Mrs. Hemingway (6 page)

“The sockless hop. A Midwest specialty.” They watched the couple for moments longer. “You can always trust a man by his shoes,” he said.

“He's not wearing any.”

“Exactly.”

They made it over to the liquor cabinet. At one point she lost her footing and Ernest steadied her at the hips. “Maybe you shouldn't have another one,” he said, with a grin. She'd heard that people go up to the roof at these parties. She wondered if Ernest Hemingway would invite her up there: he looked strong as a butcher. She wondered why a man like this would be talking to a woman like her. “How old are you?” she asked.

“That's bold.”

“I think you're younger than me, that's all. I was trying to guess by how much.”

“I'm twenty-one.”

“Oh,” she said. “You seem older.”

“Everyone says that.”

“But
twenty-one
? Twenty-five would have been disappointing. Twenty-one is an outrage. You must be barely out of college.”

Ernest shrugged and poured her a gin with lemon on the rim of the glass. He sunk a green olive in there too.

“Is there not a mixer?”

“Gin tastes better straight.”

“Are you a Princeton man?”

“No. I served in Italy.”

“Did you see much action?”

“My leg was shot up before I could see much.”

“That's terrible.”

“Not so bad. I fell in love with a nurse in Milan. She was called Agnes. That was worse.”

Hadley laughed and tried not to seem too interested. His beauty only seemed to underline how frozen she had felt these past few years. But tonight she felt reckless and bold. She wanted to be drunk nearly all of the time if this was how it felt. “And is your heart still in Milan, Mr. Hemingway?”

“Not anymore, thank God. Please,” he said, “call me Ernest.”

“What do you do now?”

“I'm a writer.” His eyes momentarily followed a pretty girl down the length of the corridor before they came to rest once more on her. “Or trying to be.”

“What kind of thing do you write?”

“Short stories, sketches. Mostly articles. I'm a journalist by day.”

“Do you enjoy it? Earning your keep that way?”

“It just keeps me from writing what I really want to write.”

“And what's that?”

“A novel. Something strong. With the fat boiled off.”

She laughed. “I'd like to read something you've written.”

“Do you write? Is that why?”

“Not at all.” Hadley had never said this before, but she decided that this stranger would make the perfect first audience. “But for a long time I wanted to be a concert pianist. I tried very hard at it. Every day I practiced. Sometimes I'd have to lie down on the carpet for fifteen minutes of every hour because I was so tired from practice. There's a cost you have to pay, to write, to sing, to play. I don't think I was strong enough to pay that price.”

Ernest smiled at her. “No one ever tells you that: that there's no method. Writing's a lawless place.” Someone shouted her name but Hadley didn't want to move away from him. “Someone's calling for you.” He stood close to her. That he might be interested in her was almost impossible, but it seemed as if he was.

“My mother died two months ago.” She had no idea why she had to say this.

“Oh”—and his smile disappeared—“I'm sorry.”

“No, I'm sorry. It's just . . . I've nursed her these past months. And I haven't been out much, on account of that.” Tears felt close but she wouldn't allow them. “I feel a little out of the scene. I feel like you might have to wipe the dust off me.”

“I'd wipe the dust off you.”

Hadley smiled into her gin, pleased to her toes.

“Were you close?”

“No. She was obsessed with politics and suffrage. She didn't have much time for me.”

“You're not a modern woman then?”

“I am modern, but maybe in a traditional way. Does that make any sense?” Ernest nodded. Hadley cleared her throat and finished the gin. “Our talk has ended up rather grim. That's my fault. What I meant was it's nice to be with friends. It was a relief when mother died. I know that sounds awful. But the house—being inside it every day—it was killing me.”

“Hadley!” The record had stopped. Her friend beckoned her over. “Come and play!”

“Oh, no.”

