Mrs. Hemingway (17 page)

Martha and Ernest had come to Shakespeare's on one of their breaks from the Spanish war and Sylvia had embraced Ernest as if he were a man resurrected. It was in this store that Martha had fallen in love with him. For a year or so she'd thought that having each other in Spain was only about survival. Maybe it was the books on the walls, the way Sylvia looked at him adoringly, the way he said “Marty, Paris,” when they looked over the city's gray sloping roofs, but it was in this place that everything seemed to fit. Ernest had captured her heart not in Sloppy Joe's or in Madrid, but among the books of Paris.
Nesto
, she'd later written on the book of hers he'd bought from Shakespeare's:
be mine forever.
And at that point she had meant it: the word
forever
.

A bell rings her entry. For a moment Sylvia Beach stares at her blankly. Sylvia is famously warm to everyone but today, evidently, she can't remember who this is standing on her doormat.

“Martha!” she says, remembrance coming back quickly. There's a hint of mustache as Sylvia kisses her. “Adrienne, come here quick, Martha Gellhorn is here!”

A tall woman with a stiff smile enters the room carrying a basket full of books. “Martha, dear,” she says, putting down her load. “How good it is to see you. Let me get you something to drink.” She returns from the pantry with a glass of water spiked with grenadine. “Sorry there's nothing more potent.
Pas de gin, pas de whiskey, pas de vodka
.”

Martha laughs. “
Pas de problème.
”

Adrienne seats herself by the cash register. The carpenter is still installing it onto the desk, and the keys jingle as if he is putting through receipts for thousands of francs. “What happened here?”

Sylvia raises her quite bushy brows. “An unfortunate episode with a man from the Gestapo.”

“How do you mean?”

“Let's just say he thought he deserved his copy of
Finnegans Wake
more than me.”

“I never knew Fascists went in for Joyce.”

“Oh, yes. He asked how much it was and I said it was my own personal copy. Then he said if he couldn't have this book, he would remove all of them.”

“And?”

Adrienne laughs: it's rich, mischievous, smoky. “In two hours we put everything into hiding. We cleaned out the whole shop—
les boches
never found a thing.”

The carpenter announces he's finished and Sylvia settles the bill. Sylvia, in particular, seems older, her features a little harder, as if she has known hunger these past few years. “How has the war treated you?”

“Kind in some respects. Unkind in others.”

There are some moments of silence before Sylvia speaks again.

“We had a fine system during the war, didn't we, Adrienne? I'd forage for berries and fruit. Adrienne would line up at the bakers. We became as obsessed with food as we had been with books. And even books didn't matter so much anymore. We considered eating them, at one time. Or smoking them, at least.”

“You were in Paris for it all?”

“A brief spell in Vittel—”

“The watering hole?”

“Well, it's not quite the spa experience when you can't get out.”

“An internment camp?”

“For American Lady Expatriates.” Sylvia says it delicately, as if she is mocking herself. “It wasn't so bad. First they drove us out of Paris but they didn't know where to put us. So they put us in the zoo at the Bois de Boulogne.”

“The zoo?”

“No idea where the animals had gone. I was in the baboon house, which I quite liked. All that monkeying around.”

“That,” Adrienne snorts with French derision, “is a ridiculous joke.”

Sylvia cracks a smile. Perhaps this was why Ernest had always warmed to her, this refusal to take anything seriously. Though he has made so many enemies from friends, Sylvia Beach he had always loved. “They eventually moved us to a converted hotel in Vittel. English aristocrats, artists, tarts and nuns . . . countless chambermaids too—I never did work out what they were there for. They considered the whole thing a rather luxurious holiday. Rightly so.”

Martha notices Adrienne has looked away, unable to keep up with the comedy of Sylvia's storytelling. “Adrienne has been here, however, keeping stock of things. Just to make sure we'll always have one foot in the marketplace of suppressed literature.”

Martha wonders how bad it was for Adrienne, stuck in Paris without Sylvia; she seems to find the whole story decidedly less comic. “And you, Martha? Where have you been?”

“Oh. Anywhere the Front is.”

