Idaho didn’t solve some of my father’s problems, however. It didn’t teach him how to deal with my mother’s criticism or to be honest about what he was feeling—or, for that matter, to manage his drinking. But it gave him one great gift, which was that it reconnected him to the outdoors. From early on, he was a powerful and almost spiritual advocate of nature, and it brought out his eloquence. “Nature never makes you feel bad about yourself,” he said. “It’s a living presence that only wants you to experience it and love it. It’s the closest thing to recapturing the pure heart you had before life made you feel bad.”
In retrospect, I see that he was talking about his own life and his own bad feelings: his drinking, his marriage, his fears that he hadn’t lived up to the example his father had set. But I heard his words in terms of my own doubts—the petty cruelties of kids at school, fears about my own shortcomings—and they gave me relief. I accepted what he was saying about nature, that it forgave you and renewed you and restored the possibility that the choices you made would be happy ones. Nature was all of what I understood about God. I would go outside with my father all day, fishing and hunting and hiking, learning to identify birds by their calls and fish by the insects amassing near the water’s surface. My fishing technique was good, especially when it came to casting, but I didn’t always catch enough fish for my tastes, and much of the time I just dangled my feet into the river or looked at colorful rocks. Bugs landed on my knees. Hawks circled around in the air looking for a mouse or groundhog, and after they made their kill the crows followed to pick at the bones. Those were some of my fondest memories with my father. He was always loving, deep down, but he wasn’t always able to find a setting where he could display his love comfortably. Nature gave him a place where he could be himself without compromise or complication.
Even then, I had questions about how people fit into the circle of life. Were we really part of the food chain, and if so, why did we have such an unnatural advantage with our guns? My father never hunted for deer or elk, because all us women at home told him we’d never speak to him again if he did. But we used the guns on birds; we hunted for chukars and doves and ducks and stored them in a huge freezer. Sometimes a dove would be paralyzed from terror, not dead but not moving either, and our dog, a Labrador named Elsa, would bring it back to us. I built a huge outdoor cage and nursed those doves back to health. I even wore a homemade nurse’s cap. The results were mixed. Sometimes they got better and were released. Sometimes our cat got into the cage.
I don’t think the other girls took to nature quite the way I did. Muffet absorbed it with ease and elegance, like she did with everything. Margot, because she knew it was something that my father valued, tried to like it too, but I don’t know if her heart was really in it, except for skiing. She would go up on the mountain and smoke pot, drink out of a bota bag, and ski back down drunk. She would go to parties and get bombed, and she was proud that my father had taught us how to drink wine at the table, which was something that I saw as a source of embarrassment.
* * *
MARGOT’S DRINKING AND RISK-TAKING were part of what she thought of as the Hemingway legacy. They were her way of echoing my grandfather’s dedication to adventure. But of course, even that appetite for adventure was extremely complicated. Life had its limits, and one of those limits was death.
In Ketchum, in 1961, about five months before I was born, my grandfather had gone into his basement, retrieved a twelve-gauge shotgun, carried it up to the foyer, and shot himself in the head, ending his life at the age of sixty-one. Local clergy called the death accidental, even though everyone knew better.
The suicide had followed a period of intense depression and frequent electroshock treatments at the Mayo Clinic. He had been in a bad way most days since he and his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, had left Cuba in the summer of 1960. Some said that he had been failing even longer than that. His eyesight was poor. He had trouble working. A. E. Hotchner, one of his closest friends and collaborators, visited Papa in Cuba in early 1960 and described him as confused and hesitant. He was heavily medicated and also self-medicating, and he had gone for the shotgun at least once before he used it. People like to use his own words to explain his suicide, especially quotes like “Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.” But the truth is that no one knew what was in his mind except him, and he took the secret with him when he went.
Ernest’s suicide was shocking to my father, in part because it was so common in his family. Back in the late nineteenth century, Ernest Hall—Ernest’s maternal grandfather—had put a Civil War–era pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. But the bullets had been removed by his son-in-law Clarence, my grandfather’s father. Though Clarence acted to prevent his father-in-law’s suicide, he had no one to stop him when he took his own life in 1928. My grandmother Elizabeth Hadley Richardson—the woman whose name my father and I both carried—had lost her father, James Richardson Jr., in the same way back in 1903. In both cases, financial pressures were involved, though it’s strange to call that the cause of something as fundamentally inexplicable as suicide. Others would follow. Ursula Hemingway, my grandfather’s younger sister, would die of a drug overdose in 1966 after battling cancer. And Leicester Hemingway, his younger brother, would use a pistol to end his life in 1982.
