Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  “No, Ernest.” She grins. “Don’t!”

  But he has already swung her into the pool.

  The cook exits the servants’ quarters right on cue. “Mr. Hemingway. Hello, sir.”

  “Hello, Isobel. Mrs. Hemingway has been a very naughty girl,” he says. Fife wonders what she must look like, a bird drowned in its bath. “Don’t mind us.”

  Isobel shakes her head as if she will never understand rich people and the stupid things they do. The cook goes back into the carriage house.

  “You’re soaking wet,” Ernest says, when Fife climbs out of the pool. The feathers drip onto the tiles. He pulls at the bow of the black ribbon she still wears in her hair. He does it very gently, as if he were skinning fruit. “My little boy.” The corners of his lips rise, acknowledging it. “How long are the kids away?”

  “The month.”

  “So we have the whole house to ourselves.”

  Fife wants to say: be rid of Martha first, then you can have your wife. She wants to tell him he can’t have the both of them. Instead she lets out a long breath as he kisses down to the hollow bit of her neck and he says, “I have been thinking about fucking you all the way home from Miami.”

  16. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  Since his return from Spain, Ernest has been working in the mornings, then fishing or swimming in the afternoons; the evenings they spend together. There are no telegrams delivered at odd hours, no phone calls to St. Louis, no dispatches from Madrid. China sits un-thrown in cabinets. Dusk is no longer the signal to begin the hot assaults that both have perfected in different parts of the house during the long warm days. Ernest hasn’t been like this since he began his trips to cover the Spanish war.

  He wants her, now, all the time: Ernest wakes her by kissing her and they go to bed having taken off most of their clothes downstairs. It reminds her of the early years of marriage when things had been so marvelous. On their honeymoon they had gone to the south of France to walk the salt marshes and swimming beaches. Magical; to be living for the first time like man and wife after so much time sneaking around, and Ernest told her how cockeyed in love with her he’d been these past few years. There was a Gypsy festival in the nearest town that week and she had stained their faces with berry juice and they had swigged red wine from pigskins. At home that night it was as if the dark masks freed them, and they had done some strange and wonderful things to each other in bed. Appetite—that’s what they had for each other—and it had always felt, to Fife, as if they had it in abundance.

  Now it feels like their second honeymoon. In the first few days of Ernest’s return, they are never out of the pool. Guava trees and weeping figs crowd the decking. The sapodilla leans in, its rich bark leaking gum. Fife perfects her dive, remembering with shameful pleasure that flop Hadley had committed to the waves in Antibes. Ernest practices a dead man’s float.

  His scars are pinker in the water. There is the gash on his forehead from Paris, his calves shot up from gaffing for sharks, the burst on his knee from the war. She has never met anyone so prone to accidents, to cocked guns and roads swerved down.

  Mostly Ernest stays in the shallows, watching as the water lifts around her. The adrenal feeling of hitting the water keeps her going; Fife has always loved the sensation of diving. She remembers the day out on the raft in Antibes, diving only for his pleasure. But she remembers, too, when she had asked him to go up to the rocks once Hadley had left. He had looked at her strangely, as if he were a character in a book and he was thinking of what his character would do next. Then he had said no. The moment had been profoundly depressing: Ernest, evidently, could take her or leave her. She, on the other hand, wanted him always. He had once told her that love was never about the powerful and the powerless. But Fife can’t think of what else might constitute a marriage.

  On her last dive she swims over to him in the shallows. She thinks about knocking him over so that water will surge up his nose. Instead she pushes his ankles apart and blows bubbles that rise on his skin. Ernest pulls her up by her shoulders only to push her head back down.

  “Water’s gone up my nose,” Fife says, as she surfaces, in a cartoonish voice.

  She pulls herself to the decking as the sinus thump begins to ease. Ernest watches her. Those marvelously seeking eyes: as if once again she’s an object of fascination. What has she done to make her husband come back to her?

  “Your mother wrote. She wants to come down and see the boys.”

