Papa Hemingway (13 page)

"Mary's all right now, but life at the
finca
got a little rough just before we left for the Dark Continent." He tasted the champagne and nodded approval, one quick nod, as a pitcher approves a sign from his catcher. He described the incident that had landed him in the doghouse—a doghouse, he said, whose dimensions pass description.

"I was running as a straight sad with built-in head wind," he said. "Mary was being tough but good. No matter what they tell you, tough dames are the only ones that matter. Tenderness is the way to handle them. When you least feel like it, be tender. Only three things in my life I've really liked to do—hunt, write and make love. You can give me advice on any of these—shooting or writing or making love—but you can't tell me how to enter a harbor."

"I trust you inched your way back into Mary's heart?"

"I'll tell you—there are a lot of womens in this highly disorganized world, but the thing that actually got me out of the doghouse is that I love Miss Mary truly. She knows this and it helps her to forgive me when I am in the wrong. She ended that incident by telling me that I was not taking life seriously. Someday I might take it seriously and a lot of characters will hang by their necks until dead.

"When I was young I never wanted to get married, but after I did I could never be without a wife again. Same about kids. I never wanted any but after I had one I never wanted to be without them. To be a successful father, though, there's one absolute rule: when you have a kid, don't look at it for the first two years." He thought for a moment, pulling at the mouth-corners of his beard. "Only one marriage I regret. I remember after I got that marriage license I went across from the license bureau to a bar for a drink. The bartender said, 'What will you have, sir?' And I said, 'A glass of hemlock.'

"Mary is pretty damn wonderful, you know. She loves Africa and is at home there. She's in London now, shopping with Rupert Belville; she sent you her love and said to tell you to roll with the punches and that at the fair in the Piazza San Mar-gherita the merry-go-round has gondolas instead of horses. I don't know whether or not this is code. It is transmitted as received."

There was a sharp rap on the open door, immediately followed by the exuberant entrance of a man whom I recognized from our previous visit to Venice. He was Count Federico Kech-ler and he was a polite, amusing, chic, nimble Venetian who on this occasion was wearing suede shoes, matching suede gloves, an
almost
matching suede jacket, and a severely weathered, misshapen snap-brim fedora which took the curse off all that matching suede. He spoke perfect Cambridge English and was considered one of Venice's top marksmen and all-around sportsmen. He and Ernest greeted each other energetically, and Ernest made him a present of a pearl-handled knife he had received for Christmas.

"I gave my Christmas boots to Jackie," Ernest said, "my Christmas tie-holder to Bertin and my money clip to some infant. I like to start new every year. Anyway, you don't own anything until you give it away." Ernest was forever giving away his possessions to make sure he would never be possessed by them; outside of his hunting equipment and his paintings, he kept very little of value. "You can have true affection for only a few things in your life," he once told me, "and by getting rid of material things, I make sure I won't waste mine on something that can't feel my affection."

Ernest was now briefing Count Kechler on his African hunting. "You would have enjoyed some of the shoots, Kech. One time Mary and her trusty gun-bearer, Charo, aged around sixty and the same height as Miss Mary, were photographing buff with the wind perfect toward them and steady, and a beautiful approach made. In back, and backing up like the Unione Sicili-ano and invisible, were Mr. Papa and N'Gui, my gun-bearer, who was about thirty, and my bad and wicked brother. While Mary was photographing—I bought her a Hasselblad with a fourteen-inch lens that looks like a sixty-millimeter mortar and costs a little less than a Jaguar—N'Gui and I saw a pack of wild hunting dogs under the same tree as Miss Mary and Charo. Miss M. and Charo were photographing, and the hunting dogs were counting the buffalo calves. Neither group had seen the other. Then the hunting dogs heard the click of the camera, and seeing Miss Mary and Charo, decided they would just as soon take them as buffalo calves. It was really something to see a wolf pack work. But Miss Mary kept on photographing, and N'Gui and I broke it up with our powerful old Vincent Coll approach, picking off the dogs without spooking the buff."

