Hemingway's Girl (10 page)

“Okay. Let’s go,” she said.

They stepped out onto Greene Street and enjoyed the change from the stuffy, noisy
bar to the fresh air and the night. He led her to Duval to look into the bars and
listen to music. The people were getting sloppy, and Gavin put his hand on Mariella’s
back in a protective gesture. She looked at him with her eyebrows raised.

“Sorry,” he said. “Can’t help it. I know how these vets get.”

“Last week one of them took off his clothes in my neighbors’ yard and had to be taken
to jail.”

“That was me.”

Mariella punched him in the arm, and he laughed.

Before long, they’d ended up on her street. She could see her house and saw Lulu’s
doctor pulling open the screen door.

“Oh, no!”

Mariella took off running, a thousand guilty thoughts going through her head, followed
by prayers to the Blessed Virgin, to her father, to Saint Theresa—everyone but God
himself, since she was too ashamed for running around to apply to him directly. She
was home in minutes, with Gavin at her heels. When she got to the house, she pressed
him to go.

“I don’t know how my mother will take you,” she said. “Go, please.” She ran through
the door without waiting for a response.

Estelle wrung her hands in the corner. Mariella heard water filling the tub in the
bathroom where Eva stood at the open door—her hair and eyes wild, and her hands fumbling
over the beads of her rosary. She looked Mariella up and down, and then looked over
Mariella’s shoulder as if she expected to see Hemingway.

The doctor came out of Lulu’s room.

“What’s her temperature?” asked Mariella.

“One-oh-three,” said the doctor. “I just gave her aspirin.”

“And her stomach?”

“Horrible,” said Eva.

Dr. Wilson smelled like booze, wore a wrinkled shirt, and looked as if he’d just been
woken up. Mariella thought he must hate living around the corner from them. She ran
to her room, pulled three dollars out of the can, and hurried back out to the doctor,
thrusting the money into his hands. He took it, but he looked ashamed. He started
to pass it back to Mariella, but she stopped him.

“No, you do so much for us,” she said.

He mumbled a thank-you, stuffed the bills in his pocket, and stepped around Mariella
to carry Lulu to the bathroom. The child thrashed her body and wailed in shock as
he lowered her into the ice-cold water.

“Shh, shh. I know,” said Dr. Wilson.

After a moment, she seemed stunned by the cold and stopped moving. He lifted Lulu,
wrapped her in a towel, and walked her to the bed. While Eva came in to dress the
child, Mariella slipped over to hug Estelle, who was growing increasingly frantic.
She led her into her mother’s room, where she sat Estelle on the bed and wiped her
tears.

“She’s going to be okay.”

Estelle looked down at her hands, which continued to crawl over each other. Mariella
placed her hands over the girl’s and touched her forehead to her sister’s.

“I know,” said Mariella. But she didn’t know. She didn’t know whether Lulu would be
all right. She didn’t know whether her mother could take much more strain. She didn’t
know whether Estelle was going to come through this time without lasting scars. Her
middle sister had grown so withdrawn. The week before,
Mariella had seen Estelle playing with dolls that she hadn’t touched for years.

After Estelle calmed, Mariella led her back to the room where Lulu slept. Dr. Wilson
talked softly to her mother in the kitchen, while she helped Estelle back to bed and
crawled in next to her.

Mariella’s guilt returned. If she hadn’t gone out, she could have helped earlier.
Maybe Lulu’s fever wouldn’t have gotten so high. Maybe she could have summoned the
doctor sooner, or could have talked Estelle through her attack of anxiety. It was
another case of her not being there to help her family.

Gavin circled the block and came back to stand in front of Mariella’s house. A doctor
stepped off the porch and brushed by him.

“Keep moving, soldier,” he said. Gavin ignored him and looked in the window. No one
was in the front of the house, but he didn’t want them to find him and think he was
a peeping Tom, so he lit a cigarette and continued on his way.

He wondered how old Mariella was. She couldn’t be older than twenty, but then again,
he looked young for thirty-three. He thought she was beautiful and spirited. He also
had to admit to himself that he was intrigued that she might be Hemingway’s girl.

Suddenly he tripped on a hole in the sidewalk and ran into someone.

“Sorry,” said Gavin.

“Been drinking, sailor?” A thin old man with small glasses and a heavy German accent
stood before him. He carried a bouquet of flowers in one hand and a paper bag in the
other. He smelled of formaldehyde, and something else that Gavin couldn’t identify,
but which caused him to recoil.

“No, sir, just clumsy.”

