Hemingway's Boat (62 page)

The dirty, scary, toothsome Hemingway grin had come all the way up. “Well, I am descended directly from Ernest Hemingway.”

The good and the affectionate and the just Patrick Hemingway, which is how his father fictionally described him in
Islands in the Stream,
said many startling and seemingly performance-based things before we'd gotten tired of talk and gone fishing
.

A day and a half later, in Ketchum, I was with the eldest son, Jack. That encounter, too, had its soft and anything-but-soft moments. And then, on the fifth day of the trip, when I was still in Idaho, the phone in my room rang and there he was on the other end: Gigi. For more than two weeks, I'd been trying to reach him. I'd left many messages at numbers in Montana, Florida, New York City. They weren't his phone numbers, but the numbers of people who were said to know him and to be in sporadic touch
.

He sounded very up. He said he was in Coconut Grove. He'd gotten my messages and was very sorry he hadn't been able to find the time to call back. “Lots of things going on,” he said. I asked if I could come. “Of course you can come, I'd enjoy talking about it, you know, life with Papa and all that, by the way, how are Jack and Pat, you've already seen them, you say, I'll bet the weather's great up there in Idaho, isn't it, you'll find it's hot as Christ down here, are you sure you really want to come?” He had seemed to say this in about two breaths
.

Within twenty minutes I had checked out of my hotel room and was driving very fast the four-plus hours it takes to get to Salt Lake City. I couldn't get on a flight to Florida until late the next morning. We didn't
meet until after eight o'clock that evening. By then his mood had crashed. Everything seemed seeping toward gloom and depression. But even in the gloom and depression, I'd encounter flashes of the old famous Gigi charm. The one in the family who fell like Lucifer possessed an extremely likable and caring side, which, from everything I know, he managed to hold on to, right up to the end, in pod 377 of cell 3C2 of the Miami-Dade County Women's Detention Center, which came fourteen years after that night
.

Gigi, sitting watch on bow of
Pilar
, Cayo Confites, Cuba, June 1943

A TV WAS ON
in an upstairs room, flickering patches of silver against the stucco walls of the stairwell. A copy of
M
magazine (“How to Feel GREAT”) was on the coffee table in the living room. So was a huge book of
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations
, opened in the middle and propped up like a missal at Mass. Spread out on the sofa was an old green flannel blanket, as if the physician, or former physician, had been trying to warm himself in the airless night. On the rug was a picture postcard, its face turned upward. Gregory Hancock Hemingway, MD, didn't pick up the card, just stepped over it.

Hanging down from the ceiling were some carved Haitian masks—scary as hell, the more so because it was so damned dark in the place.

“Let's go out back,” he said. “Perhaps a breeze will come in tonight.”

I was eyeing the masks. He laughed, a big, guttural, liquid laugh. Patrick's loud, high, and almost girlish laugh, and the way he'd stuck it in at weird moments, was still echoing. Of Gigi, Patrick had said, fairly breaking up: “The devils in him. There is something molten in him, demons roasting in fiery pits.” Jack's laugh, by contrast, which had seemed to punctuate every other sentence, was chiefly about his nervousness. This laugh had its own disconcerting Hemingway quality—something sardonic, for sure.

“Something, aren't they?” he said. “They're not mine, of course, they belong to the people who own this house. I'm just staying with them. I stay with a lot of people. By the way, I went to Haiti once. I remember walking into a hospital there, the pediatrics unit, and seeing twenty babies convulsing. It was an awful sight. At birth their mothers had rubbed their cords in cow dung. And no neonatal tetanus. It's a ritual.” It was as if the caregiver in him was repulsed, but the symbolist in him, the symbolist's son, was savoring the image.

He had on running shorts and sneakers and a white T-shirt with “Unicorn University” printed in orange on it. His stomach was heavy; the nails of his fingers were long and shiny. He had very muscular legs. His neck seemed hammered into his brawny shoulders. The huge, wide, dark eyes were sunk deep in the pouchy face. His hair was long and stringy, oily-looking. His stylish red-stem glasses were almost dainty. That morning,
while I was flying to meet him, he'd broken off a tooth right at gum level.

All night he drank Scotch, just pouring it in over the top of the water and not even stirring it with his fingers. “I've had seven nervous breakdowns,” he said at one point. Very low, almost as if he were trying to
whish-whish
it through the back of his mouth, in the way that a naturalist, son of a naturalist, might call to a shore bird: “I've tried so goddamn hard my whole life to get free of it.”

Earlier: “Yes, I had the most talent, I was the brightest, I could do so many of the things he loved most.” The statement hung. “I've been a doctor, that's something. I've written a little. That's something. And of course I guess you know that his father was a doctor, so a lot of people have drawn the point that I was only trying to please him.”

He kept crossing and uncrossing his legs—ladylike. The shorts would ride up high. It was almost seductive. Once, he crossed his legs, took off his glasses, plowed his hand through his hair like an old torch singer, and sighed. “He got into everybody's unconscious with his symbols. That's part of what he's about, you know.”

