Hemingway's Boat (69 page)

There's a PS to the letter that amounts to a letter in itself.

Next day: “I suppose you wonder what has happened to all my filial respect for you. Well, it's gone Ernestine, dear, it's gone!”

Ernestine, dear
.

Further down: “Little goody-goody Miss Mary, for instance, who's taken more shit from you than they dump in Havana harbor. But we know better, don't we, you'll never write that great novel because you're a sick man—sick in the head and too fucking proud and scared to admit it. In spite of the critics, that last one was as sickly a bucket of sentimental slop as was ever scrubbed off a barroom floor.”

Four days later, Hemingway answers:

He signs it, “Your father, E. Hemingway.”

Three days later, Gigi replies, and
please understand
is all over the page, as is the need for a cease-fire. “The clothes business is something that I have never been able to control, understand basically very little, and I am terribly ashamed of. I have lied about it before, mainly to people I am fond of, because I was afraid they would not like me as much if they found out. It has been a terribly destructive influence on my life and is undoubtedly responsible for a lot of moral disintegration.”

About four days later, a father, who must have had nearby a work in progress about sex-twinning honeymooners and their fears of moral disintegration, wrote across the front of Gigi's envelope: “No answer.”

In
Papa
, Gigi wrote: “My mother made her absences in the early and most formative years of my life readily explicable later on, when she admitted, ‘Gig, I just don't have much of what's called a maternal instinct, I guess. I can't
stand
horrid little children until they are five or six.… But I loved you, darling, I really did, though I guess I didn't always show it.' ” This
paragraph ends: “Understood completely and forgiven. But not originally.” Did he ever really forgive? It's hard to believe that.

In late September 1945, back from war, trying to heal, to begin serious writing again, Hemingway said in a letter to his future wife, Mary Welsh:

Hemingway and Pauline went to Africa in 1933, when Gigi was two, so he's off in his dates by about a year. Nor are other time frames right. But it isn't that; it's the casual claim that a mother, who couldn't stand horrid little children, had more or less yawned near the end of the long absence and said:
Mmmm, guess I oughta see my Gig
. Not that her husband was any less accountable. (They'd left their baby child in the care of a shadowy woman named Ada Stern. For at least part of the time away, five-year-old Patrick was put with relatives in Piggott. The Dickensian-named Miss Stern, from upstate New York, had begun watching over Gigi when he was three months old—and she tended him until he was twelve. In
Papa
, Gigi describes how, when he was a toddler, she'd threaten to leave him when he was bad. “She would pack her bags and go hobbling down the stairs with me clinging to her skirts, screaming, ‘Ada, don't leave me, please don't leave me.' ” And Ada would say, “All right, I'll stay, you little shitsky.” He loved her, though, in spite of everything.)

In
Papa
, Gigi makes it sound as if he might not ever have spoken again to his father had Hemingway not suffered those two back-to-back airplane crashes in East Africa (near Murchison Falls in January 1954) from which, as we now know, he never really recovered in either his body or mind. Gigi writes: “The first headlines announced that the wreckage of the plane had been sighted and that there was no sign of life. Thinking he was dead, I
realized how much I still loved him. When I found out soon afterward that he had survived, I resolved to patch up our differences. After he won the Nobel Prize that October, I sent him a congratulatory wire.”

What he doesn't say—once again, John Hemingway in
Strange Tribe
fills in the record—is that there was a quiet letter of apology nearly six months before that wire. He'd said, “I didn't mean to say those things. I was crazy at the time, just as crazy as Mouse was when he used to swing at you during the shock treatments [of 1947]. If you don't ever want to see me again, O.K., but I hope you will change your mind when you find out over a period of time that I am on my feet again.” Over the next several months father and son talked of business matters, family matters. In early August 1954, Hemingway wrote a letter any child would crave to have.

Soon they were talking about the possibility of Gigi going to Africa to visit his brother Pat. Gigi wanted to take his wife and child, and also his old governess. His father thought it a terrible idea to take a child and a sixty-seven-year-old woman to Africa—the risk of infection would be enormous. Gigi made a budget and asked his father for $2,500. Hemingway promised to send it—and more, if he won the Nobel, which was shortly to be announced. “About dough again,” he wrote on October 12, sixteen days before he got the prize: “I have $6,046.81 in the bank. $33,000 income tax paid this year.… I pay $320 a month for Mary's mother and father in the nursing home, which adds up to $3,840 per year, plus extra expenses, and is a little more than half of my total income from all securities
which I had originally intended to be a reserve fund for when I was sick. My basic income, if I were ill and could not work, is about the same as yours and Mouse's.”

The next day, talking again of Africa's danger: “There are all sort of things there are no serums against.”

