“It will happen, I promise,” I said as gently as possible. “I know how much you want a daughter.”
“I want one. That’s right…and that’s the problem, isn’t it? If you wanted a child, we’d already have one. You’ve only been pretending.”
“Oh, Ernest, that’s not true,” but he was already striding out of the room and I was alone with his words as they bounced against the closed door and echoed back, challenging me.
Did I want a child? Did I? I had to admit that the dream was a perfect one when it remained a dream, shimmering out ahead of us like the lilting mirage of an oasis. Our daughter, with my hair and sense of adventure, and Ernest’s wits and his brown eyes, goggle fishing beside him in the reef, or scrambling up the path behind the pool house barefoot, an orchid tucked into her braid. Oh, it was lovely, that fantasy, but the moment I let myself think of how life would really be with a child, I hit against the truth like a submerged bit of sharp reef. Ernest loved his children, but he had the freedom of hunting or fishing with them on holidays, enjoying their company, while Pauline and Hadley did all the daily caring for them, particularly when they were young, making sure they were fed and well, their tears soothed, their skinned knees bandaged, their cares and worries listened to, their teeth brushed, their schoolwork done.
The list went on and on, and all of that would fall to me, I knew, as the mother. It was hard enough already to fight for my work now. With a baby, it would become a secondary consideration, while Ernest’s would go unchanged. My ability to travel independently would dissolve, but whenever Ernest needed to go anywhere, he would. Of course he would, because I’d be behind at home making that possible, tending our child and keeping everything going for him. It might be selfish to sit on this decision a bit longer, but I had to think about how much of myself I was willing to give up.
* * *
—
Christmas that year was somber and thin feeling, all around, and when it was over, there was only relief. Ernest still wasn’t writing, and though I had told my mother he didn’t really need to write anything new now, since For Whom the Bell Tolls was still selling incredibly well, and had been one of the most successful books anyone could remember, Ernest was a writer before he was anything else. He needed to work to feel solid and like himself, but when I asked, he insisted he was fine.
“I just haven’t hit on the right thing.”
“You’re not afraid, then?” For that was my new suspicion. “You’re sure something will come when you’re ready?”
“Whose side are you on, anyway?” he asked, narrowing his gaze.
“Yours, of course. Always.”
“I’m not worried. A book always leaves me feeling swept out for a while. And this one took so much. That’s all.”
I wanted to believe him, but couldn’t quite. He had gained ten or fifteen pounds in the last six months, and his skin looked sallow beneath his suntan. He’d also just mixed his third martini, and it was barely past noon. “Just try working tomorrow,” I said, though part of me knew it wasn’t wise to push him. “You have to begin somewhere.”
“Now you’re instructing me? That’s rich.” There was acid in his voice. I felt a warning sensation, a prickling at the back of my neck, and swallowed the words I should have said. I felt them for a long time after, like small burning stones.
60
One day Ernest came home from an all-day trip to Havana with two wriggling long-bodied cats in his shirt.
“This is Good Will,” he said of the one that was a rich-brown-and-gray tabby with a plush feather duster of a tail. “We can use some of that around here, don’t you think?”
“We definitely can.” Though inwardly I wondered if he meant our disagreement about having a child, I was smarter than to bring that up again. “Who’s his friend?”
Both cats had jumped from Ernest’s arms and were exploring tentatively, noses glued to the floor. The second had a shorter face and was solid gray, gray as a storm cloud. “This one?” He touched the lanky side of the cat’s body with the toe of his sneaker. It arced away from him like the curve of a bow, and then back again elastically. “This lovely girl has no friend.”
“Friendless.”
“Precisely.” He grinned.
“Poor lovely starving things. Wherever did you find them?”
“Fighting over a rusted can of beans in the alley behind the Floridita.”
I dropped to my knees and waited for one of them to venture my way. “We can do better than that, can’t we?”
“Hell yes, we can.” He called Rene, and told him to take one of the filet mignon steaks he had set aside for dinner and chop it very fine and leave it for the cats on two plates in different corners so they wouldn’t fight.
“He thinks you’ve gone mad, you know,” I said when Rene had gone.
“You have to feed them meat if you want them to be good mousers. Everyone knows that. How else will they grow to like the taste of blood?”
“Because they’re animals?” But he only swatted me on the rear. He was deadly serious about these creatures already. Already they were his children.
When Rene came back with the meat, Ernest pinched some of the pieces even finer with his bare hands, saying that next time he should use the grinder so the cats wouldn’t choke.
“You want for them to have this meat every day?” Rene’s thick brows were knitted, his brown hands cocked at his waist. You could see that, in his world, felines didn’t eat better than their human counterparts. It was simply absurd.
But Ernest didn’t care. “Why not? They’ll think it’s the Ritz and never leave.” Then he settled on his haunches and watched with great pleasure as the cats fell on their plates like wolves.
* * *
—
Even though Ernest still wasn’t writing, I decided I would try my hand at another novel or die trying. I hit on a story that I liked—at least in my head. It was about a Caribbean girl named Liana and her marriage to a much older man, a white man she doesn’t love. It was far more romantic than anything I’d ever tried, and had nothing to do with war. I wasn’t sure where the plot would take me, or what would happen to Liana in the end. But that was part of the intrigue.
