a rush of happiness and excitement, as if she were in Villa America all over again. It’s not the most expensive of her outfits—there are far costlier samples stolen from the Vogue closet—but it is the most cherished.
Without much thinking, Fife decides to try it on. Two children later and more than a decade from Antibes, the dress still fits perfectly: this in itself is a minor triumph. The feathers sound in the breeze. It is a suit of wings.
She would marcel her hair if she had the tongs, just as she had done that Antibes night; instead she paints her lips red. In the mirror’s reflection she sees how soft her lids have become with age: the skin feathers the kohl line. She remembers doing all of these things that evening, while she listened to Hadley catastrophically pleading with Ernest for a decision.
Mrs. Hemingway had never exactly blended into their set: she wasn’t exactly a wit or bon viveur. Sara had said the same thing: Hadley was a wonderful mother and wife, but not quite the companion for a wild party, or, necessarily, a wild author. Fife liked to think Ernest had found that in her. The playmate. The partygoer. Her wealth had also seemed attractive to him. She didn’t care what that made her. Or him. Sara said that when they’d married, on that warm May day in Paris in 1927, their group came to look just as it always should have.
Fife remembers wearing this dress on the night she had won him, walking from the French doors to the terrace, where Hadley sat in proper blue serge—a dress Mrs. Pfeiffer would have approved of—appropriate, say, for a child’s baptism. As she walked she watched Hadley. And Hadley watched her husband watching Fife.
How hard Scott had thrown the fig hours later; it had felt like a tennis ball hit from a crosscourt lob, and how comic the moons of Zelda’s rump had been when Ernest had strong-armed her into a fireman’s lift.
Afterward, when they were cleaning up in the kitchen, Ernest kneeled to wipe the fruit from his dress shoes. When Fife was sure they couldn’t be seen, she slipped her fingers into his mouth and the fig began to melt on his tongue. She felt Ernest tense though he wouldn’t look at her. Nothing for two weeks. Not even earlier on the raft when they had been all alone. And now Ernest was sucking her fingers and grabbing her wrist: just as he had the first time he had touched her in Paris. This time, however, he held on.
Beyond the glass Sara was berating Scott, Hadley wasn’t talking to anyone, and in the kitchen Fife had her fingers in Ernest Hemingway’s mouth.
He let go of her wrist and touched her stocking-less ankle. His fingers slipped upward to her knee. She heard his intake of breath as his hand traveled upward. From the garden Sara smiled at her brightly.
“We can’t do this here,” Fife whispered.
But Ernest wouldn’t stop. She leaned against the sink watching his wife. “Nesto. Upstairs. Now.” It felt right to break the quarantine at Sara and Gerald’s.
Villa America, after all, debauched all of its residents.
She should have thanked Scott for throwing the fig, Zelda for being the best histrionic version of herself, the composer of that waltz who had encouraged Ernest to dance with someone for whom he had no tenderness, because after that night nothing was the same. There was never any chance of going back to the time before Antibes. Not for anyone.
Fife worries at the feathers; how lush they once felt! Now she feels an old crow. Born in 1895, what an ancient she feels next to Ernest, who only seems to look younger as the years pass. How easily he attracts women! How they come in droves, unwelcome as moths.
By her feet there are feathers on the tiles where she has in distraction pulled them from the dress. The frock looks as if it has been supper for a tabby cat. Pulled feathers skitter along the tiles. The telephone rings downstairs.
Fife has always hated the telephone; she feels a child of the twenties, at home in the subterfuge of letters and telegrams, not this bawling thing demanding attention. There’s no time to drag herself from the dress so she rushes the stairs but still manages not to spill a drop of her drink.
“Hello?” she says, a little out of puff.
“Fife? It’s me, Hash.”
Far from Paris, far from Antibes, they are friends once more: it is Hadley’s generosity that has made this happen. They gossip for a few minutes. First about Sara and Gerald who will visit next week, then about Harry Cuzzemano who has been calling her again about Ernest’s lost novel. “I tell him it was fourteen years ago. That suitcase has either been thrown to a bonfire or is in some attic somewhere. It’s silly,” Hadley says, “but I still get upset about it.”
“It was an honest mistake.”
