Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  “I don’t know if I should say. It’s rather crass.”

  “You have to.”

  “The one thing I do know about Miss Gellhorn. Her father was a gynecologist in St. Louis. In fact, Dr. Gellhorn used to be my gynecologist.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “All rather Freudian, don’t you think? Just imagine Martha’s father staring up Ernest’s first wife’s undercarriage.”

  “Is it a good sign or a bad one?”

  “Very bad, of course! The affair has been damned from the start.”

  Fife laughs: fully now, with heart. “You’ve cheered me up incalculably, Hash. Though I’m not sure how.”

  “Me neither. Good-bye, Fife dear. Take care. And try not to worry. It will all blow over. Believe me.”

  Fife hangs up and sinks the last of the martini. She sucks at the tangy green olive, spitting the pit back in the glass. This is what her passion for Ernest feels like: she wants to have him all the way down to the stone.

  14. PARIS, FRANCE. 1925–26.

  All fall Fife had meant to leave him to his wife. Her friend, kind Hadley. That October she did try to stay away. But she couldn’t conceal the elation when Hadley invited her over to their apartment. And as it grew cooler, Mrs. Hemingway’s invitations only increased.

  Now every night Fife would leave the office to see them: her chaps. If she’d known her friend had felt uncomfortable, she wouldn’t have gone; but the invitations were always from Hadley. And she couldn’t say no: it was only in their apartment—when she saw Ernest with a manuscript balanced on one knee, his face lit by the coal fire—that a stillness came to her. All day at Vogue she positively vibrated with her own nerves, but as soon as she stepped into the Hemingways’ tiny apartment she felt herself hit like a tuning fork, sounding out the right and perfect note.

  In the evenings the three of them talked books and gossiped about the writers they knew. While she read his work, and he waited for her thoughts, he spat clementine seeds into the fire and watched them flame blue.

  She prayed to God to put in her way a more suitable husband.

  When she should have been at Vogue she helped Hadley with the dishes, the cleaning, the changing of the bedclothes, encouraged her friend at her pursuits with the piano. Anything to be in his space and have her hands on his things. When Hadley needed to sleep off her cold, Fife took care of Bumby, and Hadley would pat her on the arm and say what a dear she was. She felt wretched and knew she was being hateful, but she did not desist.

  With Ernest, she felt that she could only worship him. She praised his work and told him every night how famous he was going to be, how stinking rich, how admired as a writer and almost as a philosopher. She meant every last damn word and she loved to see him grin, ear to ear, when she told him these things.

  One evening, she caught him looking at her. It had been one of those evenings when they read rather than talked and Hadley was in the bedroom, nursing the cold. On these nights her imagination often strayed from the story: Fife wondered what it might feel like if he were to kiss her. Or what might happen if she innocently sat on his knee, or what it would be like to go to bed with him.

  And when she looked up from this daydream, with her legs swung over the ratty armchair just as she had always sat reading as a schoolgirl, this time she found Ernest observing her. It made her feel self-conscious, as if she had been discovered bathing.

  He put down his manuscript and came toward her. The fire behind him darkened his face so that she couldn’t find his expression. He picked up her hand and looked about ready to snap it, but instead he pressed his mouth to the button of her wrist and held his lips there. Hadley coughed in the bedroom behind the wall, and Ernest went back to his chair and gazed into the fire, looking scared and alone.

  They sat for a long time like that, no one saying much. Then Fife began talking in a hushed voice about the mystery of the lost suitcase, and Ernest admitted how sorely he still grieved for his wife’s mistake. Oh, yes: Fife knew there was a special place in hell for women who did this to other women.

  It was Sylvia Beach who mentioned it first. Not to her, but to Jinny. The two women were huddled into their coats at La Rotonde, surveying its patrons with much indifference until one of their set walked in. All afternoon they had been gossiping about Sylvia’s customers at Shakespeare and Co.: whom she liked and whom she didn’t, who didn’t pay their dues on time and who was to be tipped as the next big thing. Sylvia knew just about everyone.

