“Yes. They’ve also promised to consider anything else if I wanted to go back under their moniker.”
“You want to go back.”
I heard the distress in her voice and rushed ahead. “If you could only know what the people are like. How bravely they’re fighting, and how everyone is working together. I’m not sure anything like this war has ever happened. I have to be there.”
“You’ll go alone?” I hadn’t told her about Ernest outright, but his name had peppered every letter I’d sent from Spain, and she was no fool.
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, I trust that you’ll know what’s right for you.”
Her words echoed what Mrs. Roosevelt had told me. I wanted to believe both of them, but frankly I was already in over my head. Perhaps Ernest’s marriage meant, as I’d said, that there was no cliff to fling myself from. But what did that matter when love itself was an ocean, and you could drown in even a teacup of it?
For the moment, I focused on what I did know. “Collier’s is sending me credentials and my correspondent’s badge, and everything. It’s exciting, Mother. I know you’re worried, but this is just what I’ve wanted. Please be happy for me?”
“Of course I will be. I am.”
As soon as I hung up with my mother, I wanted to call Ernest and tell him about Collier’s. He’d believed in me from the beginning. Whatever else had happened between us, or not, he’d encouraged my work and seen potential in me as a journalist long before I had. I also wanted to tell him about going back to Madrid, of course, because as complicated as everything was now, the truth was that I couldn’t even imagine being in Spain without him. I stood there for a long time, holding the receiver, listening to the hum going out in all directions to no one. Then I put it softly in its cradle, and went for a long walk instead, hoping to clear my head even a little.
* * *
—
Within twenty-four hours, almost as if Ernest had been reading my mind or could feel my dilemma in the air like a storm, a cable came. Hollywood had lit up for the film. Celebrities had thrown fistfuls of money after them wherever they went, and already they’d raised twenty thousand dollars. THAT’S 20 AMBULANCES UP AND ROLLING ON THE FRONT LINE IN FEW WEEKS’ TIME, he wrote. JUST ARRANGED TO GO BACK 17 AUGUST FROM NY ON USS CHAMPLAIN. YOU’LL COME TOO ON DIFFERENT BOAT. SAY YES.
23
I met Ernest in Paris, at the Café de la Paix, one afternoon in late August. He’d found Matthews and brought him along, and we fell on each other in a crush, talking over each other and taking in each other’s faces and smiling like crazy. We ordered two-dozen oysters for the table and enough red wine to choke an ox and stayed there, shoulder to shoulder, long past the time when the waiters and everyone else wanted us to leave.
This time, when we made for Spain, there was no caravanning or walking down cold dirt roads, but civilized transport, ever efficient. Once we reached the border at Andorra, we boarded a small plane loaded with supplies and bound for Valencia, first, and then to the Loyalist offensive at the Aragon front. The lion’s share of Spain was in Franco’s control now. Bilbao had fallen, and San Sebastián, and all the Basque territory to the west. There were still a few small victories for our side, costly ones. In recent fighting below Zaragoza, the Loyalists had managed to liberate the city of Belchite—what was left of it.
The smoke hadn’t yet cleared when we arrived there. It clouded the ruins of the city with a haze that lent a dreamlike quality to what you were seeing. And what you were seeing was mostly terrible. The Loyalists had won this battle, and now the dead needed to be dug out of the rubble, often by hand. Men needed to take the bodies to a place and line them up, waiting for the trenches to be carved out, big enough to hold them. At one place the dead were piled eight feet high, with wretchedly stricken faces, dusty feet, and hands that stuck out at unnatural angles. And the smell, the smell was something I hoped I wouldn’t remember later when I tried to write about this day. It made me feel sick and terrified and small—and glad I wasn’t alone.
On the narrow streets, shelling had loosed the houses from their stone moorings. They listed and tipped toward one another. We walked through searing late-summer sunlight, through air that was thick and orange with dust. Bits of paper flew around us and we had to step over things—shutters ripped from windows, a crushed bicycle. Café chairs reduced to kindling. In the center of the road, I saw a heavy black sewing machine on its side, as if it had crawled out into the street to die.
Robert Merriman was still standing, somehow. Back home he’d been a history professor at Berkeley, but here he was chief of staff for the Fifteenth Brigade, and had led this final assault. Half-a-dozen times he’d taken grenade flak to his face and neck and hands, but seemed mostly to ignore his wounds, which looked jagged and brutal to me, like raw meat. In the hospital tent, he told us how he and his men had marched from Quinto and sometimes belly crawled to encircle Belchite with their bodies and a sheer force of will, moving toward the center of the city.
“It was house to house,” he told us, his clothing still blackened with soot and smoke and dust. “House to house, bombing our way forward. We had to take the cathedral was all I could think.”
“You left some blood along the way,” Ernest said, his look full of a deep respect.
“Almost nothing. The boys did their best. They were wonderful.”
