by Paula McLain
It wasn’t any great secret that I was a virgin. Aside from a passionate kiss here and there from various suitors, my experience as a lover was nil. Ernest liked to hint that he’d known lots of girls. I assumed he’d been with Agnes in Italy—they were going to marry after all—but more than that, I tried not to think about. It made me too anxious to wonder if I could satisfy him, so I pushed that thought aside and focused on how making love would be a way of knowing him, in all the ways that were possible, with no obstacles or barriers. It wouldn’t matter that I was inexperienced. He would feel me loving all of him and holding nothing back. How could he not?
Ernest seemed prepared to wait for our wedding night—he’d certainly never pushed me in any way—but on the night of our visit to Oak Park, after a lingering kiss good night at Kenley’s door, he told me he wasn’t heading off to Don Wright’s place to sleep that night after all. “I’m camping out.”
“What?”
“C’mon. I’ll show you.”
I followed him up the fire escape to the rooftop, expecting it to be freezing up there—it was March, and weeks away from true spring in Chicago—but tucked into a sheltered corner, Ernest had piled up quilts and blankets to cozy effect.
“You’ve made quite a little kingdom here, haven’t you?”
“That’s the idea. Do you want some wine?” He reached into his nest and pulled out a corked bottle and a teacup.
“What else have you got hidden in there?”
“Come in and find out.” His voice was light and teasing, but when I was lying beside him on the quilt, and he reached to wrap a blanket around my shoulders, I felt his hands shaking.
“You’re nervous,” I said.
“I don’t know why.”
“You’ve been with plenty of girls, haven’t you?”
“None like you.”
“Well, that’s the perfect thing to say.”
We tented the blankets around us and kissed for a long while, cocooned and warm and separate from the rest of the world. And then, without even knowing that I was going to do it beforehand, I took off my jacket and blouse, then lay down beside him, not minding the scratching of his wool jacket on my bare skin or the way he pulled back to look at me.
I didn’t feel as shy or exposed as I thought I might. His eyes were soft and his hands were, too. They moved over my breasts and I was surprised at the charge his touch sent running through me. I arched automatically into his body and everything happened very quickly after that, my hands searching for his urgently, his mouth on my eyelids, my neck, everywhere at once. It was all new, but natural and right feeling, somehow, even when there was pain.
When I was a teenager, my mother had published an article in the New Republic saying that a wife who enjoyed sexual activity wasn’t any better than a prostitute. Submission was required for children, of course, but the final goal for women could only be a strict and blissful celibacy. I didn’t know what to think about sex or what to expect but discomfort. As I grew older and more curious, I scanned excerpts of Havelock Ellis’s Psychology of Sex in Roland’s Literary Digest for much-needed information. But there were things I had a hard time thinking too specifically about—such as where our bodies would meet, and how that would actually feel. I don’t know if I was repressed or just dense, but in my fantasies about our wedding night, Ernest carried me across some flower-strewn threshold and my white dress dissolved. Then, after some sweetly vague tussling, I was a woman.
On the rooftop, all the veils fell away, and when there wasn’t a diaphanous scrap of fantasy left, I think I was most surprised by my own desire, how ready I was to have him, the absolute reality of skin and heat. I wanted him, and nothing—not the awkward jarring of knees and elbows as we struggled to get closer, not the sharp jolting sensation when he moved into me—could change that. When his weight was on me fully, and I could feel every bump and contour of the roof against my shoulders and hips through the blankets, there were moments of pure crushing happiness I knew I’d never forget. It was as if we’d pressed ourselves together until his bones passed through mine and we were the same person, ever so briefly.
Afterward, we lay back on the blankets and watched the stars, which were very bright everywhere above us.
“I feel like I’m your pet,” he said, his voice warm and soft. “You’re mine, too, my small perfect cat.”
“Did you ever think it could be like this? The way we’re happening to each other?”
“I can do anything if I have you with me,” he said. “I think I can write a book. I mean, I want to, but the thing is it could all be stupid or useless.”
