The photograph they’d used of me was far too large and vampish. I wore deep-red lipstick and sported a fashionable haircut, all of which worked to underline the journalist’s remarks. My face was “too beautiful” for a writer, he said. My long legs too “distracting.” It was a goddamned exposé.
When I showed Ernest, he threw the magazine end over end to the other side of the dining room. “These people are disgusting. They have no idea the trouble they’re going to cause me, and the boys, too.”
Of course he was worried about what this meant for him. This was the first time anyone had dared to report that we were romantically involved. It was also the first mention anywhere of Ernest and Pauline’s impending divorce. But as much as I understood his anxiety, I was still fuming, still raw. With no effort at all, the magazine had stolen my credibility as a writer, and reduced me to Ernest’s concubine.
“Listen to this,” I said, as I retrieved the magazine from the corner against my better judgment. “ ‘Gellhorn is headed to San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, where Ernest Hemingway is wintering.’ How do they even have that on record? Have reporters been following us?”
“Probably.” His tone was defeated, flat as slate. “It doesn’t really matter now. Fife’s going to come with her guns blazing. You can bet on it.”
And she did. The next day, a telegram arrived. She’d changed her mind about the boys coming to Havana that spring for Easter vacation. The environment won’t be healthy for them, she’d written.
“ ‘Environment,’ ” he repeated sourly. “You’d think I was running a whorehouse here. She can’t keep my kids from me.”
My head felt so heavy I had to rest it in my hands. “Can’t she, though?”
“Maybe. Oh, hell,” he said. “Maybe she can.”
He wrote her a long letter immediately trying to plead his case. We waited for her reply, both of us ill at ease and able to think of little else. I wrote several damning letters to Time, threatening to take legal action, and sat at my desk for long hours, trying to read and feeling lower than low. It was one thing to receive bad notices, and another thing entirely to have one’s work be made cheap and meaningless when it was not that. I’d worked hard—incredibly hard—for a year, and now all the public would remember was my sordid association with the most famous writer in America.
That famous writer wasn’t writing, either. The real world had grown too loud, and was drowning out Robert Jordan and everyone else in the book, there in the middle of chapter 28. Ernest began to panic. He told me he wanted to go away for a little while, just until the dust cleared, to see if he could get back in. I agreed to stay behind to field the mail and keep an eye out for snooping reporters, but then immediately regretted it. I needed peace just as much as he did, and to believe in the value of my work again. I wanted to run far away until the dark voices in my head quieted. But his needs upstaged mine.
He left for Camagüey, an inland city on the plains of Cuba, hundreds of miles from us. It was far away from everything, and just what he’d been looking for. He wrote me every day, telling me that his head was clearing a little at a time, and that the book was coming back.
I was relieved for him, but I was also in mourning for my own book, and feeling very alone with it. From the beginning we had made a promise that our books would be our children. That we’d tend them together, him mine, and mine his. I still needed to know that we were in this together, even when things grew difficult, like now. I understood that he was overwhelmed, but I was, too.
I wrote him a letter telling him just how much I missed him and was looking forward to having him home again, as it should be. Then I closed the door on my office and my work. My articles for Collier’s had been posted, and I had no idea what came next. Someday I would be ready to think about that. For the moment, I only wanted peace and forgetting.
47
Ernest came home in the later part of March, just in time for Patrick and Gigi’s arrival from the mainland. Pauline had finally relented, though not happily. On the day they were set to come, I went around and around the house nervously wiping away nonexistent dust and rearranging piles of books, trying to distract myself. I still hadn’t begun to get over my book and what its failure meant. Overseas, the Soviets had begun bombing Viipuri until finally Finland submitted to their terms of surrender. I thought of the Finnish people, all their quiet determination and their dignity, and now their country would fall anyway. I felt awful, and didn’t know what to do with myself, so I washed and rewashed every glass in the sink, and then scoured myself in the hottest shower I could stand.
“They won’t care what anything looks like,” Ernest said. “They’re kids.”
“I want them to be comfortable here,” I said.
“And they will. You’ll see. Just give it time. They’re going to love you, you know.”
“God, I hope so.”
* * *
—
The moment he saw his sons on the gangplank of the ferry, Ernest rushed at them, somehow managing to scoop both of them off the ground at once. The look on their faces was beautiful. The pure, unadulterated joy of belonging to someone. Of coming home to love.
“How d’you do?” Patrick said with a warm and delicate smile when Ernest brought them my way. He had a straight fine nose, brown hair brushed down from the crown of his head, and beautifully shaped feathery eyebrows. Immediately I recognized his gentleness, the quiet that he kept at the center of himself. It was right there, as plain to see as his blue-checked cotton shirt.
“H’lo,” Gigi chirped. He put his warm slim hand in mine, his eyes black as glass buttons. When they darted up at me in the middle of the handshake, I could see the comic in him instantly. This was a funny story already in the making, just below the surface, where he was trying to be good, and I was trying to be good.
“You can call me Marty if you like.”
“That’s your name?”
“Yes, part of my name. It’s Martha, actually, but that’s too serious sounding for me, most of the time anyway.”
