The next morning, I helped Ernest load the car, which was already chock-full of rods and reels and all kinds of tackle, plus rifles, and sleeping rolls and canteens. Over his shoulder, the morning sun was fat and bright as a tangerine.
“Just get in,” he said. “We’ll figure things out when we get there.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
He leaned against the side of the Buick and I pressed into him, draping my arms around his neck. The sun shone down on us, warming the tops of our heads. From the treetops, cicadas rattled their song, which was about the end of summer, and about us, too, it seemed. Maybe the neighbors were watching. Maybe my mother was standing at the window waiting for me. I only wanted to stand in this spot for as long as possible, to hold time still.
“If you get lonely, you know where to find me,” he said.
“I’m already lonely.”
“I don’t want to be without you. We’re going to have to do something about that.”
“We are. I love you something awful, you know?”
“Good.”
He kissed me for a long time, while I felt uncertainty pulse between us, and happiness, too, at having found each other. The two hovered in a balance, difficult but true. Finally, there was nothing to do but let him go.
He climbed behind the wheel of the Buick, nudging over his tackle box and favorite rod. I kissed him one last time through the open window and watched him pull away, passing under all the bowed trees along the street, growing smaller and gauzier and fainter, until he wasn’t there at all. Even then, I stood still a few moments longer, while my heart stretched after him, out across the spaces between us.
37
Days after Ernest and the boys were settled at the L-Bar-T, Hitler’s troops marched into Poland. In no time at all, Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand all declared war on Germany, and there was no place in the world far enough or deep enough to hide from the terrible facts any longer. The Second World War had begun.
In St. Louis, Mother and I huddled around the radio for hours and hours without moving or speaking, feeling drugged with sadness and worry, though we’d known this was all coming for a long while. The same broadcasts played endlessly with very little variation, but we kept listening. The living room went dark. Neither of us could even stand to turn on the lights.
When Ernest phoned, he told me it was the same for him and the boys. They had barely left their cabin. He was only sleeping a few hours a night, tuned constantly to the portable radio on his pillow. It was like no other time in Wyoming; that was certain.
“What do you think Roosevelt will do?” he asked through the phone line.
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters. Wasn’t everything lost with Spain and Czechoslovakia? We did nothing then, and now it’s too late.”
Mother’s phone was a heavy black monstrosity, with a receiver that must have weighed a pound. It was cool and dull feeling in my hand and against my cheek, and seemed to stand for something, though I couldn’t have said what. I heard Ernest breathing, so near sounding, and yet impossibly far.
“The whole thing makes me sick,” he said.
“I know.”
We fell silent, and I could hear the sound the wires made, something between a hum and a heartbeat. “Fife’s back from Paris,” he finally said. “She’s flying out tomorrow.” His voice had dropped, and I knew he had been dreading telling me.
Jealousy rose up quick as anything. I didn’t know why anyone ever said jealousy was green when clearly it was red. Rage red. “I knew she hadn’t given up.”
“I didn’t. It’s dawning on me I don’t know very much about women. I’m sorry, Rabbit.”
I didn’t know what to say. The phone felt hot, suddenly. I wanted to drop it, or throw it.
In the silence, he went on, “I’m going to have to do something. I thought it might be easier for her to come to a decision on her own time.”
“Someone has to do something.” I’d snapped the words, making them a challenge, but he didn’t bite. He was so deep inside his own worries it was very possible he couldn’t even recognize mine.
“It’s a hell of a trip already, I’ll tell you that.”
* * *
—
I didn’t hear from him for the next two weeks, while I camped out on the divan in the living room, listening to the radio and feeling more and more vulnerable. The world was being turned inside out, and I was, too. I was plagued with terrible thoughts of Ernest changing his mind, of the tactics Pauline might use to hold him. But when he finally did phone, he told me it was over. He’d asked for a divorce—no more pretending, no more silent standoffs. Pauline had listened, seeming to hear, but he wasn’t sure in the end, since she’d taken to her bed immediately afterward, locking the door, and hadn’t come out for three days.
He was calling from a pay phone down the road from the ranch for privacy. I tried to picture him where he stood, mountains all around and pine dust, goshawks, a hard crisp edge to the air. He didn’t sound angry or relieved, but like someone he knew well and had loved until he couldn’t any longer had died.
“It’s miserable business,” he said. “She’s strong as steel in some ways, but those are the ones who fall hardest when you get down to it.”
“She’s still there, then?”
“Until the end of the week. Toby Bruce will get her and the boys back to New York. Bum will stay on a bit longer, and then go to Cody with Hadley and Paul.”
“The boys must be a wreck.”
“I think they’re trying to be brave. Patrick hasn’t really said anything. He just sits on the front porch and reads, quiet as a stone. He’s there now. Gigi’s trying to comfort his mother, but she won’t let anyone near. He just waits at the door to her room and plays solitaire on the floor in the hall. It’s like a goddamned funeral parlor.”
“How awful. I wish there was something I could do.”
He was quiet for a long minute and then said, “What if you came west? I could almost stand this if you were here.”
