by Paula McLain
SIX
have so many schemes about writing—so much I want to see and feel and do. Say, do you remember playing the piano with your hair glinting full on and how you got up and came over to me on the davenport and said, “Do you gather me, Begonia?”
Do you gather me, Hash?
Will you come up here already and give me some of that dead-sure stuff that’s you?
His letters came crushed and strangled, full of deliciousness, sometimes two and three a day. I tried to be more reserved at first, vowing to write only once a week, but that fell apart immediately. Before long I found myself in a real bind. The letters were flying back and forth, but what did they mean? Kate’s voice often filled my head—He likes women, all women, apparently—and I debated over whether or not I should tell her about our quickly progressing friendship. I couldn’t imagine her not feeling hurt and angry; I was blatantly, willfully disregarding her advice after all. But if I confessed everything, she might give me more advice, and then I’d have to listen and perhaps act on it.
I was torn between wanting to know if I could trust Ernest and wishing I could stay blind enough to keep things exactly as they were. His words already meant so much—too much. Each of his letters was a perfect tonic and writing him, too, was a tonic, and before long I learned I could hear the mail boy on his bicycle from several blocks away even if he didn’t ring his bell. I told myself that Kate didn’t know everything about Ernest. Who knew everything about anyone? There were qualities coming through in his letters—tenderness, for instance, and palpable warmth—that she might never have seen in all those summers in Michigan. It was possible. It had to be, because the happiness that grew out of Ernest’s interest in me was seeping over into the rest of my life. I was suddenly busier and more content at home than I’d ever been. Two friends, Bertha Doan and Ruth Bradfield, had moved into the upstairs apartment with me as boarders, and for the first time in almost a decade, I wasn’t lonely in my own house. I also had young men interested in me, and even if they weren’t anything extraordinary, they were a nice diversion. I let them take me dancing or to the theater and even let a few of them kiss me good night. Not one of them had Ernest’s great big square head or padding feet and hands; not one asked his wonderful questions or made me want to say, Do you gather me, Begonia?
I kept up with it, though, going out with nearly anyone who asked because Ernest, dear soul that he was, was theoretical—a lovely hypothesis—and hundreds of miles away. In St. Louis, where I was fated to live my actual life, there was Dick Pierce, the brother of a good friend. I liked his company and knew that if I encouraged him at all, he’d fall in love with me and perhaps even propose, but I felt little or nothing for him. There was also Pere Rowland, a pleasantly rumpled boy who knew a lot about books and music, but romantic dates didn’t appeal to me as much as when a group of us would jam into someone’s car and go to a movie in town or the dance hall where everyone was happy and free. Afterward, Ruth and Bertha and I would sit up in our nightgowns with tea and talk through the events of the night.
I had just turned twenty-nine, but in a way I felt younger and more carefree than I did my first year at Bryn Mawr, when I couldn’t enjoy the smallest happiness or intimacy. It was as if I was experiencing a long-delayed coming out, and I was grateful for every minute of it.
And then there were the letters from Chicago arriving every day, always beautifully crumpled and full of busy news. Ernest told me all about his articles for the Commonwealth, his ideas for sketches and novels. But more and more he was also sharing stories about his growing up—about the long summers up in Michigan when his father, Ed, who was a practicing obstetrician and natural outdoorsman, had taught him how to build a fire and cook in the open, how to use an ax, land and dress a fish, hunt squirrel and partridge and pheasant.
Whenever I think of my father, he wrote, he’s in the woods flushing jacksnipe or walking through short dead grass or shocks of corn, or splitting wood with frost in his beard. I read these sentences with tears in my eyes because I had so few warm memories of my own father. When I did think about him, the first image that came to me was his revolver, and then the noise it made ringing through the house. Remembering his death and the way I used to painfully fixate on it disturbed me so much I had to walk twice around the block in a stinging wind before I was calm enough to return to Ernest’s letter.
But if I was jealous of his relationship with his father, his mother was troubling in other ways. Nearly every time he mentioned her in a letter, she was that bitch. He described her as utterly dominant in the household, quick to criticize and full of unbendable ideas about how life should proceed, down to every detail. Before he could read, she’d taught Ernest to memorize Latin and German phrases and lines of “essential” poetry. Although he tried to respect her creative spirit—she sang opera and painted a little and wrote poetry—Ernest ultimately believed she was a selfish mother and wife, intent on her own needs at the risk of destroying everyone around her, particularly her husband. She forced Dr. Hemingway into giving in to every one of her demands, and seeing this made Ernest despise her.
Though Ernest’s passionate rejection of his mother gave me chills, I couldn’t help but recognize it. Learning just how alike our parents’ relationships were was eerie, and yet what struck me hardest was how even though I’d often detested my mother’s indomitable will and even blamed her for my father’s suicide, I’d never expressed this hatred to a soul. It had seethed and roiled inside me. On the occasions it forced its way to the surface, I took up my feather pillow and screamed my feelings into it, choking them off at the root. Ernest spat out his rage freely. Whose response was the most terrifying?
