by Naomi Wood
The next morning Ernest was sitting by the open window, watching people line up for food though there was hardly anything in the shops but oranges and shoelaces. When he saw she was awake, he came away from the window. He pulled back the blanket and held her in the single bed close to him. “Rabbit,” he said, “I want to marry you.”
That evening she saw him write a cable to his wife. Only two words: EVERYTHING MARVELOUS.
But their obligation was not to his wife or even to each other in Spain, but rather to observation: to watch the refugees come in on their creaking carts, the fat dogs and dead mules, buses opened by bombs. They watched people walk off with parts of houses: doors, window frames, and tabletops. There were holes in houses like broken skin. Only to observe and put it all down in words: that was their job here. And Martha, slowly, began to do this: to watch, and to write. People back home thrilled to her reports from Spain.
They should never have left the war, Martha thinks, as she comes to the end of the bridge and prepares to meet her husband in the Ritz. War was the one thing that had kept them alive.
26. HAVANA, CUBA. 1939–40.
The house rose from the hills. The palms that flanked the villa were as enormous as aircraft carriers, and the facade of the building was webbed with vines. Martha turned back to check the driver was still down at the gates; she felt a little nervous about being in the big house alone.
She peered through the windows into the living quarters—a bathroom, the kitchen, some bedrooms. They would need a study each. Inside, there was a smell of old water and in one of the rooms a pond-sized puddle. Blown-in leaves gathered at the skirting and enormous flower heads knocked quietly at the windows as if asking to enter.
In another room—which would be her bedroom, Martha decided—the vines grew so thickly around the window they made a curtain. A tarnished mirror still hung on the wall and she caught sight of herself in her sundress and sneakers. Would she be able to do this? Be mistress of this house? A cat wandered in and looked unblinkingly at her reflection. For years their home had been a single room in a Madrid hotel. Here there was space and quiet and peace. Here they could live and write books and not fear that someone’s head was in the sight lines of a sniper.
In the pool the still water was covered with algae and the tennis courts were overgrown with weeds. The whole place was falling apart but to Martha it seemed close to paradise. Standing there, in the Finca’s wildness, she remembered Ernest’s house in Key West: how neat and well-tended it had been behind the brick wall and iron fence. Apparently the wall had been Fife’s idea—to keep the world out, and, Ernest said, her husband in. But Martha would keep this home open: let nature crawl over it.
“I’ve found it,” she said to Ernest, back at their Havana hotel, which was swamped with his things. In jest, she had started calling him the Pig. “I’ve found our new home.” It was called La Finca Vigía. The Watch Tower. It somehow seemed right; as if part of the house’s role was to stand guard against Ernest’s flotilla of wives, sailing down the Straits of Florida, come to reclaim him.
“Let’s make a colossal mistake,” Ernest announced, one day in July, as they sat by the Finca’s poolside. They were celebrating the end of The Bell’s final draft. As a finishing touch he had penned the dedication: This book is for Martha Gellhorn. He’d wanted to dedicate the play he’d written to her a couple of years back, but Fife had found out, and this was Martha’s recompense. She preferred it this way. The play was fine; but this novel was magical.
They sat in the shade of the jungle leaves she’d hewn back the week before, and Ernest’s face was now lit with all the daiquiris he’d had since lunchtime. He stood up from the lounger and knelt on one knee. She felt a surge of terror.
“Marry me, Marty,” he said.
She stared out at Havana, white as a cloud beyond the wetlands and sugarcane. “You’re already married. Don’t you remember?”
“Soon I won’t be.”
“You should be so lucky.” Martha took a sip of the champagne though a headache had been forming since lunchtime. “You’ll be clawed in that woman’s grasp for a long time. There’ll be bits of you stuck to your wife’s fingernails at the end of all of this.”
Fife was still simmering her miseries in Key West. Ernest must have been a real shit for her to be so angry with him still. It seemed she would resist divorce as long as she could manage. Martha knew it to be some kind of punishment for Spain.
