Beautiful Exiles, Page 4

  “Ah, but Scribbles is worth listening to, Stooge,” Ernest said. “It’s not just the magazine space he’s thinking about.”

  My crankiness was just the boredom and the fear of being stuck in the St. Louis Wednesday Club or left behind at the gymnasium’s edge—boredom I tried to dampen by working with the Red Cross, helping flood victims in south Missouri. I exchanged letters with Bertrand, who was in still in Paris and, like me, considering going to Spain to cover the war. And of course I did shorten the story just like Mr. Scribner wanted. It wasn’t a book, after all; it was only a magazine story meant to be read on a train.

  I wrote my novel too, finally. I holed myself up on the third floor like a hermitus maximus and barely looked out the window to McPherson Avenue, much less to the ghastly coal-smoke haze of St. Louis. I wrote the way I always wrote back then, getting each chapter right before moving on. I wanted to write a hell of a book, to choose the words properly and string them together just so, to move people the way Ernest’s writing moved me. But I was chewing cement, and Mrs. Roosevelt, when I wrote her about it, suggested I’d gotten the jitters and lost the flow in my obsession for the perfect words. I took her advice to save the revising for later, and I wrote like a slave, ten new pages a day no matter my mood or my temperature or the state of my winter constitution. I wrote with one ear to the war humming louder in Spain. Yet for all of Hemingway’s urging me to let him arrange for me to get to Madrid, there was something daunting about him, something that left me squawky about being under obligation to him or dependent on his patronage.

  I finished the novel draft and sent it to Time magazine journalist Allen Grover; we’d been a bit more than friends for five minutes some years before but had settled into being the best of pals, and starkly honest with each other in the way that every writer needs.

  Grover pronounced my novel a credible political tract but not much of a story.

  I abandoned the damned thing, and I wrote to Bertrand to wait for me in Paris if he could, that we might travel together from Paris. And I wrote Hemingway that I would see him in New York on my way to Spain.

  New York, New York

  FEBRUARY 1937

  There was plenty of trouble to find with Ernest in New York, but it was Hemingway’s brand of trouble, all dashing and vulgar and alcohol fueled. There was always a gang, and we were always going or coming, rushing about in the evening and recovering in the day to rush out again to the Stork Club or to “21.” The “21” Club—what a name for a place and never mind that I was twenty-eight and Ernest thirty-seven and we weren’t any older than anyone else. It was just the address, a brownstone at 21 East Fifty-First Street that had been a speakeasy, with a wrought-iron fence and a doorman and a tiny jockey statue you wouldn’t know announced a club unless you were in the know. We shunned the wood-paneled bar and the dining room hung with model ships and cars and planes for a private room where Ernest and his pals spent long nights plotting a film they meant to change the future of Spain. The Spanish Earth was to be directed by Joris Ivens, a vodka-drinking Dutchman with the kind of rough dark-hair-blue-eyes-cleft-chin looks that bring respect for a man, while a good-looking woman cannot possibly be sharp or witty—or if she is, then she must be up to something that will do a man harm.

  “Stooge is going to Spain too,” Ernest told them, “as soon as her papers are in order.”

  “We’re co-conspirators, Ernestino and I. I’ve brought my false beard and dark glasses,” I joked, trying to win them over with my favorite orange dress and a good old-fashioned laugh at myself. “We’re both going to say nothing and look strong.”

  But I couldn’t just go to Spain without a travel visa on account of the nonintervention pact banning civilian travel to the country, and Ernest, whose papers were already in order and only waiting for him to decide to go, was providing me none of the help he’d offered in all those phone calls when I was back home. He would talk without ever taking a breath (except to drink his whiskey) about how the Republicans had pulled back together and counterattacked at Jarama, and how Fascism was the only kind of government that couldn’t produce good writing, and how we needed to set aside our own happiness and do our bit. Despite all his talk, though, he began to seem like a man who wanted to be going to Spain with no desire actually to arrive at the war.

