January 10, 1954
Dear Miss Leithauser,
Hell of a hatchet job they did on the interview. You did fine on the observation bits, but they chopped what I said to pieces. Had a sense this was coming all along. Those boys are deep into it with the censor lot. At least Clifton, that lousy publisher of mine, lets me say what I will as long as the writing’s good. If it’s not good, he sends it back with womanish notes scrawled all over. Might as well use pink pen.
Am back in the country for a while. Came through New York for a few days but didn’t want to see anyone. Just a new thing or two at the Met, time for friends, no journalists. Not even you, even though you have the hat Mary gave me last Christmas. Will notify you when we are back at home so that you can return hat.
Now am in the West. Staying with an old friend with a cattle ranch near Casper. I write for an hour and a half each morning, and then, for the rest of the day, we hunt. Landed a bear last Thursday, a great big male with gray in his muzzle. The meat had the texture of wet yarn. But, daughter, thrill of the hunt makes for mighty good sauce. There’s that killer instinct.
In any case, Mary and I have a sense we’re all alone here. None of the busybodies on the coasts. Drinking has been fine, sunsets early and bright, and the guerrilla novel, which has turned out to be a marvelous long story, is flowing as quick as water.
Daughter, you’ve crossed my mind more than once since that day at the zoo and the Garden. Hope whatever trouble you had found yourself in has been resolved in a satisfactory manner, or that you’re embracing trouble with clear eyes.
Tell them where they can put the interview assignments from now on. Keep up with your own writing. Remember not to get behind in the count.
Yrs,
E. Hemingway
P.S. The best of my novels is not The Sun Also Rises, as you said. It is A Farewell to Arms. There’s the one I’ve got to outdo before my time is up.
I heard the bathtub begin to drain, and I jumped. Quickly, I stuffed Hemingway’s typewritten letter—only the postscript had been scrawled in pencil—back into my purse. I’d had it in my possession for a week and had read and reread it a hundred times. The thrill of receiving word from him, even if it was just his way of getting his darn hat back, made my toes curl.
When Joe emerged from his bathroom in a towel, combing his wet hair, he found me curling my eyelashes. I gave him a little smile. I sat at the vanity he’d set up for me in his apartment, wearing my new Chantilly lace nightgown with matching peignoir. The nightie was bell-shaped, ending just below my panties.
Besides the vanity, Joe had bought me an entire maternity wardrobe, assembled by the salesgirls at Barney’s. The only caveat was that I had to keep these new things at his apartment. The maternity wear I’d purchased for myself looked far more pedestrian.
He came up behind me, put his hands on my shoulders, and kissed me on the cheek.
“Why won’t you let me marry you today?” he whispered against my temple. “Head to City Hall, make it official….”
My smile faded. I licked my lips and gazed out the window. Joe’s apartment, at the corner of Forty-second and Tenth, faced north and west, with a view of the Hudson River and the low roofs of Hell’s Kitchen. This morning, a light flurry of snow had just petered out, and the city looked like an elaborate cake, dusted with powdered sugar.
“Oh, silly,” I said, pushing him away gently. “You know how I feel about City Hall weddings. Let’s wait till I have my figure back, and I can wear a real gown.”
He frowned and turned away, and I watched him in the mirror as I curled my round brush under the ends of my hair. I didn’t give a damn about a real gown, and part of me feared Joe knew I was simply buying time.
“I’m also not in the most celebratory mood yet,” I said quietly, toward my compact. “You understand.”
Joe took a deep breath and nodded. “I do.”
After my brother died, it had become immediately clear to me that I wanted to keep this baby—my flesh and blood, and Paul’s, too. Joe had been there to support me, honoring my wishes, though he hadn’t quite understood why I didn’t want him at Paul’s memorial service in Ossining. Whenever that subject came up, or if he started asking questions about my parents, I put him off with talk about the baby. To my surprise, he’d been supportive of the pregnancy in general, even eager; he’d gotten my engagement ring within weeks, and I’d accepted it. It was a bright half-carat diamond in a palladium band, the new “it” metal, which Joe had found at a jeweler’s on Wall Street.
But when he pressed me to marry quickly, I’d demurred, even in the fog of my grief. I’d had the willpower to hold on to my own apartment and my job. For now, at least.
“And—what?—our child will be the ring bearer?” Joe asked from his dresser, rooting through his socks. “My mother won’t exactly be pleased.”
“Your mother doesn’t sound as if she’s pleased anyway, dear.” I swung around to face him. “And since when do you care what your parents think? You run a magazine that prints photos of nude girls, for crying out loud.”
