Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  “Mrs. Hemingway,” Cuzzemano says, with oily delicacy. “If there’s any way, any way at all, you might procure any of the … aftereffects of Miss Martha Gellhorn, I would be able to pay you handsomely. Handsomely! Or any letters written by your husband to his …” He clears his throat with theatrical poise. “Affinity. Just look in his drawers, in his correspondence, for any of their love letters. You’d be anonymous: no one would even know—”

  “Good-bye, Mr. Cuzzemano—”

  “Know that I am here if your situation changes, and if my proposition becomes more attractive—”

  The telephone rattles in its cage.

  Sara has clipped back her bangs and her head is at full tilt to the sunshine. She is in the company of her robots, one of whose arms has fallen off and with it some of the paint, revealing the toasted corn flakes lettering on its side. She opens one eye. “Who was it?”

  “The grocer. We’re late on a bill.”

  Fife makes daiquiris for them both. She thinks, as she stabs at the ice, of giving Harry Cuzzemano just what he wants. A small part of her wants to revel in her husband’s ruin if Miss Martha Gellhorn is still around. She thinks again of the inscription. Those words. Nesto. Be mine forever. What did forever mean to that woman?

  Ernest comes home with Gerald and Honoria that evening, tired, the stink of fish on them, zinc still on their noses. Fife imagines herself as one of his sailfish, hooked in at the mouth. He’ll let the line out, let it slacken for a while. He will do this once, twice, three times, letting the fish go, as if it were free, before reeling it in and gaffing it on the boat. What a strange dance it is, until she comes in bleeding, reeled in by the nickel-plated rod.

  They eat in the dining room that evening: her and Ernest, Sara and Gerald. Martha is their fifth guest at the table: invisible and mute but loud as hell.

  22. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  They arrive at the Thompsons’ party gorgeously dressed. Sara and Gerald make the most perfect robots. No one in Key West high society—if there is such a thing on this Floridian backwater—has ever dreamed of such costumes. The locals are dressed as pirates or sailors, mermaids or Hawaiian girls; nothing like this mechanized couple from up north.

  Sara and Gerald are all silver boxes and geometrical shapes, with tin cans on their heads for goggles. They have a wobbling gait when they walk; Honoria screeched in pleasure when they had clomped down the stairs, but still declined the invitation to join them.

  Ernest and Fife are Bottom and Titania. Fife wears flowers in a wig of blonde crimped hair; painted flowers climb her chest and ivy wraps her arms. She wears a bra of shells and a grass skirt; she is half mermaid, half fairy of the woods, but they did well for making it all yesterday.

  Ernest’s donkey’s head is stuck with fur; tufts of it hedge his eyes. They should have made the eyelets bigger: Ernest complains that his lashes scratch his eyes. His lids are at constant blink, as if he is trying to send a message to the world in code.

  The guests at the party are a little more understated. There are white Key West fisherman who have painted themselves darker to look Cuban: with their loincloths they look more like a group of oversized Gandhis than dockyard Cubanitos. Peacocks and cats roam among them.

  An Adolf Hitler marches past with a little mustache. He seems a bad-tempered man; it turns out later he is one of the Thompsons’ cousins from Jacksonville. “Give us a goose step, Adolf,” says Ernest.

  “Or a Heil Hitler, at least,” says Gerald.

  Adolf resists. Fife wonders why he chose such a costume if he didn’t want to join in. “Go on,” she says. “Tell us how Europe has to be a good boy or else you’ll eat it up!”

  Sara joins in. “Now, now, Adolf, indulge us! Quick march. Pretend I’m a Czechoslovak ready for a ravaging!”

  Adolf squeezes the paper cup, his silly mustache adding to his peevish refusal to join in. “If Herr Hitler is so underconfident he’ll never get on in the world,” says Gerald, whose face is so sweaty it’s rubbed off the mask’s gray paint. His lips are quite pink. “Did mother not love you enough, mein Führer?”

  “Do shut up, love. The poor man’s already lamenting his costume choice.” Sara pulls Gerald by one of the goggles which breaks off from the mask. “Oh, Gerald,” she says warmly, “you do look ridiculous.”

