Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  Mary tries to sort his letters chronologically. She finds some from Harry Cuzzemano, ever the milksop come to beg off him what he could. At the back of her mind she wonders if she will find any from an unknown woman. Perhaps this is why she has been putting off this task. She has no appetite to find Ernest has lied to her. There are a few from Adriana, a young woman whom Ernest had longed for, she knew, with much desire for many years. But she had never felt threatened by Adriana: she hadn’t been much more than a teenager when Ernest discovered her as his new obsession. And Mary could tell that though Adriana wanted him for a friend, she had not wanted anything more. Then she had disappeared from his life. Just like all of the others.

  Mary looks to the strongbox at the top of the glass cabinet. Ernest always kept the key in his locked bureau. She has, so far, resisted opening it. She is scared of what’s inside: he always told her not to ask him about it. Its contents baffle her. What if there are letters from an unknown woman in there? An unknown woman, struggling out of the dark, like a blind grub in the night.

  The sound of the telephone pulls her away from the study, and she’s out of breath by the time she reaches it in the kitchen.

  “Oh, Mary, I didn’t think I’d catch you. What have you been up to?”

  “Sorting Ernest’s things,” she says to Hadley. “It’s taking a long time.”

  Mary sits at the kitchen counter where July’s obituaries are piled on the countertop. The New York and Los Angeles Times, the Herald, the local rag. Ernest’s photograph is on all of the front pages. Every morning she looks at his face while making coffee or grilling toast and feels a sudden fury that he’s not here to have breakfast with her. “There’s so much of it,” she says to the papers.

  “He kept so much trash, didn’t he? Candy wrappers. Grocery lists. Radio schedules.”

  “Some of it has to go, I’m just not sure what.” Mary catches her name in the articles on the countertop. “Mr. Hemingway accidentally killed himself while cleaning a gun this morning at 7:30.” The next morning all of the obits used the same quote.

  “Have you thought about going back to work?”

  Mary laughs. “I haven’t done any reporting for sixteen years, Hadley. You’d have to scrape the dust off my notepad.”

  “I just worry about you needing more of a purpose.”

  Mary wraps the telephone cord around her thumb, watching it go plum. When she unwraps the cord, the blood sinks. There is a clicking on the line. Perhaps Ernest was right and the phone is bugged. But why should they still be listening in, months after his death, to his first wife and inconsequential widow? “I have purpose.”

  “How’s the Paris book coming?”

  Hadley means the sketches Ernest had been working on these past few years. Ernest began writing them after discovering, in 1956, some trunks he had left at the Ritz, when he was fleeing his first marriage to set up his second. Mary shouldn’t have asked why Ernest never threw out a scrap of paper; he’d had such bad luck losing things in the past. And this discovery had seemed like deliverance: finding all those notebooks made him want to write again. “The lawyers are going to have a field day. There’ll have to be a libel read.”

  “He could get frightfully honest, couldn’t he?”

  “There’s a brilliant one about Fitzgerald’s manhood. Ernest is full of grave reassurances that it’s all a normal size, et cetera, but you can hear his laughter in the background. It’s all rather wonderful. Walks down the Seine, madcap motoring tours with other Americans, that kind of thing. Tons of food: what white wine to drink with oysters, when to mash the egg into a steak tartar. There’s a story in there about you.”

  “Not about the suitcase?” Hadley’s voice has gone quite anxious.

  “No, no,” she says, quick to reassure her friend. “It’s all very sweet. I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her, that kind of thing. In fact it all makes me feel rather a spare part. As if our life together was just the appendix to a greater life he had once before.”

  “Those Paris days—take no notice. Ernest fell headlong in love with them, but only after the fact. They were splendid, and they were damned difficult at the same time.” Hadley pauses. “Is there anything about me and Fife?”

  Mary is delicate in how she phrases this. “There’s lots of talk of her … infiltration. You and Ernest come off very well from the whole thing, while Fife, well, he’s made her into a kind of devil in Dior. I’m glad she’s not here to read it. It’s not the version I know from either of you. He began to think some strange things, in the end. He felt quite strongly about certain matters he’d never mentioned before.”

