Mrs. Hemingway Read online

  For Katherine

  CONTENTS

  HADLEY

  1. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  2. PARIS, FRANCE. 1925–26.

  3. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  4. PARIS, FRANCE. APRIL 1926.

  5. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  6. ANTIBES, FRANCE. MAY 1926.

  7. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  8. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  9. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  10. CHICAGO, ILLINOIS. OCTOBER 1920.

  11. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  12. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  FIFE

  13. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  14. PARIS, FRANCE. 1925–26.

  15. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  16. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  17. PIGGOTT, ARKANSAS. OCTOBER 1926.

  18. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  19. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. DECEMBER 1936.

  20. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  21. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  22. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. JUNE 1938.

  MARTHA

  23. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  24. KEY WEST, FLORIDA. DECEMBER 1936.

  25. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  26. HAVANA, CUBA. 1939–40.

  27. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  28. HAVANA, CUBA. APRIL 1944.

  29. PARIS , FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  30. PARIS, FRANCE. AUGUST 26, 1944.

  MARY

  31. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  32. LONDON, ENGLAND. MAY 1944.

  33. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  34. PARIS, FRANCE. SEPTEMBER 1944.

  35. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  36. HAVANA , CUBA. 1946.

  37. KETCHUM, IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  38. HAVANA, CUBA. 1947.

  39. KETCHUM , IDAHO . SEPTEMBER 1961.

  40. KETCHUM , IDAHO. SEPTEMBER 1961.

  AFTERWORD

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  HADLEY

  1. ANTIBES, FRANCE. JUNE 1926.

  Everything, now, is done à trois. Breakfast, then swimming; lunch, then bridge; dinner, then drinks in the evening. There are always three breakfast trays, three wet bathing suits, three sets of cards left folded on the table when the game, abruptly and without explanation, ends. Hadley and Ernest are accompanied wherever they go by a third: this woman slips between them as easily as a blade. This is Fife: this is her husband’s lover.

  Hadley and Ernest sleep together in the big white room of the villa, and Fife sleeps downstairs, in a room meant for one. The house is quiet and tense until one of their friends arrives with soap and provisions, idling by the fence posts, wondering whether it might be best to leave the three undisturbed.

  They lounge around the house—Hadley, Ernest, and Fife—and though they know they are all miserable no one is willing to sound the first retreat; not wife, not husband, not mistress. They have been in the villa like this for weeks, like dancers in relentless motion, trying to exhaust each other into falling.

  The morning is already warm and the light has turned the white cotton sheets nearly blue. Ernest is sleeping. His hair is still parted as it was during the day, and there is a warm fleshy smell to his skin that Hadley would tease him about were she in the mood. Around his eyes is a sunburst of wrinkles on the browned skin; Hadley can imagine him squinting out over the top of the boat, looking for the best place to drop anchor and fish.

  In Paris, his beauty has become notorious; it is shocking what he can get away with. Even their male friends are bowled over by his looks; they outpace the barmaids in their affection for him. Others see beyond all this to his changeability: meek, at times; bullish at others—he has been known to knock the spectacles off a man’s face after a snub in the Bal Musette. Even some of their close friends are nervous of him—including Scott—though they are older and more successful, it doesn’t seem to matter. What contrary feelings he stirs in men. With women it’s easier—they snap their heads to watch him go and they don’t stop looking until he’s gone. She only knows of one who isn’t charmed by him.

  Hadley lies looking up at the ceiling. The beams have been eaten away; she can track the worm’s progress through the wood. Lampshades sway as if there is a great weight to them, though all they are is paper and dowelling. Someone else’s perfume bottles glint on the dressing table. Light presses at the shutters. It will be hot again today.

