by Naomi Wood
More of the whiskey helps her nurse her outrage. Martha hates the way he throws himself around a city with all the swagger of a warlord. She hates, too, that other people can’t see past his phony heroism. So he has liberated the Ritz! Of course he would.
The Pig knew it was the one place that wouldn’t have run dry.
But today Martha will show him he can’t trick everyone. Today she will be the one to rip open his idea of himself, and she will do it with claws. Because today they are done and through, and she will throw away the name Mrs. Hemingway with as much gusto as his ex-wives slavered over it. Today, Martha will leave him.
The air in her hotel room is insufferably warm. An odor wafts in of scorched wood, of things having been burned. She has left the windows open so that she can hear the cries of the Parisians, but also so that the panes won’t smash if the fleeing Germans were to indulge in leftover shells. Gunfire only briefly interrupts the singing of “La Marseillaise.”
Martha wears her pajamas, the same ones she wore when she was evacuated from a Helsinki hotel five years ago. She had asked Ernest if he would come with her to cover the Finnish war, thinking it might be good for them to re-create the dangers of Spain. But Ernest said he wanted to shoot duck in Sun Valley. Funny that it had been Ernest who had first lit her interest in the battlefield while his wife brought them cocktails in the shade of mimosa trees and banana palms, and now it was Ernest who wanted to make house while she went off to war.
Martha rises from the bed. Flags drape from the opposite building and boys cock about the pavements with carbines, as if they had single-handedly driven les boches to the gates. Well, good for them. The recriminations will come later—who colluded, who resisted—but not today. Today everyone is jubilant.
In the bathroom the washbowl faucet creaks with the old plumbing. Her hair could do with a wash; the Jeep’s fumes are still in it from last night, but instead she rolls the curls to her neck. She pulls on a white shirt and her army jacket with the “C” for correspondent. Martha uses some black-market lipstick she bought in London and wonders where she will find her husband. Who knows? Perhaps he is planting a flag at the Arc de Triomphe. She wouldn’t be surprised to hear Ernest has freed the whole City of Light single-handedly.
In her satchel she gathers her things—notebook, purse, and hotel key. For luck she takes an extra shot of the whiskey. She will watch how Paris frees itself: take notes, heed its guidance. Fleeing the shadow as the wife of one of the most famous writers in the world: is she mad to leave him? Her father would have thought her mad—but then her mother had thought her mad for marrying him in the first place.
The concierge gives her an oily smile in the lobby. He looks desperate to talk more but Martha hurries on through the revolving doors. As she steps into the iced light of Paris she is immediately kissed on the lips. The man—he is rather handsome and tall—says, “Vive la France!” before strolling toward the crowd on the Champs-Élysées.
People kiss and drink on every corner. Perhaps each family saved a bottle of something good ready for this day. Men, as always, are first on the streets. A man released, she thinks, is worse than one imprisoned, and she does up the top button of her shirt. Spiked on their own glory, they eye her with an abandoned look; it might scare her, had she not seen it all in Spain. Kids hide in the shade by tanks and women wear the most enormous hats, the size of buckets. It seems quite the perfect day for her own liberation. Martha sets off into the city to break the news to Ernest Hemingway.
24. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. DECEMBER 1936.
Martha went to Key West to meet her hero, not marry him. In fact, the island had been rather an afterthought that Christmas holiday of 1936, somewhere to go after they’d run out of things to do in Miami.
All she wanted to do was talk about books with him. Perhaps pick up some tips. In her own writing she tried hard to manipulate the words so that they were cool and dry—just like his—as if worked by a mason from hard stone. She had even included a quote from A Farewell to Arms in her first novel: “Nothing ever happens to the brave.” But if she weren’t brave, she thought, as the Gellhorn family disembarked the ferry, surrounded by mangroves, sea grapes, and the most enormous palms, then she definitely would not meet him. And so she had worn the little black dress that her mother had said showed her off in the very best light.
