My Father and Hemingway

Florida/Cuba Convoy, 1953

Among Mom’s papers, my brother found this ribbon with tarnished lettering: Albert Keuning was typed on the tag, “Keuning” misspelled like always. Dad was a yacht captain in that convoy, a pleasure trip for its wealthy owners. His employer’s 75-foot boat was a converted sub-chaser, top-heavy with cabin additions: carpeted living room, chandelier, piano, and bedrooms. She wasn’t particularly seaworthy. He had to run his bilge pump the entire voyage.

A pair of green Chrysler diesel engines powered that yacht, each one longer than I was tall. When owners were absent, I skipped down the companionway past the galley behind him, still followed him around, was Daddy’s little girl. He kept that engine room clean, but it was loud and close and often awash in an inch of water, just below the planks we crossed.

When he told us about the bilge pump, I thought of all that ocean between Florida and Cuba. My father couldn’t swim. He’d never learned, and now his bad leg made it impossible. At nine, I had already learned to worry about him, thought his health was as unreliable as his presence. The boats took him for weeks at a time, even though we lived in a trailer and moved twice a year to be near him. I don’t know how long the Cuba cruise lasted, but it was a child’s forever before he returned.

In May 1953 Batista was the U.S.- backed dictator and would remain so until the revolution exiled him in 1959. When that happened Fidel Castro asked for our support and only turned to Russia when we turned him down. We created our own mess in Cuba. But when Dad was there, Batista was in power and the only Cuba he saw was the glittering tourist strip along Havana’s Malecón.

There’s a photo of my father and his first mate seated on the edge of a fountain, a bare-chested maid at its center, spilling a cornucopia of water into the pool, palm trees in the background. She was yards from where he sat, but Dad had his hand stretched to look as if he were grasping one of her marble breasts. He wore a big grin, proud of his trick. Two months later, Castro’s forces attacked military barracks in the first act of rebellion. That attack failed.

Hemingway lived in Cuba over twenty years, was there in 1953, marlin fishing from his boat called Pilar. He hadn’t won the Nobel yet—that came in 1954—but was already famous. My father’s boat was in the same section of harbor as the Pilar. Hemingway was 54, wore a trimmed white beard. Dad was 36, hadn’t gone bald yet.

My father was illiterate. When I was in junior high, he got glasses for the first time. He was the oldest son of immigrant parents farming in Pennsylvania. When he’d finished the sixth grade with not much to show for it, he quit school to work the farm full time. The Depression took the farm, and the family moved to New York City, where, eventually, Dad learned how to write his name, but not much more.

When he ran into Hemingway on the docks, they chatted about boats and fishing. Perhaps it was refreshing for the writer not to talk about his books. Dad loved boats, the sea, being in motion. Marlin were plentiful and sport fishing was a major reason people came to Cuba—or Florida for that matter. In my childhood, seafood restaurants, gift shops, hotel lobbies had blue marlin mounts on the walls, great fish measuring twelve feet and more. These days marlin suffer from overfishing like many others, and their numbers dwindle.

The Old Man and the Sea is, in part, about fishing for marlin. When Hemingway and Dad were “chewing the rag,” as Dad put it, on the docks of Havana, the novella that helped win the Nobel was already written. By my last year of high school, I was submerged in reading, making discoveries about the world beyond our small Florida town, things my father couldn’t share. I decided to read The Old Man and the Sea to him. We sat in the living room, Mom with her legs tucked under her on the couch, Dad in his recliner, my younger brothers often on the floor. I read a section each evening until it was done, Dad nodding appreciatively, as he would to a well-tuned engine.

“He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.” So begins The Old Man and the Sea, a fable for all times.

By then Dad wasn’t skippering yachts anymore. He was a mechanic at a cropdusting service, allowing us to stay in one place, a sacrifice he made for the family. By then my brother had failed a grade. By then I dreaded each annual encounter with yet another new group of students. By then I worked after school, had a boyfriend, wasn’t Daddy’s little girl anymore.

In the fall of 1962, starting community college classes, I watched troop trains clatter past on their way to Miami for the Cuban missile crisis. Soon, I’d transfer to the University of Florida, and essentially be gone for good. I’d never read him another book. I’d never know if it would have made any difference if I had.