Papa Hemingway (23 page)

The address I had been given was that of the pool house, but when I knocked on the screen door, no one responded. I carried my bag in and called out but no one was around. It was a two-story house, the downstairs consisting of a kitchen, through which I had entered, a small bedroom with a single bed, and a large, high-ceilinged living room that had been furnished with imagination and taste. Crammed book shelves ran from floor to ceiling. The floor was a beautifully designed tile, and the front of the room opened onto a charming terrace, beyond which was the pool, surrounded by verdant, extravagantly colored tropical plants and trees.

On the outside of the house was a winding iron staircase, the only access to the second floor, which, I presumed, contained the master bedroom. It was midafternoon and very hot but the shuttered interior of the living room, with its tile floor and wicker furniture and cool vista, was quite pleasant. I had rightly guessed that Mary and Ernest were taking a siesta, for around five o'clock I heard descending steps on the spiral staircase and a moment later Ernest, wearing swim trunks, came into the room.

He had gained considerable weight, most of it in his girth. His hair had thinned and his white beard was scraggly. His face bore signs of the white scaling which constantly abused him, not a serious condition but an irritating one that caused his skin to flake off as if from sunburn. The condition was one of the reasons why, many years before, he had started to grow a beard: to cover the look of his skin and to eliminate the irritation of shaving. Ernest sometimes called his facial condition skin cancer, but this was Ernest's pronouncement and not that of an M.D.

He looked old. There were lines in his face I had not seen before, especially the vertical lines between his eyes. It had always been characteristic for him to walk lightly on the balls of his highly arched feet, but now he walked flat-footed, slightly favoring his right leg.

He settled me into the little bedroom, and then we both went for a swim in the very warm, brownish salt water that had the effect of a sulfur bath. Ernest entered the pool cautiously, stopping several times on the pool steps to splash water across his middle. He swam breast stroke very slowly, his head out of the water, his frog-kick without force, his arms moving through the water listlessly. As he reached each end of the pool, he would stop and rest several minutes. Mary came down and joined us while we were swimming.

After we had changed to dry clothes, we had drinks on the terrace and Ernest began to shed his siesta heaviness and some of his natural juice began to flow.

Mary prepared to go pick up a package that had arrived from New York. Ernest was very solicitous about how she felt and whether she had taken several varieties of medicine. "Poor Mary," he said, after she had gone, "she's taken a bad beating; all that Nobel Prize crap, and then her father so bad up in Gulfport, she having to commute back and forth from Havana. He died finally and she had to get her mother settled and handle her. It was all an awful job. I have been trying to help her get back into shape, help her with our income tax—it was a complicated year to keep track of—and write on book every day."

Mary returned with several huge cardboard boxes, the fruit of her pickings from an Abercrombie & Fitch catalogue. Such items could not be sent to Cuba without paying heavy duty, so being in Key West was a rare opportunity to stock up. Mary took a small cardboard box out of one of the big boxes and handed it to Ernest. It contained a tiny transistor radio, which Ernest was surprised and delighted with; he kissed Mary and said it was his first successful toy in years. We took it outside to get clearer reception. In a few moments Mary emerged from the living room, carrying a high pile of Viyella shirts, pants, shorts, socks, belts and other haberdashery. She stopped in front of Ernest and held them out, as one would present an offering at an altar, but Ernest just narrowed his eyes and regarded them suspiciously.

"I feel like I've been traded and have to wear a new uniform," he said. He inspected the pile very gingerly and settled for six shirts, a pair of shorts and a belt. Everything else was to be returned. "Listen, Kitner," Ernest said to Mary, his voice even and serious, "my Kraut belt has disappeared. I know I had it when I hit here and they cleaned me out fast."

"I'll look for it, lamb," Mary said. "I'm sure it's around."

"That's what the sheriff said when he got the news about Judge Crater," Ernest replied.

That evening Ernest decided to call the
finca
to find out how everything was; he approached making the call as one would approach being shot out of the Ringling Brothers cannon. On those occasions when he phoned me from the
finca,
the call was always placed by someone else, usually Roberto, so that
initiating
a call was a new experience for him and, his attitude toward phones being what it was, a very upsetting one.