  Last night, they had talked to the kids on the telephone and both Patrick and Gregory had jostled with each other to talk to their father. Whenever one was speaking the other was speaking too, and Ernest had put his hand over the mouthpiece, laughing, saying to her: “I can’t understand a damn thing either one of them is saying!” And then he turned back to the telephone: “Boys!” he said. “One at a time now!”

  Wrapped up so much in each other, neither one of them had been as attentive to the kids as they might have liked. She had always just assumed, because they were boys, that she could leave them to do their growing up in private. It wasn’t like daughters, where you had to school them in how to behave, and tell them what not to do. In their first few years Patrick and Gregory had been practically raised by their nursemaid, or Jinny, while she had gone off wherever Ernest wanted to go: Spain, Wyoming, safaris in Africa. She could manage being away from her sons, but not her husband.

  It’s not that she doesn’t love them; it’s just that there is always so much to do: editing Ernest’s work, instructing the servants, restoring the house; then there were the trips with Ernest when he wanted to go quail shooting, or deep-sea fishing, or to the bullfights in Spain. She was his wife; it left little time for her to be a mother as well.

  “My mother doesn’t want to see the boys. She wants something else. Money. More money. She can go to hell.” Ernest swims over to her and he pulls at her suit so that it snaps against one warming buttock.

  “Nesto.”

  “I’m not allowed to touch my wife?”

  “Not that. Your mother. I think she’s lonely without your father.”

  “Maybe that’s her fault.”

  He rests his head on her belly. Fife traces water from his ear. “Do you really think she could’ve stopped him?”

  “No. Doesn’t mean she didn’t drive him to it.”

  “He’s the one that pulled the trigger.”

  “And he was a son of a bitch for doing it. A chickenshit coward.”

  Ernest’s weight drops down again to the water. When he emerges on the other side she says: “He was ill. People don’t kill themselves over nothing.”

  “He got blind to drown out Mother’s voice. God knows I would have done the same.” Ernest paddles at the water then looks up at his studio, as if the answer might lie in his work, or his ability to write through it. “All that worrying about money. Why not ask me for help?”

  “There were so many years when you didn’t have a dime.”

  “He knew you did. Your family could have bailed him out of life’s biggest fixes.”

  “Please.” Fife rolls onto her back to feel the sun on her. She won’t tolerate his habitual carping about her family’s money. It doesn’t make any sense, not when he feels no guilt about using great bags of it. “There’s no one to blame. It’s just sad. That’s all.”

  The water gives a sucking noise as Ernest pulls himself up to the pool edge. “I don’t think she should come. Now’s not a good time.” He wraps himself in a towel and wetly pads to the kitchen. The sound of chopping ice comes from inside the house. Two p.m. Cocktail hour.

  When he returned from his father’s funeral a decade ago, Ernest spent his evenings working. Sometimes, when Fife went to his study with a gin and tonic at the end of the day, she caught him looking at the page with so much sadness that he might have been staring at his father’s dead face. To have died in such a manner. To be the son of a suicide; it seemed to dispossess Ernest of the idea of himself. He would take the drink
and then give her the half smile he used when it was only just the two of them. But his mind was another place altogether.

  A package arrived some time after Ernest’s return. Their address was written in a firm Midwestern hand. Wrapped in brown paper with his mother’s schlocky bows, the package sat in the den for days. After some time Fife saw the box’s base was wet, a dreadful smell coming from it. He had to either open it or throw it away, she said, but it could not remain in here forever.

  When the package was finally opened, they found the source of the stink. Ernest lifted a dripping chocolate cake from the packet, its icing blued with mold. He raced with it into the kitchen, dropping great chunks of it as he went. But an altogether different object had been warming under the cake this past week.

  Ernest read the note aloud. “‘You said you wanted it, so here it is. For you and Pauline. Enjoy. From your loving mother, Grace Hemingway.’ I guess she meant the cake.” Ernest picked up the handle of a gun. “Not this.” It was a Civil War handgun: a Smith and Wesson. Mold furred the trigger that had last held his father’s finger.

  “It stinks,” he said. And he went back to the kitchen to clean the gun of Grace’s cake.

