Authors: A. E. Hotchner
"Papa, I wanted to ask you ... I know it's hard to answer for someone else ..." I was embarrassed and wished I hadn't started this. "Well, I lived here for a while after the war, but that was just having fun and spending my severance pay. Now, though—these weeks we've been here—the more I see of Paris with you, the more I feel I should give up job and country and seriously live here and find out if I can be a writer— that's a pretty half-ass pronouncement, but I think you know what I mean. So many men I know in New York work at jobs they say they don't like and they're always promising themselves that one day they will quit and do whatever it is they really want to do. Writing is one of their favorite Canaans. They tell you the plots for their novels and plays which the world is waiting for. Well, I don't want to belong to that fraternity—Alpha Gamma Frustration—but at the same time I can see that chucking an editorial job and rushing off to a Left Bank garret with beret and portable may be overly romantic. It's just that I'm young now and I remember the equation you once mentioned—'hesitation increases in relation to risk in equal proportion to age.'"
Ernest looked down into his drink; then he looked up and studied our reflections in the speckled mirror behind the bar and talked to my mirror-self. "Well, it's tough advice to give. Nobody knows what's in him until he tries to pull it out. If there's nothing or very little, the shock can kill a man. Those first years here when I made my run, as you say you now want to make yours, and I quit my foreign correspondent job with the Toronto
Star
to put myself on the line, I suffered a lot. I had finally shucked off the journalism I had been complaining about and I was finally doing all the good writing I had promised myself. But every day the rejected manuscripts would come back through the slot in the door of that bare room where I lived over the Montmartre sawmill. They'd fall through the slot onto the wood floor, and clipped to them was that most savage of all reprimands—the printed rejection slip. The rejection slip is very hard to take on an empty stomach and there were times when I'd sit at that old wooden table and read one of those cold slips that had been attached to a story I had loved and worked on very hard and believed in, and I couldn't help crying."
"I never think of you crying," I said.
"I cry, boy," Ernest said. "When the hurt is bad enough, I cry." He stirred his drink meditatively. "So, Hotch, just as you wouldn't give a friend advice on whether or not to play the wheel, you can't on this, except to quote the odds, which are a damn sight worse than roulette. And yet..." He turned away from my mirror-self and spoke to me directly, in that special way of his that made the words come to you through a corridor of intimacy. "Yet, there's this to consider as a guide, since it's a thing I truly know: If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast."
Later, when I got back to my hotel room, I carefully wrote those words on the fly leaf of my Michelin, and years after when Mary Hemingway was searching for a title for Ernest's posthumously published Paris memoirs, which he had left untitled, I remembered those words, "a moveable feast," and gave them to her for his book. They also appear in
Across the
River,
when the colonel refers to happiness as a moveable feast, but, of course, in Ernest's lexicon, Paris and happiness were synonomous.
The last week of the Auteuil meet we audited the Hemhotch books and found we were running slightly ahead, but considering the time, skill, emotion and energy which had gone into our Steeplechase Devotional, "slightly" was hardly proper compensation. Two days before the end of the meet, however, on December 21st to be exact, as it sometimes happens to horse players, our fortunes dramatically surged upward.
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 onto 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.