Hemingway's Boat (49 page)

But there's no one else on the earth who can claim, as Walter Houk can, that Ernest Hemingway, in a pinstriped suit and clean white shirt and shined shoes (he even put on socks), stood up for him and his wife on their wedding day. He not only stood up, he gave the bride away and signed his name to the official documents. Later, on that same, indelible, swamp-hot April afternoon, both Hemingways, Mary and Ernest, hosted on the west terrace of their hilltop home in the village of San Francisco de Paula, Cuba, a champagne brunch–reception before the just-marrieds drove off in a rain squall of rice for the start of their four-day honeymoon to a place down the Cuban coast called Casa Happiness. To borrow a line from Arthur Miller's
Death of a Salesman
, doesn't attention have to be paid?

Appreciating the uncelebrated life of Walter Houk has helped me to appreciate all over again and in new ways the myth-swallowed life of Ernest Hemingway. It's as if he's single-handedly brought him back around—the goodness, in and amid all the squalor. In astronomy there's a technique known as “averted vision.” The idea is that sometimes you can see the essence of a thing more clearly if you're not looking at it directly. It's as if what you're really after is sitting at the periphery rather than at the center of your gaze. Something of this same hope and principle was at work in telling Arnold Samuelson's story. But the Maestro's life was a mirror opposite.

Walter Houk is in his mid-eighties, as I write. He is a small, trim, learned, meticulous, and sometimes fussy and nitpicky man, a widower, an accomplished former journalist, a failed painter, an ex-outdoorsman and
naturalist, an ex–Foreign Service officer, a once-and-long-ago midshipman, who lives alone, has long lived alone, quietly, unobtrusively, a little sadly, in a comfortable house, on an ordinary street, in a tucked-away corner of greater Los Angeles. That house, which is kept as tidy as the officers' quarters on a submarine, is full of old Hemingway photographs, nautical charts, unpublished book-length Houk manuscripts, Esso highway maps of Cuba in the 1950s, Havana bar menus, Christmas cards with Hemingway's greeting on them—and a lot more. Entering his house is like walking into a hidden Hemingway museum.

I'm certain I'd have no chance to do what Walter has so often urged me to do—namely, to try to help rescue Hemingway from his seemingly set-in-stone image of immortal writer and immortal bitch of a human being—had I not accidentally pulled down from a high shelf in a university library on the East Coast about eight years ago the wrong volume of an academic quarterly. The volume I'd been searching for contained some obscure reference to
Pilar
that probably would have helped me in my understanding only minimally, if at all. The one I inadvertently pulled down had a twenty-one-page article in it titled “On the Gulf Stream Aboard Hemingway's
Pilar
.” I stood there and stared at the title. What was it doing in an academic journal? Was the man who wrote it still alive? (The article in question was six years old.) Within an hour I had Walter's address and phone number, although I didn't muster the nerve to call until the next day. “I don't see why not,” he said in that hearty voice that belies its age, the more so if you're first encountering it on a telephone. “That is, if you want to bother to come all this way.”

It wouldn't be accurate to suggest that Walter Houk is an unknown figure in the scholarly Hemingway universe. He has published a handful of Hemingway-related pieces, contributed to online Hemingway chats and websites, spoken at an international Hemingway conference. But what I am suggesting is that so much of that scholarly Hemingway universe, as it stands, as I've encountered it, doesn't really seem to get it about Walter, namely, that he is still
here
just as he was once
there
. I've mentioned his name now and again to respected Hemingway scholars and critics, and the response has tended to run along these lines: “Oh, Houk. Rose-colored glasses.” There are the exceptions, of course. But the general view seems to be that his testimony, which is breathing testimony, must somehow be tainted, even invalid, because he insists on viewing Hemingway in such a human light.

Up above I described him as a somewhat sad man. In fact, there is a
great sadness about him, a kind of nimbus of sadness, which has little to do with the reality of someone facing his sooner-than-later extinction. Indeed, Walter has often said that it's not the dying itself he fears so much as the process, and that he would just as happily get it over with. (But I wonder, for all his infirmities, how many other octogenarians in California or anywhere else could find the will to get out of bed in darkness and lace on tennis shoes and get the walking stick that sits on the canvas deck chair by the front door and then go for about a mile and a half on up-and-down surfaces. Until just recently, this was Walter's almost daily regimen.)