“Go on, Hash. Can I call you that?” Ernest took her by the elbow back to the piano. “The whole party's demanding it!” Ernest placed her gin on the piano top with all the other half-empty glasses smudged with lipstick. He bent down to her ear. “My mother's a musician. She'd like to meet you.” He smiled. “Just play what comes to mind.”

“I only know classical,” she said, feeling rather stunned. She hastened to pull down her dress when she sat at the stool. Hadley tried to think of a song that wouldn't sink the mood. Eventually, she settled on Bach, a sonata. It seemed to make people rueful, but in a romantic rather than melancholic way.

As she played she thought how all of the happiest times in her life had been with music. Often, in the afternoons, when her mother would take a nap and her yellow mouth would fall open in laboring breath, Hadley would take a walk around St. Louis, keeping her eyes to the sidewalk, listening to women her own age talking about men, housework, a new pair of gloves. When she got home she would stuff a towel into her mouth to prevent her mother hearing the lonely sobs from the bathroom. Then, in the afternoons, she played the piano, and momentarily, all that sadness lifted.

Maybe she had played the nurse with more morbid gusto than she knew. It wasn't just her mother keeping her inside that stopped her—she could have slipped away in the evening. Something else in her had given up—years ago really. She'd given up on friends and dancing. The only men she had talked to all this time were her brother-in-law and the grocer at the end of the street, who would look at her over the pale rounds of the oranges with pity. She thought about what that word meant.
Spinster
. And whether, at twenty-eight, she might be called that now.

 • • • 

Hadley neared the end of the sonata. Ernest hadn't become transfixed with her hands at the keys or become mesmerized by her playing, nothing like that. Instead, he looked surprised when she laid down the lid.

“Put on another record, someone,” she said. “It's too sad for a party.” But then the room burst into applause, and Hadley felt pleased. She had done well.

When the party ended Ernest walked her out onto the sidewalk. Rain made the roads slick and the yellow leaves had been stamped into the sidewalk by the tread of boots. Ernest stood shyly with his hands in his pockets.

“That's a fine cape you have on,” she said, tugging his collar.

Ernest looked rather bashful. “Women say that.”

“It's a hit, is it? You look . . .” she laughed, thinking of the word: “ducal.”

“Can I walk you home?”

“You could, but you've already done it. I'm staying here tonight.”

He slipped an arm around her and kissed her. It was more chaste than she had imagined, just the press of his lips on hers. “How long are you in Chicago?”

“Three weeks.”

“We have three weeks then.”

They made promises to see each other again after she returned home. She wrote him a letter, telling him how finding him felt like liberation; like jailbreak. She decided she was going to get out of the Midwest. She was going to break free—of St. Louis, and her mother's ghost—with or without Ernest Hemingway.

Mercifully the evening has lost the day's heat. The last of the day's light comes from the sun dipping behind the trees and ends on the terra-cotta tiles in the shape of the villa's windows. “I remember this,” Ernest says as he sees her in the dress she wore to the Chicago party. The fabric pulls over the width of her hips but it still fits. “I forgot how lovely it is.”

Conscious of the ultimatum she has set down, they are being nice to each other. “I'd never shown my knees before. And my hair was long, remember?”

He fixes his cuffs at the window. “I remember.”

“I hated it when it was cut in New York. I felt too much like a boy. But you liked it. And I knew how much your father would have hated it, which helped.” She goes over to the dressing table. “He despised bobbed hair.”

Hadley pulls her hair back now, brushing it with three firm strokes on either side. “Your mother never said anything about it. She was always more tactful than we thought,” Hadley says. “She chooses her battles, like you.”

Ernest looks at her quizzically, but doesn't comment.

The earrings clip her lobes and she loosens them so they don't squeeze. Lightly, she applies a blush and eyeliner as a friend in Paris has taught her to do. In the mirror she looks fine but still can't escape the image she has of herself as a handsome peasant who should feel grateful for rolling around with the aristocrats of the village for a precious few years. There is still much good to him, but it's this summer; it's made everyone so bad. She can feel it in herself and in Fife: how quickly they are moved by petulance or glee. Mascara spikes her lashes. It might be the first time she has worn makeup this vacation.

