Mrs. Hemingway (24 page)

She has come to sit by the water often this summer, and has continued, into fall. Whenever she sits here a vivid memory from her childhood surfaces. It is a memory of skating out on the lake in Minnesota. She figures she must have been seven, because the date she carved onto the sawmill door was 1915.

The freeze had arrived early that year, on a night of no wind, so that the surface of the lake was as smooth as a plate. Mary glided around the lake feeling the slip of her blades until she had built her own dark path into the rink. Near the long grass the ice had frozen thinner and she stayed away from these parts although she liked to see the trout dart under the ice.

A sawmill stood at one corner of the lake. It was the color of dried blood in the white landscape. On the door there were the scratched names and dates of the kids brave enough to test their weight on the corner's thinner ice. Mary had just managed to carve the figure
5
onto the door when she heard the same dry sound as when her father's axe bit into timber. Under one of her boots the ice had begun to tear.

Mary tried to take little steps sideways, just as her mother had told her, but when she moved, the ice began to crack under the other boot. Black water began to come up over the shelf. Without warning, all of the ice under her began to split. Water filled her boot.

Mary grabbed at the door handle but it only turned when she twisted it, and nothing else on the sawmill could hold her weight. Shouts came from the shore. Now there was no ice under her and she could hold on to the handle no longer. She felt herself go into the open hole of dark water and down into the terrific cold.

 • • • 

The lake now is calm as the ducks swim and the light slanting in through the silver birch is beginning to go. Ernest always described his loneliness as
cockeyed
—as if it made him squint, as if he couldn't see straight; but her loneliness today is an ache, a song.

In her mind Mary has grafted the two accidents together, since Ernest had no more wanted to be dead than she had wanted to find herself under the ice. Perhaps he had tripped, just as she had as a child. Perhaps he had tried to grab the vestibule handle, just as she had placed her tiny hand on the sawmill door, but the doorknob had turned just as it had for her. And maybe, Ernest's finger, which had been resting gently on the gun, may have been forced to the trigger. And then she wondered if the moment had been the same for the both of them, as the bullet had been discharged and she had gone down into the ice. It was a moment not of outrage but curiosity.
What's happening to me?
he might have thought.
What am I doing down here in the black?

“Papa,” the private said, “there's a dame here to see you.”

The private stood between the door and the frame. As he half-listened to the room the young man wore a knowing look as he watched her. “I didn't know they handed those out so easily,” he said, nodding to the badge—“C” for correspondent—on her arm. His eyes swept her breasts flattened by the military jacket.

“When you've been doing it as long as me they practically give them away.”

Something was said behind him and the private said, no, not her. It had been like this all week: one had to get through all the lackeys first before one could get to Ernest himself. “Tell him it's Mary Welsh.”

When her name was repeated Ernest appeared and the young private quickly moved aside. “Hello, pickle,” he said. She kissed him on the cheek, removing his hand from her ass. Her happiness this week had felt close to delinquency. Most sensible people—certainly all of her friends—had warned her against any kind of alliance. Short attention span, they warned.

“My pocket Venus,” he whispered to her as he planted her near the window while his “irregulars” filed from the room. Inside there was still the alarmingly strong smell of the horse shank they'd cooked on his gas stove a few nights ago. “Champagne? We haven't exhausted the supply yet.” A bowl of oranges sat on the side table.

Ernest's suite was as well stocked as a general's mess. Wherever he went he came equipped with booze the rest of the correspondents hadn't seen in years. To parties he'd bring jars of marmalade, peanut butter, tinned ham, boiled peaches. If he'd written not a single book he still would have been a celebrity in no time with his famous wardrobe stuffed with delights at the Dorchester. In London, they had gone out for a few more lunches and dinners together: both of them mindful of their absent spouses. Mostly she filled him in on troop movements, lines of attack, the battles of the past five years. After his car crash she had brought him yellow tulips to St. George's Hospital. When she kissed him near the bandage he smelled of soap and camphor. “What happened?” she had said in the dusty room of the clinic.

