The Paris Wife (23 page)

“Not everyone drinks as well as you do, Tiny.”

“Still, I don’t trust a man I haven’t seen tight.”

As November passed into December, Ernest’s mood grew worrisomely low. He wasn’t sleeping well, and the baby’s night waking only made this worse. The copies of
Three Stories and Ten Poems
had arrived and Ernest sent some off to Ezra and Gertrude and Sylvia, and several home to his family in Oak Park—and then he waited for praise. He combed the papers and magazines daily, anxious for a review, but there wasn’t so much as a hint of the book’s existence. If the world didn’t know about the book, had it happened? He had a copy of Jane Heap’s
Little Review
with the bullfighting miniatures, and sometimes he thumbed through them and frowned. “I’m not sure I’m the same writer who produced these. Hell, I’m not writing at all.”

I couldn’t tell him I thought he was being overly dramatic, because he really did feel the loss of his writing life profoundly. He needed me to keep him warm and loved, solidly tethered to earth; he needed his work to keep him sane. I couldn’t help him with that part. I could only look on and feel troubled that our life was burdened by worry at a time when we should be so happy.

“It was a terrible mistake to come,” he said after arriving home in a particularly dire state of mind one night.

I couldn’t take his suffering any longer. “You’re right,” I said. “It was a mistake to come. We’ll go back to Paris and you can give everything to your writing.”

“How will we afford it?”

“I don’t know. We just will.”

“Your trust fund pays only two thousand a year. Without my income, I can’t see how we’ll manage.”

“If you can’t write, the baby and I will be a burden to you. You’ll resent us. How can we live like that?”

“We’re in a bind. That’s for sure.”

“Let’s not think of it in that light. It can be an adventure. Our great gamble. Maybe we’ll come out on top after all.”

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, Tiny.”

“Buy the tickets. I’ll wire your parents for money. They want to help.”

“They want to obligate me. I won’t take it.”

“Don’t then. I will, for the baby.”

“What if I did one last series for the
Weekly
? I could kill myself for seven or ten pieces and then resign. With that and some from Oak Park, we’d have maybe a thousand to carry us. A thousand and a prayer.”

“That should just about do it.”

Just after the first of January 1924, as soon as we thought the baby could safely travel, we boarded the train for New York and then the
Antonia
, bound for France. We’d begun to call the baby Bumby for his very round and solid feel, like a stuffed bear. I rolled him tightly in blankets in the ship’s berth and talked to him and let him play with my hair while, up on deck, Ernest found anyone at all and began to wax nostalgic about Paris. I would have stayed in Toronto for a year or five if it took that to make a good home for Bumby, but it wouldn’t have cost me the way it would Ernest. Some men would have been able to choke it back and take it for a while, but he might have lost himself completely there. Ahead in Paris, it was anyone’s guess how we’d make it, but I couldn’t worry about that. Ernest needed me to be strong for us both now, and I would be. I would scrimp and make do and not resent it at all because it was my choice in the end. I was choosing him, the writer, in Paris. We would never again live a conventional life.

“I know we meant to be gone a year,” Ernest said to Gertrude on our first visit to their flat after we returned, “but four months
is
a year in Canada.”

“You’re finished with journalism, that’s the main thing,” Gertrude said. “Time to go all out, now, and write the thing you’re meant to.”

“I’m ready, by God,” he said, and helped himself to another glass of pear liqueur.

I watched Alice as the two of them went on this way, feeding off of one another’s certainty and enthusiasm. She seemed to tighten and turn inward, and I wondered if she wasn’t happy to see Ernest back; if she’d gotten used to having Gertrude to herself when we were away. Granted, there was always someone circling Gertrude, wanting her attention and good opinion, but she and Ernest had a special intensity together—almost as if they were twin siblings with a private language, zeroing in on and hearing the other almost exclusively. I felt it, too, and though I had been hurt by their connection at times, I could hardly remember what it felt like to be lonely. The baby needed and responded to me completely. It was my voice he turned toward, the rhythms of my rocking arms that felt most right, the way I patted and rubbed his back when he woke in the night. I was essential to him, and to Ernest, too. I made everything run, now.

