Portrait of Hemingway by Lillian Ross

Author:Lillian Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

* * *

The following morning, the door of the Hemingway suite was opened for me by Patrick, a shy young man of medium height, with large eyes and a sensitive face. He was wearing gray flannel slacks, a white shirt open at the collar, Argyle socks, and loafers. Mrs. Hemingway was writing a letter at the desk. As I came in, she looked up and said, “As soon as Papa has finished dressing, we’re going to look at pictures.” She went back to her letter.

Patrick told me that he’d just as soon spend the whole day looking at pictures, and that he had done a bit of painting himself. “Papa has to be back here for lunch with Mr. Scribner,” he said, and added that he himself was going to stay in town until the next morning, when the Hemingways sailed. The telephone rang and he answered it. “Papa, I think it’s Gigi calling you!” he shouted into the bedroom.

Hemingway emerged, in shirtsleeves, and went to the phone. “How are you, kid?” he said into it, then asked Gigi to come down to the Finca for his next vacation. “You’re welcome down there, Gigi,” he said. “You know that cat you liked? The one you named Smelly? We renamed him Ecstasy. Every one of our cats knows his own name.” After hanging up, he told me that Gigi was a wonderful shot—that when he was eleven he had won second place in the shoot championship of Cuba. “Isn’t that the true gen, Mouse?” he asked.

“That’s right, Papa,” said Patrick.

I wanted to know what “true gen” meant, and Hemingway explained that it was British slang for “information,” from “intelligence.” “It’s divided into three classes: gen; the true gen, which is as true as you can state it; and the really true gen, which you can operate on,” he said.

He looked at the green orchids. “My mother never sent me any flowers,” he said. His mother was about eighty, he said, and lived in River Forest, Illinois. His father, who was a physician, had been dead for many years; he shot himself when Ernest was a boy. “Let’s get going if we’re going to see the pictures,” he said. “I told Charlie Scribner to meet me here at one. Excuse me while I wash. In big city, I guess you wash your neck.” He went back into the bedroom. While he was gone, Mrs. Hemingway told me that Ernest was the second of six children—Marcelline, then Ernest, Ursula, Madelaine, Carol, and the youngest, his only brother, Leicester. All the sisters were named after saints. Every one of the children was married; Leicester was living in Bogotá, Colombia, where he was attached to the United States Embassy.

Hemingway came out in a little while, wearing his new coat. Mrs. Hemingway and Patrick put on their coats, and we went downstairs. It was raining, and we hurried into a taxi. On the way to the Metropolitan, Hemingway said very little; he just hummed to himself and watched the street.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.