“Of course you can do it, and it will be wonderful. I’m sure of it. Young and fresh and strong just like you are. It will be you.”
“I want my characters to be like us, just people trying to live simply and say what they really mean.”
“We say what we mean, but it’s hard, isn’t it? It might be the hardest thing of all, being really honest.”
“Kenley says we’re rushing things. He doesn’t understand why I’d want to move in the marriage direction when single life suits me so well.”
“That’s his prerogative.”
“Yes, but it’s not just him. Horney’s worried I’m going to gum up my career. Jim Gamble thinks I’m going to forget the whole point of Italy once we’re hitched. Kate’s not speaking to either of us.”
“Let’s don’t bring her up, please. Not now.”
“All right,” he said. “I’m just saying that no one seems to get that I need this. I need you.” He sat up then and looked into my face until I thought I might dissolve from it. “I hope we’ll get lucky enough to grow old together. You see them on the street, those couples who’ve been married so long you can’t tell them apart. How’d that be?”
“I’d love to look like you,” I said. “I’d love to be you.”
I’d never said anything truer. I would gladly have climbed out of my skin and into his that night, because I believed that was what love meant. Hadn’t I just felt us collapsing into one another, until there was no difference between us?
It would be the hardest lesson of my marriage, discovering the flaw in this thinking. I couldn’t reach into every part of Ernest and he didn’t want me to. He needed me to make him feel safe and backed up, yes, the same way I needed him. But he also liked that he could disappear into his work, away from me. And return when he wanted to.
NINE
rnest pushed off, suspending his body over the lake before he punched through. Coming to the surface again, he treaded water and faced the dock where Dutch and Luman sat and passed a bottle of rotgut back and forth, their voices carrying clearly over the water.
“Good form, Wem,” Dutch called out. “Can you teach me to dive like that?”
“No,” he called back. “I can’t teach anyone anything.”
“Do you have to be so stingy about it?” Dutch said with a snort, but Ernest didn’t feel like answering, so he balled himself up like a rock and let himself sink, falling through the lake until he bumped the mossy bottom and drifted there, the moss cool and strange against his toes.
Was it just last summer that Kate and Edgar had been on the dock eating stolen cherries and spitting the meaty pits at him as he bobbed nearby? Kate. Dear old Katy with the cat-green eyes and the smooth strong legs all the way to her rib cage. One night she had said, “You’re the doctor, examine me,” and he’d done it, counting each of her ribs with his hands, following the curve all the way around from her spine. She didn’t flinch or even laugh. When he reached her breast, she pushed the top of her bathing suit down while looking at him. He stopped moving his hands and tried to breathe.
“What are you thinking, Wemedge?”
“Nothing,” he said, working to keep his voice steady. Her nipple was perfect and he wanted to put his hand on it and then his mouth. He wanted to fall through Kate the way he liked to fall through the lake, but there were voices coming down the sandy path toward them. K
ate straightened her suit. He stood up quickly and plunged into the water, feeling it burn him all over.
Now Kate was little more than a mile up the road in her aunt Charles’s cottage with Hadley, both of them in the same room in little beds that smelled like mildew. He knew that room well and all the rooms in the house, but found it hard to picture Hadley there or in any of the places he knew best. When he was a little boy, he’d learned to walk on the slope of patchy grass in front of Windemere. And that was just the beginning. He’d learned everything worth learning here, how to catch and scale and gut a fish, how to hold an animal living or dead, and flint a fire and move quietly through the woods. How to listen. How to remember everything that mattered so he could keep it with him and use it when he needed to.
This place had never once let him down, but he felt slightly outside of it tonight. Tomorrow, at four o’clock in the afternoon, he and Hadley would be married in the Methodist church on Lake Street. He felt a surge of panic about it, as if he were a fish thrashing in a taut net, fighting it instinctively. It wasn’t Hadley’s fault. Getting married had been all his idea, but he hadn’t told her how very afraid of it he was. He seemed to need to force his way through it anyway, as he did with everything that scared him terribly. He was afraid of marriage and he was afraid of being alone, too.
