Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  It began with a phone call at six in the morning.

  "This is Hemingstein the Tout. Are you awake?"

  "No."

  "Then get awake. This is a big day. I have just had word from Georges that there is a good horse in today's race, the first one that Georges really believes in, and I think we better meet earlier than usual and give it our special attention." Ernest was referring to Georges, the Ritz's chef du bar, who was a very cautious track scholar, so this development had to be treated seriously.

  The Ritz's elevator lights up "entendu" when you press the button, which was also my reaction to being summoned to this urgent meeting. Ernest was in his old wool bathrobe, secured, naturally, with the gott mit uns belt, sitting at a small antique desk, already at work on some form sheets. "When Georges called at six," he told me, "I'd already been up a couple of hours. I got up at first light because I was dreaming the actual stuff—it sometimes happens to me—dreaming the actual lines, so had to get up to write it down or would have dreamed it all out. Closed the bathroom door and sat on the can and wrote it down on toilet paper so as not to wake Mary."

  "You better get dressed, lamb," Mary said.

  Ernest told me that the name of the horse was Bataclan II, that the word was that he had previously performed under wraps but was now going to be given its head for the first time; the odds were twenty-seven to one. He had already gathered and studied every available piece of information about Bata-clan's past performances, had checked him out favorably with his jockey-room contacts, and had come to the conclusion that we should shoot the entire contents of our treasury and whatever other capital we could raise on the nose of this jumper.

  "Papa, you promised to meet Georges at eleven, and it's eleven now. You better get dressed," Mary said.

  "Kitner," Ernest said sternly, "don't count over me. The big problem is I can't find my goddamn lucky piece. This is a hell of a day to lose my lucky piece."

  "I'll help you look," Mary said.

  "So will I," I said.

  "It's a champagne cork from a bottle of Mumm. During the war, what I had for lucky piece was a red stone my son Bumby had given me, but one morning in England when I was scheduled to fly a mission with the RAF, the floor maid at my hotel brought back my pants from the cleaners and I realized that I had left the stone in one of the pockets and the cleaner had thrown it away. The RAF car was already waiting for me downstairs to go to the airfield, and I was really sweating over hitting a mission to Germany without the lucky piece. So I said to the maid, 'Give me something for a lucky piece—just anything and wish me luck on it and that will do it.' Well, she didn't have anything in the pocket of her uniform but she picked up the cork from a bottle of Mumm I had drunk the night before and gave me that. Damn good thing I had it—every plane on that flight got chewed up except ours. Best lucky piece I ever had and now it's been spirited away. You guys won't find it—I've checked out the whole joint. Tell you what, Hotch. While you're out raising capital, bring me back something. Anything, as long as it's pocket size. I once asked Charlie Scribner and he brought me a horseshoe. I said, 'It's a nice, tidy lucky piece, Charlie, but why did you take off the horse?'"

  My Paris sources for steeplechase fund-raising were, to say the least, limited, but by the time I checked in at the Ritz Bar at the appointed hour, I had managed to scrounge some additional capital from a former girl friend, an old Air Force buddy who now worked at the transportation desk of American Express, the play-writing (nonproduced) wife of a French publisher, a young lyric soprano I knew who sang at the Opera, the proprietor of a bistro where I was an established eater, and the business manager of Newsweek, to whom I had sold my French Ford when I left Paris in 1947. I had never solicited funds before and I felt like one of those small round women who shake cans at Broadway theater intermissions. I also felt the ghost of young John Dos Passos sitting heavily on my shoulder.

  Ernest was deep in consultation with Georges when I arrived. Bloody Marys to one side, the table top was a morass of charts, forms, scribbles and whatnot. The "thorough briefing" was one of Ernest's most salient characteristics, and it applied to everything he did. His curiosity and sense of pursuit would send him swimming through schools of minutiae which would flow into his maw and emerge crystallized on the pages of Death in the Afternoon or "Big Two-Hearted River" or in his flawless techniques for deep-sea fishing and big-game hunting. Now he was in pursuit of Bataclan II.

