The Paris Wife (13 page)

We had over two hundred dollars from the
Toronto Star
burning with possibility when Ernest came back, and decided to splurge on a trip to Switzerland. He was feeling good about nearly everything just then. Scofield Thayer at the
Dial
had recently sent back the poems Pound had recommended with a stingingly impersonal rejection letter, but Ernest had made a lot of new connections in Genoa, other correspondents he’d worked closely with such as Max Eastman, an American editor who wanted Ernest to send along some of his prose sketches, and Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraking journalist who impressed Ernest to no end with his bold politics. Steffens had recently traveled to the Soviet Union and come back with an enthusiasm for communism, telling the press and anyone else who would listen, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Ernest was thrilled to have Steffens take notice of him and, bolstered by a new sense of community and ambition, he’d just sent off fifteen poems to Harriet Monroe at
Poetry
.

“Why the hell not?” he said. “Maybe the door won’t open unless I bang on it loud and long.”

“It’s all going to happen for you,” I said. “I feel it coming.”

“Maybe,” he said, “but let’s not jinx it by talking about it.”

We bought third-class tickets to Montreux, and then took the electric tram straight up the mountainside to Chamby, which overlooked Lake Geneva. Our chalet was large and rough, and the mountain air was wonderfully clear. We spent hours a day hiking on densely forested mountain trails and came back to a lunch of perfectly roasted meat, winter squash and parsnips, and stewed fruit with heavy cream. At night, we read by the fire and drank mulled wine with lemon and smoky spices. We slept as much as we wanted, made love twice a day, read and wrote letters and played cards.

“You’re so tan and strong and healthy,” Ernest said to me as we hiked one day. “Everything seems to agree with you here.”

I liked to hear any praise from him, but those weeks alone in Paris were still on my mind. They’d scared me and had me thinking about what it meant to be really strong, on my own terms—not just fit and brown from the sun, not just flexible and accommodating.

After the first week, Ernest’s old war friend Chink Dorman-Smith joined us. The two had met in Schio, at the Italian front, before Ernest was wounded. Chink was Irish, as tall as Ernest but much fairer, with ruddy cheeks and a red-blond mustache. I liked him immediately. He had the most beautiful manners, much more suited to someone who’d spent time at court than the professional soldier he was. Every morning he came to breakfast humming merrily and calling me Mrs. Popplethwaite. Ernest loved Chink like a brother and had endless respect for him. He wasn’t competitive with him as he could be with many of his writer or reporter friends, and so the time was easygoing, day after day. The Rhone Valley was in top form just then, with narcissus blooming in every bare patch of meadow and in the jagged crevices of rock. The first time I saw a narcissus pushing through ice and thriving, I thought it was perfect and wanted that kind of determination for myself.

Every day we tramped well into the mountains to find nice inns and promising fishing spots. The Stockalper, a stream near the junction of Lake Geneva and the Rhone, was Ernest’s favorite place this side of northern Michigan. He spent hours there happily hooking trout while Chink and I lounged in the grass and read or talked.

“It’s wonderful to see the two of you in love this way,” Chink said one afternoon as we lounged in the shade of a blossoming pear tree. “There were times I wondered if Hem would ever get over Milan.”

“Milan or his beautiful nurse?”

“Both, I guess,” he said. “That whole time hardly brought out the best in him. But you do.” Chink crossed his arms behind his head and closed his eyes. “Good old Hem,” he said, and then promptly fell asleep.

I liked that Chink saw and understood what was good in us. He also knew things about Ernest I didn’t. They shared a history, oceans of beer, late-night confessions. Sometimes they talked about the war in the long cool evenings on the chalet’s wide porch, and it gave me a new appreciation for what they’d both seen and endured.

Chink was and would always be a soldier. When Ernest went home to his life in the States, Chink stayed on with the British army. For the past several years he’d been stationed in Ireland with a British occupying force that was trying to control violence in the Irish fight for independence. It was a difficult post, and he’d seen a good bit of death, which you could feel him trying to throw off a little more every day he was with us.

“It must be so strange,” I said to him one evening, “with terrible fighting going on there, and you boarding a ship to take a holiday from it. Just buying a ticket and stepping away.”

