Authors: A. E. Hotchner
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 negligence 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.
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.
"Very gory story. Ought to sell it to the
A.M.A. Journal.
If Roberto hadn't been there I probably would have bled out. But vision okay now, and on three dressings she got clean and the hurting stopped, but they said it was too deep to take the stitches out. Am always bored shitless when am hit or smashed up. Never like to be in bed without a woman or a good book or the
Morning Telegraph
, so this time decided not to go to bed at all except very late at night. I can tell you I am getting tired of being smacked on the head. Had three bad ones in the 1944-45 period, two in '43, and others going back to 1918. Despite what you hear, they do not come from carelessness or my celebrated death wish. At least none I remember did, and I think I've got recall on all of them. Anyway, that spill on
Pilar
was the beginning of the Black-Ass.
"Maybe we should antidote Black-Ass by another tour at Auteuil. We did have lovely times racing, didn't we? Aided or unaided by that ancient and faithful retainer, Calvados. Want to go over when Auteuil and Enghien open in the spring? Georges will have kept track of the form." I said that would be splendid and I started to talk steeplechasing, but Ernest was still bent upon explaining the Black-Ass.
"Then to solidify the Black-Ass," he was saying, "there's Korea. This is the first time my country ever fought that I was not there, and food has no taste and the hell with love when you can't have children."
"I noticed you were limping a little. That come from the fall you took?"
"Developed a few days later. I began to get pains in both legs, really bad, and when somebody around the joint, who shall be nameless, started referring to it as my 'imaginary pains' I demanded a count. Took x-rays and the photos showed seven pieces of shell fragments in the right calf, eleven in the left, and parts of a bullet jacket also in the left. One piece was resting on a nerve. Doctor wanted to cut it out. But it started to travel and is hung up for the moment and now they think it is encysting again in a good place. The calf of your leg is a good place to encyst in if you ever want to encyst. Offer that as thought for the day—correction, night.
"But otherwise am okay. Have knocked blood pressure down to one forty over seventy and don't have to take any medicine. Refuse to read any reviews on
Across the River
, not for blood pressure but they are about as interesting and constructive as reading other people's laundry lists."
"John O'Hara's review in
The New York Times
called you the greatest writer since Shakespeare," I told him.
"That would have sent the old pressure up to around two-forty. I have never learned anything from the critics. In this book I moved into calculus, having started with straight math, then moved to geometry, then algebra; and the next time out it will be trigonometry. If they don't understand that, to hell with them."
"Mr. William Faulkner got into the act by observing that you never crawl out on a limb. Said you had no courage, never been known to use a word that might send the reader to the dictionary."
"Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don't know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use. Did you read his last book? It's all sauce-writing now, but he was good once. Before the sauce, or when he knew how to handle it. You ever read his story 'The Bear'? Read that and you'll know how good he once was. But now . . . well, for a guy who runs as a silent, he sure talks a hell of a lot. Okay, now, let's write off Black-Ass as a subject. The moderator will please change the discussion. How goes it with your writing? You making out all right since you left Mayes' Citadel of Literature?"
"Doing fine. Did five magazine articles the last three months, and now I've sold a couple of short stories."
"That's wonderful. But remember, free-lancing is like playing sand-lot second base—the ball can take some awful hops—so if you ever get pressed for eating money, I want to know about it. We know where we had and will have fun and I always think of you as my sound and true friend and am sorry for any bad luck I caused you and always ready to fight our way out of anything we get into. Yes, gentlemen, that comment is a bit sentimental—very well, maudlin if you like, but the wine is Chateauneuf-du-Pape, a bit maudlin in itself."