“I think my name’s too serious,” Patrick chimed in, “but no one around here uses it. I guess that’s lucky enough.”
“You’re the Mexican Mouse, aren’t you, because you were brown and small like a mouse when you were a baby?”
“I’m brown as a mouse in the summertime, too—browner than either of my brothers.”
“Say, I can get brown enough, too,” Gigi said.
“Sure, you can,” Ernest broke in, “and you’ll both get plenty of sun this week and we can have a contest and Marty can judge.”
We sorted the boys’ luggage in the car and settled them in the back before starting home the usual way, passing through the heart of the city and then winding up the hill out of town. It was the usual way, but already anything but ordinary. It was livelier, moving through the countryside with the boys talking and noticing things. The windows were down and Patrick had his hand out lightly, riding the air pressure.
“Can we go goggle fishing later?” Gigi asked.
“Sure, if the water’s not too cloudy,” Ernest said. “We’ll go plenty of times, so don’t worry if today’s not right.”
“Do you like goggle fishing, Marty?” Patrick asked.
“Why sure.” I turned around to face him, resting my arm over the top of the bench seat. “Not the fishing part so much as the swimming and looking at everything.”
“Whoever heard of not liking to fish?” Gigi’s question was good-natured and honest, coming as quick as thought, the way only children seemed to allow—not yet burdened by trying to rearrange themselves for others.
“It doesn’t matter,” Patrick said. “She can do as she pleases, can’t she? There are plenty of things to be good at.” He gave me a diplomat’s smile. He was clearly a natural mediator, as middle children often were, less on the side of any particular p
erson than on evenhandedness in general.
“Maybe I can learn to like it,” I offered.
“You’re a writer, aren’t you?” Gigi said. “Like Papa.”
“Yes.” Unexpectedly, my throat tightened. None of the tidying or preparing for the boys had touched that sore place in me. “No one’s quite like your father,” I said. “But yes, I am a writer.”
* * *
—
Time began to swing like a hammock as the boys settled into their vacation. They had no set bedtime and sometimes fell asleep at the dinner table, or on the floor in the middle of a game. The refrigerator was always open, no matter how close to either side of any meal we might be.
“Boys need food,” Ernest said simply.
Obviously that was true, but I had no idea of the scale. Entire hunks of cheese vanished. If I bought a dozen eggs, three dozen were needed. And the milk they could put away—it was shocking. But there was also something wonderful about coming into the kitchen and seeing one of the boys emptying a foamy white glass into his mouth without even breathing, and then gasping afterward for the coldness, and wiping his lips with the back of his sleeve.
They slept on cots on the long sun porch, strewing their bedclothes and dungarees and T-shirts and pajamas on the floor. Their socks, I found everywhere, which was funny, because they rarely seemed to wear them. Ernest laughed at this and everything. He seemed to have only two house rules, no properly filthy swearing before 4:00 P.M., and no sand inside. If we came back from the beach or an outing on Pilar, he made them rinse their feet and legs with buckets of rainwater on the terrace. All sorts of other things got tracked in, of course—rocks, bark, shiny leaves, and, once, a yellow-flecked, opaque-eyed lizard, but these were somehow permitted. And if it was after four, when the boys let everything rip, well, watch out.
“They’re actually making a great effort to behave for you,” Ernest said, as we were getting ready for bed one night. “I know it doesn’t seem that way, but just wait. Your newness will wear off and everything will go to hell. Maybe you won’t be as fond of them then.”
“I guess I can stand it,” I said, slipping into white cotton pajamas. “They’re children, after all.”
I could see I’d surprised him. “Miss Dutch Cleanser,” as he liked to call me. He gave me a funny look and then sank into bed and stretched out long. “I wish I could get some sort of special dispensation as their father.”
I flicked off the light and lay beside him, kicking the sheets clear. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”
“I’ll tell you one thing. I sleep better when they’re around. It’s the sound of their breathing. Even when I can’t hear it, I know it’s warm and even and untroubled. They get to sleep that way. They haven’t ruined anything for anyone yet.”
“I’m hoping they’re going to be around a lot. They bring life with them, you know?”
We lay still for a long time—so long that I was sure Ernest had fallen asleep. Then, in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, he said, “I’d like to have a daughter.”
He’d caught me off guard. I felt my pulse speed up instantly. “Would you?”
“Yes. With you, I’m saying. I’d like us to have a child.”
I felt a flashing up of excitement and terror and everything in between. I was glad we were in the dark, and that he couldn’t read my eyes. “Do you really think we’re ready for that? We’re not even married yet.”
“The wedding is a formality at this point, isn’t it? We’re already together in every way that matters. And anyway, no one’s ever ready for a child. I learned that with Bumby in Paris. You could have knocked me over with a feather at first. I just kept thinking of all I was losing, not having any idea how he would be a whole real person with his own wonderful mind. Not knowing how much he would bring.”
“Do you feel something’s missing, not having a daughter? Is that what this is about?”
