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FIFTEEN

Barbara Epstein tells me that Joan Didion has just written a good book on grief, apropos the recent death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne. I saw her shortly afterward in Los Angeles at a friend’s house. We compared notes on the subject. The worst, we agreed, was having no one to talk to as well as the blankness of familiar rooms, lacking their usual occupant. Certainly at one’s age there are no substitutes, no replacements, recently attested to by Nancy Reagan: we both attended Sidwell Friends School in Washington at the same time during the thirties but we never knew each other then or, indeed, until quite recently when we joined the ever-increasing company of widows and widowers cluttering Los Angeles. “Don’t you hate it,” she said, “when they tell you how time is the great healer?” I agreed that I hated it, because, “after all, time is the great constant reminder of things lost and gone for good.”

At the grave site the three young women opened a metal box and removed a triangular plastic bag containing brown ashes, which they placed in a hole that had been dug in the yellowy earth next to the marble rectangle. Someone had brought roses and we placed them, one by one, in the underworld at our feet. By then my new knee was growing unsteady and I hobbled back to the car while the Prettymans went to look at Jimmie Trimble’s nearby grave. It wasn’t until later we learned that this day had been the sixtieth anniversary of the battle for Iwo Jima where, at eighteen, he had been killed.

I’ve just read in the newspaper how all those marines had been slaughtered to gain possession of an island that proved, in the end, to be of no strategic use to our military. Worse, it was practically impregnable because, unknown (as usual) to our “best” intelligence, the Japanese had dug a series of underground tunnels where twenty thousand troops lay in deadly wait for the invaders. Jimmie’s last letters home show how aware he was that they were all being thrown away for no purpose other than the enrichment of war contractors. He also added, bitterly, that “no one will remember what we’ve done, only how much they made out of it.” Since his mother had been secretary to a powerful congressman this sunny apolitical athlete had always had a good idea of just how things actually worked in a country such as ours, nor was he alone: during the three years I spent in the army I never heard a single patriotic remark from a fellow soldier, only grief for friends lost and, almost as often, a fierce grievance felt for those back home who were decimating our adolescent generation.

SIXTEEN

I now surrender to Montaigne’s request. How did the living die and what did they say and how did they look at the end? Howard has now quietly entered this narrative, as he remains permanently present in my memory.

In 1976 I was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an august assemblage to which William, but not Henry, James refused to accept election. I also refused the election. When an interested party asked me why I had said “no,” I quoted William James who had said that he disliked too many of the inclusions as well as the exclusions. Pressed further, I noted that “I already belong to the Diners Club.” This was quoted here and there and, though academy revisionists like to say that I did not
write
this in my letter of rejection, I did
say
it to an official of this congregation of American immortals. A quarter century later, as our millennium was drawing to a close, the president of the academy (my onetime cousin due to marriage who ceased to be my cousin due to a subsequent divorce and remarriage that provided him with Jackie Kennedy as my replacement), this old friend and esteemed fellow novelist-historian, Louis Auchincloss, said that it was time that I behaved responsibly and accepted my ancient election with good grace since, once elected, one is forever, like it or not, installed on Parnassus. So I was duly inducted; then a splendid dinner was served. A couple of dozen fellow academicians and their friends, many of whom I had not seen in years, filled a large hall outside the dining room with their wheelchairs, reminding me of the dodgem cars at Glen Echo Amusement Park near Washington, D.C.

Howard and I had just flown in from Italy; we were both tired. Later that night Howard was ill. Food poisoning? Acute Academitis? The next day, he was still sick but we flew on to Los Angeles where we stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel as our house was not ready. It was a weekend which meant that all the doctors we knew were playing golf. Finally, we tracked one down on the golf course and he prescribed medicine for us at a pharmacy that would not fill his prescription without at least a notary public’s seal. Thus, we entered the ongoing bureaucracy of American medicine, never again to be avoided this side of Rock Creek Cemetery. Fortunately, we were covered by insurance but, even so, catastrophic illness still manages to be endlessly expensive.

Howard was now running a fever; his bowels were not working; and he had a terrible pain across the upper abdomen which was tight as a steel band. Plainly, it was appendicitis. Fortunately, the hotel had a young intern on call who took one look at Howard and said, “I’m taking him to the emergency room at UCLA Hospital.” Then an old friend, Wendy Stark, came to the rescue. She knew all the doctors at UCLA where her father, Ray Stark, a movie producer, was a benefactor. By now, Howard was feverish and seriously ill. I told the doctors that he had every symptom of appendicitis, which I had had. Patiently, it was explained to me that no one at seventy could have a functioning appendix, much less appendicitis. Until further tests, it was clear that he had cancer, possibly of the colon. They would do full tests the next day and did not operate that evening. During the night, the appendix burst and he was suddenly dying of peritonitis. Once medical folklore was dispensed with, a competent surgeon operated. Howard’s abdominal cavity was awash with poison which, once drained off, made a slow shaky recovery possible.

We celebrated the millennium at the hotel in rooms on the ground floor. There was something soothing about watching the fireworks all around the world as well as those in the distance beyond the hotel. We talked about living for a time in the Hollywood Hills which we would have to do while he convalesced and I rewrote for CBS my screenplay for
The Catered Affair
which MGM had originally made with Bette Davis. Although everyone I dealt with at the network “loved” the screenplay it seemed I was insufficiently artful in creating the forty-four or so commercial breaks (usually done
after
the film is made). This was the extent of everyone’s interest and expertise. In the end, I suggested that they might be better off
not
doing movies at all—I think they may have taken me seriously because for a time they did abandon producing slices of movie filler to separate the commercials from each other, the only object of their peculiar enterprise.