  Apologetically I placed my rather meager collection of franc notes on the table. Ernest pulled a sheet of paper out from under the others and added my amount to a list. "We have more contributors," he said, "than a numbers drop in the Theresa Hotel on a Saturday afternoon. Every waiter in the joint has something down, plus Georges, plus Bertin, Miss Mary, Jigee, the concierge at the Rue Cambon entrance, Claude the groom, and Maurice the men's-room attendant. If Bataclan doesn't perform as expected, we better check into another hotel tonight."

  Jigee and Mary came to the bar to participate in this august occasion, and Jigee decided that this was the proper time for her to take her first drink. "You mean you have never had a drink of hard liquor?" Ernest asked, astounded.

  "I've never wanted to until now," Jigee said.

  This important news caused Ernest to suspend his race-track thinking for the moment and consider (a) whether Jigee, who was in her thirties, should terminate a lifetime of abstinence, and if so, (b) just what the first drink should be. The answer to (a) was affirmative. As for (b), Ernest judiciously considered a range of drinks from Bloody Mary to martini, and discarded each for stated reasons, until only the Scotch sour had survived the elimination. It was mixed by Bertin with the greatest of care and placed before Jigee as the court sommelier must have placed a new wine before Queen Elizabeth. Ernest told Jigee to take a good sip and hold it in her mouth long enough to taste it and warm it before swallowing it. She did, and we hung on her reaction. When her face broke into a smile, Ernest said, "It's a good omen," and went back to his track calculations.

  But again he was interrupted, this time by the arrival of a short plump man in clerical robes who called out, "Don Ernesto!"

  "Black Priest!" Ernest exclaimed, and he arose and embraced him Spanish-fashion. Black Priest, on a month's sabbatical, had arrived in Paris on his way to a little town in the north of France where he was about to invest his modest life's savings in a new ceramic factory that was being started by a Frenchman he had met in Cuba. He had some reservations about the trustworthiness of his new partner, as did Ernest, but Black Priest felt it was worth the risk since it was his only chance of emancipation. He sat at the table and drank a Bloody Mary and watched in wonderment as Ernest wound up our pretrack conference with a final audit of the funds to be bet. "I'm sorry to have to run off, Black Priest," Ernest said, "but we have this titanic track venture under way. Please have dinner with us tonight at eight o'clock."

  "Don Ernesto," Black Priest said solemnly in Spanish, "I have been listening to the nature of your operation, and I would like to come to the track with you and invest my ceramic money in your race horse instead."

  "I'm sorry," Ernest answered in Spanish, "but I could not accept the responsibility for such risk."

  A rather heated discussion followed, Black Priest insisting, Ernest refusing, until a compromise was reached that Black Priest was to bet only half his ceramic money on Bataclan II.

  As we moved toward the door, Ernest said to me, "I better take my lucky piece now." We always took each other's re-sponsibleness for granted. "It fell on my head," I said, "where the Champs Elysees comes into the Concorde. It has a nice clear eye, don't you think?"

  Ernest took the chestnut, examined it, rubbed some oil on it from the side of his nose, nodded, and put it in his pants pocket. "Never lose your faith in mysticism, boy," he said, and he pushed on through the revolving door.

  Ernest went down to the paddock and studied our horse and the other horses as they paraded by; later, when we were in the grandstand and Bataclan came o
nto the track, he said, "The ones we have to worry about are Klipper and Killibi. That Killibi has a good smell. But, as you know, the thing that really spooks me is that goddamn last jump."

  The cockney-speaking tout and his pal, whom we had previously encountered, now approached Ernest and offered him a guaranteed, certified mount, but he demurred. I waited until the last moment to get our bets down; we were betting so heavy I didn't want the tote board to show it before closing. The final odds were nineteen to one. I got back to the stands just as the horses broke away. Bataclan ran first, then faded to second on the upgraded backstretch; he lost more ground on the water jump, and on the turn it was Killibi, Klipper and Bataclan in that order. As they came toward us going into the last jump, Bataclan was a hopeless twenty lengths off the pace. I moaned. "Keep your glasses on them," Ernest commanded.

  As Killibi took the low hedge, pressed by Klipper, his jockey reached for the bat and in so doing loosened his grip. Killibi's front legs dropped slightly and scraped the hedge, breaking his stride, and he hit the turf hard and stumbled and pitched forward with his boy jumping clear. Klipper was already through the jump at the fall; his jockey tried to clear the fallen Killibi but he couldn't make it and Klipper went right down on top of Killibi, the jock hitting the turf hard and not moving.