  Fife had been up to fetch drinks when she caught the tail end of what Sylvia was saying. “—is Ernest Hemingway in any way involved?”

  Several people in the café looked around when Fife came to a standstill, hidden by the curtain at the café door.

  Her sister blushed. “Why do you say that?” Her face rose perfectly from the mink that Ernest had so admired above her own half a year back.

  “You’ve no idea how indiscreet people can be: they think a shelf of books is as good as soundproofing. Harry Cuzzemano calls them the Hemingway Troika. It’s just rumors, of course. But I wondered whether they had any basis.”

  “And what do these rumors say?”

  “Just that wherever Hadley goes, there Fife tends to be.”

  “They’re best friends.”

  “All three of them?”

  “I mean Hadley and my sister. They’re best friends.”

  Sylvia dropped a sugar cube into her coffee, one gloved hand stirring the cup. “Ernest has started borrowing love poetry. Walt Whitman, of all people.”

  “So?”

  Sylvia sank her coffee. “Trust me: he’s just not Ernest’s usual tastes, that’s all.” She kicked at a couple of pigeons pecking at the crumbs of a madeleine on the sidewalk. “You know the Hemingways have absolutely no money. It’s none of my business, Jinny, but I can see your sister’s allure to a man without means.”

  A waiter in an apron tried to get around her to the terrace, and Fife was forced out into the wintry air. At the table she pretended she’d heard nothing and put down the drinks. She thought of Sylvia’s words about her money, and how exotic she sometimes felt in a dress borrowed from Vogue in the tiny apartment of the Hemingways. So what if Ernest found her wealth attractive? Money was attractive—it meant travel, and fine wine, and good food. Above all, it meant opportunity.

  Sylvia pushed the glass of Pernod over to Jinny. “Got to dash! Will you have mine?” she asked, looping her scarf around her. “Adrienne’s cooking for an American book collector tonight. So rich he stinks!” Sylvia kissed them both and walked away in her quick brogued stride. The pigeons flew about her shoes like mud from under a car’s wheels. As they watched her go, Fife tried to talk about something else but Jinny immediately cut her off.

  “There’s nothing going on between you and Ernest, is there?”

  “No,” Fife said. And it wasn’t a lie.

  On the night of the heavy rain Ernest invited her over to his apartment. They had spent all Christmas as a three on a skiing trip where no one had done much skiing. In the evening they read by the fire, or drank sherry and played billiards or three-handed bridge. As a joke they called themselves the harem. Fife slept in the room next to theirs.

  Now Hadley had stayed on, and Ernest had come back to Paris for business. And soon enough, the invitation arrived from the Left Bank. Could she look over something new he had written on the train home?

  Fife walked instead of getting a cab that night. She thought she might be able to exercise from herself her bad thoughts. Be good, she urged herself, as she walked over the Pont Neuf, be good, you foolish girl. But she could think of nothing but him.

  When she arrived Ernest stood in the doorway: pale and tired. He greeted her almost as if she were an unwanted guest. Fife waited for him to show her the manuscript, but instead they talked about his trip to New York. They sat by the fire. All evening he seemed distracted and grouchy.

  When she made to leave he idled by the door as if he did not want to
let her go. She started to talk about some piece of gossip Jinny had told her when he shoved his knee between her legs and grabbed at her breasts under her coat. She struggled against him at first, meaning to stop it, remembering her words to herself on the bridge. But she collapsed into him and they made love by the fire without Ernest even taking off his pants. It was exciting as hell. Afterward he sat propped against his armchair and she against hers, still dressed in their clothes. She had desired him, in this very spot, for what had seemed like years.

  Writing might prove, that spring, an absolution. Fife wrote letters and letters to Hadley, as if in writing to his wife she could absolve herself of guilt—but it was no good. Sometimes she got so excited about what was going on with Ernest that she forgot to tone it down even in her letters to his wife. Drunk one afternoon she slipped up and wrote a letter only to Ernest about a friend of theirs she had been flirting with, scrawling it out on a piece of notepaper and sending it off, imagining the delight on his face when he opened his private mail.

