“Next question?” Joe asked wearily.
I crossed my arms and glared at the boys. We’d been smoking cigarettes all morning—Joe, Harry, me, lighting the next with the butt of the last—and I wondered if Glenys worried we’d stain her walls with nicotine. Joe sat on the arm of one of the sofas; Harry slumped in among the cushions with his wife. I stood in front of them, a little girl whose parents have forced her to sing for company.
Cigarette mashed in my tight, grim mouth, I read the next item on my list. “ ‘Mr. Hemingway. How do you do your best writing—longhand, or do you use a—’ ”
The men had begun shaking their heads the moment I started talking, and I groaned. Harry put out his Pall Mall in the overflowing ashtray. “This is Ernest Hemingway we’re talking about, Louise. There’s no time for sophomoric questions like that.”
“Damn it!” I threw my notebook onto the floor and stomped on it with my right foot. “Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Lou, honey,” Joe said, rising to his feet. He was in shirtsleeves, cuffs rolled back, neck pocked with shaving marks. “You’re going to be swell. It’s just not every day that someone gets to sit down with this guy.”
“All right, how’s this for a question nobody’s asked our friend Hemingway?” I cleared my throat. “ ‘As a resident of Cuba, what’s your reaction to the unfolding attack on the Moncada Barracks? What’s the mood like on the ground?’ ”
My question was met with cold silence. Joe fumbled his glass. Harry, who’d been pressing the icy bottom of his drink to the bridge of his nose, sat up straighter. “Well,” he said, nudging Joe, “that’s one way to get some attention.”
“Lou,” Joe said warily, “we can’t invite our best writer to say something he’d regret. Not about a failed coup. Ask Hemingway the mood on the ground, you invite him to criticize Batista and help make Castro into a martyr. Better to ask Hem something along the lines of…” Joe drummed his fingers on his chin. “How serious he thinks the threat of Communism is there, and how likely it is to spread to the U.S.”
“Should we just let the man talk?” Harry said. He’d put his arm around Glenys, the two of them sipping their cocktails on the sofa. She looked happy. “This is, purportedly, an interview, is that the case? Not a multiple-choice?”
Joe looked pained. “Not you, too. The Soviets have Trotsky, and Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. Who do we have? Roy Rogers? We have Hemingway. Don’t let him wade into red waters, Louise.”
I’d just about had it with them. I needed to lie down for a minute, get my bearings. I headed to Glenys’s bedroom to touch up my makeup and have a moment alone.
“Louise.”
Joe tapped me on the shoulder in the darkened hallway. I turned, relieved to have a chance to connect with him alone, to see the concerned wrinkle between his eyes. A slanted yellow parallelogram of light, pouring from the open door of one of the children’s bedrooms, glowed on the parquet floor behind him. I reached up to smooth one of his sideburns.
His hand wrapped around mine. It was cold. “We just can’t afford to mess this up, Louise.” He said it quickly, his words coming out in a huff.
My head snapped back, as if I’d been slapped. So it wasn’t me he was worried about. It was how I’d perform. A little squeak gurgled from my throat, in place of a retort.
Glenys whisked by us then, taking me by the arm. “Come on, dear, I’ll help you spruce for the interview.” Still dumbfounded, I allowed her to usher me into her bedroom and shut the door with a gentle click.
“Sometimes they just make me want to scream,” I muttered.
Glenys grunted in what I assumed was agreement. “Let me see your blouse.” She reached out, tapping just between my bosoms. “You’ve popped a button.”
I looked down; my shirt gaped in the middle, revealing my white Maidenform bra. “Oh, damn it. Would you go out and find the button for me?”
She’d already gone to her closet and pulled out another blouse, peach-colored. “Why don’t you try this one?”
I hesitated, ready to say that it wouldn’t fit—Glenys most certainly didn’t buy juniors—but that would be insulting. The pure silk poured down like cool water over my shoulders. To my surprise, it fit perfectly. “Thank you,” I said, smiling. “That’s such a relief.”
She hesitated, holding my hand. “Is there anything…Are you all right?”
“Of course I am. What do you mean?”
“Oh, you just seem…peaky. Pale and…and that with your blouse…”
“I’m fine,” I said in a regrettably snappish tone, lifting my skirt so I could tug the tails of her shirt down over my hips. “It’s almost my time of the month.” I smoothed my skirt down, pushing it so that it wouldn’t bunch around my thighs.
I had my own plan for my interview with Mr. Hemingway. Over dinner, I was going to fill him in on my missing brother, get him talking about Korea. I wanted to see what a veteran of the Great War thought of the way we’d ended things. Perhaps it was petty, but I hoped Hemingway would agree with me, and openly contradict what Joe had said about how we should have stayed in Korea longer. That would show him.
Oddly, Hemingway had asked to meet me at the Bronx Zoo. By the time I shuffled all the way from the subway, past the balloon vendors and the reeking rhinos rolling in dust, I was drenched in sweat and breathing hard. I found him leaning on a fence outside the African Enclosure, staring at the hoof stock.