“She said if I’d been more honest in the beginning she would’ve let me go easier. There’s a damn Catholic for you.” He gave her that smile that made his top lip disappear under the mustache. “But I couldn’t resist you, Rabbit. You know that. Marriage, Marty! It’d be splendid.”
“It would ruin things,” she heard herself saying. In the corner of her vision the jungle leaves teemed, growing like the tissue of some cancerous thing. She’d have to chop it back again. The champagne gave off a waft of apples and the headache began to pulse once more. “You have to learn how not to get married, Ernest.”
She needed to shake out the restlessness from her legs and she spoke pacing from the other side of the pool. “We can do what we want like this. You can go to Key West and see the kids and Fife. I can get out on assignment. Marriage would wreck us. Both of us.” Jungle leaves spread around his face. The way he looked at her: his expression was crestfallen and disbelieving, as if he had previously convinced himself of a positive answer. But marriage, she thought, was for women who wanted to stay put and play tennis with the neighbors and have cocktail hour on the lawn in full dresses. Martha didn’t want any of that. She wanted to be with him traveling from war to war. They were correspondents, not stay-at-home pals.
“I’m sorry. It’s just not right for me.”
“Don’t you love me?”
“Of course I love you. But that doesn’t mean I want to marry you.” She felt angry at him: for ruining the nice time they were having, for commenting on the situation. Couldn’t he see things were better left unsaid? “I just don’t know why you had to bring it up.”
For weeks he wore a look as if she’d kicked him in the guts. His eyes followed her around the house though he said nothing. But she would not apologize for trying to keep them alive. Martha had never promised him anything, least of all marriage.
They’d been at the Finca now for nearly a year. No bullets powdered their walls. They did not have to interrupt making love to dash for the hotel shelter. They did not wake in the middle of the night trying to work out the closeness of a falling bomb. They got on with their writing and went out on Pilar and drank daiquiris at the Floridita. But that summer Ernest wore a heavy look.
When she could bear it no longer, she sat him down at the dining room table. In an attempt to appease him, she had made his favorite lunch: shrimp salad, fresh from the icebox. But when he saw the pale pink dish he looked no happier.
“What I meant the other day,” she said, trying to explain, “is that it’s a tricky thing trying to do my job and still be a good woman for a man.”
Ernest looked at her broodingly. “If nothing happens, nothing changes.”
“I don’t think marriage would be good for me.”
“Marriage is excellent for me.”
“Yes, Ernest, you’re a pro! You’ll have ten widows by the time you die at a hundred.” She wanted to make him laugh but he wouldn’t even smile. “Come on, Ernest. Who wants to be married?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to marry the woman I love. To show the world it’s us against them.”
“You’ve done it before and it didn’t work.”
“Third time lucky. This time it’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve learned—divorce is too expensive.” Ernest smiled but then his expression turned serious. “Because I’m cockeyed crazy about you, Rabbit. Because you’re braver than me, and funnier, and a better reporter, and young, and you’re so blonde i
t’s like waking up next to a dandelion. Because you’re damn beautiful and fearless as hell. Because I love you. How’s that for a reason to be married?”
“Oh, Ernest,” she said. “They’re good reasons for you to get married. But not for me.” She came over to where he sat and perched on his knee. “Let’s live in sin and keep the servants disapproving. We wouldn’t want to deny them gossip, would we?”
Ernest said nothing. Martha went back to her seat and watched him chew the shrimp slowly. The look in his eyes: it was something close to admiration, and something close to fear.
Later that summer Martha found the book she had given him, and the dedication written on the photograph. She stared at the word forever in the bedroom she had only sparely decorated. She had an odd fantasy that if she were called up again for an assignment she’d be able to clear out of the house in no fewer than ten minutes. She felt like a bird on a perch: at home but also ready to take flight. She did want this life to go on forever on this hill above Havana. She didn’t want to lose what they had here, where Cuba seemed to her a kind of heaven away from staid America, and a Europe intent on slaughter.
If love was all that was needed to marry, then perhaps there was love enough indeed.