Ernest then told us about his startling nuptials: during one of Mary's trips into Nairobi, he said, he had taken an eighteen-year-old Wakamba bride and, as local custom dictated, inherited her sister, a widow of seventeen. The three of them slept on a goatskin bed fourteen feet wide, Ernest said, and when Mary returned she was very solicitous about the event and impressed with the lofty position Ernest had attained in the tribe by virtue of his matrimony.

One of Ernest's mischievous pleasures was the practical-joke fantasy, and this matrimonial escapade may well have been just that, even though he backed it up by showing us photos of his African bride. It reminded me, however, of the time he had recorded for posterity an account of his sexual encounter with the celebrated spy Mata Hari. He told a well-wined group of us that he did not know her very well, since he was a simple sublieutenant and she was consorting with general officers and Cabinet ministers, "but one night I fucked her very well, although I found her to be very heavy throughout the hips and to have more desire for what was done for her than what she was giving to the man." I had been very impressed with this cool appraisal of the talents of Mile. Hari until it dawned on me that the lady in question had been executed by the French in 1917, and Ernest had first gone abroad as a Red Cross ambulance driver on the Italian front in 1918. After that, I was always on the lookout for the practical-joke fantasy but I could never determine whether Ernest's African nuptials was one of them.

"Very good show on Mary's part, wasn't it?" Federico asked. "Average woman might have been miffed."

"Mary was lovely the four months on safari, really wonderful, and most of the time quite brave. But after the first crash, when we were down in the jungle with the elephants pretty thick, she got a little testy—refused to believe I could tell the males from the females by the smell. Her other failings were that she never really considered lions dangerous and that the really bad fight we had with a leopard—when I had to crawl on my face into bush thicker than mangrove swamp and kill him with a shotgun—was stunting. Leopard was hurt bad and very dangerous, and I had a piece of shoulder bone in my mouth to keep my morale up. I had to fire at the roar because it was too thick to see. So that was stunting. Actually, what I'm saying is not against her because she was in a state of shock from the crashes, but she doesn't know about shock nor believe in it and she thinks when I am removing impacted feces from a busted sphincter, I am dogging it. But mostly she is loving and wonderful. And, as I say, very brave. But I wish she had some Jewish blood so she would know that other people hurt. But you can't have everything and I married a woman who is one-half Kraut and one-half Irish and that makes a merciless cross but a lovely woman. She is my pocket Rubens."

"You know, when you were announced dead," Federico said, "your friends here took it very hard. Adriana begged me to take her to Cuba so that she could burn down your
finca,
so no one would ever sleep in your bed, sit in your chair or ever go up into the white tower. She was seriously going to destroy the swimming pool. Poor damned blessed girl."

Adriana Ivancich was a tall, nineteen-year-old aristocratic beauty with long black hair and a curiously shaped but not unattractive nose that Ernest said was true Byzantine. Ernest had known her since early 1949; she came from a fine old Venetian family, wrote delicate poetry, painted, and skied expertly. She designed the book jacket for
Across the River and into the Trees
, and the length of time Ernest knew her corresponded roughly to the period that Colonel Richard Cantwell of the book knew the young Contessa Renata.

"I haven't told Hotch yet," Ernest said, "but we are going to Adriana's
palazzo
on the Grand Canal tonight for dinner. It seems that the husband of Adriana's sister, an officer in the Italian navy, is attached to an American naval unit in Norfolk, Virginia, where he has fallen in love with The Hamburger. He's coming home next week and there is great anxiety in Adriana's household because of their total ignorance of The Hamburger. I've been prevailed upon to demonstrate the construction and execution of The Hamburger, but now that Hotch is here, I'll defer to him."

After Federico had left, Ernest said, "What a damn classy gent he is. Italians are wonderful people. Probably have had the worst press in the world."

"I'm damn glad to be back here. Our trip in '49 was the best time I ever had anywhere," I said.

"Don't despair," Ernest said. "There's more where that good time came from." Ernest's confidence in the unending order of good times was founded on a very disciplined point of view toward the hours of his days and weeks. Each day was a challenge of enjoyment, and he would plan it out as a field general plans a campaign. That did not mean that there was no flexibility—two days in Paris quite often meant two months, as I had found out to my delight in 1949. But each of those Paris days was set up carefully before it dawned or, at the very latest, at its dawning. "When in Paris," Ernest had said to me, "the only thing you leave to chance is the Loterie Nationale."

