Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  Mary finishes her drink and Martha chases hers down too.

  Objects emerge from the cellar dark: prewar suitcases left by tourist refugees, folded flags, old menus, jars of mustard, and bottles of vinegar. Lined along the wall are dusty bottles of champagne—so in his twelve-hour stay Ernest hasn’t completely decimated the supply. Martha calls out his name. There’s no response.

  She winds her way around the cases and calls out to him again. He must be down here if Mary says he is. She imagines him squatting behind one of the valises, his breath rifling the air, his eyes more adjusted to the dark than hers. She doesn’t want to be scared out of her wits just because Ernest thinks it would be a good practical joke to frighten her. She tries to calculate how much he might have had to drink since the champagne at noon. “Ernest! For Christ’s sake: answer me!”

  She notices a line of gray light at the side of the cellar and follows it outside.

  A man stands with his hands deep in the garbage cans. Somehow, among the empty wine bottles, broken wooden crates, slimed scraps of food, Ernest still has the air of a man in touch with the gods.

  His hands drop from the trash cans, greased and mucky. He cracks that hobnailed grin. He isn’t alone: two of the hotel staff stand some way up the alley, too respectful of Monsieur Hemingway to intervene. He’s the Ritz’s sweetheart. How must he seem to them, she wonders, only hours after rescuing the hotel with his martini-tour-de-force, now up to his elbows in the muck of rich men? “Marty.”

  “What are you doing, Ernest?”

  “I’ve missed you so much, Rabbit.” The words slur over each other. His arms hang uselessly. A ripe smell of garbage comes off him. She leads him to the curb where they can sit.

  Martha doesn’t say anything until he’s calmer. “Are you all right?”

  He stares at his hands. “Mary lost the poem.”

  “I know.”

  “Where is it, Rabbit?”

  “You know all documents are burned if they’re thrown away.”

  He looks at her. Mania pushes into his eyes. “Nazi swine, what if they stole it?” He puffs himself up then he almost rolls on the ground before managing to stand. Like a bear with a sore toe, he crashes about the alley, kicking a tin can against the wall. “What if Cuzzemano has it? He’s been down here, I know it, trying to find anything he can. He would have these damn hands if he could chew them off !”

  “Ernest, please. I doubt Cuzzemano has a deal with the chambermaid.”

  “Then it’s that bitch’s fault—Mary! For throwing it away.” Ernest kicks at a crate and the hotel staff turn. “She called you here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you my wife anymore, Rabbit?” He comes to sit on the step again and looks at her with those watery drunk eyes. He puts his hands on her knees as he had done that night in Cuba.

  “I can’t be your wife anymore.” Now her voice is full of tenderness, because she is the one letting him go.

  “But I want you to be. I’m cockeyed lonely without you.”

  “You have Mary now.”

  “What is Mary to me? She doesn’t even want me. Not for good.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Let’s call it my built-in shit detector.”

  A woman laughs on the street by the hotel. Then a man says something and the night watchmen laugh too. “What do you want me to be?”

  “My wife.”

  “I’m a correspondent. I don’t want to be just a wife.”

  Ernest stands, holding out his shirt to make breasts. He

  minces around, his voice falsetto. “Oooooh! I am Martha Gellhorn and I am the only woman war reporter around!” At this he lets the breasts go, then grabs at a mop and pail leaning on the garbage cans. He puts the pail on his head and the handle about his chin. He jabs the mop toward her. “Well I am a knight errant and I will win you back!”

  He jabs the mop a few times and she laughs. Then he shoves it in her face. It makes her retch and she pushes him away. “Stop it, Ernest.” He doesn’t and she has to say it more forcefully. “Stop it, for God’s sake.”

  He ditches the helmet and broadsword and sits by her chastised. She barely recognizes him: his skin is pouchy, his stubble roughly shorn. Ernest’s head is no longer bandaged but the London wound protrudes like a peach pit. She wishes more than anything that he would take better care; it’s as if he can’t be bothered anymore. She has called him Pig as a joke, but this is what he seems like now: fat and wobbling, with his small eyes and rough skin, not the dazzling man she had met in a bar on a hot afternoon seven years ago.

