Hemingway's Boat (48 page)

Sometime after midnight she awoke with severe abdominal pain. The pain got worse. They got her to St. Vincent's Hospital. Doctors worked furiously, bewilderingly. Her blood pressure crashed from 300 to zero. Three hours later Pauline was dead, at age fifty-six. “Hemorrhage into adrenal,” the attending surgeon would pen into box 19 of the single-page certificate of death. Pauline's ex-husband found out by cable from his former sister-in-law at about noon that day, his time. All the rest of that day and into the next he is said to have stalked around Finca Vigía, evincing
an exterior toughness. His present wife, his fourth, told him he was behaving appallingly. So of course they fought and of course the wicked words flew, almost impossible to defend against when the one attacking was Ernest Hemingway. According to Mary Hemingway, her husband followed her into her bathroom and spit in her face
.

So now it was Tuesday evening, October 2, thirty-six hours after the death, and the sleepless, unable-to-work Hemingway, still in recoil, was writing to Charles Scribner, with whom he'd become very close, the more so in the four years since Max Perkins's death. In fact, this was the second letter he wrote to Scribner that day, which only suggests the level of his anxiety, the level of his denials
.

Bad storms had been through—the letter writer had spent a lot of that day watching the barometer. His phone had gone out
.

He not only put down the date, which he often forgot to do on his letters, he also set down the exact time. His mind had to have been very concentrated
.

“Dear Charlie,” he said. “The glass is lower; now 29.30 but the sky looks as though the storm were going away. It is a very strange storm. But this has been the strangest year for weather that I have ever known. I certainly would like to see the glass start to rise.”

Three paragraphs down: “The wave of remembering has finally risen so that it has broken over the jetty that I built to protect the open roadstead of my heart and I have the full sorrow of Pauline's death with all the harbour scum of what caused it. I loved her very much for many years and the hell with her faults.”

No, it wasn't him, of course not, it was his harbor scum of a son. It almost sounds obscene to say it, but the sea metaphor is so perfectly Hemingway when all the emotions are sounding at their deepest levels: the wave of remembering, the roadstead of his heart, the jetties getting breached
.

There's a lot more to tell here, not just about Hemingway, always, of course, about Hemingway, but about Gigi, and about the price Gigi paid until the day he died, which came fifty years to the day of his mother's death, early on the morning of October 1, 2001
,
in a third-floor cell of a women's detention center on the edge of downtown Miami, about a mile from beautiful Biscayne Bay. The inmate, who'd been in jail for five days on charges of showing his sexual organs in public and resisting an officer without violence, was trying to get a bulky leg into a pair of too-tight underpants, which were women's panties, when he just fell over dead. He
was six weeks from his seventieth birthday. This was the two-sentence lead that went out on the AP wire once the death was made public: “Gregory Hemingway, the youngest son of macho novelist Ernest Hemingway, died a transsexual by the name of Gloria in a cell at a women's jail, authorities said. He was sixty-nine.” Weren't all the savage ironies instantly clear?

Walter and Nita Houk on their wedding day, April 30, 1952

AN OLD MAN
in California, who wakes early, is drawing a picture of Hemingway's boat. He's working with a sharpened pencil and an old-fashioned clipboard to which he has attached a single sheet of unlined white paper. Morning light is coming in through a window just to his right, filtered and refracted by big coast redwoods that he has watched grow from saplings into majestic trees. He's very intent. This is Walter Houk's way, trying to get things right. It's as if he's talking out loud to himself but in another way to the twenty-six-year-old incredibly fortunate sapling self that once, in the early 1950s, got invited out for long cruises on Ernest Hemingway's boat.

“See, the outrigger lines came around like this, amidships, out from the sides, in sort of a catenary curve,” he says. “The whole point of outriggers in the first place is to keep your lines from tangling, so you can have several rods going at once.” But he's already erasing. “No, I don't quite have this curve right,” he says. He draws the lines again, extending them out further, in a wider loop. He puts in a whitecap or two. At the end of one of the outrigger lines he draws a mullet—or maybe it's a cero mackerel or a squid or a needlefish, all of which
Pilar
's captain tended to keep in his bait box at the stern. The artist—who actually once was a working artist—labels the little pencil smudge “Bait.”

“Okay,” he says. “Better.”

He's putting in the flying bridge on the topside. He's trying to get these angles and cross-hatches exactly right—from memory. “The roof over the cockpit was a little bit curved, like this, so Papa had a flat platform made that he could stand on up there,” he says. “It was made of slats.” He draws the flat, slatted platform over the curved sedan topside. Then a Lilliputian ship's wheel. Then a passable rendering of a slightly bulky figure standing at that wheel. It's more or less a stick person, but it's clear who it is. “I took a photograph of him once up there,” he says. “Well, it wasn't just any old once, it was his fifty-second birthday. July 21, 1951. My first time on the boat. So of course all my senses were heightened. I guess I'd known him for about seven months. I wrote about it in my journal. We were out most of the day. I remember the sense of being apart from the world—the drift, the serenity. Anyway, I had my cheap old Argus C3 rangefinder with me. I climbed up on the bridge, or maybe I was on the ladder just a little bit below, trying to get the right angle. I said, ‘Papa, would you mind?' He was standing at the wheel. He's in a blue tropical shirt and his hair is slicked back from the heat and he's got that reddish and almost blotchy skin. He really had a fair complexion, you know, and the sun and of course all the booze could make him florid. So I'm framing him in my thirty-five-millimeter camera, catching his right side in profile. The boat is rocking and I'm trying to hold the Argus steady so it won't blur. Those huge shoulders, that's what I remember. His beard wasn't a full white yet—it was kind of scraggly and flecked with white and not fully grown in. It looked itchy underneath. Anyway, my wife, Nita—what I mean to say is, she's not my wife just yet, but I guess I maybe had an idea she was going to be my wife—was up there, too, just a couple feet away. He said, ‘Okay, Walter.' I remember how just before I snapped, he took off his glasses and held them in his right hand and sort of broke into a squinty smile and sucked in his stomach. That amused me.”

