Hemingway's Boat (47 page)

One manifestation of how badly Ed Hemingway was being taken down by his fraying nerves was his propensity to erupt into red rage and physical violence during Hemingway's teenage years—and earlier, too. It wasn't uncommon for the Hemingway children to be razor-strapped and then commanded to get down on their knees and ask God for forgiveness. Children in moralistic, faith-heavy midwestern households of the early and mid-twentieth century were known to be strapped by their parents. But the degree of
this
corporal punishment, which is what it was often called, by ministers in the Sunday pulpit and by sleeve-rolling fathers reaching for the belt, seems beyond the common and the civilized by any standard. In
her family memoir, Hemingway's sister Marcelline wrote about the beatings—it's one of her moments of true candor. She calls her father a “strict disciplinarian.” She insists he “was never cruel.” But in the same paragraph she contradicts herself. The behavior she describes sounds like incipient—or even arrived—bipolarism.

In 2002, a now-deceased Oak Park Hemingway scholar named Morris Buske, in a piece titled “Hemingway Faces God,” published excerpts of manuscript passages that Marcelline had omitted from her book. She'd written about the beatings that became “more violent” if you refused to give the doctor “the satisfaction of saying, ‘I'll be good' or ‘I'm sorry.' ” She spoke about her father becoming “so angry that he slapped at me with the strap.” She remembered him standing over her with the strap after he'd earlier discovered she'd been dancing at school. “My father awaited me in the living room, his back to the fireplace. His hands were clenched. His face red. Mother was there too, with a handkerchief in her hand. ‘I have told you I will not have dancing in my home. You are to promise me now that you will never do this wicked thing again.' ” Marcelline tried to protest that she hadn't even been dancing with a boy, just with another girl in her class who felt sorry for her because she didn't know how to dance. “ ‘But you wanted to dance.… I will not have it. No matter what your mother says. You will now get down on your knees and ask God to forgive you.' I knelt. I repeated the dictated words.… When I rose to my feet I saw my mother sobbing quietly in a corner of the room. She wouldn't look at my father.”

In “Fathers and Sons,” Hemingway writes of Nick coming home from a day's fishing and getting whipped for lying. “Afterward he had sat inside the woodshed with the door open, his shotgun loaded and cocked, looking across at his father sitting on the screen porch reading the paper, and thought, ‘I can blow him to hell. I can kill him.' Finally he felt his anger go out of him.”

You read that and you know why Hemingway couldn't whip his own children—all three Hemingway sons told me that. Once, when Jack Hemingway was about ten or eleven and was visiting his father and stepmother and half brothers in Key West, he did something horrible. Maybe he had filled the mosquito sprayer with tooth powder and sprayed one of his brothers. Maybe he'd spit at the maid because she had a land crab in her hat and was trying to terrify the bejesus out of them. He had to have a whipping—Pauline had said so. His father led him into the bathroom and sat him on the hopper and took down his own pants and proceeded to give himself whacks with a hairbrush. He motioned for the boy to fake some loud crying and pleading. “When we come out,” he whispered, “Mother will know you were punished.”

Hemingway's letter in
Esquire
in 1935, “Remembering Shooting-Flying: A Key West Letter,” is the one where he speaks of needing to move farther out and it making no difference what they do after you are gone. He remembers Oak Park and the gone prairie and the illegal pheasant he shot at the Evans game farm along the Des Plaines and of how “I came by there five years ago and where I shot that pheasant there was a hot dog place and filling station and the north prairie … was all a subdivision of mean houses, and in the town, the house where I was born was gone and they had cut down the oak trees and built an apartment house close out against the street. So I was glad I went away from there as soon as I did.”

He doesn't say so, but he is talking about the last time he ever saw Oak Park, at least that we know of. It was in December 1928, at his father's funeral. It wasn't true that they'd torn down the house where he was born. It's a wholly forgivable Hemingway lie, built on deeper truths, about loss, about fathers and sons.

