The Paris Wife

TWENTY-FIVE

I wanted muskmelons and a really nice piece of cheese, coffee and good jam and waffles. I was so hungry thinking about this I couldn’t sleep.

“Waffles,” I said to Ernest’s curled back near dawn. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

When he didn’t rouse, I said it again, louder, and put my hand on his back, giving him a friendly little shove.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” he said, rolling out of bed. “It’s gone now.”

“What’s gone?”

He sat on the edge of the thick mattress, scratching one knee. “The right words for the sketch.”

“Oh, sorry then,” I said.

I watched him dress and move toward the kitchen. Within minutes I could hear the coffee boiling and smell it and it made me hungrier. I heard him get his coffee and then heard the chair squeak back as he sat at the table. Silence.

“Tiny?” I said, still in bed. “What do you think about the waffles?”

He groaned and pushed his chair back. “There it all goes again.”

The months were closing in on us. Our baby was due at the end of October and we were set to sail for Canada in late August. That would give us six or seven weeks to find an apartment and prepare. As the time grew closer, Ernest worked hard and worried harder. He was panicked he’d never have time to set down the rest of the miniatures for Jane Heap and the Little Review. He was working on five new ones simultaneously, each describing some aspect of bullfighting. When he came home from his studio, he often needed several drinks back to back before he could tell me about his work, which was going well, but seemed to be taking everything he had.

“I’m trying to keep it alive,” he said. “To stay with the action, and not try to put in what I’m feeling about it. Not think about myself at all, but what really happened. That’s where the real emotion is.”

This was one of his newest ideas about writing, and because the miniatures would test it, he was killing himself to get them right. I had no doubt they would hit and be perfect, but in the meantime, it was hard to see him so overworked.

He was also slaving over proofs for Bob McAlmon. Even after their prickly time in Spain, Bob had made good on his offer to do a book for Ernest through Contact Editions. The volume would be titled Three Stories and Ten Poems, and although Ernest was crowing with excitement at the prospect, he was worried he’d never get the proofs corrected on time. He worked by candle late into the night; when he’d finally finished his notes and mailed everything back to McAlmon, it was time for good-byes.

In a series of sad dinners, we saw the Straters, the Pounds, Sylvia, Gertrude and Alice-each time saying we’d be back in a year, when the baby was ready to travel.

“Mind it’s not longer,” Pound said ominously. “Exile weighs on the mind.”

“It’s not quite exile, is it?” Ernest said.

“Limbo then,” Pound said, retreating slightly.

“A softer word only if you don’t bring in the Old Testament,” Ernest said with a grumble.

Ten days later, we sailed.

It was early September when we arrived in Quebec, and by the time we got to Toronto, there was an enthusiastic note waiting from John Bone and another from Greg Clark, a reporter friend from Ernest’s past, welcoming us warmly to town. All seemed to be boding well, but when Ernest reported for work on September 10, he learned that Bone wouldn’t be his immediate supervisor, as he expected, but Harry Hindmarsh, who was the Star’s assistant managing editor. After one meeting, Ernest knew the relationship would be a troubled one. Hindmarsh was heavy physically and also in word and deed; he liked to throw his weight around.

“Right off, he sized me up,” Ernest said when he returned to our room at the Hotel Selby. “I hadn’t said three words before he decided I was too big for my britches.” He paced the room, scowling. “What about him? If he weren’t married to the publisher’s daughter, he’d be sweeping sidewalks.”

“I’m sorry, Tiny. I’m sure he’ll come around to your wonderfulness,” I said.

“Fat chance. He seems bent on treating me like some cub reporter. I won’t be getting a byline, and he’s sending me out of town.”

“When?”

“Tonight. To Kingston to cover some escaped convict. It’s only five or six hours on the train, but I don’t know how long the story will keep me there.”

“Does Hindmarsh know this baby could turn up anytime?”

“I don’t think he cares.”

I sent Ernest off with a kiss and repeated assurance that all would be well. He made me swear to find reinforcements, and I did. Greg Clark had a lovely wife, Helen, who warmly agreed when I asked her for help in finding an apartment. Money was as much of a concern for us as it had always been, even more so because we were putting away every possible dime for the baby. We couldn’t afford some of the nicer neighborhoods she recommended, but we did find something that would do on Bathurst Street. It was a railroad flat on the fourth floor, with a claw-foot tub and a pull-down Murphy bed in the bedroom, which was oddly squeezed between the kitchen and living room. Although the apartment itself lacked warmth and charm, it looked down on one corner of a ravine on the Connables’ estate.

