by Paula McLain
“Poor Ezra,” Shakespear said. “They fired him next day.”
“Poor Ezra nothing. I’d be in Indiana still, teaching poetry to stalks of corn.”
“And roasting the occasional chicken,” I said.
“Even chicken won’t save you from Indiana,” Ezra said.
Late that evening, after we’d abandoned the Dôme for the Ritz, Ernest and Pound began heatedly discussing the merits of Tristan Tzara. Pound thought the Surrealists might be onto something, possibly, if they could stay asleep long enough. Ernest thought they were idiots and they might just as well wake up so we could all move on to something else.
“I’m dropping off just listening to you all,” Shakespear said, and the two of us moved to the other side of the room and sat at a small table.
“You and Hem really are beautiful together,” she said.
“Are we?” I’d been drinking only warm water for an hour, and could finally feel my tongue.
“I wonder how that happens. Love, I mean.” She touched the sweep of her hair, still smooth and perfect.
“Don’t you and Pound have it?”
“Oh, no.” She laughed with a small puff of air. “We have what we have, though.”
“I’m not sure I understand you.”
“I’m not sure I do either.” She laughed a dark laugh and then became quiet, stirring her drink.
The weather turned wonderful that fall, and although we knew the cold, damp season would be coming soon enough, we were living deep into what we had and feeling happy and strong. Ernest was working well on his Nick Adams novel and new stories and saw so clearly the books they could be, it was almost as if they already fully existed. In our circle, everyone believed things would hit for him, and that it was only a matter of time.
“You’re making something new,” Pound told him one day in his studio. “Don’t forget that when it starts to hurt.”
“It only hurts to wait.”
“The waiting helps you boil it down. That’s essential, and the hurting helps everything along in its way.”
Ernest put this wisdom in his pocket the way he did everything Pound said.
Soon enough, the light began to change in the streets in the late afternoon, thinning and waning, and we started to wonder if we had it in us to face the long winter.
“I’ve been thinking about writing to Agnes,” Ernest said to me one evening. “It’s been on my mind since Milan. Do you mind?”
“I don’t know. What do you want out of it?”
“Nothing. Just for her to know I’m happy and thinking of her.”
“And that your career is going just as you said it would.”
He smiled. “That’s the cherry on top, is all.”
“Send your letter.”
“Yes,” he said. “I already have.”
I felt a flare of jealousy. “You were so sure I wouldn’t mind?”
“Maybe. But if you did, I knew I could make you see it was all right. It’s just a letter, in any case, and we have each other.”
“That’s what Shakespear said the other night.”
“Shakespear? What does she know about love?”
“Maybe more than we do, because she doesn’t have it. She’s not in the thick of it.”
“That’s why I can’t write about Paris now, because it’s everywhere.”
“So you write about Michigan.”
“It feels so close. As if I could never lose it.” He’d been reading over the day’s work from a notebook on the table in front of him. He rested his hand on the pages, his fingertips brushing over the boldly slanted sentences. “But it’s not just the real place. I’m inventing it, too, and that’s the best part.”
Over his writing desk he’d pinned a pale blue map of northern Michigan, and all the essential places were there—Horton Bay, Petoskey, Walloon Lake, Charlevoix—the precise locations where important things had happened to him, Ernest, but also to Nick Adams. Ernest and Nick weren’t the same guy, but they knew a lot of the same things, like where and when to look for bait hoppers heavy with dew, and how the water moved and what it told you about where the trout were. They knew about mortar shelling in the middle of a still night, and what it felt like to see a place you’d loved burned down and hollowed out and changed. Nick’s mind wasn’t altogether right and you could sense the pressure coming up inside him, in a story like “Big Two-Hearted River,” though Ernest never had him look at it directly or name it.
“I love your Michigan stories,” I said.
He squinted at me through the lantern light, across the table. “Is that true?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Sometimes I wonder if you want me writing at all. I think it makes you feel lonely.”
“It’s not the writing that makes me lonely, it’s your being gone. It’s been so long since you’ve even tried to write here at home. Maybe it would work now and I could see you. I wouldn’t have to talk or disturb you.”
“You know I need to go away to make anything happen.” He closed the notebook and put his pencil on top, rolling it back and forth with his fingertips. “I have to be alone to get it started, but if I really was alone, that wouldn’t work either. I need to leave that place and come back here and talk to you. That makes it real and makes it stick. Do you get what I’m saying?”
“I think so.” I walked behind him and put my head on his shoulder, rubbing my face into his neck. But the truth was I didn’t, not really. And he knew.
“Maybe no one can know how it is for anyone else.”
I straightened and walked over to the window where the rain came down in streams and pooled on the sill. “I’m trying.”
“Me too,” he said.
I sighed. “I think it’s going to rain all day.”
“Don’t kid yourself. It’s going to rain for a month.”
“Maybe it won’t after all.”
He smiled at me. “All right, Tiny. Maybe it won’t.”
