Ghosts by Daylight by Janine di Giovanni Page A

took trains, buses and finally a taxi, which dumped me at the edge of a field. I hiked in the blazing sun, and wondered what I would say to this woman who I was hoping would be my mentor, would tell me things about how to live my life and where to go and who to meet.
    I was twenty-eight years old, and had recently left my first husband, a photographer I had met at university. I was free. I wanted her to advise me how to be an independent woman, how to work in a man’s world, how to report real issues, how not to be afraid. I had felt the same way when I met the legendary Vietnam War reporter Gloria Emerson at her home in Princeton, and she had been equally distant. Both of them were powerful writers who understood chaos and destruction and death, but both were notoriously difficult in real life, had complicated love lives and neither had ever given birth. Was it war that had done this to them, had somehow frozen them in time away from real life?
    Gellhorn, who Hemingway once described as ‘grace under pressure’, opened the door, elegant and beautiful in slim trousers, a neat blouse, and a burning cigarette. She was as lovely looking as Lauren Bacall. ‘Don’t think you’re getting lunch,’ she said a bit fiercely, ‘because you’re not.’ Instead, because it was hot, she gave me a glass of iced water. Later on, she did show me her upstairs bathroom, and she had laid out a fresh towel for me, so perhaps she was not as thoughtless as she was trying to appear. In the end, we talked for many hours. She called me ‘my dear girl’ – I must have seemed very young to her – and although I longed for one of her long, slender cigarettes, I did not have the courage to ask. We watched television together. The war in Slovenia had just started, and she made historical references to Yugoslavia that I did not yet understand.
    Nothing ever happens to the brave – that is what they said about her, and that day I realized above all what she had: courage. I wanted a life like hers, courageous, free and unencumbered.
    I met her one more time. A few years had passed, and now I was what they called a war reporter, although I could never say it without great embarrassment, because it was not what we – the tribe I worked with, who travelled round and round the world from conflict to conflict – called ourselves. It was something other people called us. I was older, and we were on a panel together about the ethics of reporting. Although I had agreed to sit on the panel, I had done so with trepidation – after my article on Gellhorn had appeared several years back, she had written me a letter in a neat, spidery handwriting on pale blue paper with MARTHA GELLHORN embossed at the top. She hated the article. She called me a liar for describing her cottage as ‘light filled’. She said it was not full of furniture as I had described – she counted the pieces and listed them. She said I had committed the cardinal sin against journalism – lying. And worse of all, I had mentioned Hemingway when I had promised her publicist I would absolutely not. Hemingway had treated her terribly during their marriage. He had cheated on her, stolen her stories and her contacts, humiliated her, and her life after him was spent trying to live down the shadow of being the third Mrs Hemingway. My editor had insisted I mention him at some point, and I did not fight it enough. In those days, I was very intimidated by editors.
    But I was more intimidated by Martha Gellhorn. I cried and cried when I got the letter. By then, I had another kind man in my life. He made me a cup of tea and rubbed my arm and told me, ‘Darling, don’t worry about it – she was probably having a bad day.’ But I did worry. I put the letter in a wooden box high on my shelf, and it stayed there, a burning shame then, and sometimes even now it hurts.
    And so, with this letter in mind, I faced her. In fact, I sat next to her on the panel, and we were photographed together.