Rising up from the cool bottom of the lake on the night before his wedding, he found it hard not to turn away from Hadley or grow confused. He loved her. She didn’t scare him like Kate did or challenge him to touch her with green eyes in the dark, saying, “Go on then, what are you afraid of, Wemedge?” With Hadley, things felt right almost all of the time. She was good and strong and true, and he could count on her. They had as good a shot at making it as anyone did, but what if marriage didn’t solve anything and didn’t save anyone even a little bit? What then?
Now that he was on the surface, he could hear Dutch and Luman again, talking of stupid things, not understanding anything at all. The water felt flat and cool against his skin, holding him and letting him go at the same time. He looked up into the black whorl of the sky and took a single deep breath into his lungs, and then he kicked hard for the dock.
TEN
eptember 3, 1921, dawned clear and balmy and windless—a perfect day. The leaves were just beginning to turn on the trees, but you wouldn’t have known it to feel the lake, which was still warm as bathwater. Ernest had arrived in Horton Bay that morning in a stormy mood after three days of fishing with bachelor friends. He was sunburned along the bridge of his nose and his eyes were lined with exhaustion or anxiety or both.
“Are you ready for this?” I asked when I saw him.
“Damned straight,” he said. He was bluffing, but wasn’t I bluffing, too? Wasn’t everyone dead terrified on their wedding day?
While Ernest spent his last hours as a free man in a cottage on Main Street in Horton Bay, passing a whiskey bottle back and forth with his groomsmen, I took a long swim after lunch with Ruth and Kate, my bridesmaids.
It hadn’t been an easy road getting Kate to agree to even come to the wedding. There’d been a string of strained and difficult letters, nearly all of them going her way at first. But after many weeks, she finally confessed: I’m afraid I was very in love with Ernest at one time. Not sure why I haven’t been able to say this, except it’s been painful to see him fall for you instead, and terribly embarrassing to think the two of you might have laughed at my expense.
I felt a sharp sympathetic twinge reading her words. I knew well how low someone could be driven by unrequited love, and yet here was Kate, showing what a very good friend she was. She had loved Ernest and lost him to me, and was still willing to stand up for us both in front of our family and friends.
I was full of admiration for her that afternoon and couldn’t help swimming over to where she splashed in the shallows, saying, “You’re a good guy, Kate.”
“You too, Hash,” she said. Her eyes brimmed with tears.
If we had only known then that eight years ahead of us, in a Paris we hadn’t begun to imagine, John Dos Passos would fall victim to Kate’s sparkle and pursue her with force until she agreed to marry him. That Dos was a figure nearly as dashing and important to American letters as Ernest was would have softened this moment ever so much—but we never know what waits for us, good or bad. The future stayed behind its veil as Kate gave me a wan smile and paddled away into the reeds.
The water was so warm and ideal that afternoon, we swam until three, when I realized with a kind of panic that my hair would never dry before the service. We rushed back to the cottage where I tied it up with ribbons and then stepped into the ivory lace dress, which fit me so perfectly I thought it made up for the damp hair. There were creamy silk slippers for my feet, a garland of flowers, and a veil to trail down my back. I carried a spray of baby’s breath.
At four-fifteen, we entered the little church, which Kate and Ruth had decorated with swamp lilies and balsam and goldenrod picked from a nearby field. Ribs of sunlight pierced the window and scaled the wall. Ernest and his ushers stood at the altar, all of them flush and gorgeous in white trousers and dark blue jackets. Someone sneezed. The pianist began playing Wagner’s “Wedding March,” and I began to walk, led down the aisle by George Breaker, a family friend. I had hoped my brother Jamie could come out from California to give me away, but he was very ill with tuberculosis. My mother’s brother, Arthur Wyman, was my second choice, but he was also too unwell to attend. I felt sad that more of my family couldn’t be there with me, but wasn’t I getting new family that very day?
