Hemingway's Boat (60 page)

After eight years at the magazine, and a proven record of productivity, Walter gets the okay from his bosses to transfer to the Los Angeles office. His parents, aging, are in Van Nuys, out in the Valley, and this has something to do with the urge to get south. Walter hears about a hillside house, three thousand square feet, across from a golf course, twenty-five miles from downtown LA. It has overhead radiant heat, lots of glass, soaring ceilings. It's not a custom design, rather a “builder home,” sort of like a long-ago stock boat that came sliding off the banana-greased wooden ways at Coney Island Creek, and whose original proprietors have only recently given up the family's proud boating ghost.

Always something of an outdoorsman, Walter becomes a nature writer as well as an expert on western homes. No question his journalism helps raise a consciousness for preservation of Southern California's natural resources. Things go along—except they don't: In 1976, after he's been running the Los Angeles office for thirteen years and has been at
Sunset
for twenty-one years, he's fired. The loner had become openly disdainful of corporate politics and risen too high up on the pay scale.

He decides not to fight it legally. He has lots of contacts and in short order converts himself into a successful freelancer. He specializes in travel stories about Mexico and particularly about Baja California. He gets standing
assignments with in-flight magazines, with
Travel-Holiday
, with
Westways
(West Coast organ of the American Automobile Association). To Mexico alone, he makes something like sixty reporting trips. He turns himself into a good photographer. He becomes expert on the whale lagoons. He has to be his own bookkeeper. Constantly, he's pitching editors. He's his own travel agent. There are lengthy absences from home. The strains seem more or less manageable until Nita's health begins to decline. Her decline, starting in the mid-eighties, well after the kids have left the house, more or less coincides with the decline of Walter's career. In her great essay about New York City, “Goodbye to All That,” Joan Didion writes about how it's impossible to lay one's finger “upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”

Editors stop calling, sources dry up, magazines change hands. Walter's brand of utterly trustworthy, fact-driven copy doesn't seem to be what editors want anymore. And Nita's decline? More or less the same slow attrition.

In the last two years of her life, when Walter's new job became that of tending her full-time, Nita was seeing six specialists in addition to her internist—almost weekly. Sarcoidosis in her lungs. Insulin-dependent diabetes. A failing heart. Then it was the liquid oxygen tanks standing in a corner of the living room with their long plastic tubes running along the baseboards into the sickroom.

And Ernest Hemingway? In those first few years after Havana, Walter and Nita would get cards at holidays with brief messages from both Hemingways. But Walter and Nita had their lives. They were raising their children. As the years passed, Nita also grew to feel very possessive of Papa—she'd been there first, hadn't she? Wasn't it her Papa truly cared about? Would Hemingway even remember him? Nita had never read many of Papa's books, nor did she need to. Walter, on the other hand, could now recite Hemingway passages by heart. But in a curious way, a husband and wife, in their loving marriage, found themselves nearly unable to talk about the man or even the country that had so touched their lives. To their kids, yes, they could talk about Hemingway and Cuba, but to them it was ancient history.

In 1964, three years after the suicide (Walter can't remember where he
was when he got the news, only that he was shocked and yet somehow wasn't), Nita had gotten a letter from Professor Carlos Baker at Princeton. He was working on his Hemingway biography, and did she have any of Hemingway's correspondence? In a shoe box in the garage, Nita found three of her old steno notebooks. The pages were soft as lanolin, and the blue and black ink of her shorthand was very faded but she could read the words. She remembered how, in that first week or two, Papa's dictation had been pretty stilted. Then, stopping, he said, “Daughter, do you mind if I use four-letter words here?” After that, his letters loosened up considerably. She'd always worked sequentially through her notebooks, filling up the pages, one side at a time. She'd get to the end of the book, come back the other way. After she had transcribed a page, she'd draw a big X through the sheet. Here was a letter from October 1949 that she'd taken off the talk machine and put down first in shorthand. Papa was writing to an insurance agent regarding a mink coat he'd just bought for his wife. “Mrs. Hemingway wants to insure a mink coat which she has just purchased from Marshall Field & Co., natural wild mink, 43 inch length, with cuffs three pelts deep for $4,735.00 against all risk (sea, air and land) including theft, any form of damage, etc., good for all countries. The coat is at present in cold storage in a fur cold storage house here in Cuba.” That was Papa, all right, with his beautiful detail. Did Nita know that Operation Mink Coat, as Hemingway called it, had come about as a makeup present to his wife for the terrible things he was saying to her in the spring and summer of '49 during the writing of
Across the River
? Mary had come back from Chicago in early October with the coat on her arm. Her husband met her at the airport with frozen daiquiris, and they had downed them in the backseat on the ride to the
finca
. But the reunion had fouled when Mary discovered that, in her absence, Hemingway had had his teenage whore, Xenophobia, out to the house about three times.

