For almost four years, Ernest and I had been together—immorally, in one way, if you thought like that, but also cleanly and honorably, because we wanted to be. Now there would be insurance policies and codicils and all the sticky bindings of matrimony. But it was done. I could only face the future, drink my champagne like a good girl, and be fiercely, dizzily merry.
Afterward, we headed east in Ernest’s brand-new Buick, which wasn’t black, for once, but a glittering color called paradise green. Ernest looked happy and relieved—weightless—as he slid behind the wheel, as if the physical fact of his shiny new wedding ring held him in place and made him feel sure of life again. My own ring was the loveliest thing I’d ever seen—a platinum band studded with small diamonds and sapphires, part of the spoils of this new book and what it could buy. It was so beautiful, I was almost afraid of it. I found myself looking at it again and again, as if I might catch it in the act of becoming something else.
52
It took us most of a week to travel from Cheyenne to New York, where Ernest had promised me a honeymoon at the Barclay. Along the way we talked of the book he might do next. He’d had an idea to write about the Gulf Stream, deeply and factually, obsessively, as he had bullfighting in Death in the Afternoon.
“I’d love it if I could do something for the boys, too,” he said. “I don’t know what exactly yet, maybe an adventure story. Something they’d like to read.”
“That would mean so much to them. Now, obviously, but also for someday. A real legacy.”
“How’s your work coming?”
For a moment, I thought of how to answer him. He’d been so preoccupied, I couldn’t remember the last time we discussed my work, or he’d asked to read pages. “I’m pretty far along on a collection of stories. They might be too gloomy for your taste, but I like them.”
“I don’t mean to tell you what to write. I’m just trying to look out for you.”
“I know.” I gazed out at Nebraska, the shorn cornfields, silver with hoarfrost. The land went on and on, empty and unspoiled. “But it’s almost as though I have to relearn everything with this book. The last one broke my heart. I’ve forgotten how to trust my own instincts.”
“I know, Rabbit. They don’t all bust you to pieces, though. I promise.”
It was easy for him to say. He was riding the most glorious wave of his life. I swallowed hard and said, “I just have to toughen up and write the damned book and take my chances like anyone else.”
“I think you should let Scribner’s do it when you’re ready. Max would put it out beautifully and respect your thoughts, too. I’m not saying you should decide anything now. Just mull it over.”
He meant to support me, to protect me, if he could, from another potential failure. Still, I felt a shadow of unease. “What happened to your idea that the same operation shouldn’t publish two writers in the same family?”
“I’m not sure I trust anyone else. This is my wife we’re talking about.”
* * *
—
The Barclay was Ernest’s favorite hotel in New York, and he treated our suite as he might his own living room, often keeping the door open to the hall, and inviting all sorts of old friends by, literary folks and sports personalities, and reporters seeking interviews. We could barely keep our bar stocked. The telephone rang off the hook.
Certainly I understood why Ernest was relishing the chance to receive everyone just now—life was on his side, and he was the talk of the town. But I felt even more frayed and exasperated than I had in Sun Valley. My husband belonged to everyone and seemed to like it that way. Where had the quiet gone, and the privacy?
“Do we have to be on display all the time?” I complained.
“I guess not, but I can’t really see wishing this all away so soon. Seems like bad luck to even think it. Can’t you hang on a bit longer?”
“I’ll try,” I promised. But it all wore on me. There seemed to be no moment that someone might not burst in the door wanting something—a chat, a drink, an interview, a photograph. We were never alone, and sometimes I could scarcely recognize the couple we’d become—and in such a short time.
The only company I actually relished was when Bumby came down from school on two of the weekends we were there to stay with us. Ernest thought it would be fun to give him a few boxing lessons at George Brown’s Gym on West Fifty-seventh Street, a place he’d loved for years. They went suited up in thick gray jersey with towels around their necks and spent hours training with the bag and working on footwork. Ernest believed that boxing was one of the best ways to stay trim and also sweat out the liquor he was taking in. Bum didn’t even try to sneak shots from his father’s flask, as far as I knew, and was already a perfect physical specimen, but I could tell that heading into that masculine sanctuary with his father by his side felt like a particular rite of passage. He’d crossed an essential threshold and had a right to be there now.
But where was my place? That wasn’t at all clear. Almost immediately, I grew tired of being trotted out as the new wife. It was almost impossible to work in our suite with so many comings and goings, and so one day, desperate to be free of the vortex, I made a lunch date with Charles Colebaugh at Collier’s.
“Is there any possibility of an assignment?” I asked him over shrimp cocktail at the Russian Tea Room.
“Well, there’s the Burma Road to cover, and the war in China. But I wouldn’t think of you for that.”
“China?” I felt jolted. It was difficult to stay in my chair. “Why not?”
“You just got married, Marty, or hadn’t you heard?”
“Married isn’t dead, Charles. My work still matters the same as ever.”
“All right, all right. Don’t get your nose out of joint. I was just thinking you wouldn’t be as free to travel now. It’s a reasonable assumption.”
