The Paris Wife

THIRTY-FOUR

Pfife came off the train looking pink and well. There had been two feet of snow the week before, but the weather had grown steadily warmer and it was all soft now, impossible for skiing. Ernest had promised to teach her to ski, and she carried her skis awkwardly when we met her on the platform, but didn’t seem disappointed when we pointed out the thaw.

“It will be enough to be near you two pets,” she said. “And Bumby, of course.”

Bumby stood holding my hand. He wore his winter togs and looked like a proper Austrian baby and was very brave about the train, which thrilled and terrified him.

“Say hello to Tante Pfife,” Ernest said to Bumby, who hid behind my skirt and peeked curiously out again, making us all laugh.

Pauline seemed charmed by Schruns and by her room at the Taube, which stood at the end of the long hall, just next door to where Ernest worked. “It’s smaller than yours,” she said when she saw it, “but I’m not so big really.”

I sat on the bed to watch her unpack while Bumby played with the fringe of the bed quilt on his hands and knees, singing a little Austrian folk song Tiddy had taught him. Pauline opened her bag and began to take out long wool skirts and well-made stockings. She picked up a butter-colored cashmere sweater, held it against her, and folded it into thirds.

“You have the loveliest things,” I said, looking down at my own trousers and thick wool sweater. “But you’ll embarrass all of us if you actually wear any of this.”

“Embarrass myself is more like it,” she said. “I guess I have overdone it. Hem said there was the best society ever here.”

“He must have meant the chamois. Or maybe the fat Austrian butchers and woodsmen he plays cards with, each one smoking a bigger cigar. You might find yourself a husband in that lot if you’re not careful.”

“The goats would fall easier than the woodsmen, I’d wager,” Ernest said from the doorway. He filled the frame, and the hall was dark behind him.

Pauline smiled. “I’ll try not to set my cap too high, then.”

We all laughed, and then Ernest went back to work, locking his door with a click. I was relieved to see him writing again. He’d spent our first two weeks at Schruns in bed, nursing a sore throat and harsh cough. So it was very good that he seemed ready to get to it now, and better that I had a friend to entertain and talk with while he was occupied.

After Pauline was well moved into her room, we dressed Bumby warmly and then pulled him through the town on his little sled so I could show her everything-the small square with its shops and Gasthäuser, the bowling alley and the sawmills and the stream, Die Litz, which split the town several times and was covered over with sturdy wooden bridges.

“I just love it so absolutely already,” Pauline said with a sigh.

Right then Bumby’s sled hit an iced-over trough and dipped low to one side, tumbling him out in the snow. He squealed with delight, stood, and quickly climbed onto the sled again. “Again, again, Mama!”

“Again, again!” Pauline echoed and stamped the snow around her happily with her pretty, impractical boots.

Back at the hotel, she followed me into my room while I changed.

“Nothing I’ve brought will do here,” she said. “Do you mind lending me some of your things?”

“You can’t be serious. I’m twice your size.”

She frowned. “Not twice, surely. What about shops? Is there anything nearby?”

“If you’re not too choosy. There’s nothing like a Right Bank boutique for several hundred miles.”

“That’s just what I came to get away from. I intend on being only practical the whole while, with sensible, no-nonsense trousers and men’s shirts, just like yours.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”

“Absolutely. And I want slippers just like yours, too. They simply have to be the same.”

“You’re a funny one. You can have these,” I said, taking off my own and handing them to her. “I’ll wear Ernest’s. That’s what marriage does to you, by the way. Somewhere along the line you discover you have your husband’s feet.”

She smiled. “I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Don’t tell me you’re getting soft on marriage. Is there someone new?”

“No, no. I’m just in love with the way you and Drum are together. There are things I didn’t see before, like how nice it is to have someone around. Not the white knight whisking you away, but the fellow who sits at your table every night and tells you what he’s thinking.”

“They don’t always do that, you know. They don’t always talk even.”

She smiled again and said she didn’t care and then put my slippers on her feet. They were standard Alpine fare, bulky and warm, lined with fleece, but she swore she loved them anyway. “I want to die in these,” she said. “You won’t be able to pry them off me.”

