Hemingway's Boat (11 page)

The Sunlounge didn't work. From court documents: “About December 13, 1946, Wheeler Shipbuilding, by its president, Wesley, filed a petition under Chapter XI of the Bankruptcy Act in which petition it admitted that it was unable to pay its debts.” The Cropsey Avenue property had been sold by then. Family members had to be hauled into tax court for alleged “deficiencies in income taxes determined for the calendar years 1946 and 1947” (quoting again from legal documents). The reports of these legal problems made the papers. In the end, the Wheeler family, individually, collectively, corporately, lost to the government and the banks and nearly everyone else. And still they somehow managed to stay in the boat business, or some of the family did.

After the 1946 failure, several of the sons had reincorporated and taken over the property of Dawn Cruisers. There were new display ads in the papers to the effect that Wheeler boats were up and running once again at the foot of Patterson Avenue, Clason Point, the Bronx. But toward the late fifties, into the early sixties, the numbers on the books seemed desperate once more. Family members had quit the business, the eldest son was dead, others were no longer on speaking terms. There had been charges of embezzlement in the civil war that had broken out in the churchgoing and close-knit Methodist family. And yet, if you were reading the papers in this period, you'd form an impression distinctly otherwise. On the second to last day of the 1959 motorboat show, by then being convened annually at the New York Coliseum, the
Times
wrote:

Within two and a half years, the company was dead, at least in terms of involvement by any Wheeler family members. “In a year that has seen two other boat-manufacturing companies acquire new ownership, still a third
boat-building firm has changed hands,” the
Times
wrote on August 26, 1961. “The famous Wheeler Yacht Company, now on Clason Point, Bronx, on Patterson Avenue and formerly with yards on Coney Island Creek and during World War II in Whitestone, has been taken over by the Rimbach family of Flushing, Queens.” Wheeler had been seized for debt by a father-son firm of certified public accountants with German connections. The new owners said that they intended to keep the marquee name. Howard E. didn't live to see this final insult. He'd died in Florida, five months earlier, on March 23, 1961. But in some sense he had to have known it was all behind him, the wooden, watery dream obsessing him since 1910.

Howard E. died three months before Hemingway died. He is said to have suffered a short final illness, a quick reversal that seems in perfect keeping with his life and the history of his company. The salesman-builder-dreamer-visionary, who'd made it into his ninety-third year, was survived by twenty-one grandchildren and thirty great-grandchildren. In his last years, with his physical health still strong, the emotionally distraught patriarch, only semi-involved with the business, still possessed of his flaring brows and untamed hair and pork-chop sideburns, all of it gone shock white, had tried to distract himself by building a house on a canal in Fort Lauderdale. He'd go to the ocean and sit fully clad on the sand in a porkpie hat and a dress shirt and a tie with miniature Wheeler flags on it. In the same season that some landlubberly CPAs in Queens were getting ready to dispossess the progenitor's business, another distraught man, in Idaho, absent of both physical and mental health, stared at his shotgun. I wonder if Hemingway even knew Howard Wheeler's name.

There's a Bruce Springsteen song called “Atlantic City” with this line: “Well now everything dies, baby that's a fact / But maybe everything that dies someday comes back.” So I can report this happy fact: a Wheeler rising yet again. A great-grandson of Howard E.'s, Wesley Wheeler, who is Wes Wheeler's son, and so has pleasure boats in his blood, has sought to remake Wheeler Yacht Company on a small scale at a shipyard in North Carolina.

He was a world-class pack rat and kept all kinds of pieces of paper, uncounted numbers of which have passed down to posterity. These receipts and tickets and bills of sale—from trains, steamship lines, hotels, hardware stores, laundries, bullfights, barbershops, taxidermists, automobile dealerships, heavyweight championship bouts, rod-and-reel outfitters—along with his letters, Western Union telegrams, journals, fishing logs, and list-makings on the front and back of envelopes, translate to manna from heaven for anyone trying to grasp a life. And yet at other times, Ernest Hemingway has a canny way of disappearing from sight, like Houdini doing a trunk trick. Documentation for a significant moment, event, incident, or day just goes missing. Maybe he's having a great horse laugh about it now from wherever he is
.

The sad fact is we know next to nothing about the day he went to Cropsey Avenue. I am convinced the date was Thursday, April 5
,
no matter that others have fixed it as April 4
.
(You can consult the endnotes for my argument.) Did he and Pauline flag down the first taxi they saw outside Scribners? What time of day—early afternoon? What was the route to Brooklyn? How long did they stay at the boatyard, and with whom did they shake hands there, and what did they do afterward, when they'd motored back into the city? (There had to have been magnums of champagne involved.) Biographer Carlos Baker, in his 1969 pioneering study
, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story,
has him coming back to his hotel “in a state of rapture”—and who'd want to disagree?