It was a reasonable assumption, and yet I felt an urgency to run at this chance now, while I still could, to claim something for myself before I became completely swallowed up by Ernest’s career, his fame. “I’ll make myself free.”
* * *
—
Though China and Japan had been battling for resources for decades, in 1937 an all-out war had begun, and now the Japanese occupied almost two-thirds of the Republic of China, including the coastline. The only way to get supplies into the country was the Burma Road, seven hundred seventeen miles stretching through ruggedly mountainous terrain and linking Kunming with Lashio, Burma, and, farther along, Rangoon. Britain had been aiding the Chinese since the conflict had begun, and protecting their crown colony along the way, but recently Roosevelt had become involved as well. Defending China was a way to secure it as an important ally now that Japan had joined the Axis powers. No one liked to think that Japan might openly attack us, but it was naïve to ignore the possibility. The Burma Road was a big story—an important story—and I wanted to be the one to tell it.
When I got back to the suite, Ernest was looking through a large stack of magazines for new notices while Bumby gobbled lunch enough for six from room service. The timing wasn’t perfect, but I thought Bum’s being there might dilute some of the tension if the conversation went south. And it did.
“China?” Ernest barked. “Are deprivation and difficulty some kind of flypaper for you?”
“Oh, stop. It’s a plum assignment. There’s so much happening in the Far East now, and I’ve always, always, dreamed of going there. Ever since I was a child, really. All of those place-names…Hong Kong, Singapore, Guam. The Orient. Doesn’t that sweep you away?”
“Someone’s read too much Somerset Maugham.” He narrowed his gaze. “What kind of honeymoon would China be anyway?”
Honeymoon? “You’d go along, then?” He’d surprised me.
“I think it sounds swell, Mart,” Bumby said from his chair.
“Can you really free yourself u
p now? I’ll be fine on my own. I still remember how.”
“I have a signed contract saying you’ll never leave me again, if you haven’t forgotten. And there’s another contract, if you remember. Some words spoken in Cheyenne. This might be the only way I can see my wife.”
“Of course I haven’t forgotten.” I went over and draped my arms around his neck, touched that he’d concede rather than fight me on this. That he would follow me where I was going when it was almost always the other way around. “Thank you, Rabbit. It will be wonderful to have you there.”
* * *
—
That week, before the ink had dried on my paperwork from Collier’s, Ernest contacted an editor he knew at PM and had a contract of his own to write a series of articles on the “real China.”
I knew everything would go more smoothly if he had work of his own to do, but I’d just begun to like the scenario I’d painted in my mind, that for once he would be subject to the demands of my schedule, traveling as my husband, my entourage, my cheering squad. I should have known better. To get my own glimpse of “the real China,” I would now have to compete with him, elbow to elbow, and pen to pen. I would also get no break at all from the chaos his fame created. Even on the far side of the world, he would be the great Ernest Hemingway, of course. And I would be his wife first, and myself only if I fought constantly to make it so.
53
The first order of business was submitting to an awful series of typhoid injections. Then, achy and bruised, we went to Washington to arrange the necessary visas and be briefed on China. From there, we made the long flight to Los Angeles, spending two days in Hollywood, where we had lunch with Gary and Rocky Cooper, before heading to San Francisco to meet Ingrid Bergman. When David O. Selznick had told her she had only a narrow window to catch us before we headed to the Far East, she’d driven through most of the night to make it happen. What a baffling thing life could be, for there was Bergman, tall and slender without a stitch of makeup, as natural as a length of birch bark, sitting across from us in a restaurant on Sacramento Street. She wore a camel-colored wool coat over a turtleneck and dark pants—simple traveling clothes she looked anything but simple in.
Ernest and I were both a little in awe of her, not because she was a star, but because she seemed to glow. It was an ordinary light she had—she just had more of it than anyone else.
“Your book is so romantic,” she told Ernest. “I can’t tell you how much it moves me.”
“You’d have to agree to have your hair shorn. It would be sort of a shame to ruin what you have.”
“Not at all. It’s such a part of Maria’s story. Who’d flinch from that for vanity’s sake?”
“I’m glad you see it that way. I don’t suppose you’d show us your ears.”
“Ernest!” I said, feeling horrified he’d be so fresh, but she only smiled and obliged him, lifting her brown hair and turning side to side. Of course they were perfect.
“I think it’s wonderful that you haven’t let Hollywood change your looks,” I told her.
“Oh, they were after me. You have no idea. My hair was too long, my name was too German, and I was far too tall. Oh, and my eyebrows were all wrong. I can’t think of the meetings they had over my eyebrows.” She smiled as if none of it touched her now. But I’d felt the power of that sort of scrutiny when Time’s journalist had weighed in on the shape of my face, the length of my legs, when the way I looked had nothing at all to do with being a writer. We shared something, a particular kind of sisterhood forged by outside pressure that perhaps only women understood.
“I wish I’d never touched mine,” I said. “They never grow back, not really.”
“Nothing does, not the way it was before.”
A short while later we said goodbye on the street while Ernest hailed a taxi.