“We rammed into a steel water tank. Couldn't see a damn thing.”

“It's called a blackout, you silly fool.” She arranged the tulips in a vase. “Here. These flowers will be good for you.”

“You're good for me.” She smiled. Ernest wore a delirious look on his face—he nursed his concussion with a bottle of champagne. Mary chucked the rest of the bottle down the sink while he protested but he did it with a smile, as if he liked her mothering. He said that Martha was coming to visit him later that afternoon, the grand dame herself. He put up his fists and made a few jabs. “Care to stick around? See who'd win in an Irish Waltz?”

Mary just laughed and declined. After the Chelsea party, the Polish pilots, and that very particular snub in the fox cape, she had no desire to see Miss Gellhorn again.

 • • • 

Ernest opened a fresh bottle of fizz and they watched the cork fall to the cobbles below. Under the mansard roofs opposite, the patisserie owner in her big smock swept the dust from her shop. Men lined up to buy their evening newspapers at a street kiosk. There was still a wine-colored stain on the street from the dead horse a week back, and the flags hung from windows were beginning to look tatty and dusty. Paris had begun to grow used to its freedom.

The champagne bottle clinked against the nickel bucket. “
Vive la Libération, et vive ma Mary.
” Ernest toasted her glass, his head still bandaged. He wore his uniform barefoot, but he looked a world away from the man who had his elbows deep in garbage cans the other night. Mary wondered about these deep swings in mood: how sure and in possession of his senses he was now. She wondered about apologizing for the lost poem but thought better of it. She remembered Martha's warning words.

Ernest sat in the armchair by the window, his face caught in the last of the light.

The champagne was delicious, butter on toast.

“No socks,” she said, pointing her cigarette at his feet, and then tapping the ash out of the window.

“Perfect for the sockless jive,” he said, scratching his ankles with the toes of the other foot. “My first wife and I lived in Paris, you know. An apartment over a mill. On the worst days sawdust came out of your eyes in chunks.”

“What happened?”

“With Hadley?”

Ernest shrugged and stood. He placed a record on the phonograph and applied the needle. He did everything with a delicacy that belied his big hands. A scratchy sound, then a piano began. Chopin: a mazurka. For some time he stood watching the disc spin. Then he looked back at her, his face ashen. “Sometimes there's this feeling of things being repeated. I put the needle on the same place in the same track and I expect a different tune.”

He had drunk nothing while she was sipping at her champagne; now he picked up his glass and sunk the whole thing. “What do you think Freud would have me down as?”

“A neurotic?”

Ernest gave her a sad smile. He tipped back his glass again but realized there was nothing in it. “I remember seeing her at a party in Chicago where we first met. She was wearing a blue dress to the knees. She looked as if she'd never been to a party before. When we spoke she wasn't shy but full of candor; very poised. Instantly I felt I could say anything to her. And I thought surely this is it: surely this is the woman I should marry. I was twenty-one.” He watched the bubbles as he poured himself a second glass and then topped up hers. “There was an extraordinary quality to Hadley. Some insane capacity for gentleness. That's what I fell in love with. Now tell me why I got bored of a woman like that.”

“Familiarity?”

“The old bitch familiarity. I was a fool.”

It felt odd, listening to Ernest unburden himself. In London they had only ever talked about the war or, with a kind of ironic intimacy, Ernest might joke about Mary becoming his wife. But it was all in jest: after all, what could they do while the both of them were already husbanded and wived? Poor Noel. He'd taken the reporting job in North Africa and left her behind in a London crazed with bombing. Noel was sweet and lovely—but she'd never had quite the amount of fun with him that she'd had with Ernest these past few months.

“You don't need to feel guilty,” Mary said. “Paul and Hadley always struck me as very happy with each other.”

“You know Paul?”

