That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald
by Morley Callaghan
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
MY two friends when I saw them separately, seemed to be wonderfully untroubled about each other. Ernest would have had me believe he hadn’t given a second thought to his words to Scott in the American Club. Nothing worth mentioning again had happened. When I saw Scott, he was superb too—he didn’t even ask for Ernest. And I joined in the general pretending. I became a man who “knew how to behave” as Ernest would say. I managed to give the impression of being completely unaware of any deep disappointments and hidden resentments. How could bitterness flare up if they weren’t seeing each other? I asked myself. For now that July had come they were both to go away, Ernest south, probably to Spain, and Scott would soon be off to the Riviera, What could be better than to have everybody go away for awhile? Everybody off to the seashore ! I was glad they were going. While they were away I could relax a little myself and pretend that we would all be the best of friends when they returned. I knew I ought to have stopped pretending. But pretending is contagious. It makes life more agreeable.
I should have said, “Ernest, I think you’ve got Scott all wrong,” But Ernest was a strange ingrown man who could make you feel his resentments were born of some deep primitive wisdom. Besides, I didn’t want to keep reminding him I had had a hand in his embarrassment. If I kept prodding him about Scott, if dared to suggest he might owe Scott an apology, I was afraid his vivid imagination would start working on me, and he wouldn’t want to see me either. Let the whole thing blow over, I thought.
July was a hot month. In the strong afternoon sunlight the Dome, the Coupole and the Select, the whole comer, had a bright hard look. But too many summer soldiers had come to town. Visitors dropping off buses around for an evening, then disappeared. At night now Loretto and I would wander off with someone to other neighbourhoods. There were the bals musettes down by the Bastille, the Pigalle bars, and the Hotel du Caveau on the rue de la Huchette; then back to our roosting place to find amusement in the antics of strangers. In the hot weather we had a nightly supply of comics. An Englishman and his wife would be giving a remarkable performance, discussing Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Talking quite rationally at first, the lady would suddenly say, “But these forget-me-nots. Why, that woman put a wreath of forget-me-nots on that man’s… well, an unmentionable part of his body.” And her husband, his face suddenly bursting red with outrage, “It’s incredible,” and turning on us, his voice quivering, “Are you prepared to say those forget-me-nots on the man’s privates isn’t rubbish?” As a man and wife they suddenly had a perfect union in their sense of outrage. And we knew they themselves didn’t go monkeying around with forget-me-nots.
Other faces, other voices had become familiar. The voices of the two young Jews who had become Catholics would drift over to us, one saying softly to the other, “Notre Baudelaire,” the other nodding in his enchantment; or from the two boys having their week in town, two who loved Jane Austen, would come the adoring words, “Dear Jane…”
But all that month I didn’t hear any arguments about economics or politics. No one stood up and shouted about the necessity of a social conscience. I remember that Hemingway had talked about Mussolini, and the Social Democrats in Germany, but he would talk as a shrewd observer; a man who had the political facts right out of the horse’s mouth; he would be letting you in on what was going on. Yet there was no distinction in being against Fascism—everyone was. The Left—the Marxist? To me at that time it would have seemed incredible that writers within a few years would go running to commissars seeking direction. If I talked about Dos Passos, it was because I was interested in what he was trying to do with his material—society; he was against the social fraud, the bourgeois values. But who wasn’t? At the cafes the writers and hangers-on—my God, now they seem to have been nearly all hangers-on—were more interested in the revolution of the word than the world. Yet within a few months the stock market in New York was to crash, the depression was to begin, and the clients of those cafes who got money, no matter how little, from home, were to vanish one by one.
In those hot days when everyone else was going away, moving on, we had to make a move too. One morning after waking up, my wife showed me a little blood mark on her leg. What was it? It worried us. Next morning she had fresh little pinpricks of blood on her ankles. Alarmed, we wondered if she was suffering from some strange malady. Next night, in the very middle of the night, she suddenly threw off the covers and turned on the lights. A bedbug ! We had never seen one. In the morning we summoned our Russian landlady and showed her the dead bug in the newspaper. “Ah, punaise!” she cried. Writhing with mortification, she explained that the grocery store below us had been fumigated. No doubt the bedbugs were driven up to her establishment. When we told her we would have to leave her, she understood. Her proud aristocratic Russian blood seemed to help her to understand. Her shame, mixed up with rage against the grocer, made us want to root for her. But nevertheless we moved to a little hotel on Raspail, and it was during that week that Scott told me that he and Zelda were going south to Nice.
