The Paris Wife

TWENTY-NINE

Our “someplace very far” was the little village of Schruns in the Austrian Vorarlberg. We arrived just before Christmas 1924, and from our first day, we felt more at home there than we could have imagined. For less than half of what we spent each week in Paris, we had two comfortable rooms at the Taube Hotel and a nanny, Tiddy, to take Bumby around. There were thirty-eight kinds of beer and red wine and brandy and kirsch and champagne. The air was champagne. Bumby could breathe better at Schruns; we all could. Tiddy would pull him through the village on his wooden sleigh while Ernest worked, or tried to, in our room when the breakfast was done, and I practiced downstairs at the piano, which was there all for my having in the warm room. In the afternoons, after hard cheese and sausages and heavy bread and sometimes oranges, we’d ski.

We did a lot of skiing. A retired professional skier, Walther Lent, had opened a school, and we were his students. For weeks on end, there was only the pure white predictable crispness of snow. We’d hike for hours, up and up, because what good was it if we weren’t at the very top of something, with no one else around and no tracks or memory of anyone else, anywhere? Skiing this way took strength-incredible strength and stamina. There weren’t any lifts or trams. We carried our skis on our shoulders and anything else we’d need in rucksacks. To my great surprise, I could actually do it. Leaving Paris had been the best thing for me. I was sleeping well, I had help with the baby, and the fresh air and exercise had made me feel stronger and more fit than ever. On our slow climb up the long valley we’d see ptarmigan and deer and marten, sometimes a white Alpine fox. On the way down, we were aware only of virgin snow; the plunge and flight of glacier runs, great clouds of powder rising from our skis. I was the better skier, but Ernest was the better devourer of anything new-new air, new mantle of eggshell snow. We dropped and dropped. We flew.

If you leaned from our second-story window at the Taube, pushing the top of your body out and holding on to the stucco walls with your fingertips, you could see no fewer than ten Alps dipped in snow.

“How do you like that?” Ernest said the first time he tried this trick and then stood aside for me.

“I like it very much,” I said. By then he’d come and pressed himself against me, his arms coming full around until it was really him holding me there in case I should want to fall. “I like it very much,” I said again, because I had two strong arms and ten Alps in sight. He pulled me into the room and we lay down on the featherbed and made love. And I was reminded of what was best about us. How very easy and natural we could be as bodies, with no sharp angles or missteps and no need for talking. How in bed, as nowhere else, he was my favorite animal and I was his.

Behind the hotel there was a low hill where I practiced my skiing in the new snow while Ernest tried to work without much success. For the work alone he was missing Paris, the busyness of the city and his routine. Generally, if the work wasn’t good, nothing was, but at Schruns there was a softer bunting around the day. I could ski on the hill and know that he was looking out over the pasture, the farms and fields, and feeling tight in his head but not unhappy. And sometimes he was watching me race straight down the hill, low on my skis, coming fast at the hotel and turning sharply at the last minute.

Ernest grew a fierce black beard that winter and looked magnificent in it. The work wasn’t coming, but there were rounds of bowling and poker by the fire in the evenings and schnapps, made from mountain gentians, that felt hot and tonicy and blue on your tongue and in your throat, just what you’d think drinking violets might be like. The hotel’s dining room was thick with smoke in the evenings. After dinner, I’d play the Bach or Haydn I’d practiced earlier in the day. Ernest would read Turgenev in his chair by the fire or play poker and smoke or talk about the war with Herr Nels, our proprietor. The wood smoke and the wool, the snow and the lovemaking-all of it warm and winding about us, building the good winter.

The only thing that wasn’t perfect during this time was Ernest’s worrying about his career. It didn’t reassure him that all his friends were convinced of his talent, or that the reviews of Three Stories and Ten Poems had been nearly ecstatic. It was a little book, not at all on scale with his big dreaming. He’d sent his family several copies hot off the press, and they’d been returned with a chilly letter from Ernest’s father saying he and Grace weren’t comfortable having such material in the house. It was vulgar and profane at best. They wanted great things for him and hoped he would someday find a way to use his God-given talent to write something with strong morals and virtues. Until he did, he shouldn’t feel compelled to send anything he published home. The letter stung Ernest to the core. No matter what he said, he still deeply wanted his family’s approval.

“To hell with them, anyway,” he said, but he kept the letter, folding it carefully and putting it in the drawer where he stored all of his important correspondence. Families can be vicious, he was fond of saying, and I could see what he meant clearly now. I could also see how he used the damage, pushing against it, redoubling his efforts to show them he didn’t need their love or endorsement. He would keep fighting until he had Vanity Fair and the Saturday Evening Post. Until an American editor took a chance on him and he had a book, a real one, published the way he’d always dreamed.

It didn’t help his mood that things were taking off for Harold. He’d finished his novel when he said he would, sent it directly off to Boni and Liveright. And they’d taken it. We got the news just before we left for Schruns. Harold had come to the apartment fairly bursting with excitement. “What do you know, Hem. Did you ever think it would hit for me?”

“Sure, why not?” Ernest had said. He was seething with professional jealousy, of course, but he held his tongue and behaved, opening a bottle of brandy and bringing the siphon over. “Anderson’s been trying to get me to go with Liveright, too. I have a handful of good stories, and I’m thinking of sending them off with the sketches I’ve been doing, the miniatures.”

“They’re just the place to do it,” Harold said. “What are you waiting for?”

“I don’t know. There are other fish in the sea, right? What about Scribner’s? Or Henry Doran?”

“Wherever you land, you’ll do what’s best. It’s all going to happen for you, too. You’ll see.”

I knew with a certainty that Ernest would have leaped at the chance to have any major publisher do the book, but with a lot of cajoling from me and Harold and Sherwood too, Ernest finally mailed the manuscript to Boni and Liveright just before Christmas. He’d settled on the title In Our Time because he’d tried to get to the heart of life at this very moment, with all its violence and chaos and strange beauty. It was the best work he’d done, and he felt good about having sent it off into the world, but the wait for a response was torturing him. When forwarded mail arrived for us at the Taube, Ernest raked through it impatiently looking for one thing, an acceptance letter. It was all he’d ever wanted.

At the end of February, Herr Lent led us up the valley to the Madlenerhaus, an Alpine station that stayed open even in the late winter. It had a good simple kitchen and a dormitory that rocked in high winds like the berth of a great ship. From there, we could hike five hundred meters up the slope and plunge down again along the Silvretta, a pristine glacier, our skis kicking up untouched powder. After skiing all day we’d drop into bed at night exhausted.

“Let’s not ever go back,” I said to Ernest one night as we lay in our bunk in the dormitory listening to snow and wind and nothing else.

“All right,” he said, holding me more tightly. “Aren’t we lucky to be so in love? No one thought we’d make it this far. No one was on our side at all, do you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, and felt a small chill. We couldn’t hide from the world forever.

After three days, we came back down the mountain to find two telegrams waiting for Ernest. One was from Sherwood and the other was from Horace Liveright and both said the same thing: In Our Time would be a book. They were offering a two-hundred-dollar advance against royalties and were sending a contract soon.

It was an epic moment, one we’d never forget-and somehow the skiing seemed ineluctably part of it, as if we had to trek up nearly to the sky and fly back down to get this news. It was the end of Ernest’s struggle with apprenticeship, and an end to other things as well. He would never again be unknown. We would never again be this happy.

The next day we boarded a train back to Paris.