Love and Ruin

  The fact remained that even if he had meant to help, I was alone now, and over my head. Maybe I always had been, but the only cure, it seemed to me now, was to stop feeling sorry for myself, and kick for the surface hard. Time was passing, and my pennies were dwindling. Even if I meant to stay in New York, I had to find a job, but I would do more than that. Whatever it took, I would find passage to Spain, earning my own way, figuring it out as I went. I’d always been good at that, if I was honest with myself. It was other people who made things tricky, even if they were incandescent ones, like Ernest.

  Making two cups of strong builder’s tea, I drank them searing hot and then bathed and dressed. I had one nice sweater from home—black cashmere, hardly what I’d need for Madrid—and wool slacks, and my Bryn Mawr coat, and it would all have to do. Stepping out onto Grove Street, I hurried for the subway. I had slept too late. It was almost the lunch hour already, and I had at least one elephant to shoot, possibly two.

  A few years before, when I was still working and writing for the FERA and at a party in Washington, I had met an editor at Collier’s magazine and we had stayed in touch occasionally. His name was Kyle Crichton, and he’d recently sent me an awfully nice note about liking The Trouble I’d Seen. I thought now might be an excellent time to remind him he thought I could write, though showing up in his office took some cheek. Collier’s had a circulation of several million, and hadn’t I just been turned down by Time?

  Still, I plunged ahead, buying a bag of warm chestnuts for his receptionist, and then dragging Kyle away for a drink at the Stork Club. It was an incongruous place to bring up war and sacrifice, I realized too late. White coats wheeled and spun around us. The dining room tinkled with luxury and privilege, each table a who’s who of the notable, the glamorous, and the altogether gilded. It was all very dazzling. It was beside the point.

  “I’m not asking for an assignment,” I tried to explain to Kyle. He had already more than guessed I wanted something from him, and I felt myself teetering on an edge. This dance took every ounce of my courage. “There are border guards, though, and I have to pass muster or they won’t let me in the country at all, let alone near the action. I have to have credentials. Real ones.”

  “You want me to hire you as a stringer.” His hands grazed the stem of his glass, his skewer of stuffed olives bobbing in the liquor, which had the sheen of lighter fluid.

  “Hire is maybe too strong a word. I know I haven’t proven myself as a journalist yet, but I mean to one day. Maybe you’ll actually like what I write, and want to publish it.”

  “Maybe.” His eyes gave nothing away.

  “All that is its own question. For now, I only need a letter or something to say I’m with you. This is bureaucracy plain and simple. It’s paperwork.”

  “And then what?”

  “I don’t know, actually. I don’t have any idea how this will go. But I can’t sit on my hands when so much is happening, when so much is at stake.” As my words tumbled out, I thought of how I must sound to him. As if I had three heads, each more romantic and stuffed between the ears than the next. “You think I’m a fool.”

  “No, just idealistic. And very young. You’re an interesting kid, Marty. If you were my daughter, I’d probably burn your passport and chain you to the cellar door. War isn’t any place for a young woman, it seems to me. But you have a good heart.” He turned back to his drink, considering something privately, and then said, “If you’re really determined to go, I’m not sure it’s up to me to stop you.”

  I lunged at his free arm, relieved and elated. “Oh, thank you, Kyle. You won’t regret this.”

  “I hope you’re right.” His expression clouded over and I was puzzled for a moment until I realized he wasn’t worried that I might embarrass his magazine or myself. But that I could die in Spain. The body count in each day’s newspapers sometimes included Americans who’d been fighting in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade since January. It was only a matter of time before a correspondent was killed.

  No one was safe. I knew that, and yet also had been trying to stand apart from it. The thought seemed to hang suspended between us now, a thread of fine-spun glass, while Kyle and I locked eyes for a moment, understanding each other perfectly. Then our waiter glided up with the bill in a discreet leather box, and I shook the foreboding feeling off, aiming to be breezy again. “I’m going to be fine,” I told Kyle. “You’ll see. Now, what should this letter say?”

