The Paris Wife

TWENTY-SIX

Later that morning, Ernest sent out a rash of telegrams saying how well things had gone. He was immoderately proud of the speed with which I delivered the baby, and I was pleased with myself. I had help from the doctors and the ether, true enough, but also braved the whole ordeal like a champion stoic, with Ernest hundreds of miles away.

He left for work, prepared for a dressing down from Hindmarsh, but it was worse than he expected. Hindmarsh didn’t wait for Ernest in his office, but humiliated him in front of everyone, saying he should have filed his story before going to the hospital. That was ridiculous, of course, but when Ernest relayed the story to me that evening, after rehashing the whole thing with Greg Clark in a pub over many glasses of bourbon, he was still stung and angry.

“Toronto’s dead. We can’t stay here.” The drink hadn’t calmed him much, and I was worried the charge nurse would come in and evict him before I’d heard the whole story.

“Is everything really beyond repair?”

“Well beyond. We were both furious. He held nothing back, the lout, and I said things they’ll probably be talking about for years to come.”

“Oh dear, Tiny. Did he fire you?”

“He transferred me to the Weekly. Not that I’ll take it. When do you think you can travel again?”

“I’ll be fine in a few days, but the baby can’t sail for months. We’ll have to tough it out.”

“I could kill the bastard. That might solve it.”

“Not for long.”

He grimaced and sat down hard, scraping the chair loudly against the floor. “Where’s the little corker anyway? I want to take another look at him.”

“He’s in the nursery sleeping. You should be asleep, too. Go home, Tiny. We’ll face this in the morning.”

“What’s to face? It’s dead, I told you.”

“Don’t think about it. Just go, and take some bicarbonate, too. You’re going to wake up with a hell of a headache.”

We didn’t immediately bolt for Paris-but only because we couldn’t. The baby really was too young for the passage, and we’d also depleted our savings with the move. We were close to broke, with a pile of hospital bills besides. There was nothing to do but dig in and take it-“like a bitch dog,” as Ernest was fond of saying. He took the transfer, and though he wasn’t working directly under Hindmarsh any longer, he still felt the man’s shadow. Every time he got a lousy assignment, he wondered if Hindmarsh was in on it-like the time he was sent to the Toronto Zoo to welcome the arrival of a white peacock.

“A peacock, Tiny. They’re trying to kill me. Death by indignity, the nastiest kind of all.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they can’t. You’re too strong for that.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Winter arrived in Toronto with snow that blew sideways and threatened to knock us over. If Paris winters were damp and gray, this was fiercely white and unremitting. The wind easily pierced our coats and blankets and found its way into every corner of our apartment, where the baby and I stayed camped against the radiator. I boiled water to keep the air moist and took to wearing Ernest’s big overcoat when I nursed. I didn’t take the baby out at all and hired a maid to mind him when I had to do the shopping. Ernest limped home in the evening, after dark had fallen, and looked more exhausted and run down all the time. He was good about exclaiming over the baby’s new accomplishments as I reported them-he’d smiled at me in the bath; he was lifting his head like a champ-but it was hard for Ernest to take any pleasure just then.

“I can’t see how I’ll make it a year this way,” he said.

“It seems impossible, I know. But when we’re old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”

“It’s not even the embarrassment of slogging away at stories well beneath me. That’s nothing. But not working on my own stuff at all, when that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I feel the material going bad in me. If I don’t write it soon I’m going to lose it for good.”

“Stay up and write now. I’ll make some strong coffee for you.”

“I can’t. I’m too tired to think. It does come in the morning sometimes, but as soon as I try to get anything down, the baby will cry or I’ll have to get to work. At the end of the day, there aren’t words left. We’re so far away from everything here, too. I don’t know who’s writing what, or what matters.”

“Yes, but you’ve made some good friends. You like Greg Clark. That’s lucky.”

“I do like Greg, but he doesn’t box and he doesn’t know anything about horse racing. I’ve also never seen him drunk.”

“Not everyone drinks as well as you do, Tiny.”

“Still, I don’t trust a man I haven’t seen tight.”

As November passed into December, Ernest’s mood grew worrisomely low. He wasn’t sleeping well, and the baby’s night waking only made this worse. The copies of Three Stories and Ten Poems had arrived and Ernest sent some off to Ezra and Gertrude and Sylvia, and several home to his family in Oak Park-and then he waited for praise. He combed the papers and magazines daily, anxious for a review, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of the book’s existence. If the world didn’t know about the book, had it happened? He had a copy of Jane Heap’s Little Review with the bullfighting miniatures, and sometimes he thumbed through them and frowned. “I’m not sure I’m the same writer who produced these. Hell, I’m not writing at all.”

I couldn’t tell him I thought he was being overly dramatic, because he really did feel the loss of his writing life profoundly. He needed me to keep him warm and loved, solidly tethered to earth; he needed his work to keep him sane. I couldn’t help him with that part. I could only look on and feel troubled that our life was burdened by worry at a time when we should be so happy.

“It was a terrible mistake to come,” he said after arriving home in a particularly dire state of mind one night.

I couldn’t take his suffering any longer. “You’re right,” I said. “It was a mistake to come. We’ll go back to Paris and you can give everything to your writing.”

“How will we afford it?”

“I don’t know. We just will.”

“Your trust fund pays only two thousand a year. Without my income, I can’t see how we’ll manage.”

“If you can’t write, the baby and I will be a burden to you. You’ll resent us. How can we live like that?”

“We’re in a bind. That’s for sure.”

“Let’s not think of it in that light. It can be an adventure. Our great gamble. Maybe we’ll come out on top after all.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Tiny.”

“Buy the tickets. I’ll wire your parents for money. They want to help.”

“They want to obligate me. I won’t take it.”

“Don’t then. I will, for the baby.”

“What if I did one last series for the Weekly? I could kill myself for seven or ten pieces and then resign. With that and some from Oak Park, we’d have maybe a thousand to carry us. A thousand and a prayer.”

“That should just about do it.”

Just after the first of January 1924, as soon as we thought the baby could safely travel, we boarded the train for New York and then the Antonia, bound for France. We’d begun to call the baby Bumby for his very round and solid feel, like a stuffed bear. I rolled him tightly in blankets in the ship’s berth and talked to him and let him play with my hair while, up on deck, Ernest found anyone at all and began to wax nostalgic about Paris. I would have stayed in Toronto for a year or five if it took that to make a good home for Bumby, but it wouldn’t have cost me the way it would Ernest. Some men would have been able to choke it back and take it for a while, but he might have lost himself completely there. Ahead in Paris, it was anyone’s guess how we’d make it, but I couldn’t worry about that. Ernest needed me to be strong for us both now, and I would be. I would scrimp and make do and not resent it at all because it was my choice in the end. I was choosing him, the writer, in Paris. We would never again live a conventional life.