  Bataclan's jockey had plenty of time to see what had happened and he took Bataclan to the opposite side of the hedge for his jump and came in five lengths to the good.

  Nobody in our party made any effort to subdue his feelings. We started a jubilant exodus to the bar, but along the way Black Priest suddenly stopped and refused to budge. He just stood there, looking determined. "Not yet," he kept saying. "Not yet." When the stands around us had emptied, he gave a quick look around and then moved his foot off a Bataclan win ticket it had been covering. "No doubt about it," Ernest said, "God is everywhere."

  I took all tickets to the cashier while the others went off to the bar for champagne, and what I returned with was a Matter-horn of ten-thousand-franc notes. Ernest peeled off Black Priest's winnings and gave them to him. "Black Priest needs the bird in hand," he said. "He's been in the bush too long." As always Ernest was wearing his special race-track jacket, a heavy tweed coat that had been made for him when he was in Hong Kong, and which contained a very deep inside pocket that had an elaborate series of buttons which reputedly made it pickpocket proof, even by Hong Kong standards. Into it he stuffed all our loot and it made him look like a side-pregnant bear. As Ernest was stacking the money, the two touts who had approached us earlier went by. "Ah," one of them said to Ernest, tipping his hat, "one can see that Monsieur is of the metier.''''

  Black Priest stood at one end of the bar, his eyes aglow, his winning wad grasped in his left hand, while with his right forefinger he lovingly counted the money. At this moment a man, in passing, raised his hat and said "Good evening, Father," and Black Priest, not taking his eyes off the money, made a quick sign of the cross with his money-counting forefinger and then immediately put it back to work.

  Most of the Bataclan winnings, coming as they did on December 21st, were plowed back into France's Christmas economy. Packages filled both beds in the Hemingway room and spilled onto the floor. We celebrated Christmas on December 23rd, and after all the presents had been opened and we were engulfed in wrapping paper, Ernest said, "Never have so few bought so much, but I'm happy and proud to say that not one thing anybody gave to anybody is useful." We drank quite a bit of champagne to celebrate that accomplishment, and as a final obeisance to the Yule spirit, Ernest decided to send one of the chapters to Mayes, whose latest cables were a touch frantic.

  On December 24th we finally set out, two months behind schedule, for our original destination—Venice—in a chauffeur-driven hand-tooled outsized rented Packard. Ernest sat in front next to Charles, the chauffeur, a position Ernest regarded as de rigueur in an automobile. His knowledge of local terrain, weather, customs, history, battles, grain, grapes, orchards, song birds, game birds, wines, dishes, cattle, wild flowers, morality, architecture, irrigation, government and accessibility of local women to outsiders was prodigious, and he commented on these topics frequently and cheerfully.

  His intense interest in the passing countryside, however, tended to make voyaging with him a bit slow. Paris to Aix-en-Provence is normally a day's run, but it took us five. Mary and Jigee sat in the rear seat, and Peter Viertel (who had joined us the last day in Paris) and I sat on the commodious jump seats. The things that slowed our progress were the morning fogs, the long lunches and the street fairs in the little towns. The shooting booths at these fairs offered as their most difficult target a cardboard pigeon that had a red eye about the size of a ball bearing. If the shooter, using a dilapidated .22, completely eradicated the red of the eye with three or four shots, depending upon the generosity of the proprietor, he would win the booth's grand prize, a bottle of champagne.

  Ernest and I ruined a lot of cardboard pigeons during that trip, and Mary scored very well in her specialty—shooting through a hanging string. Ernest always presented the champagne, which was of questionable vintage, to members of the audience that invariably assembles at shooting booths.

  Thus we journeyed through Auxerre, Saulieu, Valence, Avignon, Nimes, Aigues-Mortes, Le Grau-du-Roi, Aries, Cannes and on to the Alps, eating exquisitely, drinking Tavel rose almost exclusively, and blasting the cardboard pigeons. The Viertels left us in Cannes and we continued on to Venice. It was my first visit there, and as I stood on the quay, looking at the Grand Canal, Ernest said, "Well, Hotch, the name of the town is Venice. You don't know it yet, but it will be your home town, same as it's mine."