TWENTY-ONE
ear Thanksgiving 1922, the Star sent Ernest to cover a peace conference in Lausanne that would decide the territorial dispute between Greece and Turkey, the thing that had started the terrible business at Smyrna and had generally kept them killing each other for the better part of three years. When the cable came, I saw Ernest’s nervousness. He almost couldn’t open it and I knew why. We couldn’t take another fight like the last. We might not survive it.
“Lausanne,” he said finally. “We have the money. You’ll come, too.”
“I needn’t,” I said. “I can be good.”
“No,” he said. “I want you there.”
I was relieved he’d insisted and agreed to go—but by the time the trip was launched, I was sick in bed, my head stuffed and aching. I couldn’t eat anything without retching. We decided he would go alone, and that I would join him when I could travel. My old friend Leticia Parker from St. Louis happened to be coming through Paris just then, and she said she wanted to visit every day and take care of me when Ernest was gone. It wouldn’t be like his time in Turkey at all, or even like Genoa.
By the time I felt well enough to join him, it was early December. I packed happily, knowing that when the conference was over and the reporting done, we’d have a long skiing holiday at Chamby and have Christmas there with Chink and then go on to Italy and Spain. All in all, we wouldn’t be back in Paris for four months, and I was ready for a nice long break from the cold and dampness. I hadn’t been out of bed for a week and wasn’t sure I’d have the energy for skiing, but I was damned well going to try.
Along with the travel plans passing back and forth between us, Ernest had also cabled to say that Lincoln Steffens, one of the journalists he’d met in Genoa, was in Lausanne and highly impressed with his dispatches. He wanted to see everything Ernest had written so far, but he only had one thing with him, “My Old Man,” a story about a boy and his ruined jockey father. Steffens thought the story was wonderful and compared it to Sherwood Anderson. Ernest didn’t like
being compared to anyone, and it seemed worse, somehow, that it was Anderson, a friend and champion, but it helped that Steffens had offered to send the story on to an editor friend at Cosmopolitan. Ernest had one published piece at that point, in a small art magazine out of New Orleans called the Double Dealer. There was only that, and the promise from Pound about printing something for Three Mountains. This was much more promising, thrilling even.
As I packed my big suitcase, I thought about how long we’d be gone, and how anxious Ernest would be to return to his stories and the novel. It went without saying that he’d like to show more of his work to Steffens, so I headed for the dining room, to the cupboard where Ernest kept all his manuscripts. I gathered everything together and packed it in a small valise. This was my surprise for him, and I felt buoyed by it as I left the apartment for the Gare de Lyon.
The station was busy, but I had never seen it any other way. Porters scrambled by in their red jackets—past the waxed wooden benches and the ornamental palms and the well-dressed travelers headed home or away with anticipation. By morning, I would be with Ernest again and all would be well, and this was my only thought as I moved through the station and handed my bags to a porter. He helped me onto the train, put the big suitcase with my clothes on the rack up high, and placed the small valise under my seat, where I could reach it. The train was nearly empty. We had half an hour before departure, so I went to stretch my legs and get a newspaper. I threaded through the station, past the vendors with their apples and cheese and Evian water, the rented blankets and pillows and warm wrapped sandwiches and little flasks of brandy. When the conductor called for boarding I hurried onto the train with the stream of passengers and found my compartment just as it was before. Except for the small valise.
It wasn’t under my seat. I didn’t see it anywhere.
In a panic, I called for the conductor.
“Is there something I can do?” my seatmate said while I waited for him to appear. She was a middle-aged American who seemed to be traveling alone. “I can lend you something of mine to wear.”
“It isn’t clothing!” I shrieked, and the poor woman turned away, understandably horrified. When the conductor finally arrived, he didn’t seem to understand, either. I couldn’t stop crying long enough to find the right words in my terrible French. Finally he called over two French policemen, who led me outside the train and interrogated me while everyone stared. They asked for my identification cards, which one officer examined while the other asked me to describe the bag and my actions in detail.
“It was yours, this valise?”
“My husband’s.”
“Is he on board?”
“No, he’s in Switzerland. I was bringing it to him. It’s his work. Three years’ worth of work,” and here I lost any remaining composure. I felt sick with rising dread. “Why are you standing here questioning me?” My voice pitched shrilly. “He’s getting away! He’s probably long gone by now!”
“Your husband, madame?”
“The thief, you idiot!”
“We cannot help you if you’re going to be hysterical, madame.”
“Please.” I felt as if I might lose my mind. “Please just search the train. Search the station.”
“Can you estimate the value of the case and its contents?”
“I don’t know,” I said in a fog. “It’s his work.”
“Yes, so you said. We’ll do what we can.” And the two men walked off officiously.
The conductor agreed to hold the train for another ten minutes while the police performed their search. They walked from one end of the train to the other asking the passengers if they’d seen the bag. I didn’t for a moment believe that whoever had stolen it was still on the train. It had obviously been a common pickpocket who’d seen an opportunity and taken it, hoping for valuables. Instead, it contained every thought and sentence Ernest had sweated over since we came to Paris and well before, the Chicago stories and sketches, every poem and fragment. He never threw anything away, and it was all there.