To begin with, he had forgotten his phone number and had to ask Mary. Then, in communicating with the overseas operator he had all the manifestations of stage fright. When he finally got Rene on the phone he spoke too loudly and distinctly, the way some orators do regardless of microphone and public-address system. Ernest had made the call because he was concerned about Black Dog and a cat named Boise, both of whom were under the weather when he left. Rene reported that they had recovered, and Ernest was happy when he hung up. "I'm proud of that boy Rene," he said, "because after eight years in my employ he has learned to answer the phone and say in English, 'Mr. Hemingway is not here.'"

The next morning, while I was having breakfast in the kitchen, Ernest took sips from a bottle of cold vodka which he took from the refrigerator. He drank constantly, the most I had ever seen him drink. It was obvious that he was still suffering from his crash wounds, and liquor transfusions helped ease the pain. He washed down a large variety of pills with these libations.

"Hotchner," he said with conspiratorial earnestness, "I have stumbled across a new invention which may make us dependently wealthy. Regard!" He took two glasses, put a couple of jiggers of Scotch in each, added water and placed the glasses in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. "While we are waiting for the
denouement
, I will show you the joint." He took me up the winding staircase and showed me the second-floor bedroom, which was a huge, wonderfully decorated room with wide windows that gave out on a beautiful panorama of tropical greenery.

Then, returning below, he led me to a door off the living room that opened into a storeroom that contained first editions, original manuscripts, letters and unpublished materials. He picked up a first edition of
The Torrents of Spring,
his first published novel, a rare item, and the mildewed cover dropped off in his hand. Inside a small cardboard box was a working manuscript of
To Have and Have Not.
The pages were so stiff and deteriorated they splintered at his touch. Mildew and jungle rot and evil-chewing beetles had wrought havoc upon this storehouse of priceless memorabilia. "Just imagine," Ernest said, examining the crumbled remains of an early short-story manuscript, "if we worked for the Library of Congress. Well, one way or another, it all goes. Most of the first editions were thieved by uninvited guests and by God-knows-who when the house was loaned, without charge, to friends. The really rare, earliest first editions were conveniently small so could be slipped effortlessly by a guest into a pocket or handbag. Then add to thieving guests, cleaning out by womenies you live with. Periodicals that got in the way of housekeeping were pitched. All manuscripts were tidied up by removing them from rot-proof file cabinets and packing them into cardboard boxes where they furnished ideal nesting materials for mice and rats and were munched on by the king-sized Key West cockroach. This process, plus jungle rot and mildew, often caused complete disappearance of manuscripts
and
their cardboard containers. Many poems also went this route.

"Then, of course, there was the regrettable incident, in the days before I was getting my stuff published, when Hadley had in her possession everything I had ever written, original copies and their carbons, in a suitcase she was bringing me—it was Christmastime and I was covering the Lausanne conference for the Toronto
Star
and the suitcase was in a compartment on the train, which was in the Gare de Lyon. While Hadley went to get a bottle of Vittel water, the valise was stolen, and none of the stories or the first draft of a novel that were in it were ever recovered. Poor Hadley was so broken up about it, I actually felt worse for her than for having been robbed of everything I ever wrote. Only story that was salvaged was 'My Old Man,' which had been sent to a magazine by Lincoln Steffens and had not as yet been returned. After that we called it 'Das Kapital'—my total literary capital. I never really blamed Hadley. She had not hired on as a manuscript custodian and what she had hired on for—wife-ing—she was damn good at."

That was the only time I almost told him about my misadventure on the Orient Express with the
Across the River
manuscript.

Ernest opened the covers of a book, all the pages of which, he discovered, had been totally consumed by literary beetles. "Well," he said, "I've got a lot of other stuff stored in the back of Sloppy Joe's—must be in the same shape." Sloppy Joe's is one of Key West's most celebrated saloons.

"I used to be co-owner of Sloppy Joe's," Ernest said. "Silent partner, they call it. We had gambling in the back and that's where the real money was. But getting good dice-changers was difficult because if he was so good you couldn't detect it yourself, you knew he would steal from you. The only big expense in a gambling operation, ours included, is police protection. We paid seventy-five hundred dollars to elect a sheriff who, in his second year in office, went God-happy on us and closed us down, so we closed down the sheriff."

