Hemingway's Boat (59 page)

He signed it, “Mary sends her love to you and to Vera. Best always, Ernest.”

On the day I handed this letter to Walter, he was wearing a V-neck cotton sweater, khakis, denim shirt, sneakers, thin-stemmed stylish glasses—an old man clad like a hip, athletic young man. He doesn't weigh 140 pounds now. He was sitting in near darkness in his usual chair. He'd never
known of the letter. He coughed a couple times, nodded slowly, kept reading, didn't speak, handed it back.
^†

Nita had been working for Hemingway for about ten days. She'd been nervous enough, on that first night they'd met (he'd insisted she stay to supper), to blurt, after one or two glasses of wine, that she'd always had a secret desire to be a blond. “Well, I can help you with that, daughter,” he'd said. Next thing Nita knew, Mary Hemingway had shown up at the embassy to tell her that things were all set for the following Wednesday. She rode the bus out from town that day, and Papa greeted her at the door and led her to the bathroom. He sat her on a stool and draped her in towels and sheets. Mary was close by. So was a Cuban beautician named Lili who regularly worked on Mary's nails and hair and who'd come out from town especially for this. He told her to relax. He said he'd had personal training in hair-blonding from the folks at Alberto Culver VO-5 in Los Angeles, when he and his ex-wife, Martha, were on their way to China in 1941. He was standing over her, working from behind. She could feel the stuff, cool and gelatinous-seeming, seeping in. It felt like soapsuds, but thicker. He told her the job would take a little while, so she should just sit there, he'd
be back shortly. He said, “I think I better warn you, daughter, that sometimes these first bleach jobs turn out to be … orange.”

Nita's hair didn't come out orange at all. “Oh, daughter,” he said, “it's beautiful, look at yourself.” She stayed to dinner and rode the bus happily back to her boardinghouse and walked in the door to hear her roommate scream.

A week or so later, again at supper, Hemingway said she should complete her new look and have her hair sheared off like a boy's. No worries, he had shaped his wife's brown hair into its fine boy-blondness. Mary was away from the
finca
that night. Again he led Nita to the master bathroom, sat her on the stool, began to scissor it off in clumps.

I remember the first time this story came up between Walter and me. We were looking at a family photo album. I was new in my visits to Woodland Hills. Walter turned the page, and there was his late wife out on
Pilar
, in the fighting chair, turning toward the camera, wearing a plaid blouse and a huge smile, with her wrinkly shorts hiked up her raised thigh. She was so young and attractive. Even in monochrome, you could tell how blond her hair was. It looked almost white. It was a helmet of hair, with the sides cut very short, streaked-looking, wind-blown, limp from the salt air. The caption said: “On board Pilar—after I caught my first fish. Summer 1949.”

Walter said, not exactly in a rush, and in a voice I hadn't quite heard before, “And that's Nita. With bleached hair. Papa dyed it. Then he cut it. I didn't know her yet. It stayed that way until family members saw it when she was home on a visit and didn't approve and then she got rid of it and let it grow out.”

A day later, he supplied additional details, warily. I kept nudging. He shrugged, and there was irritation in it. The shrug was saying:
It's somebody else's problem. I don't have to worry about it. It doesn't concern me
. In the years I've known Walter, I've come fully to know this shrug, and the small silences that follow. There's a line I know I can't cross.