  “We’re tearing each other apart. There’ll be nothing on us but bones if we carry on.”

  “Please can we continue,” he says flatly.

  “We have to work hard and get things written. That’s all we can do.”

  “I haven’t written anything since the Bell.” He takes her hand. “I’m out of business.”

  “You’re forty-five, Ernest, hardly over the hill. You’re a wonderful writer.”

  “All you wanted was an editor, not a husband.”

  “That’s not fair.” This morning she had expected to feel some pleasure in doing this, but there’s no triumph now. There’ll be no grand party, no drinking, no kissing in the street to mark her liberation. Not when her husband has been rifling through garbage, the dirt still on his hands, his mind half-mad with booze. Martha lights a cigarette.

  “I’m scared,” he says.

  “Of what?”

  “I’m deadhouse.” He gives her the crooked grin again but it has stopped working on her a long time ago. She remembers when he had nailed her with it at Sloppy Joe’s.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not. I tell you it would kill an ox, this thing. This …” He loses the thread of what he wants to say. His eyes turn as hard as pebbles. “It used to be I could write. Now I have to drag the words up and even then they don’t hit straight. The Bell! The Bell was easy; it was about us, and Spain. The longer I don’t write, the more it hurts.” He pauses. A firework goes off somewhere close. “I have a hole inside me big as a house, Marty. I’m scared.”

  “Of what?”

  “Women or words. Who knows?”

  “Dearest Ernest—”

  “What if I end up like my father?” It’s like a gunshot in the dark. “Martha,” he says, and it is as if her real name comes out of the deepest place in him; he always calls her Marty. It scares her, this place, where Ernest’s horrors sit as hard as quartz inside him. What is it that makes him so frightened? She knows he is afraid of being alone. He is scared of the brutish character of his sadness, but there is something more to it, which she cannot name, and neither can he. Down inside Ernest there is something rotten: there is the slag heap of himself, like all this garbage. Were she to delve into this, she would have to commit to him for the long run. And she can’t. She simply doesn’t have the energy to sort out Ernest Hemingway amidst everything else. “Work,” she says. “Work is the cure for us.”

  “I want to be a good man, a good writer.”

  “Be one or the other, Ernest, not both.”

  “I have this longing,” he says, and he points to his heart, “to change myself. See it out with me.”

  Martha looks at him searchingly. She wonders if he has said these words once to Hadley or Fife. “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I just can’t.” He must notice how her voice catches.

  “Has Mary put you up to this? I won’t see her if I can be with you.”

  “Mary asked me talk to you about the poem.”

  “It seems France is where I lose my work. And my wives.” He gives a sad smile, rubbing the muck off his hands onto his pants. Quickly he seems quite sober. “I have a terrible feeling I was only of use to you when I had a pen in my hand. Did you love me?”

  “Of course.” Martha looks at the stitching on her sneakers. “But I think it’s time we let each other go.”

  “Okay, Ma
rty. I’ll issue you a divorce. I’ll sue you for abandonment. For all those times you left me for your cherished wars. And then—now—for the time you left me for good.”

  Martha kisses him on the cheek as they stand from the sidewalk. “Darling Ernest, you smell awful.”

  “So would you if you’d been going through the garbage.”

  “You were never one for hygiene, old bear.”

  The hotel staff idle, sensing the scene is over. She hopes they won’t tell anyone; she hopes his propaganda will have more traction with Parisians than a sorry story of Ernest Hemingway with his hands in the trash. “Rabbit,” he says, pausing for the last time by the door. He lets his lips rest on her wrist then lets it go. “It was good a lot of the time, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she says. “And I will miss you so much.” It’s the truth. He has been the other half of her for seven years. Martha follows him through the cellar, through the old boxes, flags, and dusty bottles of wine. While they are still in the dark, he says, “I thought I’d left a box of my writing in here before Fife and I sailed home. But that’s gone too. Another thing lost.”

