Mrs. Hemingway Read Online Free PDF Page B

whooping cough, it had been no uncertain banishment from Villa America. Hadley’s exile only underlined the fact that Mrs. Murphy held her, not in contempt, but with something approximating indifference. Though Sara paid the doctor’s bills and had her chauffeur drop by regularly with provisions, Hadley had always thought Sara behaved toward her with a certain chilliness. If Fife had had children, Hadley was sure the treatment to her would have been different. She wouldn’t have faced this banishment.
    At the end of their visits the group would hand over the basket of supplies and then, like a school of fish come to observe the goings-on on the other side of the pond, they would depart back to Villa America, their silver-flecked skin and fishy scowls flashing in the hot light of midday. Scott was always the merriest, shouting joyous good-byes as he walked down the gravel path, already drunk despite it not yet hitting noon. Hadley would watch them until they were out of sight: imagining the exquisite conversations back in Villa America, where one dressed for dinner and did not always undress in one’s own bed.
    The gang came to relieve the quarantine every few days or so, but it wasn’t like having somebody to talk to. The rest of the time, Hadley was alone. She watched Bumby while he was bedridden and burned eucalyptus for his chest. She watered the roses in the garden and waited for the Villa’s next arrival. She tried hard to read the cummings novel but didn’t understand it. The replies from Ernest came in slowly. He was busy writing so much in Madrid that she didn’t want to disturb him. If it was going well he had to apply himself for as long as he could manage, because who knew when it would go well again? He needed to write, and they needed the money. In the days her thoughts looped around the same thing: the matter of her friend, her husband, his mistress.
    Behind the invitation was a muddled reasoning. Hadley had seen, in Paris, how the trio made him feel awkward: flummoxed as to what he should do. Long April days spent in the company of wife and mistress would always make Ernest rush back to her in the evenings, as if he could finally see his wife’s merits next to Fife’s empty dazzle. Fife was rich and blowzy and urbane, but Ernest wanted a wife, not a showgirl. Hadley had asked him to sort this thing out after Jinny’s revelation—but what it had meant was a moratorium on speaking about it, and Hadley was pretty sure things between Fife and her husband only continued.
    And so she thought that she could perhaps break the affair by setting them up like this, so that the pressure of three would reduce them again to two. In Antibes, there would be none of his little exciting adventures across the Pont Neuf with Fife alone. Nor could there be the intimate walks down to the Seine with his wife to watch the barges and fishing boats. No, they would be a three again, all the time, and she had banked on Fife’s presence here making the spindles of this triangle snap.
    With a coldness to her thoughts that morning, a fortnight into the
coqueluche
confinement, Hadley wrote to her husband’s lover and invited her to Antibes.
Wouldn’t it be fun
, she wrote,
if we vacationed down in Juan this summer; all of us—un, deux, trois?
    And when she put down the pen Hadley had even felt triumphant. She wrote Fife’s address on the front, and the envelope’s glue was bitter on her tongue. That afternoon she gave the letter to Scott through the grill when he came, on his own this time, to deliver food and telegrams. In return she handed over the note for Fife to her fashionable Paris address. Scott gave her a strange look, over the shaker he carried of martini, as if asking her if this were a good idea.
    And so Fife had come with her Riviera stripes and her fisherman’s hat and her talk of
chaps
and everything being
ambrosial
or
indecent
and her kid-leather