That day in Venice, Ernest was as usual helping things happen. His plans consisted of a visit to his jeweler's, Cogdognato & Company, to look at some emeralds, then a visit to Harry's Bar to see his old friend Cipriani, the enterprising Italian who is, in fact, Harry. At Harry's we were to pick up a ten-pound tin of beluga caviar to bring to the hamburger dinner. "We can't eat straight hamburger in a Renaissance
palazzo
on the Grand Canal," Ernest said. "The caviar will take the curse off it." After Harry's we were to meet some of Ernest's duck-shooting Torcello pals whom I had met on my previous trip. The plans seemed an ordeal for a man in Ernest's condition, but when I mentioned this he said, "They've slowed me down, but they haven't stopped me. They'd have to chop off both legs at the knees and nail me to the stake for that—but even then I could probably still get them with my reflex action."

A hostile Adriatic wind had command of the Piazza San Marco as Ernest and I hunched our way toward Harry's Bar. We had already seen the ten-emerald display at Cogdognato's (Ernest's rating: one possible, three passables, two questionables, four absolute rejects), sent flowers and regrets to a duchessa's dinner invitation, and supervised the grinding of the evening's hamburger meat at a butcher shop on the Calle Barozzi. Now Harry's was refuge and reward.

We stood at the bar and drank a Bloody Mary but it was not in the same league with Bertin's. The barman asked Ernest what he thought of the previous night's prize fight, a contest that had pitted Tiberio Mitri of Italy against Randy Turpin of England. Ernest gave the barman a detailed analysis of that one-punch fifty-second encounter, and then went on to discuss his own exploits in and around the ring.

"Any time I was in New York I used to work out at George Brown's Gym," he recalled. "I was working out there one time with George when
The New Yorker
asked if they could send over St. Clair McKelway to do a 'Talk of the Town' on Hemingway the Boxer. Well, George and I talked it over and decided McKelway ought to have some good authentic color for his piece. At the entrance to George's place there was a big photo blowup of an Abe Attell fight, two faces like raw liver, so bloody you couldn't see the features; when McKelway shows up I say, 'See those guys, Mr. McKelway? They weren't really trying.'

"Then George and I start to work out in the ring. George kept calling out, 'Maurice!' (The ring boy was named Morris.) 'Maurice! Mr. Hemingway wants to toughen his feet.' (I didn't own boxing shoes, so boxed in my stocking feet.) 'Bring down some pebbles from the roof.' Morris got some pebbles and sprinkled them around the ring. McKelway took notes. We boxed a little; then George yelled, 'Maurice! Strew some broken glass.' McKelway is writing a mile a minute. 'Mr. Brown,' Morris says, we ain't got no broken glass.' 'Then break some,'

George says. Finally we belted each other a few times for show. McKelway was very impressed. Don't know if
The New Yorker
ever published the piece."

Cipriani, a compact, energetic gentleman, all in gray—hair, face, suit and eyes—came in and was delighted to see Ernest. "I have been to Torcello," he said, "and the ducks are beyond description. Ernesto, you must stay a few days longer and shoot."

"I couldn't raise a gun, much less hit anything," Ernest said.

"How's your hand?" Cipriani asked.

Ernest showed him the hand that had been badly burned in the African brush fire. "The new skin is beginning to gain confidence," Ernest said. "I wish I could say the same for the vertebrae, the kidney and the liver."

"I didn't know about the kidney," Cipriani said.

"Ruptured," Ernest said. "Do you mind if we sit at that table? Christ, you ever know me to sit at a table when there was a bar to stand at?"

"What injured you?" Cipriani asked.

"Crash number two. We went right to fire on that one. When I picked myself up off the floor of the plane I felt busted inside. The rear door was bent and jammed. My right arm and shoulder were dislocated but I used my left shoulder and my head and had good pushing room to get it open. Ray Marsh was up front with Miss Mary. I yelled to him, 'I have it open here. Miss Mary okay?' He yelled back, 'Okay, Papa. Going out the front way.' Was glad to see Miss Mary without a scratch on her and carrying her vanity case. Never been in a crisis yet that a woman forgot her jewels.