Hemingway's Boat (57 page)

In that final year at the academy, Christmas 1946, forgoing a holiday at home (it would have meant three days each way by rail), the loner decided to seek the tropics, or at least the subtropics. He rode the Seaboard Air Line Railroad to Miami, thumbed down to Key West on the Overseas Highway. (Even though the war was over, if you were in uniform, you were
golden for a ride.) He wasn't Arnold Samuelson on the rackety top of a sooty freight, but the freedom he felt—not to say the sight of an almost surfless green and blue sea on either side of him that looked so unlike his California ocean—was exhilarating. He got to the bottom of the Keys about three days before Christmas, took a room on the third floor of La Concha Hotel (Max Perkins used to stay there when he came to see his star author), made some pencil sketches of the view out his window (one, dated December 23, 1946, is hanging in the small room in Woodland Hills where Nita spent her last days), sat on the docks, slipped into a bar or two, made entries in his journal, talked to no one. He didn't ride the elevator down to the lobby, walk out onto Duval Street, go to the corner, go one block, turn left onto Whitehead, and then proceed four blocks down the street to number 907—that might have taken all of five minutes. He wasn't even aware Ernest Hemingway had once bestrode this town.

And the bestrider himself? He'd just gotten home from New York. Hemingway and Mary had trained down to Miami and then caught a Pan Am DC-3 over to Havana's Rancho Boyeros Airport in the same time frame that Walter was training and hitching to Key West—so paths had been vaguely crisscrossing again. The Hemingways arrived in Cuba on the twenty-third (“Got in here today,” he began a typed letter to Buck Lanham), the head of the house having recently made a boor and inebriated bully of himself at the Stork Club—twice. (Both occasions involved Ingrid Bergman, who'd been dining at a nearby table with a male companion. She'd played Maria in the 1943 movie of
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, and so the cameo-skinned beauty, who was appearing in a play in New York, in his mind belonged to him in proprietary ways, and so naturally he was compelled both times to begin tossing loud, insulting comments at her escorts.) He'd told the
New York Post Week-End Magazine
some silly lies, but also that he'd “like to write a good novel and ten or fifteen more short stories and not go to any more wars. I'd like to raise my kids.” Perhaps he'd said the last part with momentary quiet in his voice.

In the spring of 1947, not long from graduation, Walter Houk, midshipman, did something on his nerve and impulse that would change his life: he requested permission to resign from the academy following graduation. He wished to renounce his commission and his anticipated assignment to a light cruiser named the
Pasadena
in the western Pacific in favor of directly entering the Foreign Service. He sat for the exams, passed in style, attended graduation with his mates (his academic ranking was number 75 out of a
class of 500), sailed his white hat into the air, got a little time off, got commissioned to the Foreign Service, and went to Washington to study for six months at the Foreign Service Institute. The navy was behind him.

They sent him to Ecuador. He hated the fevered backwater. At the end of 1949, he was posted to Havana as third secretary. Instantly, things got better. He liked the coffee, the food, the women, the architecture, the music, the casinos, the nightclubs, the sunsets, the air of gangsterly intrigue. The embassy was right in the heart of the old city, bordering the Plaza de Armas. The embassy didn't have its own building, but rather it leased space in a building that housed an American importer of farm equipment. Walter got a good office with a good view, and eventually he'd get an even better one—with a shuddering air-conditioning box. Some months into the next year, he bought himself a snazzy car. That fall he took an apartment that opened out onto a terrace that looked out over the rooftops to the Gulf—he enjoyed coming home after work, with or without dames, to pour a drink and to watch the big pearly Cuban moon roll up over his railing. He got assigned to the desk of the agricultural attaché. Eventually he took weeklong trips to inspect rice crops at places like Santiago de Cuba, at the far eastern end of the island. Cuba is the seventeenth-largest island in the world—the “long green lizard,” as a famous Cuban poet put it. It's really a vast archipelago, and the curving coastline of its main island—something close to eight hundred miles on an east–west axis—is washed by the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico. It's only an island, yes, but it feels like a whole nation, which it is. It's got the mountains, the seashore, big cities, villages stuck in colonial time. It's the “little” nation that's the “big” island that we have made this last half century into one of our larger Western Hemisphere myths, going back, at a minimum, to New Year's 1959, when Batista fled and the Bearded One, as his worshipers liked to call Fidel, came down out of the Sierra Maestra to ride like Jesus into Jerusalem on the tops of tanks and on the hoods of jeeps. In Walter's time, the not-yet myth of Cuba and the world was only a high-pitched, stringbeanish, rabble-rousing law student at the University of Havana, and then, following that, an agitating lawyer with his own scrabbling one-man practice in Havana.