  “He was quite different these past few years.”

  Mary lets this lie. She knows where Hadley is trying to go with this. “I was thinking we could call it A Moveable Feast. It’s from one of his letters.”

  “Do you think he would have liked it? I do. You’ll let me read it beforehand?”

  “Of course,” Mary says. “Hash?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want him to come home.” Mary looks down at Ernest’s face in the paper’s obituary. “I miss him so much.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s not fair.”

  “Mary …” Hadley sighs.

  “What?”

  “These wild swings in mood … The paranoia you told me about. The alcohol. Don’t you see? Cloaking it as some kind of accident, it can’t—”

  “It was an accident.”

  “I think he was very depressed.”

  “He was feeling better, Hash, you should have seen him the night before. He was his old self again.”

  “Apparently that—”

  “It was a mistake. That’s all.” A door out back slams and Mary’s heart races. She sees again scraps of plaid dressing gown. Blood and teeth on the vestibule walls. His gun held crossways against his body. But the housemaid comes into the kitchen and her heart stills.

  “The gun misfired. That’s all. That’s just what makes it so sad.”

  That night, Mary dreams of him. They were back on Pilar motoring toward the shore. As they approached, the seawater went from dark to light and gulfweed surrounded the boat. Nothing more than thin-blown clouds in the sky and a light breeze that encouraged them toward the shine of the beach.

  Ernest buried her in sand, giving her colossal breasts, going all the way up to her neck then studding her in cowrie shells and stones. When he gave her a long wet lick across her cheek she laughed so much the sandy belly jiggled. “What a delicious salt lick your face is! I could be here for hours!” He tongued the wets of her eyes and the wells of her nostrils and the holes of her ears until she was helpless with laughter. And she asked him to unpack her from the sand so that she could hold him close to her heart.

  When she wakes it’s with a sob, gasping, as if she’s spent too long underwater. Her pillow is wet with tears. They had gone shelling like this on a beach in Bimini. She wishes he could have seen more of it. The joy of it all; of being alive.

  Outside the weather is fretful and the trees are moving with the wind. Mary tries to shake the afterimage of the dream. She hates these dreams where Ernest is alive, and yet in her waking hours she wishes so dearly for him to live again. Out on the decking Mary drinks a glass of water and smokes a cigarette. Widow’s privilege.

  She thinks: what if it wasn’t an accident? The question surfaces like a bubble escaping a shipwreck. Gregory had asked her this at the funeral and she had pretended not to hear the question. Ernest’s three sons had stood next to each other at the graveside, and she had thought how dearly she would have liked to have given him a daughter. But after the first miscarriage, only months after their marriage, he’d told her he couldn’t ask her to do this. “I wouldn’t ask a man to jump from a building without a parachute,” Ernest had said. “You mean more to me than any daughter.” But standing there watching his casket lowered into the earth, she had wondered if a daughter might have somehow saved him from himself.
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  Mary finishes up the cigarette. She’s about to go back inside when she sees a big stag tread through the garden, caught in the last of the quarter moon. The animal is nothing less than majestic. Its antlers are huge and its legs have such a drifting, dignified walk, it’s as if they don’t even really touch the soil. Lonesome creature, with such a heaviness on its head, she wonders how he bears the load.

  36. HAVANA , CUBA. 1946.

  On the night of their wedding Mary locked the door of her bedroom so that he could not get in. “Mary, let me in!”

  The handle moved up and down and the door, already weak from the termites, shook in its casings. “You brute! Go away!”

  Mary held the handle fast until she heard Ernest’s steps retreat to the living room. At once she began to pack her things: the wool suit made from Noel’s civvies, her cotton frocks, her few books; remembering the day she had arrived and unpacked all of her things. How exciting—how glamorous—the Finca Vigía had seemed to her then after the Paris winter!