  Hadley really wants nothing more than to be in cold old Paris, in their apartment with the smells of pigeon roasting on the coal fire and the pissoir off the landing. She wants to be back in the narrow kitchen and the bathroom where damp spores the walls. She wants to have their usual lunch of boiled eggs at a table so small their knees knock together. It was at this table that Hadley had her suspicions of the affair confirmed. I think Ernest and Fife are very fond of each other, Fife’s sister had said. That’s all she had needed to say.

  Yes, Hadley would rather be in Paris or even St. Louis right now, these cities which nurse their ash-pit skies and clouds of dead sleet—anywhere but here, in the violet light of glorious Antibes. At night, fruit falls to the grass with a soft thunk and in the morning she finds the oranges split and stormed by ants. The smell around the villa is ripening. And already, this early, the insects have begun.

  Hadley gets up and goes over to the window. When she presses her forehead against the glass, she can see his mistress’s room. Fife’s blinds are closed. Their son Bumby sleeps downstairs, too, having fended off the whooping cough—the coqueluche—which brought them all to this villa in the first place. Sara Murphy didn’t want Bumby near her children for fear the infection would spread. The Fitzgeralds were good to offer their villa for the quarantine—they didn’t have to. But when Hadley walks around the rooms, touching their glamorous things, it feels awful to have her marriage end in the rented quarters of another family’s house.

  Tonight, however, marks the end of their quarantine. The Murphys have invited them over to Villa America and it will be the first time this vacation that the unhappy trio has been in the company of friends. To Hadley, the party feels both exciting and dreadful: something has happened in the villa that nobody else has seen, as if someone has wet the mattress and not owned up to the fast-cooling spot in the middle of the bedclothes.

  Hadley climbs back into bed. The sheet is tense around Ernest; she tries to pull it back so that he’ll think she hasn’t yet left, but he has the cotton bunched in his fist. She kisses the top of his ear and whispers, “You’ve stolen the bedding.”

  Ernest doesn’t answer but scoops her toward him. In Paris he likes to be up early and in his studio by nine. But in Antibes these embraces happen many times daily, as if Ernest and Hadley are in the first flush of romance again, even while both of them know this summer might be the end of things. Lying next to him she wonders how it is she has lost him, although perhaps that is not quite the right phrase, since she has not lost him, not yet. Rather Fife and Hadley wait and watch as if they are lining up for the last seat on a bus.

  “Let’s go for a swim.”

  “It’s too early, Hash.” Ernest’s eyes are still closed though there is a flicker behind the lids. She wonders if he’s weighing both of them up now that he is awake. Should it be wife? Or mistress? Mistress, or wife? The brain’s whisper begins.

  Hadley swings her legs over the side of the bed. Sunlight threatens to storm the room with a pull of the chain. She feels too big for this heat. All the baby weight seems to have thickened her at the hips; it’s been so hard to shift. Her hair, too, feels heavy. “I’m sick of this place,” she says, pulling her hand around her da
mp neck. “Don’t you long for rain or gray skies? Green grass? Anything.”

  “Time is it?”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  Ernest paws at her shoulders.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just can’t.” Her voice catches on the last word. Hadley goes over to the dressing table and she feels Ernest following her with sorrowful eyes. In the mirror her breasts spike under the nightgown. Bone-colored light fills the room when the blinds snap. He pulls the sheet over his head and looks a tiny thing under the bedclothes. Often she doesn’t know what to make of him, whether to class him as a child or a man. He’s the most intelligent person she knows and yet sometimes her instinct is to treat him like her son.

  The bathroom is cooler. The claw-footed tub is inviting: she’d like to get in and run herself a cold bath. She splashes the back of her neck and washes her face. Her skin is freckled from the sunshine and her hair redder. She dries herself with a towel and remembers last summer in Spain. They had seen the running of the bulls and gone splashing into the pool. Afterward Ernest had towel-dried her: going up from her ankles, between her legs, then over her breasts. Her mother would have hated such a public show. Touching is reserved for the bedroom, she would have said, but this, too, added to the excitement, as Ernest had gently dried each inch of his wife.