From Walter Houk's journal entry of that day: “Around noon we pulled into shallows off the beach of Santa Maria del Mar, into that fantastic green water, clear as glass and cool after the beating sun. We had a swim, lunch, a siesta, another swim and then headed back toward Habana. It was Papa's birthday and the lure of celebration was drawing him back to the wicked city, I would soon realize.”

Regarding lunch, and not just that first one: “We started with alligator pears. Papa's name for avocados. He used to pick them fresh from the hillsides of Finca Vigía, or get them in a little bodega at the foot of the hill, on his way in town in the car to the harbor. They were fat and juicy and we'd scoop out the flesh with a spoon or a fork. They'd be seasoned with vinaigrette dressing. We'd toss the seeds over the side. In the seed cavity was your little puddle of vinaigrette. You could practically eat a half avocado in three scoops, you'd get so hungry out there in the salt air. We'd all be gathered around that little folding table in the cockpit, with the cushioned bunks on either side. We'd eat the avocados and wash them down with cold beer. That was the first course, the salad, a side dish, if you will. For a second course, we'd have fresh fish.”

He has looked up again from his artwork, and is gazing out toward the trees, or through them, as if trying to recover a sensation on the back of his tongue.

Regarding the fishing: “Ha. One strike all day. Papa said, ‘Okay, you take it, Walter.' I didn't especially want to take it, but I got in the fighting chair. I knew a lot about the sea, since I'd gone to the naval academy, but I knew next to nothing about deep-sea fishing. Total amateur. It wasn't a big fish, although it seemed like it when he came to the top. It was about a forty-pound dolphinfish, they told me later. The word Hemingway would have said was dorado, not dolphinfish. People would call it mahimahi today. The point is, I lost it. Not a very good performance in front of somebody I would have liked to impress. I didn't know what I was doing. I jerked the rod upward. I could feel the line go dead.”

An old man in California has just reflexively jerked upward on an invisible piece of big-game tackle, causing him to erupt in a laugh.

“Hemingway came over and said, ‘Now, here's what you did wrong, Walter, and here's what you should try to do next time. Basically, you didn't slack to him.' ”

Then: “The whole idea was to be instructional. He was trying to teach me something. People don't tend to know what a great teacher he was. He was always teaching you something, one way or another. In this case I
think he needed to hang back and let me make my mistakes first, then he could come in and show me the right way.”

Walter Houk, who keeps insisting he won't be around too much longer, has set down his pencil. The words “right way” may have tripped something in him. He's growing weary and needs to nap. At dinner tonight, stoked with a vodka martini and a glass of wine, he'll say: “You see, for a long time in my life, I avoided a consideration of all the negatives about Hemingway. It was just so politically correct to dislike the man. I didn't know what to argue against, or where to start arguing. I didn't want to be bothered. It wasn't going to change anything I knew. My whole experience with Ernest Hemingway is the conventional diswisdom. He didn't wreck my life. It was a hugely positive experience to be around him, for those several years in the fifties, getting to go out on the boat and all the rest. I was half his age. He treated me kindly. He treated my wife, Nita, kindly. It was as if we were sort of the kids around the place, and I think he liked that, because his own kids so often weren't there, and he missed them. He wanted to help us out with our lives. The vultures have long ago gathered around the Hemingway corpse and rendered their judgment. But their judgment's wrong; at least it's incomplete. I don't think the terrible vile side defines him. It was a facet of his character. He was a great man with great faults. We should not allow the faults to overshadow the accomplishments. He said in a letter once—I think it was to one of his children—that ‘a happy country has no history.' I'm paraphrasing, but that was his point. You could say a happy man has no biography—who'd want to read it? I think of him as a Beethoven, for the way he changed the language. He's Gulliver surrounded by the Lilliputians. He threatens all the little academics sitting at their computers. Somehow or other you've got to try to help rescue him from all that.”

What kind of blind luck did it take to find Walter P. Houk of 21439 Gaona Street in Woodland Hills, California? Pretty blind is all I can say.

Walter Houk is an authentic living Hemingway witness, with his faculties mainly intact; with his memory, at least his long-term memory, still razor keen—and even now, after seven years of knowing him, talking to him, the thought still has the power to raise on my forearms what Hemingway used to call “the goose-flesh.”

Not counting Hemingway's surviving middle son, there aren't two or three people left on the earth who can authentically say, as Walter Houk
can, that, yes, they used to get invited out on Hemingway's boat; that, yes, they once took swims in Hemingway's soapy-soft pool (it was fed by rain collected in a cistern, and it was so refreshing you almost felt you were paddling in mountain lake); that, yes, they got to borrow books from Hemingway's personal library; that, yes, they got to attend lubricated, rollicking, multicourse dinners with Ernest and Mary Hemingway at their favorite Havana Chinese restaurant (El Pacífico, about ten blocks behind the Capitolio, next door to a nudie stage revue and porno theater called the Shanghai; the funky eatery sat beneath a canvas awning on the rooftop of a seven- or eight-story building, to which you ascended via the world's slowest and smallest iron-cage elevator, passing on the way a bordello and opium den and cacophonous Chinese orchestra, but never mind, because once you were on the roof, in the open night air, the view was amazing, and so was the food, starting with the shark-fin soup and the first bottle of Tavel rosé, Papa's favorite).