“Only as Mr. Mowrer. He was my boss in Chicago. At the
Daily News
.”

“My wives,” he said. “They have a way of finding each other without me being involved a jot.”

“And Pauline?” The words came out in her smoke. She wafted it away out of the window, knowing that he disliked the smell.

“Fife?”

“Yes. Has she remarried?”

He shook his head. “I feel badly for how it went with her.”

“She's still in Key West?”

He nodded. “Hash says she still carries a torch. That's her expression. Fife . . .” He looks around the room. “What to say about Fife? She was the bravest woman I've ever met. We were unbelievably happy at times. But for a lot of the time we were useless. All we did was fight.” Ernest tipped the last of the champagne into the glasses and upended the bottle into the bucket. “This is a funny line of questioning.”

“I've met Martha. I figured I should like to meet the others.”

“Sometimes I look back and I can't work out how it's done. How they all fell apart. Each and every one.” Ernest looked rather blindsided by it all, sitting in the Ritz armchair, looking back at his decades of lost women. “You think who was to blame, but we were all to blame. I understand that. But me more than the others.”

He took the needle from the vinyl. The room was silent. Looking at him sitting there in his armchair, with no shoes and no socks, and with his head still turbaned from the car accident, Mary remembers a boy she saw on the drive to Paris, his head bandaged, dead in a Normandy ditch. The boy's blue eyes were ancient: wrinkled and red. His belly was swollen, as if he were six months gone with child. It was so sad to see him there, lying alone in his American uniform in the French earth. Mary came away from the window and held Ernest's wounded head in her hands. “Do be careful,” she said. “Do be careful with your poor head.”

“You forgive me, don't you?”

“You're here now, Ernest. Culpable for nothing.”

“What I'm saying is that I'll stay the course with you.”

“Remember the old bitch, familiarity?”

“No. I feel differently this time.”

“How is anything different?”

“I'm an old man.”

“Old man! You're not more than forty-five, surely.”

“Exactly. That's old enough for me.”

Ernest took her glass and put it to one side. “Too old, too tired, too in love, pickle, to do this all again. You'll have me in my autumn years, and then the wintering time too. Let's put both our lonelinesses out of business.” He kissed her, nuzzling her face with his nose. “You won't be able to get rid of me. I'll be as faithful as a dog. This is the last time, I promise. You're my last go.”

“I'll tell you what, I'll consider your proposal if I can get the dedication to your next book.”

“That means you'll be my wife?”

“No. That means I'll think about it.”

“Done.”

She laughed.

 • • • 

That night Mary passed some sleepless hours. The room was hot though they had left the window open for the draft. Late in the night, but not yet early in the morning, Mary heard singing from the street and went over to the window. A group of men were passing a bottle between themselves.

Après la guerre finie,

Tous les soldats partis!

Mademoiselle a un souvenir,

Après la guerre finie!

The men swung their bottles to and fro like salted mariners. When they saw her up at the window, one of them gestured with a bottle. “
Venez!
” he said, then they all joined in. “
Venez!
” Mary smiled and put her finger to her lips, miming the gesture for quiet.

She finished her cigarette and came back to the bed. She wondered what it was, this sensation: if it might be called happiness, or whether it would more rightly be called fear.
I'll stay the course with you
, Ernest had said, but she had no means to test those words.

Caught in the evening light, her awake, him asleep, she felt some surge of power. With a feeling of extravagance she pulled back the sheet. This was the part of him that no one else got to see. She looked at him as if trying to memorize him, as if for an article, as if trying to put down in words the quality of Ernest's erotic body. What struck her instead was how much of him was scars. Opened by shrapnel decades ago, his right leg was hatched all over his calf and knee. Bits of the bomb, he said, were still inside him. His knees were discolored from the force of the automobile accident in London, and the tips of his fingers were dark as if they were frostbitten. There was an oval scar on his other leg—it looked like a gunshot wound. The wonder was that he had managed to stay whole at all.