The Wildest Sun by Asha Lemmie EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Asha Lemmie
- Language: English
- Genre: Romance Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Virgo Terrae
Harlem, New York
October 1945
When I was five years old, I learned how to roll my mother onto her
side so that she would not choke on her own vomit. I learned how to press a
cool, damp rag against her flushed cheeks and coax her to drink some water.
I learned that a little chilled white wine could bring her down gently, not the
terrifying crash that would leave her shaking and writhing on the floor. At
nine I could make a perfect dry martini, and I was always so pleased to see
Maman’s eyes light up. If I waited until the right mood struck her, she
would let me sit between her legs, and she would braid my hair and sing.
If
I begged, she would laugh like a little tinkling bell and tell me stories about
when she was young and one of the most promising young socialites in all
of France. She was friends with anyone important, and she wanted to be a
famous poet whose words would make her immortal. Her parents wanted
her to marry well, and God knows she could have—her creamy
complexion, thick auburn ringlets, trim figure, and luminous blue eyes were
a painter’s dream—but she had her head turned by an American writer, and
he was her savior and her doom.
I know the story by heart, I know it backwards and forwards. I know
more about my mother’s past than I do about myself.
When Maman met Hemingway, she loved him instantly.
She met him at a bar called the Dingo, where they were introduced by
her favorite of the Americans who flocked to Paris twenty years ago, a
writer she called “dearest Fitzy.” For two years she was Papa’s mistress,
and he called her his tournesol, his sunflower. He called her poetry trite,
and they had terrible rows, but she could refuse him nothing.
He kept his promise to leave his wife, but he did not leave his wife for
her.
“I could have almost lived with it had he stayed with the dull one,”
she’d bemoan, her cheeks flushed, her eyes mournful. “After all, she was
there first, and they had that adorable little boy. One could say she had a
right to him. But to be abandoned for that awful drowning terrier . . . the
shame of it. To have him turn from me and place a ring on the finger of that
gaudy slut.” She’d brush the invisible tears from her cheeks. “But at least I
have you,” she’d sigh. “Ma belle Delphine. Mon ange.”
I was born on the eleventh of January 1929. By the time I entered my
mother’s life, he had already left it—retreated back to America with his
second wife.
Louise told me that the drinking escalated when he left, and that the
persistent melancholia set in after Maman’s parents disowned her for falling
pregnant. But I didn’t need Louise to tell me that.
It was something I’ve always known but never let myself dwell on. I
was never one for self-pity or for wishing things were different. My mother
needed me; there was no room for those indulgent feelings.
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