  Fife wonders where he has put that gun, where it sits in Ernest’s collection of arms. It would look small next to the long shots that killed bison, lion, elk; this tiny thing that had killed his father.

  In the shadows, in the garden, the scent of citrus spills. Dusk is coming. She follows the smell of lemons into the kitchen. The gin and tonics stand blue on the countertop. She hears him quickly closing a drawer in the dining room.

  “You’re up,” he says, coming into the room with his edgy grin. “I’ve already sunk a couple of these. Post meridiem. Now we can break out the strong stuff!” He chases the ice cubes in the glass with a long spoon.

  Out in the hall is his fishing gear: rods, the live-fish box, and the hat he likes to wear on Pilar. He takes a drink then says, as if there hadn’t been a break in their conversation: “Hadley’s father shot himself as well, you know.”

  “I know,” she says, following him back into the dining room, placing her hand, cold from the iced drink, on his neck.

  “She was only thirteen. Put the gun behind his ear while still in his nightshirt. We are a cursed generation. All these children without their fathers.”

  He holds her hand against him.

  “You’re not a child anymore, Ernest. You’re a father now. So,” she says, thinking if she can steer his thoughts back to work she’ll be able to snap him from this dangerous melancholy, “tell me about this play.” She lays out a spread for them, of hams, cheeses, grapes, and pineapple. They drink their cocktails and then one more each as Ernest tells her about his character, stuck in Madrid, faced with a rather large decision to make.

  17. PIGGOTT, ARKANSAS. OCTOBER 1926.

  Hadley said she would commit to a divorce if they agreed to one hundred days of separation. On day seventeen of her exile, Fife found herself in the family car being driven back to her old home. Mrs. Pfeiffer had begun her spiel on the station platform, only pausing to direct the driver to her daughter’s trunks. On the drive home her mother had really found her stride: Fife must, at all costs, avoid sundering a union God Himself had made. Hellfire and brimstone were waiting for her in the Ever After if she would insist on this path. “Your mother will wear you down,” Ernest had warned, begging her to spend Hadley’s required exile elsewhere. “You won’t come back to me and then I’ll be all alone.” Fife had only laughed at the absurdity of that notion.

  She tried to keep busy: learning Spanish and keeping up her French and doing exercises to keep herself toned. On day zero she was determined that Ernest would think her more beautiful than ever before. She walked around the town and cycled when she could, anything to avoid her mother.

  Fife tormented herself with how easily Ernest might run into Hadley in Paris, stay on at their apartment for a glass of wine, play with Bumby, be entreated into staying the night … and then the rest of his lifetime. She was banned from seeing Ernest, but Ernest was not banned from seeing Hadley. Maybe his wife had been far more cunning than either of them had ever given her credit for. Jinny was her eyes and ears in Paris. She told her sister to see Ernest as much as she could.

  Late into the separation Fife took her old bicycle onto the mud roads to the west. Outside, she saw the trees only as swatches of color, the sky gray. All morning she had felt wretched. Her mother’s words accompanied each turn of the bicycle wheel: You have broken a home. You have trespassed against God. You have sinned. In the cotton fields she tried to out-pedal her mother’s admonishments but they would not go away. Marry Ernest and you cannot pay back the price of this sin. She rode through the town square, past the liquor store where she and Jinny used to flirt with the owner for thimblefuls of rye. Let Ernest be a father to his child and a husband to his wife. Back home she abandoned the bike at the porch.

  Each room in the house that afternoon was unlit and the air hung motionless. “Mother?” She checked the chapel—often she might be found offering a daytime devotional—but her mother wasn’t there. No noise could be heard in the rest of the house.

  Shadows settled on her things in her room. It was as if someone had been going through her possessions. In the sewing room a reading lamp was still switched on. On the table where her mother kept her tapestries was one of Ernest’s books: The Sun Also Rises. The book was open and facedown, but had not been started. Instead, it was creased at the dedication page. This book is for Hadley and for John Hadley Nicanor. Little Bumby’s real name.

  Outside, the sage brushed against the boarding. A moth was in the reading lamp, its wings fluttering against the soft cloth shade. Fife held on to Ernest’s book, and the moth beat its wings faster. It sounded like blood beating in her ears. Above her mother’s sewing things there was a portrait of the Virgin and Child: a look of fierce calm in Mary’s eyes.