Fathers and sons. In the fall of 1939, the father of Jack, Patrick, and Gregory Hemingway came out for the first time to the new mountain resort of Sun Valley, Idaho, and caught some feisty rainbows and cutthroats in the Lower Cottonwoods section of the Big Wood River. The next fall he came
out again, arranging for his boys to join him and his bride-to-be, Marty Gellhorn. He drove across the country with his friend Toby Bruce but shipped all his fly-fishing gear ahead of him on Railway Express in an old metal footlocker. Almost every piece of trout tackle he owned was in that trunk. Some of it went back to Michigan. Peering inside the footlocker when you were a kid was like looking into King Tut's tomb. There were Hardy reels and silk leaders and any size hook and just boxes and boxes of flies—Royal Coachmen, McGintys, pale evening duns, yellow woodcocks, gold-ribbed hare's ears. One of his rod cases had his name written on it in tiny black script: “Ernest Hemingway. Hardy Brothers Ltd., Alnwick, England.” The custom-made rod itself was a thing of wonder: a three-piece traveling rod, with a soft cork handle and green silk wrappings on its thin-wire British guides. It weighed three ounces. You lifted it out of its chamois-soft cloth rod sack, and jointed it up, and held it in front of you, and felt it quivering to your heartbeat. It was an indescribable thrill when your papa had picked you, over your brothers, to be the first one to get to open the King Tut trunk when that year's family vacation had finally commenced.

When Hemingway got out to Idaho that year, fall of 1940, the people at the depot told him the footlocker had been lost. Railway Express couldn't find it.

Jack Hemingway recounted this story. He was sixty-three, and his coarse mustache was straw yellow, like the bristles of an old shaving brush. He talked of many things, not all of them sad. But at the memory of the lost footlocker, his voice caught. “I think it just broke his spirit for trout,” he said. “He was stricken. He never really fished streams much after that.”

This was in the late eighties. Our paths didn't cross again. But some years later I heard the following story about Jack himself: Not long before he died, at seventy-seven, of a sudden complication from open-heart surgery, the former Mr. Bumby and his second wife were visiting Hemingway places in northern Michigan. They drove into Horton Bay and parked their rental car. Jack went into the general store, shyly introduced himself, bought some postcards with his father's photograph on them, and then walked the half mile or so down the road to the creek. He'd never seen it before. He walked into the meadow on the north side of the road, where the stream passes underneath the road, through a corrugated culvert. There's a small nature preserve on that side of the stream. It's a little swampy in there, squishy on your street shoes. The water is fairly deep and is cut with mossy banks and moves with a kind of deceptive listlessness.
Jack creaked down onto all fours. A grasshopper appeared in front of him. He reached over and imprisoned it gently between his first two knuckles. He stood up, walked back out of the meadow, came up into the light, crossed to the other side of the road, then edged down the steep bank to the south side of the creek, where the water, very much alive again, comes sluicing out of the culvert on its way into Lake Charlevoix. Jack got down on all fours again and leaned out over a rock worn smooth by all the water that had been rushing over it for who knows how long. The hopper was in his knuckles. He waited. He set it on the riffled surface. In an instant, a trout came up and took it.

This was in early September 2000. Three months later Jack was dead.

On October 2, 1951
,
at 6:10 p.m., a man in Cuba unable to sleep or work wrote a four-paragraph letter to his publisher in New York. His handwriting was shaky. Thirty-six hours earlier, at three o'clock in the morning, West Coast time, his ex-wife had died of shock on an operating table in Los Angeles. A few hours before she died, this man had had a screaming argument with her on the telephone. The argument was over the conduct of their son, a troubled, gifted boy. The newest trouble was that Gigi Hemingway—then nineteen, newly married, due to become a father in two more months, living on the West Coast and working in an airplane factory (he'd dropped out of college)—had just been arrested for entering the women's restroom of a movie theater in drag. It was the first such arrest, though hardly the first such expression of a compulsion that Pauline and Ernest Hemingway's son seemed unable to control. The news about the dressing up in women's clothes was a shock only in the sense that a public space had been involved, and that the police had come
.

No one can say for sure what terrible words passed between Gigi's parents on the telephone that Sunday night. (It was a little after 9:00 p.m., so just past midnight in Havana.) The gist of it from the Havana side of the staticky connection seems to have been: It's all your fault, you bitch, see how you've brought him up, you're corrupt and he's corrupt. According to Pauline's sister, Jinny, who is said to have been in the room in LA that evening with Pauline, but who can hardly be thought of as an impartial witness, Pauline was soon “shouting into the phone and sobbing uncontrollably”—those are words from Gregory Hemingway's memoir
, Papa.
Pauline was trying to defend herself against someone so very wicked with words. The conversation broke off. Pauline went to bed
.