  Mary waits for them at the bar, her face tear-stained, her glass empty. Martha will shake her hand and kiss Ernest on the cheek, and then she will walk back to the Hotel Lincoln alone. Then, in the months to come, they will write a few letters and meet again to discuss the details of divorce. And sometimes they will think back to that hot afternoon in Sloppy Joe’s, and those weeks spent in Fife’s garden, and the mornings together listening to the mazurkas in Madrid, and their serene days of writing in the Finca. She had been his mistress nearly as long as she had been his wife. And despite the vitriol that will come to pass between them, she will remember the old bear with his paws sunk into the garbage, talking to her of fear. But to all others, she will not let his famous name pass her lips. And after that year, she will never see him again.

  MARY

  31. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  Mary sits in the part of the study that won’t get any more sun. Papers surround her: magazines still in wrappers, lottery tickets, charts of the Gulf Stream, drafts of novels, telegrams to mistresses and wives.

  Every day she comes into the study as if her work is a kind of vigilance. Over morning coffee the desire to have everything sorted possesses her with violent energy, but within minutes of beginning the desire goes and by the evening she finds herself in Ernest’s chair, reading his letters, wrapped in a blanket from which his smell is disappearing with terrifying speed.

  Mary has brought back from the Finca boxes of papers and photographs, thousands of dollars’ worth of manuscripts in a shrimp boat from Havana. In the boxes there are skeletons of mice and cockroaches, the cockroaches sometimes as big as the mice. Sometimes she dreams of throwing a match into the room, relinquishing it all, every last damn piece of paper.

  Ernest’s voice feels near when she reads the letters, as if it came in on the winds from the Sawtooths. When her hands get cold at night, she imagines moving them into the warmth of his. Sometimes sitting in his armchair she would put her chin onto his palm and they would read whatever he was reading together. Hands: that’s the part of him she misses. Ernest’s hands weren’t writers’ hands: they were hatched with scars and rough from the sea. If she could wish for anything again it would be the confirmation of his touch.

  Sometimes she catches Ernest’s footfall on the porch. He unshoes in the vestibule. The snow coat he puts on the hook. Ernest comes into the house with a rifle on his shoulder. Maybe there is a pheasant under his arm ready for the pan: blood clotted in the feathers, its gaze elsewhere. Sometimes she hears her name from an empty room. Mary She continues whatever it is she is doing because she’s not crazy; she knows the house is empty. Look at the garden, Mary. We’re early for rabbits. His voice ghosts.

  And then there’s the sound of that morning’s gunshot. She hears that, too, again and again, even when she’s out on the deck, watching as snow comes to the mountains of Idaho.

  That’s the trouble with reading these letters. They resurrect him.

  At night she wonders what it must sound like to hear her crying: it’s not gentle, not at all, not a keening sound but rather a bit dog howling at the disturbance of the moon. In the morning the cook gives her a towel she’s left in cucumber water in the icebox overnight. Mary holds it to her eyes as she smokes the first of the day’s cigarettes. This business of being widowed; it has its scant pleasures.

  Outside, beyond the deck, the trees are on the edge of turning. In weeks she’ll be able to powder the leaves under

  her boot. She holds the smoke in her mouth. Many days into September Ernest’s office is still a mess; it is a city of paper. She holds on to that thought; only suicides leave their papers neat.

  One afternoon she finds a copy of Ernest’s tribute to the president.

  Ernest had greeted the request from Washington with something close to cold fright. For too long, now, he’d been an unhappy writer. To lose his ability to write was to have lost the ability to clear his mind of itself. To write was to come into a wonderful house: a clean well-lighted place where the light fell in large white blocks on the good wooden floors. To write was to be at home, to be able to see well.

  The request was for a few handwritten lines for Mr. Kennedy. That week in February Ernest sat in his study, looking with nervousness over the barrel of his stomach. Misery hovered close. She had often wondered why he couldn’t give up on this wretched business. They had enough money from royalties, film options, magazine deals. If he could send off the Paris stories and then put himself to the work of hunting or fishing, he might have a better chance of happiness. But writers and their woes: they couldn’t be parted. Not for anything.