Ultimately, I felt a growing respect for the way he could express even the worst bits of himself and was drawn in by his confidences. I looked forward to Ernest’s letters as I did little else. But his candor, I soon learned, applied to everything equally. In early December, not long after my birthday, he wrote that he’d been attracted the night before by a girl in a flashing green dress at a party. It made me sick to read this. I had no flashing green dress, and even if I did, he wouldn’t see it. He was hundreds of miles away, absorbed by the details of his days and nights there. We were friends and confidants, yes—but he didn’t owe me anything, had made me not a single promise, not even a false one. He could follow that green dress like a siren into the lake if he wanted. I had no hold on him.
No one seemed to have any hold on anyone, in fact. That was a sign of the times. We were all on the verge now, bursting with youth and promise and little trills of jazz. The year before, Olive Thomas had starred in The Flapper, and the word suddenly meant jazz and moved like it, too. Girls everywhere stepped out of their corsets and shortened their dresses and darkened their lips and eyes. We said “cat’s pajamas” and “I’ll say” and “that’s so jake.” Youth, in 1921, was everything, but that was just the thing that could worry me sick. I was twenty-nine, feeling almost obsolete, but Ernest was twenty-one and white hot with life. What was I thinking?
“Maybe I’m not up to this game,” I told my roommate Ruth after I’d gotten Ernest’s siren letter. Bertha was out, and Ruth and I were making dinner together, moving easily around each other in the small kitchen, snapping beans and boiling water for spaghetti, as if we were two maiden aunts who’d done this for decades.
“I’m not sure any of us are,” Ruth said, measuring salt and tossing some over her shoulder for luck. She had wonderfully strong hands, and I found myself watching them and wishing I could be more like her. She turned to face me and gave me a wry smile. “But what else is there? If we give up now, we’re done for.”
“I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I’m old and doddering and can’t remember feeling anything for anyone at all.”
She nodded. “You want to, but you won’t.”
“I won’t.” I moved around the small table, setting the plates and second-best silver, smoothing our two napkins. “I’ll try ver
y hard not to.”
• • •
I was desperate to get to Chicago again and see the big old room at Kenley’s—the piano, the Victrola, the knobbly rug pushed aside for two people to dance. I wanted to look into a pair of impossibly clear brown eyes and know what that beautiful boy was thinking. I wanted to kiss him and feel him kiss me back.
In the middle of January, my friend Leticia Parker and I cooked a plan to get me there. I’d be her guest for a week. We’d stay at a hotel and go shopping, and I could see Ernest as much as I wanted. But then, two days before our scheduled departure, Leticia phoned to cancel. Her mother was ill, and she simply couldn’t be away for so long. I told her I understood; of course I did. My own mother had been ill for months, and I knew those demands well, but I was also crushed. Everything had been set for weeks. Ernest would meet the train, and that moment alone I’d worked through in my imagination a hundred times or more.
“Now what?” I railed to Ruth later that day.
“Go,” she said.
“Alone?”
“Why not? These aren’t the dark ages, you know. Didn’t you go alone last time?”
“I wasn’t attached then. Fonnie would hate it.”
“All the more reason to go,” Ruth said, smiling.
The evening I left for Chicago, Roland drove me to the train station on the north side of St. Louis in his new Peugeot, a bottle-green coupe that made him feel proud and more masculine, I think, while sending Fonnie into near-apoplectic levels of anxiety. I liked Roland but also felt sorry for him. His situation was very like my father’s. He peeped only when Fonnie gave him leave to; it was pathetic, and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way. I felt we were allies in the house, and hoped he felt so, too. Though he could easily have left me at the curb, Roland parked and walked me to the platform where he handed my suitcases off to the porter. Then, as he was saying good-bye, he cocked his head to one side, one of his most annoying and endearing tics, and said, “You look beautiful, Hadley.”
“I do?” I felt suddenly shy with him and smoothed the skirt of my pale gray traveling suit.
“You do. It just occurred to me you might not know this about yourself.”
“Thank you.” I leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, and then boarded my train, taking new pleasure in my traveling clothes—my soft wool hat and buttery gloves, my tan suede T-strap shoes. The seats and couches were plush and inviting, and Fonnie’s puritanical voice, telling me I shouldn’t enjoy it, was suddenly very far off. This was the Midnight Special, and I tucked myself into my Pullman berth, behind deep green curtains.
When I arrived at Union Station the next morning, I was well rested and only slightly nervous until I saw Ernest on the platform, almost exactly where I’d left him in November—and then my mouth was dry as cotton, my stomach full of bees. He was gorgeous in a charcoal peacoat and muffler, and his eyes were bright with cold. As I came off the train, he picked me up off my feet with a squeeze.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said when he’d put me down, and we both grinned, embarrassed to be together suddenly. Our eyes met and fell away. So many thousands of words had thrummed between us. Where were they now?
“Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
We rubbed noses and then walked off through the icy morning to find breakfast. There was a place he liked off State Street where you could get steak and eggs for sixty cents. We ordered and then sat in the booth, our knees just touching under the table.