Just ahead of this: “Let's face it, any kid reaches a certain age where he wants to destroy his father and have his mother sexually. But this was impossible if you were a son of Ernest Hemingway. He was too large. I mean, on a basic psychological level, there was a time when you were just terrified of your old man because he was so much bigger than you were. In one sense, this never leaves you.”

With almost no pause: “I've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying not to be a transvestite. It's a combination of things. The problems are twofold—no, they're threefold. First, you've got this father who's supermasculine, but who's somehow protesting it all the time, he's worried to death about it, never mind that he actually is very masculine, more masculine than anybody else around, in fact. But worried about it all the same—and therefore worried about his sons and their masculinity. Secondly, you start playing around with your mother's stockings one day when you're about four years old. Maybe it all starts with something as seemingly innocent as this. And why do you do this? Who knows? But it must have something to do with the fact that your mother doesn't seem to love you enough. Or that's your perception of it. Her maternal instincts just aren't very strong.… You think she loves your older brother Patrick more. So maybe you're putting on her clothes in the first place because you somehow
think you'll be able to win her that way, get close to her. But then, you see, it starts to feel sexy for its own sake, just to have those things on. It's erotic, it arouses you. The third thing is your own heightened awareness to everything around you. You're a writer's son, after all. You take in a lot more.” He had said it all slowly, with his head slung a little off to the side, the way a child will do when he's trying to puzzle out something.

His hand moved into a long, wrinkly, narrow white sack of French bread on the table in front of him. The hand seemed to hold inside the sack, and then began to probe it. It was as if he was examining beneath a sheet. The hand pulled off a large chunk of the bread, came out of the sack, and the image was gone. He popped the bread into his mouth.

“You know, he said to me one time, he was trying to help me, I knew it, no matter how it was killing him, he said, ‘Listen, Mr. Gig, I can remember a long time ago seeing a girl on a street in Paris and wanting to go over and kiss her just because she had so much damn red lipstick caked on. I wanted to get that lipstick smeared all over my lips, just so I could see what that felt like.' The other thing about him—and, funny, with me too—is he really needed to be in love with a girl to bring about this unexplainable chemistry that could produce the words in the right combination, you know, the whole artesian outflow. Hell, I'd love to be in love with a woman right now. Maybe I could actually be a doctor again. There's been this one woman, lately. I can make out with her, all right, but the trouble is she's fat and I can't fall in love with her.”

Later: “None of my mistakes were in medicine. All my mistakes were social.”

Toward the end: “If I could only sleep well.”

The laugh, stuttering from him: “Course I need a ‘fixed address.' If only I had the goddamn ‘fixed address.' ”

His voice all the way back down: “I just can't concentrate like I used to.”

Coming in close: “Everything finally comes home to roost, doesn't it?”

Saying it twice: “Not much malevolence, you see. But an absolute destruction.”

He walked me to the front of the house. Suddenly, he seemed anxious. “Listen, there's no place for you to turn around here, you'll have to back out, and these maniacs come flying down this street after midnight trying to kill people. You get in and back out very slowly, I'm going to go halt the traffic.” He broke into a trot. I rolled down the driver's-side window and started to creep out. In the rearview mirror I could make him out, the fireplug figure in the unicorn T-shirt and satiny running shorts, arms
extended outward, like a traffic cop without a whistle. He was standing in the street yelling at headlights: “Slow down, slow down, goddamn it, slow down, I gotta guy pulling out here!” I backed into the street, threw the car into forward. He ran over and slapped at the doorpost. “You know where you're going, right, you go get a good sleep now, huh?”

There's a Hemingway letter from early 1936 that's extraordinary for its fatherly affections and momentary wisdom about family life. It was written when Gigi was newly four, so, yes, in the same time period when he'd first begun stealing to his mother's closet to put on her nylons—and allowing the tinglings from that to travel upward. By Gigi's testimony, he wasn't to get caught at what he was shamefully doing for about another five or six years. He said it happened when he was “nine or ten,” on summer vacation in Cuba, when he and his brothers were visiting their father and his new wife—on whom all three Hemingway sons, though especially the younger two, had their large crushes. (It was almost as if Marty was their big sister and not their stepmother. Gellhorn was nine years younger than Hemingway and from the first had shone on all three boys, but especially the younger two, the beam of her loving attention.) He said his father just walked in on him, stood there frozen, with this look of horror and disgust, turned, and left the room. Who knows if it's true: Gigi could be a wild distorter and exaggerator and misrememberer and often bald liar about his own history. Wouldn't he have learned the trade at the master's knee? If it did happen that way, then the catching must have taken place in either the summer of 1941
,
when he was nine, going on ten, or in the summer of 1942
,
when he was ten, going on eleven. By then the dopey little guy with the pudgy fingers and rolls of baby fat (go back to that photograph of him on page 201,
taken with his brothers and papa on the docks of Bimini in the summer of '35
,
when he was three and a half, with
Pilar
in the background) had grown into a mop-haired, freckle-faced, pug-nosed, Key West imp working hard on his altar-boy card, so that he could get up early during the school year and serve at daily Mass at Saint Mary Star of the Sea. Going into the fifth grade, the imp still stood barely four-foot-six
.