In those days, Hector seemed always to be getting to the good and interesting places before me, or at least making a convincing case that he had. But Hector was a committed bachelor and I convinced myself that gave him certain critical advantages as an explorer. I’d first met Hector in Italy. He was driving ambulances after being injured and cashiered out and he trained me and taught me the tricks of driving the old rigs with their bankrupt, metal-on-metal brakes. Later, he’d been in Paris perhaps a year, or even two years before me, and, in this other case, he would beat me to Key West, too, though it might have been better for both of us if he had not.
But that was still many years away and this particular morning we were the best of friends and it was Christmas Eve and we were sitting by the fire and drinking belly-warming, tongue-loosening rum St. James. We sat on the terrace by the brazier and it was warmer there, but it was still a very cold morning, despite the sun, and we could see our breath as we talked and even see it a little when we breathed.
We spoke a bit of our morning’s work and Hector told me he would be spending the holiday with a tart he’d met a few days before and whom he was trying to reform.
The girl’s name was originally Victoria. She had come from St. Louis to Paris to be a singer or dancer. But she had fallen through the layers of bals-musettes, and then to the smaller revues in the poorest quarters, then into the Folies Bergère and finally had fallen further and now her working name was “Solange.”
I’d met her once or twice and she was quite pretty with shining blue-black hair that she wore straight and long against fashion. Her eyes were blue, though not as blue as Hector’s, and she had a pretty smile but she did not have dimples as Hector had. Still, she was quite pretty and one felt sad that she had come to Paris young and with dreams and had failed to meet those dreams, or even, really, to come close, and had come to debase herself as a streetwalker.
With his new money, Hector had recently moved her into his apartment, causing a small scandal with his haughty and newly religious femme de ménage, and so furthering his need of a new place to live.
“Vicky and me popped some corn this morning,” Hector told me. “We spent the morning stringing the popcorn and after lunch we’re going to go down to the Luxembourg gardens. I found a good pine tree there, like the Christmas trees from back home, and we’ll string the popcorn around the tree and watch the birds eat the corn and we will drink some kirsch and sing a carol or two. You and your family should meet us there, Hem.”
As if remembering then, Hector reached under the table to the empty chair next to him and fished around his overcoat’s pocket. He handed me a small tissue-wrapped parcel and said, “Merry Christmas, Hem.”
It was a metal flask and I could feel something sloshing inside it and was about to unscrew the lid to smell it when he said, “Pernod.” He smiled and raised his rum St. James and said, “Alla tua salute.”
I said, “Salud!” and we toasted one another and then he handed me two other small parcels.
“The one in the red tissue is for Bumby,” he said. “Some gizmo I saw the other day.” The other, he said, was for my wife. Hector was just a bit younger than me, and my wife treated Hector like a kid brother most of the time. But sometimes they would flirt with one another and I knew they were quite fond of one another and that Hector perhaps even had a kind of crush on my wife. That is, if a man like Hector could be said to have “crushes.” But it was all very innocent that time, and when I had still been working as a journalist, and would sometimes be away on assignment, I knew Hector would watch out for her, and for our son, and that they were safe together and that nothing untoward would happen.
But now I could feel the contours of the gift through the tissue and I could feel the anger building in me. My wife’s red hair was growing out raggedly and thick after the baby and she had lost one of her fine hair brushes in the move back from Toronto. Just that morning, as I was leaving, she had been cursing the tangles in her thick red hair.
We had been out with Hector and his reformed tart a few nights before and my wife had seen an antique, silver brush in the window of a shop and had commented on it. I knew the present must be the brush that she had admired.
“I can’t accept this, Lasso,” I said.
“It’s not for you, Hem,” Hector said carefully. “Tell her it’s from you. You should do that anyway. Anything else might look…improper.” He gave me his best smile then, or what I knew to be what he thought was his best smile; his boyish, winning smile with dimples that could erase any slight or injury, or so he clearly thought. Often enough he was right. And my first drinks in several weeks had left me mellow and warm.