In the meantime, our animal inventory was expanding at a terrifying pace. Ernest had found and adopted three more cats—Princessa, Boise, and Fatso—as well as a dear little bitch dog he’d plucked, half wasted with hunger, out of the gutter at the Frontón. She was inky black with a delicate muzzle and a tail that curled up decorously at the end. Negrita was her name, and he made it his project to feed her as lavishly as he did the cats, our “cotsies,” as he liked to say. Salmon, tuna, chicken breast, and freshly peeled shrimp: nothing was too good for them, or too much trouble.
I was half worried that nothing was going to grab Ernest’s attention again beyond our animals and a very cold martini, but then he began talking of trying to develop a private intelligence network in Cuba. He’d gotten the idea by talking with our good friend Bob Joyce at the American embassy in Havana and didn’t want to let it go. At first I thought it was madness—what did he know of espionage? But it was like Ernest to want to be on the inside of things, and to seek out opportunities for daring. What could be more daring and more covert than messing about with spies?
He and Bob decided to seek support from higher-ups at the embassy, and that’s when Spruille Braden became involved. Braden was newly posted as US ambassador to Cuba, a squat, jowly man with flesh that pressed at the buttons of his shirt and vest. He seemed ill suited for Cuba to me, but Ernest liked him and respected him, probably because he took Ernest seriously. Cuba did need a counterintelligence group now, he agreed. In April, the embassy had sought out and immediately arrested more than fifty men—German, Japanese, and Italian—for “illicit activities on behalf of the Axis powers.” No one was saying more than that, but they didn’
t really need to. Several freighters had been sunk off the coast of Cuba in the past few weeks, and enemy subs were suspected.
More and more, it seemed the sea was where the war was actually taking place. When we went to town now, rumors flew about predatory German U-boats lurking in Caribbean waters and off the coast of Florida, sinking scores of freighters and oil tankers, anything large and useful. Dozens were torpedoed every month, and sometimes more, it was speculated, but speculation was all we had. Strict censorship kept real news from reaching us either in print or over the wire, and this only increased the feeling of unease. The Nazis were out there, who knew how many, and how close, or how lethally armed. But they were there.
Ernest was going to get his shot at them, too.
* * *
—
Naval Intelligence for Central America would give Ernest a five-hundred-dollar monthly stipend to patrol the waters off the coast of Cuba, with more allotted to outfit Pilar as a Q-boat and assemble a crew. Ernest would call on the people closest to him: the Basque pelota players; his favorite waiters at the Floridita; his frequent first mate on Pilar, Gregorio Fuentes; and Winston Guest, an aristocrat he’d met years before on safari in Africa, who’d recently been visiting us at the Finca. The mission was dubbed “Operation Friendless,” after our favorite of the cats, though Ernest immediately began calling it the Crime Shop, or even the Crook Factory. Stacks of egg crates full of hand grenades and small-fuse bombs were loaded on board, along with machine guns, a supersensitive shortwave radio, and a life raft. Their first mission was in June, and they went off full of fire and conviction and derring-do. If they ran into a German sub, they would pretend to be a group of scientists gathering specimens for the Smithsonian. When the Nazis sent a boarding party, Ernest would gun the engines, close the distance to the sub, and signal his men to start shooting, throwing grenades or bombs down her conning tower if he got close enough for that, and then disappearing into the night, safe as butter in a jar.
“Don’t worry about me one bit,” he insisted as he outlined his plan for me. “There are things I know about these waters that no one else does, not anyone. There are numberless places to hide. I can find every one of them.”
I nodded and kissed him, wishing him luck—all the while biting my tongue. I knew better than to say what I thought, that this mission smacked of fantasy, and avoidance. He would be hunting subs instead of facing his fears head-on, sweeping out that empty place inside him, and beginning something new. Or perhaps this was his way of coming to terms with all that plagued him from the inside, only instead of wearing their own faces, his demons would look like German U-boats. If everything went well, he would blow them to smithereens, perhaps without ever having to see them fully. And all without writing a word.
* * *
—
If Ernest really wanted to do something for the war effort, I wished he would go over to one of the fronts in Europe as a journalist and add his voice to the resistance, as he’d done so brilliantly in Spain.
I was dying to go myself, but now that this was our war, too, the American military had decided that female journalists shouldn’t be anywhere near the front lines. It wasn’t like Spain, or like anything that had come before. Magazines were still hiring women, just not where it counted. Any battle zone would be off limits for me.
I pleaded with Charles Colebaugh at Collier’s to see what he could do to stretch the rules for me, but it was nothing doing. The closest I might get to action, he wagered, was a stint in the Caribbean, trying to see what the effect was there of all this submarine warfare. How did that sound?
The assignment wasn’t at all what I’d hoped for. I wanted to be at the center of the fray, where things of real consequence were happening. That’s where I felt alive, and useful and involved. Still, sweeping through the Caribbean was better than staying home, hounding the servants to polish the silver, and feeling soft and domesticated and safe, safe, safe. So I took it.
