by Paula McLain
“I’d love to show you Schio,” Ernest said to me. “It’s one of the finest places on earth.”
“There’s an old mill we made into a barracks and called the Schio Country Club,” Chink said smiling. “I couldn’t tell you how often we swam in the stream there in the heat of the day. And the wisteria!”
“And the trattoria with the little garden where we drank beer under a full moon,” Ernest said. “There’s a charming hotel in Schio, the Due Spadi. We’ll stay there for a night or two, and then head on to Fossalta. I could even write the whole trip up for the Star. Wounded soldier returns to front.”
“Brilliant,” Chink agreed, and it was settled.
The next morning we left the chalet with heavily loaded rucksacks. Ernest had come into the room when I was packing and seen me trying to find space for my bottles of face cream and toilet water. “Do you have any room in yours?” I asked, holding out the bottles.
“Fat chance,” he said. “Are you hoping to smell nice for the trout?”
“Give a girl a break,” I said, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally I asked Chink to carry them, which he did, grudgingly. But the vanity of wanting toilet water nearby while crossing a treacherous mountain pass was nothing in comparison to my shoe choice—slim tan oxfords instead of proper boots. I don’t know what I was thinking except that my legs looked better in the oxfords. A lot of good swell-looking legs did me. We hadn’t gone five miles before my feet were soaked through. In my defense, we didn’t know what we were in for. The pass was crossable in spring, but it hadn’t been opened that year. No one had yet gone through, and the snow was still thigh deep in some places. We trudged on anyway, through valleys and thickly forested pine trails and wide meadows dotted with wildflowers. The scenery was extraordinary, but Ernest and I were both in pretty bad form. My feet throbbed and my legs ached. He’d developed some sort of altitude sickness—nausea and a headache—and as we climbed, the symptoms worsened. His head swam, and every mile or so, he leaned over and retched into the snow. In a way, Chink had it worst of all, since he had to take up our slack, often carrying two packs several hundred yards at a time, then dropping them and returning for the third. As we walked I started to fantasize about being rescued by one of the famous St. Bernard dogs that would tug us, all three, up the rest of the mountain on a comfy sled.
Halfway up, we stopped at Bourg-St.-Pierre and ate lunch in a patch of sun. My feet were so swollen I was afraid to take off my shoes, thinking I might never get them on again. Good for nothing but a nap, I curled up on a wooden bench while Ernest and Chink wandered around the town sampling the beer.
“You missed a great little cemetery,” Chink said when they came to wake me later.
“There are rows and rows of tombstones for the poor bastards taken down by the mountain,” Ernest said.
“This mountain?” I said with alarm. “Are we really in danger?”
“Do you want to cash it in and stay here?” Ernest said.
“And miss the monks?” Chink said. “How would we forgive ourselves?”
The Hospice of St. Bernard sat at the highest point of the pass, where an order of devotees had been aiding travelers for a thousand years or more. Anyone knocking at their door would be given bread and soup, a cup of wine, and a straw bed to pass the night on. And so it was we came to them, late that evening, thirty kilometers up the mountain and a little drunk from the cognac we’d been sipping every twenty minutes to get us there from Bourg-St.-Pierre. It was a clear night. The moon loomed up behind the hospice and lit it eerily.
“Looks like a barracks, doesn’t it?” Chink said, stepping forward to rap at the imposing wooden door.
“You’d make a barracks of any old thing,” Ernest said before the door swung wide to reveal a taut bald head.
The monk asked no questions, just led us in and through the dark hushed corridors to our rooms. They were simple, as advertised, with straw mattresses for sleeping, but there was good reading light and a nice fire. While Chink and Ernest rested before dinner, I went exploring, thinking I might find a kitchen and a basin to soak my poor feet. But every corridor looked like every other. I tried to follow voices, but there were none. Finally, I took a chance on a long, dark passageway only to find that I’d stumbled on the monks’ private quarters. Several doors opened all at once, shaved head after shaved head popping out like moles. I was horrified, and returned to the room where I collapsed and spat out my story. The boys just laughed, of course, and then Ernest told me he thought I’d likely been the first woman to tread these halls in a thousand years! He promptly put it in a letter to Gertrude and Alice: Mrs. Hemingway trying to seduce monks, here. Please advise.
