Yes, I thought. Runch and ssss.
I calmly turned the key to kill the engine. Not click, but tik, a short, little sound without the c to soften it.
I opened the driver side door—thunk—and climbed out—chhhh chhhh—as my practical flats slid onto the pavement.
I left the car door open, the key in the ignition.
“All right, Hemingway,” I said. “Fine. It’s your car, then.”
I walked away, setting off toward home in the darkness, trying to ignore all the sounds that followed, the spectator sounds that were a chaos of “Coño,” and “¿Viste eso?” and “Hijo de puta,” and, above it all, Ernest shouting drunkenly, “You stupid bitch! You stupid bitch!”
He wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning, I told myself, my anger spent now in the crashing of the car, which, of course, I shouldn’t have done. I was becoming as crazy as he was with his obsession about finding submarines. Or maybe I’d always been as crazy. Maybe I was the crazy one and it was me that was driving him to it, rather than the other way around.
If we were lucky, he wouldn’t remember any of it in the morning, and I wouldn’t remind him. I’d say that we’d had a little accident, and wasn’t he a good husband to stay and tend to the car while he sent me home. In that way, we would get past this. I’d stick it down inside me where it wouldn’t hurt for too long if I didn’t let it, and all he would remember would be a grand dinner and a happy drunk and a little accident that might, at least, convince him to let Juan drive us into town next time. If he did remember, well, his darkness was the kind that let go in the morning. It was only my darkness that held on to things, that began to form a tidy little pile of bitterness at the edge of my heart.
The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba
AUGUST 1943
The car was not yet repaired from our “little accident,” which Ernest had, indeed, been too drunk to remember, when my editor at Collier’s called. He didn’t have anything yet, but he might be able to get me accredited to London if I came up to New York.
“I might go with you if it wasn’t all propaganda,” Ernest said over a good, big breakfast on the patio by the pool the morning I was to leave. He was waiting for new orders, still intent on sinking one last German sub. Rommel had been run out of North Africa in May, and now we’d taken back Sicily and were bombing the hell out of Nazi ports and factories. Even if the Germans could keep building subs enough to spare a few for our neck of the woods, they’d have a damned hard time getting them in the water, much less all the way across the Atlantic. But Ernest was obsessed with those subs that no longer existed. I’d learned to raise the topic of going to war before he started drinking. The drink brought out charges that I was picking fights just to justify wanting to leave him behind. “You’ve turned into a fucking prima-donna writer, abandoning me when I have important business to do, never mind that I spent half the last year tending to you and your novel.” But he was good about it—even all for it, really—when he wasn’t drinking. So I ignored his drunken petulance and organized this trip to New York to check the galleys for my novel, and to follow up with Collier’s.
“You’re such a rare, great writer, Bug,” I said, one ear to the front of the house, where my bag sat by the door, waiting for the car that would collect me for the trip. “You’re such a rare, great writer that whatever you think about becomes a great book without you having to live it first. I’m a lousy writer—”
“You’re a fine writer, Mook. You’ve written a fine new book, and you’re proud of it or will be if you allow yourself the luxury. You’re too fine a writer for the hack job of journalism even if it weren’t going to be censored into propaganda.”
The sun was warm on us, and the flowers lovely, the morning not yet too hot.
“Sure, I’m a fine writer, then, but I can’t write the way you write. My writing is like colonic irrigation, things rushing in and out. I never can make anything into a book except by going out and seeing it and recording the details, the rong cararong rong rong. I need to go to war if only to have something for a new book, Bug. And anyway, I know I’ll write the news true, and if I don’t go for Collier’s they might send someone who won’t.”
He said, “Why don’t they send writers over, not as propaganda correspondents or to write government pamphlets, but just to have someone write it truly afterward, even if the truth can’t be told right away? Maybe I could get them to make a category like that for me, so we could be together. The British are using writers that way, and artists too. Maybe I could get a job with the Brits.”
I said, “Then we could be together and happy like we were in Spain.”
