The Paris Wife (41 page)

In the spring of 1928, Ernest and Pauline left Paris for the States. Pauline was five months pregnant at the time, and they were headed to Piggott and then to Key West, where Dos Passos had promised the best tarpon fishing in the world. Pauline would buy a house for them and make everything wonderful because she knew how to do all of that—where to buy the best furniture and how to get pictures framed the right way and which friends to cultivate. She could care for him better than I had, maybe. Or maybe not.

In the end, Ernest didn’t have the luck I did in love. He had two more sons, both with Pauline, and then left her for another. And left that one for another, too. He had four wives altogether and many lovers as well. It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was probably vanity, wanting to stand out in a long line of women. In truth it didn’t matter what others saw. We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.

After he left for the States, I saw him just twice more in my very long life, but I watched from a distance as he became, very quickly, the most important writer of his generation and also a kind of hero of his own making. I saw him on the cover of
Life
magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats—the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size. The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time—but under this, I knew he was still lost. That he slept with the light on or couldn’t sleep at all, that he feared death so much he sought it out wherever and however he could. He was such an enigma, really—fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn’t one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.

The last time we ever spoke was in May of 1961. He called out of the blue around lunchtime on a cool afternoon when Paul and I were in Arizona, vacationing at a ranch we returned to every few years for the fine fishing and the views. I took the call alone while Paul invented an errand because he knew I needed this. I didn’t have to ask. We’d been married thirty-five years, and Paul knew me better than anyone. Almost.

“Hello, Tatie,” Ernest said when I picked up the receiver.

“Hello, Tatie,” I said back, smiling to hear our forty-year-old nickname again.

“Your housekeeper told me how to find you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I’m happy you called. I’m happy it’s you.”

I told him quickly about the ranch Paul and I were staying at, because I knew he would approve of it. It wasn’t prissy or too comfortable. In the cabin, there were dark silky places on the wood paneling from eighty years of good fires, and all the furniture was rugged and plain and felt real under you. The days were long and open. The nights were full of stars.

It had been ages since I’d heard from him, and now he was calling to talk about a new book, a memoir. He wanted to share stories about our time in Paris.

“Do you remember the whores at the
bal musette
, and the accordion music and the smoke and the smells?”

I told him I did.

“Do you remember that Bastille Day when musicians played under our windows for nights on end?”

“I remember it all.”

“You’re everywhere in the book,” he said, and his voice dipped. He was working hard to stay cheerful, but I knew he was sad and low and haunted. “It’s been something, writing that time and living it all again. Tell me, do you think we wanted too much from each other?”

“Oh, I don’t know, Tatie. It’s possible.”

“Maybe that’s it. We were too hooked into each other. We loved each other too much.”

“Can you love someone too much?”

He was quiet for a moment and I could hear static coming through the line, a low crackle that seemed to stand for every sharp thing that had come between us. “No,” he finally said, his voice very soft and sober. “That’s not it at all. I ruined it.”

I felt a hot clench in the muscles of my throat, but I tried to rally. We both did. We talked about Paris a while longer and then talked about Bumby and his new wife, Puck, and then stayed on the phone though everything had been said.

“Take care of the cat,” he said when he rang off, meaning me. I hung up and sat down hard on the sofa and then surprised myself by bursting into tears.

Later that afternoon, Paul and I took the long way to the stream and dropped our lines in just as the insects began to swarm and the light began to change. It was our favorite part of the day, this in-between time, and it always seemed to last longer than it should—a magic and lavender space unpinned from the hours around it, between worlds. I held my reel and felt the line list, and was back in Cologne with Ernest and Chink. Back at my first fish, knowing there wouldn’t be any fish without this one, and no love without this first one either.

It was a Sunday in July when we got the call from Ernest’s wife, Mary, that he had shot himself. He’d woken early and put on his favorite red robe and gone into the front foyer with one of his most loved guns. He’d stood in a pool of light and leaned into the barrel and tripped both triggers.

The irony wasn’t lost on me that this is exactly the way my father had killed himself, and Ernest’s father, too, in 1928, when Ernest was just twenty-nine. Maybe it wasn’t irony at all, but the purest and saddest sort of history. Ernest’s father used a Civil War pistol. Later, his brother, Leicester, would use a pistol, too. His sister Ursula would take pills. With this much loss, you begin to think it’s in the blood, as if there’s a dark magnet pulling the body in that direction—pulling, maybe, from the beginning.

I couldn’t pretend to be surprised by Ernest’s death. I’d heard from various friends about the sanitarium in Rochester and the terrible shock treatments. Death was always there for him, sometimes only barely balanced out.

“Can I get you anything?” Paul said after a while, stepping back from me and cupping my shoulders with his hands.

“No,” I said, and my own voice sounded strange and separate in the room. Tatie was dead. There was nothing Paul could possibly do for me except let me go—back to Paris and Pamplona and San Sebastian, back to Chicago when I was Hadley Richardson, a girl stepping off a train about to meet the man who would change her life. That girl, that impossibly lucky girl, needed nothing.

First and foremost, I need to thank my agent, Julie Barer, whose absolute investment in this project was obvious (and so very crucial) from word one. The completely brilliant Susanna Porter was vital in bringing the book to its final form and nothing less than my dream editor. I’m deeply appreciative for the support and assistance of so many at Ballantine Books and Random House, including Libby McGuire, Kim Hovey, Theresa Zoro, Kristin Fassler, Quinne Rogers, Deborah Foley, Steve Messina, Jillian Quint, and Sophie Epstein. William Boggess at Barer Literary fielded every desperate phone call with aplomb and has been indispensable to the process. Many thanks to Ursula Doyle, Victoria Pepe, and Virago, Kristen Cochrane and Doubleday Canada, as well as Caspian Dennis of Abner Stein and Nicki Kennedy, Sam Edenborough, and all at
ILA
.

