by Paula McLain
The squalor of our living situation didn’t bother Ernest as much as it did me because he was gone all day, writing in restaurants and coffee shops. I was stuck in the apartment—two rooms, the bath down the hall—and had very few ways to keep myself busy. At another time it might have occurred to me to find work, but I’d only ever volunteered, and the idea, at least, of throwing myself into domesticity was appealing. I missed the energy of the Domicile, but Kate had gone off to journalism school in Buffalo, and things were strained between Ernest and Kenley. He still owed Kenley back rent from well before the wedding, but as time passed, Ernest only dug in more stubbornly, saying that Kenley was trying to gouge him. He wasn’t paying, and Kenley was livid, finally sending a letter saying that Ernest could come get his things from storage.
Ernest sent a brutal reply back, sacrificing the friendship as if it meant nothing. I knew he was hurting over the loss and his own mistakes, but he wouldn’t admit it. His mood was pretty low during this time. He’d gotten several more rejections on stories he’d sent to magazines, and it hurt his pride. It was one thing when he was writing part-time and having no success. But now he was devoted to his craft, working every day, and still failing. What did that mean for the future?
Certainly there’d been moments in our courtship when Ernest’s spirits flagged and he got down on himself. A dark letter from him could seem pretty ominous, but then a few days would pass and his tone would grow more buoyant and positive. Seeing his mood turn at close range was more trying. In fact, the first time, which came shortly after we were married, disturbed me more than I could comfortably confess.
He’d come home from working in a coffee shop one day looking simply terrible. His face was flat and drawn; his eyes were pink with exhaustion. I thought he might be ill, but he shrugged off this concern. “I’ve just been too much in my head. Why don’t we take a walk?”
It was November and quite chilly, but we bundled up and trudged along for a good while, moving toward the lake. Ernest was quiet and I didn’t force the issue. By the time we reached the shore, it was growing dark and the water was rough with chop. Still we could see some brave or stupid soul, maybe half a mile out, in a small rowboat that tipped ominously, taking in water.
“What would Darwin think of this rube?” Ernest said, cracking a wry smile.
“Aha,” I said. “I was worried I wouldn’t see those lovely teeth at all.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He put his head in his hands and sighed. “Goddamn it,” he whispered fiercely, and then struck his forehead sharply with his fists.
“Ernest!” I said, and then he did it again.
He began to cry, or at least I think he was crying; he hid his face in his hands.
“Please tell me what’s wrong,” I said. “You can tell me anything.”
“I don’t even know. I’m a wreck. I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
“Are you having regrets about getting married?” I tried to meet his eyes. “If you are, I can take it.”
“I don’t know. I’m just so lost.” He rubbed his eyes hard against the sleeves of his wool jacket. “I have these nightmares and they’re so real. I can hear mortar fire, feel the blood in my shoes. I wake up in a sweat. I’m afraid to sleep.”
I felt a wave of maternal love for him, wanting to wrap him tightly in my arms until the cold feeling in his heart went away. “Let’s go home,” I said.
We walked back to our apartment in silence. When we got there, I steered Ernest straight to the bedroom and undressed him the way my mother always did for me when I was sick. I pulled the blankets tightly around his shoulders, and then rubbed his shoulders and arms. After several minutes, he fell asleep. I found a blanket and went to a corner chair to watch over him. It was only then that I let myself feel the whole weight of my own anxiety. So lost, he’d said, and I could see it in his eyes, which reminded me of my father’s. What did it all mean? Was this crisis related to his experiences in the war? Did those memories descend to plague him from time to time, or was this more personal? Did this sadness belong to Ernest in the fatal way my father’s belonged to him?