But it still wasn’t working all the way upon me yet, and sensing that, Hector said, “You two are the closest thing to family I have, Hem, and it’s Christmas and that’s about the giving. You’ll just have to live with the receiving, you righteous son of a bitch.” He pointed to the gift for our son. “I’ve got no brother or sisters, so I’ll never have nieces or nephews, either. I’m afraid Bumby fulfills that need for me. Christ, Hem, please let me have my Christmas. Without it, I’m left to decorating trees in the gardens with fallen women. What kind of Yule is that? You can’t appreciate family, truly, when you have one. When you don’t, it’s all you think about.”
I still wasn’t completely soothed or convinced, but I was then terribly fond of Hector. I didn’t yet know what I would do with the gifts, and, if I took them home, what I would say about their origins, but his smile and steady blue-eyed gaze broke down the last of my resentment and jealously and my guilt for having no money.
We toasted one another again and I tried to think of something I might have around our small apartment to give Hector as a gift.
Hector ordered us both Welsh ‘Rarebit’ and we sipped more of our rum and I said, “What did you get Vicky for Christmas?”
Hector shook his head and then shook loose a cigarette and struck a match with his thumbnail and lit his cigarette.
He stared into the coal fire of the brazier.
Finally he sighed and said, “An abortion.”
***
Hector sighed and bit his lip and sipped more wine. Hem’s sketch of that long-gone Christmas Eve was accurate, and it wasn’t.
Much of the distortion — perhaps intended…probably intended—came in the omissions. It was tucked into the spaces between the lines. Contrary to what Hem had written, Hector had always gotten to the good places first. Hector’s war injury had removed him from combat and sent him to Italy seven months ahead of Hem.
Hector had lured Hem to Paris and then later to Key West. He’d introduced Hem to Cuba.
The antique brush had been given to Hadley for Christmas. Hector knew from later conversations that Hem had passed the hairbrush off as his own gift.
That was fine. Hell, that’s what Hector had intended, really.
It was that last paragraph that really angered Hector.
It made it sound like the aborted child had been Hector’s.
Artistically, Hector could appreciate that touch: Hector recognized the effect and the contrast with Hem’s own, then-happy family life that Ernest had been going for as a writer.
But for various reasons, it was reprehensibly dishonest.
Victoria had claimed to have no idea who the father of her child was. The father could have been any of a dozen of her “clients.” But Vicky hadn’t wanted the child and she had begged Hector to help her take care of it before they returned to the states and before she might have to see her parents again. He reluctantly complied.
The eventual procedure had gone very badly, though that wasn’t apparent at first, and it eventually left Vicky infertile.
Many years later, Hector heard that her failure to produce a child had ended Vicky’s fine-enough, otherwise happy marriage to a man whom, by all accounts, was, otherwise, a nice-enough man.
Vicky died shortly after the ensuing divorce.
Hector rubbed his temples, rec
alling old days in Paris with Vicky. Who had been the father of that child? There had been so many men in her life. She talked of them from time to time: the doomed soldiers; the rich but unhappily married men.
But there was one man…
Victoria never spoke of this man, never put a name to him, and when Hector pressed, she’d shrug and say, “You’re being foolish, Hec. There’s nobody.”
But there was somebody. Hector knew it—some man who filled the voids Hector sensed in Victoria’s biography…whose memory dwelt in the ellipses in her occasional tipsy reminisces. Not necessarily a lover—not anymore, at any rate—maybe not even the father of her aborted child.
But someone—some man—cast a long and perhaps even fearsome shadow over Victoria’s life.
When Hector would press too hard, Victoria would take shelter in drink and solitude—sometimes ordering him out.