  For Hadley and for John Hadley Nicanor.

  Fife then regarded herself with terrific shame. All summer they had acted horribly, as if only the three of them were involved. But what was going to happen to Bumby?

  Her mother must have heard her sobbing because minutes later she hurried into the room and held her as she wept. Fife felt heartsick for everything and everyone: herself, Ernest, Hadley, Bumby. She said I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, Mama, I love him, I love him, please, please don’t make me. She could feel how she shook in her mother’s firm embrace, as if she were experiencing a delirium.

  From then on, Fife woke with a quiet horror of herself. Even the sight of a feather on her mother’s church hat reminded her of the gentle menace of that dress. For days she did not write to Ernest but stayed in bed, knowing what she had to do, and thinking at the same time how awful it was to do it. She thought about all the days at Vogue when she went home instead of seeing the Hemingways: how miserable those nights were. And now she would have to stay in Piggott and marry some man from the country club. The portrait of the Virgin now hung above the bedroom bureau. Mary and the baby stared at her, a vigil for the penitent. Her mother was right. But how could she go on living without him?

  When she wrote to Ernest now the words were only about Hadley: her kind open face, how savage they had been, the sheer lunacy of Antibes. She remembered with revulsion how she had contemplated slipping between the sheets with them in their marriage bed. Oh, Europe had deviled the lot of them!

  But if Fife could stay in America, perhaps it wasn’t too late. If she never saw Ernest Hemingway again, she thought, she might not do the devil’s work. Still, she crossed out Hadley’s hundred days on the calendar: fifty-eight, fifty-seven, fifty-six … The Virgin and Child stared down at her. Reproach was in her eyes.

  A telegram arrived on day fifty-five. HADLEY HAS CALLED OFF EXILE STOP WHEN CAN I EXPECT YOU? EH. In his subsequent letter Ernest explained Hadley had gone to Chartres to do some thinking and had decided to cancel the separation. Divorce proceedings were already set
in motion; Fife should come back to Paris as soon as she could. This was, Ernest said, entirely what Hadley wanted.

  Knowing that it had been Hadley’s decision, Fife’s shame lifted, quickly and easily. She was going back to France and to home. She was going back to marry Ernest.

  Thank God, Fife thought, for Chartres cathedral.

  When she saw him again, at the port of Boulogne, she said she would never leave his side again for the rest of their lives. Only later did she wish he might have promised the same.

  18. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  In the first week of Ernest’s return Fife scours the gossip columns. She looks for a “bust-up between our seasoned Spanish reporter and a girl correspondent.” She looks for the story that says the screeching heard from one room in their hotel “was said to be louder than the bombs that fell on Barcelona that day.” The newspapers would never break this story—but sometimes the private lives of celebrities were hinted at, glossed over. Fife looks for the scrappiest piece of gossip—anything to confirm his relationship with Martha is over. There’s nothing. This must be a good thing, she decides. Already, this week, she treats Ernest’s infidelity with positive retrospection—Martha was just a passing infatuation. Still, she calls Sara Murphy.

  Sara’s voice sounds even richer on the telephone than it does in person; she has the voice of a movie star. Fife imagines she might be lounging on a divan drinking Scotch and wearing a man’s housecoat. In another room Gerald would be painting. Sara has always been as close to her idea of glamour as any of her friends.

  “How’s Ernest?” Sara asks. “Is he back?”

  “He came back Tuesday.”

  “Any concussions? Gunshot wounds? Did he blast off his toes and not even realize?” Fife tells her he’s completely well. “Really, I have never met anyone so accident-prone. He’s always getting himself into these damned scrapes.”

  “He’s fine. In fact, he’s quite the changed man.”

  Fife looks into the living room to check Ernest is out of earshot. He is the type of man who can be involved in one conversation and be monitoring another across the table as well. “He’s more than fine, actually. He’s come back with a sense of … I don’t know … interest, really. As if he’s broken it off in Spain.”