Mrs. Hemingway (25 page)

Ernest looked vulnerable like this: naked and asleep. The damage he'd done to himself, the scars, merely served as a proof of his nudity. She felt an enormous inrush of happiness, a maharaja's pleasure. All this, she thought, with sure possessiveness: all this is mine.

Mary kneeled between the V of his legs and she slipped her mouth over him. She felt Ernest wake above her and he stroked behind her ears. A gunshot rang out in the streets below and the men swapped their song for chanting.
Ré-sis-tez! Ré-sis-tez!

Ernest brought her up to him with a kiss. He put his hands into her soft blonde curls and guided himself into her. “I love you,” he said. “I'd do anything to make you happy.” All this he said looking up at her entranced, intoxicated, as if she were a kind of saint or savior; as if she had come to deliver him from all the world's ills.

More gunfire sounded along the roofs of Paris.
Ré-sis-tez!
they shouted.
Ré-sis-tez!

 • • • 

The next few weeks they spent jaunting along Paris streets, getting what good food they could, eating lunch with Picasso and his girlfriend in the Marais, buying books recommended by Sylvia at Shakespeare's, making love in the evenings with the rattle of guns still outside the window. They lived at the Ritz and their objective, he said, was to deplete its stocks—they'd leave only once they had drunk the place dry.

Then one night, over a silly fight about some tiny thing, Ernest hit her. It was hard, right on the jaw. She held her cheek: stunned. How could he have done this, she wondered, after these marvelous few weeks? She went into her room to think over what she was doing with a man like this. “Certain things are being said about me and Ernest Hemingway,” she wrote to her parents. “These are only rumors. Nothing has been confirmed.”

Ernest's study is a palace of paper. There are books everywhere: his own, in many different languages, as well as books from friends and publishers, asking for quotes. Hundreds of condolence telegrams and letters which she has not yet responded to, but must, at some point, when she has the energy.
Across the River
sits on the bureau. She doesn't know why Ernest had pulled it from the shelves the night before his death. The dedication reads:
To Mary with love
. Boxes of his things are on the floor: French weeklies and issues of the London
Economist
and red-wax-sealed manuscripts and other people's letters: all waiting for her to put them into some kind of decent order. But Mary wants to be his wife, not his executrix.

She puts on the mazurkas and wraps herself in his blanket, tenting herself in the last of his smell. From Ernest's armchair she listens to the piano endeavor at the difficult rhythms and the needle stick in the same place as it always has. It's their music from Paris. It brings her back to their room at the Ritz, cordite blowing in at the window, making love to this man who wanted to make himself her husband. Mary had once read an interview with Martha, and she said how they would listen to Chopin while planes bombed Madrid. It didn't matter that the music was shared between them. Ernest had, by default, to be shared. There weren't two women in her marriage; there were always four—Hadley, Fife, Martha, and Mary. The thing was not to be heartbroken about it.

Mary tries to sort his letters chronologically. She finds some from Harry Cuzzemano, ever the milksop come to beg off him what he could. At the back of her mind she wonders if she will find any from an unknown woman. Perhaps this is why she has been putting off this task. She has no appetite to find Ernest has lied to her. There are a few from Adriana, a young woman whom Ernest had longed for, she knew, with much desire for many years. But she had never felt threatened by Adriana: she hadn't been much more than a teenager when Ernest discovered her as his new obsession. And Mary could tell that though Adriana wanted him for a friend, she had not wanted anything more. Then she had disappeared from his life. Just like all of the others.

Mary looks to the strongbox at the top of the glass cabinet. Ernest always kept the key in his locked bureau. She has, so far, resisted opening it. She is scared of what's inside: he always told her not to ask him about it. Its contents baffle her. What if there are letters from an unknown woman in there? An unknown woman, struggling out of the dark, like a blind grub in the night.

 • • • 

The sound of the telephone pulls her away from the study, and she's out of breath by the time she reaches it in the kitchen.