He shrugged and smiled a wistful smile. He had undergone somewhat of a metamorphosis as a result of my pregnancy. He hadn’t gotten chubby, exactly, but had filled out a bit more in the face, his cheeks fuller and manlier, more fatherly. Even his beard, shorn down now but visible underneath the skin, seemed to have thickened. It was almost as if something pheromonal was going on, my pregnancy and its aura taking him from juvenile to silverback in a matter of months. I had to say, he’d become even more delicious.
“If you can get a break at Mr. Franklin’s today,” he said, “maybe think of a few more questions for Malamud, would you? It’d be good to have a list for us to go over with Harry, when we get a minute this weekend.”
I put some lotion in my hands and began smoothing it up and down my bare legs, aware of Joe watching. “I’ve got a few questions worked out.”
The Hemingway article, butchered as it was, had been a great success for the magazine. The issue had come out right around the same time as Paul’s funeral, so I hadn’t been at peak form to argue with Joe and Harry, but they had indeed done a hatchet job on my work: gone was everything about Cuba, about the FBI, about Hemingway’s reasons for living outside the States. I thought the whole thing came across as sophomoric drivel when you took all that out: a schoolgirl acting skittish about boxing and bullfighting (gone were my points about Korea) and babbling about word counts in fiction. But, apparently, readers had enjoyed it, as had the critics: Downtown No. 3, the issue in which my article had appeared, had earned Joe and Harry a Magazine Editors’ Guild award nomination for best new monthly. We all were ecstatic, even I myself. After that, Joe and Harry had declared I was worthy of at least a bimonthly feature: Louise Leithauser, girl journalist, interviewing the great men of letters. Next up would be Bernard Malamud. I planned to ask him which seat in Yankee Stadium he thought King Arthur might choose.
“Did you get any writing done yesterday?” asked Joe, tugging a shoe tree out of his loafer.
“Sure, I did,” I said without looking at him. I’d written, all right, but I hadn’t been working on my questions for Malamud. I was still knee-deep in my story about Katherine and Sergey on the moon, despite what I knew Joe would think of it. It had taken on a life of its own; sometimes I couldn’t type fast enough, and when I got to the end of a page I’d find I was out of breath, heart pounding. The two had become lovers, which had been my plan all along, but I was no longer sure Katherine would get the better of Sergey, bend him to her will, make an American of him. I was no longer at all sure where the story was headed.
I blew Joe a kiss as he made for the bedroom door, headed for the Downtown office. A second later, he was back.
“It’s snowing pretty hard out there again. Let me get you a car to the office.”
“I’ll manage on my own. I have my snow boots here.”
Joe frowned. “I’m only trying to keep you and the baby safe.”
I shook my head. “We’re getting along just fine. Oh!” I cried, catching him. He turned around. “Do you have a copy of A Farewell to Arms?”
“Probably. If I do, you know where to find it. Why?”
Subconsciously, I let my fingers flit to the leather handle of my purse, where I’d been keeping the letter from Papa. “Oh,” I replied, reaching inside my robe to scratch the taut skin on my warm, round belly, “just something I’ve been meaning to read for a while.”
Joe let out a nervous laugh. “Maybe you should wait until after you’ve had the baby.”
“Why?”
“At the end…Well, I don’t want to spoil it for you, honey, but it’s not the best fit for the expectant mother.”
“Let me guess. Disastrous childbirth?”
“You could say that.”
I shrugged. “I’m not worried. I’m sure Hemingway’s girl didn’t have twilight sleep.” Labor and delivery were the furthest things from my mind. It was a modern era, I would have anesthesia, people did it all the time. It wasn’t in my plans to remember a thing. I’d go in with my hair done and makeup on, and I’d wake up a few hours later without even having broken a sweat.
Joe smiled. He came over to give me one last lingering kiss, on the lips this time, putting his cool hand under my nightie. “See you tomorrow at the awards dinner.”
I waited until he’d left, listened for him to lock the door. Then I ran to the spare bedroom.
Joe’s apartment was a two-bed—or a one-plus-den, to be more accurate. In the little den he kept his bookshelves and an old writing desk he’d bought at a thrift store in the Village when he first moved to the city. The desk came with a pedigree—it might have once belonged to Henry Jarvis Raymond, the antiques dealer claimed—but to me it just looked like a beat-up table, soft wood with an artificial orangey stain, dented and scratched in deep black grooves. Joe claimed that when he sat there he could feel the energy and drive Raymond must have felt when he was cofounding The New York Times.
