Hemingway's Boat (65 page)

From “I Guess Everything Reminds You of Something”:

There are no time frames in the fiction. But, as noted earlier, a good guess for the date of the story's composition is mid-to-late 1955—which would have been “seven years” from the 1948 discovery of Gigi's plagiarism in his fifth-form spring at Canterbury. In the last five of those seven years—that is, from 1950 to 1955—the boy in the story and the boy of real life had done every hateful and stupid thing. The fiction doesn't specify
what they were. In real life, nothing a youngest son would have done in this interval, after leaving prep school and dropping out of college and getting his girlfriend pregnant, was stupider or more irresponsible, certainly in his father's mind, than an incident involving a movie theater—because that public incident had led directly to the middle-of-the-night death in a Los Angeles hospital of the youngest son's mother.

The final three sentences of the story: “Now he knew that boy had never been any good. He had thought so often looking back on things. And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.”

And yet here is a characteristic Hemingway switchback. In 1955, four years after Pauline's death, Gigi's father was working overtime to try to be a supportive father. Hemingway hadn't abandoned Gigi, or vice versa. They had said horrible, unconscionable things to each other. But in a way, wouldn't that just prove how much they cared?

Things written in a kind of code. Things exposed under the surface
.

Hemingway wrote four stories about homosexuals and lesbians. The most psychologically layered and surprisingly sympathetic ran to five and a quarter pages in its first published form, in the 1927 Scribner's collection
Men Without Women.
(It's really a very brief story. The book was compact in design, with large type, making the piece seem deceptively longer than it is.) The story is called “A Simple Enquiry.” The irony starts there, for there is nothing simple in the enquiry the story turns on. A homosexual Italian major is reclined on his bunk in his hut at the snow-blinded front. He announces he is going to take a little sleep. Outside, the March sun is thawing the mounds of snow, which are piled higher than the hut's windows. Signor Maggiore, as his subordinates address him, has been at his desk in the other room, oiling his swollen and blistered facial skin that has been badly burned by the sun's glint off the snow. Very delicately he's been “stroking” his forehead and cheeks and nose. Now, reclined, with the door half-open, his head on a rucksack, he tells his adjutant to send in the orderly. The orderly, whose name is Pinin, is nineteen. The officer, it hardly needs saying, has every advantage. “Come in,” he tells the boy, “and shut the door.” The orderly comes across the room and stands beside the bunk. The major wishes to know if Pinin has a girl, if he's ever been in love, in love with a girl, or whether, in fact, he is—“corrupt.”

“ ‘I don't know what you mean, corrupt.' ”

The major tells him he needn't be “superior.” Pinin studies the floor. The major is eyeing him up and down
.

“ ‘And you don't really want—' the major paused. Pinin looked at the floor. ‘That your great desire isn't really—' Pinin looked at the floor. The major leaned his head back on the rucksack and smiled. He was really relieved: life in the army was too complicated. ‘You're a good boy,' he said. ‘You're a good boy, Pinin. But don't be superior and be careful some one else doesn't come along and take you.' ”

The boy stands there. He hasn't been dismissed
.

“ ‘Don't be afraid,' the major said. His hands were folded on the blankets. ‘I won't touch you.' ”

The piece ends with the orderly walking out awkwardly, stiffly. “Pinin
was flushed and moved differently.” As for the relieved Signor Maggiore, who will not be acting on his erotic urges today, he is still on his bunk, thinking aloud. That's the story's final sentence: “The little devil, he thought, I wonder if he lied to me.”

For decades, Hemingway scholarship largely ignored “A Simple Enquiry,” and it is hard to understand why, for it has the terseness and precision and subsurface swirls of the best of Hemingway's work. It seems to be suggesting that moral and sexual dilemmas are deserving of our deepest human understanding—not of our rejections and bigotries. Archibald MacLeish read the story and told his touchy friend in a February 20, 1927
,
letter: “I think its in your real manner, a fine, cool, clean piece of work, sure as leather, & hard and swell.” In the margin, he added: “Ten things ‘said' for every word written. Full of sound like a coiled shell. Overtones like the bells at Chartres. All that stuff you can't describe but only do—& only you can do it.”