  9

  “Collier’s has named me ‘special correspondent,’ ” I said to Ernest and the other Historians that evening at ‘21.’ “It works utterly, if special means ‘fraudulent.’ But I don’t care. Beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “It doesn’t matter what’s in the damned letter,” Ernest said. He sat across from me, his shoulders square with the top of the banquette. They seemed to balance his whole side of the room. “You’ve found a magazine to claim you. That’s the main thing. What about the fare?”

  “I stopped at Vogue a few hours ago and abased myself. I said I’d take absolutely anything, and they believed me. You’re looking at the new expert on the middle-aged woman and her beauty problems.”

  “What would you know about middle age?”

  “It gets worse. There are all sorts of skin treatments and I have to try them, and then write about my results.” I puffed out my cheeks, trying to make him laugh. “But the truth is I’d do the cancan through Central Park if that’s what it took.”

  “Wouldn’t that be amusing?” Lillian Hellman said. She’d drawn on a deep-red lipstick, and the lines were perfect and a little brutal against her face powder. I realized she terrified me, how she talked and walked and leaned and smoked, all intensely and pointedly. Her remark had felt like a cuff, too, though in fact she’d barely flicked her eyes at me before turning back to Ernest and more serious matters. “Now about these ambulances?”

  “Forget about the ambulances for a minute,” Dos Passos said. “We have to talk about the film.”

  This was the documentary they were funding, and apparently the shape of the film was still in question. The Historians couldn’t agree on what mattered most. Dos Passos seemed bent on making the common people the focus, while Ernest was far more interested in the soldiers, the tactics, and other military elements.

  “I don’t see how anyone can make a war film without warfare.” Ernest’s voice rose easily above the din of the bar, cutting through. “Any battle means tanks and guns, men in trenches. It means death. Tragedy on the simplest and most absolute scale.”

  “But what about the people in the villages?” Dos challenged. “They deserve to be seen. They haven’t asked for any of this, you know? Nothing’s in their control.” He was sweating and repeatedly pushed back a skein of slick, dark hair that clung to his round forehead. “I’m only saying their story matters, too. Besides, the world might very well show up more to defend mothers and farmers and children over soldiers.”

  “Sure, they will. And why not?” Ernest snapped back. “Let’s save the blood for your filet mignon.”

  Though I hadn’t known either of them for very long, I felt myself agreeing with Ernest. Part of it was his conviction. When he really got going on something, his feelings came through in his voice. His face grew expressive, and his eyes snapped to life. I could also tell that he believed what he said. That he felt all these things deeply, and wasn’t afraid who knew. It was hard not to be won over by him.

  “Good grief,” Lillian piped in. “Can we eat before we duke this out? You’re not likely to agree anyway, even if everyone plays nice, and that’s a long shot.” She readjusted her fox stole with purpose. It was a biting February night, but all practicality aside, the stole made her shoulders flare out commandingly. I would have to get one for Spain, I thought, making a mental note, and maybe for everyday life, too.

  “Okay. Go on,” Dos said, ignoring her. “Shove gore in
everyone’s faces, and see if they don’t run for the hills.” His face was pink and vehement. “I don’t even think this is about the film at all. It’s you. You want to go to war again. You’re the one who needs to see the blood.”

  Ernest glared at him. “All right, Sigmund Freud. Is that how it is?” The bite of his joke was probably meant to deflect or diffuse things, but I caught how Ernest’s pupils shrank and his hands tensed. Dos had hit a nerve.

  “Boys!” Lillian cried, and everyone fell silent, as if she held a wooden ruler instead of a highball glass. Nervous laughter gradually filled in.

  The bar was dark and close and the ceiling pressed down, seeming to collude with the shifting mood. I had been squeezed into the center of the banquette, and as the Historians made noises about heading to the dining room, and then stood, downing the last of their cocktails, I waited to be released. Even with the current tension, they drifted in pairs toward the maître d’, talking and conferring, planning—united and serious, and more than a little dazzling to watch.