  I begged an editor I knew at Collier’s to play along with some bunk I made up about being a special correspondent for them, to give me an excuse to get my travel papers. Just after he agreed, Ernest finally set sail for Paris, taking along Sidney Franklin—a sandy-haired bullfighter from Flatbush he met while writing The Sun Also Rises, who didn’t even know which side of the war they meant to cover. Me, I dug up a commission from Vogue to write fluff about “Beauty Problems of the Middle-Aged Woman” to earn my own passage to Paris. To write the piece, I had to try a new treatment that peeled away the skin on my face, to expose fresh layers underneath. I was a ghastly sight when I sailed, in a cabin with an exploding radiator, a telephone that worked occasionally, and an elevator and a service bell that never did. But I’d have done a fan dance in Times Square or sung Aida in Madison Square Garden to earn passage to cover the Spanish war.

  They say hindsight is twenty-twenty, but it isn’t; it’s as fogged by the goggles we swim through life wearing as anything is. Nostalgia goggles, or goggles of regret? See the difference? My life, looking back on it, seems a series of running toward excitement, covering Hitler’s early violence, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the civil wars in Central America, and, when I was eighty-one, the US invasion of Panama, which folks like to remark upon, but really there is so little upside to acting your age as an old woman that it would have been more remarkable had I stayed home. In the view through my own goggles, though, it’s less clear what direction I’m running, and I have as company a ghost in an ugly traveling hat.

  I was barely twenty when I first began running. Already, I’d failed my first exams at Bryn Mawr, only to pass them with high marks on a second try; I’m not sure which enraged Dad more. Before I could pass or fail the next exams, I landed in the school infirmary, too lousy with dullness to get out of bed. After recuperating in St. Louis, I went to New York for a job marking galleys—misspellings, punctuation, on a good day a split infinitive. I managed to get a piece I’d written about Rudy Vallée published, I suppose for the plain reason that nobody older than I was could explain the attraction of Vallée’s wavy hair and wavy voice. On the strength of that piece and one other, I landed a job as a journalist in Albany, reporting on crime and divorce—improbably never the divorce of the city editor whose drunken advances I forever parried. Weary of the task (which always seemed to be mine to deal with), I returned home again to Dad’s haranguing me to return to school. At the reappearance of the St. Louis blues, Matie lent me train fare to New York, where I could sleep on my brother’s couch until I pulled together passage to Paris. Running to Paris, not from anything, I would have told you; I meant to take whatever job I could find there, and live cheaply, as you could back then, and write.

  I certainly didn’t imagine I was running from Dad’s fierce disapproval, clear as that is now through any of the goggles I might wear. But at the St. Louis train station, as I was saying goodbye to Dad, I began sobbing. He was a man who stood proudly for independent women when others shamed them, but somehow I’d become a daughter of whom he was ashamed.

  It never was a thing Dad could tolerate, a woman sobbing, especially when that woman was his own daughter and she in a public place, with people who might know who we were turning to look. He demanded I get ahold of myself, which of course made it impossible.

  When I went to kiss him goodbye on the platform, he leaned away from me, with all those people watching. I was left to wipe my eyes and blow my nose and pretend interest in my hat—an embarrassingly homely thing I could no longer imagine I’d ever admired.

  In the first minutes of that steamy chug toward my new life, I lowered the window and chucked the damn
ed hat out toward the muddy Mississippi drifting below us. Goodbye, hat. Goodbye, St. Louis. Goodbye, Matie, I’m off to write scrofulous French novels on grey paper with blunt type. Goodbye, Dad, and all the disappointing, flunking-out failure daughterness, the lunchroom rejection, the wet-wool stink of the coatroom as, in the gymnasium, others waltzed.

  The lousy hat didn’t even make it to the river. It landed on the westbound tracks, to be crushed by a returning train, or dragged all the way back to St. Louis.