He said, “We were happy in Spain, weren’t we?”
“We belong to each other, Bongie.”
“But I can’t go anywhere until after we’ve cleared the Caribbean of German subs.”
“Someday the war will be over, and we’ll have a wide life ahead of us,” I said.
“Will we? I wonder if this one will end before we’re too old ever to have a bit of fun again.”
“If it doesn’t, I’ll try to be jolly and beautiful for you even when I’m old.”
He said, “You’ll always be beautiful, Mrs. Bongie.”
The car arrived, and I stood and leaned over him and kissed him, long and slow and loving. “Be careful of the sun, Bongie. I don’t want you to become Anselmo.” Viejo, he called the character in For Whom the Bell Tolls: the old one.
“Ah, Mook,” he said, standing too. “I’ll never be Gary Cooper, even if I clean up and put on a fine suit. You knew that when you married me.”
I slid my arms around him and looked straight into his sad eyes. “I’m going to try harder to be a nice Mrs. Rabby. I know I’ve been an awful Mrs. Rabby, but I can do better, only first I need to do this or I never will be able to.”
“I haven’t been a good Mr. Rabby,” he said. “I haven’t protected you good, and I’ve been scoffing, which is the worst, I know, but you do know I admire you, Mook. I admire you and respect you, and as of this date and this hour I will not be scoffing again.”
“Don’t miss me too much,” I said, and we kissed long and slow and lovely again. “I won’t be gone long.”
“I know. But living alone makes me jumpy.”
“It makes me jumpy too, but maybe you jumpier.”
“I’ll have the wigglies for company.” One of his nicknames for the cats.
“Yes, but don’t sleep on the floor with them, Bug. It isn’t good for your back.”
“I’ll read them your letters. When you make it to London and to beyond London and I forget the secret code, I’ll have them remind me.”
“But don’t forget the code, really.”
“A visit to Robert Capa means you’re in Africa,” he said. “One to Herb Matthews means Spain.”
“Italy.”
“I was testing you, Mrs. Bongie.”
“And you’ll come if the submarine hunting is finished before I get back?”
“But it won’t be. We’ll be out for two or three months this time, as soon as we get the new orders. You won’t be gone that long.”
“But if it is.”
“If it is, sure. If the submarine hunting is done before you climb back into our bed here, I’ll come to London and climb in your hotel window and be wild with you.”
I arrived in New York feeling fat and jowly and old-looking. I set about seeing doctors and dentists and getting vitamin injections, and having my shoes rebuilt so they would stand up to war. I had my hair cut and colored, too, just the way Ernest wanted it: short and tawny brown, like Maria in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And while I didn’t much care for all the boring doing-about of New York society, Mousie came down from boarding school, and that was fun.
Everything was going snappily for the book too, which I’d finally titled simply with my protagonist’s name, Liana. Or everything was going snappily except the prepublication notice that referred to me only as “the wife of Ernest H
emingway” and the photograph Max Perkins had chosen for the cover, which made me look as old as I felt. Still, those were little things that didn’t matter, and all the things that mattered were lining up well: the Book-of-the-Month Club was considering it, and Paramount was talking about a film, and the Theatre Guild was interested too, although its snooty manager was so lordly and condescending about my “miscegenous love story” and so certain no audience would like it unless I made my protagonist lily white that I really did want to rub her I-know-everyone-worth-knowing-and-let-me-tell-you-about-it mouth in hot peppers.
Three weeks into September, my papers for Europe still hadn’t come through. I moved from the Berkshire to smaller, cheaper rooms at the Gladstone, where I made a little nest for myself with photos of Ernest and the cats and the Finca. I knew by how very much I missed him that all the bickering didn’t mean anything. It was just the detritus of my long months in the sea of my novel and his long months in the actual sea.
I started going down to Washington for the weekends, where on Saturday evenings the Roosevelts introduced me to every ambassador in town, and on Sunday nights Mrs. Roosevelt cooked scrambled eggs.