“It wouldn’t be fair to turn up the minute the door closes, would it?”
“What’s been fair about any of it? I feel awful. I’m not sleeping. Come.”
The line crackled as we both fell quiet. For a long time, even after he was gone, I didn’t hang up.
* * *
—
I began packing almost immediately, dragging the radio up to my room so as not to miss the latest apocryphal updates. The Nazis were defiling Poland as they marched. They’d reached the Vistula and were set to take Warsaw. Canada had thrown in with the Allies and declared war on Germany. In Washington, Roosevelt had called a special session of Congress to revisit our Neutrality Acts, but not much changed. His position was what it had been for years, that we wouldn’t enter any foreign wars. We simply couldn’t. He’d made that promise to all the mothers and fathers, and sons and wives, and he was going to keep it for as long as he was able.
“What’s happening with Ernest?” my mother wanted to know. She’d come up to check on me and found me throwing things into an open suitcase. She looked worried, but only sat down to show me she was ready to listen if I was ready to talk.
“He’s asked for a divorce.” The words were thick and strange in my mouth. I felt run through with guilt about Pauline, but also freer and more hopeful than I’d been in months. “I’m going to join him out west. This has all been pretty ugly for him.”
“I’m sure it has.” There was something in her tone, chilliness or suspicion. “But what about you?”
“What do you mean? I thought you liked Ernest.”
“I do like him. A more charming man never lived, but he seems to demand a great deal from the women in his life. What about your book? Won’t that suffer if you drop everything to run to his side?”
“I’m not dropping
everything.” I tried not to sound defensive, but I was. “The bulk of it’s finished. I’m onto the second draft now. And anyway, could you please try to be happy for us? It might not look like it should, but Ernest loves me.”
“Of course he loves you.” She settled next to me, picking up a pillow and gently smoothing the cotton with her fingertips. “He’d be a fool not to. But he’s been through two wives, now. He loved them, too, didn’t he?”
“I assume so.” It was hard to hear her talk this way without rushing to his side. Or maybe it was my own side I was rushing to. They’d blurred together and now I couldn’t tell the difference. “He was so young the first time. People make mistakes.”
“Yes, and I’m trying to spare you one, sweetheart. Possibly the worst mistake of your life. Just be careful, will you, Marty?”
“I will,” I said, knowing full well that it was too late to promise any such thing.
38
Sun Valley sat in the Wood River Valley, surrounded by a symphony of mountain ranges, and the Sawtooth National Forest. There were flaring peaks, and golden jagged hills, and aspens rising tall and shapely against the sky.
After the Depression, Averell Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad had had the bright idea that year-round play might save this part of Idaho from spiraling into worse straits. He’d sunk a lot of capital but hadn’t been able to draw many visitors until he thought to seed the field with movie stars and other glittering sorts that would make Sun Valley look like the plum portion of heaven it actually was.
When he’d reached out to Ernest, offering a free vacation in exchange for a small amount of publicity, Ernest had actually turned him down at first. Then the war had come, and Pauline and all that misery, and suddenly a new place without any bad memories, or any memories at all, seemed like just the thing.
They gave us the corner suite on the second floor, the nicest the lodge had to offer, which had two large rooms, both with open fireplaces, a vast bed, and a living area wide enough for ninepins. It was almost too much, an embarrassment of riches with our current pangs of conscience and remorse—but I did feel something begin to loosen as we stood there and took in the view.
The window to the terrace was open, and the whole valley was laid out gold and green. Bald Mountain rose up out of the basin like a lord, the dry ski runs streaking down the sides as if something sticky had melted there. Soon enough there would be snow, and frost-tipped mornings and clear, crisp nights.
“We’ll start writing again every day,” I said. “That’s what we both need. There’s plenty of room for us to forget the other is even here. At lunch we’ll ring a bell or yodel or something.”
“That sounds wonderful.” He looked at me, his eyes tired and unguarded from the night’s long drive and also everything that had come before. All he was feeling and not saying. “That might cure us. But we should have some sort of story to explain you.”
“Oh.” His words thudded. Pauline was gone, but of course nothing was truly settled. Not yet. “You mean how I’m not Mrs. Hemingway.”
“Yes.”
“What would you like me to say?” I snapped.
“I don’t have any answers, you know. I don’t have the damnedest idea what’s right. How do you think we should move ahead?” He sounded frustrated with my sharpness, but he’d never been anyone’s mistress, never been where I was now.
“I guess that depends if you want to protect your reputation or mine?”
He looked stung. “Yours, obviously. I’m not sure the shreds of my reputation would be worth the effort. We’ll come up with something.”
“All right,” I said, unconvinced.
“For now, we both need sleep and a good meal and then some whiskey. If we just keep doing that over and over for a few weeks, we might be okay. We’ll get to writing, like before. We’ll fill ourselves up again and in the afternoons we’ll fish or ride or shoot.”
“Shoot? What? I think you’ve got the wrong girl.”
“No.” He squeezed me against his chest and held me there while my questions and doubt went on ticking loudly inside me. “For the first time in a long time, I’ve got the right girl.”
