The Paris Wife (22 page)

Ernest came home from Kingston looking tired and irritable, and then left again, just days later, to do a mining story in Sudbury Basin, easily twice as far from Toronto as Kingston. He barely had time to visit and approve of the apartment.

“Oh, Cat. I feel terrible I won’t be here to help you get settled.”

“There’s not much to do. I’ll hire someone to do the lifting.”

“I can’t help but think we were foolish to come here. You’re alone all the time. I’m working like a slave for what? Spotty bits of news in nowhere locations? What a bust.”

“I know you’re overworked, Tiny. But everything will make sense once the baby comes.”

“I hope to Christ you’re right.”

“I am. You’ll see,” I said. And kissed him good-bye.

I was doing far too much of that for my comfort, it was true, but I did believe coming to very cold and lonely Toronto would be worth it once our baby was born healthy and well. In the meantime, I tried to make the new space as homey as I could. We’d brought crates from Paris with our clothes and dishes and pictures packed inside. I hired a cleaning woman and an ancient-looking janitor to cart our things up the four flights. We didn’t have much in the way of furniture, and for the first weeks, as Ernest crisscrossed Ontario like some kind of traveling salesman, I camped out on the Murphy bed, wrapped in blankets against the dropping temperatures and finishing the letters of Abélard and Héloïse.

I was keen for any distraction, and it was easy to lose myself in their words and their story. Some days I only got up to make tea or stuff blankets under the doors and windowsills where the chill crept in. I also wrote letters to Paris, to the friends we were missing there, and home to the States. Fonnie had been trying to muster happiness for me about the coming baby, but she was close to the breaking point on many fronts. Roland had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and was recuperating in a mental hospital in Massachusetts.
It’s a highly regarded facility
, Fonnie said in a letter,
as those places go. But the children are confused and ask if he’ll ever come home again. I don’t know what to tell them
. I felt very sorry for them all, but not surprised that such a thing could happen. There had always been too much unrest between them, as with my own parents. And when tensions are that high for so long, something
has
to snap. How can it not?

I also wrote to Ernest’s parents. He was too busy to answer his own letters, but his stinginess with his parents was more complicated than that. He’d never wanted them overly involved in his life, particularly Grace. When he left for Paris, I think he felt he had freedom for the first time to completely reinvent himself. His parents reminded him of his beginnings, which he would rather have thrown off altogether. I understood his need for independence, but here we were a few weeks away from the baby’s arrival, and Ernest hadn’t said a thing to them. I felt they had a right to know, and I continued to tell him so when he came home ever so briefly between assignments.

“I’ll do it if you insist,” he finally agreed. “But it’s a mistake. They’ll just come sniffing around they way wolves always do.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“The hell I don’t. Can you imagine my mother
not
forcing her way into everything with this baby, pummeling us with her opinions and advice? We don’t need her. We don’t need anyone.”

“She and Ed would love any small opportunity to help.”

“So let them, but I’m not asking for a hot dime.”

“Fair enough,” I said, but was grateful when they responded to Ernest’s cable quickly and extravagantly, sending trunks full of wedding gifts we’d been storing with them and furniture, too, from our long-ago apartment on Dearborn Street. None of it was especially nice, but having our own things around us made our lot on Bathurst Street seem less provisional. And it all arrived just in time.

Hindmarsh sent Ernest off again, the first week in October, this time to cover the arrival of British prime minister David Lloyd George in New York City.

“It’s like a personal vendetta,” I said as I watched him pack for his trip.

“I can take it, I guess,” Ernest said. “But what about you?”

“The doctor said we have until the end of the month, maybe until the first of November. You’ll be here.”

“This is the last trip,” he said, snapping shut the new valise. “I’m going to ask John Bone to talk some sense into Hindmarsh.”

“If it comes directly from Bone, he’ll have to lay off, won’t he?”

“That’s the idea. Take good care of the baby cat.”

“I promise.”

“And the mama cat, too.”

“Yes, Tiny, but you’d better hurry. They won’t hold your train.”

Several days later, on October 9, Harriet Connable called on me with a dinner invitation.

“I’d love to,” I said. “But I’m so very large now nothing fits me. I’ll have to wear table linens.”