“Your mind on a girl, no doubt.”

Gavin smiled and rubbed the back of his neck. The man extended his hand.

“Count Von Cosel.”

The name rang a bell, but Gavin wasn’t sure why. Gavin shook his hand. He looked at
the flowers and the bag. “For your lady?”

Cosel grew dead serious. “Yes. Everything for my love.” He stared at Gavin until Gavin
felt uncomfortable and excused himself. He walked down the street for a bit and then
turned back to watch the count move away into the shadows.

Mariella stood on a stepladder in the front parlor, polishing Pauline’s chandelier.
She rubbed the soft cloth over each crystal until it sparkled. It hung over the room
like a fat, useless diamond.

Pauline had gone out for some lunch and shopping with Chuck Thompson’s wife, Lorine,
and Ada had taken the boys somewhere. Mariella enjoyed the stillness, but it didn’t
last. She soon heard Papa’s footsteps on the stairs and on the floor behind her.

“What time do you get off?” he asked.

“Five.” She feigned disinterest, but she had to use her will to keep her body from
turning toward him. She knew these feelings for him were wrong and wanted to do everything
she could to suppress them.

“It’s only three o’clock! What am I supposed to do until then?”

“Don’t you have some fish to catch, or a book to write or something?”

“I wrote for four hours this morning and I had to stop. It was getting really good.”

“You stopped when it was getting really good?” she asked.

“I always stop when it gets good. Then I can pick right up the next day. If I stop
during a lull, there are no guarantees.”

Mariella raised her eyebrows.

“Wouldn’t that be like leaving a fish on the line before you pulled it all the way
in?” she asked.

“No, it’s like leaving a woman in bed before she’s—”

A dish slammed the sink in the kitchen. Isabelle must have heard him. Mariella turned
red.

“She’ll want more, right?” he said.

Mariella couldn’t look at him. She kept polishing the chandelier.

“Sorry—that was out of line,” he said.

Isabelle snorted from the other room.

“Come on, daughter. Get down off that ladder. Let’s go get some lemonade and watch
people. I’m the boss. You’re done for today.”

Mariella looked at him. He leaned his arm on the ladder and looked up at her pleadingly.
She badly wanted to join him, but she knew Isabelle was listening and didn’t want
to sound too eager.

“I need to get this done today, because I have to do the rug tomorrow, and I like
to work from the top down. You go on. I’ll catch up later.”

“No. I’ll wait here until you’re done. You only have a bit more to do anyway.”

He smiled at her and walked over to the couch, where the paper that he’d been reading
earlier lay folded over the arm. He picked it up, shook it out, and watched her over
the top of it.

Mariella concentrated on the chandelier so she wouldn’t be tempted to look at him.
She knew she’d blush from head to toe if she met his gaze. She was almost finished
and she’d already done so much. Knocking off early wouldn’t be such a sin. And he
was the boss.

“Who in the hell replaces fans with chandeliers in a house in the damned tropics,”
he said.

He had stolen the thought from Mariella’s head.

“I’m not here to judge, just to clean,” she said.

He made a grunting noise and shuffled the paper.

After she finished, she stepped down the ladder. He was immediately at her side and
had the ladder folded up, hanging from
his hand like it weighed nothing, and out the French doors before she could blink.
He was back in a flash.

“Let’s go.”

The fragrance of a great magnolia drifted past on the afternoon air. The streets were
noisy with children who had just gotten out of school and fishermen who just finished
at the dock. Hemingway walked her to the café, got a table, and ordered two lemonades
and two slices of key lime pie. A cat walked up to the table and rubbed against Ernest’s
leg while they waited. He reached down and rubbed the back of its neck.

“She’s like you,” he said.
“Mi pequeña gata.”

Mariella looked down at the soft black cat.

“Your little cat?
You
are the cat. A lion.”

He laughed. “I’ve been told that before.”

The drinks and food came quickly, and Mariella tried not to shove the whole pie in
her mouth in one bite so she could save some for her sisters. It was delicious and
tangy, and the sour lemonade was the perfect complement to it.

They watched the people walk by for a little while and then he asked her if she would
mind if he jotted down some character ideas in his notebook. She said she didn’t and
continued working on her pie. After a few minutes, a tall, thin man with thick glasses
stopped on the street in front of their table.

“Hemingway? Ernest Hemingway?”

The lion looked up without a hint of friendliness or welcome.

“Jesus H. Christ, it is you?” asked the man. “How the hell are ya?”

Hemingway didn’t say anything. Mariella watched.