  It was on that trip to Paris that I met Bertrand de Jouvenel, who, despite everything, I was looking forward to seeing again. Because of the delay in my travel papers, though, by the time I finally arrived in Paris, he’d given up on me and gone ahead to Spain. He was reporting for Paris-Soir with the gang at the Imatz in Hendaye, journalists from the Chicago Tribune, the New York Herald Tribune, and London’s Daily Mail. “Rabbit, you’ll think I’m off my head marching with the troops,” he wrote to me. And, sure, Josephine Baker was singing at the Folies-Bergère and Maurice Chevalier at the Casino, but Paris was so wet that the Seine threatened its banks, and everyone was surly or outraged or stunned by one thing or another: deficits and government incompetence, worker protests, even books.

  Hemingway too had already set off for Spain by the time I arrived in France, and my efforts to find another journalist with whom to travel came to naught. There was nothing to do in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower except wait for the French government to do with issuing my papers to Spain what they did so well with helping Spain and confronting Hitler and everything else, which was to delay and delay and delay.

  Paris, France

  MARCH 1937

  I spoke no Spanish and had only fifty dollars in my pocket, but I studied my maps and pulled on sturdy gray flannel trousers and a sweater and windbreaker, stuffed my bar of soap and spare clothes into my knapsack, loaded a duffel with canned goods, and caught a train south from Paris. I rode second class, changing trains once before the Spanish border. When the sun rose or I rose or we both did, it was to a world of trees blooming pink and white. An hour later, the snow was falling in flakes as huge as those blooms had been.

  I disembarked at Puigcerdá; the French and Spanish trains ran on different-sized tracks, so I had to walk across the border. I stood alone on the platform, watching the French train reverse and disappear, the field around me as white as my face might have been if not for the cold making it red. I’d been to almost-war, to pending-war, to this-place-is-about-to-explode, but I hadn’t actually been in the midst of shells falling and people shooting guns at each other, popping each other dead.

  The cold was a blessing as I heaved my backpack and duffel and tromped over the snow-covered border to the Spanish side. The cold left me sure I would freeze to death before I ever got a chance to be killed.

  A customs officer examined the nonintervention papers finally granted me by the French administratoramuses with their scratchy pens and their scratchy personalities. He stamped my passport, and I climbed onto the train to Barcelona, an old pile of junk with no heat and no comfort beyond the fact that the snow was falling on the outside of the windows and the windowpanes stopped the wind, more or less. The train was rowdy with recruits on their way to join the Republicans, boys dressed in whatever they could find in an army where the soldiers fed and clothed themselves. I was glad to see them, though, glad to see the Republicans might have what it took to turn back the Fascists at Madrid. They’d been abandoned by every government in the world to survive on their own sweat and blood while Hitler and Mussolini provided weapons and aid to Franco’s murdering Fascists. They were good boys too—boys who gave me bits of their garlic sausages and their bread that must have been made from chalk, who quieted at each stop when a senior soldier poked his head into our carriage, only to return to rowdiness as the train set off again.

  Barcelona, when I arrived, was all swarms of soldiers and rifles and political posters plastered along the Ramblas, and red streamers everywhere. It was cold cold cold, and there wasn’t one bit of coal in the whole city, and no butter, even at the hotels. Everything about it pleased me. Life’s damned funny that way, isn’t it? The hotels were jammed full of young Brits and Americans meaning to get themselves killed if only they could get to the front, but the Ministry of Foreign Propaganda found me a room. I was so exhausted that I slept through the bombing that night without even a dream.

  I poked around Barcelona for two days before hitching a ride to Valencia, where the woman in charge of the government press bureau found me a ride on to Madrid. “With Ted Allan, a young pup who’s been recruited from the International Brigades,” she said, the Brigades being the foreigners fighting with the Republicans against the Fascists. “Ted is here to work on a film about the surgeon who established one of the first mobile blood-transfusion units for the front.”

  “Mr. Allan,” I said on our introduction, the scummy rub of the long time on the road falling away with his smile.

  “Ted,” he said.

  “You don’t seem like a Ted,” I said. “You seem like a Mr. Allan. Or perhaps just Allan.”

  He laughed easily, although he’d spent months with the International Brigades already and had plenty of reasons not to laugh.