The next morning we headed out for Aosta feeling more ready to tackle the rest of the pass—or so I thought until my right oxford split open at the seam.
“Serves you right, Miss Vanity,” Ernest barked. Frankly, he wasn’t in much better shape. He was still nauseated from the altitude, and it took everything he had to go the remaining leg of the journey. Only Chink was still in good form. He took a knife and cut open my other shoe for me, and this was the way we hobbled into Aosta the next day, stepping out of a snow-throttled pass into full-on spring, pale green hills with glorious vineyards to every side. I joked in a letter home to Ruth that the boys all but had to carry me into town, but the truth was I’d surprised myself with my stamina. It hadn’t been pretty by any stretch, but I’d shown more endurance than I thought was even possible. If it hadn’t been for those terrible shoes, I might have run the last hundred yards to Aosta.
FIFTEEN
n the train to Milan, I slept like the dead and woke to hear Ernest and Chink talking about Benito Mussolini. The new fascist leader was in town, and Ernest wanted to try to use his press card to arrange an interview. He thought Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe just then and was dying to meet him. Meanwhile, Chink had to get back to his post, and so he left us there with kisses and promises that we’d meet again soon.
Ernest was happy to be in Milan again. After we found me new shoes, our first stop was the gorgeous and imposing stone mansion in the Via Manzoni that had been converted into the Red Cross hospital where Ernest and Chink had both recovered. We stood at the gates and looked up at the balconies and terraces, the striped awnings and wicker furniture and fat potted palms.
“It looks like a fine hotel,” I said to Ernest.
“It was good living, all right. Too bad we had to get shot to get inside.”
“I’m sorry I can’t really know what it was like for you.”
“I’m glad you’re here to hold my hand for it just the same.”
“That I can do,” I said, and reached for him. We walked to the Duomo next and then to Biffi’s at the Galleria where we drank sparkling wine floating with fresh strawberries, and although Ernest didn’t often speak about his time at the front, talking and being with Chink had primed the pump, and he was full of it now. Stepping into Milan had completed the process. The whole trip had become a time machine, and he was back.
“It’s funny,” he said, “but sometimes what I remember most about the night I was shot is the mosquitoes. They got in your ears and into the corners of your eyes and you couldn’t sleep for them. Not that we were sleeping much anyway. Then the sky went up in flames. I was blasted right off my feet. We all were. I couldn’t feel anything at first, and then there was just a pressure in my chest like I couldn’t breathe and a jangling in my head.”
“Do you really want to say all this?” I asked gently. “You don’t need to.”
“I guess I do,” he said, and then fell quiet for a few minutes. “My hearing was all off, but someone was yelling for help. Somehow I got over there, and lifted him up and carried him to the command post. I don’t even know how. I hardly remember that part, just feeling my legs going to pieces under me. I heard the machine gun afterward, as if it had nothing to do with me. I went on running and put the bastard down and then I was down, too. Then nothing. I don’t
know what else.”
“Then the field hospital,” I said. “And the train to Milan.”
“Yes,” he said. “Every time that train stopped, flies streamed through the open windows and covered my bloody bandages. I was two days on that train.”
I nodded. It wasn’t years behind him at all, but right there in his face and in his eyes, the way he’d come to Milan like a broken doll. Not a hero, but a boy who might never truly recover from what he’d felt and seen. It gave me a sharp kind of sadness to think that no matter how much I loved him and tried to put him back together again, he might stay broken forever.
“You must be thinking about Agnes today,” I said after a while.