On my way toward the pulpit, I passed Fonnie, stiffly dressed with a small, tight navy hat. Roland stood beside her and gave me a dear smile, and then my niece Dodie grinned and pointed to Ernest’s knees, which were shaking slightly in his white flannel trousers. Was this just more evidence of cold feet, or something else? I honestly didn’t know, but it was too late to be asking these questions anyway—too late to stop or take anything back, even if I wanted to. And I didn’t want to.
The ceremony was quiet and beautiful and went off without a hitch. We walked out of the little church into the last of the day’s sunshine. Later, after a chicken dinner and sticky chocolate cake and too many pictures in the yard with everyone squinting into the sun, Horney offered to drive us out to nearby Walloon Lake, where we would be honeymooning at Windemere, the Hemingway family’s summer cottage. Grace and Dr. Hemingway had offered to put us up for two weeks as a wedding gift. It was dusk when we stepped into the rowboat and began our journey across the lake. Our luggage bumped around our knees, and a sweet nervousness fell between us now that the business of the day was over.
“Are you happy?” he said softly.
“You know I am. Do you need to ask?”
“I like asking,” he said. “I like to hear it, even knowing what I’m going to hear.”
“Maybe especially, then,” I said. “Are you happy?”
“Do you need to ask?”
We laughed lightly at one another. The air was damp and still and filled with night birds and feeding bats. By the time we beached the boat in the shallow cove at Windemere, it was fully dark out. Ernest helped me scramble onto the sandy shore, and then we walked up the hill holding each other close. We opened the door and lit the lamps and looked into the cottage. Ernest’s mother had taken it upon herself to wax everything within an inch of its life, but though the rooms were clean, they were chilly. Ernest opened a bottle of wine that Grace had left in the icebox for us, and then we lit a fire in the parlor and dragged mattresses from a few of the beds down to make a nest in front of it.
“Fonnie was in rare form today,” he said after a while. “A perfect tank.”
“Poor Fonnie,” I said. “Her own marriage has been one big bust. It’s not surprising she’s so stingy with us.”
“Aren’t you a good egg?” he said, stroking my hair. And I was reminded of my afternoon swim.
“Kate behaved awfully bravely, don’t you think?�
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“Yes, she did, but I’m glad that’s all behind us now.” He got up and crossed the room to turn on the lamp. “I should have mentioned this before, but I always need to sleep with some light. Will that be all right?”
“I think so. What happens if you leave it off?”
“You don’t want to know.” He climbed back into our nest and squeezed me tight. “After I was shot, when my head was still in pretty bad shape, a very wise Italian officer told me the only thing to really do for that kind of fear was get married.”
“So your wife would take care of you? That’s an interesting way to think about marriage.”
“I actually took it to mean that if I could take care of her—you, that is—I’d worry less about myself. But maybe it works both ways.”
“I’m counting on that,” I said.
ELEVEN
Three traveling clocks
Tick
On the mantelpiece
Comma
But the young man is starving.
E.H., 1921
e’re hardly starving,” I said to Ernest when he showed me his newest poem.
“Maybe not, but you couldn’t call us flush,” he said.
Our first apartment was a cramped and dingy two-floor walk-up on North Dearborn Street, a dodgy neighborhood on Chicago’s North Side. I hated it there, but it was all we could afford. We were living on about two thousand dollars a year—money from a trust fund that had been set up for me by my grandfather. There was or would be a little more money coming from my mother’s estate, though that was still tied up with various lawyers. Ernest had been making almost fifty a week writing for the Co-operative Commonwealth, but he resigned just a few weeks after we returned from our honeymoon, when gossip began circulating that the paper was involved in crooked financial dealings and was quickly going bankrupt. Ernest didn’t want to be caught up in any of that ugliness, and I understood why, particularly if he was going to be a famous writer, but our plans to travel to Italy seemed more and more impossible.