No, the sadness that suffuses this man's life, not to say this man's spic-and-span sixties-modern California home, has to do with the absence of his wife. Nita's been gone since Christmas Eve, 1991—“at seven past noon and a part of my life ended” is the way he once put it. She died a hard death, and he was there through all of it, taking her out even toward the end to neighborhood parks in her wheelchair, tending to her meals and liquid oxygen tanks at home, which is where she tried to stay, until the last four or five days, when things were clear. Then it was just waiting in a chair beside her bed at the hospital until her vital signs flatlined in digital green on the overhead monitors. “She didn't say good-bye,” Walter told me. “She just went to sleep.” It was many things that killed her, but mostly it was a combination of virulent diabetes and lungs that were so eaten up with scar tissue that she could hardly breathe.

Nita had her own deep relationship with Ernest Hemingway. In fact, she knew Hemingway before Walter did. In fact, she's why Walter knew Hemingway at all: she got there ahead of him, and pulled him in, after she and Walter were sweethearts. Nita's real name was Juanita, although no one really called her that, certainly not Hemingway, who was fond of calling her “daughter” and Miss Nita. She used to take his dictation and transcribe some of his less poisonous letters off a wire recording spool that Hemingway called his “talk machine.” (The truly awful ones he saved for his own typewriter.) From mid-1949 to about February 1952, Juanita Jensen worked part-time for Hemingway while she held her regular clerical government job at the American Embassy in Havana—which is where her future husband also worked, as a high-ranking diplomatic officer.

It's not uncommon for the still-grieving spouse to set a place for his wife at Saturday dinner—and always on their wedding anniversary. He'll make her a martini.

Perhaps you have a sense of him as a talkative person. The opposite is true. He possesses the knack of reticence. Because he's comfortable with
the flat spaces between conversations, he can make other people at ease with them, too. Some of the inclination to silence comes from his long-ago training and experience as a seaman. There's a passage in
The Old Man and the Sea
, which Walter admires, where Hemingway writes, in the mind of the aged Santiago, who has now gone his famous eighty-four days in the Stream without taking a fish: “When he and the boy fished together they usually spoke only when it was necessary. They talked at night or when they were storm-bound by bad weather. It was considered a virtue not to talk unnecessarily at sea and the old man had always considered it so and respected it. But now he said his thoughts aloud many times since there was no one that they could annoy.”

Walter and Nita were married for almost forty years. They raised two children. Walter's son, Paul, and his daughter, Tina, late-middle-aged now, have long been on their own with their own lives and, in truth, are somewhat distant from their father. There are no Houk grandchildren. It's the loneliness for Nita that seems to supersede everything.

Hemingway once saved Miss Nita from a shark attack when she was swimming off
Pilar
's stern. He once made a semi-clunky pass at her when he'd taken her out on his boat alone for the purpose of trying to bed her. He once took personal charge of dyeing her shoulder-length brunette hair into a bleached blond, and then, about a week later, took further command of shearing it into a boyish cut, sides severely short, ears exposed. Yes, some of that sounds more than a little provocative. And I'll get to it. But wouldn't you rather hear just now about one of the most nonprovocative and unambiguous and
sweet
moments of a long and well-lived life?

Walter and Nita's wedding day. April 30, 1952.

Drift your eye back to the image at the beginning of this chapter. An eight-by-ten copy resides in an album that usually sits by the raised hearth in the middle of a Woodland Hills living room. There are probably two dozen surviving images from Walter and Nita's wedding reception at Finca Vigía. This one's not a great picture in any aesthetic sense, just the human one.

Here they are, the five-foot-nine groom, who's twenty-six, shortly to be twenty-seven, and his thirty-two-year-old bride, who has a twenty-six-inch waist, poised on the first step at the wide, main, portico entryway to the Hemingway home. It's right around two thirty. (Those lengthening shadows over on the left are from the giant ceiba tree that grows right up through the steps and part of the foundation of the house.) The newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Walter Houk, wed ninety minutes ago in a civil ceremony
in downtown Havana, have just rolled up the
finca
's long private drive and come around the circular driveway and stepped from their boat of a car. They've arrived, the guests of honor, in their squinty semi-daze.

