Mrs. Hemingway

by Naomi Wood

  A strange family indeed; such unlikely sisters.

  39. KETCHUM , IDAHO . SEPTEMBER 1961.

  When Mary comes back from the study, Cuzzemano is not in the living room, nor is he in the kitchen. Perhaps he has driven off in the midst of screeching tires and churned gravel. What should she do? Put in a call to the police? Call Hadley? Or even Martha? She’d be deemed a patsy for even letting him into the house. He could be well on the road to a New York auction house by now.

  But Ernest’s things are still where they should be: his fishing rod, typewriter, first editions, wire-rimmed spectacles. Nothing is gone. The house is quiet.

  Mary is just about to make the call when she catches a shadow through the frosted glass of the inner door. A gap in the frame shows Cuzzemano’s well-oiled curls and the gully of the scar. He sits on the pine ledge where Ernest sat countless time to un-shoe. Around him are woollies, parkas, snow boots. He’s as still as a saint.

  “We don’t use this entranceway, Mr. Cuzzemano. I told you that.”

  His eyes open and they’re that shock of tender blue. “Mary.” His tongue gives a sweep of his lips.

  The vestibule isn’t even really a room but rather a passage between inside and out where they put coats and scarves, muddy boots and guns. In her life she’s spent no more than a few minutes in here at a time. This room meant nothing to her until she heard that gunshot, watched her slippers take the stairs two by two, shouting “Ernest! Ernest!” to find her husband alone in the vestibule, blood on the door handle where he’d tried to catch himself while falling.

  She says again: “We don’t use this room.”

  “Was it in here?”

  She concentrates on the sleeve of one of Ernest’s hunting jackets. “Yes.”

  “Oh, Mary, how did you stand it?”

  “It was an accident,” she says. “It just happened.”

  But Cuzzemano brings out one of the newspapers from the kitchen. He reads aloud the quote they have used from her. He looks at her not as if she is a fool, but as if she is somehow a woman orphaned.

  “And you’ve come to persuade me otherwise, have you?”

  “Not at all, Mrs. Hemingway. You are the only one, the only one, who might know what happened.”

  The leaves of the nearby cedar are still now. Patches of light show where the sky is darkest. Rain threatens again. Hesitantly, she walks into the vestibule for the first time since that day. Vestibule: she thinks how the word belongs to the architecture of a church, and it feels like that in here—very calm and still, as if this room were the sanctuary of the house.

  At the window Mary sees a covey of black birds break from the nearest tree. Without thinking she says, “I planted those trees while Ernest was at the clinic. Flowering plum. Mountain ash.”

  “The clinic?”

  Mary doesn’t turn from the window because she doesn’t want to see his face. Only their closest friends know about the clinic.

  “What was it for?” Harry asks. “His stay there?”

  “Blood pressure,” she says, and though she believes it is the truth, she also knows it is a lie.

  Those birds are high, now, and not one of them has broken rank. Close together, they bank on the air and turn in the afternoon sky. The way they move is like wind in a cornfield. They fly east until they have all but disappeared completely.

  “It was electroshock therapy. For depression.” She wonders why it is to Cuzzemano she is unburdening herself. “He called it frying the bacon. It took me a long time to persuade him to go.”

  “Yes.”

  “He didn’t stay long. He managed to convince the doctors he was well again; I don’t know how. When I came to pick him up again he was sitting in the doctor’s office with his suitcase neatly packed and a grin like the Cheshire Cat’s. I should have protested. I should have made him stay.” She holds her hands together. “But I didn’t.”

  “And then?”

  “A week later.” She tears up. “He wasn’t himself.”

  Mary goes over to the bench to sit by Cuzzemano. They sit for a while in the vestibule where Ernest died and watch as the mauve clouds gather and the room darkens. The rain, spots at first, begins again, then pours. It’s not unwelcome. It drums on the vestibule’s roof. The plum trees shake in the storm.

