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CHAPTER 12 A Place to Call Home (1930–1931) The Hemingway party—Ernest, Pauline, Patrick, and his nurse Henriette— departed France on January 19, 1930, aboard the La Bourdannais, bound for Havana and Key West via New York. Gus Pfeiffer had left one week ahead of them, having completed his extended business trip to Europe, and planned to meet them at the dock in New York. Gus and Ernest had schemed about the future while together in Berlin, including a possible African safari, and agreed to resume discussions in New York. Gus hoped to have time as well to show off the Homestead, his new family retreat in Aspetuck, Connecticut. “We can also plan a lot of other things,” he wrote Ernest. “Building air castles was always a favorite pastime with me. I remember how in 10 minutes while plowing corn I’d change from a farmer’s boy to the highest pinnacle of success and then maybe I’d find I plowed out a good hill of corn, and back I was a farmer’s boy.”1 One issue Gus settled while in Europe was financial security for Ernest’s widowed mother. With money from Pauline and Gus and proceeds from A Farewell to Arms, Ernest set up a trust fund of approximately $50,000 to take care of his mother and his two younger siblings, Carol and Leicester. The trust provided approximately $2,700 in annual income. At the death of Ernest’s mother, $10,000 each from the trust principal went to Leicester and Carol; $5,000 each to Sunny and Ursula; and $20,000 back to Pauline. Unfortunately, Grace Hemingway was less grateful than Ernest expected. She raised the issue of Carol’s college financing and suggested that justice demanded that her younger children have the same opportunities as the older. A livid Ernest shot back that she could hardly bring up the issue of justice, since he had left home after high school, made his own living, and received neither money nor moral support from his family. Instead, all he had gotten from them was that they would “rather see me dead and in my grave than writing as I am.”2 Ernest wrote his mother that he did not appre120 ciate the fact that if you gave someone ten dollars, they thought you had a million. He likened the comparison in his case to giving ten dollars when you had only thirteen. Ernest suggested that if his mother deemed his assistance insufficient, she should contact Marcelline, who not only had money but had benefited more than he from the family largesse. Gus Pfeiffer crossed the Atlantic on schedule aboard the fifty-thousandton Bremen, considered the finest ship afloat, but the Hemingways’ twelvethousand -ton transport fared poorly in the unusually rough January seas. Several days late getting into New York, they had only two days before the ship continued on to Havana. So the trip to Gus’s Aspetuck Colony went on hold, and they had just enough time to meet with Maxwell Perkins; make a few business calls; and visit Ada MacLeish at the hospital, where she was recuperating from a hysterectomy. Ernest went directly to her room, rushed over to her bed, and grabbed her. “I thought I was breaking in two,” she recalled. Archibald MacLeish deplored Ernest’s insensitivity.3 When the Hemingways arrived in Key West from Havana, they rented a large frame home on Pearl Street, located for them by Lorine Thompson, and settled in with Patrick and his French nurse. By this time, Patrick spoke nonstop, but in French. Ernest told his in-laws that Patrick’s fluent French included grandmere and grandpere, but he could say “I don’t know” and “hobo” in English. When they traveled to Piggott in June, Ernest assured them that Patrick would learn “all the English you will teach him.”4 Paul and Mary, delighted that their grandson no longer lived an ocean away, suggested that the Hemingways “get a good strong anchor and sink it deep and stay put for awhile.”5 The Pfeiffers’ annual excursion to Phoenix took a backseat to their attempt to save the Bank of Piggott after the stock market crash. While the institution appeared to be back on solid footing by the time the Pfeiffers finally headed to Arizona in mid-January, a run on the bank in early February forced its permanent closing. At that time, small banks all over the state were...

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