Hemingway's Boat (63 page)

My own belief is that it happened in June or July of 1941
,
his fourth-grade summer, for reasons I'll detail in the next chapter
.

But this earlier Hemingway letter, with its transcendent note, written on a Sunday afternoon, up in the writing loft, two and a half months after Gigi had turned four. It's a long letter;
Pilar
and the sea are much in it. It was as if once he'd gotten going, in his bighearted way, the letter writer couldn't stop. (As he notes toward the end, he went on so long he missed
the special Sunday afternoon airmail pickup.) Hemingway is writing to his mother-in-law, Gigi's maternal grandmother, Mary Pfeiffer, and his chief purpose is to thank her and her husband for their once-again generous Christmas gifts (a fat check and a bunch of new stocks). But soon enough the letter is getting off onto the letter-writer's kids, onto his loving and decent wife, onto all the family's amusing, mundane doings. It's as if a man, lately wounded, has awakened to what's important in this life, not the lusting after fame, but your own family
.

Hemingway, of course, had been creamed that fall on
Green Hills of Africa.
Afterward, the sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide had come on hard. He wishes to say here they're passing off, but it isn't so. His night terrors will be with him through much of 1936
,
and indeed are now probably what a clinician would term chronic. In any case he doesn't nearly name them for the stark things they are, but rather codes and masks them to “Mother” Pfeiffer, whom he likes a lot, as his recent “spell.”

“Had a spell when I was pretty gloomy, that was why I didn't write first, and didn't sleep for about three weeks,” he says. “Took to getting up about two or so in the morning and going out to the little house to work.… Had never had the real old melancholia before and am glad to have had it so I know what people go through. It makes me more tolerant of what happened to my father.”

As to the kids, and how they've unwittingly been rescuing him: “It is only in this last year that I have gotten any sort of understanding or feeling about how anyone can feel about their children or what they can mean to them.”

He's been taking them out separately in the boat. The day before he had Pat out. “I was steering and saw him throwing up over the side and heard him, in the midst of it, shouting ‘Papa! Papa!' I jumped to him to see what was the matter and he said, ‘There's a sailfish jumping over there. I just saw him while I was throwing up!' ” The Mouse-man, seven now, has even come up with a little ditty to fortify him against all his puking. It goes: “You put the chowder down. The stomach goes round and round hydeeho hydeehay and it comes out here.”

And the Gig-man? This damn kid can do addition in his head up into the hundreds. He can multiply by fives and tens. “You will say to him ‘What's 240 and 240 Jew?' and he will put his head on one side and say
‘I think its about four hundred eighty.' ” A few days before, when Mousie was in school, he had Gigi in the boat, “and there were some friends down here and we harpooned a porpoise and put the harpoon on a rod and
reel so the porpoise was making a monkey out of the man who was trying to catch him and when we would shout suggestions to him in the bow Gregory would repeat these all and add new ones of his own.”

The letter's date is January 26, 1936
.
In less than a year Hemingway was in adultery with Martha Gellhorn. As for the so-called spell of recent melancholia, this is what it was really like: “I felt that gigantic bloody emptiness and nothingness like couldn't fuck, fight write and was all for death,” Hemingway said in a letter to Dos Passos, three weeks after the one I've been quoting. As for the cutest one in the family, who had a way of slinging his head off to the side when you posed him a riddlesome question, who could stand in the bow of his papa's boat and shout instructions like a good first mate, who may have already entered the thing from which there seemed no turning back, why, they'd recently given him this humongous birthday party in the backyard of 907 Whitehead. That was on November 12
.
There'd been pony rides and a hired clown and neighbor kids, both black and white, from up and down the street. Not least there'd been a four-layer cake with four candles on it that the Gigster had stood over and whoofed out nifty as you please
.

Gigi, Havana, summer 1945

I'LL WHOOF this
straight out: a lifelong shamed son was only acting out what a father felt, which is why they couldn't forsake each other, no matter how hard they tried. Firstly, they were father and son. But past this, they recognized they were yoked more deeply and darkly than anybody ever knew. Didn't Hemingway himself signal it on the page? Go back to that passage in
Islands in the Stream
. “[H]e had a dark side to him that nobody except Thomas Hudson could ever understand. Neither of them thought about this except that they recognized it in each other and knew it was bad and the man respected it and understood the boy's having it.”

“Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes, and in this sometimes he is fortunate; but eventually they are quite clear and by these and the degree of alchemy that he possesses he will endure or be forgotten,” Hemingway wrote to the Swedish Academy upon accepting his Nobel Prize in 1954, the ceremony for which he was much too ill to attend.

