Papa Hemingway

by A. E. Hotchner

  I went to find the waiter and on the way passed a table where Chuck Atkinson and his wife were having dinner. I asked Chuck whether he knew the two men at the bar. "Sure," he said. "They're salesmen. Been coming through here once a month for the last five years. Don't tell me Ernest is worried about them.'''' He shook his head sadly.

  When I told Ernest they were salesmen, he scoffed, "Of course they're salesmen. The FBI is noted for its clumsy disguises. What do you think they'd pose as—concert violinists? Come on, Mary. You can have coffee back at the house."

  Mary had been anxious to speak with me from the time I had arrived, but Ernest had made it very difficult. He had become hypersensitive to the critical reactions around him, and whenever he saw any of his friends talking to Mary he was certain that they were discussing him—in reality, they probably were. Mary was understandably nervous and distraught; she had been subjected to Ernest's accelerating anxieties since his return from Spain and she was exanimated from inability to cope with him. On our way out of the Christiana that evening, she was able to tell me, without Ernest hearing, that she would be shopping at the supermarket at eleven the next morning.

  We had our talk over a shopping cart in back of the cereals. Mary said she was desperate. She showed me a letter she had found on Ernest's desk the day before; it was addressed to his bank, the Morgan Guaranty in New York. The salutation and first sentence were in order but then the words became gibberish, as if he had been experimenting with a new language.

  Basically, Ernest's ability to work had deteriorated to a point where he spent endless hours with the manuscript of A Moveable Feast but he was unable to really work on it. Besides his inability to write, Ernest was terribly depressed over the loss of the finca, and although Mary had suggested that they get an apartment in Paris or Venice, or a new boat that could take them on a long sea voyage, there was no way to get a reaction from Ernest that could relieve the bleakness out of which the constant delusions and hallucinations seemed to rise. His talk about destroying himself had become more frequent, and he would sometimes stand at the gun rack, holding one of the guns, staring out the window at the distant mountains.

  I told Mary that I thought it was perfectly obvious that Ernest needed immediate and thorough-going psychiatric help, and even went so far as to suggest Menninger's, but she registered concern over what effect such publicity might have. I then suggested that if she wanted me to take over, I would go back to New York immediately and contact a very fine psychiatrist whom I knew; she urged me to act as soon as possible, and reiterated her fear that Ernest's threats to destroy himself might become a reality.

  Before leaving, I arranged to see Vernon Lord, because if Ernest was to receive treatment it had to be with his own consent and approval and Vernon, I felt, was the key to achieving this. Vernon told me that Ernest had given him a note to be opened after his arrest. Vernon said he had already read the note, which contained instructions for taking care of Mary and rabid disclaimers intended to protect Vernon from imagined prosecution. Some of the note, Vernon said, was garbled and made no sense; he was as fearful as Mary about Ernest's condition.

  "I'm just a country doctor," he said, "and a pretty young one at that. I have the responsibility of knowing that Ernest needs immediate help that I can't provide. Oh, I have prescribed various tranquilizers and even a few new drugs I've read about in the journals, but Ernest is in a serious condition that is so far out of my field I cannot even diagnose it; yet I can see almost daily deterioration in these past few weeks. If you could bring in a New York psychiatrist it would be vitally helpful."

  I asked Vernon whether, when he next took Ernest's blood pressure, he could find that it had risen perceptibly.

  "You mean, enough to alarm Ernest over it?"

  "Well, enough so that you could convince him that he must go somewhere for tests and treatment. I'm just thinking of how we can lay the groundwork for getting him to go wherever the New York doctor recommends, if that's what he recommends."

  "It might work," Vernon said. "His blood pressure is one of the things he really cares about. Keeps running statistics on the readings. We have an appointment this afternoon. I'll do what I can. The irony is that this psychogenetic deterioration has developed just when after all these years he's finally rounding into shape—following his diet, virtually not drinking. It's an ironic seesaw, isn't it?"

  The New York psychiatrist, whom I shall call Dr. Renown, acted quickly. He described Ernest's general condition as depressive-persecutory, and in a telephone conversation with Vernon Lord he prescribed certain new drugs that he felt would be helpful, pending hospital treatment. Dr. Renown's first hospital choice was Menninger's, but Vernon felt that because of the stigma of the name, there was no possibility that Ernest would go. I pointed out that Mary would probably also resist Menninger's to avoid public awareness of Ernest's condition.

  It was apparent, therefore, that the only acceptable hospital would be one that had both physical and psychiatric facilities so that Ernest could be admitted for some physical ailment, thereby masking his true malady. On that basis Dr. Renown suggested the Mayo Clinic. Vernon reported that Ernest had reacted to the increased-blood-pressure readings with the alarm we had anticipated, and Vernon said he thought he might be able to get Ernest to go to Mayo on the basis of blood pressure tests and special treatment. Subsequently, Dr. Renown made all arrangements for Ernest's hospitalization and discussed his general condition in telephone conversations with the Mayo doctors.

  On November 30th Vernon accompanied Ernest to Rochester, Minnesota, in a small chartered plane, and Ernest was admitted to the Mayo Clinic that afternoon. He was admitted under the name of Vernon Lord and placed in a room in St. Mary's Hospital.