“You're still reporting?”

“Of course.”

“Now listen, Martha, Ernest's been here.” The mention of his name makes her feel strange. Shakespeare's is a treasured place, and it's beginning to dent her resolve. Suddenly she feels an urgent need to find Ernest and make sure he is all right. Her emotions all morning have veered between outrage and a mad desire to be close to him; she wishes she could feel more constant in her thoughts. “I knew he'd come here first.”

“Why, of course, dear. ‘Paris without a good book is like a pretty girl with only one eye.' Who said that, Adrienne?”

Adrienne rolls her eyes and takes the empty glass back into the pantry. “Balzac,
chérie
,” she says, with the sound of the faucet running in the back. “But he said it about dinner without cheese.”

“Martha,” Sylvia continues, still excited, “your husband practically liberated the shop! I heard a familiar voice shout, ‘Sylvia! Sylvia!' then I heard the whole street begin to chant my name. It was joyous, dear: really so thrilling. He went up to the attic to clear the rooftops of German snipers. Then he made sure the store was completely secure and afterward we all celebrated with brandy—then he said he was off to liberate the Ritz cellar. Wonderful!”

That longing Martha felt moments ago seems to have sunk somewhere near her ribs. Everywhere she goes she finds herself in the shadow of Ernest's propaganda. It is exhausting: her husband's need to self-aggrandize. In her articles she writes about small stories, about things observed up close: in his reportage there is always Ernest, the great writer, standing in the middle of the story like a fat dictator orating in a square somewhere.

Sylvia asks where she is staying. “Oh. We're staying separately.” Sylvia's eyes look nervously to Adrienne. “It was a mutual decision. And Ernest? Where is he?”

“The Ritz,” says a male voice from the back of the shop. “I hear he saved them as well.” The man she had seen outside the shop walks into view.

“Oh, Harry,” Sylvia bursts into a smile. “I forgot you were there! Have you been eavesdropping all this time?”

“You didn't hear me come down?”

“Martha, do you know Harry Cuzzemano? He's a book collector. He's known your husband for years.”

“Only by reputation.”

Harry Cuzzemano steps out from the bookshelves. A long scar runs from eye to chin, the sutures still visible. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Hemingway.”

“Any success yet on Ernest's suitcase?”

He gives a hasty laugh. “Oh, I gave up on that quite a while ago. Apparently it may not have even happened.”

“Oh, I doubt that. I think it's very true indeed. Gosh, just imagine if someone finds it before you. What a waste of time that would have been.”

He flushes. Sensing danger, Sylvia intervenes. “If I found it, I'd sell it back to Ernest for a mint. We'd own our own island in Antigua. Imagine, Adrienne!”

Martha has been caught by Cuzzemano inspecting his wound. “Mortar attack by the Americans a few days ago,” he says, quite quietly. “Friendly fire.” He raises his eyebrows as if his words carried some private meaning between them.

“I must go, Sylvia. Must intercept Ernest before he rescues another damn landmark.”

“
Trop tard
,” Adrienne almost sings.

Sylvia picks out
Finnegans Wake
. “At least take something to read.”

“Isn't it your only copy?”

“One of many,” she grins. “No one should be cajoled into the selling of their books.”

“A happy lesson for us all,” Martha says, looking at Cuzzemano, whom she has only ever spoken to on the telephone in the most colorful language she remembered from her playground days in St. Louis, and which her father, Dr. Gellhorn, would never have countenanced at home. Martha thanks Sylvia, gesturing with the book.

“Just remember not to try too hard with understanding it,” Sylvia says. “Like people, they're best not to be too thoroughly understood.”

 • • • 

Martha crosses the sidewalk and stands at the barricade of rue de l'Odéon, behind a pile of old furniture, an oven, and some garbage bins. She watches Sylvia and Adrienne deep in conversation behind the shop front. Sylvia is furiously shaking her head and mouthing the word “Non!” Martha's presence has somehow upset the balance of the shop.