The plan was to go island to island looking for anything interesting—informants for the Nazis, stashes of supplies for the subs, lifeboat survivors. The Germans were most definitely in the Caribbean. Allied ships were being blown out of the water almost daily, but what I saw wasn’t a battle zone but a postcard, the glinting blue surface of the Windward Passage shifting and concealing everything but itself.
I was sunburned, ant bitten, seasick, catatonically bored, disgusted by cockroaches and fish smells and the ceaseless porpoiselike rolling of the boat. And though I never saw what I’d come for, the secret thrust of a periscope on a still black silent night, I wrote anyway, sending Collier’s eleven thousand words that didn’t amount to much more than a travelogue of the horror journey of all horror journeys.
I came home with dengue fever I’d contracted in Surinam and the feeling that my bones were slowly breaking. I also missed my husband terribly. When Ernest finally returned from his latest Operation Friendless patrol, he was sunburned, with a thick, scraggly beard. He smelled of fish and men and close quarters. As far as I could see, he hadn’t changed his clothes or bathed the whole while. He’d also lost his shoes somewhere.
“We’re a pair, aren’t we, Rabbit?” I asked after he’d held me for a long time and then poured us both a scotch. “Did you find your sub?”
“No. Did you?”
“Not even close.”
He collapsed on the other end of the sofa, the cue for Princessa, who’d been drowsing nearby in a patch of sun, to perch on his chest and purr like a sputtering Model T. “There must be a lesson in here somewhere.”
“I can think of one,” I said, beginning to ease off his clothes. I led him to the shower, where we stood for a long time under the warm spraying water, then I began to rub him with soap and a soft cloth, kissing each part of him after it was clean, reclaiming him bit by bit.
“Go easy,” I said when he started to wash my hair. “I’m still a little tender everywhere from the fever.” But his hands were wonderfully gentle, easing away the exhaustion, and all the efforts of travel, and the strain of our months apart. And there, in the total surrender, I felt us come back to each other. Here was the man I had fallen for, not being able to help myself. He hadn’t disappeared entirely.
Later, when we were curled in bed together, half knotted in the damp towels that had trailed us from the shower, it was lovely and peaceful in the old way—before Pearl Harbor, before the rising wave of his great book and the sinking troughs of my disappointment, and the doubt that had crept in that we weren’t on the same side anymore.
“We can’t lose sight of what really matters,” I told him, easing against his neck and shoulder and kissing him there.
“Hmm?” he asked sleepily. “We won’t.”
“I mean it, Rabbit. Even when other things come in loud, we have to keep choosing each other. That’s marriage. You can’t only say the words once and think they’ll stick. You have to say them over and over, and then live them out with all you’ve got.”
He made another soft noise and I realized he was already tumbling toward sleep. He couldn’t hear me.
“This is what I want,” I said softly, anyway. “I choose you.”
61
All through the fall, Ernest came and went often, not saying much about his Crook Factory business. I didn’t ask many questions, either. I didn’t really understand what he was doing or why it mattered to him, or how he could justify his being away from home for such long stretches, when he always hated my being gone. But if I was going to be here, I decided I might as well be writing.
I dug through my desk to find the pages of the long story I’d begun the year before, about the Caribbean girl, Liana. There were good things in the pages, things worth salvaging and polishing. I wasn’t sure if the material was rich enough to sustain a novel, but there was only one way to find out. I would start at the beginning again, I decided, setting the book in the Carib
bean, since my mind was so full of the place now. It would be my private joke, taking my horror journey and making it Liana’s home in paradise.
I knew something about paradise, didn’t I? Only it seemed to me more and more that you couldn’t turn your back on heaven any more than you could turn your back on love. They both wanted to go wild on you—and would quicker than you thought if you didn’t tend them properly.
All I had to do was go room to room for evidence of this. The rains had come again, leaving trails of mildew. In the back bedroom, chunks of the tile floor were being forced up by a thick system of roots as if the outdoors was trying to tunnel its way inside to wreak havoc like everything else. The kitchen paint was peeling from damp. The silverfish were at our books.
I tackled what I could and hired out the rest while the cats chased one another from room to room. The population had doubled in the last several months, and though I loved all of them as much as Ernest did—the fat white Persian named Uncle Wolfer, the two black-and-white toms, Dillinger and Thunder, and the gray tabby who looked so much like Friendless we called him Friendless’s Brother—I realized that if we didn’t do something about neutering the toms, there’d be no way to stop the rising tide.
I found a veterinarian in town, congratulating myself on being so practical. But when Ernest returned to refuel and collect his mail at the end of October, he was absolutely furious over what I’d done.
“You may as well cut my balls off,” he spat out. “Or shoot the cats outright. That would be kinder.”
“Don’t be dramatic. The doctor said it’s very humane. They don’t feel much. Not like us.”
“Like hell they don’t. And now they’re women, the poor bastards.” He shot me a sharp look. “You want to kick me some other way while I’m here, or have you had enough?”