All the while, Ernest and I wrote the dearest letters. I wrote about the Bell movie, which I saw almost the day I arrived so I could assure him that the critics were wrong about it, that it wasn’t the political mess they made it out to be. The handsome Gary Cooper and the beautiful Ingrid Bergman were so clearly the good people of the film, and the Fascists, even if they weren’t called that, were as unattractive as all bad people in film are made to be, and anyone could tell the difference. The film was long, sure, but it was long because it was important, and if they would only let people smoke in the theater so they wouldn’t have to go for three hours without a cigarette, then no one would think it too long at all. Only the color was bad, the color did bring out the fake a little, the makeup and the sets, which would have looked more real in black and white. But audiences were wild for color, and at least Ingrid Bergman as Maria did look astonishing with her short tawny hair and blue blue eyes.
Ernest wrote me that he was glad about the film and that I was a better judge than any lousy critic. He shared all the good stuff of Bumby’s visit to the Finca, now as a lieutenant in the military police and off to his first duty station, at Fort Custer in Michigan, thank heavens. After Bumby left, Ernest wrote that he missed Bumby and me both so dreadfully that he might die of sadness. I wrote that I couldn’t be a part of that kind of painful death, that I was sad with loneliness too and he mattered more to me than anything in the world, and if he truly couldn’t bear it, I’d call it off with Collier’s and come home to him. But he was still expecting permission to operate the Pilar in the Caribbean again, using Guantanamo as a base this time.
At the end of October, I boarded a Pan Am Clipper for London via Bermuda and Portugal and Ireland, with a promise of a war correspondent credential when I arrived. Collier’s had commissioned me to write one long piece and as many one-thousand-word ones as I cared to, on the lives of specific people. It was the easiest writing for me, these personal stories, and I was glad to be at the edge of war, poised to move right into it if only I could find a way to get beyond England, which was as far as I was accredited to go. The journey took twelve days, but I was so smashingly happy to be going off to war that I went dancing with anyone who would dance on the stopovers, and wrote Bug all about it, and wished he’d come with me.
London, England
NOVEMBER 1943
My old friend Allen Grover, whom I’d excoriated over the Time magazine piece on A Stricken Field, made it up to me by pulling every string in his entire closet of sweaters to get me two weeks at the Dorchester in Park Lane. London hotel rooms were nearly as rare as pleated women’s skirts (which were banned on account of the waste of fabric), with so many journalists back from North Africa or on leave from the Italian campaign, or biding their time in London awaiting the next phase of the war, which surely would be France.
Ginny took me to breakfast the morning after I arrived—not much of a breakfast due to the rationing, but I fell upon it and upon her, wanting to know everything she knew. It made me ashamed of myself. It made me want to trade my practical shoes for her spiked heels and gold jewelry and Boston vocabulary. It made me want to have dyed my hair dark instead of tawny, and never left the war.
Ginny went with me to arrange for a uniform—with a patch on the left jacket pocket, C for correspondent—and to pick up my accreditation papers. That was something, to get my pass, with my photograph and my fingerprints and in the blank for grade, “Accredited War Correspondent.”
“It says here I’m a captain in the US Army, how about that?” I announced with glee. We were on our way back to the Dorchester, Ginny’s spike heels clicking along through the busted pavement, her shorter legs matching me stride for stride in the brisk autumn air.
“Which will gain you exactly one benefit,” she said. “It will save you from being shot by Germans who will otherwise imagine you a spy.”
I grinned and I said, “I do like the way you think, Miss Cowles: we sure can’t be captured by Germans on this side of the Channel.”
“Well, you’re an optimist,” Ginny answered. “Clearly you’re the new girl. Give it a month or two, and if you’re still so sure of that, I’ll see about having you committed as a lunatic.”
“You think I’m crazy just because I figure we’ll either convince them to let us tag along on the invasion of France or we’ll figure out how to do it without their say-so?”
“I think you’re crazy to be so certain that we won’t be captured by Germans here in England, Mart,” she said, and she laughed her proper little Boston laugh.