  Ernest was not permitted to receive or make phone calls, and he wrote no letters, but during December, I occasionally spoke on the phone to Mary, who was staying at The Kahler Hotel and seeing Ernest every day. She was very lonely in the town. It was a hell of a place for her to spend Christmas, and my daughters sent her a boxful of little-girl presents to try to cheer her up.

  During the month of December, Ernest was given eleven treatments with electric shock, technically referred to as ECT's. Mary told me about them, how terrible they were for Ernest and how he suffered, more psychologically than physically, from receiving them. But she said he seemed to be getting along well with his doctors, who reported that he was making good progress. She said, however, that they were at a disadvantage since they did not know him as well as she did.

  The ECT's were abruptly stopped during the first week in January. Shortly thereafter Ernest asked the doctors whether he could speak to me on the phone, and they had agreed. It was Ernest's first outside contact since his admission and obviously very important to him. I asked whether there were instructions as to what I should and should not talk about, but there were none. The call was for a specific time on a specific day.

  The operator said to hold on, Mr. Lord was coming to the phone; after he greeted me Ernest said, "Hell of a thing having a name like [Lord] in a Catholic hospital—and me a failed Catholic." He sounded vigorous and in control but there was a heartiness in his voice that didn't belong there. He told me that during the past few days he had been able to read for the first time since his arrival; what he had been reading were the galleys of a new book by our friend George Plimpton. It was called Out of My League, and Ernest said he was enjoying it very much. "But it's hard to enjoy anything," he said, "in a room where they frisk you and lock the door on you and don't have the decency to at least trust you with a blunt instrument."

  Hearing this from him was startling, simply because I had not properly imagined his physical life there. I asked whether he thought his doctors would permit me to visit him. He said he would inquire and let me know but that Rochester was really too far out of the way to ask anyone to come. "But there's no denying," he said, "I'd be glad as hell to see you."

  We talked for fifteen minutes and there was not one wor
d about any of his old delusions. He spoke a good deal about the Paris sketches and getting back to work on them, for he had decided to publish them in the fall. The hospital operator cut in to say, "Mr. Lord, will you please conclude your call," and he quickly said good-bye.

  The town of Rochester, Minnesota, is the Mayo Clinic, and vice-versa. It stands upon a flat plain, a needle ringed by thimbles. The needle is the skyscraper clinic and the thimbles are the hotels that house its patients. They come from all over the world and stay in the hotels, which have subterraneous passageways connecting with the clinic, which is an elongated honeycomb of examining cubicles. Stretchers and wheelchairs fill the hotels' elevators and are pushed back and forth through the passageways.

  The Mayo Clinic itself has no hospital facilities. An affiliation has been arranged, however, with the town's St. Mary's Hospital, which is run by an energetic order of nuns, whereby doctors of the clinic can administer to patients whom they hospitalize there.

  I was scheduled to fly to Rochester on January 13, 1961. On the tenth I received a telegram from Ernest telling me that Northwest Airlines was on strike, and I should take Capitol direct to Minneapolis, then Braniff or Ozark to Rochester, or a Jefferson Transportation limousine that took ninety minutes, left every four hours and cost eight bucks. He gave me his weight as one seventy-three and a quarter, and said all of it would be glad to see me.

  This was a flash of his old self, I thought, this concern about his friends and attention to details for them. I bought a large tin of beluga caviar from Maison Glass and set out from Newark via Capitol. Unfortunately, the kitchen of the Capitol plane was taken off in Chicago, with my caviar in the refrigerator, never to be seen again. I had intended it for Mary as a lift from the Grande Cuisine de Rochester.

  I checked into The Kahler, then went directly to the hospital. Ernest looked shockingly thin: 173 pounds on a frame that normally held 210 or 220. His face had lost its conformation and even his features seemed changed. He introduced me to his nurse, a large, pretty young woman who obviously relished her patient, and later on to his doctors, whom he had already invested with "pal status." He had been to their houses for meals, and one of the doctors told me they had shot skeet in back of his house the preceding Sunday, following a luncheon attended by many of the doctor's friends. We were sitting in Ernest's room, which was small but pleasantly furnished, and one barely noticed the bars on the windows. Ernest joked and laughed and remembered things for the doctors' enjoyment, like our triumph at Auteuil and my afternoon in the ring; despite his disappointing physical appearance, Ernest certainly seemed restored. But I got the uneasy feeling that the doctors were treating him like a celebrity as much as a patient.

  When they left they said it was perfectly all right for Ernest to get dressed and go for a walk with me. The nurse brought him his clothes, and as he was dressing, Ernest pointed to a pile of letters on the dresser, saying that he had always been a good letter-answerer so he felt bad that he hadn't been able to answer all those. He said he wished he had Nita there so he could dictate them. I suggested that he arrange for the public stenographer at The Kahler to come in every afternoon for an hour or two, and this possibility cheered him. "Would like to clean up all correspondence here," he said, "so when I get back to Ketchum I can go right to work on the book."