Ernest had known Ralph and Harriet Connable since just after the war, when he’d come to Toronto to try and find newspaper work. Ralph owned the Canadian chain of Woolworth five-and-dime stores and was as wealthy as a god as far as we were concerned. He and his wife were both very kind to me as soon as they learned we were neighbors, and I was happy to have someone, anyone, close by as I neared my due date.

Ernest came home from Kingston looking tired and irritable, and then left again, just days later, to do a mining story in Sudbury Basin, easily twice as far from Toronto as Kingston. He barely had time to visit and approve of the apartment.

“Oh, Cat. I feel terrible I won’t be here to help you get settled.”

“There’s not much to do. I’ll hire someone to do the lifting.”

“I can’t help but think we were foolish to come here. You’re alone all the time. I’m working like a slave for what? Spotty bits of news in nowhere locations? What a bust.”

“I know you’re overworked, Tiny. But everything will make sense once the baby comes.”

“I hope to Christ you’re right.”

“I am. You’ll see,” I said. And kissed him good-bye.

I was doing far too much of that for my comfort, it was true, but I did believe coming to very cold and lonely Toronto would be worth it once our baby was born healthy and well. In the meantime, I tried to make the new space as homey as I could. We’d brought crates from Paris with our clothes and dishes and pictures packed inside. I hired a cleaning woman and an ancient-looking janitor to cart our things up the four flights. We didn’t have much in the way of furniture, and for the first weeks, as Ernest crisscrossed Ontario like some kind of traveling salesman, I camped out on the Murphy bed, wrapped in blankets against the dropping temperatures and finishing the letters of Abélard and Héloïse.

I was keen for any distraction, and it was easy to lose myself in their words and their story. Some days I only got up to make tea or stuff blankets under the doors and windowsills where the chill crept in. I also wrote letters to Paris, to the friends we were missing there, and home to the States. Fonnie had been trying to muster happiness for me about the coming baby, but she was close to the breaking point on many fronts. Roland had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and was recuperating in a mental hospital in Massachusetts. It’s a highly regarded facility, Fonnie said in a letter, as those places go. But the children are confused and ask if he’ll ever come home again. I don’t know what to tell them. I felt very sorry for them all, but not surprised that such a thing could happen. There had always been too much unrest between them, as with my own parents. And when tensions are that high for so long, something has to snap. How can it not?

I also wrote to Ernest’s parents. He was too busy to answer his own letters, but his stinginess with his parents was more complicated than that. He’d never wanted them overly involved in his life, particularly Grace. When he left for Paris, I think he felt he had freedom for the first time to completely reinvent himself. His parents reminded him of his beginnings, which he would rather have thrown off altogether. I understood his need for independence, but here we were a few weeks away from the baby’s arrival, and Ernest hadn’t said a thing to them. I felt they had a right to know, and I continued to tell him so when he came home ever so briefly between assignments.

“I’ll do it if you insist,” he finally agreed. “But it’s a mistake. They’ll just come sniffing around they way wolves always do.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“The hell I don’t. Can you imagine my mother not forcing her way into everything with this baby, pummeling us with her opinions and advice? We don’t need her. We don’t need anyone.”

“She and Ed would love any small opportunity to help.”

“So let them, but I’m not asking for a hot dime.”

“Fair enough,” I said, but was grateful when they responded to Ernest’s cable quickly and extravagantly, sending trunks full of wedding gifts we’d been storing with them and furniture, too, from our long-ago apartment on Dearborn Street. None of it was especially nice, but having our own things around us made our lot on Bathurst Street seem less provisional. And it all arrived just in time.

Hindmarsh sent Ernest off again, the first week in October, this time to cover the arrival of British prime minister David Lloyd George in New York City.

“It’s like a personal vendetta,” I said as I watched him pack for his trip.

“I can take it, I guess,” Ernest said. “But what about you?”

“The doctor said we have until the end of the month, maybe until the first of November. You’ll be here.”

“This is the last trip,” he said, snapping shut the new valise. “I’m going to ask John Bone to talk some sense into Hindmarsh.”

“If it comes directly from Bone, he’ll have to lay off, won’t he?”

“That’s the idea. Take good care of the baby cat.”

“I promise.”

“And the mama cat, too.”

