Hemingway's Boat

by Paul Hendrickson

  Hemingway once saved Miss Nita from a shark attack when she was swimming off Pilar’s stern. He once made a semi-clunky pass at her when he’d taken her out on his boat alone for the purpose of trying to bed her. He once took personal charge of dyeing her shoulder-length brunette hair into a bleached blond, and then, about a week later, took further command of shearing it into a boyish cut, sides severely short, ears exposed. Yes, some of that sounds more than a little provocative. And I’ll get to it. But wouldn’t you rather hear just now about one of the most nonprovocative and unambiguous and sweet moments of a long and well-lived life?

  Walter and Nita’s wedding day. April 30, 1952.

  Drift your eye back to the image at the beginning of this chapter. An eight-by-ten copy resides in an album that usually sits by the raised hearth in the middle of a Woodland Hills living room. There are probably two dozen surviving images from Walter and Nita’s wedding reception at Finca Vigía. This one’s not a great picture in any aesthetic sense, just the human one.

  Here they are, the five-foot-nine groom, who’s twenty-six, shortly to be twenty-seven, and his thirty-two-year-old bride, who has a twenty-six-inch waist, poised on the first step at the wide, main, portico entryway to the Hemingway home. It’s right around two thirty. (Those lengthening shadows over on the left are from the giant ceiba tree that grows right up through the steps and part of the foundation of the house.) The newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Walter Houk, wed ninety minutes ago in a civil ceremony in downtown Havana, have just rolled up the finca’s long private drive and come around the circular driveway and stepped from their boat of a car. They’ve arrived, the guests of honor, in their squinty semi-daze.

  Twenty or twenty-five people have gathered at the steps. Some of them, the women in their floral-print dresses and sling-back pumps, the men in their haspel suits and white shirts with moons of sweat growing beneath their armpits, are breaking into applause. A little bronze saluting cannon, a lantaka, is firing off blanks, sending out mini–sonic booms and puffs of sooty smoke. The cohost of the party, who’s standing maybe ten feet this way from the lower edge of the frame, is orchestrating the firing, although he’s left the actual firing to the black-robed figure beside him: don Andrés, an old exiled Hemingway priest-compatriot from the Spanish Civil War. The padre lives on another part of the island and comes on a bus every Wednesday for supper and nostalgia. Since today is a Wednesday, that makes the timing perfect.

  Walter has recounted for me how much Hemingway loved his personal cannon, which sat up on wheels, and had been rolled into saluting position at the top of the steps. Mary Hemingway described it in her memoir of her fifteen years with Hemingway, How It Was, which was published a decade and a half after his death. (It came out the same year as Gregory Hemingway’s Papa. It’s about six times as long—exhausting to read and yet with startling and sometimes almost inadvertent revelations. Scholars and biographers have been mining it for years.) Her husband had purchased the cannon from a catalog for his fiftieth birthday in 1949. According to Mary, he owned two cannons, “no more than twenty inches long which fired real shells with impressive sound effects and backfired a mist of black soot which nestled snugly in the ears, eyebrows and hair of the artillerymen.” Actually, they didn’t fire real shells, but you can imagine the things firing up Hemingway in some delicious, atavistic, bad-boy way. The booms were said always to scare the bejesus out of the finca’s fifty-two cats and sixteen dogs, not to say its domestic staff of nine.

  That boat of a car in the background: It’s a four-door, pea-soup-green 1950 Buick Special with whitewalls (you can catch a glimpse) and Dynaflow automatic transmission and a three-panel window in the rear and a “bucktooth” vertical grill attached to the front bumper and, the pièce de résistance, an indicator on its “pilot console” dash that reports speed in kilometers instead of miles per hour. Two years ago, Walter bought the beast, on which he likes to keep a high Simoniz, and in which Hemingway has ridden a time or two, at a Foreign Service discount in a showroom in Manhattan. It was billed as the International Edition. Walter drove it to Miami, had it ferried to Cuba. It’s only one of the accoutrements that give him a kind of diplomatic dash and bachelor-about-Havana aura. That should go in the past tense. He has just renounced bachelorhood.

