by Naomi Wood
Martha had heard a rumor in London that Ernest might be entertaining someone at the Dorchester, but she had put it down to wartime nooky and thought nothing of it. After all, she has had her own fair share of indiscretions since Havana. She thinks of those yellow tulips in the London hospital. Perhaps they’d been a gift from her— from Mary Welsh. Or is it Walsh? But for Ernest to be writing poetry—and love poetry at that—it must be quite serious indeed. Martha almost admires him: what a feat, she thinks, to want to marry every woman he fucks. He is so good at being in love that Ernest Hemingway makes a rotten husband.
Martha smokes a cigarette to mask the coffee. It tastes as if liquefied from bark. She watches the world go by. The Parisians all look so happy, but Martha feels a rueful spectator to the memories of the past. She remembers how many times she and Ernest had gotten blind on gin
and coconuts in Havana; how they had spent one night inventing a dance called the Hem-Horn Step, the both of them too drunk to remember the moves each time they attempted it. She remembers how, after a terrible time with the writing, Ernest had taken her out on Pilar, and, looking out over the sea, he had said, “This, Marty, is the only thing that matters.” And he coaxed her out of a misery so peculiar and so vague that only writing could cause it—and only another writer could understand it. That afternoon he named each tuna he hooked after every reviewer they’d both come to hate. And that night they roasted the cream of the New York critics on their barbecue back at the Finca.
Most of all, as she finishes up her Kration cigarette, Martha remembers his love for her. Perhaps it had only been her own ambivalence that had made his love so sharp and so angry. “I love you like a fucking dope”—how he had seemed to spit out those words, just an hour ago at the Ritz, as if he were in some part disgusted with himself.
And now it’s all ending, Martha thinks, with a shock she hasn’t yet felt about the end of her marriage. Everything bad is coming to a close, but so is everything good, and she feels wretched and bleak. Oh, Ernest! Why, she thought, did he have to do this to her as well? But there could never be two people at the close of his marriage. No, she thinks, a little bitterly: it always had to end on a three-card winner.
As Martha walks from the park her hand is shaken vigorously and she collects a hundred embraces when they see her correspondent’s badge. De Gaulle is due at three and already people are gathering on the boulevard with a bottle of calvados or plum liquor. She’ll need to get her story quickly before the boulevard is flooded with drunks and jubilants.
Since her D-day stunt Martha has been in hot water with her boss at Collier’s. To sweeten him up she’s decided to give him a light piece on Paris fashion. That is what Americans want to hear from Europe: not the state of the Jews, or the work of the Resistance, but what has happened to the French hemline. Well, she thinks, let them have it. In any case, she needs her work to take her mind off Ernest. Whenever she has been sunk with worry of one kind or another, it has always been reporting that has proved the most effective anesthetic. Travail: opium unique—this has always been her motto.
Martha finds an assistant in one of the fashion houses. Behind the glass he hangs flags around mannequins dressed in fur and brocade, buttons and lace. It’s as if Paris is an exotic bird next to London, where she saw no fabric on sale—no buttons, no lace, no beads. When she knocks on the window, the man jumps and palms his hand over his heart. Paris is still jumpy. He eyes the badge on her arm.
He leaves his mannequin sunbathing half-nude in the August light. Martha offers him her best smile and then goes in for the kill. “So what were the Krauts like as customers, Monsieur?”
He instantly bridles. “I am only the window man,” he says. He watches the boulevard nervously as if he fears the mob might turn on him. Martha tells herself to go gently: all she has to do is find out what ladies did with their rayon rations.
“What could women buy, Monsieur?”
The man gives a guarded summary of their shortages— no metal hooks, no eyes, no leather for soles. He tells her about the craze for enormous hats because they could be made from scraps and leftovers. She thinks she has enough down to spin something together, a little froufrou article that her boss will love. Martha thanks him and starts to make her way back to her hotel, where, for an hour, she will forget the mess of marriage to Ernest and she will sit at her typewriter and just write. She might start her piece with a portrait of the couturier’s, then give the panorama of the city itself: the booksellers down at the Seine, the rich women in their palanquins, the semelles en bois that made every Parisian sound like a two-legged horse. Keep it simple, she tells herself.