None of those things were mentioned at Ernest Hemingway Elementary School. Any inkling I had of the suicide came from the party that his widow Mary still held for him every summer. It was a strange event, to say the least — a birthday celebration for a man who was no longer alive. People shared remembrances and offered tributes; most of them were memories of drinking with Papa. At one of those parties, I overheard my father in conversation with another man, talking more openly about his father’s suicide. But even once I was able to piece together what had happened to Ernest, I don’t think I had anything close to an appreciation of his adult pain and the sense of hopelessness he must have felt as his ability to engage in life ebbed, and the writing that he thought depended upon that engagement ebbed along with it. How could I possibly understand? People in Ketchum weren’t sad that he had killed himself, not really. He had left behind a great deal of celebrity for this little town of a few thousand people. Most of them weren’t related to him and couldn’t be expected to feel any connection beyond fame or literature. Even within the family, he had a strange status. Grandfathers weren’t quite real beings. My mother’s father had died when I was very young, and I had a persistent vision of him burning up in a fire while we were visiting him, though that wasn’t what had happened at all. However I processed death and departure, it wasn’t straightforward; grandfathers were mystical beings who existed beyond what could be known and explained.
But Ernest was a presence, always, especially in Ketchum and Sun Valley. When I was on the ski lift, heading up the mountain, I would sometimes be paired with adults who weren’t locals. When they asked me my name, I would answer politely. They would blink and repeat it: “Hemingway?” After that came a furrowed brow, then a pause, then a smooth brow, then a nod of significance and admiration. At seven or eight, I wasn’t sure what I had done to deserve it.
Other than that, my relationship with my grandfather was like that of any other kid: his books came to me in the classroom and the library. I read The Old Man and the Sea in grade school and thought that in my naïve childhood way I really understood him, that I had a special access to him that no one else did. But that thought, even at the time, passed quickly: I wrote it off as a kind of self-absorption, as the feeling that I wanted everyone to see me at the center of the universe at the same time that I wanted to remain invisible.
4
THE FATHER IN THE HOSPITAL
“MARIEL,” MY FATHER SAID. “WAKE UP.”
I turned in bed, opened my eyes, and closed them again immediately. It was either too late or too early. Either way, I wasn’t moving.
&
nbsp; “Come on,” my mother said. “Let’s go.” I blinked and looked around my room: white bedspread, white dresser. It was pitch black outside the window. Was I sick? Had someone died? Were we moving again?
“Mariel,” my father said again. It was his quiet voice, not deep and loud like when he was mad, but scratchy, a little constricted. He was being gentle when he spoke and also when he put his arm on mine. He guided me downstairs and then up the driveway to the car. I slid into the backseat still in my pajamas. In the front seat, my mother and my father talked in rapid, hushed voices. I was still mostly asleep, so I picked out only the words I already knew: Muffet, problem, worried.
Muffet had made the move to Ketchum normally. She found herself a group of friends, did well in school, seemed to be going along like any other teenager. But here and there, we saw flashes of the behavior that had alarmed my parents in Mill Valley. And then I was rousted from my bed and packed into the car.
The voices in the front seat started to become frenetic and upset. My mother may have turned and pressed her face against the window. Before I knew it, we were in town. I saw my older sister running naked down the main street of Ketchum, a strange flowing scarf up over her head and the expression of someone who believed she could fly.
I wasn’t awake enough to be scared. The whole thing was dreamlike, but I definitely knew that something was wrong. My father got her into the car, which involved more than a little wrangling, since Muffet was possessed by an idea of herself that couldn’t be contained or controlled.
At home, she kept insisting that she had only taken one hit of acid. The next day, the doctor came and gave her a shot, and she slept for two days. After that, she was sent away to school. The house was lonely, and Muffet’s strangely calming presence evaporated without her. My father became more withdrawn. My mother became more brittle and critical. Margot wasn’t the kind of person to calm things down—she liked to spark conflict—and she was already away at boarding school, so the day when Muffet was sent away may have been the beginning of my official role as the family’s peacemaker and facilitator. None of these things are precise. It’s not like an election, in which candidates throw their hats into the ring, the votes are counted, and a winner is declared. Family roles evolve. But I know that when Muffet went to school, I quickly became more aware of my parents’ frailties and conflicts, along with the fact that someone in the house had to provide order and stability. I was only eight years old and not ready for any real responsibilities like this, but they were falling to me nevertheless.
After a little while, we went to visit Muffet, and that’s when I found out that the school was in fact a different kind of place—a hospital up north where people went who had “mental difficulties.” What were mental difficulties? I wasn’t sure, but it seemed like Muffet had them.
The place was called Blackfoot, and when we arrived, we had to wait outside a building that had big black iron bars on the windows. Muffet came out in full American Indian regalia: high moccasins, a short leather skirt, hair in braids, everything beaded and fringed. Her skin had turned yellow from the drugs she was taking. We took her out of Blackfoot and brought her home, at which point she immediately stopped taking her medication, which she said saddened and dulled her. That launched her on a cycle that would characterize the rest of her life, right up to the present: she would act in ways that people deemed normal for a little while, act in ways that alarmed people for a little while, provoke response, receive treatment, reject treatment, act normal for a little while. No matter how she acted, Muffet never scared me. She was my sister and she loved me, and she was generous and smart and entertaining. But even as a young child, I knew there was something wrong, even before people started using words like “schizophrenia.” She spoke in different voices. She claimed to hear voices. She was violent only very rarely, though I remember she once held scissors near my mother’s neck. For the most part, she was the Muffet I had always known, but with less control and regulation and a greater sense of vulnerability.