  It didn't happen that trip, for I soon had to return to New York with the last three chapters of Across the River. They were hand-written and Ernest's only copies, and I was to have them typed by Mme. Gros, his Paris typist, before returning to New York. I took the Simplon-Orient Express from Venice to Paris. Ordinarily there was little or no border customs-inspection on the Express, but that trip the douane was on some kind of special alert and all bags were carefully inspected and turned upside down.

  It was not until I had checked into my hotel and called Mme. Gros that I realized I did not have the envelope that contained Ernest's manuscript. I trace my ability to speak fluent French from that moment, for there followed a nightmare of rigmarole with Paris railroad officials, yard foremen, security officers, porters and maintenance supervisors, all of whom were determined that I comply with The System, which was to wait and patiently check Lost and Found. The manuscript had not yet appeared there, but the records showed that my car had already been cleaned and dispatched to the terminal yard, so it was highly unlikely, they said, that as large an object as a nine-by-twelve manila envelope would have been overlooked if it had been in the compartment.

  But even the iron hegemony of French bureaucracy can be cracked by a frantic and persistent American, and finally, at two in the morning, I found myself in a vast, grimy railroad yard, being led by an elderly gimpy-legged torchbearing watchman, searching for the car I had occupied that day. There were hundreds of cars along miles of terminal tracks, in no order, and it was necessary to inspect the number of each car to determine if it was the one I had occupied.

  Finally, at four, we found my car but now came the worst of it, for the odds were that the missing envelope would not be there. I had already gone over all the different ways I would break the news to Ernest, and all of them sounded awful. I took the watchman's torch and began a minute search of the compartment but found nothing. I repeated the search, again fruitlessly, and was prepared to give up when the watchman spotted it. On the walls of the compartment were framed photographs of tourist scenes in France, and the envelope had lodged in the frame of a photograph of Avignon.

  I never told Ernest. Once or twice I started to, but I never quite made it. If I had, I don't think our relationship would have been quite the same again. In Ernest's book an act of recovery did not overcome an act of negligen
ce or untrustworthiness—if your gun goes off while you're going over a fence, it doesn't matter that you luckily did not hit anyone; it went off, didn't it?

  So I never told Ernest.

  Or anyone else.

  Chapter Four

  Havana ♦ 1951-53

  In the spring of 1951, just before I was to depart for Cuba to discuss my ballet version of Ernest's short story "The Capital of the World," I received a letter in which he warned me that he was Black-Ass. He furnished no details indicating the nature of this affliction but it had an ominous ring to it, and I was prepared for the worst.

  As he came down the steps of the finca to greet me, I saw no outward signs of whatever had beset him. Later in the day, however, I realized he was a bit more subdued and contemplative than usual, and these, I was to learn, were significant Black-Ass symptoms.

  After dinner that evening Mary turned in early, but Ernest and I continued to sit at the dining-room table, drinking red wine while two of the cats prowled among the remaining dishes, polishing them off. "Sorry about the Black-Ass," Ernest said. "Usually am a cheerful, as you know, but this time have maneuvered myself up the creek without paddles or oar locks. What started it was an accident I had on the boat. Was going good and busier than a one-armed South Korean when I took a beauty spill up on the flying bridge—very heavy weather, and I was just relieving Gregorio at the wheel when he put her in the trough. Got a good sound concussion complete with fireworks; not stars, but the ascending type, and it was arterial and spouting. One of the clamps that hold the big gaffs went all the way into the skull bone.

  "This is the thing I always thought helped a writer the least. I had held onto the rail when I hit, broke the fall as well as I could with my shoulders (spine hit the big gaffs), but Pilar is fifteen tons, the ocean more, me two hundred ten, and I hit hard. But was up at the count of one and when I saw that bright red spurting, I told Gregorio I had to go below and for him to anchor and let Roberto come up astern. Roberto was fishing alongside in 'The Tin Kid.' Then I told Mary to get a roll of toilet paper and put big folded packs on and I would hold them down. She was very good and fast and unpanicked, and when Roberto came up we dug out gauze and tape and made a tourniquet alongside the left eye. This way we contained the hemorrhage and made the finca okay.