“Only a little.” He covered my hand with his. “I’m glad we can do this together.”
“Me too.” I knew he was telling me the truth, but I also knew that if it were possible, he would have preferred to have me and Agnes both there—his past and his present, each of us loving him without question—and the strawberries, too. The wine and the sunshine and the warm stones under our feet. He wanted everything there was to have, and more than that.
I slept and read at our hotel the next afternoon while Ernest arranged for an interview with Mussolini. He’d recently been elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, and this fascinated Ernest. The man seemed to be a mass of contradictions. He was strongly nationalistic, and wanted to bring Italy back to its former glory by reaching into its Roman past. He seemed genuinely invested in the plight of the working class and of women, all of which he’d laid out in The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle. And yet he also managed to endear himself to the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, guaranteeing their continued existence. He seemed to want to be all things to all people, traditional and revolutionary, loved by the military, the business class, and the liberals. The National Fascist Party was gathering steam so quickly it all seemed terribly inevitable.
“Are you nervous?” I asked as he was organizing his notebooks and preparing to leave.
“Of what? He’s just a big bully, isn’t he?”
“I don’t know. Some say he’s a monster.”
“Maybe, but monsters don’t always look that way. They have clean fingernails and use a knife and fork and speak the King’s English.”
I buttoned his coat and brushed the fabric over his shoulders with my hands.
“You’re fussing, wife. Take a nap, and don’t worry.”
He was gone for two hours, and when he came back to the hotel to type up his notes, he seemed all too pleased to tell me he’d been right. “The man’s up to here with bluff,” he said, gesturing to his neck, “and nothing on top.”
“Was he wearing his black shirt?” I asked, very much relieved.
“He was, they all were.” He sat down at the desk and put fresh paper in his Corona. “He’s bigger than you’d guess, too, with a wide brown face and very pretty hands. A woman’s hands, really.”
“I wouldn’t write that if I were you.”
He laughed and began to type rapid fire in his usual way, his fingers stabbing quickly with very little breaking or breathing. “I’ll tell you what else,” he said without looking up, “there was a beautiful wolfhound pup with him in the room.”
“So the fascist monster is a dog lover.”
“Maybe he planned to eat it later,” he said, grinning.
“You’re terrible.”
“Yes,” he said, his index fingers poised for another violent attack on his machine. “That was a fine dog.”
The next day we boarded a bus to Schio, where Ernest wanted to show me the mill and the wisteria and every part of the town that had managed to stay so fine in his memory, no matter what else had happened around it. But on the way, the sky dimmed and grew gray. It began to rain and didn’t stop. When we finally arrived at the town, Ernest seemed surprised. “It’s so much smaller,” he said.
“Maybe it’s shrunk in the rain,” I said, trying to lighten the mood, but quickly realizing that it wasn’t going to be possible. For the whole visit, Ernest wrestled with memory. Everything had changed and grown dingy in the four years since he’d last been here. The wool factory—closed down during the war—spewed black muck into the swimming hole where Ernest and Chink had bathed on so many hot afternoons. We walked up and down the winding streets in the rain, but everything looked dull and lonely, the shopwindows full of cheap dishes and tablecloths and postcards. The taverns were empty. We went into a wine shop where a girl sat carding wool.
“I can barely recognize the town,” Ernest said to her in English. “So much is new.”
She nodded and continued with her work, drawing the paddles back and forth, the white fibers becoming long and smooth.
“Do you think she understands you?” I said to Ernest quietly.
“She understands me.”
“My husband was here during the war,” I said.
“The war is over,” she answered without looking up.
Deflated, we gave up on sightseeing and went to check in at the Two Spades, but it had changed, too. The bed creaked, the linens were worn and sad looking, and the lightbulbs were filmed over with dust.
In the middle of a tasteless dinner, Ernest said, “Maybe none of it happened.”
“Of course it did,” I said. “I wish Chink were here. He’d find a way to cheer us up.”
