Donald Junkins

from Conversations With Carol Hemingway Gardner at Ninety

On June 14, 1999, my wife Kaimei Zheng, Robert Gajdusek, and I drove up a winding driveway off North Street in Buckland, Massachusetts, that led to Carol Hemingway Gardner’s yard with its two sheds piled with firewood next to her small, ranch-style home. I rang the front doorbell and almost immediately a thin and neatly dressed handsome older lady opened the door and said, “Welcome,” in a soft voice that contrasted with her merry eyes. She stood very straight and her neatly coifed gray hair shone in the early afternoon sun as she held the door for us to enter and ascend the several steps that led to her living room. This would be the first of eight or nine visits between Carol and my wife and me during the next three years, either in Buckland and the neighboring town of Shelbourne Falls across the Deerfield River, or in our home in Deerfield, Massachusetts. Two of these visits, this first one and one two years later in 2001, my wife and I documented on paper immediately afterward, and four others we recorded, two on video tape which became Carol Hemingway Gardner Remembers Ernest, shown at the International Hemingway Conference in Stresa, Italy, in 2002.
          In our first meeting, Carol asked us to sit down in her cozy living room, which contained several of her daughter’s paintings on the wall, and then brought out copies of siblings Marcelline Hemingway Sanfords’s At the Hemingways and Leicester Hemingway’s My Brother, Ernest Hemingway books to show us. She spoke of Ernest with great affection, and we were so charmed by her pleasant openness and steely bright blue eyes that we never thought to ask her if we could take notes. When we returned to Deerfield, however, Kaimei wrote down what she remembered, and I typed out her notes and put them inside our copy of Marcelline’s book.  Because we saw Carol often in the next three years, those first notes were temporarily forgotten, and only recently I
discovered them and the second set from two years later while preparing the interview texts that appear below.
          Several things we included in the two sets of notes that do not appear in the later recorded interviews are worth including here out of context even though a couple might seem cursory, if only because they are part of the record and also because they catch the gentle tones of her immediate forthrightness. Before we began, I mentioned to her that Kaimei and I had sailed in San Francisco Bay with her nephew John Sanford the previous December, and Carol remarked on her affection for him and said, “We are all very close.”
          —About Ruth Arnold and her mother’s close relationship with her: “She was an Irish girl who came to our house when Leicester was born. My mother counted on her and I counted on her.  She was always good to us. My father was always happy that my mother had extra help, and there was nothing sexual between Ruth and my mother. I think people just made that up.  Later, Ruth got married and had children of her own. I always felt very close to her.”
          —About whether it was she who notified Ernest about her father’s death: “Yes. Ruth heard the shot and told my mother, who went into the room and found him. I called Max Perkins and he sent a telegram to Ernest. Leicester was sick at the time. When Ernest came back, my mother was not in good shape.”
          —About the newspaper report that she was married in Salzburg, Austria, in March 1933. “Yes, and we kept that as our official date. John [Gardner] was not yet 21, so we couldn’t be legally married—he was admitted into Princeton when he was fifteen. When we got back to New York, the first question my mother-in-law asked us was, ‘Are you legally married?’ She was quite some mother-in-law. She arranged another marriage in a small church in June, but we kept the official date in March even though we always celebrated in June.”
          —About John’s relationship with Ernest and Ernest’s renunciation of her (treated later in fuller detail): “Every time I had a child, I sent Ernest a picture, but he never replied. Leicester [Hemingway] took his attitude toward John from Ernest, and Leicester never spoke to John either.”
          —About Kaimei’s Chinese background: “My uncle [Willoughby] was a missionary, and I played with his two sons when he visited America. I used to say, ‘If I couldn’t be born in China, I would like to die in China.’”
          In June 2001, Carol served Kaimei and me lemonade and cookies in her home before we all went to a flower show of hybrid iris at a former Congregational Church in Shelbourne Falls. The weather was warm and sunny and Carol wore her floppy white hat and a blue cotton pants suit and white blouse. After the iris exhibition we slowly walked across the Bridge of Flowers over the Deerfield River, taking photos. We left Carol sitting on a bench three quarters of the way across and went for ice cream cones on the Buckland side. Coming back with her maple walnut cone, we met her walking toward us. (The iris on the bridge were more spectacular than the hybrid ones in the exhibition.)
Back in her home Carol talked about the garden across the lake in northern Michigan that her father supervised during their summer vacations (in later meetings she talked about Ernest’s aversion to working in that garden) and about the apples that her father had shipped back to Oak Park in the fall: “A whole barrel!”
Before we left, Kaimei and I visited with her in her backyard, first sitting in homemade tree-limb chairs around a rock-slab table, and then in a double-seat swing also made from tree limbs.