In those 1987
Washington Post
pieces, “Papa's Boys,” I had made the same general point I am making here, but I had phrased it as a question and more or less slipped it in at the back of the Gigi portrait. I wrote, equivocally: “There are Freudians afoot—especially in light of so much of the recent Hemingway scholarship, and the publication last year of his novel
The Garden of Eden
, which is awash in transsexual fantasies—who would raise this question: was the son merely acting out what the father felt?” I
was doing what journalists do when they don't quite have the courage of their convictions—or enough facts. Namely, hedge the bets. Put it off onto others.

No longer. I've come to think of both of them, the one who exploded himself into infinity, the one too long regarded as the genetic blunder of the Hemingway family, as far braver human beings than anyone ever knew. Which is why, in spite of everything, there is uplift in their separate and bound stories.

It happened, if it did, the first catching, by his father, in the early summer of 1941, and I'll base my conviction on an important Hemingway letter, written in a kind of code.

It's a short letter, misdated, three paragraphs long. Hemingway wrote it to his ex-wife possibly around August 1. He was thanking Pauline for letting him know that the boys, Pat and Gigi, had arrived safely back in the States from a shortened stay in Cuba. Since their divorce, their feelings toward each other had begun to mend. But they were still finding their way. As with any divorced parents of young children, their communication was often taken up with mundane logistical matters, hence the first sentence of this one: “Thanks for the wire about the kids arriving o.k.”

In the second paragraph: “Giggy is better all the time
I think
[my itals]. He has the biggest dark side in the family except me and you and I'm not in the family.
He keeps it so concealed that you never know about it
[my itals] and maybe that way it will back up on him. But
maybe too it will disappear
[my itals] as nearly all talent does along with youth and all the perishable commodities that shape our ends. (Sic)”

These hedgings and codings are enough to make me believe Gigi's father had only recently found him doing something horrid. We will never know for sure. The letter writer can't say that horror's name, not even (or especially), to his own former spouse.

That night in Coconut Grove, I should have pressed Gigi for more details about this moment. Maybe a mind-fogged man wouldn't have had them. What I do know is he told me his father opened the door of the
finca
's master bedroom and came in while he was putting on “Marty's white nylons.” But almost as soon as he said this, Gigi's mind went to something else.

So why don't I believe it would have happened during the next summer's vacation at the
finca
, when he was ten, going on eleven? Two reasons.
First, because the summer of 1942 constituted one of the largest triumphs of Gigi's boyhood; and, second, and as a direct result of the triumph, Hemingway's correspondence of that summer, as it concerns Gigi, seems unambiguous in its fatherly pride. The codings and shadings are largely absent. (With Hemingway, you have to insert the word “nearly” or “largely.”)
^*

In 1942, Hemingway taught his youngest son how to shoot. Next to fishing, shooting was the supreme outdoor Hemingway manly value. Within weeks of learning how to fire a gun, the vest-pocket Hemingway was going up against grown men in live-pigeon shooting competitions at the Club de Cazadores del Cerro, and doing so as if he possessed “built-in radar.” Actually, he was competing against some of the finest marksmen in all of Cuba, including the great Rodrigo Díaz and the almost-as-great Antonio Montalvo. The pint-sizer was using a .410-bore against professionals with 12-gauges. Gigi had never picked up a shotgun until that summer. He just seemed to understand in his veins about shooting. In no time he could place his weight on his back foot and lean forward with just the right bead; could swing and lead the birds, and keep swinging and keep leading after the recoil. He was like that other natural, the one who'd sat down at the iconic tables in the iconic city by the Seine and written an ostensible fish story titled “Big Two-Hearted River.” And wouldn't that former phenom, watching this phenom, have been trying to convince himself that things were turning out just fine with his youngest, even if something disturbing had happened the summer before?

Built-in radar: about a decade and a half after Gigi's first summer with a gun, Hemingway used this image in a deeply bitter story titled “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something.” It's not a very well-known piece in the Hemingway canon, and wasn't published in his lifetime. It was probably written in 1955. By then, it would have been too painfully clear to the author of “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”—or so all the surface evidence would seem to argue—that the “fictional” boy who'd shot with the coolest hand and the built-in radar for the National Live Pigeon Championship of Cuba “had never been any good.” He was just vile. “His vileness came on from a sickness.” The specific sickness isn't identified.

Am I confusing fiction with real life? Yes, deliberately, riskily.

That boy, called Stevie, son of a man called Papa, “never took a shot out of range nor let a driven bird come too close.” His father would watch him with the “heel of his right foot lifted gently as all of him leaned behind the two loads in the chambers.”