  “No more than you do, my dear. Besides you’ve ruined my costume.”

  “It was a pile of crap anyway.”

  “This was made by the hands of a New England socialite! How dare you!”

  “You’ll just have to make do.”

  “Fife, tell me if you want me to send this coarse old woman home. No wonder I never invited her to meet my mother; I couldn’t introduce her to the servants without blushing.”

  Gerald kisses his wife handsomely on the mouth.

  The sight of them together makes both Ernest and Fife smile. They’ve not been the best versions of themselves these past few years. Not like Sara and Gerald, the stoics among them. Living well, they insisted, was the best revenge. And sometimes, Fife could almost be convinced that this was true. Later, she watches bashful Adolf in an elegant waltz with a tall woman, perhaps his wife. Perhaps he wasn’t shy. Perhaps he just didn’t like being bullied by this group of semi-Europeans from up north.

  The two couples take turns with husbands and wives; they still drink as much as they did in Paris, though now they marvel at their hangovers. At least, tomorrow, Fife will not think about Ernest and Martha. The four friends will sit by the pool eating, nursing their heads, then go off to bed. The hangover: such a cure, she thinks, for overthinking.

  Ernest keeps on adjusting the mule mask. He seems nervy and his eyes look sore. He flings her about the dance floor when it’s their turn to dance, and then lets off a donkey’s bray that makes the robots and his fairy queen laugh. But he keeps on doing it, won’t relinquish the game, until Gerald tells him to shut up, and Ernest walks off. Fife remembers Gerald’s words from that dinner party two years ago: Don’t you see how sick everyone is of it?

  There has been a request from the floor and the band starts up a slower tune. The piano begins, and the trumpet over it. Couples dance as close as their costumes allow. Sara is taken up by a bald Gandhi, and Gerald takes Fife in his arms. Over his shoulder she sees Ernest in the kitchen, rifling through the cupboards for something stronger.

  The singer’s voice rasps as she begins “All of Me”. It is a lovely number, so melancholy and blue. The song is so full of sadness, it nearly knocks the breath from her, as the singer offers her lover just about every last part of her to take away with him as he leaves her. The trumpet now begins. The singer pauses to watch him and her hips kick at the beat. Fife wonders whether she grieves for a man she loves, or had once loved.

  Other words circle in Fife’s mind: Nesto. Forever. To Marty, with love.

  “You look very beautiful with your hair like that,” Gerald says as they dance. At this angle she looks up at his full neck and chin, and she loves Gerald for his middle-aged plumpness.

  Fife rests her head against his shoulder. “You’re nice to me. You always have been. But then you’re nice to everyone.”

  “You are funny, sometimes.” They stop. She feels her shoulders give. “Are you all right?” Gerald asks. He leans in to her. “Are you crying, Fife?”

  “No, I’m fine,” she says. “Everything’s fine.” But she feels as if Ernest is about to take all of her, just as the song says, her heart, her mind, her mouth, every last one of her limbs. As she turns away from Gerald she notices the singer, too, has tears in her eyes as she just about manages to sing, through her tears, the last refrain of the song. It is a requiem, and it fills the night.

  Rain comes for the second time that week. The guests—who are hot and disheveled from the Charleston and the hop, with the Cubanitos whiter and the mermaids less scaled—rush under the garden’s canopy to wait for the downpour to end. Everyone looks happy and drunk, smeared in each other’s face paint.

&n
bsp; The New England robots are sitting on the other side of the enclosure’s wall, laughing and pointing at the food: turtle stew, jewfish, plantains. Fife watches her friends pile their plates, then she catches Ernest slip through the crowd. He turns back momentarily with a watchful look then walks down the side of the house. Fife follows him, dodging around the guests whose faces are rosy under the red bulbs.

  Ernest is in the back garden, talking to a woman in a black dress. She wears a cat mask with perfectly pointed ears. Her hair is done up in a neat chignon, and the string leaves a shadow line where it cuts her golden hair. When Ernest goes to pull the woman’s mask, she bats him away.

