by Paula McLain
“I’ll do it if you insist,” he finally agreed. “But it’s a mistake. They’ll just come sniffing around they way wolves always do.”
“You don’t really mean that.”
“The hell I don’t. Can you imagine my mother not forcing her way into everything with this baby, pummeling us with her opinions and advice? We don’t need her. We don’t need anyone.”
“She and Ed would love any small opportunity to help.”
“So let them, but I’m not asking for a hot dime.”
“Fair enough,” I said, but was grateful when they responded to Ernest’s cable quickly and extravagantly, sending trunks full of wedding gifts we’d been storing with them and furniture, too, from our long-ago apartment on Dearborn Street. None of it was especially nice, but having our own things around us made our lot on Bathurst Street seem less provisional. And it all arrived just in time.
• • •
Hindmarsh sent Ernest off again, the first week in October, this time to cover the arrival of British prime minister David Lloyd George in New York City.
“It’s like a personal vendetta,” I said as I watched him pack for his trip.
“I can take it, I guess,” Ernest said. “But what about you?”
“The doctor said we have until the end of the month, maybe until the first of November. You’ll be here.”
“This is the last trip,” he said, snapping shut the new valise. “I’m going to ask John Bone to talk some sense into Hindmarsh.”
“If it comes directly from Bone, he’ll have to lay off, won’t he?”
“That’s the idea. Take good care of the baby cat.”
“I promise.”
“And the mama cat, too.”
“Yes, Tiny, but you’d better hurry. They won’t hold your train.”
Several days later, on October 9, Harriet Connable called on me with a dinner invitation.
“I’d love to,” I said. “But I’m so very large now nothing fits me. I’ll have to wear table linens.”
“I’m sure you’ll carry them off beautifully, dear,” she said with a gracious laugh. “We’ll send a car around for you at eight.”
In the end I was very glad she insisted. All afternoon I’d been feeling something I was calling indigestion. Of course it was more than that. My body was readying itself, but I tried to ignore it. I thought if I just stayed calm and didn’t overexert myself, the baby would hold off until Ernest returned home. I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse and then sat on the Connables’ rich velvet sofa listening to Harriet play a lively rendition of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” without so much as tapping my foot. But of course the baby was coming whether I was prepared or not, and this became more and more obvious as the evening passed.
“Hadley, dear, I don’t think you’re feeling well,” Ralph Connable said when he could no longer politely disregard the strained and serious expression on my face.
“I’m perfectly all right,” I said, stubborn to the last, but then I began to cry as soon as I’d said it, my emotions bursting right through my carefully made dam. The pain was too much now. I bent over with it and began to shake.
“Oh, you poor girl,” Harriet said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll make sure you’re very well cared for.”
They drove me to the hospital, Harriet patting my hand and making soothing noises while Ralph sped along with determination. The streets glowed faintly under gaslight.
“Can you try and reach someone at the Star? There must be a way to let Ernest know.”
“We’ll move mountains if we have to,” Harriet assured me. “There’s still a little time, I think.”
But there wasn’t. Half an hour later, I was gowned and draped on the surgical table, coached by the doctor and several nurses to begin pushing. This was why we’d come to Toronto—to have these very capable and trained professionals oversee everything. In Paris I would have had a midwife who boiled water on my own cooktop to sterilize her instruments. Even in the States, doctors were just beginning to perform hospital deliveries. Ernest’s father still woke in the middle of the night to answer calls when he was up in Michigan, and though I knew women had been having babies at home forever—my mother, certainly, and Ernest’s, too—I felt so much safer this way. Particularly when my pushing did nothing at all.
I strained for two hours, until my neck ached and my knees shook with the effort. Finally they gave me ether. I breathed in the fresh-paint smell of it as the mask was drawn over my mouth and nose, the sharpness stinging my eyes. After that, I felt nothing until I woke from my fog and saw the nurse holding out a tightly wrapped bundle. This was my son, swaddled in layers of blue wool. I gazed at him through happy tears. He was perfect, from the pink whorls of his well-made ears and his squeezed-shut eyes, to the dark brown hair with a fuzz of sideburns. I was devastated that Ernest had missed the birth, but here, safe and sound and utterly marvelous, was his son. That was all that mattered.
When Ernest finally did arrive early the next morning, panting and completely beside himself, I was sitting up in bed, nursing the baby.
“Oh, my God,” Ernest said, breaking down. He stood just inside the door and sobbed openly, covering his face with his hands. “I’ve been dead worried for you, Tiny. I got a cable in the press car saying the baby had come and was well, but not a single word about you.”
“Dear sweet Tiny. You can see I’m fine. Everything went smoothly, and come look at this fellow. Isn’t he wonderful?”
Ernest crossed to me, sitting gently on the edge of the mattress. “He seems awfully small. Aren’t you afraid of doing something wrong?” He put a single finger on the baby’s small veined hand.
“I was afraid at first, but he’s very solid, actually. I think the bullfights had an effect on him after all. He came barreling out like a good torero.”