The morning I met him at the Deux Magots, I remember that we talked quietly about our plans and about his hope of getting time enough to finish the novel. It still wasn’t going right for him. Now I remember that the conversation stuck in my. mind, and when Tender Is The Night finally came out, I felt Scott never did get Dick Diver, his central character, in focus.
There at the cafe he didn’t ask for Hemingway. Maybe Ernest was in our minds, for Scott that morning seemed to have a stiff dignity. He had been treated without respect in my presence, and he had taken it; a little thing like that could make him want to avoid me, I knew. We assumed that I would be in Paris when he returned. As we walked away from the cafe, talking easily, I suddenly felt great affection for him. He hoped I would quickly finish the book I was working on. I remember he said, “Try and get something from a child’s point of view as a contrast. It opens up another world. It lightens all the material.” Then it was time for us to part. Suddenly he pulled his wallet out of his pocket, took out the bills, thrust the wallet at me. “Here, Morley, keep this wallet. I’d like you to have something of mine.” And I said, “All right. Write your name in it then.” Neither one of us had a pen. He put the wallet against a lamppost, and taking out his knife he scratched his name on the leather. We shook hands and he was gone.
Hemingway, too, had left town. So had McAlmon. In August all the people one knew had gone to a watering place or into the mountains or south to a seashore. Titus too had gone to Nice with Helena Rubenstein. Before he left he asked us to move to his handsome apartment just around the corner from the Dome. He was a book collector. He had one of the finest book collections in Europe. While he was away he liked to console himself with the thought that he had someone in his quarters who was reading the books, not stealing them. Late at night I would sit up reading the later novels of Henry James. That style of his in those later books! I began to hate it. Not layers of extra subtleness—just evasion from the task of knowing exactly what to say. Always the fancied fastidiousness of sensibility. Bright and sharp as he had been in the earlier books, the fact was that James had got vulgar—like a woman who was always calling attention to her fastidiousness.
When Titus returned, Loretto and I began to believe that we were the last of the immovable figures around the Quarter. One night our friend Whidney, from the Chicago suburb, talked about the Basque country. Suddenly we wanted to go there. We went with Whidney. We stayed in Bayonne, where we became honorary members of the Bayonne Tennis Club. In the mornings we would play tennis and in the evenings go to the Casino in Biarritz, and I remember that one night on the way home we wandered into an elegant house without noticing it had a red light over the door. A woman, surely the world’s most tolerant and cultivated madame, explained that my wife could not enter the room where her girls were, but if we would like it, two of her girls would come into our room and make a tableau for us. We had a drink and some sympathetic conversation with the madame, then my wife led the way out.
One week-end we crossed the border to San Sebastian and saw the bullfights. And then—well what could we see now that we hadn’t seen before, what could we do we hadn’t done before? That was the quest. There was Lourdes in the mountains. Lourdes and the miracles! So we took the train through the Pyrenees to Lourdes on the day of the Belgian National Pilgrimage to the shrine. The great mountain valleys were filled with mists and shadows, and mists lay on the peaks of the mountains. It was the kind of heavy lonely landscape that made me want to believe in angels as well as earthly creatures. It looked like a place of mysterious grandeur where men could trust their own visions. Peer Gynt could have—come here, I thought, seeking something new that might finally satisfy him. And had I, too, just begun my own wandering from home?
Now I think that all of us in Montparnasse, McAlmon, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Titus and even that Pernod poet were Peer Gynts who knew in our hearts we would soon have to go home. No, not Ernest. Could he ever really go home? Or for him, committed as he was to the romantic enlargement of himself, did there have to be one adventure after another, until finally there was no home? And what could be left for Scott when the glamorous wandering was over? When “a primrose by a river’s brim, a yellow primrose was to him, and it was nothing more.” My old theme. Nothing more; the wonder of the thing in itself. Right for me. But not for Scott.
