by Naomi Wood
Life in the Finca was a life undreamed of. Mary went about in the hot afternoons exterminating termites, supervising the carpentry, renovating the house. They took long trips fishing off Pilar, to Bimini, to Cojímar, bringing back dinners of marlin and dorado. Each morning she took a naked half-mile swim before lunch; in the afternoons were the promises of frozen daiquiris. Vacations in Italy, New York, France, the fiesta at San Fermin, plans for East African safaris. For Ernest’s fiftieth they ate lunch in the garden with all of their friends: winter-melon soup, slippery chicken, ice cream in coconut halves.
Afterward, everyone blind, they erected a coconut shy and it was a smooch on the lips from Ernest—men of the party included—who managed to knock down a coconut. Mary used Martha’s old Winchester to bag her catch and earned herself three of the longest kisses that afternoon. “Happy half a hundred, lamb,” she said, as she watched Patrick and Gregory, young men now, go at the coconuts.
“You’re my guy,” he said, with his arm around her.
What a life of plenty this was! And when he published The Old Man and the Sea, after a long time when no one much had liked his stuff, the world once again went mad for Ernest Hemingway. Accolades, sales, and a Nobel Prize; nothing, it seemed, could be improved upon.
37. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.
From the woods she can see a car traveling up her driveway. Its hood points to her house; its only objective could be her home. The sky this morning is so high and wide; the car looks a tiny thing in the expanse of air. Mary’s heart drops. Visitors.
Closer up she sees it’s an old Ford though there’s no driver to be seen now that it’s come to a stop outside her house. The car’s paintwork is so dented it looks as if it’s been stoned by Idaho natives. A man is looking in through one of the living room windows, pressing his hands against the glass. He takes a few steps back to look at the concrete walls and square planes of the house, as if he’s scoping out an opponent’s bulk. Not much can be seen, at first, between his collar and hat. But when he walks back to the car she sees who it is.
Ernest would be rolling in his grave to see Harry Cuzzemano on his drive.
“Mrs. Hemingway,” he says. He smiles at her as if this is all perfectly normal. He’s grown better with age: his weight has softened his face. The scar that was so livid at the Ritz (“Friendly fire,” she remembers him saying in the lobby) has faded, though it still runs down the better part of his cheek. “How good it is to see you.” The press of his hand is soft in hers.
“Mr. Cuzzemano. This is a surprise.” She feels herself observed by him—she supposed she would be much changed since they met in Paris so many years ago.
His face becomes grave. “Mrs. Hemingway. I’m sorry for your loss.”
Mary nods her acceptance.
She’s always had an affectionate spot for Harry Cuzzemano, believing him to be the unfortunate target of some of her husband’s more wrathful moods. Still, he always seemed to know how to stir Ernest’s displeasure. Sometimes he even seemed to court it, like an animal holding out its neck for the catch rope: letters, late-night telephone calls, copies of advertisements in French newspapers detailing the lost suitcase. It seems he would do anything for Ernest’s attention; even goad him.
“What are you doing here?”
“I thought Ernest would have a bead on me before I could even get up the drive. I figured I was safe now.” He says this as if it were an answer to her question.
“Are you on your way somewhere?”
Harry Cuzzemano nods but does not elaborate.
“Where have you come from?”
“The South.”
His blue eyes are so intense Mary finds it difficult to hold his gaze. “Do you want to come in?” she says, because she doesn’t know what else to say. Cuzzemano nods and with his long step he walks over to the vestibule door.
“That one’s locked.” Mary hasn’t yet moved. “We’ll go round the back.”
Cuzzemano’s expression changes as soon as he steps into the house. It would be uncharitable to think he wasn’t moved by being here. It’s as if the entire room emits grace.
“The man himself,” he says, immediately taken by the portrait that hangs in the recess of the wall. Ernest stares out into the room: his eyes are like the twin holes of a rifle. The white beard almost reaches the frame; his grin is nearly as wide. She called him Santa Claus when she thought the beard needed a trim.
“It was taken at his sixtieth.”
“You should have seen him as a boy. He had the look of a god.” Cuzzemano is close to the picture. “It has his likeness. Very much.”