“John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. He’s perfectly beautiful. And aren’t you something for making it through so well?”
“I feel surprisingly sturdy, but you, Tiny. You look terrible. Didn’t you sleep on the train?”
“I tried, but I had the most terrible feeling you were in danger.”
“I was in excellent hands. The Connables were so thoughtful and helpful. We owe them so much.”
“Maybe we were right to come to Toronto after all,” Ernest said.
“Of course we were. I told you it would all make perfect sense.”
“I’m so tired I might fall over.”
“Sleep then.” I pointed to a chair in the corner of the room.
“Hindmarsh will be wondering where I am.”
“Let him wonder. You’re a new father.”
“Can you believe it?”
I smiled to myself and said nothing as he curled up under a blanket and fell soundly asleep. Two men, now, I thought with deep satisfaction. And both of them mine.
TWENTY-SIX
ater that morning, Ernest sent out a rash of telegrams saying how well things had gone. He was immoderately proud of the speed with which I delivered the baby, and I was pleased with myself. I had help from the doctors and the ether, true enough, but also braved the whole ordeal like a champion stoic, with Ernest hundreds of miles away.
He left for work, prepared for a dressing down from Hindmarsh, but it was worse than he expected. Hindmarsh didn’t wait for Ernest in his office, but humiliated him in front of everyone, saying he should have filed his story before going to the hospital. That was ridiculous, of course, but when Ernest relayed the story to me that evening, after rehashing the whole thing with Greg Clark in a pub over many glasses of bourbon, he was still stung and angry.
“Toronto’s dead. We can’t stay here.” The drink hadn’t calmed him much, and I was worried the charge nurse would come in and evict him before I’d heard the whole story.
“Is everything really beyond repair?”
“Well beyond. We were both furious. He held nothing back, the lout, and I said things they’ll probably be tal
king about for years to come.”
“Oh dear, Tiny. Did he fire you?”
“He transferred me to the Weekly. Not that I’ll take it. When do you think you can travel again?”
“I’ll be fine in a few days, but the baby can’t sail for months. We’ll have to tough it out.”
“I could kill the bastard. That might solve it.”
“Not for long.”
He grimaced and sat down hard, scraping the chair loudly against the floor. “Where’s the little corker anyway? I want to take another look at him.”
“He’s in the nursery sleeping. You should be asleep, too. Go home, Tiny. We’ll face this in the morning.”
“What’s to face? It’s dead, I told you.”
“Don’t think about it. Just go, and take some bicarbonate, too. You’re going to wake up with a hell of a headache.”
We didn’t immediately bolt for Paris—but only because we couldn’t. The baby really was too young for the passage, and we’d also depleted our savings with the move. We were close to broke, with a pile of hospital bills besides. There was nothing to do but dig in and take it—“like a bitch dog,” as Ernest was fond of saying. He took the transfer, and though he wasn’t working directly under Hindmarsh any longer, he still felt the man’s shadow. Every time he got a lousy assignment, he wondered if Hindmarsh was in on it—like the time he was sent to the Toronto Zoo to welcome the arrival of a white peacock.
“A peacock, Tiny. They’re trying to kill me. Death by indignity, the nastiest kind of all.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But they can’t. You’re too strong for that.”
“I’m not so sure.”
Winter arrived in Toronto with snow that blew sideways and threatened to knock us over. If Paris winters were damp and gray, this was fiercely white and unremitting. The wind easily pierced our coats and blankets and found its way into every corner of our apartment, where the baby and I stayed camped against the radiator. I boiled water to keep the air moist and took to wearing Ernest’s big overcoat when I nursed. I didn’t take the baby out at all and hired a maid to mind him when I had to do the shopping. Ernest limped home in the evening, after dark had fallen, and looked more exhausted and run down all the time. He was good about exclaiming over the baby’s new accomplishments as I reported them—he’d smiled at me in the bath; he was lifting his head like a champ—but it was hard for Ernest to take any pleasure just then.
“I can’t see how I’ll make it a year this way,” he said.
“It seems impossible, I know. But when we’re old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”
“It’s not even the embarrassment of slogging away at stories well beneath me. That’s nothing. But not working on my own stuff at all, when that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I feel the material going bad in me. If I don’t write it soon I’m going to lose it for good.”
“Stay up and write now. I’ll make some strong coffee for you.”
“I can’t. I’m too tired to think. It does come in the morning sometimes, but as soon as I try to get anything down, the baby will cry or I’ll have to get to work. At the end of the day, there aren’t words left. We’re so far away from everything here, too. I don’t know who’s writing what, or what matters.”
“Yes, but you’ve made some good friends. You like Greg Clark. That’s lucky.”
“I do like Greg, but he doesn’t box and he doesn’t know anything about horse racing. I’ve also never seen him drunk.”
“Not everyone drinks as well as you do, Tiny.”
“Still, I don’t trust a man I haven’t seen tight.”
