Hemingway's Boat (50 page)

On Monday, March 10—so roughly six weeks back of this moment—General Fulgencio Batista, the iconic military thug who in one way or another has had his way with power in Cuba since the mid-thirties, had regained the country in a coup against the elected government of President Carlos Prío Socarrás. When that happened, Walter realized that life is momentary. After the takeover, Batista's troops had been circling the city with blaring horns on the tops of cars and tanks:
“Batista, este es el hombre para Cuba.”
Batista is the man for Cuba. Walter, in his post as second secretary (about fifth in the hierarchy of command), had been thrust into
new responsibilities, intelligence responsibilities, in the embassy's political section. As he went about his expanded duties, he kept thinking of Nita, whom he'd been dating for something like a year and a half. He felt seized with romantic excitement. Six days after the coup, Walt, as Nita calls him, popped the question. She said yes.

But they hadn't been able to come out to tell Ernest and Mary until the end of March, because on the same day Batista drove Prío from power, the Hemingways had slipped out of Havana on
Pilar
at 9:40 a.m., motoring over the next two days some ninety miles westward down the coast to an uninhabited island off Pinar del Río province that they'd nicknamed Paraíso Key: their little paradise hideaway key. Hemingway had told friends and correspondents this would be an “austerity vacation.” For two and a half weeks, while a new government lowered its calming iron fist on the country, he and his wife had fished and swum and drunk and eaten like kings and tried to forget about the world's problems, not to say their own. They'd loaded up with barracuda, cero mackerel, horse-eye jacks, red hinds, speckled hinds, red snappers, mangrove snappers, amberjacks, and needlefish. A big storm had delayed their return. Hemingway had come home in a restored mood, and sitting in his metaphorical back pocket was the uncorrected typescript manuscript of 26,531 words that he'd now all but decided to go ahead and publish as a separate work. He'd settled on its title:
The Old Man and the Sea
. The manuscript had been ready for almost a year, but he'd been hesitant to publish it as a stand-alone fiction, believing it to be the coda or epilogue to the great Sea Book that a blocked writer had been trying to make right in his head and on paper, on and off, since the postwar forties. More accurate to say great
mess
of a Sea Book that in turn was an intended part of the even greater and unwritten trilogy mess in his head known as the Land, Sea, and Air Book.

As he'd said in a letter to a Scribner's official just before shoving off: “I am tired of not publishing anything. Other writers publish short books. But I am supposed to always lay back and come in with War and Peace or Crime and Punishment or be considered a bum. This is probably very bad for a writer and I will bet it did more to wreck poor old Scott than anything except Zelda, himself and booze.” From this last sentence alone, you could understand how good he must have felt: gratuitously kicking Scott, dead now eleven years, once more.

Anyway, right after their return, Nita and Walter had driven to the
finca
with the good news. The benevolent, reigning monarch of all he surveyed had said, “Done, daughter.” Hell, he'd even wear a suit, although he
wouldn't put on one of those damn wedding-party boutonnieres because he'd feel like he was attending “the Saturday-night taxi-driver's ball.” (Walter remembers this remark, but says he has never quite understood its meaning. In the greenhouse climate of Cuba, lapel flowers could grow to a ghastly size—regard again Walter's.)

The actual ceremony probably hadn't lasted ten minutes, which suited everybody fine, since it was so damn hot. It was scheduled for noon in an attorney's office, but nothing in Cuba happens particularly on time. Hemingway handed off Miss Nita to Walter in a small, florid, grinning flourish. It was pretty obvious to the bride and groom that he was giving away the daughter he knew he'd never have. Afterward, three witnesses signed their names to the documents. The lawyer told the newlyweds that the official certificate of marriage wouldn't come in the mail for another month or so. (It did, although it took longer than a month, and it's preserved now in an album in California. Beside Hemingway's name, penned by some Havana bureaucrat lost to history, are the words
“ocupación escritor.”
)

After the hitching, the stand-in father drove the thirty minutes home in his own car. Walter and Nita lingered in town for a while, so that their guests might arrive ahead of them and so that Mary Hemingway could get everything arranged. (She'd skipped the ceremony on this account.) The cohost of the party got out of his monkey suit and into a white guayabera, a pair of white flannel trousers, a pair of loafers without socks—which is how he's standing now, in the nick and click of time, drink in his paw, spectacles slightly sliding down his nose, as “the kids” arrive and step from the Buick and don Andrés loads in another charge. Up north today, Harry Truman is nationalizing steel mills, and Dwight Eisenhower is mulling a run for the presidency, and Ringling Brothers is running two shows a day at Madison Square Garden.

Let it roll. The iced champagne gets served in Mary Hemingway's best stemware. (She's in an off-the-shoulder dress and no brassiere—pretty racy.) There's much delicious food. Roman candles and skyrockets get lit on the west terrace, off the dining room. A two-tiered cake gets sliced into, but not before a statuette, of a hooked-together bride and groom, with angel wings on their backs, and with a black netted veil hanging down over the bride's tiny plaster face, are removed for keepsaking. The slicing is done with a big blade that the head of the house is said to have lifted off the corpse of an SS officer in World War II. Who knows, maybe it's true.