There was no mistaking him: a bearded bear of a man, hunched in a scally cap and too-small jacket with his elbows on the split-rail fence. His interlocked hands were as large as catcher’s mitts. Everyone around him, miraculously, ignored him, tending to their prams or disentangling cotton candy from children’s hair. The afternoon sun illuminated all of us in an egg-yolk glow. Before I approached him, I chewed an aspirin from inside my purse.
“Mr. Hemingway!”
He turned, small dark eyes on me, his nose sunburned: a ship’s captain a bit bewildered and irritated to find himself on land. He was holding a piece of wood about the circumference of my arm, carved like one of those totem poles in the Pacific Northwest. Too late, I realized that I should never have shouted his name out loud, but no one turned around.
He waited until I stood just beneath his chin to speak. “It’s in heat.”
“I’m— Pardon?” The sun felt hot on my cheeks.
He nodded. “I can sniff out this sort of thing. You have to, if you hunt. Take it from me, she’s in heat.” His voice was surprisingly smooth and eloquent, not the grunt I’d expected. He lifted one of his huge hands and wafted the stench from the animal pen toward my nose, as if inviting me to inhale steam off a bowl of soup. “Smell that.”
I drew in a rank odor, like stale urine and rotten fruit. I was hit by a sudden urge to vomit. “Ugh,” I said, making a face.
Hemingway smiled approvingly. “It’s why they’ve got the male cordoned off over there. Can’t give the children too much of a show.” He rolled his eyes. “Hear him? In agony.”
I looked where he pointed, to a zebra trotting nervous circles in a pen by himself. A lone fiberglass baobab tree was planted in the middle, to make him feel at home. The hoarse cry he produced sounded like that of a drunken donkey.
“Zebras,” I said. So that’s what we were talking about. Already I felt I was failing here. My armpits seeped, soaking Glenys’s shirt. I tried again to offer him my hand. “Mr. Hemingway, I’m—”
He waved his arms, stopping me. “Everyone calls me Papa.”
“—Louise Leithauser—”
“Know who you are.” He twitched a finger in front of my face, and apropos of nothing, began speaking in some kind of foreign accent. “Don’t forget name like that. Louise eh-Light-hau-sah. Sound like girl journalist in comic book.”
“Thank you,” I said, unsure whether this was in fact a compliment.
“Those boys, Harry and the other one, Eager Eddie. They tell me you cub writer.”
“Eager Eddie,” I repeated, having just realized whom he was talking about, and laughed out loud.
Hemingway shrugged. He had a faded bandanna tied around his neck, which looked to be limiting his circulation. “You know which one I mean.”
“I do,” I said. “He and I are an item.”
“Is that so!” Hemingway’s beard puckered around his mouth. For a second, I thought he might apologize, but no. “Those boys. American Harry, Eager Eddie. The ‘oldest men at the game,’ ” he scoffed. “Ever think you’d like to see the two of them duke it out? They need some blood on their collars, I tell you what. They’re soft—like shucked shellfish. Ivy League boys.” He shook his head. I wondered if he had a chip on his shoulder regarding education, since he hadn’t been to college in his youth. He scratched his chin. “Always whining about how they never got their war. Am I right?”
I bit my lip. I had heard Joe say that. “You are right,” I said.
“I’m sorry to say it, but your Joe would go down in the third.”
“I’d be there with the popcorn,” I said.
This got a laugh out of Hemingway. He slapped my upper arm, hard, with one of his giant hands. “He’d go down by the third, I’d wager you that. No worry. I give you all the writing tips you need, cub reporter. In festive mood today.”
There was that voice again. It put me off my guard. Who was he pretending to be? “Uh, thank you, sir. Shall we go—”
“I know what you want me to say, you know.” He fixed me with a stern eye.
I felt my face flush. “What I want you to say?”
He came close to my ear, mustache bristles tickling the lobe. “About Fidel. You get down my thoughts on that crazy Commie bastard, you get big placement for your article. Louise Leithauser, household name! Daughter, I do you one better than that.”
I swallowed and nodded, trying to think of what to say next. Something clever. The nausea hadn’t totally subsided; between this conversation and the smell, I needed to sit down.
“Now try it,” he said, reaching for his leather backpack, which had been sitting on the ground against the fence. He stuffed the wooden idol inside.
“Try what?”
He put the backpack on. The straps looked absurdly small against his chest. “I told you, everyone calls me Papa. Try it.”
“Papa,” I said slowly, the word sticking on the roof of my mouth. “Should we head to the Oak Leaf?” Joe had had to bribe the hostess to get us a dinner reservation for five-thirty.
Hemingway grunted. “The Oak Leaf has become a dump,” he said, already walking. The odd totem pole poked from the zipper of the backpack, its topmost face grimacing at me. “I may not live in the U.S. of A. anymore, but I know bits and pieces. We go where the action is. Daughter, you follow me.”