by Paula McLain
When my father was alive, I often watched him come home while the women were still gathered. Hearing them he’d freeze and then retrace his steps, slinking back out the door. Where did he go? I wondered. How far did he have to walk and how much whiskey did it take to quiet my mother’s voice in his head? Did he remember the way he used to love his bicycle? I did. There was a time when he would happily ride anywhere in St. Louis, choosing it over any other mode of transportation, probably because of the freedom it offered. Once he hitched a cart to the back and took Fonnie and me along the paths in Forest Park, singing “Waltzing Matilda.” He had the most beautiful baritone, and as threads of song floated back to us in the cart that day, his happiness seemed so real and so strange to me, I was afraid to move in case I might startle it away.
It was a cold morning in February when a single shot rang through the house. My mother heard it first and knew instantly what had happened. She hadn’t let herself think the word suicide, that would be too terrible and too common, but she’d been half expecting it just the same. Downstairs, behind the locked doors of his study, she found my father lying on the carpet in a pool of blood, his skull shattered.
For weeks after, the noise of my father’s death rang through the house. We learned he’d lost tens of thousands of dollars in the stock market, that he’d borrowed more and lost that too. We already knew he drank but not that he did little else in his last weeks, plagued by throbbing headaches that made sleep impossible.
After he was gone, my mother stayed in her room, crying and confused and staring at the drawn curtains while the servants took over. I’d never seen this kind of chaos in my house and didn’t know what to do with it but play Chopin’s nocturnes and cry for my father, wishing I had known him better.
The door to my father’s study stayed closed for a time, but not locked. The carpets had been cleaned but not replaced, the revolver had been emptied and polished and placed back in his desk—and these details were so terrible I couldn’t help but be magnetized by them. Again and again, I imagined the last moments of his life. How alone he must have felt. How deadened and how hopeless, or else he couldn’t have done it, lifting the muzzle and tripping the trigger.
My mood grew so low that my family began to worry I might hurt myself. Everyone knew that children of suicides stood a greater risk of taking that route. Was I like him? I didn’t know, but I had inherited his migraine headaches. Each one resembled a dreadful visitation, pressure and nausea and a dull but constant thrumming from the base of my skull while I lay absolutely still in my airless room. If I stayed there long enough, my mother would come in and pat my hand and tuck the covers around my feet, saying, “You’re a good girl, Hadley.”
I couldn’t help but notice my mother responded to me more warmly when I was ill, so it’s no surprise that I often was or thought I was. I missed so much school as a junior and senior that I was forced to stay another year as all my girlfriends went away to college without me. It was like watching a train leave the station for some far-off and exciting place, with no ticket myself and no means to purchase one. When letters began to arrive from Barnard and Smith and Mount Holyoke, I suddenly felt sick with jealousy of my friends’ excitement and promise.
“I want to apply to Bryn Mawr,” I told my mother. Her sister Mary lived in Philadelphia, and I thought having a relative nearby would put my mother at ease.
“Oh, Hadley. Why do you insist on overreaching yourself? Be realistic.”
Fonnie came into the room and sat near Mother. “What about your headaches?” she said.
“I’ll be perfectly fine.”
Fonnie’s brow furrowed skeptically.
“Mary can care for me if something happens. You know how competent she is.” I put particular stress on the word competent because my mother loved and was often persuaded by it. For the moment, however, she only sighed and said she would give it serious thought, which meant that she would take the matter up with our neighbor Mrs. Curran and the Ouija board.
Mother had long been interested in matters of the occult. There were séances in our house occasionally, but many more of them down the street at Mrs. Curran’s. According to my mother, she was a savant of the supernatural and had a very familiar and persuasive way with the board. I wasn’t invited to attend the session, but when Mother returned home from Mrs. Curran’s she reported that I could go to Bryn Mawr after all, and that everything would be well.
Later I had to wonder about Mrs. Curran’s prophecy because it seemed blatantly false to me. I did go away, in 1911, but the whole venture was doomed before it even began. The summer before I left for Bryn Mawr, my older sister Dorothea was badly burned in a fire. Though she was well out of the house during the years I was growing up, Dorothea had always been the kindest and most supportive member of my family, and I felt she understood me in a way no one else did or wanted to. When things at home grew too stifling and restrained, I’d walk to her house and watch her two young boys wrestling around her, feeling calmed and restored.
