Love and Ruin

  When I brought my reports to Hopkins in Washington, he arranged for me to meet Eleanor Roosevelt, who had once worked on social causes with my mother, and whom I’d always admired from a distance. I grew so intense as I laid out the scenes for her I’m surprised she didn’t throw me out. But she only listened, really listened, and asked intelligent questions, her pen racing back and forth as she set down notes for herself. She wore a dark, unflattering dress, and her graying hair sprang up in wisps here and there. Middle age had been hard on her looks. She had no chin to speak of and her teeth protruded oddly, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone so beautiful. It was her dignity that shone through.

  When I returned a few months later, I’d just been fired for encouraging a handful of mine workers in Idaho to rise up against a crooked relief contractor. They’d broken out all the windows at the FERA offices, and I was sent packing. But the Roosevelts thought I’d done the right thing, and offered to let me stay at the White House until I got my bearings.

  I was given a simple room with a narrow chintz-covered bed and a rickety corner desk. Mrs. Roosevelt was so sensitive to the plight of the country that she would rather have broken the bones in her own hands than live in luxury while others suffered. The meals were plain, seasonless rib-sticking things. Wine was served rarely and by the thimbleful, and alcohol never—but the president would sometimes pull the more liberal and amusing guests into the cloakroom for one of his murderous martinis and a good joke. He found me charming and diverting, I think, like a minimally trained Pekingese, while Mrs. Roosevelt pressed me for news and the “young person’s view” of the country.

  I liked her. Actually, I loved her—and almost immediately. I’d never met anyone with so much goodness and humility and tireless concern for others. Sometimes she let me help her answer her mail, which was absolutely bottomless and often heartbreaking. People asked her for help when they had no idea where else to turn—like a young man in Minnesota who had lost his arm in a hunting accident and could no longer help his brothers and sisters as before. They didn’t have clothes fit enough to wear to school and desperately needed a horse. Could she find one?

  I sat in a covered chair next to her simple cherrywood escritoire. She wore a shapeless blue dress and bent over the letter, her hands—they were lovely, strong hands, her most beautiful feature—pressing the page in thought.

  “Will you send them a horse, then?”

  “I’ll try to find someone who can. We can always do better than nothing. It’s a fine letter. Think of the time it took him to write it.”

  I watched her for a few moments, filled with admiration, as I always was when I was anywhere near her. She had a kind of light, fueled by decency and wisdom and utterly inextinguishable. She made me want to be a better person.

  “I’ve been thinking of turning some of my reports into character studies,” I told her. “If I wrote stories or a novel, they might become real breathing people instead of figures and numbers on some graph no one will see. I want to help them. I want to try, anyway, and perhaps this is how.”

  “You want to help them,” she repeated, looking at me with those deep clear blue eyes that could be shy or filled with unchecked loneliness or steely and terrifying. I knew she never agreed with anyone unless she meant to.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then you will.”

  * * *

  —

  I left the White House soon after that and went to Fields’s house in Connecticut, a decision that would greatly rattle my family, as it turned out. But the golden chance to work without distraction was worth it. Over the next four months, while snow fell thickly, accumulated, then melted into spring, I wrote every day, feeling stoked by a conviction that was utterly new, at least in my writing life. It occurred to me that the reason What Mad Pursuit had failed utterly in the commercial realm was the same reason my father had despised it. My choice of subject. My characters were more than “hectic,” I saw now. They were trite and narcissistic. Whom had that book helped? No one. This new idea, though, could be something else. It had nothing to do with ego or self-importance or with me, Gellhorn. I was only the burning bush.

  I was still enormously proud of that second book, that it had sold well, and received nice notices, that Eleanor Roosevelt had written about it twice in her “My Day” column, calling it fine and useful. The only regret I had at all was that my father hadn’t lived to see me redeem myself. I still wanted to feel his pride and validation, I realized, though that was impossible. I suppose that was why my horizon line had newly shifted to include others—Matthews and Ginny Cowles and Tom Delmer, and Ernest. I wanted them to respect me as a writer, and I wanted to respect myself, more than anything.

  I missed the driving sort of holiness I had felt in Connecticut when my characters were way down in my bones. Alice in her sad kitchen joined with all the other girls I met to become Ruby. And though I changed details and filled in things I couldn’t have known, the thrust of the truth remained.

  Did I still remember how to burn like that? Could I do it now, for the boy? For Madrid?

  Yes, I thought I could.

  21

  I woke in Ernest’s room at dawn, pushing the blankets back and turning away from him, beginning to dress, while he propped himself up on his elbow to watch me.

  “You’re off to work now, aren’t you? Are you writing something new? I’d like to see it.”

  “I’m a little afraid of it just now.”

  “Oh?”

  “I like it too much. It feels new, I guess. Like I’ve broken through something. I don’t know.”

  “Show me.”

  “I could. But what if I’m wrong and it’s terrible? What then?”

  “You know, when you’re young it can be important to hear other voices and test them against what you’ve done. I’ve told you about Stein, haven’t I? She cut me to shreds, and Pound, too, but I needed it and then some.”

