Beautiful Exiles

by Meg Waite Clayton

  The day I left for New York, the Germans marched into Paris. I called Ernest to tell him, unsure whether he would have heard the news without me there to turn on the radio.

  “Ginny just flew from London to Paris, to cover the fall of the city,” I said.

  “She always was crazy as a feral cat,” he said. “And I know about feral cats too.” He’d collected them at the house in Key West, and now he was collecting them at the Finca Vigía. He would hear no word against them despite there being more than we could afford to feed.

  I went to Washington and spent a little time with the Roosevelts, then collected Matie and returned to Cuba, where the mangos and alligator pears were thick on the trees and the male pigeons courted the females, who, being fewer in number, could be as picky as they chose. It was all easier somehow, for the five weeks we had Matie for company. The visit started with my mother eyeing the car, which had suffered its fourth accident in my absence. Ernest simply assured her he would get a new car with the proceeds from his new novel. I started a piece on the Nazis in Cuba; two thousand Germans were in the country, and I’d had run-ins enough with some of the local Fascists to know they were not all Germans of the likable type. When we were done writing each day, we took Matie out on the Pilar to watch marlins playing in the water like little boys, or like fighter planes. We all found it restful, even when a whale shark as big as the boat swam right up to us, its gargantuan mouth (twelve feet if it was an inch) open wide and quite perfectly terrifying.

  “You only need worry, Edna,” Ernest assured my mother, “if you’re a sardine.”

  One afternoon when Ernest hadn’t shown up two hours after he was to meet Matie and me for lunch, I knew exactly where we’d find him: on his favorite seat at the left-hand corner of the bar at the Floridita, with the fans turning overhead and the bartender serving daiquiris.

  “What the hell, Hemingway!” I said when we found him leaning toward the cool seafood display case, yammering on to some poor patron on the next barstool who, on account of his fine listening skills and manners far better than Ernest’s, was left with no chance to get in a word.

  Ernest looked up to Matie’s and my reflection in the mirror over the bar.

  “You can stand me up,” I said, “but I’ll be a hideously rotund piglet before I’ll have you stand up Matie!”

  Around the bar, people chuckled, those who understood English did, while those who didn’t asked each other, “¿Qué dijo ella?”

  Ernest looked from me to Matie, who was suppressing a smile.

  He excused himself to his bar companion, saying loudly enough that no one in the bar could mistake his words, “Como puedes ver, tengo algunos problemas . . . Culpa mía sí, estoy en un lugar de problemas aquí—de mi propia hater, pero no por ello dejan de ser problemas.” As you can see, I’m in a spot of trouble here—of my own doing, but trouble no less.

  He set a few bills on the bar to cover his drinks and his friend’s, and a healthy tip.

  “Forgive me, Edna?” he said. “I’d like to say I’ll never do it again, but your daughter is so beautiful when she’s self-righteous that I can’t always help myself.”

  The drinkers laughed, and Ernest and Matie laughed, too, and my mother said to me, “Not just any garden-variety ugly, fat piglet, Martha, but a hideously rotund one?” And she and Ernest laughed even harder, Ernest putting his arms around me to hug me so that his chest and stomach rattled against me as I stood stiffly, not amused.

  “I’m sorry, Mart,” he whispered into my ear. “I get carried away about the book. I’m a pig, I know I am, but I don’t mean to be, and I’ll try better, and anyway, I’ll always be your ugly, fat pig.”

  “Hideously rotund,” I said. “Piglet,” I said.

  He laughed, and, without letting go of me, he leaned back to have a look at my face. “I’m not that bad, am I, Mookie?”

  “Hideously rotund,” I insisted.

  “All right, then,” he said. “Hideously rotund. I’ll always be your hideously rotund pig.”

  “Piglet,” I said.

  “Piglet,” he agreed.

  On good days, Ernest would let me read his pages. On very good days, he would let Matie read them too. Matie, after she’d finished reading some of the chapters one afternoon, said, “I feel so sorry for him.”

  “Sorry!” I said. “How can you feel sorry for a bear of a man who has been an absolutely smashing success and is so sure of it that he’ll blurt it out with the first hello?”

