The Paris Wife

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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

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.

READER’S GROUP GUIDE

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