Dorothea was very pregnant that summer. She was home alone with the boys a great deal, and one afternoon the three were out on the front porch when Dorothea saw that a fire had started in a pile of rubber tires in the empty lot next door. The boys were curious about it, but Dorothea was afraid it might spread to her own yard. She ran over and tried to stamp out the flames with her feet, but her long summer kimono quickly caught fire. Her stockings did, too, badly burning her all the way to the waist before she fell to the ground and rolled, snuffing out the flames.
When her husband, Dudley, called us with the news, we were at our vacation cottage on Ipswich Bay. We were all worried sick about Dorothea, but Dudley reassured us she was in the hospital getting the best of care. She had no fever, and the doctors believed she would recover fully. The next day, she delivered a stillborn baby girl. Dorothea and Dudley were both devastated, but the doctors were still saying she’d live. They kept saying that until she died, eight days after the fire. Mother got on a train for the funeral, but the rest of us stayed in Ipswich, heartbroken and numb.
I remember feeling that I might not survive Dorothea’s loss, and maybe that I didn’t want to. Mother came back from St. Louis, bringing Dudley and the boys with her. They stepped off the train looking wretched, and what comfort could I offer? They have no mother, I found myself thinking over and over.
One afternoon shortly after the funeral there was a terrible storm in Ipswich Bay, and I talked one of the boys from a neighboring cottage into taking me out in it, in a rowboat. Waves slashed at the bow and came stinging over the sides and into our faces. I couldn’t even swim, but he didn’t turn back, even when the lighthouse captain signaled us to come in. The clouds were low and terrible and the air was drenched and salty. I felt as I if was drowning the whole time, over and over again. And even when we made it back to shore that day, the feeling that I was still out in the bay, sinking deeper and deeper, stayed with me through the rest of that summer and long afterward.
In September I boarded the train and went off to Bryn Mawr as planned, but my classmates seemed to be running on a different frequency. The girls in my dorm spent their afternoons in the salon drinking tea and frothy hot chocolate, talking about dance mixers and potential conquests. I felt well removed. As a girl I knew I was pretty, with bright red hair, nice eyes, and fair skin—but now I couldn’t seem to care whether boys noticed me or not. I stopped taking an interest in my clothes and my coursework, too. I began to fail exams, which was difficult and surprising to me, since, aside from my appalling pile of absences, I’d been a good student all of my life. Now I found I couldn’t summon any focus or attention or even interest.
The next fall, I let Fonnie and my mother persuade me to stay home. I can’t say it was any better for me there than at school. There was nowhere to go in the house to escape my dark thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, and when I could, I had terrible, obsessive dreams about Dorothea and my father, replaying the last awful moments of their lives.
I’d wake to a panicked feeling and the promise of more joyless days and nights. And if I said that I remained in this kind of coma for eight more years, then you’d understand how ready I was to live just as my mother began to die.
My mother was sick with Bright’s disease for years, but things got quickly worse in the summer of 1920. Throughout the hottest weeks of July and August, I hardly ever left the upstairs apartment, and when I did leave, she worried endlessly.
“Elizabeth? Is that you?” she called out weakly as soon as she heard me on the stairs. I wasn’t sure why she was using my given name after all these years, but much about her baffled me just then. She didn’t resemble the steel-spined and difficult woman who had always been able to dissolve me with a single word. She was frail and anxious, calling out again as I hurried up the stairs: “Elizabeth?”
“I’m here, Mother.” I came into the main room where she rested on the worn pink velvet settee. I put down my shopping bags and unpinned my hat. “Are you too warm? Can I open a window?”
“Is it warm?” Her hands kneaded the afghan in her lap. “I’m chilled to the bone.”
I pulled a chair over to the settee and took up her hands, rubbing them to bring blood to the surface, but wherever I touched, the impressions of my fingertips became set, as if her skin had become bread dough. I let her go and she started to whimper.