  I had recently heard a rumor that after The Children’s Hour, MGM had put Lillian Hellman on retainer for twenty-five hundred a week, just in case something clever and deathless came to her in her sleep. It was almost impossible for me to imagine that kind of money, or the freedom she’d won. Until a few months ago, it had been my general understanding that if you were a writer, you pummeled your own soul until some words trickled out of the dry streambed, enough to fill a saucer or a teaspoon or an eyedropper. And then you wept a little, or gnashed your teeth, and somehow found the fortitude to get up the next day and do it again.

  But these writers were like magazine covers. Like skyrockets, too. That I was here, even glancingly lit by the wake they cut, was still a little stupefying. Not that I didn’t have ambition. Sometimes I thought I was entirely made of it. As I’d said to Kyle, I meant to show him and everyone else that I could be a proper journalist, a writer others admired and respected and remembered. I wanted my name to count but for the moment was still an apprentice, and particularly in this crowd, where heroes were milling about, ready to be clung to. It would take time for me to earn my way. To prove myself, and to rise.

  “You’re not a fraud, you know,” Ernest said, as if he’d read my mind. He’d sat back down to say it, reversing his steps. “Your work is good.”

  It meant everything to hear him say it, and I told him so. “More and more, it’s the only thing that really matters to me,” I went on. “The only thing that never bores me, and never lets me down. You know what I mean.”

  “It just so happens I do.” The wall behind him was mirrored and threw back half-a-dozen fractured likenesses. White shirt. Black mustache. Tight-fitting jacket. Squared jaw. Strangling tie. He didn’t look like a hero at the moment; he looked like a man. Confident about some things and not at all about others. Like all the men I knew. Like all the people I knew. Like me.

  “I’m not sure when I’ll sail,” I said. “It could be weeks from now. Make sure to leave a bread-crumb trail for me, all right?”

  “I will.”

  “I’m very fond of you, you know, Hemingstein.” To hell with Dos and how I sounded, I thought. I believed we were friends. I felt an understanding between us, a coming together of like minds, and I wanted to trust that feeling. “I’m happy we’re going to be in the same union.”

  He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and looked at me. In the three months since we’d parted in Key West, all of our talk had happened over the phone or in hastily scrawled letters. All these things that could happen in his eyes, or with his moods, or what each of his smiles meant, were a mystery to me. New people were complicated, but they were also wonderful. Everything was a code not yet solved.

  “I’m fond of you too, daughter.” His eyes changed a little as he spoke, and he seemed about to say something else. But then Lillian ducked back around the corner, tugging on his arm and saying how famished she was. Before I knew it she had pulled him out of the dim bar and into the next room, out of sight.

  Part 2

  TO SPAIN WITH

  THE BOYS

  MARCH–MAY 1937

  10

  I didn’t see Ernest again. He raced home and back, and then sailed for Paris on the ocean liner Paris (naturally) while I scrambled through slush-worn Manhattan, collar up, chin out, huffing and puffing to get my work done.

  The last instruction from Ernest before we parted was that I should look for Sidney Franklin when I got to France if he and the others had already gone ahead. Franklin was a famous matador friend of Ernest’s who was improbably from Brooklyn, and Jewish besides. The Torero of the Torah was the joke about him, but apparently his work with the cape was no joke at all. He was an absolute wonder in the ring, Ernest had told me, and of course I’d read the pages and pages of admiring stuff about him in Death in the Afternoon. Sidney had also lived in Madrid for a time and knew the lay of the land. If he could get all the right visas, Sidney would be Ernest’s majordomo and factotum, his common-law wife—that was another frequent joke—since Pauline was needed at home with their two boys.