“I’m sure you’ll carry them off beautifully, dear,” she said with a gracious laugh. “We’ll send a car around for you at eight.”

In the end I was very glad she insisted. All afternoon I’d been feeling something I was calling indigestion. Of course it was more than that. My body was readying itself, but I tried to ignore it. I thought if I just stayed calm and didn’t overexert myself, the baby would hold off until Ernest returned home. I spooned up my delicious soup as quietly as a mouse and then sat on the Connables’ rich velvet sofa listening to Harriet play a lively rendition of “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” without so much as tapping my foot. But of course the baby was coming whether I was prepared or not, and this became more and more obvious as the evening passed.

“Hadley, dear, I don’t think you’re feeling well,” Ralph Connable said when he could no longer politely disregard the strained and serious expression on my face.

“I’m perfectly all right,” I said, stubborn to the last, but then I began to cry as soon as I’d said it, my emotions bursting right through my carefully made dam. The pain was too much now. I bent over with it and began to shake.

“Oh, you poor girl,” Harriet said. “Don’t worry about anything. We’ll make sure you’re very well cared for.”

They drove me to the hospital, Harriet patting my hand and making soothing noises while Ralph sped along with determination. The streets glowed faintly under gaslight.

“Can you try and reach someone at the
Star
? There must be a way to let Ernest know.”

“We’ll move mountains if we have to,” Harriet assured me. “There’s still a little time, I think.”

But there wasn’t. Half an hour later, I was gowned and draped on the surgical table, coached by the doctor and several nurses to begin pushing. This was why we’d come to Toronto—to have these very capable and trained professionals oversee everything. In Paris I would have had a midwife who boiled water on my own cooktop to sterilize her instruments. Even in the States, doctors were just beginning to perform hospital deliveries. Ernest’s father still woke in the middle of the night to answer calls when he was up in Michigan, and though I knew women had been having babies at home forever—my mother, certainly, and Ernest’s, too—I felt so much safer this way. Particularly when my pushing did nothing at all.

I strained for two hours, until my neck ached and my knees shook with the effort. Finally they gave me ether. I breathed in the fresh-paint smell of it as the mask was drawn over my mouth and nose, the sharpness stinging my eyes. After that, I felt nothing until I woke from my fog and saw the nurse holding out a tightly wrapped bundle. This was my son, swaddled in layers of blue wool. I gazed at him through happy tears. He was perfect, from the pink whorls of his well-made ears and his squeezed-shut eyes, to the dark brown hair with a fuzz of sideburns. I was devastated that Ernest had missed the birth, but here, safe and sound and utterly marvelous, was his son. That was all that mattered.

When Ernest finally did arrive early the next morning, panting and completely beside himself, I was sitting up in bed, nursing the baby.

“Oh, my God,” Ernest said, breaking down. He stood just inside the door and sobbed openly, covering his face with his hands. “I’ve been dead worried for you, Tiny. I got a cable in the press car saying the baby had come and was well, but not a single word about you.”

“Dear sweet Tiny. You can see I’m fine. Everything went smoothly, and come look at this fellow. Isn’t he wonderful?”

Ernest crossed to me, sitting gently on the edge of the mattress. “He seems awfully small. Aren’t you afraid of doing something wrong?” He put a single finger on the baby’s small veined hand.

“I was afraid at first, but he’s very solid, actually. I think the bullfights had an effect on him after all. He came barreling out like a good torero.”

“John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway. He’s perfectly beautiful. And aren’t you something for making it through so well?”

“I feel surprisingly sturdy, but you, Tiny. You look terrible. Didn’t you sleep on the train?”

“I tried, but I had the most terrible feeling you were in danger.”

“I was in excellent hands. The Connables were so thoughtful and helpful. We owe them so much.”

“Maybe we were right to come to Toronto after all,” Ernest said.

“Of course we were. I told you it would all make perfect sense.”

“I’m so tired I might fall over.”

“Sleep then.” I pointed to a chair in the corner of the room.

“Hindmarsh will be wondering where I am.”

“Let him wonder. You’re a new father.”

“Can you believe it?”