A hundred yards away, Martha realizes she has forgotten to take the man’s name. She jogs back to the fashion house, but from a distance, Martha sees he is talking to someone else outside the store. Another reporter.
This is irksome. Collier’s will only want her story if it’s an exclusive. She’s about to march over to this journalist to tell her to quit it but she stops short. There is something familiar about this woman, who is her own age and has blonde hair curled close to her scalp. She’s very neat in blazer and shirt, though the suit can’t hide her full chest. Perhaps Martha knows her from Madrid; perhaps she was a fellow resident at the Hotel Florida and they have breakfasted together over orange halves.
Martha watches this reporter from behind a newspaper kiosk. No, Martha thinks, changing her mind, she is someone from the New York office of the Post or the Times. The shop man’s froideur has all but gone under this woman’s warmer attentions—there can be no question who has snagged the better interview. He even laughs. At the end of the interview the journalist hands over her card and introduces herself in French. The shock of the name makes Martha go cold. It’s her. It’s the woman of Ernest’s poem.
Mary Welsh hardly looks a war reporter. Her breasts are unshaped by a bra and she has big soft blonde curls that are not well kept from her face by bobby pins. When she listens, she tilts her head sympathetically—she is probably used to soft-soaping people for the gossip columns or women’s pages. She is attractive, Martha thinks, to a degree.
An overweight American reporter comes to talk to her just as she is putting her notepad away. Mary looks delighted to see him, whoever he is. They talk on the boulevard corner, their faces close and intimate in the crowd.
“Do you want to buy something?”
Martha looks blankly at the newspaper seller. “What?” He asks her again if Madame would like to buy a newspaper. “No.”
Martha has nowhere else to hide aside from the kiosk. And so, with little forethought as to what she will actually say, she strides over to Mary Welsh. It is an ambush. But it is also unplanned. “Mary?” she says, but she can’t be heard. Horns sound where a crowd has gathered, and people are shouting that the general is arriving. A policeman blows his whistle, trying to keep some sort of order. “Mary!” she is forced to say again.
“Yes?” The woman looks at her with a blank expression.
The fat man blinks. His face is pink and wet in the heat.
“I’m Martha. Martha Gellhorn.”
The man’s eyes glitter with something like fear; she’s glad her name can still do this. He gives Mary’s arm a squeeze. “See you tomorrow.” The way he says it, it’s as if he’s wishing her luck, as if Mary is entering battle. Martha wonders if Ernest’s relationship with this woman is common knowledge; perhaps she is the only one in their circle of reporters who has been left in the dark. She would hate to be thought of as a chump by any of them. The man nods at her before walking away and for moments the two women watch him go.
“I know who you are, Miss Gellhorn,” Mary says. She puts her knapsack on both shoulders and smiles, as if she is completely at ease in the company of her lover’s wife. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
Martha feels forced onto the back foot; she thought she would be the one to steer this. “Remember you?”
“We met in Chelsea. Earlier this year.”
Martha realizes where she has met her: not in Madrid or New York, but in London. They were introduced at a Herald Tribune party but Martha had been too busy pressing a couple of Polish pilots for information to pay much attention to her. The only thing she remembers about this woman is that she had taken a particular interest in her fox stole—but their meeting that night couldn’t have lasted longer than a few minutes. And she had never entertained the idea that Ernest might be fashioning this woman for a wife. Martha and Mary, she thinks: biblical sisters, war reporters, and now companions in Ernest’s shareable bed. And so the sorry wheel turns again.
Mary lights a cigarette and stands with one hand on her elbow. She looks biddable—as if her whole body were ready to do whatever was desired. How Ernest would enjoy that. “How long has it been going on?”
Mary shrugs. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t play the innocent.”