  Now, she couldn’t wait for colder climes. She wanted to go back to Chicago where the air was flat and sensible. How long did your marriage to Ernest Hemingway last? her friends on the women’s pages would ask her at the Daily News, maybe even for a few inches in their gossip columns. About twenty-four hours, she’d have to respond. She could just see the headline now: FOURTH HEMINGWAY MARRIAGE LASTS UNDER A DAY.

  Now the only question was whether she should leave still in her wedding dress. It could be passed off as traveling clothes she supposed—both of them were old hands at marriage; neither of them had wanted much fuss. Mary unpinned the flower corsage and dropped it in the wastepaper basket.

  With her suitcase packed she prepared for the confrontation. Ernest would be sitting in the lamplight of the living room, watched over by kudu, nursing a Scotch, ready to make his emollient apologies. Mary would, without drama, walk past him and drive away. She would not listen to Ernest’s protests; he was becoming too skilled at his apologies.

  When Ernest had driven up to the Finca, the morning of her arrival in Cuba, she had immediately smelled hibiscus and lime. Before her was the most enormous white mansion, bright as a pebble in the Caribbean sunshine. Scarlet flowers splashed down the steps. Ernest stood outside the car, scanning her face for a reaction.

  “Oh, Ernest,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s glorious.”

  The trees sounded with enough noise to make an aviary. He led her up the broad stone steps, pointing out the pool and the ancient ceiba tree, then bringing her into the living room with the animal heads studding the walls. “It’s as if I’m Elizabeth Bennet,” she said.

  “How’s that?”

  “This might just be your Pemberley, Hemingway.”

  “Remind me, do Darcy and Miss Bennet marry?”

  “She’s very suspicious of him. Then she sees his house and is persuaded otherwise.”

  “You like the house?” She nodded. “A good sign, then.”

  Cats wrapped themselves around her ankles.

  Ernest left her to unpack in her room. Mary opened up the furniture to see the insides of things. The bureau drawers came out nicely on their rollers; everything smelled of wood and was empty and clean. Fresh roses were on the bedside table and the vines outside the windows were as heavy as drapes. This room, she knew, had probably been Martha’s.

  Mary lay on the bed in her underclothes. As she watched the ceiling fan turn she wondered if she might just be crazy. She had given up her job at Time, given up her apartment in London, given up on her gentle husband, to be in this paradise of lemon light and hot sweet air. When Ernest was good he was entrancing, but when he was on the sauce he could be vile. She wondered, too, what might be her purpose here. Manage the staff ? Go fishing and shooting with Ernest? No longer would she be a correspondent with her own stories and salary. A bird of some exotic description cawed outside. Would she have enough to do?

  Knocking came at the door. Mary raised herself, looking for a gown or robe. She felt a little nervous of him. After six months of close but independent living in Paris, here they were in Cuba, as if they were man and wife. “Would you like a swim, Mary?” he said behind the door.

  “Just a minute.” She changed into her bathing suit and checked herself over in the mirror. She was as white as paper; her skin hadn’t seen real sunshine since the Liberation. She held the robe at her chest and opened the door.

  Ernest stood holding a bowl in his hands. “Peaches in champagne,” he said, offering them to her. “Soaked overnight. A real humdinger.”

  The spoon he held clattered to the floor. He picked it up, gave it a lick clean, replaced it back in the bowl, and whispered in her ear. “I’m too excited to see you.”

  At the pool, when she disrobed, he gave her the most enormous smile—a grin, she would later learn, that was reserved for when he’d hooked a fish and it turned out to be a real monster. As she started to do laps, smelling the frangipani and eucalyptus wafting over, and seeing the palms over a mile away in Havana, she let out a sigh. This might be Pemberley, indeed.

  An hour after the wedding Mary slammed shut the door of the convertible. “I wanted to stay, Ernest.” It was a half-hour trip back from Vedado to the Finca, and Ernest screeched out of the Spanish mansion.

  “Not with those clowns.”

  “Clowns! They’re our friends!”

  “Marjorie was drunk. Didn’t you hear her slurring?”

  “You’re drunk, Ernest.”

  The wedding toasts had gone well, back at the house of one of their friends, until Marjorie had made some dumb joke about Mary taking Ernest for all he was worth: royalties, options, books, and more, and Ernest had savaged the poor woman and pulled Mary out of the apartment by her wrist.