Chink laughed darkly. “In our war”—he paused to nod to Ernest—“when the front ran all the way to the English Channel, there were men who got short furlough to go home for tea. They’d come back again and pick up their bayonets and gas masks and get to it, still tasting biscuit crumbs on their tongues.”

“Your mind can’t survive that, though,” Ernest said. “You can’t keep up with that jump. You get stuck one place or the other, or somewhere between. And that’s when the crack-up starts.”

“That’s right,” Chink said.

“Sometimes, though, once you’ve been to war and have that in you, you can go back there. And that’s sort of like what you were saying, Tiny.” He nodded to me over the table, meeting my eyes. “Like buying a ticket and going there, and then climbing out of it again when you snap to or wake up.”

“That’s not always so pleasant, is it?” Chink said, because he knew about Ernest’s nightmares of the front, and the way he still woke in the middle of the night, sweating and screaming with his eyes wild and terrified. The two friends nodded at one another and lifted their glasses.

It was on one of these evenings full of drink and talk that Chink brought up the idea of crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass into Italy.

“It was good enough for Napoléon and Charlemagne,” he said, sweeping beer foam from his mustache.

“How far do you think it is?” I asked.

“Maybe fifty kilometers?”

“Let’s do it,” Ernest said. “From Aosta, we can take the train to Milan.”

“Or Schio,” Chink said. “Return to the scene of the crime.”

“I’d love to show you Schio,” Ernest said to me. “It’s one of the finest places on earth.”

“There’s an old mill we made into a barracks and called the Schio Country Club,” Chink said smiling. “I couldn’t tell you how often we swam in the stream there in the heat of the day. And the wisteria!”

“And the trattoria with the little garden where we drank beer under a full moon,” Ernest said. “There’s a charming hotel in Schio, the Due Spadi. We’ll stay there for a night or two, and then head on to Fossalta. I could even write the whole trip up for the
Star
. Wounded soldier returns to front.”

“Brilliant,” Chink agreed, and it was settled.

The next morning we left the chalet with heavily loaded rucksacks. Ernest had come into the room when I was packing and seen me trying to find space for my bottles of face cream and toilet water. “Do you have any room in yours?” I asked, holding out the bottles.

“Fat chance,” he said. “Are you hoping to smell nice for the trout?”

“Give a girl a break,” I said, but he wouldn’t budge. Finally I asked Chink to carry them, which he did, grudgingly. But the vanity of wanting toilet water nearby while crossing a treacherous mountain pass was nothing in comparison to my shoe choice—slim tan oxfords instead of proper boots. I don’t know what I was thinking except that my legs looked better in the oxfords. A lot of good swell-looking legs did me. We hadn’t gone five miles before my feet were soaked through. In my defense, we didn’t know what we were in for. The pass was crossable in spring, but it hadn’t been opened that year. No one had yet gone through, and the snow was still thigh deep in some places. We trudged on anyway, through valleys and thickly forested pine trails and wide meadows dotted with wildflowers. The scenery was extraordinary, but Ernest and I were both in pretty bad form. My feet throbbed and my legs ached. He’d developed some sort of altitude sickness—nausea and a headache—and as we climbed, the symptoms worsened. His head swam, and every mile or so, he leaned over and retched into the snow. In a way, Chink had it worst of all, since he had to take up our slack, often carrying two packs several hundred yards at a time, then dropping them and returning for the third. As we walked I started to fantasize about being rescued by one of the famous St. Bernard dogs that would tug us, all three, up the rest of the mountain on a comfy sled.

Halfway up, we stopped at Bourg-St.-Pierre and ate lunch in a patch of sun. My feet were so swollen I was afraid to take off my shoes, thinking I might never get them on again. Good for nothing but a nap, I curled up on a wooden bench while Ernest and Chink wandered around the town sampling the beer.

“You missed a great little cemetery,” Chink said when they came to wake me later.

“There are rows and rows of tombstones for the poor bastards taken down by the mountain,” Ernest said.

“
This
mountain?” I said with alarm. “Are we really in danger?”

“Do you want to cash it in and stay here?” Ernest said.

“And miss the monks?” Chink said. “How would we forgive ourselves?”