They spent the day walking the key. As she walked around the island she formed a vague outline for a travel piece about the persistence of the Depression here though it was nearly a decade after the crash. Raw board hung from the houses and everything looked in need of paint. Chickens roamed the streets, and the smell of garbage and the sewers was everywhere. Bordellos did a brisk trade and nobody seemed to mind. Everywhere there was abundance: banana, lime, coconut—fit to burst off the trees with a snap of the fingers. No wonder the Depression hadn’t left: without work you could just as well eat by shaking down a tree. Still, the kids looked about as happy as they did in any other American backwater.
When they passed the Hemingway home—it had to be his, it was the biggest and richest-looking house on the whole key—Martha spied prowling cats and a water feature behind the high brick wall and locked gate. Her mother read aloud from the tourist map; the Hemingway home was on the attractions list. From what Martha could see, the garden was piercingly neat and well kept. The house was grand, its shutters open to the breeze coming off the Gulf. A woman’s voice traveled over to them from inside the garden. “Fetch the scissors will you, Sara? I’m going to attack this poinsettia.”
Mrs. Gellhorn looked up from her map and gave Martha a bright smile as if they had overheard something deliciously secret. “Oh, Martha, it’s Mrs. Hemingway!”
Martha led her family onward; she thought them superior to the tourists come to gawk at the author’s private quarters. Perhaps, she thought later, she should have knocked and introduced herself there and then. Perhaps, if she had met his wife first, things might have turned out a little differently.
By the afternoon they were hot and tired, and Mrs. Gellhorn suggested a drink. It was dark inside Sloppy Joe’s and the bar looked like something salvaged from a boat wreck. Fans did little to move the air. As the Gellhorns sat themselves at a table, Martha had a memory from some magazine article that this might be the author’s haunt, that Mr. Hemingway might even be here, killing the hottest part of the afternoon alone.
Because she’d imagined him being here, she had assumed he would not be. But there was Hemingway, looking older than the photograph of him she had tacked up on her college wall, coming directly from the pool table and seating himself at the bar. He was scruffier too. He wore a dirty T-shirt and basque shorts with a rope tied at his waist. Barefooted, as well. The barman, whose dark hands had been juicing limes, put a glass of greenish liquid in front of Mr. Hemingway without him even placing an order.
“Un highbalito,” he said, and the author smiled and read his mail.
Martha straightened her back and cocked her head in a posture of listening to her mother while the scent of the limes spilled into the air. From the bar she felt herself observed.
Her mother was deciding volubly on the relative merits of a daiquiri or a gin twist in a louder voice than Martha would have liked when the penny dropped. “Oh!” her mother said, barely trying to temper her excitement or lower her voice. “Mr. Hemingway is at the bar, dear!”
Mrs. Gellhorn then looked up above Martha’s shoulder. He must have come over. Martha willed the heat to leave her face. When she turned, she was as bold and as richly voiced as she could muster. “Mr. Hemingway,” she said, standing, and put out her hand before he put out his. “I’m Martha Gellhorn. A pleasure to meet you, sir.” She tilted her head; she had decided her beauty was best at this angle. And indeed he seemed pleased by the look of her.
Martha introduced her mother and brother, and Hemingway pulled up a chair to join them. “What are you drinking?” he asked Mrs. Gellhorn. “Have you had one of these?” Her mother took the offered
glass and sipped at the drink. “I call it a Papa Doble.”
“That’s going to knock me sideways for the rest of the afternoon,” Mrs. Gellhorn said. “I’ll have one.” She passed it to Martha.
Her mother was right: the drink was strong as hell and delicious.
“Skinner,” he said. “Papa Dobles for everyone.”
“Thank you, Mr. Hemingway,” her mother said.
“Only the IRS calls me Mr. Hemingway. Please call me Ernest. Or Papa.”
Though he might be a decade or so older than Martha, there was no way she was going to call him Papa. Ernest would do just fine.