Mary and Ernest had been invited to an elaborate Fourth of July party but Ernest had begged off at the last moment and Mary was going alone. Ernest assured her that we could manage in her absence. He consulted his watch. "Past meridian," he said. "We can break out the serious drinks." He took the two glasses of Scotch from the freezer and replaced them with two others. The water had frozen around the Scotch, and when you tilted the glass, the Scotch cut a rivulet through the ice to reach your mouth, ice-cold and giving the illusion that you were drinking out of a mountain stream that had suddenly turned to Scotch. I complimented Ernest on his invention.

We put slabs of turtle meat, which Mary had cooked beautifully, on large pieces of pumpernickel bread and covered them generously with fresh horseradish; it was an absolutely wonderful lunch of mountain-stream Scotch and turtle sandwiches.

Later we listened to a transcript I had brought of a National Broadcasting Company radio tribute to Ernest for winning the Nobel Prize. It contained accolades and anecdotal remembrances by such as John Mason Brown, Leonard Lyons, Sidney Franklin, Marlon Brando, Max Eastman, Leon Pearson and Cornelia Otis Skinner. After listening attentively to the hour recording, Ernest said, "It sounds like Irving Stone's true fiction-alization of The Life and Times of the Very Ernest Hemingway with footnotes by Frank Yerby." Then he went for his siesta.

At dusk we sat on the terrace as the first pale fireworks irritated the sky. As the dusk fell to night the fusiliers launched their more spectacular pyrotechnics and we watched the brilliant tracings dart among the low-hanging stars.

"I thought it would be pleasant to get away from the
finca,"
Ernest said, his eyes fixed on the sky. "They've ruined it for me and I thought it would be pleasant to come here to a place I once loved and to reach into the past for a little peace and solitude. But I find I'm Black-Assed in this house because Pauline is dead now and this house is full of memories of the good times and of the kids when they were young and a real part of my life and of the times I worked good in the bedroom here.

"This is where I wrote 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' upstairs here, and that's as good as I've any right to be. Pauline and I had just come back from Africa and when we hit New York the newsboys asked me what my next project was and I said to work hard and earn enough money to get back to Africa. It ran in the papers that way and a woman who read it got in touch with me and asked me to have a drink with her. Very classy society woman, extremely wealthy, damn attractive. We had good martini conversation and she said if I wanted to return to Africa so badly, why put it off just for money when she would be very happy to go with me and my wife and foot the bill. I liked her very much and appreciated the offer but refused it.

"By the time we got down here to Key West, I had given a lot of thought to her and the offer and how it might be if I accepted an offer like that. What it would do to a character like me whose failings I know and have taken many soundings on. Never wrote so directly about myself as in that story. The man is dying, and I got that pretty good, complete with handles, because I had been breathed upon by the Grim Reaper more than once and could write about that from the inside out."

"But did the situation in 'Kilimanjaro' draw anything specific from your safari with Pauline?" I asked.

"Everything and nothing. What might interest you was Operation Amoebic Dysentery. You ever had
unfriendly
amoeba?"

"In the army."

"Then you know. Probably picked up mine going to Africa on the putrefied French ship we took—long trip through the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Amoeba assault began soon after safari started, but I managed to avert permanent latrine duty on every hunting day but two. Then amoeba stepped up attack, all-out, and I was really knocked down solid. We were in camp on the Serengeti Plain at the time, and my condition, which I had neglected, had suddenly turned so bad I had to fight pretty good to hang on until we could get word back to Nairobi. Was finally flown out in a two-seater plane that came to get me. It was four hundred miles to Nairobi and we went by way of the Ngorongoro Crater to the Rift Escarpment with a stop at Arusha. It was coming out of Arusha that we had to climb fast and wheel off the sudden-looming peak of Mount Kilimanjaro— so there were those specifics in the story. But there was a hell of a lot more; by the time I finished 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro,' I had put into it the material for four novels, distilled and compressed, nothing held back because I had declared to win with it. It took me a long time to write another short story after that because I knew I could never write another as good as 'Kilimanjaro.' Don't think I ever did."