I turned out to be a bad pilgrim, or perhaps I was still a dissatisfied Peer Gynt. I seemed to be able to notice nothing but vendors selling cakes and religious medals. And I muttered so often that I might as well be at a fair ground, I’m sure I spoiled things for Loretto. In the grotto we saw all the weathered crutches. We were in the great square when it was time for the sick and the crippled to be wheeled there to wait for the terrible moment when the priest would hold aloft the Blessed Sacrament. The square, set down in the mountains, was jammed with the faithful and the sick in chairs, who gazed raptly at the Blessed Sacrament which was being carried by the priest in a slow procession. As he moved past those in wheel chairs in the front row, the sunlight glinted on the golden chalice containing the Host. The sun’s rays coming over the mountain peaks flooded the whole square in the valley. Finally the little procession turned back to. the altar. Then there was utter silence. I had never before felt such a general tension within a silence. It was the moment of desperate prayer for the sick who were there waiting, the wild leap of faith.
Then I heard a cry, a moan. A cripple rose slowly out of a wheel chair, rapt, his face shining, and went staggering forward. He fell flat on his face. He sobbed. It was a terrible sound. In a chair beside me was a beautiful fair American girl who was trying to lift herself from her chair. Finally her head fell back, her eyes closed, and she wept but made no sound as the tears ran down her cheeks. All around us now was excited chatter broken with wild cries: “Un miracle, un miracle.” Wheeling, turning, groping, shoving, they were all trying to get close to a miracle. Groups formed around those who claimed to have been touched by healing light. And groups were around the comics, too, who basked in attention. A middle-aged woman who kept tapping her shoulder explained that the arm had been hopelessly crippled. She held it out proudly. But the wise Frenchmen around her were smirking behind her back. They understood that she had grabbed the centre of the stage.
The whole crowd had been broken into these little groups, and in each group was someone insisting his prayers had been answered. Those in the chairs were being wheeled back to the hospital where doctors would examine them. As I watched their faces I thought of the fair American girl and how the tears streamed down her face. My little prayer that afternoon was that her tears might have been from hope and not despair, and that in her hospital bed that night she would still have hope, still have faith that she would be cured, still be dreaming of going home. As we wandered away from the square, darkness came quickly from the mountains. Soon the night and the hills were all one and we were on our way back to Bayonne. Two days later we were back in Montparnasse.
Having finished my novel and with the September days passing slowly, I noticed we were always looking around restlessly for something new to do. I missed the excitement, the pleasure and surprise I had got out of the company of Ernest and Scott. I would have been glad to see McAlmon coming along the street ready to create a difficult situation, or bringing some news of Joyce.
In the tennis games at Bayonne, Whidney, who had taken lessons from a good pro, had always beaten me, but he had hated himself for finding it so difficult. My form was bad and he had contempt for the way I could get the ball back over the net, and even greater contempt for himself for not being able to blast me off the court. He maintained I was so bad I was good. One night at the cafe I looked at Michael Arlen and knew beyond all doubt he would have taken tennis lessons from the best of pros. How was his tennis form? I asked. It was great, he assured me. Whereupon I bet Whidney money Arlen could beat him in a match. We were all to meet at the Coupole next day and go off to the tennis court.
Next morning my wife, having looked at my flannels, said they were soiled. We agreed that Arlen, who was so dapper himself, and from whom we expected great style in tennis, would be insulted if his partner did not show up in immaculate flannels. I took them down to a corner laundry. The laundress promised to have them cleaned and ironed in two hours. At the hour when I was supposed to be meeting Arlen, I was sitting in the laundry watching the laundress trying to iron my pants dry. Arlen and Whidney were kept waiting an hour and a half. After my silly apologies we all went to the tanbark court. Arlen did put on a very stylish performance against Whidney. But of course, Whidney beat him easily. With superb aplomb Arlen stood before me, his backer and sponsor, and as if he were holding a club he flicked his wrists. “I have been playing too much golf,” he explained. “It is a different motion of the wrists,” and he walked away grandly.
With the nights getting a little cooler I would notice, sitting at the cafe, that I seemed to be waiting for something. Gradually I began to figure out what was troubling me. We seemed to have come to a resting place in Montparnasse. Talking to Ernest I had said, “The Americans around here can’t be Frenchmen, no matter how well they speak the language. If we are going to stay here it means really we have to become Frenchmen.” And he had said, shrugging, “Who would want to stay?” Looking at him, I had gathered he had no intention of settling down in France. But then where would he go next? It had been my absolute conviction that he would never return to America and write about his own people in their cities and towns as he had done once in his little Michigan stories.