They talked at first about Key West and what they had seen and what they thought. Ernest admitted he thought her brother was her husband and laughed when he found out he was not. Everyone was quickly drunk by dusk and Martha thought it wonderful that they all were sitting there in the presence of a genius. The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, Death in the Afternoon—as well as all of the short stories that writers studied for the inner trick of them. But there was no trickery: only the plain words put there as if they had always been there—like pebbles cooled in a river.
Martha, at twenty-eight, had only one book she was proud of; the rest of it, she thought, was the foulest crotte. She wanted to ask Hemingway questions without sounding like an ingénue: how does one edit one’s work and know what was good and what was bad if one thought the whole thing, invariably, was rotten? When should one soldier on, and when should one just throw it to the trash?
They ordered more drinks and Skinner continued to work at the limes. At one point the barman shot her a meaningful look. Perhaps Ernest was expected at home by Mrs. Hemingway.
Later, when her mother and brother argued about the best route back to the hotel, Ernest addressed her privately. “Are you in love, Miss Gellhorn?”
Martha took a sip of her Papa Doble and laughed. “Why do you ask?”
“You look flushed. And happy.”
“No,” she said. “I am not in love.”
“But you have been?”
“Of course.”
“Who was he?”
“A Frenchman.”
“Did you leave him or did he leave you?”
Martha drained the last of the drink. It really did taste wonderful. “I am not a woman apt to be left,” and then she laughed at her absurd words. “I left him.”
“I see.” When he smiled he looked more like that college photograph. “Why did it end?”
“He wanted to marry me.”
“And you didn’t want to marry him?”
“No. His wife didn’t want him to marry me.”
“Ah,” he said. “Wives are apt to feel like that.” He finished his drink. What number was it for him? The man could drink like a fish. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight,” she said.
“By that age I’d married my second wife.”
“And how’d your first wife feel about that?”
“Not very pleased.”
“Ah, wives are apt to feel like that.”
“Touché,” he said, then he stared at her for longer than was polite. Maybe because she was drunk Martha went ahead and stared right back until it was Ernest who looked away and she swore she caught Skinner, now done juicing the limes, roll his eyes.
“Why are you wearing your shorts like that?”
The frayed rope belt flopped on one side of his pants, like a snake sunning itself. “Because I like to.”
“You look like you’ve just pulled your pants on and are about to take them off again.”
“You might have just hit upon my plan.”
But now her mother and brother were listening again and Ernest changed the subject. “Have you ever known war, Martha?”
She shook her head.
“I think you might like it. I met a woman like you in Italy in the Great War. She was a nurse at the Milan hospital.” He paused for a moment as if lost in the memory. “I imagine you’d like living on the knife-edge.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“Some of it. Some of it was terrible. I remember after a munitions factory blew up and we were sent to recover the bodies. There was hair everywhere, tufts of it, clinging to the wire. The dead had faces like blown-up balloons. Lumps of flesh with bits of bone, that’s all they were after the hit.” Ernest’s eyes had gone hard and smooth. “It took three days to clean up. I vowed that I’d never think war a good thing after that. And I don’t. But there are good things about it for writers: it makes every minute seem a million bucks and all you want to do is kiss all the women you meet and hunt for the truth and write good words. Think you could do it?”
“Aside from kissing all the women, yes, I think I could.”
“I’m going to the war in Spain. You should think about it. Where will you go after Key West?”
Martha shrugged. “Back to St. Louis.”
“Both my wives are from there. You’re from a noble tradition.” His eyes search her face. “The Blonde Peril. That’s what they’d call you on the Front Line, Miss Gellhorn.”
Ernest insisted Martha eat with them that evening back at the villa. When they walked up to its gates, she was followed by the memory of her shyness that morning, hiding behind the brick wall.
Pauline Hemingway sat through supper pinched about the mouth and drunk but in a sour way. When Martha addressed her as Pauline, Sara Murphy practically spat out her bean soup. “Dear girl,” she said, “nobody calls Pauline Pauline. It’s Fife. From Pfeiffer: her maiden name”—she gestured to Ernest—“before she married this wretch.”