Twenty-four years later, on October 2, 1951
,
a sleepless, denying, lashing-out man employed the same semi-coded word, “corrupt,” in a letter to his publisher regarding his ex-wife's death. Hemingway, remember, wrote an earlier letter to Charlie Scribner, on the day following Pauline's death, in addition to the letter he wrote at 6:10 p.m., in which he called his son “harbor scum.” Here's part of what he said in that first one, in respect to his late-night phone talk with Pauline, two nights previous, that, from all that can be known, had gone very cruelly: “I was sympathetic and kind although I did not feel that way since she had the boy in her charge and I had been writing her registered letters about how he was doing and asking for details and receiving no answers.… But this boy Gigi was not brave as Patrick always was. He was only terribly skillful and corrupted. His mother, and her sister being corrupt did not help him much.”

Corrupt, as in general moral deviance, not corrupt in the narrower sense he'd employed it in “A Simple Enquiry.” Hemingway's son wasn't a homosexual, and he knew this. His sister-in-law was an open lesbian, yes, and it's also true that his ex-wife had drifted by now into some lesbian relationships of her own (including one with the poet Elizabeth Bishop), and that he generally knew about these, or suspected as much, or had heard talk about such. But if you're newly married, as Gigi was; if you have a child on the way, as Gigi did; if you go into a ladies' room of an LA movie theater in drag, as Gigi did, thus willing to risk arrest and public shame and damage to your family's decent name, then aren't you damn well “corrupt”? Not that the lashing-out man writing to his father-figure
publisher spelled out any details of the corruption. He just used the code word. “[A]nd the story was sordid and bad” is the way he put it
.

Once again, Hemingway was trying in any way he could to fling blame from him, scapegoat others: a lifelong pattern. But he had to have known in his bones that not all the perfumes of Arabia could sweeten his complicit hand
.

Ernest with his sons, Havana, June 1945. On back: “Pigeon Hunting Club, Cazodores del Carro.”

WE DON'T KNOW
the name of the movie theater he entered. We don't know the day it happened (although Saturday night, September 29, seems probable). We don't know who called the cops, or what police substation they took Gigi to, and whether they carted the kid in drag directly downtown to the central jail. We do know they held him through the rest of that weekend, while his distressed mother flew in from San Francisco, and while he awaited a scheduled hearing on Monday afternoon, October 1. But records of that hearing, if there was one, as well as any record of the arrest itself, have disappeared. What may have happened is that, once word had come that his mother had died on an operating table overnight, the authorities let him go. And records eventually got tossed.

Gigi and his wife of five months were living in a one-bedroom concrete-and-stucco apartment two blocks in from the Lincoln Highway, in the seaside community of Venice. The unit was part of a complex of two-story, look-alike postwar pastel housing spreading itself over eight or ten LA acres. Their flat was about a half-mile walk to the beach. But neither
Gigi nor his wife, the former Shirley Jane Rhodes—who was even younger than he was, who was descended from Cherokee Indians on her mother's side (which gave her stunning high cheekbones), who'd worked a bit as a Powers agency model, who is said to have held a recent job taking tickets at an LA movie house—would have much free time to go to the ocean. They were both holding down sixty-five-dollar-a-week jobs at Douglas Aircraft in nearby Santa Monica, and in addition Gigi was enrolled in a night class or two at UCLA Extension. (The two are said to have met on campus.) There had to have been pressures beyond the pressures of a new marriage between teenagers.

He was six weeks shy of twenty and an expectant father. He'd quit college back east, just one more hardheaded and ill-advised and impulsive thing he'd done. The quitting, as noted earlier, was at the end of his freshman year, from a college only a few blocks from the naval academy, where Walter Houk had finished up four years before.