Papa Hemingway by A. E. Hotchner

Author:A. E. Hotchner [Hotchner, A. E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-12-11T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Key West ♦ 1955

On the morning of July 3rd I flew to Miami, where I caught the small afternoon plane to Key West and took a taxi to 414 Olivia Street, the address Ernest had given me.

When the taxi stopped, I was sure the driver had taken me to the wrong place. It was a street of grimy, run-down houses with ramshackle sidewalk fences that contained yards of high weeds. When Ernest had bought his place in the ig3o's, the neighborhood was sparsely settled and the few houses that were there were of a quality that matched his. (Actually Ernest had two houses: a large main house and a small, more modern house that had been constructed beside the pool.) But the years had been unkind to the neighborhood, which was now crowded and seedy, and the Hemingway property was an oasis amid the squalor. Ernest had not lived there since 1940, when he was divorced from Pauline; it had become her property as part of the divorce settlement and she had continued to reside there with their children until her recent death, when the property had passed to the children. But the children did not want to live there, nor were they around to look after it. So it fell to Ernest to try to keep it rented for them and to attend to its problems. The pool house was unrented at the moment, and in addition to his desire to get away, Ernest had come over to attend to maintenance problems and to arrange for a real estate agent to rent it.

The address I had been given was that of the pool house, but when I knocked on the screen door, no one responded. I carried my bag in and called out but no one was around. It was a two-story house, the downstairs consisting of a kitchen, through which I had entered, a small bedroom with a single bed, and a large, high-ceilinged living room that had been furnished with imagination and taste. Crammed book shelves ran from floor to ceiling. The floor was a beautifully designed tile, and the front of the room opened onto a charming terrace, beyond which was the pool, surrounded by verdant, extravagantly colored tropical plants and trees.

On the outside of the house was a winding iron staircase, the only access to the second floor, which, I presumed, contained the master bedroom. It was midafternoon and very hot but the shuttered interior of the living room, with its tile floor and wicker furniture and cool vista, was quite pleasant. I had rightly guessed that Mary and Ernest were taking a siesta, for around five o'clock I heard descending steps on the spiral staircase and a moment later Ernest, wearing swim trunks, came into the room.

He had gained considerable weight, most of it in his girth. His hair had thinned and his white beard was scraggly. His face bore signs of the white scaling which constantly abused him, not a serious condition but an irritating one that caused his skin to flake off as if from sunburn.

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