  I bent over my shoes, feeling blood rush to my face. He was the last person in the world I wanted cutting me to shreds. I couldn’t think of a writer I admired more. And then there was everything else about him. How he seemed to eat up every day’s experience, even the terrifying stuff, when others turned into nervous cats. Who is this person? I found myself wondering more and more. The one in the filthy brown trousers and a blue shirt full of holes? The one who prays to typewriter keys and also bourbon and also, more than anything, the truth? Who steps over shell holes where the earth has been opened all the way down to the sewers? Who meets my eyes when the ceiling begins to shudder and tells me with no words at all that I’ll be okay because he’s with me? How does someone arrive at love with such a person?

  I didn’t at all know, but that’s what was happening to me. I was falling in love, and it was wonderful, and it was awful. I wanted to run like hell and never look back. I wanted to shut the lid down tight and stay in this room forever.

  “Give me some time, all right?” I finally said, sitting up straight and meeting his eyes. “I’ll show you soon. I promise.”

  “We don’t have time, do we?”

  “Not for Madrid, maybe.”

  He fell quiet. I had another week or ten days left. He had a little more, but not much. We had been careful never to talk about it, but now it seemed we had no choice.

  “Over here, nothing at home feels real,” he said after a while. “I don’t have a wife or three sons or a novel to write. I don’t have house payments or people counting on me, or anything except each day’s dispatch and trying not to get shot. And you.”

  “But as soon as you’re back in Key West, all of this will fade,” I finished for him, flatly, while inside I swayed, lurching off-center. “That’s what you mean. Everything will change places and Madrid will be the thing that’s not real.”

  “Something like that.”

  I had expected this, and yet it
still surprised me. His words seemed to fit exactly into the thing I’d been fearing. That he would break my heart without having to lift a finger. That there was no way to actually have him. From the beginning I had known that he would go back to Pauline. But I’d also been telling myself that we’d somehow manage to build a bridge into lasting friendship. We were friends, weren’t we? I couldn’t believe we could simply vanish from each other’s lives after all this, but he seemed to be suggesting as much. That we had been a fleeting thing, an interlude. Something inconsequential. And that soon I would mean nothing at all to him. It hurt in a dizzying way to feel him pulling away, and just when I’d begun to trust my feelings.

  “You’re a rare person,” I told him, trying to keep my voice even. “I’m going to miss you.”

  His look softened. “We still have a few days.”

  “I can’t,” I said. I bent toward him until my forehead rested on his, and held still, breathing in the smell of his skin, the warmth of the cotton sheets, each detail of the room as it faded and became a ghost. Then I stood up, squaring my shoulders, and let myself out without looking back.

  Walking to my room, I felt loneliness and fear come wisping down from wherever they had been waiting. They draped themselves over me, snug and familiar. Filling my pockets and all the spaces inside and out until I thought I might have to lean against the wall to stay upright. In moments, I’d been kicked out of love and was alone again.

  He was never yours, a voice in my head said. But what did that matter? I had lost him just the same.

  Part 3

  HALFWAY HOME

  MAY 1937–FEBRUARY 1939

  22

  I should have gone back to St. Louis, I realized later, to see my mother and sleep in my old bedroom under the eaves in the house on McPherson Avenue until I’d cleared Madrid from my system like a fever. But I went to New York, where instead of bread lines and lorries filled with wounded dirty-faced men, there were chestnut blossoms and pink-tinged clouds and streams of yellow cabs. Instead of tanks in the streets or Junker planes roaring high above, polished cars glided toward cocktail parties. Shopwindows glittered with all sorts of things no one needed—evening wear, sapphire watches, cakes too elaborate to ever think of eating. It was all so beautiful. It was all so wrong.

  New York meant I could help Joris Ivens, though. He was there to usher The Spanish Earth through its final stages, editing footage and cutting in the sound, which needed to be as visceral and arresting as the images were. This took some imagination. For weeks we met with a group of engineers in a padded studio on the Columbia University campus trying to reproduce artillery fire with an air hose and a football bladder, finger snaps and foot stampings, and fingernails dragged over a wire-mesh screen, not quitting until the result gave us chills.

  “I think I can get us a viewing at the White House,” I told Ivens when the film was finally done. “Mrs. Roosevelt is keen to hear what we’ve been doing. You’ll love her. Everyone does, though she can be awfully fierce, too.”

  “If you can fix it we can meet in Washington in July or maybe August. I’ll write to Ernest. He’ll be over the moon.”

  “I’ll write, too,” I said, as if it were a simple thing. I had been thinking of him almost constantly, and then torturing myself about it. It was foolish to go on this way, missing what we’d had when it had probably been nothing at all. I also understood it was Spain as much as Ernest that had gotten under my skin, and the experience of the war. How important and real and raw every day was. How useful I felt, and understood. I had found a place at last where I actually fit, just as I was. The people around me seemed to be those I was meant to know and to care about. Now it was all over, and what was the cure for that?