In that same shoebox in the garage, Nita had found an old, yellowed single sheet of white paper with Hemingway's signature on it in four forms—for her to use to sign letters if he wasn't available. There was “Mister Papa,” “Ernest,” “Ernest Hemingway,” and “Ernie.” She'd become a pretty skilled signer.

She had opened another box of her Cuba things that had survived all the years and moves, and there were some of her old letters to
him
. This one, for instance, typed on Papa's portable. It's February 26, 1950, and the Hemingways are abroad, and she's been helping to hold down the fort at the
finca
. He has sent her a list of questions, and she's answering them in
numerical order: “We have had several good rains which have helped considerably. The garden is beautiful and all sorts of vegetables are on hand. The boat is completely rejuvenated and Gregorio told me several weeks ago that everything is in applie-pie order (I mean to say apple-pie).” Next page: “Papa, please don't forget to send Abercrombie & Fitch a check—they just sent another bill with a gentle reminder.” And a month later, March 28, 1950, catching the travelers up on all the news, and adding a word about Papa's youngest son, who's been on a visit: “Will certainly miss Gigi when he leaves. He's a sweet boy and will have no trouble breaking a few female hearts.”

That same year, 1964, when Nita had first heard from Professor Baker, she had also gotten a letter from Mary Hemingway, who was living at 27 East Sixty-fifth Street in New York. “We're letting Pilar rot away in Cuba because I know Papa couldn't bear the thought of anyone else being her ‘commander,' ” Mary had said.

In the late eighties, when it was clear that his wife was dying, Walter gently suggested they should try to produce a joint memoir of their time in Cuba, with Hemingway at the center. Nita nodded. Walter wrote the text, interpolating long Nita passages set off by quotation marks. In the way that she had found several of her old steno books, he rooted around and found some of his old Havana diaries. But the pages were badly disintegrating, so he retyped selected portions without editing or otherwise polishing them. The manuscript that emerged, from both memory and documents, was modest in size and titled “Havana and Hemingway: A Mid-Century Memoir.” Walter sent it to a dozen publishers. He was dreaming of getting it into print before Nita died. Every publisher sent it back with notes to the effect of, we don't really do regional stuff, or, sorry, it's a little too narrow for our needs. I've read this manuscript, and what seems closer to the truth is that there just wasn't enough Hemingway dirt.

After Nita died, Walter tended to stay in more and more. He'd never joined clubs or attended churches. Widows and matchmaking friends of widows were calling up, but he wasn't interested. He liked going to the Saturday morning organic farmers' market down in Calabasas. Avoiding the freeways, he'd cruise at forty miles an hour in his spotless 1984 Honda Accord, which he otherwise kept in his locked and spotless garage. He took his walks. He obsessively cleaned the house. He organized his old travel slides. He created a rack by the front door where he lined up dozens of old
Sunsets
and in-flights with his pieces in them. More than once, giving fits to neighbors, he got up on his roof via a stepladder and started whacking
away at tree branches with a pruner. From a neighbor, who tended to look after him, he got a cast-off Ping-Pong table and brought it to the basement and cut down the legs and spread out huge nautical maps. He wanted to begin charting Thomas Hudson's submarine pursuits in
Islands in the Stream
. With his exquisitely sharpened pencil, he'd bend over the maps for hours, with the deeply annotated text beside him. On the maps he'd enter his calculations: “Soundings in Fathoms. Soundings in Meters.” This work eventually led to a nearly book-length manuscript, “A Sailor Looks at Hemingway's Islands,” which got into academic print. Other manuscripts—about growing up in Los Angeles, for instance—got drafted and put into neat red binders with clear plastic covers. Walter didn't bother to send them out. He was writing these manuscripts for himself, or his children.