Mary gazes at her shoes but she looks far from culpable. “Ernest said you were very much out of the scene. He said he was alone in London, and that he’d been alone for months.”
“Seventeen days I was away!”
“You didn’t look so alone at the party where we met.”
“That is immaterial. I want to know what has been going on.”
“We’ve had lunch and drinks, that’s all.”
“What kind of overtures is he making you?”
“I hardly think it’s your business.”
A group of students approach, ringing their bicycle bells and wearing ski hats despite the August temperatures. They’re chanting one of the Liberation songs and some of them, inexplicably, have toilet brushes that they pump into the air with abandoned glee. Martha wants them quickly out of here; her temper is high and she wants answers. They wheel past, forcing Martha and Mary to the side of the shop front.
“Does he talk to you of marriage? I assume he does.”
Mary nods. It might be the shade of the building, darkening her features, but she finally has the decency to look a little guilty. “He’s not serious.”
“Oh, he’s deadly serious,” says Martha. “I have no doubt that he will very swiftly want to marry you. Is that what you want?”
“Marriage? To him? I don’t know.” Mary looks at her other hand with some misgiving. “The problem is,” she says, “I’m already married.”
Martha notices, now, the wedding band on Mary’s finger. Suddenly she has the desire to burst out laughing. How absurd! How perfectly ridiculous! Hurrah for Ernest, since once more, in a new decade, cuckolds and fools are made from each and every one of them.
One of the students prods a toilet brush in her direction. He frowns, mimicking her expression, and then he traces a smile on his own lips. Involuntarily, she laughs.
“Well, that does tend to complicate things,” she says to Mary. At least, Martha thinks, Mary might have a little more sass than the virgin brides of Hadley and Fife.
“Look, Martha. Can I call you Martha?”
She nods. Mary gestures over to a bench just vacated down the side street. The two women sit next to each other rather awkwardly, a little far apart. “Martha, what I’m trying to say is that I wouldn’t have stepped on your toes if I thought you were still about. Ernest made very firm insistences that you were finished with him. Not the other way around.”
Her temper, which had felt hot and sharp just minutes ago, has lifted, and she listens to Mary’s words of truth. She does not want to be married to Ernest anymore. All around her are thrilled Parisians, crammed in at the balconies above them, wearing homemade flags, and kids perched in trees and streetlamps. The occupation is over, and Martha can’t find it in herself to deliver the bruising to Mary she’d come here to give. Instead, she feels an urgency to be honest. Mary, a reporter herself, might even understand this strange predicament: of loving this man but wanting, even more than that, absolute liberty.
Martha sees a little girl up in a tree, with scuffed knees and blonde hair, searching for General de Gaulle. It reminds her of when she was a little girl, and how she had once hid herself in the ice man’s cart until long into the night. When her parents found her she could only reply that she had wanted to see the world. Motion. Flight. Martha had always craved it.
“I’m sorry for coming across abruptly before,” she says to Mary. “I didn’t mean to be an ass. I was upset. You see, I have only just become acquainted with your relationship with my husband … with Ernest. And it has come as something of a shock.”
“I’m sorry,” says Mary.
Sitting beside this woman, a woman to whom Ernest has already dedicated a poem, Martha recognizes Mary suddenly for what she is: her ticket out of here. This morning she saw that Ernest won’t let her break things off if there’s any chance he’s going to be alone. What he fears is loneliness, and whatever brutish thoughts he has when he is left untended. Only if he is assured of another wife will he let his present wife go. “All I want is to be shot of it,” Martha says, slowly, to Mary. “I want my own name in my passport. You’re right. I don’t want to be Mrs. Hemingway anymore.”
“Would you so little recommend it?”
“Marriage to Ernest?” Martha laughs. “No, that’s not true. I have had,” and she says this without a shadow of a lie, “the most wonderful time. It’s just over—for us that is. It’s the end of something, that’s all.”