From across the room, Ernest made a small animal noise and turned to face the wall. I pulled my blanket more tightly around my shoulders and looked out our bedroom window at the stormy November sky. It had started to rain hard, and I hoped that poor soul in the rowboat had found his way to shore. But not everyone out in a storm wants to be saved. I knew that myself from the summer Dorothea died. My summer friend and I had made it safely out of Ipswich Bay, but that was happenstance. If the raging waters had reached out to swallow me, I would have let them. I wanted to die that day—I did—and there’d been other times, too. Not many, but they were there, and as I watched Ernest twitch in an uneasy sleep, I couldn’t help wondering if we all had them. And if so, if we survived them, was it by chance alone?
Hours later, Ernest woke up and called out for me through the darkened room.
“I’m here,” I said, going to him.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I get like this sometimes, but I don’t want you to think you’re getting a bum horse in the deal.”
“What sets it off?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, it just comes.”
I lay down quietly next to him and stroked his forehead lightly as he talked.
“When I got shot up, I had it pretty rough for a while. If it was daytime and I was doing something, fishing or working, anything, I was okay. Or at night, if I had a light on and could think about something else until I fell asleep. If I could name all the rivers I’d ever seen. Or I’d map out a city I’d lived in before, and try to remember all the streets and the good bars and people I met there and things they’d said. But other times it was too dark and too quiet, and I’d start to remember things I didn’t want in my head at all. Do you know how that is?”
“I do a little, yes.” I held him tightly. “It scares me, though. I never knew my father was so unhappy, but then he was gone. It all got to be too much for him.” I paused, trying to get this part right. “Do you think you’ll know when it’s too much for you? Before it’s too late, I mean.”
“Do you want a promise?”
“Can you?”
“I think so. I can try.”
How unbelievably naïve we both were that night. We clung hard to each other, making vows we couldn’t keep and should never have spoken aloud. That’s how love is sometimes. I already loved him more than I’d ever loved anything or anyone. I knew he needed me absolutely, and I wanted him to go on needing me forever.
I tried to be strong for Ernest’s sake, but things weren’t easy for me in Chicago. His preoccupation with his work made me sharply aware that I had no passion of my own. I still practiced at the piano because I always had, but it was a rented upright, not the graceful Steinway of my childhood, and the draftiness of the apartment wreaked havoc on the tuning. Because I no longer had any friends in Chicago, there were whole weeks when I didn’t talk to anyone but Ernest and Mr. Minello, the grocer down the street. Every afternoon, I’d walk the three blocks to the market and sit and chat with him. Sometimes he’d make us a cup of tea—a strong leaf that tasted of mushroom and ashes—and we’d chat like fishwives. He was a widower, a sweet man who knew a lonely woman when he saw one.
It was Mr. Minello who helped me plan my first dinner party as a married woman, for Sherwood Anderson and his wife, Tennessee. Kenley had introduced Ernest to Anderson in the spring, before their falling-out. Winesburg, Ohio was still fairly big news, and Ernest could hardly believe Anderson would meet with him, let alone ask to see some of his stories. Anderson had seen promise in Ernest’s work and offered to help launch his career if he could, but he and Tennessee had promptly left the States after that, for a long European tour. They were just back in town when Ernest sought him out and invited the couple over to dinner. I was excited to meet them but also panicked. Our flat was so terrible, how could I possibly manage to
pull it off?
“Low light,” Mr. Minello said, trying to calm my nerves. “Spare the candles but not the wine. And serve something in a cream sauce.”
I wasn’t much of a cook, but the evening went off smoothly anyway. Anderson and his wife both had perfect manners and pretended not to notice how awful our living situation was. I liked them both immediately, particularly Anderson, who had an interesting face. Sometimes it seemed blank and completely without feature—squishy and ordinary and mid-western. At other times he had a kind of dramatic intensity that lent everything a lovely hardness and charge. He was just short of magnificent when he began to talk about Paris over dinner.
“What about Rome?” Ernest asked, filling him in on our longstanding plans to move to Italy.
“Rome certainly has its appeal,” Anderson said, blowing smoke away from his empty plate, “la dolce vita and all that. What’s not to like about Italy? But if you want to do any serious work, Paris is the place to be. That’s where the real writers are now. The rate of exchange is good. There are things to do at any hour. Everything’s interesting and everyone has something to contribute. Paris, Hem. Give it some thought.”