  Matie frowned and said, “But of course you can’t see it, because you’re so deeply in it yourself.”

  “He’s writing such a damned gorgeous novel, though, Matie. A novel that’s truer than this very minute.”

  She said, “Do you suppose he’s as certain of that as you are?”

  “Listen to him, Matie! He badgers every poor, unsuspecting bar patron who happens to take the stool next to him about how brilliant the book is.”

  “Yes, you do see why, then, Martha,” Matie said. “And there’s what he’s writing about too. The father.”

  I didn’t see, but I saw that she thought I should, that if I couldn’t see what she saw in Ernest’s writing—or in Ernest himself—it exposed something about me she didn’t want to know, and maybe I didn’t either. She let it go and so did I, or I tried to. But her words stayed with me, and each time I read Ernest’s pages, after I’d had the breath knocked out of me by the first reading, I read a second time. And I began to wonder why, when he was so sure of it every night, it was so hard for him to share his pages. I began to see the fact of his own father winding through the story, the fact of Ernest, like his character Robert Jordan, not wanting to do what his father did, and struggling against it. Making fun of the father’s suicide in that early dialogue with Pilar that was so damned funny, and broke your heart even as you were laughing. Now, in the latest pages, he sketched at the edges of what it meant for a father to kill himself. He’d never said straight what a selfish bastard his father must have been to kill himself, but there it was, leaking out in his novel that was meant to be his masterpiece. And a few paragraphs later, as Robert Jordan worried that he would be charged a coward, he told himself straight out that that’s what his father was, a coward who let his wife bully him.

  His father’s Civil War revolver, that’s what his character Robert Jordan’s father used to kill himself. A Smith & Wesson, like Ernest’s own father had used to shoot himself in the fall of 1928, just after Ernest had moved from Paris to Key West with Pauline, after Patrick was born and A Farewell to Arms was published and his bully of a mother returned the copy he sent her with a note that she would not have filth in her home. If he would write a book that wasn’t full of filth, she would be happy to have it, his mother wrote him. Ernest had been only twenty-nine.

  “There isn’t much to the girl, is there?” Matie said. “In Ernest’s story. The story is so real and Pilar is so real, and Pablo and Anselmo and even the Gypsy, even Robert Jordan, although he’s a bit heavy on the hero side, isn’t he? Everyone is so real except the girl, the ‘rabbit.’”

  “Maria?”

  “The girl is all love for him and nothing for herself, all docile and compliant, and that’s what he wants, that’s love to him. A damaged child with no desire in life but to adore him.”

  “That’s what Robert Jordan wants?” I said, trying to understand what Matie was saying. “Or Ernest?”

  I wanted to ask her then what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t be happy in bed. Why was it that the best of the bed stuff was when it didn’t hurt too much? But how could I ask that of my mother, who never spoke of sex except once to say it was to be endured? Whom I suppose might have had the same thing wrong with her. It would be an easier conversation with Ernest than with Matie, except that I couldn’t tell Bug, after all this time of lovemaking together, that as he had been meaning to make me happy, he had been making me hurt.

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  JULY 1940


  Ernest wrote the ending to his Spanish war novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls, in one big 2,600-word day, July 11, and if it wasn’t a hell of a chapter and a hell of a book, well then, you could tell him so and he would assure you that you were wrong. He was no good for writing at all the next few days, but he finished the first draft of the thing for all intents and purposes, writing the epilogue—or something more like a rough outline for two chapters that would wrap up the story—on his forty-first birthday, July 21. It was a big book: two hundred thousand words.

  To celebrate, we went shopping in Havana and had a fine Basque fiesta at the Beach Club, and we were unbearably happy. We would have married right then and there if only Ernest’s divorce from Pauline had come through.

  Ernest took the manuscript to New York a few days later. He holed up in the Hotel Barclay with an electric fan blowing directly at him in an attempt to stave off a brutalizing heat wave as he revised the manuscript. The printer was setting the novel for galleys as fast as Ernest let the pages go. On Wednesday, July 31, Max Perkins was banging on Ernest for more pages, as the printer had only one day of work left to set. The next day, Max begged him for another two hundred. Ernest rarely left the hotel room. The publication date was set for October 14—less than three months from the date he’d finished writing the first draft, when it usually took a year or more from a book’s final draft to get it out.