At the Select one night with Loretto, I remembered this conversation. I told her that if I were to stay on in France I should now be soaking up French culture. I should want to be with French writers. If I didn’t want the French culture, then I was there in exile. Could the dream I had had for years of being in Paris been only a necessary fantasy? A place to fly to, a place that could give me some satisfactory view of myself? And she asked if Scott and Ernest too were in flight, and I said, yes, they were. Ernest would never again write about his own country. And Scott, as long as possible, would go on drinking and rushing to the Riviera.
“It’s a kind of otherworldliness,” I said laughing, yet meaning it. And indeed it was my conviction now that for most men there had to be some kind of another more satisfactory world. (The primrose had to be anything put a primrose.) The saints, tormented by the anguish of the flesh, wanted to reject the human condition, the world they lived in. But whether saints or cafe friends there in Paris, weren’t they all involved in a flight from the pain of life—a pain they would feel more acutely at home? It struck me then too that the French literature we had so much admired from Mallarme to the surrealists was simply a rejection of this world and the stuff of daily life.
The French writers stayed at home and exiled themselves in their own dreams. Then what would my own fantasy be? Loretto asked, lightheartedly. And rather grandly, to mask my doubt and wonder, I said I might have to forge my own vision in secret spiritual isolation in my native city. Joyce in exile had gone deeply, too deeply, into himself. But what if he had stayed in Dublin?
A week later, looking around the cafe Loretto said idly, “Paris is lovely. We’ve been so happy here. But doesn’t it strike you that this neighbourhood is now like a small town for us?”
“Yes, the same faces always in the same places. And all the gossip. What do you say if we go to London?”
“Don’t you want to see Ernest or Scott?” ““I’ve been thinking about it,” I said slowly. “How do I know Ernest wants to see me?” I didn’t tell her I had a hunch Ernest was back in Paris. I had been nursing a suspicion that Ernest, brooding over the indignities he had endured in the last encounter with me and Scott, had decided it would be better to avoid me. Why be in the company of someone who could only remind him of embarrassing moments? If I had revealed this suspicion to Loretto she would have said to me, “If you think he’s back in town, for heaven’s sake, why don’t you look him up?” My egotism wouldn’t let me go looking for him again. I had told myself I would leave it to him. If he were back in town and wanted to see me, he knew where to find me.
We booked our passage to London. In three days we were to leave the Quarter.
That night at ten we had come along Montparnasse from the rue de la Sante. The October nights had got much cooler and a heavy dampness seemed to be in the air, and even at that hour we saw derelicts huddling near restaurant doors. Later, when the chairs were piled on the tables on some of the terraces, these derelicts would sleep in the corner by the wall. We went to the Falstaff where we sat by ourselves. Often now we did not need any company. When we had been there only fifteen minutes, Loretto said, “Good heavens, there’s Ernest.” He was at the door, looking around rather shyly or self-consciously. Big and dark he loomed up there in the doorway. Waving to him, I stood up, and I remember how he grinned coming towards us. His pleased warm friendly grin made me feel ashamed of my secret thought about this man who had meant so much to me. As he sat down he looked at my wife, shook his head and laughed, for she had had her hair cut short like a boy’s. Titus and McAlmon had persuaded her that a short haircut would accentuate her handsome profile. When she asked Ernest why he was laughing, he assured her he liked her haircut very muck
We talked like old good friends. We told him we were leaving town. Never had he been more sympathetic and charming. He asked us if we were leaving France without seeing the Cathedral of Charters. We were? How foolish. But we had only two days more. Then take a day and go to Chartres, he said. It was incredible that we would depart without making this pilgrimage. When we demurred, finding obstacles, he told us that he, himself, would drive us to Charters in the morning. All we had to do was get up early and be at his house at eight thirty.
After he had left us I told Loretto how moved I had been to see Ernest come walking towards us. Our last trip anywhere in France should be with him, I said. And, of course, he was right. To have left France without seeing Chartres would have been criminal.
In the morning at the appointed hour we were at Hemingway’s place. Not in months had I been up at such an hour. Half asleep as I was, it was hard for me to be immediately charming and available. I went in to get Ernest. I remember that his sister, a tall dark girl, was there. As we came down the stairs, he stopped half-way down and. asked how we would like to go to Longchamps? He had been given a hot tip on a horse, a really hot tip. Of course it was up to us, since he had offered to drive us to Chartres and had told us how important it was to see the Cathedral, but what did we think about us all going to the races? His boyish eagerness was usually irresistible, but now I looked at him blankly. “We’ll ask Loretto,” I said. Just last night he had convinced me that I was guilty of criminal negligence in not going to Chartres. Outside he said hopefully, “You’d like to go to the races, wouldn’t you, Loretto?”