“Yes, Tiny, but you’d better hurry. They won’t hold your train.”

Several days later, on October 9, Harriet Connable called on me with a dinner invitation.

“I’d love to,” I said. “But I’m so very large now nothing fits me. I’ll have to wear table linens.”

“I’m sure you’ll carry them off beautifully, dear,” she said with a gracious laugh. “We’ll send a car around for you at eight.”

In the end I was very glad she insisted. All afternoon I’d been feeling something I was calling indigestion. Of course it was more than that. My body was readying itself, but I tried to ignore it. I thought if I just stayed calm and didn’t overexert myself, the baby would hold off until Ernest returned home. I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse and then sat on the Connables’ rich velvet sofa listening to Harriet play a lively rendition of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” without so much as tapping my foot. But of course the baby was coming whether I was prepared or not, and this became more and more obvious as the evening passed.

“Hadley, dear, I don’t think you’re feeling well,” Ralph Connable said when he could no longer politely disregard the strained and serious expression on my face.

“I’m perfectly all right,” I said, stubborn to the last, but then I began to cry as soon as I’d said it, my emotions bursting right through my carefully made dam. The pain was too much now. I bent over with it and began to shake.

“Oh, you poor girl,” Harriet said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll make sure you’re very well cared for.”

They drove me to the hospital, Harriet patting my hand and making soothing noises while Ralph sped along with determination. The streets glowed faintly under gaslight.

“Can you try and reach someone at the Star? There must be a way to let Ernest know.”

“We’ll move mountains if we have to,” Harriet assured me. “There’s still a little time, I think.”

But there wasn’t. Half an hour later, I was gowned and draped on the surgical table, coached by the doctor and several nurses to begin pushing. This was why we’d come to Toronto-to have these very capable and trained professionals oversee everything. In Paris I would have had a midwife who boiled water on my own cooktop to sterilize her instruments. Even in the States, doctors were just beginning to perform hospital deliveries. Ernest’s father still woke in the middle of the night to answer calls when he was up in Michigan, and though I knew women had been having babies at home forever-my mother, certainly, and Ernest’s, too-I felt so much safer this way. Particularly when my pushing did nothing at all.

I strained for two hours, until my neck ached and my knees shook with the effort. Finally they gave me ether. I breathed in the fresh-paint smell of it as the mask was drawn over my mouth and nose, the sharpness stinging my eyes. After that, I felt nothing until I woke from my fog and saw the nurse holding out a tightly wrapped bundle. This was my son, swaddled in layers of blue wool. I gazed at him through happy tears. He was perfect, from the pink whorls of his well-made ears and his squeezed-shut eyes, to the dark brown hair with a fuzz of sideburns. I was devastated that Ernest had missed the birth, but here, safe and sound and utterly marvelous, was his son. That was all that mattered.

When Ernest finally did arrive early the next morning, panting and completely beside himself, I was sitting up in bed, nursing the baby.

“Oh, my God,” Ernest said, breaking down. He stood just inside the door and sobbed openly, covering his face with his hands. “I’ve been dead worried for you, Tiny. I got a cable in the press car saying the baby had come and was well, but not a single word about you.”

“Dear sweet Tiny. You can see I’m fine. Everything went smoothly, and come look at this fellow. Isn’t he wonderful?”

Ernest crossed to me, sitting gently on the edge of the mattress. “He seems awfully small. Aren’t you afraid of doing something wrong?” He put a single finger on the baby’s small veined hand.

“I was afraid at first, but he’s very solid, actually. I think the bullfights had an effect on him after all. He came barreling out like a good torero.”

“John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. He’s perfectly beautiful. And aren’t you something for making it through so well?”

“I feel surprisingly sturdy, but you, Tiny. You look terrible. Didn’t you sleep on the train?”

“I tried, but I had the most terrible feeling you were in danger.”

“I was in excellent hands. The Connables were so thoughtful and helpful. We owe them so much.”

“Maybe we were right to come to Toronto after all,” Ernest said.

“Of course we were. I told you it would all make perfect sense.”

“I’m so tired I might fall over.”

“Sleep then.” I pointed to a chair in the corner of the room.

“Hindmarsh will be wondering where I am.”

“Let him wonder. You’re a new father.”

“Can you believe it?”

I smiled to myself and said nothing as he curled up under a blanket and fell soundly asleep. Two men, now, I thought with deep satisfaction. And both of them mine.