“What do you hope to find in China?” she asked.
“I don’t exactly know, but it feels important to go there. It feels important to go everywhere one can and see all there is to see and try to understand it. Everything’s changing so fast. I want to believe in something while there’s still time. I want to tell the truth, even when it’s difficult. And I want to find the story I’m meant to write.”
She was looking at me with those soft, large, intelligent eyes, and I felt a sudden wave of insecurity that I had babbled on too long or been insensible. But she only said, “You seem to know a lot about what you want, actually.”
“I hope so,” I said, and looked back at Ernest waiting by the cab, his body squared against the open door while traffic streamed past. “I’m going to need it where I’m going.”
* * *
—
Ernest and I had been thinking the sail over to Honolulu would be full of banquets and buffets; that we’d sit in deck chairs and be waited on hand and foot while paradise rolled nearer. Instead, the journey was like a small death. We were plunged first one way and then the other until we were green as frogs. Bad weather trailed us, and the high seas never stopped pitching with dark chop. I wanted off almost immediately, but there were days and days of unbroken misery. Finally we went belowdecks and tried to stay drunk. Ernest had a theory that with enough liquor you could fool your stomach or sense of balance or whatever it was that made you wish you’d never seen food and never would again. But even whole jugs of whiskey only helped marginally.
“Who knew the Pacific was such trouble,” I told him. “Isn’t an ocean an ocean?”
“Obviously not.”
When we reached Pearl Harbor we were anxious as could be to stagger off the boat and find solid ground, but the moment the gangplank was lowered, scores of well-wishers scrambled aboard to greet us, flinging leis around our necks and making speeches and saying “Aloha.” Photographers snapped publicity photos. Strangers pumped our hands and thrust more garlands on us until we could barely see over them.
“You’d better get me out of here.” Ernest had his jaw clenched, his smile like a barracuda’s. “The next person who touches me will get a sock in the nose.”
“Careful, darling.” It took effort not to break my own stricken smile. “They’re all here for you, you know.” In truth, I wanted to punch someone, too, or scream my head off, just to clear the air. Instead, I said, “Thank you, thank you so much,” over and over, a hundred times or more. I was green to the gills, delirious with fatigue, but smiling, smiling, doing my very best impression of Mrs. Hemingway.
54
We traveled to our hotel by rickshaw through the choking heart of Hong Kong, the cramped streets seeming to close in on us as our driver navigated through bicycles and tumbledown food stalls, bodies and more bodies. There were scraps of red and white paper wherever you looked, litter from the firecrackers that seemed to go off every few seconds. There were chickens in the street, and also babies. Who knew how the traffic moved at all?
Our hotel in the swarming downtown was ancient looking with touches of gentility. Broad paddle fans swept back and forth across the ceiling of our room, and heavy brass spigots trimmed the heavy soaking tub in the bathroom. I said a prayer for small mercies, climbed in up to my chin, and didn’t come out for two hours while Ernest went to get the lay of the land.
“I found someone to shoot pheasant with,” he said when he came back. He’d found a Chinese newspaper, two huge bottles of warm beer, and a colorful array of fireworks he wanted to try setting off right there in the room.
I grabbed them out of his hands, thinking of a hiding place. “Pheasant hunting? Where? You know there’s a war on, right?”
“It’s here somewhere, I suppose, though not obviously.”
And that was true. The Japanese army surrounded Hong Kong on three sides, but the most serious problem seemed to be overcrowding. Apparently the colonial government was attempting to evacuate its citizens, but hadn’t made a dent in the number of bodies. For common people, food was
scarce, and clean water was a myth. There was staggering poverty everywhere you looked, but Hong Kong was also like nothing else we’d ever experienced. The air was full of smells we’d never smelled before. Smoke hung on the air and filled the alleyways, where mysterious offerings swung from hooks, and children squatted in the sewers. This was life, as teeming and raw and strange as it came. I wanted to understand it all the only way I knew how, which was to go out and fling myself in up to my neck, talking to everyone I could, taking every little alleyway by foot, getting good and lost until I found a picture, a story, a moment. Something that called to me alone.
Ernest, in the meantime, held court in the hotel lobby, letting his story find him, with absolute confidence that it would. His celebrity drew all sorts of people to him—Cantonese bankers and expat rugby players, cabdrivers and card sharks and even an intelligence officer for an expat warlord general. He took over the choicest corner of the room, spreading out his books and magazines and highball glasses, receiving his subjects from a tufted cordovan leather chair, and listening to tale after tale. He was in his element.
* * *
—
Four days after we arrived, I boarded a primitive, metal-clad DC-2 bound for Lashio on the border of Burma. It was before dawn in early February, the air frigidly cold and black as anything. There were only seven other passengers, all Chinese, in the dark cave of the cabin. The seats were rickety-looking metal with the barest canvas coverings. The lavatory sat behind a green canvas curtain and was, essentially, a lightly covered hole that everything dropped straight through to whatever or whomever lay below. I couldn’t even look at it without shuddering.