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on, when I got to know Marlene quite well, she told me: "I never ask Ernest for advice as such but he is always there to talk to, to get letters from, and in conversation and letters I find the things I can use for whatever problems I may have; he has often helped me without even knowing my problems. He says remarkable things that seem to automatically adjust to problems of all sizes.
    "For example, I spoke to him on the telephone just a few weeks ago. Ernest was alone in the finca; he had finished writing for the day, and he wanted to talk. At one point he asked me what work plans I had—if any—and I told him that
    I had just had a very lucrative offer from a Miami night club but I was undecided about whether to take it.
    " 'Why the indecision?' he asked.
    " 'Well,' I answered, 'I feel I should work. I should not waste my time. It's wrong. I think one appearance in London and one a year in Vegas is quite enough. However, I'm probably just pampering myself, so I've been trying to convince myself to take the offer.'
    "There was silence for a moment and I could visualize Ernest's beautiful face poised in thought. He finally said, 'Don't do what you sincerely don't want to do. Never confuse movement with action.' In those five words he gave me a whole philosophy.
    "That's the wonderful thing about him—he kneels himself into his friends' problems. He is like a huge rock, off somewhere, a constant and steady thing, that certain someone whom everybody should have and nobody has.
    "I suppose the most remarkable thing about Ernest is that he has found time to do the things most men only dream about. He has had the courage, the initiative, the time, the enjoyment to travel, to digest it all, to write, to create it, in a sense. There is in him a sort of quiet rotation of seasons, with each of them passing overland and then going underground and re-emerging in a kind of rhythm, refreshed and full of renewed vigor.
    "He is gentle, as all real men are gentle; without tenderness, a man is uninteresting."
    "The thing about the Kraut and me," Ernest said after I told him what Marlene had said about him, "is that we have been in love since 1934, when we first met on the lie de France , but we've never been to bed. Amazing but true. Victims of un-synchronized passion. Those times when I was out of love, the Kraut was deep in some romantic tribulation, and on those occasions when Dietrich was on the surface and swimming about with those marvelously seeking eyes of hers, I was submerged. There was another crossing on the lie, years after that first one, when something could have happened, the only time, but I had too recently made love to that worthless M––, and the Kraut was still somewhat in love with the equally worthless R––. We were like two young cavalry officers who had lost all their money gambling and were determined to go straight."

Chapter Two
    New York ♦ 1949

    Ernest came up to New York at the end of October, 1949, with the manuscript of Across the River and into the Trees. New York City was just a way station for Ernest, a place to stay for a week or so on the move to or from some serious place. There was a small core of New York regulars whom he invariably contacted on arrival and a large peripheral group who contacted him. For years his favorite hotel was the Sherry-Netherland (he liked their "good protection"—no name on the register, phone calls all screened, newsmen and photographers thrown off the scent); but in 1959 he gave up the Sherry-Netherland for a three-room pied a terre at 1 East Sixty-Second, a once-fabulous town house which had been divided into not-especially-fabulous apartments.
    Ernest was always uneasy in New York and liked being there less than in any other city he frequented. Mary loved it, and I suspect that he came as often as he did as a favor to her. He did not like theater, opera or ballet, and although he liked to listen to music he rarely, to my knowledge, attended a concert or any