“No. He wouldn’t be able to take it either.”
We slept badly that night, and when morning came the rain went on and on. Ernest was still determined to show me Fossalta, where he’d been wounded, and so we found a driver who would take us as far as Verona and then boarded a train to Mestre, where we had to find another car and driver. On and on, all day, and for the whole of the trip, Ernest studied maps and tried to match up what he saw in the countryside to what he remembered seeing years before. But nothing was the same. Fossalta, when we finally arrived, was worse than Schio because there wasn’t a single sign of ravage. The trenches and dugouts had vanished. The bombed houses and buildings had been changed out for new. When Ernest found the slope where he’d been wounded, it was green and unscarred and completely lovely. Nothing felt honest. Thousands of men had died here just a few years earlier, Ernest himself had bled here, shot full of shrapnel, and yet everything was clean and shiny, as if the land itself had forgotten everything.
Before we left, Ernest combed the hedgerows, and finally came away with a single rusted shell fragment, not much larger than a button.
“Chasing your past is a lousy, rotten game, isn’t it?” He looked at me. “Why did I come?”
“You know why,” I said.
He turned the fragment over in his hand a few times and I guessed he was thinking about our talk with Chink, and how the war in his head couldn’t be counted on any longer. Memory couldn’t be counted on. Time was unreliable and everything dissolved and died—even or especially when it looked like life. Like spring. All around us, the grass grew. Birds made a living racket in the trees. The sun beat down with promise. From that moment forward, Ernest would always hate the spring.
SIXTEEN
e didn’t return to Paris until late in June, and before long the Bastille Day celebrations had begun, and there was dancing and singing in the street at all hours. It was hot and noisy, and we shouldn’t even have tried to sleep. I could see Ernest’s restless outline in the dark, one arm over his eyes.
“It will be our anniversary soon,” I said.
“Should we go away?”
“Where would we go?”
“To Germany, or maybe to Spain.”
“We wouldn’t have to,” I said. “We could stay home and get very drunk and make love.”
“We could do that now.” He laughed.
“We could,” I said.
The clarinetist outside our window played a series of low notes, waiting for accompaniment, then fell silent again. Ernest turned on his side and reached to stroke my bare shoulder. His touch gave me a delicious run of chills, and then he pulled me to
ward him and rolled me over onto my stomach without saying anything, covering my body with his. He was heavy and warm, and I could feel his lips and forehead against my neck.
“Don’t move,” he said.
“I’m hardly breathing.”
“Good.”
“I like it slow this way.”
“Yes.” His arms were bent to each side of me so he wouldn’t crush me completely, but I wanted to be crushed a little.
Afterward, as we lay in the dark, the same laughter rose from the street, and the music was louder, if anything, and more chaotic. Ernest grew very quiet again, and I wondered if he was thinking about Schio and all that wouldn’t be found there, and of the sadness he’d carried home with him.
“Should I get up and shut the window?”
“It’s too hot, and it won’t help anyway. Just go to sleep.”
“Something’s on your mind. Do you want to tell me?”
“Talking won’t do a lick of good either.”
I could hear that he’d fallen into a very low place, but I believed, naïvely, that I could help if I could get him to talk about it. I continued to gently press and finally he said, “If you really want to know, it’s making love. There’s something about it that makes me feel emptied out afterward, and lonely too.”
“How awful,” I said, feeling the sting of his words. We’d just been so very much with each other, or at least I’d felt that way.
“I’m sorry. It’s nothing you’ve done.”
“The hell it’s not. Let’s not ever do it again. We won’t have to. I won’t care.”
“We do, though. You see that. I know you do.”
“No.”
He pulled me closer then. “Please don’t worry, just tell me you love me.”
“I love you,” I said, and kissed his hands and eyelids and tried to forget what he’d said. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t forget anything he’d ever said to me. That’s how it was.
“Go to sleep now.”