I opened the drawers one by one, as I’d done on several previous occasions. Nothing new. The drawers were messy, full of Joe’s memoranda and torn-off notes to himself, articles ripped from competing magazines, and aspirin, Alka Seltzer, and miniature bottles of liquor. I’d already combed through it all. In another drawer, a few boxes of Eaton’s Corrasable Bond paper and some fresh gummy-pink erasers. And candy, always candy. I crunched some nonpareil chocolates as I rummaged.
I’d been doing this since the day I found out about my brother—that is, the day I’d spoken with Eli—fishing around in Joe’s desk and bookshelves for anything to corroborate what Eli and Glenys suggested about him. Anything that would give me some insight into who, or what, might be pulling Joe’s strings. Plain as day, Joe and Harry had edited my words and Hemingway’s with a political bent, aimed at making Hemingway seem friendlier to the United States than he’d actually been. But why? It was easier for me to believe that Joe, with his naked ambition, was involved in a conspiracy than to conclude that his co-conspirators were members of our own government. We were on the side of freedom, after all. Freedom of speech, freedom of the press. That was what I’d always believed, and until I found some evidence that the CIA, or FBI, or any other government body was working to control artists’ words, I wasn’t quite ready to accept that.
So far, all I had found, surprisingly, was a lot of booze. Never had I thought of Joe as a lush—that was more Harry’s role. Beyond the stocked liquor cabinet, which I’d been familiar with, I found bottles of bourbon, schnapps, even a half-empty jug of tequila stashed in the apartment. This morning, as I combed his shelves for A Farewell to Arms—it would be my cover, if he surprised me by coming back to the apartment—my fingers touched not one but two bottles of Scotch with sticky labels, a squat cinnamon schnapps used as a bookend, and a mini–vodka bottle flung on a high shelf, empty. For a while, I just stared at the bottle, puzzling it out.
Why would someone throw an empty bottle up into his bookshelf? It sounded like something that might happen at a party, but I knew there’d never been a party here—the place was just too damn small. And if there had been, I’d have been invited.
If he was drinking alone, I wondered what motivated this. Stress? Guilt?
Pushing the chair toward the bookshelf, I stood on the seat (unsteadily, my weight creaking the spindly legs) and pulled down an old hatbox where Joe kept his tax returns. Nothing seemed to have changed there, either. I was losing hope of ever finding anything. This didn’t produce the relief I would have hoped, or the closure I needed to marry Joe. Instead, I felt even more unsettled.
I was just about to dismount the chair when I noticed a group of books shelved sideways.
“There you are,” I said, reaching for A Farewell to Arms. For Pete’s sake, when had I started talking to myself? Maybe I was starting to lose it.
As I pulled the book from the middle of the stack of paperbacks, the pile shifted, and a single sheet of paper emerged from the bottom. I picked it up to read.
The handwriting was large, cockily drawn in thick black ink. Right away, my eyes picked out my own name. I gripped the letter in shaking hands. My head went fuzzy, and when I held on to the bookshelf the whole thing wobbled. I managed to catch my breath and lower myself, one bare foot at a time, to the cold floor.
It was a memo from Harry, written on his personal stationery, dated right after my meeting with Hemingway.
Joe,
Here it is with the fixes. I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much you want to put back in, if you think you’ll be in the doghouse with Louise if we change too much. I don’t think she’s as bad a writer as you say, but it damn sure would’ve been best if she let him talk and didn’t yammer on herself so much. At least she took good notes.
Well, he must’ve thought she was pretty or we wouldn’t have gotten anything, and there’s a little meat left here. It won’t be a bad piece, but can we lead with it? I’m thinking maybe a last-page question-and-answer will be the better format. Ultimately, it will be up to you-know-who
The letter cut off there; the rest of it had been torn away. I smacked the paper. My cheeks were flaming hot. “I don’t think she’s as bad a writer as you say.” My fists clenched, wrinkling the paper. I focused on the last part: “It will be up to you-know-who.”
The boys had been scared to death of a mystery man lurking at their release party. Who the hell was it, and whom did he work for? This little torn slip of paper, which I stuffed into my handbag before dressing quickly for work—I was going to be late—might just have been the best proof I’d found that he existed at all.
With a splitting headache, I arrived at work a half-hour late. A bad move, since I’d decided I finally had to tell Mr. Franklin I was expecting. I knew he and Mrs. Whitacre had to have noticed, especially now that I looked as if I’d swallowed a small melon. I rapped lightly on his door when I heard him get off the phone with a client. Inside, I was still fuming, flustered, over having found the note from Harry. My news came out in an ungainly rush just after I’d closed the door to his office, shutting out Mrs. Whitacre and her pricked ears.