* * *
—
The plan was to stay for six weeks, and get straight again—straight with each other, and our work. To do this we had to forget about the world a little. The Soviets had invaded Poland and quickly turned Warsaw over to the Nazis, as if it were a toy to be bartered with, kicked back and forth. Reinhard Heydrich, who’d been second in command in Himmler’s Security Service, was put in charge of the Sicherheitsdienst, overseeing intelligence for the SS, as well as the Gestapo and Hitler’s Kriminalpolizei. It was too much if you let it all in, all the time, so we agreed to listen to the radio only twice a day, at lunchtime, after we’d written our quota of pages, and again in the evening when we had drinks before dinner.
Ernest was plunging forward on “the Spain book,” as he was calling it, and I was elbow deep in my second draft of A Stricken Field, relieved to feel fully inside the story now, completely absorbed. It felt real to me, this world I was making, almost as if it were a bridge I could stand on when so much else was erratic and unpredictable.
In the afternoons, we tried to be outside as much as possible, and to enjoy what was left of the nice weather. The country was so beautiful. Sometimes we went riding up into the hills on horseback. At first I wasn’t sure I could sit a mount anymore, since I hadn’t been on one since I was a girl and hadn’t been very good at it then. But Ernest said it would be fine, and it was. He and Taylor Williams decided on a nice old gelding for me named Blue that was broad as a sofa across the backside and awfully patient with me when I hadn’t sorted myself out yet.
Taylor was the lead guide at the lodge, a tall and narrow Kentuckian who shot and fished as well as Ernest. He was smart with the kind of biting sense of humor that caught you off guard sometimes, because it didn’t seem to jibe with that lilting drawl of his—like spitting out honey-coated tacks. He could make us both laugh, and Ernest loved him instantly, calling him the Colonel.
You could ride east from the lodge, crossing the Big Wood River, and over a broad meadow flocked with rabbitbrush and sumac and sage, the grass nearly up to the horses’ bellies. Trails went up into the hills, over stark-looking golden passes or through aspen forests, all of it so free looking and untouched by man it made you almost dizzy.
One day we went north instead, skirting the edge of Sun Valley Lake until it met Trail Creek, and then following that, lazily and happily, until we’d found a nice flat dry spot for the horses to graze. We tied them off and threw a blanket down under a tree on a soft berm and had our lunch before lying back, closing our eyes against the sun.
“We should stay until it snows, don’t you think?” I said.
“Maybe we should,” he said. “Or until Christmas even. I’ll bet it’s wonderful here, and quiet, too. No one’s found out about this place. Part of me hopes they never do.”
“Don’t tell Harriman that. He’ll sock you in the nose.”
“Still. Things make sense here, and they haven’t in a long while. There aren’t any ghosts.”
“Oh, we’ve carried some with us,” I argued. “You know we have.”
“Yes, but they’re growing lighter.”
On a high branch above us, a blue jay craned his head one way and then the other, intent on all sorts of things we couldn’t see. This was his kingdom. “Where are you at now in the book?” I asked Ernest.
“Gaylord’s. God, it’s fun to be there again. To turn and know just where everything is, and how it looks in the dark, and what everyone’s secrets are.”
“Gaylord’s! Good Christ, I’m jealous. I want to go now, just for a drink, you know? To feel everything shaking apart, and then to come back here and feel very safe again.” I fell quiet for a moment, and then said, “If you thin
k about it, Spain is one of our ghosts, too. It broke my heart, but I wouldn’t take any of it back. Places change us, don’t they? Sometimes more than we can even guess.”
“Yes. Writing is one way to keep certain places alive. I’ve often thought that, and not just about Spain. If I know I’m going to write a story about Horton Bay, or Pamplona or Madrid, even, I feel better. As if I can’t ever really lose that time, or who I was then.”
“How about Sun Valley? Will you write about this?”
“Maybe I will. When I know what the story is. Not every place has a story.”
I looked up at the jay again, the pine tree behind him, the sky hard and blue behind that, not wanting any of it to disappear. “This one has to. Let’s make sure it does.”
39
We took to having dinner or drinks with Lloyd Arnold, the lodge’s PR photographer, and his wife, Tillie, a dark-haired, whip-smart woman with simplicity and honesty in spades. She wore her curls short, close to her head, and her brown eyes showed her thoughts and feelings as easily as if you were watching them played out through a pane of glass. Ernest liked her immediately, and I did, too, though she seemed to have very old-fashioned ideas about men and women. She didn’t understand why I needed to work, for instance, or even why I would want to.
“Part of it’s very practical,” I tried to explain. “I’ve always paid my own way, and that’s important to me. But I also have a passion for my writing. Sometimes, it seems like the only thing that makes sense to me at all.”
“I suppose it’s what women are doing now. Modern, as they say.”
“I think it’s wonderful. Why should we have to choose one thing or another?”
She smiled placidly, smoothing her skirt with her hands, but somehow she didn’t look convinced. “You really think you can have it all and not compromise anything?”