ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife
Tags: Writing Life, Memoir, Dysfunctional Family, Marriage, Stories

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ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: The Writer, His Wife, and their Afterlife

Book One, Part One, Prologue: In the Beginning

It’s mid-March. I’m on a walk, headed up the parkway by myself, shrouded in a long off-white wool coat. I’m a wintry ghost slowly passing.

When Ernie was alive we often took this walk, passing substantial brick houses built in the 1920s. One evening Ernie pointed to one, two dormers popping out its red-tiled roof. “See that house? Its third-floor garret? That’s where Cor lived. I visited him there once. We ate cake. Cor was fond of cake.”

Cor is Cornelius Dominic Sandifort, a Dutch-born artist Ernie knew back in the ’60s. In Amsterdam, during the last winter of the second world war, Cor rode a bicycle — its rubber-less wheels wrapped in ship rope he’d found on the wharf — to a farmhouse a three-hour ride away to exchange paintings of the farm, its cows, the countryside, for potatoes and salt and butter — food he took back to his wife and children in the food-starved city. Coming and going, he had to evade German soldiers guarding the bridges. People like Cor were drawn to Ernie. They told him their stories.

Gray smoke, drifting from the home’s wide chimney, disappears into the gray sky. Wood smoke. Its intoxicating smell grabs me and takes me back to the only fireplace Ernie and I ever shared, in the pale yellow living room of our stucco cottage.

I’d never lived in a house with a fireplace before. I’d never even experienced a campfire. Ernie is amazed at my sheltered life. “Where have you been all your life? In a nunnery?”

“Close,” I say. “I grew up next-door to a church. My father talked golf with Father Weicker over a chain-link fence. My mother made my brothers and sisters and me go to Confession once a week.”

“What did you confess?”

“I told the priest: ‘I talked back to my mother six times this week.’ ”

I lie next to Ernie on the living room’s daybed — our favorite place to be — warmed by the fire he’s built. And warmed by him. His dynamic presence. His sense of purpose. His intelligence. I inhale his skin. Nuzzle it. Our legs interlock. He’s only an inch or so taller than I, which helps me feel equal to him even though I’m not. He knows what he thinks, knows how he feels, knows how to write. I’m deficient in all three areas but so lacking in self-knowledge that I don’t know this about myself. Ernie thinks I’ll be his helpmate, assisting him in what he really wants to do.

“I’m through with newspaper work,” he says. “I find myself writing the same story over and over again. It’s boring. I want to write my own stories.”

And I want to help him.

An idea comes to Ernie. He finds a needle and pricks the tip of my finger and the tip of his. Our fingers kiss. Then he blends our blood on a sheet of paper. Underneath our mingled blood, he writes: I am you, and you are me, and we are the universe.

Yes, Ernie is my fire-maker. He is my blood brother. He is my husband. He is my Wonder-Man. Ernie is everything to me. I don’t need anyone else.

Now, forty years later, I have lost my fire-maker, my blood brother, my husband, my Wonder-Man. To understand all I have lost, and why it happened the way it did, I must go back to the beginning. To just before the beginning.

And this is how it all began.