  After their strange little trip to Chartres cathedral Jinny had stayed on at the Hemingway apartment for tea. Now she stood in their house on the rue Picot and peeled off her hat.

  “Ça va, mon homme?” Fife asked her sister.

  “I’ve been at the Hemingways’.”

  The newspaper fell from Fife’s lap. “Was Ernest there?”

  Jinny looked about their home as if newly sensitive to how much space the sisters kept. She seemed wound up. “I am frozen. Their apartment is tiny, and cold, and smells of dead birds. I don’t know how that woman stands it. Or him, or you, or herself! You’re all ridiculous.”

  “You’re tired from the drive. Let me get you some tea.”

  “Oh, I don’t want any more tea!”

  Still in her coat, Jinny pulled out a stained handkerchief and went to the kitchen. “Barely room for two people to sit,” she said to the faucet’s running water. “Where does everyone go when you’re there? Or do you just jump into bed with each other to keep yourselves warm?”

  “For God’s sake, stop washing that damned hankie!”

  Jinny swiveled around to face her. “She asked me.”

  Fife felt her whole face flush. Nothing had ever been said. Not by Hadley. Not by Fife or Ernest, not even to each other. All three of them labored for everything to be always unsaid. “And what did you say?”

  Jinny’s gray eyes looked out of the window then back at her. “I told her you were very fond of each other. She seemed to get the picture.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I confirmed only what she already knew.”

  “You had no right.”

  “I saw you praying at Chartres,” Jinny said. “Are you not afraid of what you’re doing? There’s Hadley to consider, and Bumby too. And what about the state of your soul?”

  “To hell with my soul; he is my soul! I love him, why can’t you see that? I need him and he needs me. We are the same guy.”

  Jinny looked dumbfounded, bewildered. “What are you talking about?”

  “He says he’ll leave her.”

  “She’s his wife!” Jinny banged the side of the sink, and the skillet pans knocked against each other. “And you are a plaything. A bauble for when he’s bored at home.”

  “That’s not true. Why are you on her side?”

  “Because she is out of her depth! Because Hadley doesn’t have a hope in hell against you. She has no friends. No family. No money. Everything you have, she does not.”

  “I’m your sister. Where’s your sympathy for me?”

  “You have everything!”

  “She has everything! She has him!” Fife leapt to her feet and Jinny cowered, as if she thought her sister would hit her. Instead she grabbed the tea-stained hankie and threw it hard against the icebox. It landed against its side then slid slowly to the floor. “Just you watch, Jinny Pfeiffer. I may be his mistress now, but soon I will be his wife!”

  15. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  A car door slams outside. Through a lemon slice of window she sees it is Ernest, emerging from a cab, directing the driver to the cases. Feathers go wildly around her legs as Fife rushes the stairs. He had said Wednesday; she was sure of it. He would think her mad for being in this dress; Antibes is a memory that they do not speak of.

  As she flies into the bedroom she struggles to get herself out of the frock.

  “Hello?” His voice travels as the front door opens.

  “Coming, darling!”

  But Ernest’s feet are on the stairs and the buttons seem tiny; her hands are all thumbs. They won’t give and the fabric rips as she pulls at it. She’s too late. Ernest is opening the bedroom door and he blinks at what he sees before him.

  “Fife,” he says. “What are you doing?”

  “I … wanted to see if it still fit.”

  She has ripped a hole in the side of the dress near the buttons. She covers it up with her hand, feeling like such a fool. “I didn’t think you were back until tomorrow.” His eyes go to the empty martini glass on the side table. “How was your trip?”

  “Fine. The flight to Miami was delayed.” He kisses her hello on the cheek. “But I guess that makes no difference.” Ernest sits down on the edge of the bed, rubbing his face with tiredness. There are a few moments of silence— it feels strange to have longed for her husband for so long and now she doesn’t know what to say to him. She notices a louse crawling out from under his shirt collar. “You’ve brought back a friend,” she says, and Ernest looks up with confusion, as if she has caught him out. Fife pinches the creature in her fingers and shows it to him. It crawls a way up her pointing finger. “Don’t they treat you with a salt shaker on your exit?”