“What can I do?”
“Bring your sister. I need Fonnie with me now.”
I nodded and stood to leave, but her eyes opened wider. “Don’t go, please don’t leave me.” So I sat again, and this is how it went, all that long night. She took a little broth and slept lightly for a few hours. Then, near midnight, she became suddenly calm.
“I worry greatly for you, Elizabeth,” she said. “What will become of you when I’m gone?”
“I’m a grown woman, Mother. I’ll be fine. I promise.”
“No.” She shook her head. “Years ago Mrs. Curran and I spoke to Dorothea about you.” Her breath was labored, and I didn’t want to see her struggle this way.
“Shh. It doesn’t matter.”
“It does. We asked her about you several times and she rebuffed us. She had nothing to say.”
I’d always been skeptical of the occult—the board, the hushed, candlelit séances and automatic writing sessions with red scarves on the lamps—but now I felt a rush of cold through me. Was it possible that Mother had been in touch with Dorothea? And if so, why had my sister, dead for nine years, turned her back on me? Did she know something hard and sad about my fate? The idea terrified me and yet there was no way to be certain. I couldn’t ask my mother to elaborate on the session; she was exhausted and more anxious than ever. I also wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to know. What if the future was worse than the present? What if it didn’t exist at all?
All that August night I stayed in the straight-backed chair next to the settee. I swabbed Mother’s forehead and neck with a damp cloth and looked out at the warm summer night, the dark sky and darker trees, everything as remote as exhibits in a museum. And I knew that I too could die in this room. This was one way my life’s wheel could turn.
Hours later, near dawn, my mother died without a sigh or rattle or ragged breath. How very different from the way my father had gone—the crack of his revolver shaking the doors in their jambs—but no less final. While everyone else was downstairs sleeping, I looked at the face I’d hated sometimes and felt sorry for at other times. Her hands were curled to each side of her thin body, and I traced one with my fingertips, feeling a terrible and complex love for her. Then I went downstairs to wake Fonnie and Roland and call the doctor. I made breakfast and had a bath, and then sat with Fonnie in the parlor to see about the funeral arrangements. Mother’s body was still upstairs waiting for the coroner, and I could feel her there, still pressing on me. She’d always seemed to take pleasure in the quietness of my life, as if I’d become what she thought I would, which was not much of anything at all. This tugging was very old and powerful, and I knew I could easily give in to it, in to nothingness. Or I could push with everything I had the other way.
FIVE
verything all right, miss?” the cabdriver asked.
“It will have to be,” I said, and opened the door.
I was back in St. Louis after a long day on the train, a day that had been stretched further by the feeling that I’d failed at something in Chicago. Now here I was again, back at Fonnie and Roland’s house on Cates Avenue. It was all I could do to pay the man and get out of the car.
Outside, the air was crisp and chill. The driver walked behind me, delivering my bags to the porch; our footfalls rang hollowly on the flagstones. Inside, I dropped my luggage at the bottom of the steps and went up to my apartment, which had a cold, unlived-in feel. Though it was late and I was exhausted, I lit the lamps and built a fire to warm myself. I sat on the pink settee and wrapped my own arms around my shoulders and wondered if some part of my mother was still there in the room, swaddled in an afghan, maybe, and looking at me pitifully: Poor Hadley. Poor hen.
The next morning I slept later than usual, and when I came downstairs, Fonnie was waiting for me in the dining room. “Well? I want to hear everything. What did you do? What kind of people did you meet?”
I told her all about the parties and games and the interesting people who moved through Kenley’s apartment in swells—but I didn’t tell her about Ernest. What was there to tell? I wasn’t sure where we stood at all, even as friends.
As Fonnie and I talked, Roland came into the room, fastening his cuffs, moving in a cloud of soap and piney hair tonic. He sat down and Fonnie eased her chair ever so subtly away from his so that she didn’t have to see him eat. That’s how they were at this point. Their marriage was a disaster and always had been and it made me feel badly for them both.
“Well,” Roland said. “Was Chi-Town everything you imagined?”
I nodded, spreading marmalade on toast.
