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ceremony.”
    One day he took the Calmers to eat at Chez Weber in the rue Royale. Hemingway knew that
Beyond the Street
had just been published by Harcourt, Brace in New York. At lunch, Hemingway “slipped a cheque across the table to me,” Calmer recalled years later. The check was for $350. “It was the ship fare home for myself and my wife and little daughter—totally unsolicited.… Years later I was able to pay him back and he thereafter liked to refer to me as Honest Ned, remarking that few others he had helped had ever bothered.… After his death, the estate lawyer sent me one of my cheques made out to Ernest which he had never cashed.”
    That day at Weber’s restaurant, the astonished and grateful newspaperman had presented Hemingway with a signed copy of
Beyond the Street
. Hemingway read it coming home on the
Paris
. He had agreed to read and react to some of Calmer’s shorter fiction. On May 28, 1934, back in America, he wrote to Calmer about his novel, apologizing for the delay: “I’ve been working like a what the hell should you call it.… I read it on the Paris—so did Pauline. We both liked it. That was not quite two months ago.… The faults of it were the faults everybody has in the first one but the virtues of it were not first novel virtues i e glamour, freshness etc. No, bo. The virtues were understanding, sympathy and a certain cleanliness of handling.” For the rest of his life, Calmer (who published a dozen or so novels and had a significant career in broadcasting for CBS Radio News) would remain grateful to Hemingway. The two renewed their friendship during World War II, when Calmer was reporting in war-blitzed London with EdwardR. Murrow and other CBS newsmen. If they were never intimate friends, they managed to stay loosely in touch. Calmer apparently never dined out on it. He came to know all four of Hemingway’s wives, especially Martha Gellhorn. This was after her divorce from Hemingway, when she was living in Rome and he was working there as a correspondent. No bitter thing Marty Gellhorn could ever have said against her former husband—whom she liked to call Pig, and not only in response to his bathing habits—would have changed Calmer’s estimation.
    Priscilla Calmer died of emphysema in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1955. Calmer wrote Hemingway a note about her death. He didn’t hear back. The next time they saw each other, Hemingway blurted an apology: “I never was any good at wakes.”
    Ned Calmer died at age seventy-eight in 1986. He’d had three wives and two children. Several years ago, when I spoke at length to his son on the telephone about his father’s relationship with Ernest Hemingway, Regan Calmer said: “I never heard a lot about it growing up—and I also never heard a bad word about it. Mostly, he kept it to himself.… I don’t know, I guess it was just the fact that my father had such a high respect and even love for such a great writer like Hemingway who did him these unsolicited favors at a critical time. He could never forget it.”
    In late April 1934, Ned Calmer wrote to Hemingway. He was in America with his family. He was promoting his first novel. “It was a great thing you did for me,” he said. “Hope you acquired that boat.”

There’s a passage in
Green Hills of Africa:
“If you looked away from the forest and the mountain side you could follow the watercourses and the hilly slope of the land down until the land flattened and the grass was brown and burned and, away, across a long sweep of country, was the brown Rift Valley and the shine of Lake Manyara.” I’ve wondered: months before he composed this landscape-painting sentence, when he was actually staring at that blue shine of African lake, so far from the Gulf Stream, did Hemingway squint and see a thirty-eight-foot Wheeler skimming on it? Did
Pilar
already have her