  Is this why he didn’t want the Murphys here? Because he’d invited his mistress to vacation with them?

  Her mother had told her once that even when she was a baby Fife could be left alone on a chair and would never fall off. “Like an angel on a pinhead,” her mother had said. And Fife wonders what’s wrong with her; why she is sitting so still, watching events unfold and doing nothing. She must do something; she cannot sit still forever.

  Ernest and the woman laugh as they shelter under the eave until the woman says something and looks ready to leave. Ernest watches her walk away, but his stare is one of accomplishment, as if, later in the night, he will come to possess what he appears to be losing now.

  Fife moves, knowing she has to be bold to get this right. She sees Ernest warning her off but she catches up and with one movement she pulls the woman’s mask so hard she can hear the elastic give. She is all ready to confront the face she’d found at the dinner party, and in the photograph, but it’s not her. It’s not Martha. The mask sits on the woman’s head like a hat. And Fife feels like such a fool. “What are you doing?” Ernest says.

  This unknown woman gives an edgy laugh.

  Fife stares at them, incredulous, before turning on her heel and running from them both.

  Gerald and Sara’s eyes are on her as she bolts through the party. She heads for the beach, letting the air fill her lungs. A car swerves to avoid her. On the beach she feels the sand fill her shoes but she won’t stop until she reaches the shore.

  Yards from the waterline, she comes to a stop, watching the black water turn white as the breakers reach the sand. She hears Ernest coming after her. “What’s gotten into you?”

  “Oh for God’s sake.” She rips off the wig. Her scalp has been itching all night and she wishes now she had claws so she could scratch with a deeper trawl. “I found your dedication, Ernest. For Marty with love, is that it? I saw what she wrote to you in her book. Why did you bother coming back here, and being so nice, if you were still writing love notes to each other?”

  Back at the house featureless faces stare down at them on the beach.

  “Fife, don’t make a scene.”

  “I will do what I want. Since that’s what you do all the time, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “You’re pathetic. You’re worse than pathetic. You’re a psychopath!”

  “Fife!”

  “Why toy with me as you have the last two weeks?” She stops, genuinely interested as to what the answer could be. “It’s made the god-damned disappointment so much worse.” Fife bites into her lower lip. “You have broken my heart, Ernest, over and over again. At least, while we were enemies this past year, you couldn’t do that anymore. But this couple of weeks, even while everyone was warning me; Sara, and Hadley—”

  “You brought Hadley into this?”

  “Surprisingly enough she could empathize with the situation.” Fife puts up a hand. “If you leave this marriage, Ernest, you’ll marry Martha and then you’ll find you just want another one. You always love at the beginning, when it’s easiest to love. And if you go through life like that you’ll never get past the start.” Fife waits for him to say something but Ernest stares morosely at his boat shoes. His hands hang unmoving.

  “I can’t have three people in this marriage. At least tell me you’re in love with her. Be brave. Or are you a hero only in war?” Waves break mournfully by their feet. Fife counts each breaker. Ernest doesn’t say anything. “Are you in love with her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Something in her collapses. What is it? Dignity perhaps. “Please don’t leave me,” she says, though it breaks her heart to have to beg him like this. But she adores him. She has never loved a man more than she has loved Ernest; she knows she never will again. “Stay with me.”

  Ernest looks back up at the house. The partygoers have gone back inside. He looks back to her. She thinks he may relent. “I can’t,” he says at last.

  Fife suddenly feels very tired. She remembers the song. Well. She will not let Ernest Hemingway take every last piece of her.

  “I won’t divorce you, Ernest. Not for a long time, if that’s what you’re hoping. You can go to hell, for all I care. I won’t let you marry that woman.” Fife spits out her name at last. “Martha Gellhorn. If we hadn’t had this week, I would let you go much more easily. But you gave me grounds to hope. And you’ll be punished. I swear it.”

  Ernest makes a grab for her, and Fife—not quite consciously—socks him on the jaw. The shock of it—because it can’t be the power—makes him stumble into the surf. “You chickenshit coward!” she screams. “I could kill you!” And for a moment she thinks she might just take his neck and hold it under the surf. She would rather kill him than have him be the possession of a woman who is nowhere near her equal. This is why her love is better than Hadley’s, better than Martha’s. No one, ever, will love him like this: enough to see his brain smashed into rock or his lungs fill with brine. Ernest picks himself up, nursing the jaw, and brushes the sand off his pants.

