Mrs. Hemingway (29 page)

With the fire going strongly now Mary steps back from the flames. It gives such a pleasing amount of heat that she'd like to roast chestnuts or marshmallows. Make a festival of it; give it the feel of a fiesta. Ernest would enjoy that. He always knew how to throw an excellent party.

She thinks of Harry Cuzzemano and his letters. Those, too, will probably be thrown to a fire somewhere, wherever he lives. How slavishly he had tried to find that lost suitcase for his hero. Mary remembers his words from this afternoon—
suitcases. Lost novels. Poems
.

It strikes her then that Harry Cuzzemano shouldn't know about the lost poem. The only people with any knowledge of that poem were herself and Martha. She remembers the chambermaid's words: “Don't worry, Madame, it will not reach the Sûreté.” Perhaps the maid had been on Cuzzemano's payroll, just as Ernest had said, and the length of lavatory tissue is now boxed up in his private collection. Well, if he has the poem, let him keep it. Mary has no energy left for grudges. The past—she thinks, as the newspapers fold into soft gray ash—the past is over now.

Branches, magazines, and newspapers are now all embers at the bottom of the garden, and the night is dark. The smell of wood smoke follows Mary into the house. The kitchen is empty. The living room still has a plate of cookies and crumbs from where Harry sat hours before.

Mary heads for the study.

The door's bolt slides. Mary takes the key for Ernest's strongbox from the bureau. She opens the glass door of the cabinet and brings the box to the desk. The box gleams like a tooth. She wonders what could be inside. Wouldn't it be a leap of faith, she thinks, to take the box downstairs and throw it to the fire, never to learn of its contents? But she cannot do it. The lid gives easily as the key turns the lock.

Inside, it is not at all what she has expected.

At the top is one of Martha's books:
The Trouble I've Seen
, with a bookmark from Shakespeare and Company. Inside, there's a photograph of Martha pinned to the back cover: on the reverse is a dedication. Though the ink has blurred, the words are still legible:
Nesto! Be mine forever
. The date is May 1938, when Ernest would have still been married to Fife. Underneath Martha's book is a letter from Fife sent to his Madrid hotel.
Come back darling, the studio is ready and there's an abundance of food
.

Deeper inside the box are letters between Hadley and Fife. She wonders how he has come to acquire them. How odd it is to see these old letters from ex-wives to dead women.
Wouldn't it be fun if we vacationed down in Juan this summer; all of us—un, deux, trois?
Letters go back and forth between them—though most of them are from Fife—until the correspondence abruptly stops. As it probably would do, Mary thinks, when a husband jumps from the wife's to the best friend's bed.

An album follows, a book of wives. In each picture of each couple a ghost wife hovers behind them. Each decade has its triptych.

Mary is about to lock the box when she realizes there's nothing from her in there. In her bedroom she takes a handkerchief and spritzes it with her perfume. Cuts a lock of her blonde hair, ashier now than when they first met, and binds it with a ribbon. She picks out her best report from her
Time
days when they had begun their flirtation in wartime London, when he had offered her an orange in a Charlotte Street restaurant and set the rest of their life in motion. These will be the things she leaves him; this is Ernest's inheritance.

In the study, almost as an afterthought, she finds a photograph of Ernest fishing. He looks happy, with his broad grin and shoulders. He is out on calm waters, perhaps waiting for the silver twitching of a marlin's tail. Perhaps this is what he always craved—stillness, stillness as a prelude to sleep. She places this photograph on top of all the others. How unusual it is, to see Ernest alone.

To close the box Mary must press all the things down firmly so that the lid will shut. Oh, Ernest, she thinks, you were a man of too many wives. It almost makes her laugh.

Out on the deck Mary has a glass of wine and smokes a cigarette. She waits, hoping the stag will come back to the garden with its gentle step. Occasionally, from the hills, she can hear the call of a coyote. Down in the garden, the trees have nearly lost their leaves—winter will be here soon and the snow will come to cover the earth.
And best of all he'd loved the fall
. That's what she'd written on his headstone, in the grove of willow and aspen.

The cigarette buzzes on the wet grass as it hits the garden below.

Mary remembers again her fall into the Minnesota lake. She remembers the thought as she had gone down into the open hole of water:
This is it
. And she wonders if this thought might have been similar to Ernest's, months ago, as he had made the decision to step into the vestibule, early that morning in July.
This is it
, he might have thought.
And the world is done
.

This is a work of imagination. To find out about the real lives of Hemingway's wives (and the other women more briefly mentioned in this novel) the best place to start is Bernice Kert's group biography,
The Hemingway Women
.