“The Saturday Evening Post just rejected another story,” he said as we waited for our meals to arrive. “That’s the third time. If this doesn’t take off, I could spend my whole life writing junk copy or someone else’s story for magazines. I won’t do it.”
“You’re going to see your stuff in print,” I said. “It has to happen. It will.”
He looked at me levelly, and then raised the toe of his shoe to press it firmly against the inside of my calf. Holding it there, warm and insistent, he said, “Did you think you wouldn’t see me again?”
“Maybe.” I felt my smile fade. “I could be a real fool for you, Nesto.”
“I’d like it if you could love me for a little while at least.”
“Why a little while? Are you worried that you can’t stick it out for very long yourself?”
He shrugged, looking nervous. “You remember my talking about Jim Gamble, my Red Cross buddy? He thinks I should follow him to Rome. It’s cheap there, and if I saved enough beforehand, I could just write fiction for five or six months. This sort of shot might not come around again.”
Rome. I felt my chest contract. I’d just found him, and he was going to run off overseas? My head was spinning, but I knew with absolute certainty that to even try to hold him back would be a mistake. I swallowed hard and set each word down carefully. “If your work’s the thing that matters most, you should go.” I tried to meet his eyes squarely over the table. “But a girl would miss you.”
He nodded seriously but didn’t say anything.
The rest of the week of my visit was filled with concerts, plays, and parties, every evening finishing up in Kenley’s long living room with wine and cigarettes and heated conversations about great books and paintings. Everything was very much as it was in the fall, except that Kate was persistently absent.
Just before I left St. Louis, I put a letter in the mail to her. I wasn’t sure it would reach her before we ran into each other in Chicago, as we inevitably would, but I couldn’t not write and at least try to gently pave the way. Nesto and I have become quite close, I wrote. We’re truly good friends and you’re my good friend too, and I hate to think this could come between us. Please don’t be angry for long. Your lovingest, Hash.
Kenley insisted she was simply busy with work, saying, “You know Kate. She takes on too much and then can’t get free. I’m sure we’ll see her before too long.”
But we didn’t see her, and as the days passed, I wished more and more that I could talk about the situation with Ernest. It wasn’t like me to be duplicitous, but I’d painted myself into a corner by not ever divulging how Kate had warned me away from him. I had plenty of reasons not to. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, for one, and also didn’t feel it was my place to step between them and create bad blood. As my visit drew to a close and Kate’s silence grew thicker, I wondered if any element of this lopsided triangle could end well. It was entirely possible she’d stop trusting me altogether. It was possible—even probable—that Ernest would go off to Rome to work on his fiction, leaving me in the lurch on two counts.
It was dangerous to leave my heart on the line with Ernest, but what real choice did I have? I was falling in love with him, and even if I didn’t feel at all brave about the future, my life had unquestionably changed for the better since I’d met him. I felt it at home in St. Louis and at Kenley’s, too. At the beginning of each evening, I was nervous and shy, worried that I had nothing to contribute to the group, but then I’d settle into my skin and my voice. By midnight, I would be part of things, ready to drink like a sailor and talk until morning. It was like being born over each night, the same process repeated, finding myself, losing myself, finding myself again.
“It wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t have the energy for more than half an hour at the piano,” I said to Ernest over breakfast one morning. “We were up until three last night, and here I am bright-eyed and chipper at eight. I used to be so tired—and not a little sad, too. What’s happened to me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I can vouch for the bright eyes.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “We’re talking about a major transformation.”
“Don’t you believe in change?”
“I do. But sometimes I don’t even recognize myself. It’s like those stories where the elves come and take one body away and leave another—a changeling.”
“For what it’s worth, I like you this way, Hash.”
&nb
sp; “Thanks. I like me this way, too.”
• • •
The next evening was my last and I was determined to enjoy every minute of it. I wasn’t sure when or if Ernest and I would see each other again. He hadn’t mentioned Jim Gamble or Italy after that first day, but he also wasn’t spinning any other story about the future. When I asked if he might visit me sometime in St. Louis, he said, “Sure I will, kid,” light as air, with no promise attached, no hint of intention. I didn’t bring it up again. Clutching and clawing wasn’t the way to hold a man like Ernest—if there was a way. I would simply have to wait it out, and see my hand through.
The night went characteristically, with buckets of drink and plenty of song, all of us smoking like paper mills. Ernest asked me to play Rachmaninoff and I was happy to oblige. He came and sat on the bench, like the night of our first meeting, and I felt more than a twinge of nostalgia as my fingers flew over the keys. But in the middle of the piece, he got up and circled the room, rocking back and forth on his heels, jumpy as a thoroughbred at the gate. By the time I finished the piece he’d left the room. When I finally found him, he was out on the stoop smoking a cigarette.
“Was I that bad?” I said.
“I’m sorry. It’s not you.” He cleared his throat and looked up into the cold night sky, which was dizzy with stars. “I’ve been wanting to tell you about a girl.”