What we do have are some excited Hemingway descriptions of the boat in letters to friends and business associates in the days and weeks and months afterward, and two documents from the company. The first is a postdated purchase order, the second a bill of sale (which shows the date that the balance was paid off, in Key West, on the day after the boat had arrived). The purchase order, dated April 18, 1934
,
states the price (which ended up changing by a modest amount, reflected in the subsequent bill of sale); provides a description of
Pilar
's power plant; gives an anticipated
delivery date (which wasn't far off from the actual delivery date); and lists the agreed-on modifications and alterations to “one 38
-
foot twin cabin Playmate cruiser.” This one-page document on legal-size paper tells us nothing, though, about the emotional texture of that day in Brooklyn. That you have to make up almost entirely in your mind
.

At sea, that first or second summer

I HAVE NO PROOF
that the boat-owner-to-be, with Gingrich's wad in his pocket, took the elevator (or maybe the stairs) from Max Perkins's fifth-floor office down to the street and grabbed the first taxi he saw. Maybe he went to his hotel and changed into different clothes. Maybe he went straight to his bank and deposited the check. Maybe he and Pauline, feeling flush, had an expensive lunch on
Esquire
. But what I picture (guided by the maps and hunches of the reference assistants at the Brooklyn Public Library) is that at some soon-after point a cabbie conveyed husband and wife over the Manhattan Bridge, got onto Flatbush Avenue, negotiated around Prospect Park, connected to Ocean Parkway, and then followed that down through the spine of the borough before turning back west and taking several side streets over to Cropsey and then to Cropsey's foot.

Was the old man waiting to greet them when they arrived? He must have been. He loved taking people through, making personal introductions, the more so if they were somebodies. Wouldn't they have hit it right
off, the monarch of literature, the purveyor of pleasure boats, both sharing the name Ernest?

As noted, the purchase order has the date April 18 on it, but surely that's the date the document was typed up and mailed to Hemingway in Key West for his executing signature. This piece of paper was the formal sealing of the bargain that had been made two weeks before in person at the shipyard. The modifications Hemingway ordered for
Pilar
at Wheeler raised the cost by $455 from the $7,000 catalog price that he had fixed in his mind and had been contemplating since Africa. But Hemingway wouldn't know the “final” price (it wasn't) until he received the purchase order in the mail.

The amount “set forth below” was $7,455. That figure would grow to $7,495 after the purchaser decided—apparently after he'd studied the specs some more at home—that he wanted part of
Pilar
's cockpit to be enclosed
with copper screens. This
was
the final price, and it got reflected on the bill of sale, a one-page document dated May 5, 1934, and executed with a company signature in Key West on May 12, 1934, after the balance was paid, and following the two-day shakedown cruise from Miami.

The bill of sale helps establish the chronology of events. The purchase order of April 18 stated the terms at “$3,000.00 with order.” This suggests Hemingway had turned over Gingrich's money—or at least his own bank check—on the day he and Pauline went to the factory and put in the order. (I couldn't find a paper trail.) It's possible Hemingway could have sent the down payment after he put in the order. But that doesn't seem like it would have been sound business practice on Wheeler's part, nor does it seem in keeping with what I know about Hemingway. He liked to pay as he went.

The estimated delivery date was “About two weeks. Subject to steamer sailings.” That turned out to be reasonably accurate: by April 18, when the document was typed up and mailed to Florida, the builders at Wheeler had been at work on Hemingway's boat for approximately two weeks; in three more weeks, she'd arrive in Miami.

Roughly seven weeks after the day he went to Cropsey—and roughly two weeks after
Pilar
was in his possession—on May 25, 1934, Hemingway, wrote a letter to Gingrich succinctly describing what he'd just acquired: “The boat is marvelous. Wheeler, 38 footer, cut down to my design. 75 horse Chrysler and a 40 h. Lycoming. Low stern for fishing. Fish well, 300 gal gas tanks. 100 gal water. Sleeps six in cabin and two in cockpit. Can turn on its own tail burns less than three gals an hour trolling and four at cruising speed with the big engine. Will do sixteen with the two motors. The little one will do five hooked up.”

He wrote that at the beginning of his first summer with
Pilar
. Toward the end of that fishing season, on September 27, Hemingway described his boat again in a letter to his old boxing and painting and fishing pal from Paris days, Mike Strater:

He wrote that from the Ambos Mundos Hotel in Cuba, on stationery monogrammed with “Atlantic Refining Company of Cuba.” He started the letter, “Dear Mike. This note paper doesn't mean old hem has sold out to the oil boys.… Just picked it up in the hall.”

The man in a rapture came back into Manhattan from Brooklyn. Pauline left for home by rail. For the next several days Hemingway made the rounds of in-laws and close friends and, one wouldn't doubt, New York saloons. He saw the Murphys. He saw Waldo Peirce and Sydney Franklin. (The first was a painter and outdoorsman; the second an American bullfighter from Brooklyn, son of a Flatbush cop, whom Hemingway had celebrated and profiled in
Death in the Afternoon
.)