  As soon as the last page was sent off to the printer—again with the epilogue to come—Ernest boarded a Pan Am Clipper for home. Matie and I met him at the boarding dock. Before we’d even said a proper hello, he handed me a little box.

  “Open it, Rabbit,” he said. “Open it here. Open it now.”

  Inside was a diamond and sapphire engagement ring.

  “It’s . . . damn, it’s beautiful, Bongie,” I said, wanting to touch the stones nestled on the bed of velvet, and yet reluctant to. “It’s awfully big,” I said.

  He said, “Go ahead and bite the stones, Stooge.”

  Matie, standing beside me, put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed it lightly, her silent call to consider what I was about to say, or what I was about to do. The gems were the real deal, sure, but Ernest wasn’t—that’s what my mother’s gesture meant. Ernest was still married to Pauline, and I’d done this before, I’d agreed to marry Bertrand de Jouvenel when I might have known his wife never would let him go.

  I gently unloaded the ring from its slot, with Matie’s hand still warm on my skin.

  “Don’t be silly, Bug,” I said as I slid it on my finger. “I know this is the real deal.”

  The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

  AUGUST 1940

  It’s always a moment, the first time you see your galleys for a book, your words set in leaded type in some fabulous font the way readers will experience it. The galleys for For Whom the Bell Tolls arrived by airmail just about as quickly as Ernest himself did. He was as happy as could be to be going over them, even with the notes from his publisher and editor suggesting changes.

  While he finalized the book, I tried to find my way out of a bit of a box Ernest had gotten me into with Charlie Scribner. Ernest meant to help me; he thought if I had a contract for a book, I would sit down and be disciplined and write. So he’d huddled with Charlie, and the two of them had come up with a madcap plan for me to do a new novel with Scribner—never mind that I had a perfectly good relationship with my publisher, Charles Duell, who might hate me personally for all I knew but did love my writing. Charlie Scribner might love me personally, but I would never know if he loved my writing or only meant to keep Ernest happy.

  We made plans to go to Sun Valley in the fall. Ernest and I would cross over to Key West and drive up to St. Louis, where he would drop me for a visit with Matie and drive out to Idaho to meet the boys, with me joining them later.

  “If the divorce comes through, we can marry right there, in Sun Valley, Mook,” Ernest said.

  “Bug, we can’t marry while Mousie and Gigi are in Idaho,” I said. “Not even with Bumby there.”

  “Not with the boys there but after they go home, Mrs. Bongie-Piglet. We can stay as long as we want and do whatever we want after the boys leave.”

  Ernest kept reaching new financial settlements with Pauline all that summer. He negotiated through her uncle Gus, who assured him with each new deal that she had agreed, only to find she’d told her lawyer to demand more money. Ernest accused her of trying to put him out of the book business, because of course he couldn’t write novels if he was forever having to make a buck to cover a monthly check she didn’t even need. She insisted on keeping the very expensive Key West house even though she’d shut the thing up and moved to an equally expensive place on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, with views of the bay and the new Golden Gate Bridge. Unlike Hadley, who had given Ernest up to Pauline without much fuss, Pauline meant to keep him from having a dime to enjoy life. It made me hesitate to marry anyone, watching how rottenly one person could try to make another pay in stocks and bonds and houses and furniture for having fallen out of love.

  “With the book done, we could go cover the war,” I said. “After the boys go back to school.”

  “There are still the galleys.”

  “Don’t be silly. The galleys will be done before the boys leave. After the galleys are done and the boys leave, we could go to the war.”

  He said, “The book won’t be released until October.”

  I said, “After the book is released in October, we’ll go to war.”

  “It will be a nice long war,” he said. “There’ll be plenty of time yet to get ourselves killed, don’t you worry about that.”

  Ernest asked my mother that evening, “Edna, what is this fascination your daughter has with carnage and pestilence and butchery? Just what I had in mind—for our honeymoon, she means to have me abandon my own writing to follow her off to war.”