They came to visit, though not all that often. Who can ever know from the outside all the tensions that root up inside families as they seek to nourish and wound each other? The core explanation here seems to be that Paul Houk and Tina Houk feel they were emotionally deprived of a dad when they grew up. Walter was too involved with his career, and, in another way, with his spouse. There were and are other issues, too. All of it is sad, and none of it is nefarious. One night, on the way back from dinner, Walter said softly, almost from nowhere: “I'm inclined to say I wasn't very good at parenting. Nita was so much better. You don't get another chance at that. It's not coming back.” After a while: “I just wasn't made for the twenty-first century.”

In these widowed years, Walter had ventured out once to a Hemingway conference, in Colorado Springs. By chance he'd found himself seated at a dinner next to the editor of
North Dakota Quarterly
. It was as if Robert Lewis (that was the editor's name) understood completely about Walter. “Why don't you try contributing something to one of our special Hemingway issues?” he asked. This offer turned into the 1998 memoir piece, “On the Gulf Stream Aboard Hemingway's
Pilar
,” the one I accidentally pulled down from a library shelf in Philadelphia six years after its publication. Several other
NDQ
pieces followed, including the long one about Hemingway's islands. In modest ways, Walter, the breathing witness, had begun to feel himself “drawn in,” as he likes to say, to the scholarly Hemingway universe.

One afternoon Walter and I were on a walk in the neighborhood when we ran into a friendly girl from Cleveland with a big dog. Determined to check my hunches, I asked, “Did you know Walter was once an intimate
of Ernest Hemingway?” I thought she was going to hyperventilate. “But, Walter, you never told me this!” she cried. Although he pretended otherwise, I think Walter was pleased.

On July 23, two days after Walter had been on
Pilar
for the first time, he wrote in his journal: “I climbed aboard Pilar Saturday (July 21) for the long-awaited fishing trip.”

In the previous seventeen days, Walter and Nita had been guests at the
finca
three times—on two Sundays and on the Fourth of July. Those were lubricated times, punctuated by cooling swims in the pool, and by the boisterous mood of the head of the house, but they weren't anything like an outing on
Pilar
. The sailor-diplomat was just dying to be on
Pilar
. The day before he got his wish, Hemingway had written to Charlie Scribner. He'd been distinctly nonboisterous; mortality seemed the underlying note. He'd talked about the Sea book, and its various parts, semi-complete. (He still thought of it as a four-part story, with the Santiago tale a kind of coda to the whole.) He'd said he wanted Scribner to know what was in his publishing mind “in case of my death.” Several paragraphs down: “My chances of living to complete the book are excellent according to my doctor. However, I have worked so hard in the last six months that I know I need a rest.” It had been a searing July, with the temperature above ninety almost every day, and he now had a case of permanent prickly heat. At the end of the letter he'd spoken of not being able to “get away from the book.” But he'd also noted that he'd been able to put 250 pounds of dolphin and kingfish into the Deepfreeze. In his postscript: “Tomorrow is my birthday and I am going fishing.” He hadn't told Charlie of the two “kids” he was taking fishing.

It was relatively cool that Saturday morning as the small boating party, in a gently rolling sea, and with a line of thin cirrus clouds on the horizon, stood down the channel past the Morro Castle. Mary wasn't aboard—she was once again up in the States. Rains had come in the night before, sending sheets of fresh water across the top of the waves. The man at the wheel, who'd just made fifty-two, told Walter and Nita that he was going to take her out farther than usual, because that's where the fish would be. (They weren't.) Gregorio rigged the baits. Soon they were in deep blue water, with the drifts of sargasso coming by. Walter's words about that day, from that first piece in
North Dakota Quarterly:
“Out here and sufficient to ourselves, large questions of world destiny, high art or philosophy were less
absorbing than the need to watch a squadron of flying fish planing above the water. Those in-transit butterflies flitting above the billowing surface, expending as much energy in vertical as in forward movement, fixed our attention.”