  “The whole thing was rather unnerving,” Walter told me once. “And I just don’t mean the cannon. I mean going to his house for the reception, the whole party in our honor. What I remember is how much Papa was enjoying himself. He was in full bloom.”

  Regard the groom in full bloom. That cock-combed, Beau Brummell up-gleam of hair. (A little dab’ll do ya, as the jingle says.) And those Ray-Ban shades in his right mitt. And that too-short tie. (Okay, it was the fashion then.) And that big-as-your-fist flower in his buttonhole. Not to say the suit itself, gone sad-sack in this infernal humidity. One of Havana’s better tailors made it for the occasion, but it looks as if Walter’s tropical-weight threads could have stood at least one more good nip and tuck.

  Regard his bride: this peachy-plain, all-American-looking tootsie, with her gloved right hand clutching her new husband’s left, with her rope of pearls (they’re real, but they belong to Mary Hemingway, who wants them back right after the reception), with her filmy blue organdy dress that’s got its bib collar locked chastely at the throat, with those sensible white pumps, with that ridiculous, flower-bedecked yellow hat that looks almost mashed on the back of her head, with that nosegay knotted at her midriff.

  It was almost exactly a month ago that the lovebirds drove out to the finca with their surprise news. Nita, who didn’t quite have Hemingway twisted around her little finger, had said that evening: “Papa, won’t you please come? Papa, will you be one of our witnesses? Papa, would you give me away?” “Done, daughter,” he’d answered. And almost in the next heartbeat: “Would you like to have the reception here?” And then hugs and awkward laughing and the breaking out of booze.

  On Monday, March 10—so roughly six weeks back of this moment—General Fulgencio Batista, the iconic military thug who in one way or another has had his way with power in Cuba since the mid-thirties, had regained the country in a coup against the elected government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás. When that happened, Walter realized that life is momentary. After the takeover, Batista’s troops had been circling the city with blaring horns on the tops of cars and tanks: “Batista, este es el hombre para Cuba.” Batista is the man for Cuba. Walter, in his post as second secretary (about fifth in the hierarchy of command), had been thrust into new responsibilities, intelligence responsibilities, in the embassy’s political section. As he went about his expanded duties, he kept thinking of Nita, whom he’d been dating for something like a year and a half. He felt seized with romantic excitement. Six days after the coup, Walt, as Nita calls him, popped the question. She said yes.

  But they hadn’t been able to come out to tell Ernest and Mary until the end of March, because on the same day Batista drove Prío from power, the Hemingways had slipped out of Havana on Pilar at 9:40 a.m., motoring over the next two days some ninety miles westward down the coast to an uninhabited island off Pinar del Río province that they’d nicknamed Paraíso Key: their little paradise hideaway key. Hemingway had told friends and correspondents this would be an “austerity vacation.” For two and a half weeks, while a new government lowered its calming iron fist on the country, he and his wife had fished and swum and drunk and eaten like kings and tried to forget about the world’s problems, not to say their own. They’d loaded up with barracuda, cero mackerel, horse-eye jacks, red hinds, speckled hinds, red snappers, mangrove snappers, amberjacks, and needlefish. A big storm had delayed their return. Hemingway had come home in a restored mood, and sitting in his metaphorical back pocket was the uncorrected typescript manuscript of 26,531 words that he’d now all but decided to go ahead and publish as a separate work. He’d settled on its title: The Old Man and the Sea. The manuscript had been ready for almost a year, but he’d been hesitant to publish
it as a stand-alone fiction, believing it to be the coda or epilogue to the great Sea Book that a blocked writer had been trying to make right in his head and on paper, on and off, since the postwar forties. More accurate to say great mess of a Sea Book that in turn was an intended part of the even greater and unwritten trilogy mess in his head known as the Land, Sea, and Air Book.

  As he’d said in a letter to a Scribner’s official just before shoving off: “I am tired of not publishing anything. Other writers publish short books. But I am supposed to always lay back and come in with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or be considered a bum. This is probably very bad for a writer and I will bet it did more to wreck poor old Scott than anything except Zelda, himself and booze.” From this last sentence alone, you could understand how good he must have felt: gratuitously kicking Scott, dead now eleven years, once more.