Motherhood could be exhausting, to be sure. I was forever under-slept, and sometimes didn’t have the energy to wash my hair or eat anything more elaborate than bread and butter. But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn’t help but melt into him. And when Ernest came home from a long day of work and had that look that told me he’d been too much alone and in his head, I felt just as necessary. He needed me, and Bumby, too; without us, he couldn’t climb back out of himself and feel whole again.

Family life worked most clearly for us when we were alone, at the end of the day, reconnecting and shoring each other up. But it was very much at odds with bohemian Paris. Gertrude and Alice could be lovely with Bumby. They gave him a shiny silver rattle and knitted booties. When it came time for his christening, they brought some very nice champagne, which we had with teacake, dried fruit, and sugared almonds, and Gertrude even agreed to be his godmother. But not all our friends seemed to know what to do with us now that we had a baby in tow. Pound and Shakespear would come to our apartment for a late-night drink or meet us at the café if we found someone to watch Bumby, but Pound made it very clear that babies weren’t welcome in his studio. It wasn’t because of the noise or the potential mess, but on principle. “I just don’t believe in children,” he said. “No offense, Hadley.”

He did help us find our second apartment in Paris—not an easy task. The dollar was losing muscle against the franc, which we’d been silly not to anticipate. We’d lived so cheaply before; we thought we’d go on this way, with three mouths to feed instead of two—but rents had skyrocketed. When we finally did find something that would do, it was three times what we’d paid at Cardinal Lemoine. But we had to pay it. We handed over the first month’s rent with a gulp, parked Bumby’s pram in the yard next to the coal pile, and called it home.

This was the sawmill apartment, on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the “Carpenter’s Loft” as some of our friends soon took to calling it. The noise and dust from the lumberyard below were too much to take at times, but it was much better situated than our rooms above the dance hall. It was very near Gertrude and Alice’s apartment and the Luxembourg Gardens, and was also a stone’s throw from the Boulevard Montparnasse and many of the best cafés.

Although Ernest had once felt disgust for writers working in cafés, saying they were phonies only wanting to be conspicuous, he began to frequent them himself now. Part of it was practical. He needed peace and quiet and Bumby, who had begun to teethe, was often fussy. But once he started to work at the Closerie des Lilas routinely, he was surprised to find he preferred it to working alone in his room, sweating it out in silence, as he used to say. It was warmer and more pleasant, too. Friends could find him if they wanted, and there was always someone exciting to talk to or drink with when the writing day was done.

Sometimes he talked about starting another novel, but hadn’t yet hit on the right idea. More and more he understood that the draft lost in the valise with the other manuscripts wasn’t the right novel either, no matter how much he’d slaved over it and wanted it to be. Still, he was skittish about committing to anything so large and time-consuming again. He would wait, and in the meantime he would write stories. “One story,” he said, “for everything I know. Really know, in my bones and in my gut.”

When he said this I wondered what it was
I
really knew in the way he meant, and could only answer with Ernest and Bumby, our life together. It was a shamefully outdated idea, I knew, and if I’d confessed it to any woman in any café in Montparnasse, I would have been laughed out onto the street. I was supposed to have my own ideas and ambitions and be incredibly hungry for experience and newness of every variety. But I wasn’t hungry; I was content.

It wasn’t just purpose that had come along to fill me. My days were richer and made more sense. Bumby was a beauty, and when we walked every day, twice a day, we were often stopped and chatted up by his admirers. My French was as halting as ever, but a happy baby is the perfect impetus for even primarily one-sided conversations. His cooing garnered us many a gift apple or pear at the market, and even when I brought him to the cafés to meet Ernest for an occasional meal, Bumby won everyone over. Some of our friends might have been at a loss, but strangers were invariably charmed.