  When they returned to Paris that summer, Fife was waiting for them. Nothing—Hadley was sure, or nearly sure—had happened between them until later that year. Winter. Possibly spring. Jinny had not been forthcoming on timings. If only Ernest had more sense than just to throw it all away. Hadley smiles to herself; she sounds like one of those sighing housewives in magazine stories she would never admit to Ernest she rather likes to read.

  In the bedroom she throws him his bathing suit which has stiffened overnight. “Come on, Ernest.” An arm emerges for the suit. “Let’s go before it gets too hot.”

  Ernest finally gets up and wordlessly steps into the bathing suit. His ass is the only white thing left of him; it pains her to see how handsome he is. Hadley shoves towels into a beach bag with a book (an e. e. cummings novel which she is trying, but failing, to read) and her sunglasses and watches Ernest as he puts on the clothes he wore yesterday.

  He takes an apple from the pantry and holds it in his palm.

  Outside the villa, near the lavender in terra-cotta pots, Fife’s bathing suit hangs on the line. It sways, awaiting her legs and arms and softly nodding head. The Hemingways tread past her room in their uniform of Riviera stripes, fisherman’s caps, and white shorts, putting their shoes quietly on the gravel, trying not to wake her. It feels, to Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway, as if they are the ones who are having the affair.

  2. PARIS, FRANCE. 1925–26.

  It was a letter that finally gave them away.

  From the beginning Hadley and Fife had been fast correspondents. They called each other affectionate nicknames and recounted the minor troubles of being American women in Paris. Fife would write, addressing Hadley as mon enfant, and talk about how overworked she was at Vogue, or who was a boring flirt, or how drunk she had been—and still was—as she clattered at the typewriter on the baby grand piano in her apartment on the rue Picot. Fife’s letters were always gorgeously funny. Hadley sometimes had trouble working out the right way to pen a response. She’d always written just as she spoke.

  The production of Fife’s letters was always evident. Slugs of gin stained the page, or there was a scratch of mascara near the date, or the bruise of jammed letters where, Fife told her in the postscript, some man had seated himself on the piano keys and made her mistype the Royal typewriter. When Hadley read the letters she imagined her slim lovely friend drinking vermouth in that kimono Fife liked to wear, perfectly huge on the girl’s curveless shape.

  Fife had been wearing chinchilla when Hadley first met her at a party. The coat had slipped past in a rush of fur, tickling Hadley’s nose, as this expensive-looking girl filled her martini glass. “Oops,” she said, batting down the fur and giving Hadley a wide grin. “Sorry. It does get in the way like that.” Fife wore chinchilla; her sister Jinny wore mink.

  Evidently they were women of means, though Hadley saw from their hands that both sisters were unmarried. When they were introduced Ernest said something wicked about how he’d like to take one of the sisters out in the other sister’s coat. Which animal he preferred left everyone guessing.

  After the party Hadley asked her husband what he thought of this woman Pauline, whom everyone called Fife. “Well,” he said, “she’s no southern belle.” And he was right. Black short hair, skinny and small, but it was the woman’s eyes that were remarkable. Dark and lovely and quite bold, not a hint of doubt about herself. That’s what she liked immediately about Fife: how assured she was, almost like a man.

  Fife started to call on the Hemingways that fall after they’d seen each other at the Dôme and the Select. When they bumped into her at the club one evening, they included her in the invitation to finish the party at their apartment. After that night, Fife started coming round regularly, as if she’d picked up a taste for their bohemian poverty. Their apartment, despite its shabbiness, she said was positively ambrosial. Hadley wasn’t quite sure what this meant, and with how much irony the woman delivered that statement.

  It had been fun at first: the three of them sitting up late every night, talking about books and food and the authors whom they liked for their personalities but not for their prose. Fife would always leave early, saying, “You men need some time alone.” It seemed a very modern thing to do, this referring to oneself as a boy, or a man, or a chap. Hadley disliked it.