One night, a bit worse for drink and angry at Hector for again pressing, she’d asked him to leave. Hector had stormed out; found Hem in a downstairs café. Spurred on by drink, the two drunken authors had determined to follow equally smashed Victoria—see if she might not lead them to this mystery man who was fast becoming Hector’s bête noire.
Nothing came of these nocturnal sorties. Well, not in terms of spotting this mystery man who hung in the shadows.
But later, over still more drinks, Hector and Hem more than once confided the same sense that while they were watching Victoria, someone else had been watching them.
Years later, when Hector’s efforts to improve Victoria’s prospects hadn’t played out quite as he expected, he heard through channels that she was found dead in her apartment.
Her body was found in the kitchen by a custodian who forced his way into her place after neighbors expressed alarm over the strong scent of gas hanging heavy in the common hallway. Victoria was there in the kitchen — her head still in the oven.
Hector wasn’t really surprised by her suicide—Victoria’s moods always ran to the dark side. She’d never overcome the guilt regarding her accidental, sorry trade.
But some newspaper accounts sent him by a lingering, mutual friend haunted Hector:
A man in Victoria’s building—some nosey neighbor—insisted that he’d seen a strange man hanging around Victoria’s apartment. He’d even seen the stranger leaving her place a time or two in the days just before her death.
Hector read the lost chapter again, then a third time.
Something nagged at him; worked at Hector in a deep but undefined way.
Something….
Damn it all: It had been so many years. And back in the day, there’d always been so many drinks. Hundreds of thousands of words had been written between then and now….
Hector looked at the typeface—the margins and spacing—the document looked like something that could have come from Hem’s typewriter. And all that marginalia about the surrealist killings—that was certainly in Hem’s hand.
It vexed Hector—who, besides Hem, might have had a hand in this strange, impossible-to-exist document?
This chapter… That long-missing and now-surfaced short story of Hector’s… And Creedy, here in Idaho…chatting up apparent Hemingway scholars?
Something sinister was going on in this remote mountain town, sure enough. Something directed at harming Hem’s reputation, and maybe Hector’s, too.
Something that made Hector go cold all over.
“Widow. The word consumes itself.”
— Sylvia Plath
12
INVITATION
“Get dressed,” Richard said, flipping on the light and tugging back the drapes, flooding the room with savage light. “She wants you to come along.”
Hannah sat up in bed and ran her hand back through her tangled hair. “Huh?” she asked grouchily. “Who? Who wants me?”
“Mary. Before she and I get down to cases, she suggested we all get together socially. Just this once. I couldn’t see a way around it. If nothing else, being around you might make her drop her defenses a bit. Mary’ll like you. Christ, everybody always likes you.”
“I feel terrible. Besides, today’s my day to do my writing.” Hannah rubbed her eyes with her knuckles. “You promised.” Richard had. On the other hand, the chance to see Papa’s house—to meet the widow and hear her side of the legendary story—the prospect privately thrilled Hannah.
“You’ll feel better and you can revise your little thing tomorrow. It’s a short story—how much time can it take?”
Hannah frowned. “As a literature professor, you should be better equipped to answer that question. Or you should presume so.”
He thought about it, then said, “Actually, you should bring that up to Mary. How much time your fiction writing takes—make it clear that it’s your priority. Well, after the baby, of course. Oh, and since you brought it up: You need to broaden out a bit. Write about something that isn’t centered around what did or didn’t happen between you and your old man.”
Hannah’s cheeks and neck reddened. “You’ve been snooping. Again.”
“I’m a professional, not a snoop.”
“Yeah, well, Papa didn’t let Edmund Wilson critique his works in progress,” Hannah said. “Writers don’t require academics to wet-nurse them through to final drafts. How to put this kindly? Butt out.” She shook her head and sighed. “I really mean that Richard. Don’t ever ever do it again. It’s like a…violation.”