  They sit close together. She takes some comfort from him being here. “It amazes me Ernest can’t see color. That he no longer has words. I’m perplexed—no—I marvel— that he doesn’t have that pleasure anymore. When you read his words it seems an outrage he’s not here anymore to put down what’s going on.” Mary smiles. “You should read these Paris sketches, Harry. They’re going to make people laugh.”

  For minutes they watch the thrown shadows of the branches against the inner wall. It’s the kind of light which comes after a storm: deep and massive, able to fill valleys. This alchemy of water and light, this beauty of fall in Idaho.

  “You know Ernest liked to hunt big game. Leopard, lion, buffalo—anything enormous. When we came back from an African trip one of the cats was in a bad way at the Finca, its back hip sticking from the fur. He said that there was nothing we could do. I asked him why it had to be so quick and Ernest said that the cat would begin to feel it soon. Someone fetched his gun. He held the cat, snuggling into its neck, telling him what a beautiful kitty he was. Then he shot it right there, on the terrace, in full view of everyone, blew its head off clean.

  “I never heard him howl as he did that day. He wasn’t a man insensitive to others’ suffering. I’m sorry you always saw a crueler side to him. And I’m impressed you loved him anyway.”

  Cuzzemano offers her a half smile and she takes his hand in hers. “Don’t worry,” she says. “Ernest always attracted obsessives. You were only one of many. And secretly, sometimes, I think he was flattered. Nobody ever stalked Fitzgerald.”

  Mary then asks him about the scar. It has always felt as if there is a longer story behind this pink line that joins his eye to his chin. “Friendly fire,” Cuzzemano says, but again he won’t elaborate.

  When the storm has passed Mary fetches his letters from the living room. “If I find any more,” she says, “I’ll consign them to the fire. Here you are.” She hands them over. Cuzzemano has his hands already open as if he is asking for benediction. “History’s pardon.”

  Outside on the drive he kisses her cheek with his good side and then walks over to the wheel and starts the engine. Ernest had told her about their chance meeting on the Riviera in 1926: how he had, at first, encouraged the book collector to look for that suitcase, thinking how lucky he was to have a free private investigator on his case. Ernest told her he’d regretted it ever since—what a leech Cuzzemano had become. But Mary, at least, has made her peace with him. She wishes she could extend this forgiveness from Ernest, but it is not hers to give.

  Before setting off, Cuzzemano takes a sip from a hip flask, as if coming here to his hero’s house has depleted him. Something about his soft mouth, the way it waits for the hit of the liquid; it reminds her of Ernest. Before leaving he takes one last look at the house and sighs. He’s a fan; of that he’s incurable.

  “Take care,” she says.

  After he’s gone she follows the car’s contrail of dust down to the Big Wood River. Mary sits at the felled cottonwood tree with her thoughts, pleased to be alone again.

  They used to sit on this trunk, looking out across the valley, until Ernest became too frightened. So much space, he said, they might be got at from any angle. “Ernest,” she would say, “Ernest,” as if his name might coax him back to himself. She wondered what devil had chased away his sanity and left him as this man afraid of his own shadow.

  In the woods he was a wild creature. “Mary,” he said, with new vigor in his eyes. “The FBI. They’re listening in.” He went over to the river: bulrush and reeds slanted in its current. He scanned the valley for a sweet spot where the enemy might be hiding, then hurried back up to the log. “They’re trying to set me up. They�
�re going to drag me to jail. They’ll say I haven’t been paying my taxes. The IRS, they’re in on it too. Listen, I’ll write you a note. I’ll say you had no knowledge of our finances, that you only had the sketchiest idea of the accounts. I’ll say you didn’t know what was kept in our bags when we traveled. You don’t realize, do you?”

  Mary looked at his eyes, trying to connect with the old version of him she knew and loved and who understood the world for what it really was. “I don’t understand what you mean, lamb.”

  He threw up his arms as if it were to the trees that he formally surrendered his sanity. “Come and get me, you BASTARDS!”

  In the woods the trees held their silence.