Gigi did go to Africa with his family in early 1955, and about all of it was a disaster. He departed with $5,000 in his pocket from his father—“right off the top of the tax-free bounty of Sweden,” he says in
Papa
. He had an affair with the wife of a plantation owner. He threw down money from his inheritance on a coffee farm. But he had no real interest, let alone know-how, in managing a coffee operation. In Nairobi bars, he drank himself into stupors. In the bush, he wouldn't come out of his tent for days. He got into quarrels with his brother Pat, who was trying to establish himself as a guide and white hunter in Tanganyika. In December, his wife gathered up four-year-old Lorian and flew back to America, to her sister's place in Arkansas. In a few months, there was her husband on her doorstep, crying, drunk, making threats, eventually getting himself arrested. None of this appears in
Papa
. What appears: “I felt guilty about Mother's inheritance, thought that since I had killed her it was blood money, and I got rid of it incredibly fast. My marriage finally broke up and I was drafted into the army.”

On the page before this: “I shot eighteen elephants one month, God save my soul. But it's no use running when you're sick, because when you finally stop, you find you're just as sick as when you started.” Such beautiful ellipsis.

It was apparently somewhere in here—mid-to-late 1955, maybe into early 1956—that Gigi's father wrote an elliptical story about a boy and wing shooting and plagiarism. Its first sentence: “ ‘It's a very good story,' the boy's father said.” Its last: “And it was sad to know that shooting did not mean a thing.”

About the army, into which he was sworn, on the fifth anniversary of Pauline's death, October 1, 1956: they sent him home before he completed basic training. The ex–buck private, judged psychologically unstable, turned up in Miami, unloading trucks. His father, just across the Straits of Florida, hadn't heard.

From
Papa:
“After an undistinguished career in the peacetime army, I went back to Africa to do more killing. Somehow it was therapeutic. Although the yellow-green emotional filter was still in place, the focus of my mind was sharpening.”

About the killing and the elephants: years later, in Montana bars, when he was a doctor, and a damn fine one (until everything got bitched again), the fleeing man used to tell friends, in various states of melancholy and rage, “Those assholes, they believed what I wrote about the eighteen elephants.” He meant the readers of his best-selling book, and all the subsequent Hemingway chroniclers who'd passed the story on.

In the approximately five years between the end of his army “career” in 1956 and his father's death in 1961, Gigi did little but disappoint and often disgust his father. The reverse could also be said. More manic trips to Africa, more depressive ricochets back home, with Hemingway paying many of the bills, including hospital bills. On August 15, 1957, Gigi ended up in a Miami medical center, where they gave him shock treatments for what was diagnosed as schizophrenia. “I'm sorry that I got into this shape, but I will be out of here soon,” he wrote to his father, five days after he was admitted. Hemingway wrote back, in a softened key:

These worries
. Keep it in code. And yet the caring—undeniably.

When Gigi was let out, in mid-October, Hemingway flew over to Miami to meet him and they drove down to Key West in a rented car, stopping at various bridges to look at the sea. So far as anyone seems to know, this is the last time they were ever physically together. Two months later, Gigi was back in the same hospital.

A couple of months later, he got this letter from his father: “Times are really rough now and going to be much rougher.… When I have to worry about you I can't write. It knocks everything out of my head and this is the time I have to work or else.… Have been lashing myself to work for so long under difficulties, bad financial problems, no chance to get out on the boat for nearly two months with this godawful weather.” The letter's
date is February 4, 1958. The black-sheep son was still two and a half years from starting medical school (Gigi got admitted to the class of 1959 at the University of Miami School of Medicine, but dropped out almost immediately); two and a half years from reading his mother's autopsy; two and a half years from writing a letter in his bad penmanship to his wrecked father that said, no, it couldn't have been me, it was you.

In July 1968, seven years after the Idaho suicide, four years from finishing med school, a thirty-six-year-old bipolar doctor, who'd become a doctor, in spite of everything, took his daughter, Lorian, on a fishing trip to Bimini. Gigi was now the father of five children, by three women. He was also a medical resident in anesthesiology. (He wouldn't finish this residency, at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, as he hadn't completed an earlier orthopedic fellowship in Boston.) Gigi's wife now was Valerie Danby-Smith, from Ireland, who'd been raised in a convent boarding school. He'd met and picked her up (literally, in a borrowed station wagon) at his father's funeral. For a brief time, Valerie had worked as his father's last secretary and fantasy love projection. (Hemingway met her in Spain, in 1959, when she was nineteen.) She'd soon be giving birth to Gigi's sixth child.

Actually, Gigi had married this third wife twice by this time—first in Mexico City, in September 1966, when he wasn't yet unmarried from his second wife, Alice, who, a few months before, in March 1966, had given birth to Gigi's fourth child. (His name is Patrick Hemingway.) Gigi had taken care of these complications, and had married Valerie again, in Miami, in November of the succeeding year, that is, 1967, with a champagne toast at Uncle Les's house in Miami Beach.