“And did you conquer dozens of new beaux?”
Fonnie made an almost inaudible huffing noise, but said nothing.
“I wouldn’t say dozens,” I said.
“You must have made at least one conquest. This letter just arrived for you.” He pulled a crumpled-looking artifact from his suit pocket. “Special delivery,” he said. “It must be serious.” He smiled and handed over the letter.
“What’s that?” Fonnie said.
“Special delivery,” I repeated in a kind of trance. Ernest’s name was on the envelope, scrawled but clear enough. He must have mailed it just after he put me on the train, paying the extra ten cents to make sure it arrived first thing. I’ll write to you. I’ll write you. I fingered the envelope, half afraid to open it.
“What’s your fellow’s name?” Roland asked.
“I wouldn’t call him my fellow, but his name is Ernest Hemingway.”
“Hemingway?” Fonnie said. “What kind of name is that?”
“I have no idea,” I said, and carried the letter out of the room to open it. It was as clutched and creased as if it had spent days in his pocket—and I already loved that, no matter what the letter held. I found a quiet corner in the sitting room near my piano and discovered that inside the pages were rumpled, too, and scratched at with dark ink. Dear Hasovitch—it began—You on the train and me here and everything emptier now you’re gone. Tell me are you real?
I put the letter down because I almost couldn’t bear the feeling that he’d crawled into my head. Are you real? I wondered exactly the same about him—and had more right, too, I thought, particularly after Kate’s warning. I was as solid as the ground he walked on, too solid probably. But what about him? His attentions to me had never faltered during my visit, but that didn’t mean he was reliable, only that for the time being he thought I was worth pursuing. The truth was I didn’t know what to think about him, and so I kept reading, devouring the rest of his letter very quickly, all he had to say about what he was doing and wanted to do, his work, his thoughts. H
e said there might be a job for him at a monthly magazine called the Co-operative Commonwealth if he’d give in to doing the whole thing himself—as writer, reporter, editor, the whole ball of wax. Not crazy about the terms but will probably take it, he wrote. Though there was a good deal of unquiet chatter in my mind about him, I couldn’t help liking his voice and vibrancy and how his words on paper sounded like the Ernest who invented reasons to pop into my room in Chicago. His letter was doing that now, bringing Ernest into the sitting room that had been dark and airless a moment before.
“Well?” Fonnie said, coming into the room with a swish of her somber wool skirt. “What does he have to say?”
“Nothing out of the ordinary,” I said, but of course that wasn’t true. Everything about Ernest Hemingway was out of the ordinary.
“Well, it’s nice to have new friends, anyway. I’m happy you’ve found a pleasant distraction.” She sat and took up her lacework.
“Are you?”
“Of course. I want you to be happy.”
That was probably true, but only if happy meant I was locked upstairs for the rest of my life, the lonely maiden aunt.
“Thank you, Fonnie,” I said, and then excused myself to my room, where I started in on my answer. I didn’t want to be too enthusiastic. I didn’t want to make my reply mean more than it did—but I found that I liked writing to him. I made my reply last all day, putting things down as they happened, wanting to be sure he could picture me moving from room to room, practicing the piano, sitting down to a perfect cup of ginger tea with my friend Alice Hunt, watching our gardener prune the rosebushes and swaddle them in burlap for winter. I miss the lake tonight, I wrote. Lots of other things too. Do you want to meet me in the kitchen for a smoke?
My mother had kept a snapshot of me in a bathing suit, splashing knee-deep in the Meramec River with Alice, both of us happy and washed over with sunshine. This version of Hadley hardly ever made an appearance these days, it was true, but I thought Ernest would like her open face and anything-goes smile. I tucked the photo into an envelope with my letter, and then, before I could have second thoughts about anything, walked down the street to the letter box at the corner. It was dark out, and as I walked, I looked into houses as if they were glowing bowls. Everything glowed faintly—and for a moment I could imagine light speeding over all the knobby cornfields and sleeping barns between St. Louis and Chicago. When I arrived at the box, I gripped my letter, kissed it on impulse, and then pushed it into the slot and let it go.