  Anyway, right after their return, Nita and Walter had driven to the finca with the good news. The benevolent, reigning monarch of all he surveyed had said, “Done, daughter.” Hell, he’d even wear a suit, although he wouldn’t put on one of those damn wedding-party boutonnieres because he’d feel like he was attending “the Saturday-night taxi-driver’s ball.” (Walter remembers this remark, but says he has never quite understood its meaning. In the greenhouse climate of Cuba, lapel flowers could grow to a ghastly size—regard again Walter’s.)

  The actual ceremony probably hadn’t lasted ten minutes, which suited everybody fine, since it was so damn hot. It was scheduled for noon in an attorney’s office, but nothing in Cuba happens particularly on time. Hemingway handed off Miss Nita to Walter in a small, florid, grinning flourish. It was pretty obvious to the bride and groom that he was giving away the daughter he knew he’d never have. Afterward, three witnesses signed their names to the documents. The lawyer told the newlyweds that the official certificate of marriage wouldn’t come in the mail for another month or so. (It did, although it took longer than a month, and it’s preserved now in an album in California. Beside Hemingway’s name, penned by some Havana bureaucrat lost to history, are the words “ocupación escritor.”)

  After the hitching, the stand-in father drove the thirty minutes home in his own car. Walter and Nita lingered in town for a while, so that their guests might arrive ahead of them and so that Mary Hemingway could get everything arranged. (She’d skipped the ceremony on this account.) The cohost of the party got out of his monkey suit and into a white guayabera, a pair of white flannel trousers, a pair of loafers without socks—which is how he’s standing now, in the nick and click of time, drink in his paw, spectacles slightly sliding down his nose, as “the kids” arrive and step from the Buick and don Andrés loads in another charge. Up north today, Harry Truman is nationalizing steel mills, and Dwight Eisenhower is mulling a run for the presidency, and Ringling Brothers is running two shows a day at Madison Square Garden.

  Let it roll. The iced champagne gets served in Mary Hemingway’s best stemware. (She’s in an off-the-shoulder dress and no brassiere—pretty racy.) There’s much delicious food. Roman candles and skyrockets get lit on the west terrace, off the dining room. A two-tiered cake gets sliced into, but not before a statuette, of a hooked-together bride and groom, with angel wings on their backs, and with a black netted veil hanging down over the bride’s tiny plaster face, are removed for keepsaking. The slicing is done with a big blade that the head of the house is said to have lifted off the corpse of an SS officer in World War II. Who knows, maybe it’s true.

  Nita, probably feeling a bit of the “champers” (it’s a Hemingway word), drops her elaborate garters to her ankles and prances around in her bare feet on the finca’s cool red tiles. There’s no doubt the host is having a good and semi-sloshed time—and he doesn’t even cotton to parties of this size. Walter sheds his suit jacket while the bride goes into another room to change from her wedding dress into more comfortable traveling garb. She makes sure to hand back personally to the hostess the choker of pearls. Mary Hemingway can be such a nasty woman, nearly the equal of her husband in a fight, especially when she’s a little liquored herself, and yet in other ways, just like her husband, when you scratch her you find a deep traditionalist and sentimentalist. A few days before the ceremony, she’d asked Nita if she’d made sure to gather the four essential things any bride must wear on her wedding day: you know, “Something old, something new / Something borrowed, something blue.” When Nita answered she hadn’t thought to borrow anything, Mary ran to her jewelry drawer.

  It’s time for the newlyweds to load up their loot and to make their good-byes and to run hand in hand down the steps to the Buick. So much rice gets hurled from the finca’s steps—Papa’s said to be right in there, with the best of the hurlers, even chasing after the car for ten or fifteen yards as it eases off down the hill—that several of the kernels lodge in the corners of the backseat and up on the upholstered ledge by the rear window. A year from now, when the Houks are in Tokyo (it’s Walter’s next diplomatic post, although he has no clue of it today), some of the kernels will end up sprouting in the wet climate of Japan.

  Their destination is Varadero, eighty-some miles east of Havana by way of the Vía Blanca. Most Yankees living in Cuba know Casa Happiness by its informal name: Happy Pete’s. That’s because its proprietor is a jovial Greek American immigrant named Peter Economides. The resort is really just a two-story cement block of rooms with a restaurant and one little cottage whose front door opens practically onto the water. But the sand is blindingly white and is so fine that it feels almost sugary. “Heaven on Earth,” proclaims Happy Pete’s letterhead. “American Management.”