  As he drove toward the sea a herd of goats moved in front of the car, their hapless shepherd following and uttering expletives in Spanish. “Biblical times we are living in!” Ernest shouted, to whom she didn’t know, but the shepherd evidently thought the invective was aimed at him, and he started shouting back in Cuban Spanish so thick— something about Ernest being the mother of something, or was it his mother was something else?—that even Ernest couldn’t understand him.

  Around them came people on bicycles and motorbikes, able to weave in and out of the goats; all the while the Lincoln stayed by the Malecón. The sequins of her wedding dress bit into her skin, and the orchid corsage gave off an alarmingly sweet smell.

  By her side Ernest was getting hotter and angrier. No wind upset the palms. He’d be a fool if he thought he could manhandle her like this in front of their friends. He was a sauced brute; what a fool she had been to marry him. “Drive me back. At least let me enjoy my wedding day even if my husband won’t accompany me in it.”

  Ernest didn’t answer but sped off from the last of the goats, nearly decapitating one as he went. He drove far too quickly; she’d be dead before she could file for divorce. “Slow down, for God’s sake!”

  He sped up and the royal palms in the valley flew past faster.

  “Slow down, you maniac!”

  Minutes from home the heavens opened. There was no time—and precious little desire for cooperation—in order to roll up the cover. Cuba became one solid raindrop. She held her jacket over her head.

  The car screeched to a stop outside the Finca. Ernest’s wedding suit stuck to him; Mary was drenched. In the traditional Spanish manner their servants were lined up in uniform outside the villa, each of them holding a small gift. A couple stood with umbrellas, ready to greet the newlyweds. What they did not expect to find was Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, drenched to the bone, and shooting each other murderous looks.

  Mary slammed the door and shouted, “Go drink another glass of hemlock, you bastard! Since this marriage has gone about as well as the last one!”

  She stormed into the house only to hear in her trail the popping of a champagne cork and the rather lost voice of the gardener saying Felicidades, Señor y Señora Hemingway …


  Now the suitcase stood by her shoes, ready for New York.

  Knocking came again from behind the door, but gentler this time. “Pickle?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  “Please open the door.”

  “I don’t want to speak to you.”

  “Mary, I’m sorry for acting like an ass this afternoon. I only wanted to spend the last of our day just with you.”

  When she opened the door he wore his kicked-dog expression and held a glass of Scotch. He offered it to her. Only reluctantly did she take a sip and feel the drink’s warmth.

  “Let’s never get married again, kitten.”

  “Certainly not to each other.”

  With the light behind him he looked older than his years: his hair was going white around his temples. He wore the glasses that his vanity wouldn’t let him wear outdoors, though he needed them, she knew, more than he admitted.

  Ernest tugged at her dress but she remained still. His eye caught her case. “Pickle, you wouldn’t leave me, not so soon? At least stay long enough to get changed out of your dress. You’re still dripping onto the tiles.”

  Ernest directed her toward the bed and they sat down. “Convince me I haven’t left a perfectly good marriage to the shambles of another.”

  “My temper, sometimes … I’m sorry.”

  He smiled at her. He wasn’t forgiven, not yet. “Ernest?”

  “Yes?”

  “Please promise you’ll be nice to me.”

  “I promise, kitten. I’m so sorry. I’ll be better. You’ll see.”

  “And I want something else.”

  “Anything,” he said expansively.

  “Take down Martha’s damn war map from that room. I can’t stand the sight of all those little pins everywhere.”

  He laughed and said, “It would be my pleasure.”

  Mary gave up on her old life with the ease of sinking into a hot bath. Cold Europe seemed a lifetime away. It made her laugh to think of how madly she had wanted her career to catch up with Martha’s. She hadn’t even got close— but she had, however, inherited the woman’s house. She remembered her haughty words at the party in London: That’s mine, Martha had said, reaching for the fox tails, holding herself in high regard. Well, Mary thought, looking around at the hibiscus villa, not anymore.