  I took to staying up late at night, smoking too much, and gazing into darkened windowpanes, thinking about Amelia Earhart. Everyone had been following her world flight, tracing her path with daily headlines and imagining what that kind of freedom must feel like. Then she’d vanished, her radio signals fading and spotty at first, then nonexistent. President Roosevelt had dispatched half the US Navy at an unheard-of expense to search for her, but so far it seemed the sky or the sea had simply opened up and swallowed her.

  It made me feel shaky and horribly lonely—and brought Spain back more sharply. Anything and anyone could disappear on you, and you could disappear, too, if you didn’t have people around who really knew you. Who were there solidly, meeting you exactly where you stood when life grew stormy and terrifying. Who could find you when you were lost and couldn’t find yourself, not even in the mirror.

  * * *

  —

  We settled on July 8 for showing the film to the Roosevelts, and met up at Newark’s Penn Station. I arrived first and waited under the vaulted blue-tiled ceiling, feeling excited and edgy in equal parts. When the boys arrived, first Ivens and then Ernest, I tried to cover my nervousness by joking about the food in the White House. We’d need contraband sandwiches—loads of them. Giddy, I pretended to tuck one into my shoe as we boarded our train, chattering a stream about how magnificent Mrs. Roosevelt was in all ways except menu planning. I couldn’t stop cracking jokes because if I did, I knew I might burst into tears.

  That night we dined on squab that chewed like a raincoat, milky, flavorless soup that was impossible to identify, and salad swamped by damp slices of pineapple. Ernest and I were never alone, and I was grateful for that. I wouldn’t have known what to feel, what to say, what to want.

  The film was a wonderful distraction. President and Mrs. Roosevelt seemed gratifyingly interested. They asked thoughtful, insightful questions about our experiences in Madrid, and so did Harry Hopkins, whom I hadn’t seen in years. Each of them agreed the film was something truly useful and powerful to watch. If they had any advice, it was that the narration could be less restrained. One expected a strong anti-Fascist argument, and even propaganda, rather than artful subtlety. Since the film was finished, this more passionate stance could be delivered as a speech to any audience before a showing.

  Ivens was delighted things had gone so well. We’d all been invited to stay the night, and while Ivens and Ernest stayed up late, working furiously on the speech, I knocked on Mrs. Roosevelt’s door.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” I said, settling in one of her Spartan chairs. “You and the president were awfully kind to my trench buddies.”

  She looked at me for a moment, her gaze cutting through even before her words came. “I hope you’ll keep your head about you. Hemingway seems a complicated man.”

  I thought about protesting or throwing up some lie, but she’d easily seen what I’d worked hard to hide, even from myself. “He is. I don’t have any fantasies where he’s concerned, if that’s what you’re worried about. How could I? But when you’re around someone like him, a fiery sort of person, a genius, really, and then you’re not. Well, it leaves a hole, doesn’t it?”

  “Perhaps. But no other person can actually fill you up. You know that, don’t you?” She looked at me piercingly for a moment, and then dropped her gaze. “I must sound like your mother.”

  “No. I’m always happy to have your opinion…you know that. You’re very wise.”

  “Not about everything.” There was a pot of petroleum jelly on her escritoire, which she dipped into, beginning to rub it into her hands. She was a deeply private person and would never have discussed her romantic life with me, but there were always rumors flitting around about the president and his women. His secretary, her secretary, foreign princesses, distant cousins by marriage. If even half of these affairs were true, I knew she must have suffered shame and loss, and a recovery that had changed her. What she and F.D. had now was so obviously a partnership, not a proper union. Not love.

  “I don’t pretend to know anything about marriage,” I tried to explain. It mattered to me that she saw me plainly and understood my intentions. “Ernest isn’t free. There??
?s no cliff to fling myself from even if I wanted to. And I don’t.”

  “How could I possibly judge you? We each have to make our choices, and then find a way to live with them. And if we can’t, well, then, that’s when we know something has to change.”

  I thanked her for her advice, wished her good night, and then sat up late in my room, pretending to read but really staring at shadows. She’d said that no one could fill anyone else up, and that sounded right—but maybe she herself still felt the emptiness of trying. Her heart had been badly damaged, whether or not she’d ever let anyone glimpse the truth. And when she’d talked about living with choices, I felt that she was sharing the smallest corner of something with me, a secret sorrow, a regret. She was a stronger woman than I was by a mile, the strongest woman I knew or could even imagine. She lived truly, and with dignity. And she slept alone.

  * * *

  —

  The next morning Ernest and Ivens headed to Hollywood to show the film everywhere they could possibly drum up support, and I went to Connecticut to plot a novel about the war with a heroine who was a lot like me, only wiser with her heart. But before I could even properly dig in, an editor at Collier’s reached me with news. They were going to publish the article I’d written in Madrid. Millions would read my piece, and see what I had seen.

  That night I called my mother, crowing my elation and feeling with every cell in my body that I’d been saved.

  “You’re a real journalist, then,” she said.