The Paris Wife

I had just turned twenty-nine, but in a way I felt younger and more carefree than I did my first year at Bryn Mawr, when I couldn’t enjoy the smallest happiness or intimacy. It was as if I was experiencing a long-delayed coming out, and I was grateful for every minute of it.

And then there were the letters from Chicago arriving every day, always beautifully crumpled and full of busy news. Ernest told me all about his articles for the Commonwealth, his ideas for sketches and novels. But more and more he was also sharing stories about his growing up-about the long summers up in Michigan when his father, Ed, who was a practicing obstetrician and natural outdoorsman, had taught him how to build a fire and cook in the open, how to use an ax, land and dress a fish, hunt squirrel and partridge and pheasant.

Whenever I think of my father, he wrote, he’s in the woods flushing jacksnipe or walking through short dead grass or shocks of corn, or splitting wood with frost in his beard. I read these sentences with tears in my eyes because I had so few warm memories of my own father. When I did think about him, the first image that came to me was his revolver, and then the noise it made ringing through the house. Remembering his death and the way I used to painfully fixate on it disturbed me so much I had to walk twice around the block in a stinging wind before I was calm enough to return to Ernest’s letter.

But if I was jealous of his relationship with his father, his mother was troubling in other ways. Nearly every time he mentioned her in a letter, she was that bitch. He described her as utterly dominant in the household, quick to criticize and full of unbendable ideas about how life should proceed, down to every detail. Before he could read, she’d taught Ernest to memorize Latin and German phrases and lines of “essential” poetry. Although he tried to respect her creative spirit-she sang opera and painted a little and wrote poetry-Ernest ultimately believed she was a selfish mother and wife, intent on her own needs at the risk of destroying everyone around her, particularly her husband. She forced Dr. Hemingway into giving in to every one of her demands, and seeing this made Ernest despise her.

Though Ernest’s passionate rejection of his mother gave me chills, I couldn’t help but recognize it. Learning just how alike our parents’ relationships were was eerie, and yet what struck me hardest was how even though I’d often detested my mother’s indomitable will and even blamed her for my father’s suicide, I’d never expressed this hatred to a soul. It had seethed and roiled inside me. On the occasions it forced its way to the surface, I took up my feather pillow and screamed my feelings into it, choking them off at the root. Ernest spat out his rage freely. Whose response was the most terrifying?

Ultimately, I felt a growing respect for the way he could express even the worst bits of himself and was drawn in by his confidences. I looked forward to Ernest’s letters as I did little else. But his candor, I soon learned, applied to everything equally. In early December, not long after my birthday, he wrote that he’d been attracted the night before by a girl in a flashing green dress at a party. It made me sick to read this. I had no flashing green dress, and even if I did, he wouldn’t see it. He was hundreds of miles away, absorbed by the details of his days and nights there. We were friends and confidants, yes-but he didn’t owe me anything, had made me not a single promise, not even a false one. He could follow that green dress like a siren into the lake if he wanted. I had no hold on him.

No one seemed to have any hold on anyone, in fact. That was a sign of the times. We were all on the verge now, bursting with youth and promise and little trills of jazz. The year before, Olive Thomas had starred in The Flapper, and the word suddenly meant jazz and moved like it, too. Girls everywhere stepped out of their corsets and shortened their dresses and darkened their lips and eyes. We said “cat’s pajamas” and “I’ll say” and “that’s so jake.” Youth, in 1921, was everything, but that was just the thing that could worry me sick. I was twenty-nine, feeling almost obsolete, but Ernest was twenty-one and white hot with life. What was I thinking?

“Maybe I’m not up to this game,” I told my roommate Ruth after I’d gotten Ernest’s siren letter. Bertha was out, and Ruth and I were making dinner together, moving easily around each other in the small kitchen, snapping beans and boiling water for spaghetti, as if we were two maiden aunts who’d done this for decades.

“I’m not sure any of us are,” Ruth said, measuring salt and tossing some over her shoulder for luck. She had wonderfully strong hands, and I found myself watching them and wishing I could be more like her. She turned to face me and gave me a wry smile. “But what else is there? If we give up now, we’re done for.”

“I might just crawl under my bed and not come out until I’m old and doddering and can’t remember feeling anything for anyone at all.”

She nodded. “You want to, but you won’t.”

“I won’t.” I moved around the small table, setting the plates and second-best silver, smoothing our two napkins. “I’ll try very hard not to.”

• • •

I was desperate to get to Chicago again and see the big old room at Kenley’s-the piano, the Victrola, the knobbly rug pushed aside for two people to dance. I wanted to look into a pair of impossibly clear brown eyes and know what that beautiful boy was thinking. I wanted to kiss him and feel him kiss me back.

In the middle of January, my friend Leticia Parker and I cooked a plan to get me there. I’d be her guest for a week. We’d stay at a hotel and go shopping, and I could see Ernest as much as I wanted. But then, two days before our scheduled departure, Leticia phoned to cancel. Her mother was ill, and she simply couldn’t be away for so long. I told her I understood; of course I did. My own mother had been ill for months, and I knew those demands well, but I was also crushed. Everything had been set for weeks. Ernest would meet the train, and that moment alone I’d worked through in my imagination a hundred times or more.

“Now what?” I railed to Ruth later that day.

“Go,” she said.

“Alone?”

“Why not? These aren’t the dark ages, you know. Didn’t you go alone last time?”

“I wasn’t attached then. Fonnie would hate it.”

“All the more reason to go,” Ruth said, smiling.

The evening I left for Chicago, Roland drove me to the train station on the north side of St. Louis in his new Peugeot, a bottle-green coupe that made him feel proud and more masculine, I think, while sending Fonnie into near-apoplectic levels of anxiety. I liked Roland but also felt sorry for him. His situation was very like my father’s. He peeped only when Fonnie gave him leave to; it was pathetic, and yet he could also be very charming, in a bookish, infinitely apologetic way. I felt we were allies in the house, and hoped he felt so, too. Though he could easily have left me at the curb, Roland parked and walked me to the platform where he handed my suitcases off to the porter. Then, as he was saying good-bye, he cocked his head to one side, one of his most annoying and endearing tics, and said, “You look beautiful, Hadley.”

“I do?” I felt suddenly shy with him and smoothed the skirt of my pale gray traveling suit.

“You do. It just occurred to me you might not know this about yourself.”

“Thank you.” I leaned in to kiss him on the cheek, and then boarded my train, taking new pleasure in my traveling clothes-my soft wool hat and buttery gloves, my tan suede T-strap shoes. The seats and couches were plush and inviting, and Fonnie’s puritanical voice, telling me I shouldn’t enjoy it, was suddenly very far off. This was the Midnight Special, and I tucked myself into my Pullman berth, behind deep green curtains.

When I arrived at Union Station the next morning, I was well rested and only slightly nervous until I saw Ernest on the platform, almost exactly where I’d left him in November-and then my mouth was dry as cotton, my stomach full of bees. He was gorgeous in a charcoal peacoat and muffler, and his eyes were bright with cold. As I came off the train, he picked me up off my feet with a squeeze.

“Nice to see you, too,” I said when he’d put me down, and we both grinned, embarrassed to be together suddenly. Our eyes met and fell away. So many thousands of words had thrummed between us. Where were they now?

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

We rubbed noses and then walked off through the icy morning to find breakfast. There was a place he liked off State Street where you could get steak and eggs for sixty cents. We ordered and then sat in the booth, our knees just touching under the table.

“The Saturday Evening Post just rejected another story,” he said as we waited for