“That’s part of it.” He rolled onto his side, releasing a complicated sigh. “But it’s also something I want us to have together. And I don’t know, there’s just a feeling I have thinking of her. Sometimes she seems so clear and real to me I can almost believe she’s here already.” He swallowed hard, his voice thick with emotion. “She has your hair and your eyes, and everything fine about her is what’s fine about you.”
“And what will you give her?”
“Not much until she’s older. Then she’ll learn to fish and swim and sail like her brothers. She’ll swim early, like a small otter, and freckle in the sun.”
Hearing him talk was stirring all sorts of things in me I wasn’t quite prepared for.
The more he went on, the more I could begin to see her, too, this small shining essence of a daughter, a bit of gold leaf quivering in a shaft of sunlight. “An otter with two rabbit parents?”
“That’s right,” he said. “And she’ll read three books before breakfast, just like the Mouse, and be funny like Gigi, and decent and kind like Bum. She’ll have all of us in her.”
“Well, she couldn’t sound more lovely. Who wouldn’t want that person around?” I paused, steadying myself. We’d plunged so far forward in one conversation I needed to catch up. “Maybe after we’ve married will be a good time.”
“Sure, if you need to do things the conventional way.”
“We couldn’t bear any more scandal right now, and you need to finish your book. When the time is right, we’ll know it.”
“We’re going to be so happy,” he said, curling toward me. “No one saw that coming in Spain, did they? Not even us.”
“No,” I said quietly. “Especially not us.”
48
It was a bright clear day—a day of frigate birds and flat white quilted-looking clouds and languorous bottomless sunshine. Pilar was tethered off one of the small numberless cays we frequented, rocking in a light wind. Ernest and I were on deck, and the boys had taken the dinghy out to the reef to goggle fish with Bumby, who’d just arrived the day before from the mainland. He’d spent part of his holiday with Hadley and Paul in Miami, and he was already brown from the sun—with tousled, sandy-blond hair and finely sculpted shoulders and a face that was so lovely it made you think of Achilles or Apollo, the absolute cream of Mount Olympus.
He was sixteen and utterly devoted to his brothers. Just now they swam along the lee side of the reef, with their rubber-framed masks squeezed tightly to their heads, their light wood-shaft spears floating atop the waves, which only had the slightest chop, the weather being so fine, while they kicked their long legs and bare feet.
All three boys seemed incredibly comfortable in the water, but there was so much of it all around, the vastness of the ocean and everything it contained just beyond the shallow stretch of the reef.
I shaded my sunglasses with my hand so I could see them all more clearly. “Do you think they’re all right?”
“Sure they are,” Ernest replied. “They’re with Bum, and they know to stick together.”
“They don’t seem afraid.”
“Not Mouse—he was made for the water—but Gigi knows about the things that can swim over the reef and worries about them. Not that he’d want his brothers to know that. It’s so important with brothers to appear braver than you are.”
Ernest went below and came back with two very tall glasses of rum and coconut water, with chipped ice and wedges of lime. The drink was cooling and delicious, the lime fizzing over my tongue, but I couldn’t quite relax with the boys out there. “Do you think something really could come over the reef at them?”
“I suppose that’s always possible. The tide is up.”
“At least the water’s clear.” I stood and continued to watch them, my drink in my hand, the boat swaying beneath me. I could see the shape of the reef, the way the tide boiled around the dark prongs of coral. Patrick had gotten a nice-sized grunt, b
right yellow, and Bumby had stopped to help him take the fish off the point of his spear. They were both laughing as they threw it into the dinghy, but there would be blood in the water now. I turned to Ernest. “Maybe we should be closer.”
He looked at me curiously. “It’s nice that you worry about them, I guess.”
“Is it nice? It’s hard to care about people. You end up fretting all the time and feeling helpless, hoping they’ll live forever. Only no one does.”
“Yes, that’s love for you.” He squinted into the sun, and then pulled the anchor, using the winch. Climbing up to the helm on the flying bridge, he started up the smaller Lycoming engine and used the controls to nose over until we were almost touching the dinghy, with Pilar’s portside to the reef, but not too close. All the while, I kept my eyes on the boys, thinking that Ernest must be right. Love came with risk by nature. But that didn’t mean any of it was easy.
“How’s that for you?” he asked when he was back down beside me again and the anchor was set.
“We can see everything now. Thank you.”
He came over and put his arms around me, resting his chin on my shoulder. “Yes, little mother. We can see everything now.”
* * *
—
The boys swam safely all day, seeming tireless, and caught lots of fish, which we cooked up that night when we were back at the Finca. Yellowtails and grunts and red snapper they cleaned for themselves—even Gigi could gut and scale anything with the precision of a surgeon—and we ate them with bacon and onions, and knobs of the Spanish cheese that Ernest liked to always have on hand in the icebox. Rene made a beautiful tomato salad to go along, and an apple cake dusted with confectioners’ sugar, with soft spoonfuls of homemade ice cream. It was a feast fit for the day we’d had, and we sat at the table for a long time afterward, with only the candles lit, as if it were Christmas, while the boys told me their favorite stories.