As November passed into December, Ernest’s mood grew worrisomely low. He wasn’t sleeping well, and the baby’s night waking only made this worse. The copies of Three Stories and Ten Poems had arrived and Ernest sent some off to Ezra and Gertrude and Sylvia, and several home to his family in Oak Park—and then he waited for praise. He combed the papers and magazines daily, anxious for a review, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of the book’s existence. If the world didn’t know about the book, had it happened? He had a copy of Jane Heap’s Little Review with the bullfighting miniatures, and sometimes he thumbed through them and frowned. “I’m not sure I’m the same writer who produced these. Hell, I’m not writing at all.”
I couldn’t tell him I thought he was being overly dramatic, because he really did feel the loss of his writing life profoundly. He needed me to keep him warm and loved, solidly tethered to earth; he needed his work to keep him sane. I couldn’t help him with that part. I could only look on and feel troubled that our life was burdened by worry at a time when we should be so happy.
“It was a terrible mistake to come,” he said after arriving home in a particularly dire state of mind one night.
I couldn’t take his suffering any longer. “You’re right,” I said. “It was a mistake to come. We’ll go back to Paris and you can give everything to your writing.”
“How will we afford it?”
“I don’t know. We just will.”
“Your trust fund pays only two thousand a year. Without my income, I can’t see how we’ll manage.”
“If you can’t write, the baby and I will be a burden to you. You’ll resent us. How can we live like that?”
“We’re in a bind. That’s for sure.”
“Let’s not think of it in that light. It can be an adventure. Our great gamble. Maybe we’ll come out on top after all.”
“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Tiny.”
“Buy the tickets. I’ll wire your parents for money. They want to help.”
“They want to obligate me. I won’t take it.”
“Don’t then. I will, for the baby.”
“What if I did one last series for the Weekly? I could kill myself for seven or ten pieces and then resign. With that and some from Oak Park, we’d have maybe a thousand to carry us. A thousand and a prayer.”
“That should just about do it.”
Just after the first of January 1924, as soon as we thought the baby could safely travel, we boarded the train for New York and then the Antonia, bound for France. We’d begun to call the baby Bumby for his very round and solid feel, like a stuffed bear. I rolled him tightly in blankets in the ship’s berth and talked to him and let him play with my hair while, up on deck, Ernest found anyone at all and began to wax nostalgic about Paris. I would have stayed in Toronto for a year or five if it took that to make a good home for Bumby, but it wouldn’t have cost me the way it would Ernest. Some men would have been able to choke it back and take it for a while, but he might have lost himself completely there. Ahead in Paris, it was anyone’s guess how we’d make it, but I couldn’t worry about that. Ernest needed me to be strong for us both now, and I would be. I would scrimp and make do and not resent it at all because it was my choice in the end. I was choosing him, the writer, in Paris. We would never again live a conventional life.
TWENTY-SEVEN
know we meant to be gone a year,” Ernest said to Gertrude on our first visit to their flat after we returned, “but four months is a year in Canada.”
“You’re finished with journalism, that’s the main thing,” Gertrude said. “Time to go all out, now, and write the thing you’re meant to.”
“I’m ready, by God,” he said, and helped himself to another glass of pear liqueur.
I watched Alice as the two of them went on this way, feeding off of one another’s certainty and enthusiasm. She seemed to tighten and turn inward, and I wondered if she wasn’t happy to see Ernest back; if she’d gotten used to having Gertrude to herself when we were away. Granted, there was always someone circling Gertrude, wanting her attention and good opinion, but she and Ernest had a special intensity together—almost as if they were twin siblings with a private language, zeroing in on and hearing the other almost exclusively. I felt it, too, and though I had been hurt by their connection at times, I could hardly remember what it felt like to be lonely. The baby needed
and responded to me completely. It was my voice he turned toward, the rhythms of my rocking arms that felt most right, the way I patted and rubbed his back when he woke in the night. I was essential to him, and to Ernest, too. I made everything run, now.
Motherhood could be exhausting, to be sure. I was forever under-slept, and sometimes didn’t have the energy to wash my hair or eat anything more elaborate than bread and butter. But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn’t help but melt into him. And when Ernest came home from a long day of work and had that look that told me he’d been too much alone and in his head, I felt just as necessary. He needed me, and Bumby, too; without us, he couldn’t climb back out of himself and feel whole again.
Family life worked most clearly for us when we were alone, at the end of the day, reconnecting and shoring each other up. But it was very much at odds with bohemian Paris. Gertrude and Alice could be lovely with Bumby. They gave him a shiny silver rattle and knitted booties. When it came time for his christening, they brought some very nice champagne, which we had with teacake, dried fruit, and sugared almonds, and Gertrude even agreed to be his godmother. But not all our friends seemed to know what to do with us now that we had a baby in tow. Pound and Shakespear would come to our apartment for a late-night drink or meet us at the café if we found someone to watch Bumby, but Pound made it very clear that babies weren’t welcome in his studio. It wasn’t because of the noise or the potential mess, but on principle. “I just don’t believe in children,” he said. “No offense, Hadley.”