Hadley inspects her reflection. She wishes the bones of her chest might protrude a little, or that her cheekbones would rise from her face. She imagines that, after a divorce, she might stop eating and her friends in Paris might shake their heads and talk among themselves, saying she is
worryingly thin
. How delighted she'd be, to be worried about like that.

“What do you mean I choose my battles?” Ernest asks from the bathroom.

“Why did you never yell when I lost the suitcase?”

He comes back into the room. “This is what you want to talk about? Now?”

“Yes.”

He gives a sigh. “I thought the worst had happened. I thought maybe you'd fallen in love with somebody else, or that you didn't love me anymore, or that I was losing you. Then you were crying and wouldn't tell me what was wrong.” He stops at the window where she stood that morning, looking down at Fife's bedroom, thinking today was going to be like all of the others spent here.

“So you were relieved. All I'd lost was your first novel.”

“Incomparable with losing a wife.”

“I'm sorry”—Hadley can't talk about it without the tears threatening to spill—“about losing it.”

“It's over now, Hash. It doesn't matter.”

“It just seems like it's been over since that moment.”

“There were good times after that. Very good times.”

He smiles at her and she smiles back: good old friends as always.

As she opens the box for her amber necklace she sees the bull's ear, cured and no longer bloody. It was given to her last year by a matador who admired her red hair from the ring. The ear is as hard now as the leather of a shoe. She pulls a finger down the hairy ridge of the ear—it was meant to be a lucky charm, and for a while it had worked. It had fended off other women before Fife had come along. Hadley fixes the necklace, closes the box and feels the hasp click.

“I heard from the publisher,” Ernest says, sitting down on the wicker chair and draining the last of his gin and tonic.

“About
The Sun
?”

“They say I'm nearly there.”

“That's wonderful.” But he doesn't seem pleased. “What's wrong?”

“I'm nervous.”

“Why?”

“It has to be a success,” he says.

“So what?”

“So I can afford more than one good suit and one pair of dress shoes.”

“Of course it will be a success. I know no one else more likely to succeed than you. And besides, we've got enough to eat, enough to pay the rent, and our beautiful son who is well, now, and healthy.”

“And we've got rich enough friends to bail us out when necessary.”

She puts a last fix to her hair and goes over to him. “Don't say that.” She kneels down so that she is at eye level with him. “It's the night-time blues. That's all. One day you'll be as rich as Sara and Gerald and only then will you realize you don't need it.”

He takes her hand and kisses her palm. “You're too good for me.”

Ernest has forgotten to correct her when she said “you” rather than “we.” And her heart sinks again, even though he is kissing her now, just like he did on the cold Chicago sidewalk. Suddenly, she knows his decision before he does. Fife will win. It seems inexorable. It freezes her to the spot.

“Are we going alone?”

“Yes,” he says very quietly, almost near the door, so that she can barely hear him over the evening hush. “We'll meet Fife there.”

“Papa!”

Bumby's footsteps rush up the central stairway. They see, first, a small hand move the brocade, then his sandals, still dark knees, and his lovely brown face show up at the doorway. His eyes are sleepy but curious: he is not allowed in their bedroom. “Papa, I got this for you.” He hands his father a red rose from the garden.

Ernest lifts him up and moves his face along his child's face. Bumby shies away from the bristles of his mustache. “
Merci, mon amour.
Now shall I give it to
Maman
?”

“
Oui
,” he says, very decisively, but then his eyes narrow with suspicion. “Where are you going?”

“To a party.”

“Can I come?”

“I think you're too tired for that tonight.”

Hadley watches her husband and son: aghast that this could be it.

Ernest plants him on the floor. “You tell Marie you can have a
chocolat chaud
after your bath.” He pulls a finger over one of his son's knees and sees the white trail left. “You're so mucky! Now look at your mother. Look how pretty she is!”