The Paris Wife

EPILOGUE

Bumby and I returned to Paris after our summer in Carmel. He missed his father terribly and, honestly, I didn’t know where else I should go.

After a few months there, I became involved with Paul Mowrer, an old journalist acquaintance of Ernest’s. Paul was the foreign editor of the Chicago Daily News and a good poet in private as well. He and Ernest had worked together in Lausanne, and I’d met him a few times back then. Not long after Ernest and I separated, I ran into Paul at a tennis club and he invited me out after my game, for a beer at the Café de l’Observatoire. He was interested in me, and made that gently clear, but I needed time to think. So much of me still belonged to Ernest, I wasn’t sure I could ever really love anyone else. But Paul was incredibly kind and patient, too, and he had these wonderfully clear Mediterranean-blue eyes. The longer I looked into them, the longer I wanted to go on looking into them. There was nothing complicated about Paul. He was solid and even and had that wonderful stillness all the time. I knew he would love me forever and not ruin me, not even a little. I just had to let it happen.

In the spring of 1928, Ernest and Pauline left Paris for the States. Pauline was five months pregnant at the time, and they were headed to Piggott and then to Key West, where Dos Passos had promised the best tarpon fishing in the world. Pauline would buy a house for them and make everything wonderful because she knew how to do all of that-where to buy the best furniture and how to get pictures framed the right way and which friends to cultivate. She could care for him better than I had, maybe. Or maybe not.

In the end, Ernest didn’t have the luck I did in love. He had two more sons, both with Pauline, and then left her for another. And left that one for another, too. He had four wives altogether and many lovers as well. It was sometimes painful for me to think that to those who followed his life with interest, I was just the early wife, the Paris wife. But that was probably vanity, wanting to stand out in a long line of women. In truth it didn’t matter what others saw. We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believe Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.

After he left for the States, I saw him just twice more in my very long life, but I watched from a distance as he became, very quickly, the most important writer of his generation and also a kind of hero of his own making. I saw him on the cover of Life magazine and heard about the wars he covered bravely and the other feats-the world-class fishing, the big-game hunting in Africa, the drinking enough to embalm a man twice his size. The myth he was creating out of his own life was big enough to take it for a time-but under this, I knew he was still lost. That he slept with the light on or couldn’t sleep at all, that he feared death so much he sought it out wherever and however he could. He was such an enigma, really-fine and strong and weak and cruel. An incomparable friend and a son of a bitch. In the end, there wasn’t one thing about him that was truer than the rest. It was all true.

The last time we ever spoke was in May of 1961. He called out of the blue around lunchtime on a cool afternoon when Paul and I were in Arizona, vacationing at a ranch we returned to every few years for the fine fishing and the views. I took the call alone while Paul invented an errand because he knew I needed this. I didn’t have to ask. We’d been married thirty-five years, and Paul knew me better than anyone. Almost.

“Hello, Tatie,” Ernest said when I picked up the receiver.

“Hello, Tatie,” I said back, smiling to hear our forty-year-old nickname again.

“Your housekeeper told me how to find you. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, I’m happy you called. I’m happy it’s you.”

I told him quickly about the ranch Paul and I were staying at, because I knew he would approve of it. It wasn’t prissy or too comfortable. In the cabin, there were dark silky places on the wood paneling from eighty years of good fires, and all the furniture was rugged and plain and felt real under you. The days were long and open. The nights were full of stars.

It had been ages since I’d heard from him, and now he was calling to talk about a new book, a memoir. He wanted to share stories about our time in Paris.

“Do you remember the whores at the bal musette, and the accordion music and the smoke and the smells?”

I told him I did.

“Do you remember that Bastille Day when musicians played under our windows for nights on end?”

“I remember it all.”

“You’re everywhere in the book,” he said, and his voice dipped. He was working hard to stay cheerful, but I knew he was sad and low and haunted. “It’s been something, writing that time and living it all again. Tell me, do 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.