  Ernest walked into the grasses as if thrashing for snipe. “The day is ruined!” he shouted. “The day is ruined!” And in the minutes that his back was turned Mary allowed herself one great wrenching sob, before she went into the marshes to try and reclaim him. It was that afternoon she had telephoned the clinic.

  40. KETCHUM , IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  A daytime fire has always struck Mary as odd. It feels instinctive to have a bonfire at night, but she wants to do this before the light goes. The garden smells of pines and blown earth and musk, as if the stag she saw the other night has left behind his smell.

  She makes a woodpile from the branches come down in the winds. Then she brings out newspapers from the kitchen in a crate which used to hold oranges. Ernest’s face stares up from the front page, and Mary remembers how much delight Ernest had taken in reading his own obituaries back in ’54, when their plane had come down over Murchison Falls. When their second rescue plane had burst into flames on the runway, Ernest had used his head as a battering ram to get out of the exploding airplane. It was a farce, Mary thought, but a bloody awful one.

  Not one editor had waited for any bodies to be pulled from the wreckage. “Well,” Ernest said, reading one of the death notices from India in the hotel the next morning, “looks like no one enjoyed Across the River but everyone has me down for perpetuity with The Old Man. I was a charming gent with enough charisma to woo famous women into bed with me. My four wives were all sucked into my designs by my winning smile”—he was grinning now, as if really tasting all the different flavors of the world’s loss—“and I set up the louche life in bohemian Paris that all writers have since tried to emulate—though all, since, have failed. I was a champion boxer, hunter, deep-sea fisherman. Oh, and I also created a whole new school of writing. What do you think of that, Miss Mary? Not bad for a fifty-four-year-old.”

  But when Ernest woke the next morning, his pillow was soaked with cerebral fluid. As a tonic he took cold champagne “to clear my thoughts,” he said. But this wasn’t like the hospital in London, where he had been trying to impress her, and he wouldn’t give up the bottle. Instead he swatted her away, quite forcefully, with his burned and still bloodied hands.

  After the crashes, she sensed something change in Ernest. His moods, which had always been erratic, grew worse; the liquor became harder; and the right words, in the right order, became more difficult for him to put down. No longer could he snap from himself the flat terse sentence. He told her alcohol helped, but if he drank every time he felt pain in his kidney or spine or spleen, he’d be drunk all the time, and then he wouldn’t be able to write. And writing, he said, was the only thing worth sticking around for.

  There were still, after the crashes, the wild parties at the Finca and the marvelous trips on Pilar to eat wahoo with lime and go shelling on island beaches. They had a wonderful life—but in private, and alone, he started to believe the bad things he thought about himself.

  Always, now, when she found him at his desk, it was with a baleful look, a look that was almost aggrieved, as if he were being denied the pleasure that, since he’d been a twenty-five-year-old putting together his first collection of stories with a print run that numbered a couple of hundred, he had come to think of as his right. Writing. It was beating the pith from him.

  Now he drank vodka or gin rather than wine, and if there wasn’t any liquor in the house he’d drink mouthwash. One day, he wanted to get his ears pierced, like the Wakamba tribe he’d met on safari, then in the middle of the night he accused her of treating him as cruelly as his mother had his father. He upbraided her about not taking the danger seriously, about the amount of taxes they owed, how broke they would be if she didn’t pay attention to their bank account.

  Mary was baffled as to what she was meant to do with him. He asked her to keep him from cracking up, but she didn’t know how she was meant to do that. Perhaps she should have removed all alcohol from him, insisted he stayed on at the clinic, had more electroshock therapy, seen a psychiatrist, but it’s hard enough to help anyone like this—least of all when the patient is Ernest Hemingway. All she could do was bank on him returning to the type of man he had been at the Finca, their dreamed years of honeyed light and happiness, of the times when he’d put his arm around her and said, “You’re my guy.”

  Mary feeds the obituaries to the woodpile. Into the garden she carts wheelbarrows of magazines, weeklies, newspapers, paper already turning to mulch. None of it’s of any interest. Some of the magazines are still in their wrappers; they’ll be in the public archives if the scholars want to surmise all manner of his mother’s mistreatment from his particular reading of an Economist. There’ll be complaints; of course there will. She could write the headline for this afternoon’s fire herself: HEMINGWAY’S WIDOW TORCHES HIS TREASURES. But she can’t find it in herself to care.