  Mary went into town to find the right kind of paper and have it cut down to size. When she returned she put it on the desk. “It only needs to be a few sentences.” Ernest

  looked at the paper with grim amazement: as if she were asking him to do something unconscionable, slay a baby. “Could I help, lamb?”

  “No. I have to do this.”

  The sentences amounted to not much more than a telegram.

  When Mary returned to the room after lunch, still nothing had been written. Ernest held the card jealously as a boy might an examination paper. He looked at her. “The turnip’s been squeezed for its last drop,” he said, surveying the blank page.

  “Just write one sentence. Just say you wish the president well.”

  Ernest’s eyes were slow, rheumed with liquor. She wondered how much he’d had that morning. “Do you want me to stay?”

  Ernest shook his head. “I’ll finish it this afternoon.” She kissed him but he didn’t seem to recognize it.

  Mary went out beyond the horse pasture. She walked the quarter mile to Warm Spring Road, remembering the man she’d fallen in love with in the Ritz hotel. What an open vista their life had seemed in the night-time of room thirty-one. How wonderful life with Ernest Hemingway would be! And now? Now he seemed unable to even register the things that had once given him pleasure. Sometimes she snapped at him because she didn’t know what she should do with him or herself. His depression sat at the table with them at breakfast and dinner.

  She knew she should not but she was tired of making accommodations for his moods. They had grown old together: they knew each other’s faults and foibles; when they were scratchy or mean-tempered; at what point forgiveness would be delivered after an argument, and how to avoid the escalation in the first place. But these months—or these years, perhaps, since the plane crashes—had been hard. During his blackest moods he was unreachable. Worse, he could be savage. Fifteen years of marriage wouldn’t ever accustom her to the outrages of Ernest’s temper. It was her husband who had delivered some of the most colorful insults she had ever had the misfortune to receive.

  Mary walked until she reached the snow.

  The light had gone from the study when she returned. Ernest was sitting in the stirless dusk
, books surrounding him. When she switched on the desk lamp she saw how sore his eyes looked from where he’d rubbed them. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. He looked at the paper—he could no more write upon it than he could a sheet of ice. Her persuasions made him give up for the night.

  But the next day was the repeat of the first. The day after was the same too. “Just a few sentences, lamb,” she said later on in the week when he was surrounded by unfinished sentences and discarded drafts.

  The president’s telegram was finished a week later. Before putting it in the envelope Mary checked the note again. The curls of his handwriting made her think of an instrument of torture: like the braces and loops of medieval stocks, where the hands were fixed and the tongue clamped. Oh, Ernest, she thought, we might be happy if only you’d put down the pen.

  Two months on Mary still goes to bed late in the newly empty house. She’s fifty-three and yet she lives like a teenager: she wakes late and her bedtime can be three or four in the morning. Her sleep is thick and when she wakes she remembers nothing of her dreams or even whether she’s had them. Her friends want her to talk to someone, a professional, about the morning she found her husband. It’s not so much what she saw that morning but the sound above all else that still ambushes her in the days: it was like a bureau drawer coming loose from its runners and falling to the floor. Even when it’s just the cook throwing the cutlery together, or a back door slamming in a draft, Mary’s mind jumps to that morning’s gun blast.

  This is what the doctor wants her to talk about: the scene itself. He says not talking—not talking about this scene in particular—will make it harder to deal with her grief. The doctor says that the memory is like the shrapnel in Ernest’s leg: to talk is to bring it up; not talking will leave it to fester and encyst. But Mary has no inclination to share: not with the quacks or biographers, not with his confederacy of ex-wives. Everyone is chivvying her to speak. Talk! Talk! Talk! As if this memory is something to be smoked from a hole.

  Mary, anyway, has done her fair share of talking. After the coroner had gone she telephoned his wives and sons. In her address book she found Hadley’s number and Martha’s in London. For some moments she stared at Fife’s entry in the book: a black line through her name. Poor Fife. She had loved Ernest almost as a matter of faith or doctrine. Had she loved him the most? She’d certainly fought the hardest to keep him, Mary thought, remembering how Martha had shrugged him off like a heavy jacket on that too-hot day in Paris.