The Best of Joe Haldeman (39 page)

“Do tell.”

“Hemingway was picking up a little extra money doing journalism. He’d gone to Switzerland to cover a peace conference for a news service. When it was over, he wired Hadley to come join him for some skiing.

“This is where it gets odd. On her own initiative, Hadley packed up all of Ernest’s work. All of it. Not just the typescripts, but the handwritten first drafts and the carbons.”

“That’s like a Xerox?”

“Right. She packed them in an overnight bag, then packed her own suitcase. A porter at the train station, the Gare de Lyon, put them aboard for her. She left the train for a minute to find something to read—and when she came back, they were gone.”

“Suitcase and all?”

“No, just the manuscripts. She and the porter searched up and down the train. But that was it. Somebody had seen the overnight bag sitting there and snatched it. Lost forever.”

That did hold a glimmer of professional interest. “That’s funny. You’d think they’d get a note then, like ‘If you ever want to see your stories again, bring a million bucks to the Eiffel Tower’ sort of thing.”

“A few years later, that might have happened. It didn’t take long for Hemingway to become famous. But at the time, only a few of the literary intelligentsia knew about him.”

Castle shook his head in commiseration with the long-dead thief. “Guy who stole ‘em probably didn’t even read English. Dumped ‘em in the river.”

John Baird shivered visibly. “Undoubtedly. But people have never stopped looking for them. Maybe they’ll show up in some attic someday.”

“Could happen.” Wheels turning.

“It’s happened before in literature. Some of Boswell’s diaries were recovered because a scholar recognized his handwriting on an old piece of paper a merchant used to wrap a fish. Hemingway’s own last book, he put together from notes that had been lost for thirty years. They were in a couple of trunks in the basement of the Ritz, in Paris.” He leaned forward, excited. “Then after he died, they found another batch of papers down here, in a back room in Sloppy Joe’s. It could still happen.”

Castle took a deep breath. “It could be made to happen, too.”

“Made to happen?”

“Just speakin’, you know, in theory. Like some guy who really knows Hemingway, suppose he makes up some stories that’re like those old ones, finds some seventy-five-year-old paper and an old, what do you call them, not a word processor—”

“Typewriter.”

“Whatever. Think he could pass ‘em off for the real thing?”

“I don’t know if he could fool me,” Baird said, and tapped the side of his head. “I have a freak memory: eidetic, photographic. I have just about every word Hemingway ever wrote committed to memory.” He looked slightly embarrassed. “Of course that doesn’t make me an expert in the sense of being able to spot a phony. I just wouldn’t have to refer to any texts.”

“So take yourself, you know, or somebody else who spent all his life studyin’ Hemingway. He puts all he’s got into writin’ these stories—he knows the people who are gonna be readin’ ‘em; knows what they’re gonna look for. And he hires like an expert forger to make the pages look like they came out of Hemingway’s machine. So could it work?”

Baird pursed his lips and for a moment looked professorial. Then he sort of laughed, one syllable through his nose. “Maybe it could. A man did a similar thing when I was a boy, counterfeiting the memoirs of Howard Hughes. He made millions.”

“Millions?”

“Back when that was real money. Went to jail when they found out, of course.”

“And the money was still there when he got out.”

“Never read anything about it. I guess so.”

“So the next question is, how much stuff are we talkin’ about? How much was in that old overnight bag?”

“That depends on who you believe. There was half a novel and some poetry. The short stories, there might have been as few as eleven or as many as thirty.”

“That’d take a long time to write.”

“It would take forever. You couldn’t just ‘do’ Hemingway; you’d have to figure out what the stories were about, then reconstruct his early style—do you know how many Hemingway scholars there are in the world?”

“Huh uh. Quite a few.”

“Thousands. Maybe ten thousand academics who know enough to spot a careless fake.”

Castle nodded, cogitating. “You’d have to be real careful. But then you wouldn’t have to do all the short stories and poems, would you? You could say all you found was the part of the novel. Hell, you could sell that as a book.” The odd laugh again. “Sure you could. Be a fortune in it.” “How much? A million bucks?”

“A million ... maybe. Well, sure. The last new Hemingway made at least that much, allowing for inflation. And he’s more popular now.”

Castle took a big gulp of beer and set his glass down decisively. “So what the hell are we waiting for?”

Baird’s bland smile faded. “You’re serious?”

~ * ~

2. in our time

Got a ripple in the Hemingway channel.

Twenties again?

No, funny, this one’s in the 1990s. See if you can track it down?

Sure. Go down to the armory first and—

Look—no bloodbaths this time. You solve one problem and start ten more.

Couldn’t be helped. It’s no tea party, twentieth century America.

Just use good judgment. That Ransom guy ...

Manson. Right That was a mistake.

~ * ~

3.
a way you’ll never be

You can’t cheat an honest man, as Sylvester Castlemaine well knew, but then again, it never hurts to find out just how honest a man is. John Baird refused his scheme, with good humor at first, but when Castle persisted, his refusal took on a sarcastic edge, maybe a tinge of outrage. He backed off and changed the subject, talking for a half hour about commercial fishing around Key West, and then said he had to run. He slipped his business card into John’s shirt pocket on the way out. (Sylvester Castlemaine, Consultant, it claimed.)

John left the place soon, walking slowly through the afternoon heat. He was glad he hadn’t brought the bicycle; it was pleasant to walk in the shade of the big aromatic trees, a slight breeze on his face from the Gulf side.

One could do it. One could. The problem divided itself into three parts: writing the novel fragment, forging the manuscript, and devising a suitable story about how one had uncovered the manuscript.