Thirteen days after his divorce, she married him in the dining room of the Union Pacific Railway in Wyoming in November 1940. The dinner was roast moose. She made a speech and joked that their honeymoon would be inspecting the fortifications of the Chinese Communists. There were only a few guests—it had been whoever they could round up with two weeks’ notice—and they laughed, thinking the China thing was a joke. The moose was flavorless and chewy.
On one of his hunts Ernest shot a couple of pheasants and sent the meat home to Key West. He didn’t really think what his ex-wife might do with the spoils of his third honeymoon. “Oh, Ernest,” Martha admonished him from their bed in the hotel suite, lying naked in the fresh white sheets with that day’s newspaper between her legs, “you really shouldn’t have.” She could just imagine the look of horror on Fife’s face when she saw Ernest’s honeymoon kill. It gave Martha a hint of shameful delight.
In the newspaper there was a notice of the Hemingway marriage a few pages in. “A pairing of flint and steel,” the journalist had written. She wondered which of them was which, and which one of those things was tougher.
27. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.
American officers and French Resistance fighters swarm the Ritz lobby. Their fatigues look out of place next to the heavy furniture and gold-threaded curtains. The hall rings with the sounds of wooden clogs; no leather, apparently, for the soles. Martha is glad Ernest isn’t down in the lobby or at the bar. A divorce is not best served over a daiquiri.
At the front desk the concierge offers a smile. “Number thirty-one, Mademoiselle,” he says when she asks where Mr. Hemingway is staying. “May I call ahead?”
“Tell him it is Madame Hemingway.” She adds: “Sa femme.”
His cheeks color. “Very good, Madame ’emingway.” Ernest must be behaving very badly to make the man so nervous.
A group of officers walk by as Martha waits and she feels their eyes run the length of her. She overhears the concierge whispering. “Oui, je suis sûr. Elle m’a dit ‘Sa femme’.”
Finally he smiles and gestures toward the stairs.
As soon as they begin their climb the concierge forgets his nerves and won’t stop talking. He describes again what she has already heard: the legend of Monsieur Hemingway’s daring recovery of the Ritz from the Krauts. “And afterward our barman asked Monsieur Hemingway what he would like to toast our freedom, and he replied, ‘My usual, Benjamin!’ It took Benjamin an hour to make them all martinis, but we were all so happy.”
Light climbs with them as they go; these windows let in all the day. Many of the balusters have been lost, perhaps to Resistance barricades or Luftwaffe fires. “But what need did the Ritz have of being freed? Were you in the habit of housing Germans?”
The concierge’s eyes swing to her press badge. “One has little choice when the Luftwaffe ask for a room, Madame. They can be very persuasive.” They walk along the corridor and then come to a stop outside number thirty-one. “Here we are.”
He hovers for a tip but Martha simply wishes him a bonne journée.
Noise comes from inside the room: there’s the sound of a champagne bottle giving up its cork; men laughing; bolts of guns catch as they’re cleaned. Here we are, she thinks, D-day once more. She prepares herself one last time to do what she has come to do: thinking of the car, the slap, the dynamite freighter. Martha sucks in her breath and knocks on the door.
Footsteps approach but the background noise doesn’t fade. When the door is opened it is Ernest who appears, Ernest with a bandage still wrapped around his head. “Rabbit.” He looks almost surprised, as if he expected her to lose heart between the concierge’s telephone call and the door. “You’re here.”
It almost winds her to see him, and she feels the same inrush of love for him that came to her in the London hospital. She wants to say, Yes, I’m here, darling Ernest, but instead she says, “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” She means to sound neutral but she can hear the loneliness slide into her voice.
Ernest must recognize it as well because he looks relieved. “Look at us standing here like great apes. Come in.” He stops. “Hold on. Let me get them out first.”