The third secretary was in his post about ten months when he stopped by an embassy party one October night and was taken by a perky brunette standing in a group of male admirers. She was a typist and confidential secretary in army intelligence—those offices were housed in the embassy, on another floor. Her name was Nita Jensen, and she'd been born in
Tacoma, Washington, but raised in the Canal Zone, where her father had held various quasi-governmental jobs. She'd gone to business school and had then begun working in government herself—a way to see the world. She'd worked in Guatemala and Madrid (where she'd fallen headlong for the bullfights and had read
Death in the Afternoon
as a kind of Baedeker) and Washington, DC. There seemed something charmingly naive and deceptively sophisticated about her. If she didn't confide her age, she did confide that she was moonlighting, with the embassy's okay, at the home of the great Ernest Hemingway. “I'll take you out,” she said, the sentence sort of turning Walter on. It was clear to Walter how deeply enamored she was of the old guy.

Old guy in California talking. He's got a liquid cough. Small, red, chapped, and blue-veined hands are riding the morning air. A lusty grin is easing up, making Walter Houk's eyes, not quite the color of the sea, seem brighter, younger. “I was interested because
she
was interested. If she wanted to take me out to the
finca
, that was fine. I didn't have that much invested in it. It's true I'd bought a copy of
Across the River
that fall—he lived right there in Havana. Why not? I liked the book.”

December 14, 1950. The light was dimming. Out of the corner of his eye, the studly young government officer could see a wide, bulky vision in bagged-out khaki shorts and thatched sandals and with a deceptive lightness in his step coming toward him. The man was walking at a tilt, and on the balls of his feet, as if it were a half-conscious calf-strengthening exercise. He was carrying a clipboard.
My God, what bulk
was the first thought that entered Walter's head. Hemingway looked old enough to be somebody's grandfather. Walter saw a high center of mass culminating in a thick chest and shoulders that seemed twice as broad as his own.

Walter and Nita had been on the Hemingway premises for maybe forty-five minutes. Mary Hemingway had greeted them at the door. At first, the three had talked down by the pool and the tennis court. Mary, who hadn't met Walter till now, had been cool toward him; polite, but formally aloof. And yet it wouldn't be long, perhaps on the very next visit, that the
finca
's mistress would draw Walter aside. “You know, young man, this almost never happens, my husband accepting another male in his home so readily. I don't quite know why it's happening here, but if I were you, I'd just go with it.”

After some time by the pool, Mary had led Walter and Nita up to the
main house. “My husband will be by shortly—he's been working late this afternoon,” she said. She was pointing out flowers, talking about gardening and house projects. Nita knew all that Mary was saying, but had been trying to pay attention. In this year and a half of her part-time employment, Nita had learned to work around Mary's moods and envy and profanities. The two had established an uneasy peace, the more so now that Mary had stopped fearing Nita as any kind of romantic rival. They'd even been to town together on a few Saturday afternoons for shopping or the movies.

Before Walter could fully get him in profile, the vision coming toward him had seemed almost to bound up onto the west terrace. Maybe an hour before, the sun had broken through, after what had seemed like weeks of gray skies. The
finca
was now cast in a dusky glow. That sounds too hokey, but Walter noted this in his journal entry for December 14, 1950, and Havana newspapers of the day confirm it.

Hemingway extended that enormous hand. Across the bow and foam of six decades, Walter can still hear the first words. “Hello,” he said, “my name's Hemingway.” He said it softly, with shyness. The handshake turned out to be like that, too—solid, for sure, but with a surprising gentleness. He was looking directly at Walter, but even in the directness, there was something almost vulnerable.