The writing part would be the hardest. Hemingway is easy enough to parody—one-fourth of the take-home final he gave in English 733 was to write
a
page of Hemingway pastiche, and some of his graduate students did a credible job— but parody was exactly what one would not want to do.

It had been a crucial period in Hemingway’s development, those three years of apprenticeship the lost manuscripts represented. Two stories survived, and they were maddeningly dissimilar. “My Old Man,” which had slipped down behind a drawer, was itself a pastiche, reading like pretty good Sherwood Anderson, but with an O. Henry twist at the end—very unlike the bleak understated quality that would distinguish the stories that were to make Hemingway’s reputation. The other, “Up in Michigan,” had been out in the mail at the time of the loss. It was a lot closer to Hemingway’s ultimate style, a spare and, by the standards of the time, pornographic description of a woman’s first sexual experience.

John riffled through the notes on the yellow pad, a talismanic gesture, since he could have remembered any page with little effort. But the sight of the words and the feel of the paper sometimes helped him think.

One would not do it, of course. Except perhaps as a mental exercise. Not to show to anybody. Certainly not to profit from.

You wouldn’t want to use “My Old Man” as the model, certainly; no one would care to publish a pastiche of a pastiche of Anderson, now undeservedly obscure. So “Up in Michigan.” And the first story he wrote after the loss, “Out of Season,” would also be handy. That had a lot of the Hemingway strength.

You wouldn’t want to tackle the novel fragment, of course, not just as an exercise, over a hundred pages—

Without thinking about it, John dropped into a familiar fugue state as he walked through the run-down neighborhood, his freak memory taking over while his body ambled along on autopilot. This is the way he usually remembered pages. He transported himself back to the Hemingway collection at the JFK Library in Boston, last November, snow swirling outside the big picture windows overlooking the harbor, the room so cold he was wearing coat and gloves and could see his breath. They didn’t normally let you wear a coat up there, afraid you might squirrel away a page out of the manuscript collection, but they had to make an exception because the heat pump was down.

He was flipping through the much-thumbed Xerox of Carlos Baker’s interview with Hadley, page 52: “Stolen suitcase,” Baker asked; “lost novel?”

The typescript of her reply appeared in front of him, more clear than the cracked sidewalk his feet negotiated: “This novel was a knockout, about Nick, up north in Michigan— hunting, fishing, all sorts of experiences—stuff on the order of ‘Big Two-Hearted River’ with more action. Girl experiences well done, too.” With an enigmatic addition, evidently in Hadley’s handwriting, “Girl experiences too well done.”

That was interesting. John hadn’t thought about that, since he’d been concentrating on the short stories. Too well done? There had been a lot of talk in the eighties about Hemingway’s sexual ambiguity—
gender
ambiguity, actually—could Hadley have been upset, sixty years after the fact, remembering some confidence that Hemingway had revealed to the world in that novel; something girls knew that boys were not supposed to know? Playful pillow talk that was filed away for eventual literary exploitation?

He used his life that way. A good writer remembered everything and then forgot it when he sat down to write, and reinvented it so the writing would be more real than the memory. Experience was important, but imagination was more important.

Maybe I would be a better writer, John thought, if I could learn how to forget. For about the tenth time today, like any day, he regretted not having tried to succeed as a writer, while he still had the independent income. Teaching and research had fascinated him when he was younger, a rich boy’s all-consuming hobbies, but the end of this fiscal year would be the end of the monthly checks from the trust fund. So the salary from Boston University wouldn’t be mad money any more, but rent and groceries in a city suddenly expensive.

Yes, the writing would be the hard part. Then forging the manuscript, that wouldn’t be easy. Any scholar would have access to copies of thousands of pages that Hemingway typed before and after the loss. Could one find the typewriter Hemingway had used? Then duplicate his idiosyncratic typing style—a moment’s reflection put a sample in front of him, spaces before and after periods and commas ...

He snapped out of the reverie as his right foot hit the first step on the back staircase up to their rented flat He automatically stepped over the fifth step, the rotted one, and was thinking about a nice tall glass of iced tea as he opened the screen door.

“Scorpions!” his wife screamed, two feet from his face.

“What?”

“We have scorpions!” Lena grabbed his arm and hauled him to the kitchen.

“Look!” She pointed at the opaque plastic skylight. Three scorpions, each about six inches long, cast sharp silhouettes on the milky plastic. One was moving,

“My word.”

“Your word?” She struck a familiar pose, hands on hips, and glared up at the creatures. “What are we going to do about it?”

“We could name them.”

“John.”

“I don’t know.” He opened the refrigerator. “Call the bug man.”

“The bug man was just here yesterday. He probably flushed them out.”

He poured a glass of cold tea and dumped two envelopes of artificial sweetener into it. “I’ll talk to Julio about it. But you know they’ve been there all along. They’re not bothering anybody.”

“They’re bothering the hell out of me!”

He smiled. “Okay. I’ll talk to Julio.” He looked into the oven. “Thought about dinner?”

“Anything you want to cook, sweetheart. I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand there with three ... poisonous ... arthropods staring down at me.”

“Poised to jump,” John said, and looked up again. There were only two visible now, which made his skin crawl.

“Julio wasn’t home when I first saw them. About an hour ago.”

“I’ll go check.” John went downstairs and Julio, the landlord, was indeed home, but was not impressed by the problem. He agreed that it was probably the bug man, and they would probably go back to where they came from in a while, and gave John a flyswatter.

John left the flyswatter with Lena, admonishing her to take no prisoners, and walked a couple of blocks to a Chinese restaurant. He brought back a few boxes of takeout, and they sat in the living room and wielded chopsticks in silence, listening for the pitter-patter of tiny feet.

“Met a real live con man today.” He put the business card on the coffee table between them.

“Consultant?” she read.