Special appreciation goes to friends and early readers Glori Simmons, Lori Keene, Brian Groh, Anne Ursu, Alice D’Alessio, Sarah Willis, Terry Dubow, Toni Thayer and the East Side Writers, Denise Machado and John Sargent, Paul Cox and Kirsten Docter, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Tawny Ratner and the Cedar Hill Walking Club, William Joson, Becky Gaylord, Heather Greene, Amy Weinfurtner, Margaret Cohen and Patricia Kao, Suzannah Hagan, and Karen Rosenberg. Also to Karen Long of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
, Judith Mansour at the
LIT
, Jim Harms and Jacqueline Gens of the
MFA
Program in Poetry at New England College, and many dear colleagues and students over the years.

I owe my family much for their unending patience and encouragement—Greg D’Alessio, Connor, Fiona, and Beckett, D’Alessios far and wide, Julie Hayward, Rita Hinken, and, finally, my wonderful, unflappable sisters, Teresa Reller and Penny Pennington. Many thanks and much love to all.

Although Hadley Richardson, Ernest Hemingway, and other people who actually lived appear in this book as fictional characters, it was important for me to render the particulars of their lives as accurately as possible, and to follow the very well documented historical record. The true story of the Hemingways’ marriage is so dramatic and compelling, and has been so beautifully treated by Ernest Hemingway himself in
A Moveable Feast
, that my intention became to push deeper into the emotional lives of the characters and bring new insight to historical events, while staying faithful to the facts. Along the way, I’ve been very grateful for a number of sources, including
Hadley: The First Mrs. Hemingway
by Alice Hunt Sokoloff,
Hadley
by Gioia Diliberto,
The Hemingway Women
by Bernice Kert,
Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story
and
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961
by Carlos Baker,
Hemingway: The Paris Years
and
Hemingway: The American Homecoming
by Michael Reynolds, and
The True Gen
by Denis Brian. Enormously useful to my understanding of Paris in the twenties and other details of place and time were
The Crazy Years
by William Wiser,
Paris Was Yesterday
by Janet Flanner,
Living Well Is the Best Revenge
by Calvin Tomkins,
Zelda
by Nancy Milford,
The Great War and Modern Memory
by Paul Fussell, and
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein
. Susan Wrynn and Sam Smallidge of the Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Library in Boston were very helpful as I navigated a wealth of materials, including correspondence between Hadley Richardson and Ernest Hemingway, as well as Hemingway’s writings in manuscript form. Finally I’m indebted to many of Ernest Hemingway’s works in addition to
A Moveable Feast
, mostly notably
In Our Time, The Sun Also Rises, The Garden of Eden, Death in the Afternoon
, and
The Complete Short Stories
.

1.
In many ways, Hadley’s girlhood in St. Louis was a difficult and repressive experience. How do her early years prepare her to meet and fall in love with Ernest? What does life with Ernest offer her that she hasn’t encountered before? What are the risks?

2.
Hadley and Ernest don’t get a lot of encouragement from their friends and family when they decided to marry. What seems to draw the two together? What are some of the strengths of their initial attraction and partnership? The challenges?

3.
The Ernest Hemingway we meet in
THE
PARIS
WIFE—through Hadley’s eyes—is in many ways different from the ways we imagine him when faced with the largeness of his later persona. What do you see as his character strengths? Can you see what Hadley saw in him?

4.
The Hemingways spontaneously opt for Paris over Rome when the get key advice from Sherwood Anderson. What was life like for them when they first arrived? How did Hadley’s initial feelings about Paris differ from Ernest’s and why?

5.
Throughout
THE
PARIS
WIFE
, Hadley refers to herself as “Victorian” as opposed to “modern.” What are some of the ways she doesn’t feel like she fits into life in bohemian Paris? How does this impact her relationship with Ernest? Her self-esteem? What are some of the ways Hadley’s “old-fashioned” quality can be seen as a strength and not a weakness?

6.
Hadley and Ernest’s marriage survived for many years in Jazz-Age Paris, an environment that had very little patience for monogamy and other traditional values. What in their relationship seems to sustain them? How does their marriage differ from those around them? Pound’s and Shakespeare’s? Scott and Zelda’s?

7.
Most of
THE
PARIS
WIFE
is written in Hadley’s voice, but a few select passages come to us from Ernest’s point of view. What impact does getting Ernest’s perspective have on our understanding of their marriage? How does it affect your ability to understand him and his motivations in general?

8.
What was the role of literary spouses in 1920’s Paris? How is Hadley challenged and restricted by her gender? Would those restrictions have changed if she had been an artist and not merely a “wife”?

9.
At one point, Ezra Pound warns Hadley that it would be a dire mistake to let parenthood change Ernest. Is there a nugget of truth behind his concern? What are some of the ways Ernest is changed by Bumby’s birth? What about Hadley? What does motherhood bring to her life, for better or worse?

10.
One of the most wrenching scenes in the book is when Hadley loses a valise containing all of Ernest’s work to date. What kind of turning point does this mark for the Hemingway’s marriage? Do you think Ernest ever forgives her?

11.
When the couple moves to Toronto to have Bumby, Ernest tries his best to stick it out with a regular “nine-to-five” reporter’s job, and yet he ultimately finds this impossible. Why is life in Toronto so difficult for Ernest? Why does Hadley agree to go back to Paris earlier than they planned, even though she doesn’t know how they’ll make it financially? How does she benefit from supporting his decision to make a go at writing only fiction?

12.
Hadley and Ernest had similar upbringings in many ways. What are the parallels, and how do these affect the choices Hadley makes as a wife and mother?