Mary nods and offers her a smoke. Lips that have shared Ernest’s now share an American-issue cigarette. Martha looks to the wide leafy boulevard where, she imagines, tanks will soon pass, and everyone will sing in ecstasy for their freedom. “Any advice?” Mary asks, saying the words into the smoke. “If it were to happen, that is.”
“I don’t know … Enjoy yourself?” Martha smiles. “It’s not every girl who gets to call herself Mrs. Hemingway.”
Mary laughs. “All a bit strange, don’t you think? Us sitting here discussing this?”
“Oh no,” Martha says. “Paris is where this sort of thing happens to Ernest, where women knit together his fate. He thinks he is the one making all the choices.” She finishes the last of the cigarette and presses it under her boot. “He is not.”
They sit awhile watching the preparations, then Mary makes her excuses, saying she has copy to file before returning to cover the parade. They walk down the Élysées together, Mrs. Hemingway and Mr. Hemingway’s mistress. Before they say good-bye, Martha remembers the look Sylvia Beach gave her at the bookshop this morning. “May I ask, Mary,” she says, just as they are about to part, “have you been to Shakespeare’s with Ernest this trip?”
“The bookshop?” Mary asks. “Yes.”
“Did Sylvia ask who you were?”
“I think Ernest just said I was a friend. Why?”
“No reason,” Martha replies. “What’s the piece you were doing, earlier on?”
“Just a quickie on Paris fashion for Time.” Martha smiles.
“What?”
“Looks like our stars have aligned again.” Martha scraps the idea for the article; she’ll let Mary get there first. They push through the crowds and stop off at the tobacconist to see if they can get more cigarettes. Martha holds out the door for her and lets the other woman in.
30. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.
Mary is waiting in the Ritz lobby when Martha arrives, having made her way through streets of celebrating Parisians. Mary’s cheeks seem drawn tightly against the bones; there is none of the mischievous woman she had met earlier this afternoon—whom she had thought she would never meet again.
“Mary.” Martha sits down next to her. “Whatever is the matter?”
Earlier that evening, just as Martha was about to sink into a bath after what had felt like the most emotionally hectic day, she had received a distressed call from Mary at the Ritz. “You’ve got to come here,” Mary said. Martha’s heart beat hard, remembering the little gun propped against Ernest’s bureau. “Ernest is losing it. Please, head over straightaway!”
Now Mar
y sits quite still on a sofa in the lobby. The Ritz is eerily quiet compared to the noise coming from outside. “Oh, Martha,” she says, biting on her lip. “I don’t know what to do!”
Martha steers her to the bar. She orders Mary a stiff drink and then one for herself. “Tell me slowly what happened.”
Mary takes a large draft of the Scotch. “When I came back home this afternoon after meeting you, I found Ernest in the lobby having an enormous argument with a man called Harry Cuzzemato.”
“Cuzzemano. Go on.”
“Ernest was accusing him of all sorts of things. Theft, harassment, how he’d hounded him for that suitcase. The poor man shook like a leaf. Eventually I managed to pry him off Cuzzemano’s neck. When we got back to the room, I got him to lie down.”
Mary’s hands still shake—she will need to fare better than this if she’s to put up with Ernest’s moods. Martha has known him to swing from tenderness to tyranny in the course of only a few minutes.
“Finally he fell asleep and I decided to type up a poem he wrote me. I thought he’d like to wake up to a gift.” The whites of Mary’s eyes are silky with fear. “And because it was written on lavatory paper, Martha. When I showed him the typed poem, he seemed pleased. He began to read it aloud then he stopped: he said I’d missed something. Then he said it was just a couple of lines and that we could check it. I didn’t know what to say! I’d thrown the paper into the wastebasket as soon as I’d finished. I ran back to my room but the bin was empty. The maid smiled when I asked her, saying, ‘Don’t worry, Madame, the papers will not reach the Sûreté.’
“I had to tell Ernest the original had been lost. But Martha, he’s been down there ever since! Scrambling through the garbage, convinced he’s going to find it. He won’t listen to me. You’ve got to talk to him.”