  I knew it couldn’t be at all easy to be attached to a person as big as Ernest. He wasn’t just famous; he was unforgettable, with a pull that seemed to work on everyone powerfully and tidally, like the moon. But Pauline seemed to carry off her role gracefully, keeping the entire ship of Whitehead Street running smooth as glass. According to Ernest’s stories, when friends rolled through at regular intervals from near and far, she was the one who ordered just the right oysters and tins of pâté and bottles of wine, entertaining everyone at her perfect table while he worked, tending his singular fire. And if that wasn’t enough, Pauline read Ernest’s work and encouraged him, while also keeping Patrick and Gregory behaving like princes instead of beasts. Even at five and eight, based on my brief visit they seemed to have a lot of her style in them and were awfully well behaved. If I ever had children, I imagined I would probably be impatient with them, distracted by my own moods in a way Pauline never seemed to be. Or maybe she hid it terribly well?

  And now she would have to be proficient in another way—watching him launch off to a battlefront, with no guarantees that he’d return. To me, it seemed so much more difficult to be a wife, at such a time, than one of the boys. She would sit at home waiting for a telegram—happy or tragic. He had feet and wings and purpose. He was on the move, and that’s where I wanted to be, too. And the sooner the better.

  * * *

  —

  Paris was the meeting tree then. The place we all swung out from.

  When I arrived in the middle of March, Ernest had indeed gone on ahead, and there was no sign of Sidney. The boulevards were windy and cold, the cafés full of trench coats and cigarettes and wan light. I rooted around for several days, hoping to find other journalists to cross the border with. Frankly, I was afraid to go over alone, but it looked like I wasn’t going to have another choice.

  Swallowing my anxiety, I began to focus on wading through the necessary bureaucracy, trying to procure whatever stamps or papers were needed, but that was a shifting target, it seemed. Even two months before, crossing over to aid the Republic had been fairly easy. A daily train nicknamed the Red Express had sped volunteers south from Paris to the Spanish border, where buses took them the rest of the way. Now you only had two options, either to find a boat over, which might very well be torpedoed by patrolling Italian subs, or to steal over the Pyrenees in cloaking darkness, hoping not to get caught.

  I studied maps and talked to as many people as I could about how to go about it. There was a train, apparently, that would take me to Bourg-Madame, only a few kilometers from the French border. There were no through trains. I would have to disembark and walk out of the village and over the countryside on back roads until I came to the Catalonian village of Puigcerdà, where I would catch another train if I wasn’t turned back first, or something worse. br />
  I left Paris alone on a soggy afternoon in late March, under a sky that was dense and wet and gray. Afternoon became evening, and I squinted as I tried to write impressions in my journal to remember later. The window beside me frosted over, rattling the countryside into a kaleidoscope of black and white. This wasn’t the France I knew, which had always been as much about swimming in the sea as about anything else, about languorous holiday sunshine and whole days spent drinking wine and staring up at clouds. No, this country seemed to be offering something dark and strange and new to me, in an entirely different language. If only I could learn to understand it.

  Spring was still far away, and I felt that immediately when I disembarked after midnight. I wore trousers in warm gray flannel and a gray jacket meant to block the wind, which it didn’t quite. In my duffel I had a comb and a change of clothes and also a dozen tins of peaches and potted meat. I could feel the cans through the canvas as I walked, pounding like small fists at the backs of my thighs, reminding me of my body again and again, that I was what I appeared to be, a tall blond woman walking alone in a frigid country, awfully far from St. Louis.

  Bourg-Madame was probably charming by day, I thought as I walked. It clung to a hillside behind stone walls and was tucked into a string of such villages, all nestled high above the surrounding valley. But the village was boarded up tight as I passed through. I readjusted my duffel and blew on my hands, then turned east, away from the village down a steep, cobbled road, the moon above a wispy, glazed-looking crescent.

  It wasn’t exactly legal, what I was doing, and for much of the time, I was too anxious to even whistle to keep myself company. I had only a little Spanish, and wasn’t sure what I would even say if I was stopped, beyond proffering my passport and the hard-won Collier’s letter. I was cold, too. The stones beneath my feet were slick with frost, and the air cut through my jacket. I hunched my shoulders, digging my free hand into my pocket, glad that it was only a few miles farther to find my next train, at Puigcerdà.