The conditions stayed too warm and wet for skiing, but we fell into a lovely routine anyway. Pauline was my shadow, and because I’d never had one before, I enjoyed the attention and her company. She took to watching me play the piano every afternoon, filling the space in between songs with encouragement and praise. She’d become my most important collaborator since she’d begun to push me toward the idea of a concert, and I was surprised to find I liked having her champion my cause with Ernest, who now had earmarked a portion of his advance for a rental piano when we returned to Paris. I didn’t know I’d needed her help until it was there, and I could rely on it-and then I wondered how I’d done without it.

Maybe it was the proximity, the way we three were thrown together so much, but at Schruns, Pauline began to take on a crusading role for Ernest’s work, too. She’d always admired it and thought him a great talent, but now that took a more personal turn. He’d just begun working on the Pamplona novel again, and one afternoon when Pauline and I were lunching, he came down from his studio with a clear and buoyant look in his eyes.

“Your work went well,” I said. “I’m so glad.”

“Very well. I’ve moved them on to Burguete.”

“I don’t suppose you’d let me read a little,” Pauline said.

“It’s not in any state. You’re just being polite, anyway.”

“Not at all. I just know it’s brilliant. It is, isn’t it, Hadley?”

“Of course it is,” I said. And it was. But I didn’t feel I could share, at least not yet, the breadth of my complicated feelings about the book. Even hearing her ask to read it brought a flaring of discomfort. She was a shrewd girl. What would she think when she saw I wasn’t even the smallest character? Would she believe Ernest and I were on shaky ground? Would she see something I didn’t or couldn’t?

“The Pamplona novel will wait,” he said. “It’s got more cooking to do.” He dug heartily into his plate of sausage and nice potatoes, pausing to say, “I have something else you can see if you’re really serious.”

“I’m only serious,” she said. “Didn’t you know?”

After lunch, when Ernest brought the pages down and handed them to Pauline, she said, “This is such an honor.”

“We’ll see if you feel that way when you’ve read the damned thing,” he said, and then readied himself for billiards with Herr Lent.

It was only when I walked around to read over her shoulder that I realized the manuscript he’d give her was The Torrents of Spring. I felt a small wave of nausea as I realized he’d never really stopped considering the project. He’d only been biding his time, waiting for the right reader.

After Ernest went off to his game, Pauline curled up in the nice red chair by the fire, and I went back to my piano. It was hard to concentrate because she was laughing out loud as she read. I finally decided I needed a long walk and it wasn’t until dinner, many hours later, that we all met up again.

“It’s all so hilarious,” she said to Ernest before he’d even gotten comfortable at the table. “Damned smart and very funny. You have my vote.”

“I thought it was funny, too,” he said. “But my very good friends seem to see it differently.” He looked at me pointedly.

“I just think it’s nasty to Sherwood,” I said.

Pauline could clearly see her cause now. “If the book is good, isn’t it kind of a tribute to Anderson?” she said. “No press is bad press, right?”

“That’s just what I thought,” Ernest said again, and the two kept egging each other on, growing more emphatic in their agreement.

“There’s no other way to see it, is there? Mightn’t he be flattered after all?” she said.

“No one with any stuff could be wounded by satire,” he said.

“Well, I think it’s great. It’s a damn fine book and you should submit it right away.”

It wasn’t until that moment that I fully understood how hurt he’d been when everyone, including me, had disparaged the book and shut it down. He loved and needed praise. He loved and needed to be loved, and even adored. But it worried me to have Pauline bolster him this way just now. With her encouragement, he would send Torrents to Boni and Liveright, and nothing good would likely happen then. Anderson was their most important author, and because it was his encouragement that had gotten Ernest a contract in the first place, I couldn’t imagine the book wouldn’t offend them. When Anderson heard, he’d be more than offended. My guess was we’d lose his friendship for good, the way we were clearly losing Gertrude’s. It was so hard to watch Ernest pushing these mentors away, as if striking deep blows was the only way to prove to himself (and everyone else) that he’d never really needed them in the first place. But I felt my hands were tied with this book. I couldn’t say anything else against it.