  “You bastard,” she says, “you don’t even know what you’ve lost.”

  Fife starts by pulling books from the shelves, looking for whatever might hurt him the most. She puts them into piles of signed and first editions. She opens the books she thinks are most bankable and starts writing down information: the book’s edition, publication city, date. She looks for his marginalia; his graffiti would add another zero to the selling price.

  Later on, sounds travel up to the toolhouse. It’s the Murphys, returned from the party. They sit by the poolside after Gerald has made tea. Ernest must still be at Sloppy Joe’s.

  Fife watches them, ginned and alone, in Ernest’s study above. Down by the pool they sit in what’s left of their costumes: a cereal box here, a spring there; both have lost their eyes. “So it’s over? That’s it?” This is Gerald. He nurses his mug between his hands. “Why does he have to be such an ass?”

  “I think he tries hard not to be cruel. Then sometimes he’s so savage, you have to stop excusing him.” Sara starts ripping Gerald’s robot costume to shreds.

  “What are you doing?” he asks her, laughing.

  “I’m finding your heart and leaving my initials there. So every woman around will know you’re mine.” Sara has now completely de-robotted Gerald and she kisses him on the chest near his heart.

  Fife slumps down by Ernest’s desk. It kills her to see this. She imagines how many other women there will be, sitting at their typewriters somewhere in the Midwest, or reading a Hemingway book in their fine English lawn, or on assignment in China, not knowing that they’ll be plucked from obscurity to be the next Mrs. Hemingway.

  From the pool she hears Sara’s voice again: “Promise me you’ll never go away.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  Fife gets up. The pen’s bleed has thinned the paper for Cuzzemano. She screws it up in her fist; she cannot do it.

  When she leaves the toolhouse she sees Sara and Gerald are asleep on one sun lounger, curled into each other under the Florida night sky, surrounded by the remains of their robots. And around them, walk the peacocks.

  MARTHA

  23. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  The Pig, they say, has liberated the Ritz.

  In an altogether different hotel, Martha lies in bed, imag
ining Ernest on his favored bar stool ordering martinis for his troops. He’d be thinking, no doubt, about his life here in the twenties, when he was poorer and happier, a man only once married. His Paris life is a memory Ernest loves to slide over and over until the place is smooth and cool with his affections. Today he would surely be longing for the sawmill apartment and his lost Saint Hadley: a woman all the more exquisite for her generous retirement of the title Mrs. Hemingway.

  A title Martha has come to hate.

  Martha has always felt more affection for the Mrs. Hemingway she robbed. At least Fife had the guts to hate her; she had no time for Hadley’s mousy surrender. To be so good seemed a calamity visited upon the poor woman. Apparently Hadley and Fife are even pals still: by Ernest’s accounts his two ex-wives chat regularly on the telephone, talking of children and the proper care of Ernest. Martha and Fife have never spoken since that vacation in Key West. Why would they? She has a proper respect for the rules of this game.

  Ernest cradles the memory of Hadley as he would a baby. Fife he castigates as the devil. After today, Martha wonders which one she will become.

  In bed she tends a bottle of whiskey; the alcohol keeps her straight-thinking. Her journey to Paris yesterday was not an easy one and she feels a pain in her chest—it might be a broken rib. When she arrived at the Hotel Lincoln this morning, typewriter, knapsack, and bedroll in hand, the concierge had told her with great enthusiasm the story of her husband’s escapades when he saw the name in her passport. Apparently, Ernest had liberated the Ritz with a troop of soldiers, sending the men from the Luftwaffe and their whores scurrying from their beds.

  None of this should be a surprise to her: Ernest loved being in the limelight wherever he went. Boxer, bullfighter, fisherman, soldier, hunter; he can’t go anywhere without playing the hero. Often, over the course of these years, she has longed for the plain friend she made in Spain.