  Then he asked the question I had been dreading to hear ever since I left New York. "How are things with Coops?"

  Cooper had come to New York the early part of January to tape a television show about the American cowboy and had called me to have lunch. "I'm going to have to check out of my plans with Papa," he had said. "The medics have given me the word on that operation I had—it was cancer. They say I'm not gonna hang around too long. I hope to Christ they're right."

  They had told him just after Christmas, when he had started to experience severe pain, and he had asked them point-blank. Now the pain was so bad that despite all the things he took for it he could only work in front of the cameras an hour at a time.

  "How's Papa coming along at Mayo's?" The subterfuge of the Vernon Lord name had been pierced, and newspapers across the country were speculating about Ernest's illness.

  "Fine."

  "What's exactly wrong with him, Hotch?"

  "High blood pressure. But they've got it under control now." I was damned if I would load Ernest's real trouble on top of his.

  "You better tell him about me. We always have leveled with each other, absolutely, about everything all our lives, and I wouldn't like him to find out from someone else or in the papers. I tried to call him but they wouldn't put me through, and I don't like to write about something like that."

  So now I told Ernest. He didn't say anything. Just looked at me as if I had betrayed him. Then he picked up his wind-breaker and slowly put it on, fitted his hound's tooth cap on his head, and started out of his prison.

  We walked away from the center of town, which quickly became outskirts. "Your doctors appear to be awfully good guys," I said.

  'You mean because they trust me with a skeet gun?"

  Well, it is pretty nice of them to have you over . . ."

  What these shock doctors don't know is about writers and such things as remorse and contrition and what they do to them. They should make all psychiatrists take a course in creative writing so they'd know about writers."

  "Have they stopped the treatments?"

  "Well, what is the sense of ruining my head and erasing my memory, which is my capital, and putting me out of business? It was a brilliant cure but we lost the patient. It's a bum turn, Hotch, terrible. I called the local authorities to turn myself in but they didn't know about the rap."

  My heart stopped. I couldn't believe . . .

  "I looked into this whole business about the federal court and you're wrong, or maybe you were trying to con me, but there is no privilege and they can nail Vernon, especially now that I've used his name for cover. That's why I wanted to turn myself in. Have you seen Honor?"

  There then followed the same exhaustive, exhausting interrogation about Honor and the immigration agents and all that. The delusions had not changed or diminished. His room was bugged and so was the hospital phone and he suspected that one of the interns was a Fed in disguise. I made the walk as short as I could, but even at that it seemed interminable.

  I had dinner with Mary that evening in the hotel dining room. She said that in the six weeks she had been in Rochester, this was the first time she hadn't eaten alone in her room after leaving the hospital. We discussed Ernest's duality, his behaving one way in the doctors' presence and another way around us. Mary said she had spoken to the doctors about this but felt it would help if I also discussed it with them.

  The doctors told me they were aware that Ernest still clung to some of his delusions, but they indicated that his growing desire to return to work was, for them, the predominant element in his recovery. I expressed my concern over his weight and asked whether they could allow him to eat more and have a few drinks; I asked whether for a man like Ernest who had drunk heavily all his life the complete stoppage of alcohol could not be as harmful psychologically as it was beneficial physically. They said they thought he was pretty sound for the time being; they wanted his weight where it was and two glasses of wine per day was sufficient. I said that I realized it was presumptuous of me, but I just wanted to say that Ernest was such an extraordinary man, that he so defied the "norm" that he could in no sense be looked upon and treated as an ordinary patient—that any accepted procedure, whether in relation to electric shock or anything else, should be re-examined when applied to him. Again I apologized for my presumption, but it was something I had to say.

  I saw Ernest again the following day. Mary was there and his mood fluctuated from being very deferential toward her and appreciative of her loving attention and care, to being brutally abusive. After one of these abusive outbursts, Mary excused herself and went out into the hall; when she later reappeared her eyes were quite red. When two of his do
ctors came by to see him, Ernest underwent the same abrupt change I had witnessed the previous day.

  Interest in and ability to work were definitely stirring in Ernest; he had arranged all his letters in expectation of the public stenographer who was due that afternoon, and he was very eager to get to work answering them. He had also written a coherent, effective puff for George Plimpton to use on the jacket of his book:

  "Beautifully observed and incredibly conceived, this account of a self-imposed ordeal has the chilling quality of a true nightmare. It is the dark side of the moon of Walter Mitty."

  Thus, bad and well-being in Ernest were now in cross-current with no clear indication as to which would predominate.

  A telegram had been delivered to Ernest that morning inviting Mary and him to be President-elect Kennedy's personal guests at the inaugural. Ernest was pleased and moved by the invitation, and we spent some time composing a proper reply of declination.

  When it came time for me to leave to catch my plane, Ernest walked with me to the elevator; when it arrived he held the doors, reluctant to let me go. "This coming spring we'll be back at Auteuil," he said, "the Hemhotch colors striking terror in the hearts of the touts." He chuckled. "Remember that tout who saw me counting my winnings and said, 'One can see Monsieur is of the metier'?" He patted my shoulder. "Good old Hotch. Put you through a lot, haven't I, boy?"