UNITED STATES—“Change is good,” would say the old acquaintance in Ketchum, and you would smile, because they were the bearers of the true American faither, and they honestly believe–poor dupes-that because you were back in the fold, at last, after wanderings in Spain and France and Cuba and Africa, that this was your home and everything would be fine, even if neighbors did not talk to each other.
Even if Idaho had once been a good place and given him “For Who the Bells Toll,” which many thought was his finest novel, but he knew with the benefit of years, that for all the accolades, you could extract that book from his opus, and honest to G-d, it wouldn’t make a whit of difference. Which is neither here nor there, except that it is true. And dinner at Christy’s wasn’t easy. There wasn’t much to say.
God, the United States was barbarous and unholy trained it its ways. All of what folks chalk up to being polite, and it’s really being programmed and unresponsive.
Afterward, Brown went to sleep in the cinder-block guest house off the kitchen. In Mary’s telling, while they got ready for bed, she sang an Italian folk song and her husband joined in from his bedroom, then in a “warm and friendly” voice said his last words to her, “Good night, my kitten.”
Perhaps he had finally found peace in his resolve. Or perhaps she created this version later.
In either case, she would maintain for the next five years that his death had been an accident.
The news that Hemingway had shot himself went viral the way it did in those days: over the wire services and onto the front pages of newspapers across the world. Howard Rome heard it from Hugh Butt. He tried to call Mary but could not reach her, so he wrote a two-page letter. Rome tried to assure her that his decision to release Hemingway had been his, not the patient’s.
Rome had wanted to spare Hemingway the “corrosive deteriorating effects of” confinement in the hospital. In tight, even script, he expressed his sympathy and his regret that he could not have done more: “My sorrow is at the loss of such an unusual man, a complex of paradoxes which made him the genius he was at capturing the spirit of a whole generation because he personally epitomized its conflicts and contradictions, its anxiety and courage.”
Mary was not mollified. She had found him, crumpled and leaking brain jelly at the foot of the stairs.
The legendary scribe was obliterated by the shotgun blast, self-inflicted. She called a lawyer and said, “I’d like to bring a lawsuit for the way they treated Papa.” The lawyer, who was also a close Hemingway family friend, held his piece, wisely knowing that time would talk Mary out of this miscarried grief, suing Mayo, holding the clinic, and Dr. Rome especially, liable for her husband’s death.
Yet, more than anything, her own involvement haunted her. She had not pushed him to go to the Institute of Living. She had assented to Rome’s discharge. She had locked up his shotguns yet left the keys on the kitchen windowsill.
Three months later, she wrote Rome, lamenting, “What more could I have done?”
He replied with a typed, single-spaced, four-page letter, reminiscing almost fondly about his many conversations with Hemingway. They’d talked about suicide, honor, fears, and the desire for control. Rome hinted at remorse in his letter.
“Damn him,” said Mary. “I wanted to see some real sorrow. Which I did not see.”
Yet after months spent reflecting on the course of events in Rochester and Ketchum, he concluded, “I feel sure that if I had to do it over again today with the information I had, I would do again as I did then.”
Unaccountably she went on. “Papa was obsessed that I had a crush on Fidel Castro. I got so mad when he’d say that, and in fact I did take out the shotgun. But maybe he was right. He was a very intuitive person. It’s taken me years to come around and see the sense of some things he saw. God, there’s not a day I don’t miss Papa,” says Mary. “Doesn’t mean I didn’t want to shoot the son of a bitch half the time.”
To be continued…