  “I met a general last week. Now I find them everywhere.”

  “I can’t wait to find them on the bedclothes.”

  “I stink,” he says, and he peels off his shirt and pads into the bathroom to shower.

  In the kitchen she waits till the gridiron is hot before assigning the louse to the flames. It pops when it bursts. As she makes Ernest coffee she admires her best china on display in the kitchen cabinet. They have always avoided throwing her expensive plates.

  Upstairs the water begins to run.

  The suitcases are piled neatly in the hall. She wonders if she has enough time to search them for traces of Martha. Probably not. He’ll be down in a few minutes and then he’ll want to eat his dinner and be in bed early with a paperback in their sons’ room. She wonders what has hastened his return. With a leap of hope she wonders if Martha and Ernest have had a huge fight and he has left her somewhere in New York, done and dusted with their silly affair.

  She lays out slices of ham on stale yellow brioche. What a meal for her Odysseus.

  Ernest comes down washed but unshaved, wearing his shorts and a white T-shirt. He looks fantastic. It would be easier if she weren’t getting older so much faster than he was. She’s forty-two and Ernest looks the same as he did in his twenties. He stares at the sandwich on the table.

  “You did say tomorrow.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  Fife brings in the newspaper from the garden and notices the toolhouse light on. She must remind the servants again that they are not allowed in there. Ernest is convinced Cuzzemano has bribed them to send him his trash. “How was Spain?” she asks, handing over today’s paper.

  “Things on either side so bad you come to think both sides stink. Kids dead. Blood in the streets.” He presses the lids of his eyes. “The food was horseshit.”

  “I heard awful reports. I was worried.” She pours him coffee with a slug of condensed milk straight from the can.

  “I can’t tell you what it’s like not to be surrounded by sandbags. I keep waiting for the sounds of shelling. And there isn’t any.”

  “How’s the writing?”

  “The play’s nearly done. But I need something big. A novel.”

  “You’ve never had a book that didn’t sell thousands.”r />
  “But the critics—I want one they’ll like.”

  Fife takes a seat opposite in her black feathered dress. She is an odd companion to an odd meal. Ernest hasn’t yet touched his sandwich. “You might as well be writing for dogs as trying to please critics.”

  “I don’t understand why they hate everything I write now.”

  “A handful of conceited people compared to the millions that love the books.”

  “I want them to like it.”

  “I’ll like it.”

  “I know, I know. Oh, Fifey. Ever faithful.” The way he says it—it’s as if the word faithful means shoddy. It vexes her. In fact, she feels a certain recklessness—if Ernest didn’t care about this marriage, then perhaps she didn’t either. Fife leans over and takes a bite of his untouched sandwich. The ham is delicious even if the bread is hard.

  “Hey!” he says, but she can see how he enjoys her mischief.

  She takes another bite. “Hey what, Mr. Hemingway?”

  Ernest tries to grab at the sandwich but she holds it from him and makes her face seductive. “It tastes so good.” Ernest rolls his eyes. “Oh, I’m just a starving reporter who hasn’t had piggy in months. What have you had these past few weeks, hmm? Cabbage and broth?”

  He leaps up but she runs away: she darts left around the dining table and he goes right; she goes right, he goes left. They’re like the cats she saw playing by the birdbath this morning. As she runs to the garden the feathers on her dress make a mad sound and the cats scatter as they come. Her feet slap the pool tiles as Ernest grabs at the sandwich but Fife takes the last bite and it’s gone. Ernest shakes his head. “I’ve had nothing for months!”

  “Serves you right for abandoning me.”

  They stand close. He puts one hand between her legs in the feathered dress. “I remember this dress, Fifey. You killed me with this dress.” He goes up farther. She smiles at him; he smiles back. She wears no underclothes. “Just like France,” he says, his eyebrows raised.

  She thinks this—this!—is the joy of her husband returned to her. Ernest grabs her wrists. “Now, what do we do with the boys when they’ve been up to no good?”