Kind as he was, Mr. Franklin pretended he’d had no idea.
“This is wonderful news, Miss Leithauser, just wonderful,” he said. He went over to his decanter to pour himself a drink, gesturing to me with an empty lowball glass. I declined. “Especially after what happened to your brother.”
I couldn’t help it; tears sprang to my eyes. My ribs pushed against my womb as I took a long, deep breath. He reached over to hand me a tissue from his brass-plated tissue box. “Thank you, sir.”
“Some of the happiest marriages I’ve seen have begun as…” He cleared his throat and adjusted his thick-framed glasses. The ice inside his glass clinked. “What I mean to say is, I’m sure you and Mr. Martin will have a very happy union. You know I’ve seen a lot in my day.”
“A lot of unhappy ones, I’m sure,” I replied, and we both uttered short-lived laughs. He took his seat behind his desk, across from me, and a silence fell over us. Behind him, the snow had stopped pelting the window. In its stead, a sad gray sky peeked through the brown blinds.
I let my eyes fall to the desk’s surface. Neat, as always, but cluttered with memorabilia from his family: a sepia photograph of his wife in a 1920s bias-cut wedding gown and embroidered veil; a monogrammed gilt desk set, a gift from his children for his fiftieth birthday; a glass paperweight with two miniature blue baby shoes suspended inside. I wondered how a man’s family remained so happy, at least from my perspective, when his entire career was predicated upon a reminder of so many other people’s suffering.
I nearly asked him to share the secret to a happy marriage, but I could predict what he’d say: honesty, trust, communication.
Harry’s words had been playing Ping-Pong inside my skull all morning: “I don’t think she’s as bad a writer as you say…. It will be up to you-know-who….” There was no question: I’d have to confront Joe with the letter. I knew my voice would shake when I did it. I knew I might break into angry tears. But it had to be done.
I forced myself back to the present. “I’ll get back to my work, then, sir.”
Mr. Franklin had been mid-sip; the ice cubes fell against his teeth, and he spat one back into his glass, wincing. “In your condition, are you quite sure, Miss Leithauser? You’re feeling up to the task?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, and, to demonstrate, I stood and did a little tap dance I’d learned from watching Shirley Temple as a child—“Shuffle Off to Buffalo.” Mr. Franklin didn’t laugh.
“Well, all right,” he said, looking very unsure. He pressed the buzzer on his desk. “Mrs. Whitacre, would you ask them to bring my car around? I have to be in court by ten-thirty.”
I thought that was the end of it, until he caught me at the door.
“Miss Leithauser, when you get a chance, bring me the file marked ‘Résumés,’ from the Office Miscellany cabinet. We saved some of the other girls’ contact information, you see, when we hired you. I’d like to start calling them so we can be sure to have your replacement lined up.”
I felt queasy. “My replacement?”
“Of course! You don’t intend to keep working for long, do you? After all, you and Joe plan to…” He gestured toward my engagement ring.
My lungs couldn’t get enough air. I supposed I knew I’d have to stop working after the baby was born, but until then I’d thought I could continue as I was. Without my job, I’d never be able to keep my apartment. Without my apartment, I’d have to marry Joe right away. And I’d just found that stinking letter.
“The baby isn’t due until April, Mr. Franklin. Can I at least stay on until then?”
Now he looked squeamish. He adjusted his glasses. “You’ve seemed on edge to me lately, Miss Leithauser. Are you certain some well-deserved rest time isn’t what you need?”
“Not at all, sir.” I swallowed, thinking of the rent that would soon be due. “I planned on working right up until the baby’s arrival.”
He winced, no doubt imagining my water breaking on his Persian rug. “I think you’d better bring me those résumés, Miss Leithauser, just in case. These babies have a way of deciding when they’ll come on their own.”
“I’ll get right on that.”
As I gripped the doorknob with a sweaty palm, I heard him chuckle.
“And here I just thought you’d helped yourself to too many of those Hostess cakes you girls keep in the break room.”
I bit my lip to keep from saying anything I’d regret.
When I came out of his office, I noticed Mrs. Whitacre adjusting herself in her seat, wiggling her behind as if she’d just sat down. No doubt she’d been eavesdropping. We gave each other tight smiles, without a word; as I’d begun to show, her demeanor toward me had cooled. I hoped she hadn’t heard Mr. Franklin tell me to fetch the file. I wondered how long I could pretend I didn’t know where to find it.