Hadley Richardson's life, from self-avowed spinster to the first Mrs. Hemingway, is amply shown in Gioia Diliberto's biography
Paris Without End
, which follows from Alice H. Sokoloff's
Hadley
:
The First Mrs. Hemingway
. Sokoloff based much of her biography on interviews with Hadley Hemingway Mowrer: these audio tapes can be heard at www.thehemingwayproject.com. Paula McLain's novel
The Paris Wife
also gives a fictional representation of Hemingway's first marriage.

As biographer Ruth A. Hawkins has noted, Pauline Pfeiffer was unlucky enough not to outlast her husband nor was she able to give her own version of events. A new, generous, and much-needed biography of Pauline Pfeiffer, which details her editorial influence on Hemingway and the importance of her family's monetary support to Ernest's career, is given in Hawkins's
Unbelievable Happiness and Final Sorrow
:
The Hemingway-Pfeiffer Marriage
. Many will know Pauline Pfeiffer from her role in
A Moveable Feast
as one of the “rich” come to “infiltrate” the Hemingway marriage. However, the restored edition of
A Moveable Feast
, published in 2011, includes previously excised material—some of which casts a much more favorable light on Fife. Many photographs of Fife and Ernest's shared home in Key West, Florida, can be found at www.hemingwayhome.com.

Martha Gellhorn's novels and short stories are still in print; her reportage is collected in
The Face of War
. Her letters (many to Hemingway) are collected in
The Selected Letters of Martha Gellhorn
(ed. Caroline Moorehead). Gellhorn is the subject of two biographies: Caroline Moorehead's
Martha Gellhorn
:
A Life
, as well as Carl Rollyson's
Beautiful Exile
:
The Life of Martha Gellhorn
. Shots of La Finca Vigía can be found at www.hemingwaycuba.com.

Finally, Mary Welsh Hemingway penned her own thoughts about marriage to Hemingway in the only memoir written by one of the Hemingway wives, entitled
How It Was
.

For photographs of the wives and for a longer list of recommended books on Mr.—and Mrs.—Hemingway, go to www.naomiwood.com.

I am extremely grateful to my editor at Picador, Francesca Main, who has lent her insight, hard work, and passion throughout the writing, and rewriting, of
Mrs. Hemingway
. If Ernest was lucky to have Max Perkins, I am very lucky to have you. My thanks to all at Picador; in particular Paul Baggaley, Kris Doyle, and Sandra Taylor.

I am grateful for the energy and passion of my agent, Cathryn Summerhayes, who, typical of her dedication, read this manuscript with her baby Ernest in one arm and Ernest on the page in the other hand. I am grateful for her consistent support since our first meeting, with many a daiquiri along the way. I would also like to thank from WME: Annemarie Blumenhagen, Becky Thomas, and Claudia Ballard.

My thanks as well to Tara Singh for her work on early drafts, and Patrick Nolan and Emily Baker at Viking for their passion for
Mrs. H
.

I have been very fortunate to receive funding that has greatly contributed to the research stage of writing
Mrs. Hemingway
. I would like to offer my hearty gratitude to the Eccles Centre at the British Library for its support during my tenure as its Writer in Residence in 2012. I would not have been able to write this book without the Centre's help. In particular Philip Davies for being so kind and generous, and Matthew Shaw and Carole Holden for providing a compass around the archives of the British Library.

My thanks to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which funded this project at an early stage for a three-year doctoral grant. Special thanks to Professors Giles Foden, Rebecca Stott, and Andrew Cowan at the University of East Anglia for their wise words and encouragement. Carolyn Brown and Mary Lou Reker also offered wonderful support at the Library of Congress, Washington DC, during my Kluge Fellowship in 2010.

Writing
Mrs. Hemingway
has offered an exotic travel itinerary. My thanks are due to the staff at the Hemingway archives at the JFK Library in Boston and the Beinecke Library at Yale University, and to the staff at the Hemingway heritage homes in Oak Park, Chicago; Key West, Florida; and San Francisco de Paula in Cuba.

Last but not least I would like to offer my thanks to the following people who offered kind words when times were rough, and for sharing the celebrations when times were swell. My family—Pamela, Michael, and Katherine Wood. Friends, early readers, and colleagues: Alaina Wong, Alastair Pamphilon, Alison Claxton, Ben Jackson, Bridget Dalton, Charlotte Faircloth, Edward Harkness, Eleni Lawrence, Eve Williams, Hannah Nixon, Jonathan Beckman, Jude Law, Julie Eisenstein, Lucy Organ, Maggie Hammond, Matthias Ruhlmann, Natalie Butlin, Nick Hayes, Nicky Blewett, Nicola Richmond, Rebecka Mustajarvi, and Tori Flower. Thank you!

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