“Oh, Mary, I didn't think I'd catch you. What have you been up to?”

“Sorting Ernest's things,” she says to Hadley. “It's taking a long time.”

Mary sits at the kitchen counter where July's obitu-aries are piled on the countertop. The
New York
and
Los Angeles Times
, the
Herald
, the local rag. Ernest's photograph is on all of the front pages. Every morning she looks at his face while making coffee or grilling toast and feels a sudden fury that he's not here to have breakfast with her. “There's so much of it,” she says to the papers.

“He kept so much trash, didn't he? Candy wrappers. Grocery lists. Radio schedules.”

“Some of it has to go, I'm just not sure what.” Mary catches her name in the articles on the countertop. “Mr. Hemingway accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning at 7:30.” The next morning all of the obits used the same quote.

“Have you thought about going back to work?”

Mary laughs. “I haven't done any reporting for sixteen years, Hadley. You'd have to scrape the dust off my notepad.”

“I just worry about you needing more of a purpose.”

Mary wraps the telephone cord around her thumb, watching it go plum. When she unwraps the cord, the blood sinks. There is a clicking on the line. Perhaps Ernest was right and the phone is bugged. But why should they still be listening in, months after his death, to his first wife and inconsequential widow? “I have purpose.”

“How's the Paris book coming?”

Hadley means the sketches Ernest had been working on these past few years. Ernest began writing them after discovering, in 1956, some trunks he had left at the Ritz, when he was fleeing his first marriage to set up his second. Mary shouldn't have asked why Ernest never threw out a scrap of paper; he'd had such bad luck losing things in the past. And this discovery had seemed like deliverance: finding all those notebooks made him want to write again. “The lawyers are going to have a field day. There'll have to be a libel read.”

“He could get frightfully honest, couldn't he?”

“There's a brilliant one about Fitzgerald's manhood. Ernest is full of grave reassurances that it's all a normal size, et cetera, but you can hear his laughter in the background. It's all rather wonderful. Walks down the Seine, madcap motoring tours with other Americans, that kind of thing. Tons of food: what white wine to drink with oysters, when to mash the egg into a steak tartar. There's a story in there about you.”

“Not about the suitcase?” Hadley's voice has gone quite anxious.

“No, no,” she says, quick to reassure her friend. “It's all very sweet.
I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her
, that kind of thing. In fact it all makes me feel rather a spare part. As if our life together was just the appendix to a greater life he had once before.”

“Those Paris days—take no notice. Ernest fell headlong in love with them, but only after the fact. They were splendid, and they were damned difficult at the same time.” Hadley pauses. “Is there anything about me and Fife?”

Mary is delicate in how she phrases this. “There's lots of talk of her . . .
infiltration
. You and Ernest come off very well from the whole thing, while Fife, well, he's made her into a kind of devil in Dior. I'm glad she's not here to read it. It's not the version I know from either of you. He began to think some strange things, in the end. He felt quite strongly about certain matters he'd never mentioned before.”

“He was quite different these past few years.”

Mary lets this lie. She knows where Hadley is trying to go with this. “I was thinking we could call it
A Moveable Feast
. It's from one of his letters.”

“Do you think he would have liked it? I do. You'll let me read it beforehand?”

“Of course,” Mary says. “Hash?”

“Yes?”

“I want him to come home.” Mary looks down at Ernest's face in the paper's obituary. “I miss him so much.”

“I know.”

“It's not fair.”

“Mary . . .” Hadley sighs.

“What?”

“These wild swings in mood . . . The paranoia you told me about. The alcohol. Don't you see? Cloaking it as some kind of accident, it can't—”

“It
was
an accident.”

“I think he was very depressed.”

“He was feeling better, Hash, you should have seen him the night before. He was his old self again.”

“Apparently that—”

“It was a mistake. That's all.” A door out back slams and Mary's heart races. She sees again scraps of plaid dressing gown. Blood and teeth on the vestibule walls. His gun held crossways against his body. But the housemaid comes into the kitchen and her heart stills.

