Hemingway's Boat (31 page)

On the evening that Toby's son, who was then sixty-one, took me out in his new boat, he'd been cruising Key West waters for something like fifty years. His boat had been constructed as a replica of a thirties Elco and had that instant classic wooden-boat look. She was tubular but she also sat upright, like
Pilar
. All her wooden parts had a kind of pumpkin gleam. Other parts were trimmed out in a rich green canvas nautical cloth. She could have been a pint-size
Pilar
in her prime. As he minded his business going out, Dink said that as a child he'd known Hemingway, although not well, since by then Hemingway was living in Cuba and didn't get over to Key West that much. Once, in elementary school, he was doing a book report on
The Old Man and the Sea
, and, when the teacher didn't especially like what he wrote, he got to ask the author himself some questions about the story. He got a good mark.

We were out about two hours, and it was a great relief from the Calcutta-like humidity on shore. Standing at the wheel, Dink called out the names of different cays and spits and rocks and channels—but it was hard for me to hear the names above the engine noise, so I put away the notebook and just enjoyed the ride. He was barefoot, in brown shorts and a white cotton shirt. His Beatlesque mop of gray hair was blown back. “This is what Hemingway was seeing and hearing all those years ago,” he said. “It's the same sand, the same light, the same water hitting the sides of the boat.” By the time we were headed back, the sky had grown purple, the water blue-black. The town was winking on like a Christmas set. Dink negotiated us skillfully through the pilings of an old wooden bridge, where the current swirled against the sides of the boat in circles and cross-circles. I trailed my hand in the wake. I felt a shiver. Dink put her into the slip neat as you please. “Do you feel you know your new boat?” I asked. He laughed. “Hell, no. Not yet. Just like I still don't really know these waters yet. But I'm getting the boatman's hands.”

Like the big brother he wished only to copy, like his father, like one of his four sisters, Leicester Hemingway, the Baron, the baby of the family, went one September day in 1982 to the foyer of his ill-tended Spanish Colonial stucco home on San Marino Island on Biscayne Bay in Miami Beach and ended his life. He was sixty-seven. He'd become depressed after a string of surgeries. He had diabetes and other ailments. He was convinced they were going to take off his legs, even as his own paranoid and depressed and diabetic father, fifty-four years before, had been convinced of a leg amputation and other horrors on the winter midday when he sat on his marriage bed in Oak Park and put a Smith & Wesson behind his right ear
.

Two and a half years before he shot himself—so it would have been either late February or early March of 1980
—
there was Les Hemingway early one morning, for all the world Ernest Hemingway himself. He was standing off to the side at the Chalk's International Airlines seaplane ramp at Watson Island in the Port of Miami, waiting, as were the rest of us, for the pilot to give a signal to board the plane for the hop over to Bimini. He had that instantly recognizable square-jawed and leathery Hemingway face; the massive upper body of Hemingway males; the requisite white Papa beard. He wore ratty clothes and sneakers without laces, and beneath one arm was a folded-over grocery bag: the never-quite-measuring-up kid brother who'd tried to be a serious writer, and who'd known some success. The one who'd kicked around in the newspaper and magazine worlds, in government service, in boatbuilding and commercial fishing. There are Hemingway letters in which the older sibling is saying things like
For crissakes, Baron, take a bath, will you, and get your hair cut, and wash your face good before you go for that job interview, because as we both know one of your worst habits is your goddamn sloppiness.

Les Hemingway had been haunting Bimini for years. He genuinely cared for the place, and the place genuinely cared for him back. In the folded-over grocery sack were a hundred or so copies of the latest edition of the
Bimini News,
of which Les was editor, reporter, distributor, and proprietor. His custom, once each new issue was ready, was to fly over on the seaplane and then go up and down Bimini's main street—essentially Bimini's only street—pressing free copies on locals and tourists. He'd
retrieve them from the grocery sack with his big hearty wave and hello and, often, a handshake. “Smallest newspaper in the world, takes two editions to wrap a bonefish,” he liked to say. I watched him do that all weekend. This was seven years before Ernest Hemingway's eldest son, Jack, told me, “Well, I've decided what works for me is not going deep.” Before the in-between son, Patrick, said, “I have stared ambition in the face and decided I don't wish it.” Before the youngest, Gregory, told me: “The ‘Papa' cult. Just think what it means to be one of the three of us in this goddamn ‘Papa' cult.”