“What do you think of Key West?” asked her husband, Gerald.
“I think it’s the best thing I’ve found in America.”
“I daresay,” said Sara into her wineglass.
“If all the world were sunny there’d be much less trouble going on.”
“There’s a Midwesterner for you,” Ernest said. “Hadley was the same.”
Fife flashed her husband a look.
“What lovely flowers,” Martha said, nodding at the arrangement in the center of the table. “What are they?”
“Poinsettia,” said Fife a little sadly.
“Do you know the florists in Paris used to dye their flowers to make them brighter?” This was Sara. “I remember the streams in the gutters. Like rivers of blood some days.”
“I lived in Paris,” said Martha.
“What were you doing there?” asked Gerald.
“I was a journalist.”
“For whom?” asked his wife.
“Anyone who’d have me. Often Vogue. I had to feign an interest in the French hemline.”
“Fife was a reporter for Vogue too!” said Ernest.
Fife offered a thin smile. “Pass the salt please, Gerald.”
During the meal Gerald kept on trying to make things jolly while Fife refilled everyone’s glasses with miserable vigilance. Martha got into a wonderfully heated argument with Ernest on the merits of Proust while Sara Murphy positively glared at her throughout.
By the time his wife plunged the knife into the roast chicken, Ernest had positioned his hand on the inside of her now very warm thigh. Martha had quickly removed Ernest’s hand before answering the question “Leg or breast?” with only the minimal amount of choked laughter.
At the end of the meal two little boys came into the room wearing heavy pajamas that looked sweltering in the heat. “Aha!” said Fife. Her face completely lost its watchfulness and became open and clear. It was at this point that Martha saw, for the first time, the woman’s beauty. “We thought we heard mice upstairs, but it turned out it was you two!”
She tickled the little one’s tummy and put the biggest boy onto her lap. Fife looked up at Martha from the crook of her boy’s neck. And just minutes after positioning his hand on her thigh, Martha watched Ernest look at his wife with love.
The little boy climbed onto his father’s lap. “Papa, who’s this?”
“This,
Gregory, is Miss Martha Gellhorn.” Ernest leaned over to her. “I would ask you to shake his hand but as you can see …” The little boy had his thumb in his mouth.
Martha laughed.
“Miss Gellhorn’s a writer. Like Daddy. And a very good one at that.”
“You know in Germany they’d have to join the Hitler Youth at ten?” Gerald said.
“Ridiculous,” said Sara. “I would never let Patrick go.” The Murphys shared a look and Martha wondered what it meant. Gerald put his hand over his wife’s and squeezed it. Sara’s look was frozen somewhere.
“Hitler’s a madman,” Gerald said. “He belongs in the bughouse. We’re lucky to be here.”
“Lucky,” Sara said. “Yes. Lucky, lucky.”
“I think you’ve had enough fun for tonight, boys,” Fife said. She gave her eldest a kiss which was promptly wiped away.
When they left, Fife called in the cook to clear away the dishes. After Papa Dobles, white wine, and a whole day of sunshine, Martha felt just about in danger of falling off one of Mrs. Hemingway’s exquisitely made dining chairs. And with the perfect timing of the rainstorm, it meant she could easily refuse coffee.
The next day Martha showed Ernest some of her work as they sat in the garden surrounded by exotic flowers for which she had no names. Fife had taken her on an exhaustive tour of the garden and Martha had hummed along, aiming for some genuine enthusiasm, but it was as if Mrs. Hemingway didn’t understand that all of these things might have more importance to a woman in her forties than one in her twenties.
Ernest went at the story she gave him with a black pen, showing her what words could be lifted. “The bones,” he said, following one of the sentences with his finger, as if helping her to read it: “That’s all you need.”
They were a cozy little family over the next few weeks. He edited her work, reading passages aloud so that they could hear the rhythms. In their conversations she felt valued and important: someone with whom to discuss ideas and test the weight of things. There might have been flirtation, but nothing more than was ordinary between men and women who looked good and wrote well.