Mary wonders what this means, given Cuzzemano hasn’t seen Ernest in over a decade. The book collector moves from the portrait to the sofa, padding his lower back with a cushion. His eyes travel the room, taking in the skulls and pelts and books. She’ll have to frisk him for paper and silverware before he leaves.
She seats herself on the sofa opposite and is about to ask what she can do for him when Cuzzemano begins speaking. “You know, Ernest took such an instant dislike to me.” His tone is offhand, as if he is returning to the subject of a previous conversation. “Even when he was a nobody in Antibes. He never understood I was trying to do things for him. Find suitcases. Lost novels, poems. Zelda and Scott: they never despised me like Ernest did.”
“Perhaps because you weren’t shy on loans for liquor.”
“The Hemingways, the Fitzgeralds, the Murphys. God, how I wanted to be part of it: the golden set, the Riviera gang. Mary, these people …” he exhales, “they were part of the elect.”
“What does it matter now, Mr. Cuzzemano? Everyone’s gone.”
Cuzzemano’s eyes fix on the corner of the table. “When Zelda died in the fire, I couldn’t stop thinking about that night in Antibes: Ernest holding her in a fireman’s lift and Scott releasing his volley of figs. That night at the Villa America. It was magical.”
Mary has never heard this story about figs or Zelda and she wonders whether it is true. Their friends said Cuzzemano could be a great dissembler when he wanted to be.
“Poor Zelda,” he says. “She hated Ernest. She was the only one. Everyone else fell in love with him, men as well as women. People were obsessed with trying to please him; I saw that obsession in Fife. She was one of my camp. Too much a fan.” He raises his eyebrows.
“I always thought,” he says it slowly, as if this will be his last chance to best represent his intentions, “that I would find Ernest’s suitcase. I put ads in Paris papers. I interviewed bellhops and train guards and the shop woman who’d sold Hadley the cigarettes. Of course, it never came to anything. But I always thought I would find it. Then I would give it back to him and he’d forgive me and want to be my friend. How foolish I was. How mistaken.”
Mary watches Cuzzemano. He must be in his late fifties now, just a shade off Ernest’s years, but his face is somehow ageless, as if he is not affected by time. “Coffee?”
He nods and looks back again to the portrait of Ernest.
When she comes back into the living room, Cuzzemano is on the sofa unchanged. His hands overlap neatly on his knees and he gives her his best smile.
“Cookies!” He says the word with childish exclamation.
Mary places the plate on the coffee table. She wonders if he has raided the room’s treasures in the time it has taken her to make a French press.
Outside, the day has turned. Now rain strings down the windows. Mary switches on a light. “What can I do for you, Mr. Cuzzemano? What’s the nature of your trip? A pilgrimage perhaps, or an auction? Or is it a journey for absolution?”
“I’d like my letters back.”
He says it without any reserve or reluctance.
She pours him a coffee while she waits to find her response. “Cream?” He shakes his head. “Sugar?” He answers no again. Mary sits down with her cup and says, “What do you want with them?”
“I want …” Cuzzemano wets his lips, ready for a cookie w
hich he then returns to the plate uneaten. He seems nervous. “I want to erase myself from the records.”
The windows behind him are only water, and steam curls from the top of his cup.
Mary thinks about the five or six letters she had found in the study signed with his extravagant handwriting: H. Cuzzemano. It was an innocent enough signature for a man who’d been living off them for decades, a flea on the coat of a big dog, trading on their manuscripts, their letters, their papers. “Why should I say yes? The rest of us have no choice in the matter.”
“They’re letters from a madman, Mary. How I badgered and bullied him. I was,” he says, taking a sip of coffee, “obsessive. I see that now. Let me erase myself from the story. I’ve burned the ones he sent me. Give me the letters, Mary, and I’ll consign them to the fire. And I won’t even be a footnote in history.”
Cuzzemano’s eyes are persuasive. He picks up the same cookie and takes a bite.