Still, it seems impossible there wasn't some kind of deep erotic gratification playing out in the fingers and mind of the man standing behind his new secretarial daughter and kneading and massaging in the bleaching formula. You can't read Ernest Hemingway even half-seriously without becoming aware of his fixation with hair. Scholarly forests have been clear-cut in the service of explaining his so-called fetishes, but most especially his hair fetish. In
A Farewell to Arms
, Hemingway wrote: “Catherine
was still in the hair-dresser's shop. The woman was waving her hair. I sat in the little booth and watched. It was exciting to watch and Catherine smiled and talked to me and my voice was a little thick from being excited.” (Relatively speaking, that lustrous novel is full of hair fetishism.) In the story “The Last Good Country,” a little sister, who has always wanted to be a boy, and who has run away to the woods with her hero-brother, has taken off her hair in clumps. Her brother is getting their supper in the trout stream. When Nickie comes up to the lean-to, Littless is lying on her side. “Do I look like a boy?” she asks. “It's very exciting,” she says. “Now I'm your sister but I'm a boy, too. Do you think it will change me into a boy?” In
The Garden of Eden
—the novel the psychobabblers fairly salivate over, without stopping to ponder what kind of courage, literary and otherwise, it must have taken for someone to attempt such a book in the first place, knowing that one day, when he wasn't around, it would get so dissected—the narrator says early in the story: “Her hair was cropped as short as a boy's. It was cut with no compromises. It was brushed back, heavy as always, but the sides were cut short and the ears that grew close to her head were clear and the tawny line of her hair was cropped close to her head and smooth and sweeping back.” Catherine Bourne has just been to a hairdresser and is now showing her husband what she's secretly done. “You see,” she says to David, “That's the surprise. I'm a girl. But now I'm a boy too and I can do anything and anything and anything.” That night, in bed, something very strange and vague and apparently role-changing happens between these honeymooners, who've come down on the train from Paris with their bicycles and are now in the seaside village of le Grau du Roi. The strange “changing” thing happens again, several nights later. After, Catherine whispers, “Now we have done it. Now we really have done it,” and her husband thinks to himself, yes, “Now we have really done it.” But what exactly
has
this deeply tanned couple—who'll soon be getting twin haircuts and dying their hair to the same whiteness and dressing in their lookalike peasant fisherman shirts and linen trousers and espadrilles—done? Again, forests have been slain to “answer” that question.

In real life, in 1947, in a period of extraordinary stress, here's something that novel's creator did: he took a bottle of shampooing dye and turned his hair red. He did it sometime during the night of May 13–14. His wife was in the States, tending to her infirm father. He started on a “test piece” of his scalp, went for the whole head. “So I thought, what the hell. I'll make it really red for my kitten, and left on 45 minutes … and naturally in the morning I was spooked shitless—and then thought what the hell.” This is
from a letter to Mary Hemingway in the daylight of May 14. Hemingway told the startled servants he'd mistakenly used an old bottle of Miss Martha's shampoo. But the letter gives the lie.
^‡

In the late summer of 1949, wondering how she might give the lie to her family, Nita Jensen was about to go on home leave. Her part-time employer, for whom she'd been working for roughly three months, convinced her she needed a retouching. But this time the blonding came out ghastly. She felt like a floozy. At home her sister introduced her as Harpo Marx. Her mother came crying into her bedroom to beg her to go back to what she was. She went to a Baltimore hairdresser, who tried to make her hair brown again, but that only made things worse. Meantime, she got a letter from Cuba. “Don't let anybody bluff you out of what colour your hair is,” Hemingway said. Outdoing himself with his quirky spelling, he said that “my eye-seight having been blinded at an early and late age by looking at Miss Mary, Miss Marlene and Miss Ingrid,” but he was still pretty sure, “through my astygmatic, bi-focallism that you look lovely.” When she got back, her hair was in three colors. She began to let it grow out and to return to its natural color, although that took some months and plenty of jokes around the office. Hemingway allowed—just once—that he was disappointed she'd been talked out of her boy-blondness. The subject never came up again.

A seduction try: It happened after Nita had been taking his dictation and typing his letters for perhaps a month (before that trip home to Maryland). Mary had seemed to grow testy around her. At lunch Hemingway said, “I have an idea. We'll go out on the boat this afternoon and work from there. We'll take a pile of mail.” Great, Nita said, turning to Mary to ask, “What time will we leave?” Mary said, “I'm not going.” Hemingway seemed in a hurry to finish his food. Nita felt growing panic. Juan drove them to the waterfront. Gregorio was waiting at the boat. Hemingway steered out of the harbor. He stamped his foot three times so that Gregorio, up top, would know to take over. Hemingway came over and
sat down beside her on the wide padded cushion on the starboard side. From her purse she took out her steno pad and fountain pen. “Daughter, I have a better idea,” he said. “Why don't we just enjoy the Stream?” He moved in closer. Silence. His voice was gentle. “Daughter, has anyone ever made really good love to you?” She felt herself trembling. “I don't know, Papa,” she said. Neither spoke. After a little while, Hemingway got up and stamped three times and took the lower wheel and turned the boat around. They were back at the
finca
in about an hour.

Only when Walter's wife was becoming an invalid, in the late 1980s, did Walter learn this story. “Isn't the Catholic Church set up for sinners, not saints?” he said once. “That's my assessment. If anything, he grew more protective of her, paternal. To me it's all pretty much in character—both the trying and the not holding a grudge.” He said he was almost certain that Mary was testy with Nita before the try because Hemingway had told his wife he wanted Nita, and intended to try, and Mary could like it or lump it. When they arrived back at the
finca
so soon, Mary knew Nita had passed a test. “Nita wasn't inexperienced sexually,” Walter said. “But she wouldn't try that, for many reasons. He was ‘Papa.' To her, Papa was old.” The seduction try never came up again.