The two officers came off the train empty-handed. “Nothing yet, madame,” one of them said. “We’ll continue to look, but if you still intend on traveling to Switzerland, I suggest you take your seat.”
I gave them our address and the phone number for the dance hall, since there wasn’t a phone in our apartment, but I didn’t hold out much hope they’d succeed in their efforts. Paris was vast and too much time had passed. I imagined the thief hurrying to an empty alleyway, opening the case and then shutting it immediately. He’d have dropped it where he stood or pitched it into a rubbish pile. It could be in any alleyway or gutter or burning trash barrel in Paris. It could be listing, at that moment, toward the bottom of the Seine.
“I’m very sorry for your trouble,” my seatmate said when I’d finally made my way back to the compartment.
“No, I’m sorry,” I said, beginning to weep again. “I’m not usually this discomposed.”
“Is it very dear, what you’ve lost?”
The train grumbled beneath us, then lurched away from the platform with finality. There was no stopping or changing anything now. No avoiding the truth of what had happened. I felt dread settle in to fill me completely and a new hard-won certainty. There was only one answer to her question. “Priceless,” I said, and turned away.
TWENTY-TWO
hat followed was the longest night of my life. The mountains closed in as we headed into Switzerland, and blackness fell. I thought about how I would tell Ernest the work was gone, but I couldn’t imagine it. There were no words.
When we finally pulled into Lausanne the next morning, and I saw Ernest on the platform with Steffens right beside him, it was all I could do to stand and walk toward them. I was crying. Ernest looked at Steffens and shrugged as if to say, Who can understand a woman, but then I couldn’t stop and Ernest knew something was very wrong.
Still, it was ages before I could say the words. Steffens excused himself, telling Ernest he’d phone to arrange a meeting. When he was gone, Ernest made me sit down at a café table near the entrance of the station. All around us couples and families kissed good-bye or bade each other farewell, and they seemed so painfully untroubled to me. A fresh wave of tears came.
“What is it?” Ernest asked again and again, first worried and tender, then angry, then worried again. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. Nothing can be that bad.”
But it was. It was exactly that bad. I shook my head and cried harder, and it went on this way until finally I was able to tell him about packing the case and stowing it for the journey.
I didn’t need to say more. His face grew pale and very serious. “You lost it on the train.”
“It was stolen out from under me.”
He nodded, taking it all in, and I watched his eyes carefully, how they changed and steadied, changed and steadied. He was trying to be brave for me, I knew. Because he wasn’t sure what I’d do.
“You couldn’t have packed everything. Why would I need it all?”
“If you were going to be making changes in the originals, I thought you’d want the copies, too, so that everything would be right.”
“You must have left something,” he said.
I shook my head and waited. Would he snap from the strain and fly into a rage? I’d certainly earned that. I’d taken what was his—what was most his in the world—without his asking me to, as if I had that right. And now it was gone.
“I have to go back. I need to know it for myself.”
“I’m so sorry, Tatie.” I shook with remorse and heartsickness.
“It’s going to be all right. I made it. I can make it all again.”
I knew he was bluffing if not outright lying, but I held him tight and let him hold me, and we said all the words people say to each other when they know the worst has come.
Late that night, he boarded a train back to Paris while I waited in Lausanne in a wet knot. Steffens took me to dinner and tried to calm my nerves, but ev
en with several whiskeys in me, I jangled.
He was gone for two days and sent no cable. But just as I could see myself reaching into the cupboard over and over, packing everything away in the valise, I could see him coming into the quiet apartment and discovering for himself that it was all really gone.
Turning on all the lights, he first looks at everything in plain sight, the table and the bed, the kitchen. He looks at the floor and walks between the two rooms slowly, saving the cupboard until he’s seen everything else, because that’s the last place, and there won’t be anywhere to look after and no hope left at all. He has a drink first, then another, but finally he has to see it. He puts his hand on the knob and pulls the door open and then he knows everything. There isn’t a page left in the cupboard. Not a note or a scrap. He looks and looks, standing there, wrenched out and hollow. As desolate as the cupboard is, that’s how he is too because the pages belong to him and are him. It’s like someone has taken a broom to his insides and swept them out until everything’s clean and bright and hard and empty.
TWENTY-THREE
hen Ernest came back from Paris, he was tender with me and kept saying over and over that all was forgiven, but his eyes were bruised looking and changed. There was still work to do at the conference, and he did it as he always did, throwing himself into the day and coming home tired and glad for a drink. I passed my time walking through the town looking for gifts to send home for Christmas. Even more than our first year in France, I was desperate to see something that captured the holiday as I remembered it from childhood. I wandered for hours, peering in shopwindows, but search as I might, nothing in Lausanne looked like Christmas to me.
At the end of the week, we readied our things for the trip to Chamby. “It doesn’t seem right to simply follow our plans through after all that’s happened,” I said to Ernest as we packed.
“Maybe,” he said. His voice sounded tired. “But what should we do instead?”