But she had seen the expression on my face. “Whatever Morley wants to do,” she said hesitantly. “I think you convinced us last night we ought to see Chartres.”
But the races, if we could all go to the races, and he had thought—well—In the presence of our embarrassed silence he yielded. Leaving us he went back upstairs and spoke to his wife. My own wife whispered to me it was plain he was exasperated. Perhaps we had better go to the races. No, I said stubbornly. Who’s idea was it to go to Chartres? Then he came out and we got into his Ford.
With the three of us in the front seat the little struggle between Ernest and me seemed to have ended. Driving out into the country he didn’t mention the races again. He seemed to be splendidly himself. We talked and laughed. We were in such good humour I asked suddenly if he had heard from Scott. He hadn’t heard from him at all, he said. Trying to draw him out I went on talking about Scott, hoping he would show some awareness of Scott’s hurt feelings. He seemed to have forgotten the whole incident. Nothing about Scott was bothering him.
As we drove along I watched his face. It was incredible that he could be unaware that he had shattered our friend. Speeding on the highway, I tried to get him to say what he thought about Scott’s writing. I was no more successful than I had been five years ago in Toronto. I think now he rejected Scott’s whole view of the world.
And yet this strange warm beguiling man, who was there on the seat with Loretto between us, could have had another need, a need to believe that as an artist he had never been dependent on the help of anyone else. We had started talking with enjoyable malice about friends. We made some jokes about Ford. As I said before, his respect for Ford had gone. Yet Ford in the beginning had written that Ernest was “the best writer in America.” Then he explained McAlmon’s crazy life. The trouble with McAlmon was that he had had a brother, or a cousin, who had been an idolized football player, and McAlmon had been no good at games. Yet McAlmon, Ernest’s first publisher, had really helped him along the way. And Sherwood Anderson in the beginning had praised Ernest to the skies. And Scott! Hadn’t he gone to Scribner’s about Ernest’s work? For one reason or another Ernest had rejected all these old friends. Warm, likable and lovable as Ernest was, did he have some secret need to protect his ego from anyone who might have a minor claim on him?
Then he became very talkative about writing. He talked about style, and we were in happy splendid agreement. The decorative style, the baroque based on a literary adornment of perceptions, was an affectation in our time, he said. Only the clear direct stripped statement belonged to our time, and it wasn’t just a matter of what you could or couldn’t do. And another thing. If it came down to a question of scholarship about these matters, no one he knew had a more scholarly awareness of what was involved than John Dos Passos, and Dos agreed with him, he said.
And he had a little trick of conversation that amused and delighted me. He would say writers caught on because of their affectations, their tricks of style, a point of view; then would add. “But we know…” That “we” became fascinating. There were real writers, the “we”; the others were nothing in themselves. But we had come to Versailles. He was sure we would want to see the grounds and the Palace.
When we were in the great Hall of Mirrors I noticed that Ernest, walking with Loretto, seemed to be in no hurry to have us get on our way. He would let me wander away, bemused by the seventeenth-century love of perfect balance and form. Sometimes I would return for a few words, then go off by myself again. Finally Ernest looked at his watch as I joined them. “Loretto,” he said hopefully, “if we leave now we’ll have time to get back to Paris and see the races. What do you think yourself?” Her expression told me she was weakening. If she had only nodded her head to him the thing would have been settled. But then I realized that he had counted on the long stopover at Versailles satisfying us and again it was as if we were boxing. Now he had feinted me out of position. Loretto would be agreeing, too, that he had been generous enough to come this far. I’m not going to turn back now from Chartres, I thought grimly. Not just to see a horse race. My wife said, “Well, what do we do?” and I said, “I’ll regret it all my life if I don’t see Chartres. Come on, let’s go.”
As we got into the car I knew that in Ernest’s place I might have been sullen and irritable. I would have felt he was pushing me around. On the other hand, if we turned back, I would be letting him push me around. We were really pulling wildly against each other. I knew he wanted to wring my neck, yet he acted with grace and charm. On the road again he was neither sullen nor irritable. When we got to Charters and entered the Cathedral, again he remained with Loretto, letting me wander around by myself. It was mid-afternoon. Sunlight was streaming through the famous blue windows. They began to enchant me. The sculptured heads, the Old Testament figures, were all around me. It seemed to me these heads had been carved by men who regarded the prophets as contemporaries; they had brought the whole Christian past into their present. Moving around by myself, meditating on this early Medieval view of history, I heard Ernest say scornfully to Loretto,”Look at him. He doesn’t even “genuflect.” As a convert he had been genuflecting right and left at all the proper places. Now he was looking down his nose at me. He was inviting my wife to do the same. Ernest, the expert, the one who always knew! But I was convinced he was really wondering what happened to his horse at Longchamps.