The shark story. Nita has known him for not quite a year. “Beautiful Nita, my Secretary” is the way he has just described her in a letter typed by his own hand. He and his wife and Nita are out on
Pilar
today and have come into a cove for lunch and a swim and a siesta. Nita gets up and dives off the stern and swims to shore. She sees a dark shadow in the green shallows and screams. Hemingway, stretched out on his daybed with a book, jumps up, tears off his shirt and glasses. He puts his hunting knife between his teeth. He reaches Nita, places himself between her and the shadow, and together they swim very fast back to
Pilar
. Gregorio is on the bow with one of the rifles. But the shark has already finned away. “Nothing nasty he ever could have done or said to his wife in Nita's presence could have bothered her after that,” Walter told me once. It wasn't long afterward that Nita witnessed a fight on
Pilar
between Hemingway and his wife. Mary was throwing plates and screaming, Hemingway ducking and cursing back. Nita hid this story from Walter for years. “She needn't have,” he said.

On Sunday evening, August 24, 1952, with most of their belongings already packed, Walter and Nita, married for four months, drove out to the
finca
to say good-bye. In nine days they'd be leaving for a new diplomatic
assignment. In eight days, editors at
Life
would be putting into circulation more than five million copies of
The Old Man and the Sea
, having paid $40,000 for first serial rights to be able to publish the entire novella across twenty pages of their September 1 issue; the magazine would sell out almost instantly. That night, Hemingway gave the Houks one of his ten advance copies of the book—the box had just come from Scribner's. (The first printing of fifty thousand copies was going to sell out, too.) He wrote on the flyleaf, “To Nita and Walter, Wishing them good luck in Japan or wherever. Affectionately, Ernest Hemingway.” Half a century onward, a California widower, living on Social Security and a small pension, would offer that book, and two inscribed others, for sale through Sotheby's auction house in New York. “It's okay,” the widower would say. “You can't take it with you. Besides, my fixed income needs fixing.” (The auction brought far less money than Walter had dreamed.)

Home that night, Nita went tearfully to sleep, while Walter, on the other side of the bed, angled the gooseneck lamp down low and read the story to its end. He cried.

They rode the Havana car ferry to Miami, drove northward to Maryland, visited family, turned west, headed across the country to Los Angeles to visit family again. They drove on to San Francisco, loaded the Buick onto the SS
President Wilson
, sailed for Honolulu, called on Hemingway's sister Ursula (fourteen years from her suicide), tossed leis into the water (so that they'd come back), continued on their thirteen-day sea voyage to Yokahama. From there they made their way by land to their new home in Tokyo.
^§

Walter's now the junior man in the political section of the American Embassy, a much larger operation than Havana's. It's not that he doesn't enjoy the work, or that he and his wife aren't stimulated by the Orient, but an old family gene of restlessness seems at work. Within a year their son, Paul, is born. Within another year, Walter, who's begun to wonder about the viability of a diplomatic career, and who's never quite gotten out of his system the itch to see if he can make it as a painter (there had been at least one show at a gallery in Havana, but it wasn't terribly successful, and the Hemingways had meant to attend that night, but didn't, and were very apologetic afterward), has convinced his wife he should resign from the
government and that they should head home. They land in Menlo Park, California. (Nita has family in Northern California.) Now Walter's in a rented detached garage with his oils. He has allowed himself a year to see if he can make this thing work. He holds a show at a department store, but there's little critical notice and fewer buyers. His semi-abstracts have boldness and a technical precision, and maybe that's the problem: it's as if a humanist is at war with a technocrat. His year is up. It's 1955. He needs a job. From a family friend, who's in personnel at
Sunset
magazine—the great bible of western living—he hears of an opening for a travel writer.
Sunset
's headquarters are nearby. For the rest of his working life, he'll function as a West Coast journalist, for a long while as a salaried employee, later as a freelancer. He's an extremely meticulous journalist. The rage to get it right to the last comma of every fact must have something to do with the scientific side of his brain, but often, it must be said, this rage costs him any real storytelling emotion. In any case, in short order Walter is writing authoritative pieces about homes and homeowners. He becomes the magazine's building editor. He and his family relocate—from Menlo Park to Redwood City to an old farmhouse in a onetime prune-plum orchard. A second child, Tina, has joined the family.