Twenty or twenty-five people have gathered at the steps. Some of them, the women in their floral-print dresses and sling-back pumps, the men in their haspel suits and white shirts with moons of sweat growing beneath their armpits, are breaking into applause. A little bronze saluting cannon, a
lantaka
, is firing off blanks, sending out mini–sonic booms and puffs of sooty smoke. The cohost of the party, who's standing maybe ten feet
this
way from the lower edge of the frame, is orchestrating the firing, although he's left the actual firing to the black-robed figure beside him: don Andrés, an old exiled Hemingway priest-compatriot from the Spanish Civil War. The padre lives on another part of the island and comes on a bus every Wednesday for supper and nostalgia. Since today is a Wednesday, that makes the timing perfect.

Walter has recounted for me how much Hemingway loved his personal cannon, which sat up on wheels, and had been rolled into saluting position at the top of the steps. Mary Hemingway described it in her memoir of her fifteen years with Hemingway,
How It Was
, which was published a decade and a half after his death. (It came out the same year as Gregory Hemingway's
Papa
. It's about six times as long—exhausting to read and yet with startling and sometimes almost inadvertent revelations. Scholars and biographers have been mining it for years.) Her husband had purchased the cannon from a catalog for his fiftieth birthday in 1949. According to Mary, he owned
two
cannons, “no more than twenty inches long which fired real shells with impressive sound effects and backfired a mist of black soot which nestled snugly in the ears, eyebrows and hair of the artillerymen.” Actually, they didn't fire real shells, but you can imagine the things firing up Hemingway in some delicious, atavistic, bad-boy way. The booms were said always to scare the bejesus out of the
finca
's fifty-two cats and sixteen dogs, not to say its domestic staff of nine.

That boat of a car in the background: It's a four-door, pea-soup-green 1950 Buick Special with whitewalls (you can catch a glimpse) and Dynaflow automatic transmission and a three-panel window in the rear and a “bucktooth” vertical grill attached to the front bumper and, the pièce de résistance, an indicator on its “pilot console” dash that reports speed in kilometers instead of miles per hour. Two years ago, Walter bought the beast, on which he likes to keep a high Simoniz, and in which Hemingway has ridden a time or two, at a Foreign Service discount in a showroom
in Manhattan. It was billed as the International Edition. Walter drove it to Miami, had it ferried to Cuba. It's only one of the accoutrements that give him a kind of diplomatic dash and bachelor-about-Havana aura. That should go in the past tense. He has just renounced bachelorhood.

“The whole thing was rather unnerving,” Walter told me once. “And I just don't mean the cannon. I mean going to his house for the reception, the whole party in our honor. What I remember is how much Papa was enjoying himself. He was in full bloom.”

Regard the groom in full bloom. That cock-combed, Beau Brummell up-gleam of hair. (A little dab'll do ya, as the jingle says.) And those Ray-Ban shades in his right mitt. And that too-short tie. (Okay, it was the fashion then.) And that big-as-your-fist flower in his buttonhole. Not to say the suit itself, gone sad-sack in this infernal humidity. One of Havana's better tailors made it for the occasion, but it looks as if Walter's tropical-weight threads could have stood at least one more good nip and tuck.

Regard his bride: this peachy-plain, all-American-looking tootsie, with her gloved right hand clutching her new husband's left, with her rope of pearls (they're real, but they belong to Mary Hemingway, who wants them back right after the reception), with her filmy blue organdy dress that's got its bib collar locked chastely at the throat, with those sensible white pumps, with that ridiculous, flower-bedecked yellow hat that looks almost mashed on the back of her head, with that nosegay knotted at her midriff.

It was almost exactly a month ago that the lovebirds drove out to the
finca
with their surprise news. Nita, who didn't quite have Hemingway twisted around her little finger, had said that evening: “Papa, won't you please come? Papa, will you be one of our witnesses? Papa, would you give me away?” “Done, daughter,” he'd answered. And almost in the next heartbeat: “Would you like to have the reception here?” And then hugs and awkward laughing and the breaking out of booze.