After we climbed into our cold little bed that night, snuggling closer to warm our feet and hands, Ernest asked me what I thought of the idea.
“Can we just switch so quickly? We’ve done so much planning.”
“Rome will be there whenever we want it—but Paris. I want to follow the current. Anderson knows his stuff, and if he says Paris is where we want to be, we should at least seriously consider it.”
We were still so broke the whole thing would have been a moot point, but then I got news that my uncle, Arthur Wyman, had died and left me an inheritance of eight thousand dollars. He’d been ill for some time, but the gift was completely unexpected. That amount of money—a fortune to us—guaranteed our trip abroad overnight. As soon as we heard, Ernest went to see Sherwood in his office downtown and told him we were keen on Paris. Was there anything he could do to pave the way? Where should we go? What neighborhood? What was the right way to go about things?
Anderson answered all of his questions in turn. Montparnasse was the best quarter for artists and writers. Until we found a place, we should stay at the Hôtel Jacob off the rue Bonaparte. It was clean and affordable and there were lots of American intellectuals to be found there and nearby. Finally Anderson sat down at his desk and wrote Ernest letters of introduction to several of the famous expatriates he’d recently met and gotten friendly with, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Sylvia Beach. All were or would soon become giants in the field of arts and letters, but we weren’t aware of this at the time, only that having Anderson’s letter as a calling card was essential. Ernest thanked him for everything he’d done and hurried home to read his words aloud to me in our dim kitchen, each of the letters saying essentially the same thing, that this Ernest Hemingway was an untried but very fine young newspaperman whose “extraordinary talent” would take him well beyond the scope of journalism.
In bed that night as we talked and dreamed about Paris, I whispered into Ernest’s ear, “Are you this fine young writer I’ve been hearing about?”
“God, I hope so.” He squeezed me hard.
On December 8, 1921, when the Leopoldina set sail for Europe, we were on board. Our life together had finally begun. We held on to each other and looked out at the sea. It was impossibly large and full of beauty and danger in equal parts—and we wanted it all.
TWELVE
ur first apartment in Paris was at 74 Cardinal Lemoine, two oddly shaped rooms on the fourth floor of a building next door to a public dance hall, a bal musette, where at any time of day you could buy a ticket to shuffle around the floor as the accordion wheezed a lively tune. Anderson had said Montparnasse, but we couldn’t afford it, or any of the other more fashionable areas. This was old Paris, the Fifth Arrondissement, far away from the good cafés and restaurants and teeming not with tourists but working-class Parisians with their carts and goats and fruit baskets and open begging palms. So many husbands and sons had been lost in the war, these were mostly women and children and old men, and that was as sobering as anything else about the place. The cobblestone street climbed and wound up from the Seine near Pont Sully and ended at the Place de la Contrescarpe, a square that stank of the drunks spilling out of the bistros or sleeping in doorways. You’d see an enormous clump of rags and then the clump would move and you’d realize this was some poor soul sleeping it off. Up and down the narrow streets around the square, the coal peddlers sang and shouldered their filthy sacks of boulets. Ernest loved the place at first sight; I was homesick and disappointed.
The apartment came furnished, with an ugly oak dining set and an enormous false-mahogany bed with gilt trimmings. The mattress was good, as it would be in France, where apparently everyone did everything in bed—eat, work, sleep, make lots of love. That agreed with us, as little else in the apartment did, except maybe the lovely black mantelpiece over the fireplace in the bedroom.