I smiled to myself and said nothing as he curled up under a blanket and fell soundly asleep.
Two men, now
, I thought with deep satisfaction.
And both of them mine
.

Later that morning, Ernest sent out a rash of telegrams saying how well things had gone. He was immoderately proud of the speed with which I delivered the baby, and I was pleased with myself. I had help from the doctors and the ether, true enough, but also braved the whole ordeal like a champion stoic, with Ernest hundreds of miles away.

He left for work, prepared for a dressing down from Hindmarsh, but it was worse than he expected. Hindmarsh didn’t wait for Ernest in his office, but humiliated him in front of everyone, saying he should have filed his story before going to the hospital. That was ridiculous, of course, but when Ernest relayed the story to me that evening, after rehashing the whole thing with Greg Clark in a pub over many glasses of bourbon, he was still stung and angry.

“Toronto’s dead. We can’t stay here.” The drink hadn’t calmed him much, and I was worried the charge nurse would come in and evict him before I’d heard the whole story.

“Is everything really beyond repair?”

“Well beyond. We were both furious. He held nothing back, the lout, and I said things they’ll probably be talking about for years to come.”

“Oh dear, Tiny. Did he fire you?”

“He transferred me to the
Weekly
. Not that I’ll take it. When do you think you can travel again?”

“I’ll be fine in a few days, but the baby can’t sail for months. We’ll have to tough it out.”

“I could kill the bastard. That might solve it.”

“Not for long.”

He grimaced and sat down hard, scraping the chair loudly against the floor. “Where’s the little corker anyway? I want to take another look at him.”

“He’s in the nursery sleeping. You should be asleep, too. Go home, Tiny. We’ll face this in the morning.”

“What’s to face? It’s dead, I told you.”

“Don’t think about it. Just go, and take some bicarbonate, too. You’re going to wake up with a hell of a headache.”

We didn’t immediately bolt for Paris—but only because we couldn’t. The baby really was too young for the passage, and we’d also depleted our savings with the move. We were close to broke, with a pile of hospital bills besides. There was nothing to do but dig in and take it—“like a bitch dog,” as Ernest was fond of saying. He took the transfer, and though he wasn’t working directly under Hindmarsh any longer, he still felt the man’s shadow. Every time he got a lousy assignment, he wondered if Hindmarsh was in on it—like the time he was sent to the Toronto Zoo to welcome the arrival of a white peacock.

“A peacock, Tiny. They’re trying to kill me. Death by indignity, the nastiest kind of all.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But they can’t. You’re too strong for that.”

“I’m not so sure.”

Winter arrived in Toronto with snow that blew sideways and threatened to knock us over. If Paris winters were damp and gray, this was fiercely white and unremitting. The wind easily pierced our coats and blankets and found its way into every corner of our apartment, where the baby and I stayed camped against the radiator. I boiled water to keep the air moist and took to wearing Ernest’s big overcoat when I nursed. I didn’t take the baby out at all and hired a maid to mind him when I had to do the shopping. Ernest limped home in the evening, after dark had fallen, and looked more exhausted and run down all the time. He was good about exclaiming over the baby’s new accomplishments as I reported them—he’d smiled at me in the bath; he was lifting his head like a champ—but it was hard for Ernest to take any pleasure just then.

“I can’t see how I’ll make it a year this way,” he said.

“It seems impossible, I know. But when we’re old and doddering, this year will seem like a blink.”

“It’s not even the embarrassment of slogging away at stories well beneath me. That’s nothing. But not working on my own stuff at all, when that’s all I’ve ever wanted. I feel the material going bad in me. If I don’t write it soon I’m going to lose it for good.”

“Stay up and write now. I’ll make some strong coffee for you.”

“I can’t. I’m too tired to think. It does come in the morning sometimes, but as soon as I try to get anything down, the baby will cry or I’ll have to get to work. At the end of the day, there aren’t words left. We’re so far away from everything here, too. I don’t know who’s writing what, or what matters.”

“Yes, but you’ve made some good friends. You like Greg Clark. That’s lucky.”

“I do like Greg, but he doesn’t box and he doesn’t know anything about horse racing. I’ve also never seen him drunk.”