The study bolt slides noiselessly. Mary opens the window to let the wind blast the room’s staleness. By the glass is Ernest’s tall desk where he would write standing up. His typewriter had been cleaned and given a new ribbon only weeks before his death. It was as if he were ready to come back to the page.
In the study is everything she has brought back from the Finca: all the paper she could salvage. She’s brought back drawers of doctors’ notes, letters from lawyers, publishers, foreign editors, bank managers. Paper has been attacked by jungle rot. In Cuba she had suggested—not jokingly either—that a servant should take Pilar out and sink her. What would she do with a boat that size? A boat had to be cared for, painted, dry-docked, loved. And so she said in all seriousness they should go out and sink her, let the sea wash reach its gunwales. Relinquishment, that was the right word, she thinks, as she surveys the study. The abandonment of cherished things. Sometimes Mary dreams of relinquishing it all, every last damn piece of paper.
Mary finds the book collector’s letters and searches another file for more. She piles together whatever evidence of Harry Cuzzemano she can find. There will be more; of that she is sure. Just before she slides the study bolt Mary sees, behind the cabinet glass, that box again. She thinks about finding the key and unlocking it. Instead she locks the office door.
38. HAVANA, CUBA. 1947.
Years passed before Mary realized another woman had a place in their marriage.
This year, with Ernest, had been wonderful: it was the marriage she had hoped for in her most optimistic of moods. Duck shooting out west, playing tennis at the Finca, seeing the orchids come into their own, the bougainvillea climbing the walls, the mariposa nodding their white bonnets. Iced coconut water and gin. Drinking and dancing in Havana Vieja. Parties with writers and artists. She had never spent so much time unhooked from obligation and she marveled that she felt no nostalgia for her old life as a hack. Here was light and warmth and good Ernest by her pillow in the morning. It was as if, only after they had married, that she had let herself fall in love with him.
And then another woman showed up: a woman of neat outfits, an eye for renovations, and the proper way of doing things. A woman who already knew the contours of Ernest’s heart, who knew what he wanted and what he didn’t want, only as Mary was gradually beginning to learn all of these things for herself.
Fife had arrived.
Eighteen-year-old Patrick had had a terrible car accident that spring. Fife had written insisting that only her presence would speed up his convalescence. “She hardly cared in Key West,” Ernest said to her. “Now she won’t rest until she’s with him. Well, I suppose the boy will want his mother. You don’t mind, do you?”
They lived like this for months at the Finca: Ernest, Mary, and Fife, with Patrick in the guesthouse, recovering. Ernest looked happy during this time: like a dog scratched behind the ears. And, after the initial jealousy of having his ex-wife in their home, Mary had to admit she liked Fife: her sassy honesty, her black charisma. Though she was more than a decade older than Mary, her hair was still as black as macadam. And she still had some irrepressible glamour to her, as if she would forever be a child of the Roaring Twenties.
It turned out that Fife was immensely knowledgeable: she knew how to plan an intricate meal, what wines would match it, how to dress the table, and above all, what to do with the garden’s acres: she and Mary could talk about plants for hours. They loved to drink together and sometimes they’d hide from Ernest when the writing was hard and he was doing his best turn as a majordomo around the house. Then they would go down to the rose garden and get sloshed before supper. Mary liked having a girlfriend around—even if it had to be Ernest’s ex-wife.
Fife became a fixture at the Finca until it became natural that, of an evening, they would dine just the three of them out on the veranda under a creeping vine that Fife had helped train against the Finca wall. The way she looked at him over dinner: it wasn’t jealousy, Mary realized; it was love. Fife was still so much in love with him. Mary remembered Ernest’s words that day in the Ritz: She is the bravest woman I know. Yes, she certainly is, Mary often thought as she watched the former Mrs. Hemingway laugh at one of Ernest’s silly jokes over a dessert of drowned peaches. But Fife, to Ernest, was a woman confined to history.
“Have you always been this color?” Fife asked, touching the curls of Mary’s hair late one night when Ernest was still out on the boat. Both of them were a little liquored as they sat by the Finca pool; Fife made a wonderful martini.
“I changed it once,” Mary said, “with bleach. Ernest went wild for it, but I never minded it being mouse.”