We were almost back to the hotel, when I said, “Martha G. Hemingway.”
“Pardon?” Ginny said.
“Martha G. Hemingway, that’s who it says I am. The real me reduced to a single letter and the most important bit of me now is that I’m someone’s wife.”
She put her arm in mine, and we walked on together for a quiet moment, past people hurrying up or down from the subway or selling newspapers or conducting busses—so many of them women, with all the young men now in uniform.
“Well,” Ginny said, “I’m thirty-three and unmarried. If you want to swap names and positions, let’s talk. But I should warn you Virginia isn’t my real name any more than Hemingway is yours.”
She pulled her own credential from her pocket and handed it to me. It read “Harriet V. S. Cowles.”
“Harriet!” I said. “‘Harry,’ that’s what I’ll call you from now on!”
“Harry Virgin,” she said, and we laughed and laughed.
God, it felt good to be at war, or close to it.
London in war was a different place than I’d so despised six years earlier, when it had been only on the verge of war and trying to imagine it wasn’t. All of Paternoster Row, the center of London publishing, was reduced to jagged edges of partial stone walls, as were a dozen of the most beautiful churches. The rationing was wearing everybody thin too, and the only spots of color on the otherwise drably garbed populace were the burgundy linings of the nurse’s cloaks and the dark-cherry and sky-blue trimmings of the parachute regiment. It all added up to the most beautiful London I’d ever seen.
Ginny and I went out together every day. I called her Harry, and she called me Mutt, and it was something to have a close pal like that, someone who wasn’t your husband to talk to about anything that was on your mind. I talked about Ernest, not the whole difficult meal, but a nibble or two at the edges, like with wanting still to be Gellhorn. And I began to imagine that when I went back to Cuba I might try to take Ginny with me, that with her as company, like in Spain, Ernest and I might love each other more easily.
The Dorchester, where the New York Times had set up shop, was the place to be—that or the Savoy, where the Herald Tribune had its offices. Ginny and I gathered most nights at one or the other with the journalists in town, to e
at what little there was and drink whatever booze we could find. Ginny took to introducing me to everyone I didn’t yet know: a Hungarian novelist whose Darkness at Noon had made him a famous son of a bitch rather than just a garden-variety one; the British writers Evelyn Waugh and Cyril Connolly, who seemed somehow not all-wool; and a fellow headed to Algiers, where he was poised to be the French ambassador as soon as there was a free France to ambass. The ambassador-to-be stopped by Ginny’s room with his wife one evening when Ginny was already in curlers and cold cream, but she invited them right in, and we became instant lifelong friends.
I met Life correspondent Bill Walton and the novelist Irwin Shaw, whom I lumped together on account of the two of them forever skulking around the same gal. The gal was Mary Welsh, an American who wrote occasionally for Life and Time and was forever showing up braless and in thin sweaters to advertise how chilly it was with all the coal going to the war effort, and who was rumored to be sleeping with Walton or Shaw, or perhaps both. Her husband, the perfectly splendid Australian journalist Noel Monks, had been in Spain with us, the first correspondent to reach Guernica after the Fascists bombed it to hell. I thought if this Mary Welsh was going to carry on behind her lovely husband’s back, she might at least be discreet.
Someone in the assembled gang was forever asking about Ernest and wondering when he would join us. I didn’t mind it from friends, but I wondered if the new people who liked me did so on their own judgment or only because Ernest had chosen me. I supposed they saw me as I might have seen myself had I been meeting me for the first time—as the very ordinary wife of an extraordinary man.
The reporting was different than in Spain, it was. That was Ernest’s argument for staying in Cuba: gloom and doom was frowned upon, and of course being accredited meant submitting all your copy to the censors, who, after years of war, were practiced at the art of saying no even to the most reasonable reports. But my copy for Collier’s wasn’t the war propaganda Ernest had disparaged (how far and fast our troops were going and the way we were slaughtering the Germans and the Italians, as if there was not a bit of them slaughtering us back). The censors didn’t bother me much.