The next afternoon, Ernest arranged the typescript and put it in a bundle with a letter to Horace Liveright saying they could have the book for an advance of five hundred dollars, and that his new bullfighting novel, which he had every reason to feel excited about, was very near completed. Off the parcel went.

As we waited to hear, a fresh storm came in with more rain. We bided our time in the hotel, reading and eating better than ever. In the afternoons, Ernest and Pauline began taking long walks along the slopes behind the hotel, or winding through the town slowly, deep in conversation.

“She’s read so much,” he said to me one night when we were getting ready for bed. “And she can talk about books beautifully.”

“About more than Henry James, you mean?”

“Yes,” he said, smirking. Henry James had never stopped being our private joke, the writer that stood as the line between us, showing how stuck in the past I was no matter what else I was introduced to or had found on my own.

“She’s a smart girl all right,” I said, feeling a twinge of jealousy about their growing affinity. She was smart and seemed to find pleasure in matching Ernest intellectually. I could be a cheerleader for him and had been ever since that night in Chicago when he’d first handed me clutched and creased pages. But I wasn’t a critic. I couldn’t tell him why his work was good and why it mattered to literature, that age-old conversation among writers and lovers of books. Pauline could do that, and he was responding, as he would. He had a new energy, particularly in the evenings when he came downstairs after a day’s work, because there was someone interesting to talk to and talk with. What was more exciting than that? I could love him like crazy and work very hard to understand and support him, but I couldn’t be fresh eyes and a fresh smile after five years. I couldn’t be new.

Two days after Christmas, the reply came from Boni and Liveright. They were rejecting Torrents. Aside from the book being an unnecessarily vicious piece of satire targeting Anderson, they didn’t think it would sell well. It was too cerebral and not as funny as it intended to be. They were very interested in the novel about the Spanish fiesta, however, and eagerly awaited its completion.

“I’m a free man, then,” Ernest said sourly when he’d read the cable aloud to us. “Scott’s talked to Max Perkins at Scribner’s about me, and there’s always Harcourt. I could go anywhere.”

“Someone has to see the genius here,” Pauline said, pounding one of her small fists on the arm of her chair for effect.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you really want to cut ties with Liveright? They’ve done right by you with In Our Time.”

“Why do you always have to be so damned sensible? I don’t want to play it safe anymore. Besides, they should be grateful to me. I’ve made them good money.”

“They’re certainly not the only publishers around,” Pauline said. “Scott’s had great good luck with Scribner’s. Maybe that’s the thing.”

“Something good’s bound to come of it,” he said. “It’s a damned fine book.”

“Oh, it is!” she said. “I’ll go to New York myself and tell Max Perkins just what funny is if he doesn’t know.”

Ernest laughed and then sat quietly for a moment. “You know,” he said. “It might not be a bad idea to go to New York and meet with Perkins myself. Scott tells me he’s the best, but it would be good to shake the man’s hand and make the deal directly, if it’s going to happen at all.”

“Aren’t you good to know it?” Pauline said, and I was struck by how quickly this scheme, too, had become a fait accompli. She fit so well inside his ear. She told him what he most wanted to hear, and it was obviously a powerful tonic for both of them, to be united in their thinking. Meanwhile I was on my own now, against Torrents and the whole scenario.

“Surely you can do all of this by mail,” I said. “Or go in the spring, when you’ve finished the changes on the new book, and then you’ll have more to show Perkins.”

“But Torrents is finished. I know you hate the book, but I’m going to strike while the iron is hot.”

“I don’t hate it,” I said. But he was already up and refilling his drink, his head thick with plans.

“It’s the right thing, you’ll see,” Pauline said.

“I hope that’s true,” I said.

Later that night, as we were readying ourselves for bed, I said, “I’m not just sensible, you know. You used to like my forthrightness.”

“Yes,” he said, with a small sigh. “You’re very good and very true. But I’m going to do this. Are you on my side?”

How many times had he asked me that in our married life? A hundred? A thousand?

“I’m always on your side,” I said, and wondered if I was the only one who felt the complicated truth of that hovering over us in the dark room.