The Hospice of St. Bernard sat at the highest point of the pass, where an order of devotees had been aiding travelers for a thousand years or more. Anyone knocking at their door would be given bread and soup, a cup of wine, and a straw bed to pass the night on. And so it was we came to them, late that evening, thirty kilometers up the mountain and a little drunk from the cognac we’d been sipping every twenty minutes to get us there from Bourg-St.-Pierre. It was a clear night. The moon loomed up behind the hospice and lit it eerily.

“Looks like a barracks, doesn’t it?” Chink said, stepping forward to rap at the imposing wooden door.

“You’d make a barracks of any old thing,” Ernest said before the door swung wide to reveal a taut bald head.

The monk asked no questions, just led us in and through the dark hushed corridors to our rooms. They were simple, as advertised, with straw mattresses for sleeping, but there was good reading light and a nice fire. While Chink and Ernest rested before dinner, I went exploring, thinking I might find a kitchen and a basin to soak my poor feet. But every corridor looked like every other. I tried to follow voices, but there were none. Finally, I took a chance on a long, dark passageway only to find that I’d stumbled on the monks’ private quarters. Several doors opened all at once, shaved head after shaved head popping out like moles. I was horrified, and returned to the room where I collapsed and spat out my story. The boys just laughed, of course, and then Ernest told me he thought I’d likely been the first woman to tread these halls in a thousand years! He promptly put it in a letter to Gertrude and Alice:
Mrs. Hemingway trying to seduce monks, here. Please advise
.

The next morning we headed out for Aosta feeling more ready to tackle the rest of the pass—or so I thought until my right oxford split open at the seam.

“Serves you right, Miss Vanity,” Ernest barked. Frankly, he wasn’t in much better shape. He was still nauseated from the altitude, and it took everything he had to go the remaining leg of the journey. Only Chink was still in good form. He took a knife and cut open my other shoe for me, and this was the way we hobbled into Aosta the next day, stepping out of a snow-throttled pass into full-on spring, pale green hills with glorious vineyards to every side. I joked in a letter home to Ruth that the boys all but had to carry me into town, but the truth was I’d surprised myself with my stamina. It hadn’t been pretty by any stretch, but I’d shown more endurance than I thought was even possible. If it hadn’t been for those terrible shoes, I might have run the last hundred yards to Aosta.

In the train to Milan, I slept like the dead and woke to hear Ernest and Chink talking about Benito Mussolini. The new fascist leader was in town, and Ernest wanted to try to use his press card to arrange an interview. He thought Mussolini was the biggest bluff in Europe just then and was dying to meet him. Meanwhile, Chink had to get back to his post, and so he left us there with kisses and promises that we’d meet again soon.

Ernest was happy to be in Milan again. After we found me new shoes, our first stop was the gorgeous and imposing stone mansion in the Via Manzoni that had been converted into the Red Cross hospital where Ernest and Chink had both recovered. We stood at the gates and looked up at the balconies and terraces, the striped awnings and wicker furniture and fat potted palms.

“It looks like a fine hotel,” I said to Ernest.

“It was good living, all right. Too bad we had to get shot to get inside.”

“I’m sorry I can’t really know what it was like for you.”

“I’m glad you’re here to hold my hand for it just the same.”

“That I can do,” I said, and reached for him. We walked to the Duomo next and then to Biffi’s at the Galleria where we drank sparkling wine floating with fresh strawberries, and although Ernest didn’t often speak about his time at the front, talking and being with Chink had primed the pump, and he was full of it now. Stepping into Milan had completed the process. The whole trip had become a time machine, and he was back.

“It’s funny,” he said, “but sometimes what I remember most about the night I was shot is the mosquitoes. They got in your ears and into the corners of your eyes and you couldn’t sleep for them. Not that we were sleeping much anyway. Then the sky went up in flames. I was blasted right off my feet. We all were. I couldn’t feel anything at first, and then there was just a pressure in my chest like I couldn’t breathe and a jangling in my head.”

“Do you really want to say all this?” I asked gently. “You don’t need to.”

“I guess I do,” he said, and then fell quiet for a few minutes. “My hearing was all off, but someone was yelling for help. Somehow I got over there, and lifted him up and carried him to the command post. I don’t even know how. I hardly remember that part, just feeling my legs going to pieces under me. I heard the machine gun afterward, as if it had nothing to do with me. I went on running and put the bastard down and then I was down, too. Then nothing. I don’t know what else.”