  All over the papers is the word accident, but a year ago Mary had watched Ernest walk toward the moving propellers of a stationary plane. She had screamed across the runway but her voice wouldn’t carry over the sound of engines and trucks. He was stopped only yards from the plane by one of their friends, his eyes entranced by the circling blades.

  After take-off he watched a herd of does in the snowfields from his window seat. The plane came up over the shelf of cloud. “Lamb, everyone has their own sack of darkness. Right there deep inside them,” she said, hoping to console him.

  “I’m just a desperate old man.”

  “You’re not old. I wish I could help you.”

  Months later she found him early one morning in the vestibule. He was wearing his plaid bathrobe, the shotgun lying crossways on his legs like a sick dog. She told him how much she loved him. She talked about his wonderful Paris sketches, and how much people couldn’t wait to read them. She talked about the dinner she was going to make him that night, and the new books that were arriving next week, how wonderful it would be to read them. Two shells were readied on the windowsill. Slowly, Ernest gave up the gun to her. It might have been the last time she was in the vestibule again until that morning.

  July’s newspapers catch first. Colored flames leap from the paper, then the branches smoke. The fire builds, bright and hot in the garden. Skeletons of transported mice and cockroaches pop in the flames. A very moveable feast, Mary thinks, with a smile.

  But maybe Ernest had had more than every man’s sackful of darkness. Maybe his darkness filled his throat and his mind like the darkest of all his inks. No man should be asked to live with so much sadness, and with so little promise of relief. Ernest chose to go, she finally thinks, watching the fire turn the papers black. He loved her but he could not live anymore.

  With the fire going strongly now Mary steps back from the flames. It gives such a pleasing amount of heat that she’d like to roast chestnuts or marshmallows. Make a festival of it; give it the feel of a fiesta. Ernest would enjoy that. He always knew how to throw an excellent party.

  She thinks of Harry Cuzzemano and his letters. Those, too, will probably be thrown to a fire somewhere, wherever he lives. How slavishly he had tried to find that lost suitcase for his hero. Mary remembers his words from this afternoon—suitcases. Lost novels. Poems.

  It strikes her then that Harry Cuzzemano shouldn’t know about the lost poem. The only people with any knowledg
e of that poem were herself and Martha. She remembers the chambermaid’s words: “Don’t worry, Madame, it will not reach the Sûreté.” Perhaps the maid had been on Cuzzemano’s payroll, just as Ernest had said, and the length of lavatory tissue is now boxed up in his private collection. Well, if he has the poem, let him keep it. Mary has no energy left for grudges. The past— she thinks, as the newspapers fold into soft gray ash—the past is over now.

  Branches, magazines, and newspapers are now all embers at the bottom of the garden, and the night is dark. The smell of wood smoke follows Mary into the house. The kitchen is empty. The living room still has a plate of cookies and crumbs from where Harry sat hours before.

  Mary heads for the study.

  The door’s bolt slides. Mary takes the key for Ernest’s strongbox from the bureau. She opens the glass door of the cabinet and brings the box to the desk. The box gleams like a tooth. She wonders what could be inside. Wouldn’t it be a leap of faith, she thinks, to take the box downstairs and throw it to the fire, never to learn of its contents? But she cannot do it. The lid gives easily as the key turns the lock.

  Inside, it is not at all what she has expected.

  At the top is one of Martha’s books: The Trouble I’ve Seen, with a bookmark from Shakespeare and Company. Inside, there’s a photograph of Martha pinned to the back cover: on the reverse is a dedication. Though the ink has blurred, the words are still legible: Nesto! Be mine forever. The date is May 1938, when Ernest would have still been married to Fife. Underneath Martha’s book is a letter from Fife sent to his Madrid hotel. Come back darling, the studio is ready and there’s an abundance of food.