“You know Ernest wouldn’t pay 150 francs for an advertisement on the off chance someone might come forward for a reward? We didn’t have any money but we would’ve spent the same on a ski pass. Maybe we could have found it. Then maybe we could have moved on.”
Dressed in the very frock that robbed Hadley of him, Fife smiles at the irony. Who, then, would have been Mrs. Hemingway?
“Now I just fob him off with dead ends,” says Fife. “I told him Eve Williams might have some explanation for the case.”
“But she died not long after we all left Paris.”
“I know,” Fife says wickedly, “but it took him far longer to work that out on his own.” Briefly, they talk about Czechoslovakia and Spain and the “lunacy of Europe” as Hadley puts it. They talk about their boys: what a fine young man Bumby is turning into, about how nine-year-old Patrick and six-year-old Gregory are doing at school. They gossip about Scott and Zelda because they are the easiest targets, and somehow, remarkably, their struggles seem the least heartbreaking of their set. Best not to talk about the Murphys. Or the Hemingways, indeed.
Fife asks if it is just a social call. She can hear the hesitation in her friend’s voice. “I know Ernest has been away a lot,” Hadley says finally.
Should Fife risk asking for help? It makes her feel ridiculous to be asking this of his ex-wife. Even more so to be standing here like an old ginned debutante. But she’d like to tell someone who knows her husband just as well as she does. “Ernest has found himself a new … affinity.”
Hadley doesn’t say anything. Perhaps this is a fact she already knows. Perhaps even Ernest has told her. They are still firm pals and write each other faithfully. “Her name is Martha Gellhorn. Have you heard of her?”
“Yes, though I’ve never actually met her.”
“She’s from St. Louis,” Fife says. “He must be cursed.”
“How do you mean?”
“Falling in love with all these Midwesterners. Can’t be fun for any man.” Fife means to sound droll but her words are a little hollow.
“You think he’s in love with her?” Hadley probably means in love as opposed to infatuated; there have been those kinds of affairs too.
“I think this has been some time in the making.”
“How long?”
“Last year. Well, the Christmas before it. He brought her to a dinner party, both drunk off their heads. I had to sit there all evening while he talked to this girl hauled in from Sloppy Joe’s. Sara and Gerald were so embarrassed. Then, what do you know, they both end up covering the Spanish war.”
“And have you talked to him?”
“We had a blazing row about a year ago in Paris. He said he would deal with it when I offered to throw myself over the balcony. I thought that meant it was over.”
“And was it?”
“I think it just meant it was confined to Spain.”
“Well. Europe makes fools of all Americans.”
“S
ounds like something Scott would say.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound facetious. Just that I think people behave a little more responsibly when they’re back home. God knows we all acted badly in France.”
Fife lets her silence acknowledge this as truth.
“Every time he’s billeted to Madrid they’re there together. Jinny told me they don’t even bother having separate hotel rooms anymore. I torment myself imagining them: jaunting around Madrid acting like man and wife.”
“How does Jinny know that?”
“Jinny! Jinny somehow knows everything. Oh, Hash, I don’t know what to do!” She composes herself but holds on to the telephone with just as much grip. “I’m scared I’m losing him.”
In the background there is a man’s voice. Paul, Hadley’s husband, is a fine man: kind and quiet and, it seems, enviably unchangeable. Since their marriage, Hadley has rather blossomed, as if all she needed was someone gentle to bring out the bolder parts of her. They had met each other while Paul was still married; in Paris they went around as a three: Hadley, Paul and his wife. None of them, not even Hadley, were innocents anymore.
Hadley sighs. “I can’t think I’d be the best person to advise you. I lost him, after all.” There is only an admission of fact here: as if she is explaining a bad business decision made in her youth. “Maybe the only thing to say is: he’ll grow out of it. During the hundred days, I saw how much in love you were. That’s why I called it off. Because I saw how much you meant to Ernest—how much it was killing him that he couldn’t be with you. This thing with Martha, it sounds like an infatuation. When the Spanish war finishes it will finish off Martha too. She’s someone to get him through the war, that’s all. He’ll not be a man of many wives.”
“I’m his second.”
“Well, sometimes we need a false start before we get it right.”
Fife takes a deep breath. “You’re a saint, Hadley. And a true friend. To us both.” She is about to hang up when she realizes Hadley is trying not to laugh. “What is it?”