  “Collier’s wants me to go to China,” I explained to my mother. Japan and China had been at it in a more serious way than usual since the Marco Polo Bridge incident a few years back, when we’d been at the White House to show The Spanish Earth to the president.

  “Or, perhaps more truthfully, your daughter wants to go to China for Collier’s, and Collier’s is still making up its mind about whether to send her or some lesser journalist,” Ernest said. “I fear you allowed Marty here too much Somerset Maugham, Edna. She imagines China as exotic buildings and women wrapped in vibrant silk, splendidly suited European men arriving in rickshaws at European bank buildings on the Bund.”

  And the funny little wooden boats called “sampans,” which sometimes gathered together in little villages. There was no place I could imagine would be more enchanting.

  “Me,” Ernest continued, “I know only that my uncle, a missionary in Shaanxi Province, cut out his own appendix while on horseback on his way home from meeting the Dalai Lama.”

  “Oh, bother,” I said. “You’re just bitter because Matie here handed me Maugham’s novels while your mother made you drop your allowance in the collection plate to save the poor heathen Chinese.”

  “My uncle Willoughby,” he insisted. “My father’s brother. ‘Hunter of Wolves,’ that’s what Hemingway means in China. And my cousins taught me how to sing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ in Chinese.”

  “You’ll have to come with me on this assignment, then, Bug, so you can do the singing for me. Do they have guitars in China?”

  “If you get the assignment.”

  “I’m sure they’d give it to me if they knew it meant you singing about the Lord our God in words the good people of China would understand.”

  The next day, August 23, I sat down and wrote Charlie Scribner that he was a sweet man to offer to be my publisher. It was a long letter, trying to explain that I couldn’t accept his offer but in a way that would leave him relieved rather than insulted. I wrote that I would do anything to earn a living if I had to: I would scrub floors or write corset ads, which I’d spent more time than he w
ould like to know doing (the corset ads, not the floors). I wrote that I just couldn’t write a book for money; I never could make the juice run unless I believed awfully in a thing. If I needed money, I would write for Collier’s. They were after me to set off for the wars, and I looked forward to that. I loved that and Ernest did too, and that was the plan after the book was done—to head off to cover some war together. The only question was where.

  That night, the letter mailed, I dreamed I was drowning in a tub of lard that was, like the silk dresses the Oriental women of my youth wore, crusted on the outside with sapphires and diamonds.

  Charles Scribner sent Ernest a copy of the proposed cover for For Whom the Bell Tolls, which Ernest liked well enough, although the bridge was the wrong kind of bridge; it was a stone and wood bridge, whereas the bridge in the novel was a high-arching, spidery metal bridge of the kind that might be blown without an abundance of dynamite. The truth is there is always a bridge that is wrong on the cover, and no one ever much seems to care that the damned thing is wrong as long as it’s evocative enough to cause a reader to pick up the book and turn to the first sentence. I’m quite sure that if it would entice readers, the bridge on the cover would be gossamer threads that would be blown away in the wind with no dynamite at all.

  Ernest, being Ernest, made a drawing of what the bridge ought to look like and sent it to Scribner, along with a picture of bells of the type that might be tolling in Spain.

  He worried his heart out over that bridge, in a happy way. He worried over the whole long list of Charlie’s and Max’s suggestions. He worried whether he should make his journalist British rather than American, on account of avoiding a libel suit from a real American journalist the character may or may not have been based on. He worried whether there were too many obscenities on some of the pages, “obscenity” being the word he was using again and again as Scribner was unwilling to publish a “damn” or “shit” or “fuck.” In A Farewell to Arms, they’d been unwilling even to print “balls” if it meant something other than round things with which one played games of the nonsexual sort, so this time he’d stuck with the Spanish, cojones; they either hadn’t known what the word meant or had chosen not to fight that battle. His editor, Max Perkins, was the kind of man who wouldn’t swear even when two of his most important authors were swinging at each other in his own office, even when brutal Germans were hanging Nazi flags all over the most beautiful city in the world.