We could see that for ourselves, too. They had fought with everything they had and now were looking after their dead with an attention that was almost sacred. Down the hill along a narrow, shallow stream, some soldiers had stripped to the waist and were trying to rinse the blood and dirt from their faces and hands. They were American. I could hear Ohio and New Jersey and California in their voices, and while Ernest went on talking to Merriman, the two of them wrapped up in mutual admiration and memories of battles past, I walked down to the river where one young man stood a little apart.
It only took us a few moments to realize we were both from the same neighborhood in St. Louis, and that his mother had been a patient of my father’s. When I asked him what he missed most about home, he didn’t hesitate.
“Creve Coeur. Just before I sailed, my girl and I had a picnic there, right down by the lake. We sat there all day.”
“That’s one of my best places, too. You know the waterfall? Under the weeping willow?”
“Yes.” His face seemed to register a hundred emotions at once. “That was our spot.”
I had to smile, because I could see it, all of it, on the best brightest day of the year, the sun like melted butter, my mother near me in tall grass, thousands of insects stirring the air. “You’ll go back.”
“Sure, I will.”
“You will,” I insisted. “You’ll go on a perfect spring day with egg-salad sandwiches and lemonade in a basket. Maybe you’ll pick some lilies of the valley. That’s what I’d do.”
“I should have asked her to marry me,” he said, and his eyes clouded over.
“You still can. Do it with those flowers. She’s going to say yes.”
His lip trembled. “That’s a nice picture.”
“It’s not just a picture,” I insisted, hoping with everything I had that I was right, and that he would get there in one piece, and claim his happy ending. “It’s the truth.”
When I walked back to the hospital tent a short while later, I felt a strange mingling of happiness and sadness, and remembered something my father had told me once, lifting a human skull that sat propped on one of the bookshelves in his medical office.
“These bones more than any other separate us,” he said, cradling the skull in his palms. “We can never really know each other, never reach each other, though we try.”
I must have had doubts even then about his kernels of wisdom, but now it struck me clearly that I’d learned all sorts of things, things he didn’t know. How we were al
l connected. How personal this life was, and how every time we grazed against one another even for a moment, we weren’t the same afterward.
“Where did you go?” Ernest asked when I reached him.
“To St. Louis.”
He thought I was making a joke. “All the way there, eh?”
“It’s nearer than you think.”
24
In Madrid, we took our same rooms at the Florida and fell into our old routine as if we’d never been away. Ernest and I became lovers again without speaking a word. He never said Pauline’s name, nor did I. Letters from her and his three sons littered his desk, and he never tried to hide them. They were there to remind me of the limit he’d set when he cabled, the one we never mentioned or looked at directly. YOU’LL COME TOO ON DIFFERENT BOAT. SAY YES.
I had said yes. And yes always came with a price.
* * *
—
Still, there was this, there was now. Bolting toward the Telefónica in the evening to post my dispatches, shells whizzing by my head, my eyes on my feet and the dusty road and nothing else. My editor at Collier’s had cabled to tell me how good my work was, and that they were adding my name to the masthead. We celebrated at Chicote’s and then at Gaylord’s, with terrible sherry and then even-more-terrible gin. Later, whoever was still around headed to Ernest’s room to eat something warming out of a can, oily sardines with their salted sea taste, potato soup, beans, corned beef. Coffee thinned with evaporated milk that clung to the side of the enamel cup. The tin opened with a penknife.
As it grew late, we talked about Hollywood, whatever gossip we could glean, or what we could invent. We almost never spoke about what had happened that day. Not the brigades, the offensive, the mud, the smoke. Not the battlefield where bodies were waxen with rain. Not the city reduced to rubble, or the house that had been there just the morning before, now a pile of bricks and splintered wood. Not the glass and rags and paper and plaster crushed to paste and white dust.
Just after midnight, we heard the shelling begin, like clockwork. Ernest rose from where he was sitting on his bed and opened the row of windows so they wouldn’t break. I got up and went to the small gramophone Ernest kept in the corner and wound the crank and heard Chopin flare up. The first few bars of the Mazurka in C Major.
“I love this song,” Matthews said. He sat hugging his knees, looking very young and hopeful.
“It’s not a war song,” Ernest said.
“Exactly,” Matthews replied.
“I want to hear it again,” I said.
“It’s still playing,” Ernest said with a half smile.
“Yes, and when it’s finished, I want it again.”
* * *
—
One night a group of us got to talking about what came next. I could scarcely stand to think about leaving Madrid and what that meant, but Ernest seemed to be half packed already. His new novel, To Have and Have Not, was about to be released, and he was anticipating the sales figures and notices.
“The reviews have to be better this time,” he said.
He meant better than those for Green Hills of Africa, the long nonfiction account of his safari trip to Kenya, which had as many literary references in its pages as hunting stories. I’d read some of those notices, too, and still remembered how John Chamberlain had ridiculed the book in the Times, “Thus Mr. Hemingway murders one whooping crane and the symbolism of Moby-Dick in the same motion.” I was already so loyal to Ernest’s work then, I’d silently fumed for him, incensed.
“At least no one ignores your books,” Matthews said. “That’s what most writers face, isn’t it?”