  Tomorrow, May 1, is a national holiday. So they have the rest of today, all of May Day, plus Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday, before they must return to reality on Monday. At Happy Pete’s, they’ll be doing what honeymooners do, emerging from their bedroom for not much more than martinis and cool-offs in the ocean. Happy Pete will have put them in the suite that fronts the ocean.

  So click the shutter once more, forward, to real time. “Our little cottage by the edge of the blue sea,” an old man in California is saying aloud, but once again as if talking to himself. He’s in his chair by the fireplace. The word “blue” has emboldened me.

  “Is it possible we could look at Nita’s dress, Walter? Is it packed away?”

  His left thumb jerks over his left shoulder. “Why not? Right behind me.”

  He gets up and goes over to a large and ornately carved wooden chest. He opens the lid. A clean woody scent is perfuming the room. “Camphor,” he says. “Teak on the outside, camphor wood inside. Far better than cedar.” He lifts out a cardboard box with “Amazon.com” printed on it. On top of some folded tissue there’s a yellow card, and written on the card, in ink, in his hand: “Nita’s wedding dress and slip.” He separates the tissue, lifts out a white silk slip. “I don’t think girls wear slips like this much anymore. Do they wear them at all?” He refolds the slip, in halves, sets it in another compartment of the chest. He lifts the dress from the box, holds it out in front of him, by the shoulders, allowing it to swing open and fall downward. The blue of the organdy has faded almost to the hue of an oft-washed denim shirt. It looks so sheer and small and beautiful.

  Softly, but smiling broadly: “Well, the moths haven’t quite gotten you yet, have they, babe?”

  Where she tried to stay, until the final four or five days, when things were clear, when her breathing through the oxygen tubes in her nose was such a labored sound, is a small, shade-drawn room down the hall from Walter’s living room. In this room now are some fine old photographs of Havana in the fifties. There’s a picture of Pilar. A bareheaded Hemingway is up on his boat’s flying bridge, his flimsy spectacles in his hands, which are resting on that polished dinner plate of a steering wheel. The photograph is in color, the blues of it very blue, an unnatural blue; it’s the close-up of Hemingway (with a sunsuited Nita a few feet away) that Walter took with his Argus on July 21, 1951, Hemingway’s fifty-second b
irthday, Walter’s first outing on the boat. “I used to be able to steer twelve hours every day on my feet without leaving the bridge and have many times steered 18 hours,” Hemingway had boasted in a letter not long before Walter took the shot. “Plenty people know about this and it is not a delusion on my part. I can steer 12 hours now but the sun is bad for my head.”

  The first time Walter opened the door to this room for me, he didn’t enter, only stood in the doorway. He turned on the overhead light. “So, yes, this was the infirmary for Nita’s last days—hospital bed, and so forth,” he said. The “and so forth” trailed off.

  Sitting on a shelf above a TV in this room is the little hooked-together plaster bride and groom from their wedding reception. The wings have come off the backs of Walter and Nita, but otherwise the ornament is intact, including Nita’s netted wedding veil. Next to the statuette is a small, squat, ornate, triangular-shaped, and heavy-looking glass bottle with a thick stopper. On the front are the words “Jean Patou” and “Moment Suprême.” The contents now look purply, bruise-colored. The bottle is maybe a third full.

  “French perfume,” Walter said. He was still standing at the door. “A two-ounce bottle. Moment Suprême, by Jean Patou. Pretty fashionable fragrance in its day. Probably not as expensive as that packaging suggests. Papa and Mary brought it back as a gift from Paris for Miss Nita in 1950. She’d been working for him on and off for about a year by then. The color used to be amber. That’s the air that’s turned it black. That’s the evaporation you’re looking at over—what?—half a century. I suppose she opened it once or twice, maybe even dabbed a little on, you know, just to try it out, but she was never a perfume kind of girl.”

  He turned out the light and closed the door and headed back down the hallway. Suddenly his leg buckled. He grabbed the wall. “Oh, trick knee,” he explained.