Behind him are Resistance men and Americans. One lies on the chaise longue, his dirty boots on the brocade and a flute of champagne in his oil-blackened hands. Ernest tells them in both languages that his wife is here, the famous war reporter Martha Gellhorn; have they heard of her? Pride fills his voice. They collect their carbines, maps, polished shoes, taking sneaked looks at her as they file from the room. As they go, some greet her as Mrs. Hemingway, as if curious to test that name on their tongues.
“My band of irregulars,” Ernest says.
Martha walks into his bedroom: so much grander than her room at the Lincoln. “What’s the membership fee?”
“A bottle of liquor. Scotch gets you the most stripes.”
A tray on the desk has an opened bottle of Perrier-Jouët; green light filters through it. Typical. Plenty seems to follow Ernest wherever he goes.
“Let me just freshen up,” he says, with his oiled hands in the pose of a man arrested. There’s an after scent in the room: something on top of the motor oil and boot polish, synthetic and sweet. Perfume? Perhaps. Maybe he has been entertaining whores in here.
Maps cover the dressing table. Documents are everywhere and what looks like a long roll of lavatory paper spilling from underneath the papers. At the window, down on the street, women gather, surveying something. Martha leans out but can see nothing but long skirts.
Ernest returns from the bathroom with his hands cleaned. When he sits on the candy-colored bedspread, he looks happy and childlike. On the pink satin bed are army rifles and hand grenades. Another champagne bucket is on the nightstand: she wonders if the ice had time to melt before her husband finished the bottle.
Martha points at the bottle of Brut. “How’d you get this?”
“The hotel cellar. I plan to exhaust its stocks.”
“And then?”
“Then I’ll move on to the Lanson.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.” He sits on his hands and leans forward, looking up at her sitting on the window ledge. “Were you over for D-day?”
“I came over on a Red Cross boat.”
“Officially?”
“No. Officially I locked myself into their toilets.” Ernest gives her a gargantuan smile. When he’s in the mood for it, she knows he loves her bravery. “How’s the head?”
“They won’t let me take this damn bandage off.”
“Lose your head and you’ll lose your livelihood.”
Ernest looks vexed. He hates it when they talk about his drinking. The breeze stirs the net curtains, and the sounds of talking drift upwa
rd from the Place Vendôme. More women have turned up and a few are arguing. When Martha turns back to the room, she notices Ernest’s press badge leans against a handgun.
“You brought your father’s gun? From Cuba?”
“Figured he’d like me to put it to the head of a Nazi. Seeing as the last thing it was kissing up to was a chocolate cake.”
“The Geneva Convention, Ernest: you’re a reporter. Not a soldier.”
A siren sounds and he comes over to the window as they both check the skies. They’ve done all of this so many times before; in fact, it all seems part of a comforting ritual, a memory from when they were in Madrid, together and unmarried.
“Want to go down to the shelter?”
“Not really.”
The people out on the street don’t seem in much of a rush either.
Ernest puts on a mazurka on the phonograph. The old fox; it’s their music from Madrid. She can hear the record skip where it’s scratched; she had thrown it at his head during one of their more heated fights at the Finca. She wonders what the argument was about. Booze. War. Women. The old trio.
Ernest, too, watches the record spin then looks at her with his marvelously frank eyes. “You look lovely, Marty, sitting there, with the sun in your hair. I’ve missed you so much, Rabbit.”
If he doesn’t touch her, she thinks, she’ll be able to stay her course. But he comes near, standing next to her, so close she can hear his breath, can hear him swallow. Gently Ernest moves a strand of hair away from her face and puts it behind her ear. She summons all her will, but then he kisses her where her throat joins her shoulder. “Tell me you’ve missed me.”
“Pig,” she says. “Of course I’ve missed you.”
“You’ve been so far away. We can be together again now.”
“Ernest.”
“In the war again, just like old times.”
“Ernest—”
The siren stops. A false alarm, perhaps. On the street people look up at the skies inquiringly. Martha turns to tell him what she has come to say, that there can be no future for them, not anymore, but he is by the bed, now, transferring the ice from one bucket into another. He pours himself a glass of champagne from the open bottle. “What I’m trying to say—”