  “You’ll be a witch, will you?” he said. “My given name was Alan. Alan Herman.”

  “So you traded two first names for a different two first names?” I said, flipping my hair in a way Dad would have found shameful. My yellow hair.

  “I like change,” Ted Allan said.

  I allowed myself a long look at him, wondering what really lay beneath this nice boy from Montreal wanting to be a Spanish hero. He was young and smart and gypsy-eyed, intense and playful all at once, and full of himself in that way I never can resist. In addition to the blood-transfusion film he was working on, he wrote for a Canadian paper, and he broadcast on Madrid radio.

  He said, “What makes a pretty gal like you want to live covered in the dust of warring Spaniards?”

  “I’m from St. Louis,” I said.

  He laughed again.

  “And I like to live,” I said, reminded suddenly of Bertrand, thinking this Ted Allan, too, was the kind who could stick in your guts for a while if things went bad.

  A car pulled up to fetch us, a Citroën with a Spanish driver and Ernest’s bullfighter friend Sidney Franklin in the passenger seat. Also two typewriters; a half-dozen enormous hams; coffee enough to send you to Jupiter; a crate of oranges, lemons, and limes; and some fifty jars of marmalade. Butter too. Trust Hemingway to find butter when there was none to be found, or to send Sidney Franklin to do it for him.

  “Martha,” Sidney said in his New Jersey bark. Just my name, but he managed to deliver in it all the disapproval I’d felt in New York.

  “Well, this is sure to be some ride,” I said, “with Sidney Franklin who is really Sidney Frumpkin from Flatbush, and Ted Allan who is really Alan Herman from Montreal.”

  I cut a glance at Ted, wanting him to laugh and yet not. If you made the wrong kind of fun of Sidney, you put yourself in danger of him knocking your lights out. Sidney wasn’t big, but he was a bullfighter, and a good one. It said something about Ernest Hemingway that Sidney Franklin who was Sidney Frumpkin would be his errand boy in Spain.

  Sidney pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

  “You stay put, Sidney,” Ted said. “Marty and I will manage in the back.”

  We tied my duffel to the front fender, and Ted and I wedged ourselves and our other gear into the overstuffed back seat, far from the car’s shabby heater. We made the best of it, though, snuggling together for warmth as we traveled through the coastal mountains to the high, pale hills and fields of La Mancha.

  Ted briefed me on the details of the fighting he’d seen. He’d recently taken a film crew to the Jarama front at Morata.

  “I’d hoped to find some of my International Brigade mates,” he said, his mirth evaporating, “but twenty of them—chaps who crossed the Atlan
tic with me—died in the ruined olive groves at the heights of Pingarrón.”

  “Suicide Hill,” I said.

  There is nothing to gain in dwelling, though, so he just laid out the details: how the Fascist rebels had begun an offensive three weeks earlier, meant to encircle and capture Madrid before winter’s end. It took them only two days to overrun Brihuega, a walled city fifty miles northeast. Ted had nearly been killed on the twelfth when bullets shattered the windows of a station wagon taking blood supplies to the front. But a change in the weather had allowed the Republicans to send bomber support to the troops and turn back the assault.

  “Eight months into this war before the good guys finally get one decent victory,” I said.

  “If anyone wasn’t yet convinced that Mussolini has a dog in this fight,” Ted said, “I’d like them to explain the Lancia trucks and Fiat tractors left behind in that retreat, and the bags of mail with Italian addresses. That little Italian Fascist is respecting the Non-Intervention Agreement as surely as Hitler is respecting Jews.”

  As Ted and I talked and laughed—sure we found things to laugh about, as you do whenever you’re in a tough spot if you want to survive—Sidney fumed in the relative cold of the heated front seat, all the while blowing his nose and turning to give us scolding looks.

  It all began to seem less of a lark the closer we got to Madrid, as more and more the road was crowded with trucks and soldiers. When we were stopped at a barricade to produce our papers, something rumbled in the distance although the sky was clear.

  “Guns?” I asked.

  “Guns,” Ted said.