“The gun misfired. That's all. That's just what makes it so sad.”

 • • • 

That night, Mary dreams of him. They were back on
Pilar
motoring toward the shore. As they approached, the seawater went from dark to light and gulfweed surrounded the boat. Nothing more than thin-blown clouds in the sky and a light breeze that encouraged them toward the shine of the beach.

Ernest buried her in sand, giving her colossal breasts, going all the way up to her neck then studding her in cowrie shells and stones. When he gave her a long wet lick across her cheek she laughed so much the sandy belly jiggled. “What a delicious salt lick your face is! I could be here for hours!” He tongued the wets of her eyes and the wells of her nostrils and the holes of her ears until she was helpless with laughter. And she asked him to unpack her from the sand so that she could hold him close to her heart.

When she wakes it's with a sob, gasping, as if she's spent too long underwater. Her pillow is wet with tears. They had gone shelling like this on a beach in Bimini. She wishes he could have seen more of it. The joy of it all; of being alive.

Outside the weather is fretful and the trees are moving with the wind. Mary tries to shake the afterimage of the dream. She hates these dreams where Ernest is alive, and yet in her waking hours she wishes so dearly for him to live again. Out on the decking Mary drinks a glass of water and smokes a cigarette. Widow's privilege.

She thinks: what if it wasn't an accident? The question surfaces like a bubble escaping a shipwreck. Gregory had asked her this at the funeral and she had pretended not to hear the question. Ernest's three sons had stood next to each other at the graveside, and she had thought how dearly she would have liked to have given him a daughter. But after the first miscarriage, only months after their marriage, he'd told her he couldn't ask her to do this. “I wouldn't ask a man to jump from a building without a parachute,” Ernest had said. “You mean more to me than any daughter.” But standing there watching his casket lowered into the earth, she had wondered if a daughter might have somehow saved him from himself.

Mary finishes up the cigarette. She's about to go back inside when she sees a big stag tread through the garden, caught in the last of the quarter moon. The animal is nothing less than majestic. Its antlers are huge and its legs have such a drifting, dignified walk, it's as if they don't even really touch the soil. Lonesome creature, with such a heaviness on its head, she wonders how he bears the load.

On the night of their wedding Mary locked the door of her bedroom so that he could not get in. “Mary, let me in!”

The handle moved up and down and the door, already weak from the termites, shook in its casings. “You brute! Go away!”

Mary held the handle fast until she heard Ernest's steps retreat to the living room. At once she began to pack her things: the wool suit made from Noel's civvies, her cotton frocks, her few books; remembering the day she had arrived and unpacked all of her things. How exciting—how glamorous—the Finca Vigía had seemed to her then after the Paris winter!

Now, she couldn't wait for colder climes. She wanted to go back to Chicago where the air was flat and sensible.
How long did your marriage to Ernest Hemingway last?
her friends on the women's pages would ask her at the
Daily News
, maybe even for a few inches in their gossip columns. About twenty-four hours, she'd have to respond. She could just see the headline now:
FOURTH HEMINGWAY MARRIAGE LASTS UNDER A DAY
.

Now the only question was whether she should leave still in her wedding dress. It could be passed off as traveling clothes she supposed—both of them were old hands at marriage; neither of them had wanted much fuss. Mary unpinned the flower corsage and dropped it in the waste-paper basket.

With her suitcase packed she prepared for the confrontation. Ernest would be sitting in the lamplight of the living room, watched over by kudu, nursing a Scotch, ready to make his emollient apologies. Mary would, without drama, walk past him and drive away. She would not listen to Ernest's protests; he was becoming too skilled at his apologies.

 • • • 

When Ernest had driven up to the Finca, the morning of her arrival in Cuba, she had immediately smelled hibiscus and lime. Before her was the most enormous white mansion, bright as a pebble in the Caribbean sunshine. Scarlet flowers splashed down the steps. Ernest stood outside the car, scanning her face for a reaction.