“Almost all of them, actually,” I agreed. “You write, desperate to publish something so you can write something else. Then nothing sells and no one reads you, and you realize you’re chasing yourself backward down a hole.”
“There’s journalism for security now that you have Collier’s on your side,” Ernest pointed out. “It’s always worked for me.”
“We’re not in the same situation at all. Here I have the chance to write something meaningful, but back home I’ll just be offered the ‘woman’s angle’ again. You’ll always have choices.” I heard the edge in my voice, but couldn’t stop. “You’ll never write a book that isn’t a bestseller, no matter what the notices say.”
“Haven’t I earned that?” His eyes held a challenge, and suddenly I realized we were actually talking about the future, how his was as bright as it had ever been, and mine was full of uncertainty. To Have and Have Not was his title? Yes, that about said everything.
“What do you want to do?” Matthews asked me, wisely trying to change the subject.
“An agency wrote me about doing some lectures for Spain in the States. There’s a whopping fee, and I’d be helping, too.”
“You’re joking,” Ernest said.
“Why shouldn’t I say yes?”
“No reason.” His voice had gone eerily flat. “If you don’t mind money-grubbing, there isn’t any problem, is there?”
I blinked at him a moment, not quite believing the mood could turn so quickly. He was speaking to me as if we were adversaries, not friends. Certainly not lovers.
“Why pretend to be honorable at all?” he went on. “A whore in wartime is still a whore, isn’t she?”
Matthews shot me a look, but it was too late. Without thinking, I slapped him.
Ernest’s eyes glittered as if he had succeeded at something or were daring me to do it again. Instead, I turned on my heel and raced out of the bar, not stopping until I was behind my own door. I didn’t bother turning on the light, just poured myself a drink and worked at it shakily until I heard his knock at the door.
“Marty, open up. Let me in.”
I sat still as a stone on the edge of my bed. I wasn’t going to him or even considering it after that little show. But then his voice came louder. He began to bang on the door, shouting my name, and I understood that in his current state he couldn’t be bothered with tact or caution.
“Stop,” I hissed, swinging open the door, but he wasn’t near finished. He began spitting insults at me. He told me he’d thought I was a real writer, but now it was clear that I was only after experience. I had probably been using him this whole while.
“I’m using you?” I swung for him again, unable to stop myself. He blocked my arm with his own and sent the lamp crashing across the floor. It exploded into dozens of shards while we stood looking at it and at each other, both of us frightened, I think, at how much we could stir in the other in no time at all.
“I think I should go,” he said.
I only stood there fuming, shock waves continuing to pulse in the room.
* * *
—
The next day I woke feeling like concrete had been poured over my shoulders and neck. I forced myself out of bed and out of the hotel, and spent the day touring Madrid with a small team of architects and stonemasons who were determining what was salvageable in the buildings that had been shelled. They examined foundations, measured the damage, and considered the risks.
I was doing the same, of course, still seething about things Ernest had said. How could I possibly be using him, unless he meant that I was a mercenary climber, a career girl. The thought made me feel numb and murderous simultaneously, and I had no one but myself to blame.
* * *
—
“We’ve got to end this now,” I said to Ernest when we were alone in his room after dinner.
“This is about last night. I’m sorry, Marty. I don’t know what got into me.”
“It doesn’t matter. I told myself I’d never be in this situation again.”
“Me too. It’s funny how some people never learn. I wish my conscience wasn’t so sharp, and that I had a terrible memory. I’d sleep a damned sight better.”
“I’m not built for forgetting,” I said. “I never was.”
“What are you built for?”
“I’m doing my best to figure that out. And making a mess of it, too.”
He was quiet. So quiet I thought I could hear shadows tick in their corners. “I wish I could marry you. I would, you know. I don’t think there’s another woman like you anywhere.” His voice was low, and then it fell away and the room was still again and I almost couldn’t bear it. The truth was I had imagined the possibility many times. I had conjured a place for us off the map somewhere, an oasis where we would write and talk of books, make love, and drink sherry and sleep in the sun. But that was a fantasy, and marriage as a thing whispered in the dark while he was married to someone else was even less than that. Less than a cloud. A dream. A mirage.
He belonged to Pauline, and I had never belonged to anybody.
“I should go,” I said.
“Please don’t run out on me. I love you, and I know you love me, too.”
“I wish I didn’t.” My throat felt tight with held-in tears. “Love doesn’t solve anything. It’s not an answer. It’s not some bright beacon showing us the way. It’s not any of that.”
“No. No, it isn’t. But what else do we have?”
He kissed me, and I couldn’t breathe. Nothing, I wanted to shout at him, but that was already understood.
25
Sometimes the only antidote for pain is more of it. In our last few weeks in Madrid, we made love every day, sometimes twice a day, desperately, trying to push through each other to what couldn’t be gotten at. His bed was an operating table, and this was heart surgery. It was awful. It was over too quickly.
“Tell me something,” I said quietly, not looking at him. The night was so still I could hear the blood tunneling through my body, the stopping and starting of each breath. Over our heads, the walls touched lightly as the corners of a picture frame. “Tell me anything.”