Muffet’s departure not only promoted me into the center of the family but also indirectly recharged her competition with Margot. My family was all about whose problems were able to draw the most notice, and when Muffet got sick, Margot got even angrier—worried for her sister, of course, but furious that there was now another obstacle preventing her from being the center of attention.
When Margot was back from boarding school, she was even bossier with me. She wouldn’t let me use the bathroom or open the refrigerator on my own. “I hate you,” she said. “You’re a little tattletale.” She was right in one respect: she ate strange foods like Mars bars and Cheetos, sometimes even hiding them under her bed. That infuriated my mother, and it bothered me too. I couldn’t stand the idea of food kept so close to the floor. “Why do you have to go and tell Mom?” she asked. “No one should ever trust you.”
Margot would grab her coat and rush out the front door. “I may or may not be back,” she’d say. When she wasn’t at home, she was at the house of a friend, maybe on a basement couch with a boy who had his hand up her shirt. She had a reputation in town for being loose, which wasn’t a word I even really understood, except that it made me feel dirty and wrong. Sex wasn’t on my mind yet, but Margot’s example pushed it even further away. Her behavior worked on me as a negative example. It made me want to be a better girl, a different girl, clean in mind and body.
* * *
THE DOG PAWED EXCITEDLY at a spot by the front door. It was Elsa, our yellow Lab, and she could tell that my dad was getting ready for an all-day hike in the mountains. He was dressed in what we thought of as his uniform: khaki corduroys, fishing shirt with buttons and pockets, medium-weight jacket with more pockets, brown boots. They were meeting a friend of his and going to high altitude. “See you later,” he said, and he and Elsa went out the door.
Elsa came back in the late afternoon. My father followed her by a few steps. But he didn’t say hello or tell us stories about the mountain. “I don’t feel well,” he said, and sat down in the chair. “I have a tightness here.” He drew a line across his chest with his right index finger.
“You shouldn’t smoke,” my mother said, though he wasn’t smoking at the moment. “It’s probably that or stress.”
My father didn’t answer. He didn’t look at my mother directly. That wasn’t uncommon—it usually took him a while to take the bait—but the expression on his face was grim. He was rubbed his left arm from the shoulder to the elbow. “It’s numb,” he said. His face was gray like cardboard. “I think I’m dying,” he said.
My mother opened her mouth to give more unsolicited advice, but something in his tone scared her. She moved quickly to his side and got an arm around him and helped him up out of his chair. We hustled him to the car and drove to Moritz Hospital in Sun Valley. The doctor, who was a fishing buddy of my father’s, determined that my father was having a heart attack. “No question,” he said. “It’s a good thing you got him here quickly.”
To a kid, a heart attack is the scariest illness imaginable. It’s simple and vivid. Your heart, which is what keeps you alive, decides that it hates you for some reason and attacks you. We all had a mental picture of someone who was having one, probably from movies: a man would widen his eyes, clutch his chest, and drop dead. It wasn’t until my father’s heart attack that I even understood that it was something you could survive.
My father was in the hospital for six weeks or so, resting and recuperating. The kids weren’t allowed to see him, for the most part, although the nurses snuck me in a few times. “Daddy,” I said, my voice fluttering. He would always smile at me, though the smile seemed weak. And he would always console me. “It’ll be fine,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back home soon.” The strangest thing about my father being away was the smell in the house. My mother was terrified, and that made her cook more, and the foods she cooked were all the American foods she loved that my father resisted: fried chicken, chops, macaroni and ch
eese. One of my clearest memories about my father’s heart attack is the smell of lamb chops filling the house.
One night, at dinner, my mother said she had news about Daddy. I tensed up. Was it bad news? It wasn’t. It was great news: he was coming home the very next day. We cleaned up the house, and I went to sleep excited and grateful.
But my father returned a different man, with different rules. He had to quit smoking, which meant that he wanted my mother to quit too. She complied as long as she was in sight, but she would sneak cigarettes in the tiny laundry room, which was the size of a closet; she didn’t open the windows when she was in there, so when she came out, billows of smoke would follow her.
My father also had to eat healthier, so butter disappeared and came back in the form of margarine, which tasted like plastic (and it turns out, was one ingredient away from being plastic). I liked the Imperial Margarine man, though: he wore a big red crown and was king of his castle. My father followed the Imperial Margarine man’s lead. When he came back from the hospital, he placed himself in charge of everything. There was to be no more stress, no more arguing, no questioning his authority. “That’s enough,” he’d say, and it had to be enough. He wasn’t allowed to get upset.
My father’s heart attack also meant an end to his drinking—in theory. What it meant, really, was that the drinking shifted from hard liquor to wine, which was considered a milder and even healthier form of alcohol. We evolved a drinking ritual called Wine Time. It happened at five o’clock in the evening, though they had one of those gag clocks that said five o’clock all the way around. At Wine Time, a huge bottle of red wine suddenly appeared, and everyone was given a glass. Muffet—when she was back—drank right along with my parents, as did Margot. To make sure the wine was at its healthiest, they would put ice in it, which I guess took the edge off. And that’s how it went: glasses of watered-down red wine, one after the other.
Out Came the Sun Page 4