As I remember it, when we came out of the Cathedral the three of us stood together in the dusty square, looking up at the two steeples out of two Gothic periods. I said something about Henry Adams and Chartres being all of France. He didn’t answer. Here again was one of Ernest’s peculiar traits. While we stood there meditating, just looking at the church, each one of us getting his fill, he expressed no enthusiasm. His handsome head raised a little, his dark eyes half closed, he looked at the church a long time, as I did too, and he kept his thoughts to himself. He didn’t ask me if I had been impressed. Yet he wouldn’t have brought us there if he had thought it would have been necessary to ask such a question.
Then we heard music like calliope circus music. A little fair with tents and galleries for games had been set up just beyond the square. We wandered over. At the shooting gallery Ernest said, “Come on, let’s shoot. Whoever loses, pays.”
For targets there were little ducks and tiny dolls set up in a row only about eight feet away from the rail where we stood with the guns. I had done a little shooting. Not much. Not since my boyhood. But we were so close to the targets, how could you miss? We each had four shots. He knocked down his four little targets. So did I. Another round. The same result. Still again. The same result. Irritated and more determined, he insisted we go on. On the twelfth round, and on my last shot, my little target tilted, swayed, then finally fell, as Ernest and I, now competing fiercely, watched breathlessly. We would have gone on all night. Grabbing my arm, Loretto cried, “You missed, Morley. You didn’t really hit it,” and as I turned to protest, I caught a withering look from her. Abashed, I said, “That’s right,” and I paid. As I glanced at Ernest I could see he felt somewhat mollified.
When we got into the car to begin the drive back to Paris, Ernest said a nearby place was famous for snails. The snails there were as good as any in France. This restaurant on the road from Chartres turned out to be a damp cellar. Snails were not my favourite dish, I said calmly, knowing I was losing all prestige. Loretto and Ernest, of course, ate the snails with great relish. “He doesn’t like snails Loretto,” Ernest kept saying with too much satisfaction. Again I knew he was picking on me. Again I knew his horse at Longchamps was still in the back of his mind. Yet the fact that he had caught me failing to genuflect, his little triumph at the shooting gallery, and now the snails made him almost jolly with us. On the way back to Paris we were laughing and joking again.
It had got dark while we were still on the road. But the lights of Paris were ahead. As we drove into the suburbs Ernest grew more subdued. At the first corner he stopped the car. “I want to get a paper,” he said. When he had got out, my wife said fervently, “Pray to God that horse didn’t win.” We saw him buying a newspaper. Breathless, we waited, watching him standing under the streetlight, scanning the track results. Then he came towards us, smiling. “Well, my horse didn’t even run in the money. You saved me some dough,” he said. And we laughed in our nervous relief.
He drove us home to our little hotel on Raspail. It was quite dark now. I remember so clearly our parting with him. The streetlight was on him, and in that light there seemed to be so much warmth and vitality in his face. He kissed my wife goodbye. As I shook hands with him, watching him smile, aware of all the ease and sweetness in him, I was moved, not only because it seemed to be right that the last full day I should be spending with anyone in France should be with him, but because in all our boxing afternoons when we had been pummelling each other, we had never had a harsh word. Not even when Scott got mixed up in it; and even the fierce silent little struggle with him over having my way about going on to Chartres was the kind of struggle you have with a man you feel very close to, and he had shown more grace than I would have shown myself. As we said good-bye, we assumed we would soon see him again. Then he got into his car, waved, laughed and was gone.
“I was glad he showed up the other night,” I said.
“Well, I could have kicked you at that shooting gallery,” Loretto said. “The guy comes around and takes us to Chartres when he wants to be at the races. You won’t turn back. And then you won’t even let him win a little shooting match. What’s the matter with you? You said yourself the first day here with him, he just has to be champion.”
Next Chapter 28
Published as That Summer In Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald by Morley Callaghan (New York: Coward-Mccann, 1963).