  When Fife left, the apartment always felt empty. Hadley didn’t feel able to put together little witticisms about their social circle and Ernest seemed deflated. Instead of talking as they normally did, Hadley started to go to bed early. And Ernest stayed up late, working on a manuscript, drinking alone.

  Then Fife stopped leaving early. One evening she stayed late (“Oh, only if you chaps don’t mind having me”) and then the next evening she stayed even later. The apartment rang with the woman’s laughter, which had such an instant flourish that Hadley had a hard time making her own heard.

  Sometimes, when it was late and they had stayed up talking, Ernest would go down and hail her a cab. She wondered what it was they talked about, Ernest and Fife, as they idled on the street corner, bundled up, their faces close against the cold, the skin of the chinchilla brushing up against his neck.

  Suddenly, whenever Hadley walked into a room, Fife would be in it. Often she’d be doing something appallingly helpful: pinning clothes on the wash line, or playing with Bumby, or, to Hadley’s fury, one day changing the bed linens without asking, as if their marriage bed were something she were privy to. And when Hadley came down with a cold that November, Fife was there: feeding her broths and making her compresses, keeping her warm and tucked up in bed while she entertained Ernest in the room next door.

  When they went skiing that December, Fife followed. They easily accommodated her, as if there were a space in the bed already waiting. Ernest worked in the mornings, and Hadley and Fife would read by the fire or play with Bumby. In the evenings, they played three-handed bridge. Hadley always lost but she’d usually drunk too much sherry to care. When Ernest returned to Paris that January for business, before setting off for New York, she knew Fife saw him alone. Fife wrote, addressing her as Cherishable, saying she would stick by Ernest’s side even during the dullest of his tasks. Hadley tried to keep her thoughts on skiing and the snow.

  She returned to Paris when spring’s blossom flowed in dusty rivers down the gutters, and the air was so full of seeds it stung her eyes. Hadley thought things would return to normal. There was, after all, no evidence: no discovered kisses, no perfume on his coat, no love letters. She hadn’t even heard of any rumors. It was just a flirtation, and Fife rambled so consistently about her paramours that Hadley told herself she was nothing more than jealous.r />
  Perhaps she should have seen more in her friend’s letters. There was that rich woman’s sense of entitlement: of deserving a particular object only by virtue of desiring it, whether it was a bicycle or a Schiaparelli dress or another woman’s husband. How effortlessly Fife charmed others—and how charmless it made her feel. Hadley started forgetting to reply. Hadley, mon amour, Fife wrote that spring, asking why the letters from her quarter had dried up, and dried up quite so precipitously.

  Stay away from my husband, Hadley wanted to write or even say; but she did not.

  The letter that gave them away was no bigger than a memo.

  Ernest had put it in one of his exercise books with the rest of his correspondence. Since the incident with the suitcase, Ernest knew Hadley wouldn’t look in this drawer. At first she didn’t even recognize it as her friend’s hand: Fife always used the typewriter loaned from Vogue. But this note was big and scrawled, boldly penned. She knew instantly what it meant without even reading it: because it was addressed only to Ernest. When Fife wrote, she always wrote to Hadley or to Mr. and Mrs. Hemingway; the letters were never for him alone.

  Cher Ernest,

  Didn’t you think Seb looked SWELL at the club?

  I must admit I find him ENTIRELY agreeable.

  Fife

  How he would have loved Fife so nakedly stoking his jealousy. He always wanted to know that he was desired. Was this evidence that they were having an affair? Or was she reading a subtext that was not there?

  Ernest called out to her from the living room. “Hash?”

  Her hand shook as she replaced Fife’s letter back in his notebook and shut the drawer. In the living room Ernest was pooled in the light of the gas lamp, and he had that frown which meant deep concentration. He wore mittens while writing: they couldn’t afford any more heating until he was paid for his articles. She sat opposite him on the only other chair they had. She could ask him. Just ask him straight if something was going on between him and Fife.