She shoves the Joyce into her satchel and strides over the Pont Neuf in the direction of the Ritz. Funds of contempt are readily there for Ernest, but in this shop is the memory of how wonderful they had been together, all bundled up like refugees from Madrid, their faces flushed with lunch of red wine and partridge, their love lean from Spain. As long as they were shot at, as long as the food was dusty mule sausages, and they could hold each other in the nights as houses blew apart around them, they were happy.

In Madrid, Martha had felt a little shy of him. It was as if his wife's presence in Key West, months before, had made them feel at ease with each other in Fife's tropical garden. But in Madrid Ernest watched her over dried bread and coffee in the hotel, and when the shelling came after breakfast he'd say: “Aha!” wiping his lips with a napkin. “Here comes dessert.”

Soon, as a matter of habit, she would follow him up to his room in the mornings because it was in here, he said, that they would be out of the sight lines of the snipers. As the bombs began to dance in Madrid, Ernest put on a mazurka. Sometimes they would talk and sometimes they listened to the music. On the breeze through the window came the smell of cordite, blasted granite, mud. Though nothing yet had happened these past two weeks, Martha began to feel as if the other reporters looked at her knowingly. She basked a little in the limelight he lent her. Otherwise, she was a nobody: she hadn't yet written a single article about Spain.

Weeks in she knew to walk carefully around the dark shapes of the men cleaned from the flagstones. In a destroyed house one morning she found a boy. Sandbags stood by the door but the bomb had forced the roof in and she found the child under the table in the kitchen. The boy's extinction made Martha quiet that night. Though the other correspondents seemed to notice, no one pressed her on it; who knew what anyone had seen that day? She kept herself separate from the others as if her aloneness were the only way to honor the dead child. At some point she fell asleep while the rest of the gang drank whiskey and some of them danced. When she woke she saw everyone had gone and Ernest asleep in the other bed. Three floors down, the death carts rattled.

The next morning Ernest was sitting by the open window, watching people line up for food though there was hardly anything in the shops but oranges and shoelaces. When he saw she was awake, he came away from the window. He pulled back the blanket and held her in the single bed close to him. “Rabbit,” he said, “I want to marry you.”

That evening she saw him write a cable to his wife. Only two words:
EVERYTHING MARVELOUS
.

But their obligation was not to his wife or even to each other in Spain, but rather to observation: to watch the refugees come in on their creaking carts, the fat dogs and dead mules, buses opened by bombs. They watched people walk off with parts of houses: doors, window frames, and tabletops. There were holes in houses like broken skin. Only to observe and put it all down in words: that was their job here. And Martha, slowly, began to do this: to watch, and to write. People back home thrilled to her reports from Spain.

They should never have left the war, Martha thinks, as she comes to the end of the bridge and prepares to meet her husband in the Ritz. War was the one thing that had kept them alive.

The house rose from the hills. The palms that flanked the villa were as enormous as aircraft carriers, and the facade of the building was webbed with vines. Martha turned back to check the driver was still down at the gates; she felt a little nervous about being in the big house alone.

She peered through the windows into the living quarters—a bathroom, the kitchen, some bedrooms. They would need a study each. Inside, there was a smell of old water and in one of the rooms a pond-sized puddle. Blown-in leaves gathered at the skirting and enormous flower heads knocked quietly at the windows as if asking to enter.

In another room—which would be her bedroom, Martha decided—the vines grew so thickly around the window they made a curtain. A tarnished mirror still hung on the wall and she caught sight of herself in her sundress and sneakers. Would she be able to do this? Be mistress of this house? A cat wandered in and looked unblinkingly at her reflection. For years their home had been a single room in a Madrid hotel. Here there was space and quiet and peace. Here they could live and write books and not fear that someone's head was in the sight lines of a sniper.

In the pool the still water was covered with algae and the tennis courts were overgrown with weeds. The whole place was falling apart but to Martha it seemed close to paradise. Standing there, in the Finca's wildness, she remembered Ernest's house in Key West: how neat and well-tended it had been behind the brick wall and iron fence. Apparently the wall had been Fife's idea—to keep the world out, and, Ernest said, her husband in. But Martha would keep this home open: let nature crawl over it.