The pilot signaled, and the ten or twelve of us got on. Les boarded toward the last. As he strapped himself in, he nodded and smiled. I leaned forward and asked, “Are you by any chance Leicester Hemingway?” The instant reply through a bared-teeth grin: “Yeah, and if you're lucky, it might get you a cup of coffee somewhere.”

The World War II–era Grumman Goose seaplane duck-walked into the harbor and took off, spraying water everywhere. Its frame rattled and shook. Twenty minutes later, we whooshed into Bimini Harbor, taxied in the sun past pastel-colored buildings and coconut palms, waddled up a ramp, onto the lower end of King's Highway. Island boys helped the pilots put chocks under the wheels. There was a commotion of unloading. Everybody went into a one-story cement-block customs office. Les got waved through
.

There was defiance in things he said that weekend, some stiffening pride. There were moments of bombast and goofy statement. He seemed willing to share an astonishing number of family secrets. (Much later I'd learn from other family members about his great generosity, helping to rear various Hemingways who weren't his own children.) He talked of
Pilar,
and of how he'd been in Key West on that day in 1934 when she first came in, sparkling in her new varnish. He said he was the founder of a nation called New Atlantis. He'd established it on a reef off Jamaica. He'd issued his own stamps, minted his own coins
.

When Ed Hemingway killed himself, on December 6, 1928
,
at fifty-seven, trying to get away from his diabetes and angina and frozen mind, his youngest child was thirteen—and in the house. Les hadn't gone to school because of a cold. The doctor came home at noontime, burned papers in the basement, told his wife he felt tired and would lie down before lunch. He went upstairs and closed the door. In his 1953 autobiographical novel
, The Sound of the Trumpet,
Les recounted the moment, as he must have been recounting and fictionalizing it all his life:

Grace, who had to be sedated, said she was too grief stricken to appear at the coroner's inquest. She sent the thirteen-year-old to report what he knew
.

Critics were thinly condescending about Les's novel, which was a war novel. The cruelest words came from the clever fellows at
Time,
a two-paragraph notice:

Hemingway himself was in Tanganyika, on five-month safari, when he saw the
Time
review in late 1953
.
He was the most famous writer in the world. Six months before, he'd won the Pulitzer Prize; the next year, he'd get the Nobel. Two months hence, in January 1954
,
he and his wife Mary would survive a pair of surreal plane crashes on successive days in Africa—and he'd stumble from them to read his own obituaries and stoke his myth. Half a dozen years later, in a letter to his brother, Hemingway said of that witty two-graph cut in
Time,
“It was the most unjust and dirty review that I have ever read.” He told Les that he'd written a letter to
Time's
editors, blasting them, and that he'd had it in the car ready to mail, when he received a copy of the novel itself. The novel, inscribed by Les
,
had caught up with Hemingway in Nairobi. He didn't take to some things in it that his brother had written about the family, about him, about his army pal, Buck Lanham. “You could hang and rattle on what you wrote about Buck,” he told Les. After he saw the novel, Hemingway never bothered to mail his angry letter to
Time.

Once, aboard
Pilar,
Hemingway had said to his little brother, yelling at him, holding in his hand a letter from Grace Hemingway:

Les proved a wonderful Bimini tour guide, taking me to room 1 on the second floor of the Compleat Angler Hotel, with its wide veranda and tropical flowers curling through the railings, so that I could see where Hemingway worked and sometimes slept (when he wasn't sleeping on the topside of his boat or elsewhere). He walked me down onto Radio Beach. He arranged for me to get inside the two-story clapboard house, with its overhanging porches, that had inspired the opening paragraph of
Islands in the Stream:

You can fault hell out of that heavily edited and stitched-together novel (the cleaver work was done principally by Hemingway's widow and publisher nine years after his death), but not a word in that lapidary opening paragraph
.

I remember asking Les where he stayed on Bimini, when he came every fortnight or so with his newspaper, which, judging from the several issues I saw, had many typos and a haphazard layout. (He told me he did the writing and editing out of his Florida home.) “Oh, I never worry about that,” Les said. “I sleep on the beach. Sometimes I'll sleep in a chair on the porch at the Angler.”