Right away we began to rearrange the furniture, moving the dining table into the bedroom, and a rented upright piano into the dining room. Once we had that done, Ernest sat down at the table and began to write a letter to his family, which was anxious for news of us, while I unpacked our wedding china and the few nice things we’d brought along, like the pretty tea set that had been a gift from Fonnie and Roland, with its pattern of salmon-colored roses and leaf work. Cradling the round teapot in my hands and thinking about where it might belong in my tiny, medieval kitchen, I suddenly had such a pang for home that I began to cry. It wasn’t St. Louis I longed for exactly, but some larger and more vague idea of home—known, loved people and things. I thought of the wide front porch of my family’s house on Cabanné Place, where we lived until just after my father’s suicide: the swing that made a cricket’s noise when I lay in it, my head on a pillow, my eyes fixed on the perfectly straight varnished bead boarding above. Within minutes I was so soggy with longing I had to set down the teapot.
“Is that whimpering from my Feather Kitty?” Ernest said from the bedroom.
“I’m afraid so,” I said. I went to him, wrapping my arms around his neck and pressing my damp face into his collar.
“Poor wet cat,” he said. “I’m feeling it too.”
The table was propped against a narrow window and through it we could see the rough sides of neighboring buildings and shops and little else. In five days it would be Christmas.
“When I was a little girl my mother strung holly boughs along the red glass windows in the parlor. In sunlight or candlelight, everything glowed. That was Christmas.”
“Let’s not talk about it,” he said, and stood to hold me. He guided my head into his chest, to that spot where he knew I felt safest. Through the floorboards and walls, we could hear the accordion from the dance hall and we began to move to it, rocking lightly.
“We’ll settle in,” he said. “You’ll see.”
I nodded against his chest.
“Maybe we should go out now and shop for our Christmas stockings. That’ll cheer up the cat.”
I nodded again and we left for our shopping excursion. At the landing of every floor of the building, there was a basin and a communal toilet, which you used while standing on two pedals. The smells were terrible.
“It’s barbaric,” I said. “There must be a better system.”
“Better than pissing out the window, I suppose,” he said.
Out on the street, we turned left to go down the hill and stopped to peek into the doorway of the dance hall, where two sailors rocked bawdily against a pair of girls, both painfully skinny and heavily rouged. Above the bodies, strings of tin lanterns threw spangled shadows that made the room seem to swim and reel queasily.
“It’s a bit like a carnival in there,” I said.
“I imagine it improves when you’re drunk,” he said, and we quickly agreed everything would be much cheerier if we got drunk ou
rselves.
We’d yet to fully get our bearings, but we took a winding route in the general direction of the Seine, passing the Sorbonne and the Odéon Théâtre, until we found the Pré aux Clercs, a café on the rue des Saints-Pères that looked welcoming. We went in, taking a table near some British medical students who were talking drily about the effects of alcohol on the liver. Apparently they’d recently been intimate with cadavers.
“You can have my liver when I’m done with it,” Ernest joked with them. “But not tonight.”
Prohibition had been in full swing when we left the States, and though we’d never stopped drinking—who had?—it was a relief to be able to buy and enjoy liquor openly. We ordered Pernod, which was green and ghoulish looking once you added the water and sugar, and tried to concentrate on that instead of our dinner, which was a disappointing coq au vin with grayish coins of carrot floating in the broth.
“It doesn’t feel right to be so far from home at Christmas. We should have a proper tree and holly and a fat turkey roasting in the oven,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said. “But we have Paris instead. It’s what we wanted.”
“Yes,” I said. “But we’ll go home again someday, won’t we?”
“Of course we will,” he said, but his eyes had darkened with something—recollection or anxiety. “First we have to find a way to make it here. Do you think we can?”
“Of course,” I bluffed.
Out the café window, the streets were dim and the only passing thing was a horse pulling a tank wagon full of sewage, the cart’s wheels throwing spliced shadows.
He signaled the waiter over to order us two more Pernods, and we got down to serious drinking. By the time the café closed, we were so tight we had to hold on to one another for balance as we walked. Uphill was infinitely harder than down, particularly in our state, but we managed in our slow way, stopping to rest in doorways, sometimes sharing a sloppy kiss. This was something you could do in Paris without drawing much attention.