The Pounds were off to Rapallo as usual that spring, but even from that distance, Ezra managed to get Ernest a job with Ford Madox Ford, as a deputy editor for the
Transatlantic Review
. Ford had a dark and cramped office on the Quai d’Anjou, and it was there Ernest headed in early February in his worn shoes and shabby jacket, with a chip on his shoulder. There was no money to be had, but he wanted the editing experience and the connections. He couldn’t let Ford know that, though, because he couldn’t stand not to have the upper hand, most particularly when the upper hand would have been impossible to get. Ford’s novel
The Good Soldier
had received some very nice attention. He’d written other novels as well and had published Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad, and others in a magazine he’d founded earlier, called the
English Review
. All of this was bad enough, but Ford was also a gentleman with money and a pedigree, a combination Ernest never had any patience for. He came home from the meeting muttering about how Ford’s tastes were slanted so far backward the man was about to fall over on his ass.

“So he’s not modern. Why should everyone be? I’m not.”

“No, you’re not modern, little cat. But you’re very beautiful and good, and a bang-up mother besides. This fellow Ford is too full of his own good opinion, and he wheezes when he talks. It’s so bad you’d think every last word has to swim through his lungs to reach his mouth.”

“Good gracious, Tiny. Please tell me you took the job anyhow.”

“Of course I did.” He smiled broadly and wickedly, reaching over to tweak one of Bumby’s feet. “Do you think I’m crazy?”

When I met Ford I was inclined to like him, even after all Ernest had said. He and his lover, the painter Stella Bowen, had us over to lunch, and I was delighted to find they had a baby, too, a darling little girl named Julie, about the same age as Bumby. I hadn’t brought Bumby out of politeness for our hosts, but I told Stella I would the next time. She was warm in her encouragement about this, and about everything—feeding us a beautiful four-course lunch and engaging me graciously with her charming Australian accent. Ford was ruddy and plump, with wispy blond hair and a mustache. I did wonder at first how Ford, well into middle age, was able to woo such a lovely woman as Stella, but he soon revealed perfect manners and spoke with an appealing conviction for everything he cared about, including Stella, good wine, creamy soup, and literature. All through lunch, he emphasized how important it was for him to help young writers like Ernest find their way. I knew Ernest would rather not need Ford’s or anyone’s help, but the truth was, he did.

“I can bring a lot to this magazine,” Ernest said when we’d said our good-byes and were headed home. “He should be grateful to have me.”

“I liked him.”

“Of course you did.”

“What does that mean?”

“Nothing.” He came upon a loose stone and kicked it into the street. “Don’t you think he looks like a walrus?”

“A little,” I admitted.

“And the wheezing?”

“That’s fairly serious, isn’t it? Stella said he got it in a gas attack in the war.”

“I could forgive him that, then, if he wasn’t so superior.”

“You don’t have to love him. Just do the work.”

“There’s plenty of work to do. That’s lucky, I suppose.”

“So much
is
lucky, Tatie. You’ll see.”

Ford and Stella took to having literary teas on Thursdays at the Quai d’Anjou. I often went for the company and took Bumby, too, parking his pram in whatever sun was coming in through the windows. It was at one of these teas I first met Harold Loeb. Harold seemed to be about Ernest’s age and was very good-looking—tall, with a sharp, straight nose and strong chin and towering waves of dark hair. As soon as Ford introduced us, we began talking easily about the States.

“I don’t miss home exactly,” he said. “But I can’t seem to stop dreaming about it. I wonder why that is.”

“It’s part of you, I guess,” I said. “It’s locked in, isn’t it?”

“That’s nicely put,” he said, and peered down at me with clear and intense blue eyes. “Are you a writer, too, then?”

“Not hardly.” I laughed. “Though I don’t think I’d be half bad at it. I’ve always loved books and felt they spoke to me. I’ve played piano since I was a girl, but not seriously.”

“I’m not sure I write
seriously,
” Harold said. “I try very hard to be funny, actually.”

“I should think you’d be very funny if you put your mind to it.”

“That’s swell of you to say. Here, come tell Kitty. She thinks all my jokes are a bust.”

We crossed the room together to meet his girlfriend, Kitty Cannell, who was truly beautiful, slim and graceful and golden all over.

“Kitty used to be a professional dancer,” he said. “If she moves to get more wine, you’ll see it instantly.”

“Oh, Harold,” she said. “Please don’t try to be charming.”