“I dyed it once even blonder than you.” Fife scratched the scalp underneath her short black spikes. The green light from off the pool made her cheeks into shadowy holes. “Because I knew how much he liked blondes. But Martha,” she said. “Martha was the real deal.”
“He’d be happy in a field of lady dandelions.”
“You’ve got that right.”
They lay on the new loungers. Fife had encouraged Mary to replace the old ones which had been too rickety. “I remember when I first met her, this Martha Gellhorn. She had an odd accent: sort of Anglo-Midwest. Proust, she said, was a real dagsbady. She talked about the foocha of literature.” Fife laughed. “The night we met I thought Sara Murphy was going to throw her soup at her. Somehow, you don’t think your husband will be stolen from you in your own parlor.”
Fife stared at the buckling light on the pool, her mouth a straight line. “I don’t even think Martha really wanted to marry him. I wish she had. Then it would somehow have been forgivable, that I didn’t lose the most important person in my life to a woman who treated him as a plaything. A person of no consequence.” And then she said, with agonizing slowness: “He was everything to me.”
“I think he meant something to her, Fife.”
“She got rid of him after four years. Four years, Mary, and I gave him twelve! What am I meant to do now?” Fife blinked back the tears as if the pain were still very raw.
“Ernest once described you as one of the bravest people he ever met.”
“Brave? Well: ha, ha. Hardly sexy, is it?” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed. “I’m glad he’s with you, Mary. More than anything I want Ernest to be happy.”
She gestured with the glass. “A welcome physic.” She drained the last of the martini and smacked her lips. She sucked on the olive then spat it back into the glass. “Lord! I’ve been keeping you up with my babbling. I shall leave you in peace.” Fife planted a kiss on her forehead. Mary noticed it was her eyes that were beautiful, as clear as gin. Her breath suggested she might have had more than two martinis tonight.
When Mary returned to the house she caught Fife in his bathroom, staring at the pharmaceutical graffiti on the walls. Inked notes covered the plasterwork: blood pressure counts and Ernest’s weight measured against dates. Cabinets were stuffed full of medical equipment: amber bottles and blister packs, medication for his heart, his eyes. Fife looked sorrowful, as if she
longed to protect him. “Make sure he takes care of himself,” she said to Mary, squeezing her hand—longing, perhaps, to touch him again. Though Ernest was wary of the relationship, she was not. She counted Fife very much as her friend.
Jinny cabled the news of Fife’s death from California on the second day of October in 1951. A heart attack at three in the morning; nothing could be done. The night before, she and Ernest had had a searing row about Gregory. In no uncertain terms, Jinny told Ernest over the telephone how he had killed her sister, and how he had ruined her life pretty much from the moment he’d met her over a chinchilla skin at a party in Paris. “You bastard,” Mary heard through the earpiece, “she gave you everything!”
Ernest fought back a little, but he let her sister quarry her grief.
The year of Fife’s death they returned to Key West to sort out her friend’s things. They spent two weeks in Fife’s house, surrounded by the brick wall and the dying poinsettia, feeling as if they should not be here without her. One night, from up at Ernest’s study, Mary watched her husband swimming alone in the saltwater pool. His body looked as busted as an old car. When he stopped at the deep end, a tear rolled down his face. Mary knew he had loved Fife more than he had let on: for giving him that time in his thirties, for letting him write, and write so much; for being the best friend she could be after his father’s death. Mary remembered Fife’s words by the Finca poolside: He was everything to me. As a tribute to her friend she did not go down and console him. Instead she let Ernest swim alone, lost in the memories of this fine house, in the tropics of Fife’s splendid garden.
It felt wrong to lose one of them. Wrong for her to die so young. Wrong that Fife couldn’t see she would overcome the loss of him. It felt that they all should live as long as Ernest, that they were all needed, somehow, to bear witness. In the narratives of their lives, which Mary had imagined more than once, they would all outlive Ernest— and Ernest himself would live a good long time. And in the end they would all be reconciled, and each would stand as herself: Hadley Richardson, Pauline Pfeiffer, Martha Gellhorn and, finally, herself, Mary Welsh.