“I’m sorry.” Richard hesitated, then waved his hand. “Honey, you have raw talent, but you really simply must dispense with this other thing and move on. It’s more than just the way everything you write about comes down to all that with your old man. Hell, you need to ignore that shit just to be whole again and find your own true voice. Forget it as fodder for your fiction. It’s not translating…no resonance. It’s self-exposure and self-confession, not literature. It’s painful and uncomfortable to read.”
Hannah blew blond bangs from her forehead. “Aye. Well, maybe. Anyway, the bairn’s using my tailbone as a football and I feel a little sick.” Hannah pressed her palm to her belly. “You know when I’m naked and he’s moving around, you can actually see the feet and arms skittering around under my skin? Sometimes you can even see the outline of an arm, or a leg. Wanna feel?”
Richard thought of the increasingly visible outline of his own liver, looking like some bloated, subcutaneous leech bent on its host’s destruction: “Too creepy.”
“At least let me take a shower first?”
“You’ve got twenty minutes.”
“Not enough time.”
“Twenty minutes.”
***
They drove a new rental car from the lodge to the Topping House. Hannah looked out the window at the passing countryside…at the distant cemetery.
As she watched the passing scenery Hannah’s mind returned to the strange phone call. She still hadn’t thought of a way to tell Richard about it. And anyway, now was the last moment to think of doing that. Richard was on his way at last—finally going to meet Mary Hemingway. And, hell, Hannah was going, too. That was a dizzying development that excited Hannah very much.
She was going to actually meet and talk with Papa’s last wife. Hannah combed her damp hair and grilled Richard about the widow. “What she’s like now? I was leafing through a book of photos taken around here and she looks teensy. Too-tanned. Blond in a bleachy way. Very sharp-featured.”
“Starting with her tiny predatory teeth,” Richard said. “She has the teeth of a terrier, though few would know. She rarely smiles in pictures, or in person, I’m told.”
Hannah shrugged. She wasn’t up to another one of his impromptu lectures; wasn’t up to debate. She decided to go for humor, this round…repartee: “Maybe nobody around Mary ever says anything funny.”
Richard bit his lip, considering that one. Frowning deeper, he said, “Hem at first dismissed Mary as a camp follower and scavenger. She smokes like a chimney and has the foul mouth of a sailor. She drinks too
much. The drinking’s killing her according to some who should know.”
Hannah wanted to say, “Just like that and you’ve found your common ground.” Instead she said, “Papa thought enough of Mary to marry her. Dubbed her his ‘pocket Reubens,’ aye?”
Richard nodded. “That is so. In a different mood, he also said she had the face of a Torquemada…of a spider.”
“Harsh.” Hannah smiled. “Was that a black widow spider?”
“The first time Bumby met his newest step-mother, she emerged naked from the pool at the Finca.”
“Bet more than the sun rose.”
“That’s funny, Hannah. In your joke, you stumble upon an interesting point. There have been growing retrospective rumors of lesbianism. Recently, allegations have even been made about an affair between Mary, wife number four, and Pauline, who was wife number two.”
“Hm. Thought I read somewhere that Pauline and Hadley might have had something before Pauline stole Papa away—that the three of them were lovers.”
“Dubious.” Richard squeezed his wife’s hand. “Which wife would you most likely have been? Which one do you identify with?”
Hannah bit her lip. Hadley was probably the most appealing, the most grounded of Hem’s wives. The others were all rather messes of one sort or another. Martha, the only real writer among the four Mrs. Hemingways, had the least appealing personality to Hannah.
She said, “None of them. Given a choice, I would have been Papa’s long-desired, unborn daughter. The daughter who would have absorbed from her genius daddy every trick and truth he knew about writing.”
As they slowed to turn into the Topping House driveway, a green Impala swung around the back of their car and continued on up the hill. Hannah caught a glimpse of the driver: a gaunt man wearing glasses. His dark hair was slicked back from a widow’s peak. His hollowed cheeks were wind-burned.
Hannah reached for Richard’s arm, then hesitated: The car was already out of sight.
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