Nita, probably feeling a bit of the “champers” (it's a Hemingway word),
drops her elaborate garters to her ankles and prances around in her bare feet on the
finca
's cool red tiles. There's no doubt the host is having a good and semi-sloshed time—and he doesn't even cotton to parties of this size. Walter sheds his suit jacket while the bride goes into another room to change from her wedding dress into more comfortable traveling garb. She makes sure to hand back personally to the hostess the choker of pearls. Mary Hemingway can be such a nasty woman, nearly the equal of her husband in a fight, especially when she's a little liquored herself, and yet in other ways, just like her husband, when you scratch her you find a deep traditionalist and sentimentalist. A few days before the ceremony, she'd asked Nita if she'd made sure to gather the four essential things any bride must wear on her wedding day: you know, “Something old, something new / Something borrowed, something blue.” When Nita answered she hadn't thought to borrow anything, Mary ran to her jewelry drawer.

It's time for the newlyweds to load up their loot and to make their good-byes and to run hand in hand down the steps to the Buick. So much rice gets hurled from the
finca
's steps—Papa's said to be right in there, with the best of the hurlers, even chasing after the car for ten or fifteen yards as it eases off down the hill—that several of the kernels lodge in the corners of the backseat and up on the upholstered ledge by the rear window. A year from now, when the Houks are in Tokyo (it's Walter's next diplomatic post, although he has no clue of it today), some of the kernels will end up sprouting in the wet climate of Japan.

Their destination is Varadero, eighty-some miles east of Havana by way of the Vía Blanca. Most Yankees living in Cuba know Casa Happiness by its informal name: Happy Pete's. That's because its proprietor is a jovial Greek American immigrant named Peter Economides. The resort is really just a two-story cement block of rooms with a restaurant and one little cottage whose front door opens practically onto the water. But the sand is blindingly white and is so fine that it feels almost sugary. “Heaven on Earth,” proclaims Happy Pete's letterhead. “American Management.”

Tomorrow, May 1, is a national holiday. So they have the rest of today, all of May Day, plus Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday, before they must return to reality on Monday. At Happy Pete's, they'll be doing what honeymooners do, emerging from their bedroom for not much more than martinis and cool-offs in the ocean. Happy Pete will have put them in the suite that fronts the ocean.

So click the shutter once more, forward, to
real
time. “Our little cottage by the edge of the blue sea,” an old man in California is saying aloud, but
once again as if talking to himself. He's in his chair by the fireplace. The word “blue” has emboldened me.

“Is it possible we could look at Nita's dress, Walter? Is it packed away?”

His left thumb jerks over his left shoulder. “Why not? Right behind me.”

He gets up and goes over to a large and ornately carved wooden chest. He opens the lid. A clean woody scent is perfuming the room. “Camphor,” he says. “Teak on the outside, camphor wood inside. Far better than cedar.” He lifts out a cardboard box with “Amazon.com” printed on it. On top of some folded tissue there's a yellow card, and written on the card, in ink, in his hand: “Nita's wedding dress and slip.” He separates the tissue, lifts out a white silk slip. “I don't think girls wear slips like this much anymore. Do they wear them at all?” He refolds the slip, in halves, sets it in another compartment of the chest. He lifts the dress from the box, holds it out in front of him, by the shoulders, allowing it to swing open and fall downward. The blue of the organdy has faded almost to the hue of an oft-washed denim shirt. It looks so sheer and small and beautiful.

Softly, but smiling broadly: “Well, the moths haven't quite gotten you yet, have they, babe?”

Where she tried to stay, until the final four or five days, when things were clear, when her breathing through the oxygen tubes in her nose was such a labored sound, is a small, shade-drawn room down the hall from Walter's living room. In this room now are some fine old photographs of Havana in the fifties. There's a picture of
Pilar.
A bareheaded Hemingway is up on his boat's flying bridge, his flimsy spectacles in his hands, which are resting on that polished dinner plate of a steering wheel. The photograph is in color, the blues of it very blue, an unnatural blue; it's the close-up of Hemingway (with a sunsuited Nita a few feet away) that Walter took with his Argus on July 21, 1951
,
Hemingway's fifty-second birthday, Walter's first outing on the boat. “I used to be able to steer twelve hours every day on my feet without leaving the bridge and have many times steered 18 hours,” Hemingway had boasted in a letter not long before Walter took the shot. “Plenty people know about this and it is not a delusion on my part. I can steer 12 hours now but the sun is bad for my head.”

The first time Walter opened the door to this room for me, he didn't enter, only stood in the doorway. He turned on the overhead light. “So, yes, this was the infirmary for Nita's last days—hospital bed, and so forth,” he said. The “and so forth” trailed off
.

Sitting on a shelf above a TV in this room is the little hooked-together plaster bride and groom from their wedding reception. The wings have come off the backs of Walter and Nita, but otherwise the ornament is intact, including Nita's netted wedding veil. Next to the statuette is a small, squat, ornate, triangular-shaped, and heavy-looking glass bottle with a thick stopper. On the front are the words “Jean Patou” and “Moment Suprême.” The contents now look purply, bruise-colored. The bottle is maybe a third full
.

“French perfume,” Walter said. He was still standing at the door. “A two-ounce bottle. Moment Suprême, by Jean Patou. Pretty fashionable fragrance in its day. Probably not as expensive as that packaging suggests. Papa and Mary brought it back as a gift from Paris for Miss Nita in 1950
.
She'd been working for him on and off for about a year by then. The color used to be amber. That's the air that's turned it black. That's the evaporation you're looking at over—what?—half a century. I suppose she opened
it once or twice, maybe even dabbed a little on, you know, just to try it out, but she was never a perfume kind of girl.”

He turned out the light and closed the door and headed back down the hallway. Suddenly his leg buckled. He grabbed the wall. “Oh, trick knee,” he explained
.

Up on the flying bridge, Ernest and Nita Jensen, July 21, 1951