“I think he was trying to put me at ease,” Walter told me. “I think he was trying to say he wasn't assuming I had to know what he looked like, even if the whole world
did
know. I think he was trying to signal in some way that we were sort of equal here, man to man.” Indeed, it almost sounds as if Hemingway had made up his mind to like Walter almost before Walter had a chance to open his mouth—something akin to the moment sixteen years before when a gawky, earnest boneyard just off the rails from Minnesota presented himself at 907 Whitehead Street. Had Hemingway done some reconnaissance on Walter? Was he embracing Walter because he so liked Walter's girl? But turn that thought around. Why wasn't Hemingway taking instant, vicious, proprietary
exception
to Nita Jensen's new beau? Walter: “This will sound egotistical, but he was an astute judge of character. That was his business, right? I was dumb enough, and not just that first time, to try not to be a phony.”

From a journal entry: “Still handsome with a reddish complexion (erysipelas? probably booze), he speaks slowly, with an odd turn of phrase that commands attention. His sincerity and humanity are very real, and almost astonishing in view of the tone of some parts of his writing.”

The conversation got on to cockfighting. Hemingway said he hadn't
figured out the morals of it, only that he liked it well enough, and was raising gamecocks himself. He said the moralizers should understand that the birds are never made to fight and are not interfered with once they've been put into the pit. “It's just in their blood to do it,” he said. Might Walter like to go with him sometime? Sure. (Was it some kind of test?)

Suddenly, Hemingway had turned, lightly taken Walter's arm, and said, “C'mon, kid, I'll show you the joint.”

A voice lifting, still astonished: “We left the women behind us.”

Actually, the kid had already seen the joint, not that he was about to let on. A month before—when he and Nita had been dating for only three or four weeks—Nita had brought him out to the
finca
unannounced. But the Hemingways had been down the stormy coast with their Italian houseguests. Nita had asked the servants if it was okay to show Walter through the house. He'd surveyed the paintings, the animal heads coming out of the walls, the shelves of books, the typewriter sitting on a small Indian rug on a high chest in a bedroom at the south end of the house, the stacks of opened mail twined into packets on the double bed in that same room, the bee swarm of phone numbers written in pencil on the wall on both sides of the hand-crank phone in the pantry. (Walter had sealed the number in his memory: Cotorro 17-3.) His eye, the trained naval eye, was fairly recording the place. Standing in the long living room, he'd counted seven doors and arch openings leading directly to the other rooms, without hallways in between. Architecturally, the entire house flowed from that sunny room.

And now he was getting a personal
finca
tour from the
finca
's owner, which included several minutes of standing before Miró's
The Farm
.

From a journal entry: “The Venetians … made a brief entrance and vanished. She [Adriana] gracefully saluted me with a handshake, but the glimpse was too fleeting to decide if she is beautiful or merely attractive.”

“Are you sure you wouldn't like to borrow some books?” Hemingway said as the couple was leaving. He was leaning in through the darkened car window. That huge head.

“My boat,” he said. “We'll be getting you out on
Pilar
.” As it turned out, this wasn't going to happen for seven more months. But there were reasons, which you'll hear about in a moment. Meantime I have a theory: Was there something in Hemingway right then, after all the recent beastliness, which longed to intersect with someone wholly new, whom he'd perceived, in the usual heartbeats of recognition, to be a decent person, and with whom he could make a fresh start at being his own good man again? Could such a need have been operating in half-conscious ways? And if so,
wouldn't this desire speak in a fundamental way to the man he truly was, down deep, which he seemed to wish always to betray, sabotage? In the novel the critics had just savaged, the dying colonel asks himself: “[W]hy am I always a bastard and why can I not suspend this trade of arms, and be a kind and good man as I would have wished to be. I try always to be just, but I am brusque and I am brutal.… I should be a better man with less wild boar blood in the small time which remains.… God help me not to be bad.” On the next page, the narrator writes: “He went out, walking as he had always walked, with a slightly exaggerated confidence, even when it was not needed, and, in his always renewed plan of being kind, decent and good.…”