Once Howard was recovered from peritonitis (and duly weakened by so sustained an attack on his immune system), we went back to Italy in the spring of the first year of the new millennium. Howard had a good appetite and slowly recovered in what Norman Douglas once called Siren Land. It was our last contented time at the villa. Later, back in Los Angeles, there had been that routine radiogram, as I have described: more visits to Cedars-Sinai where the splendid Scots surgeon who had taken on the case warned me that if the tumor had spread he would not operate because Howard’s other lung was so weakened by emphysema that it alone could not support him.

Ernest Borgnine and Bette Davis at the end of
The Catered Affair
, my first screenplay under the MGM contract. Bette looks weirdly like my mother. She didn’t care for the director who screamed at the grips and whispered thrillingly to Bette while he showed her how to pour coffee from an old pot in the kitchen. “I may not,” she said, “be much of an actress, but I am marvelous with props.” She said this was her favorite movie of the final phase.

Once again, I accompanied Howard in his wheelchair along corridors that I was to know eventually by heart. He was now cheerful, a tribute to his sweetness of character since he knew that I was the one mute with dread. As the nurse opened the door to the operating room where I could not follow, Howard turned to me in his wheelchair and said, “Well, it’s been great.” Then the door closed behind him.

I waited in an area near the operating rooms. I watched the clock. One, two, three hours passed. I had a series of waking nightmares. He had died on the operating table. The inadequate lung had given out. All around me people, presumably in my situation, were nursing their own nightmares. At last the surgeon appeared. It had been a long procedure but he had got all the tumor out and much surrounding tissue.

A day later we were celebrating what was, in effect, a “cure”: that is, he was free of every sign of cancer in the lungs. One knew that cruel recurrence was the nature of the beast but at least this clean initial sweep was encouraging. We went home to Italy. The white cat and the brown cat, thirteen-year-old brothers, were waiting patiently for us at the gate and, with military precision, escorted us to the villa.

Rita, who works for us part-time, has studied nursing and was helpful as Italians tend to be whenever medical problems arise. One now arose with me. I had foolishly allowed a Roman surgeon to flush out a torn meniscus in the left knee, thus neatly crippling me. I assume the surgeon thought that I’d take the next step and allow him to install an artificial knee but I preferred to suffer pain until I was back in Cedars-Sinai land.

During that lovely last Siren Land spring, Howard fell coming out of the pool. More tests—this time in Naples. Cancer had spread to the brain. We tried to fly back to Los Angeles but were warned that the plane’s cabin pressure, at transatlantic altitude, would cause the water gathering in his skull literally to boil. A doctor friend in Rome, although officially retired, still worked at a private Roman clinic. We checked in. An MRI revealed a small dark bubble on the lobe of the brain that controls locomotion. He had also become incontinent. Several times I had to lift his deadweight off the floor until, finally, I ruptured a spinal disk. Donella, our doctor friend, arranged for a distinguished surgeon at Rome’s Villa Margherita to operate. But when the professor had studied the MRIs of Howard’s brain he said, “We must not wait.” Unfortunately a long holiday weekend was coming up and such weekends are sacred in Italy. The operation was scheduled for the next week. As I left Howard’s room, he said, “Kiss me.” I did. On the lips, something we’d not done for fifty years. When I rang the Villa Margherita the next morning, he was not in his room. The Roman team of doctors had, amazingly, ignored the holiday and he was now in surgery. I waited most of the day and some of the night in a room above the operating room. Finally, in a large elevator shaft, he arrived on a lift from the operating room below. He was naked and unconscious like a corpse in a fifteenth-century painting of the plague years. Attendants carried him into a cell where his vital signs were constantly checked, their lights blinking as intravenous tubes were placed in his arms. One nurse asked me his name and if he spoke Italian. I told him the name and assured him that Howard spoke Italian. The nurse kept calling his name until Howard finally opened his eyes; saw me; winked; went back to sleep. One of the distinguished surgeon’s aides told me what a success the operation had been. “Oh, there is still a spot or two,” and he mumbled the Italian word for
metastasized
. I had a sudden image of Howard on the bench in front of the Ravello post office where the old men sit in the sun. Then, when one of them dies, they all move down one place toward the main road. He was now close to the corner.

The next day, I began to negotiate for a small hospital plane to fly us to Los Angeles. Meanwhile, we went back to Ravello. Howard had recently begun to hallucinate; luckily, he knew that he was hallucinating so he’d report with some fascination on what he
thought
was going on about him. “Look! They have made this hospital room look exactly like my bedroom in Ravello,” he said from his bed in Ravello. “But then in Rome they also pretended that I was still in Ravello even though I could see the sea from my window. You’ve got to admit the special effects are wonderful.” Then good humor would suddenly change to anger at me. “Why is it always about you?” he began to rage apropos nothing that I had said. Worse, despite the “success” of the operation, he still could not walk.

Finally, the private plane was ready and it was time to go. In the piazza Ferdinando, owner of the bar San Domingo where Howard had sung so many nights over the last thirty years, had got up early to say farewell and to recall all those good times never to come again. Howard listened gravely; spoke briefly; Ferdinando wept.

The hospital plane was like a flying coffin with two nurses, two pilots, Howard, a general assistant from Los Angeles, and me, crippled leg bent under me. We flew to the Azores and I took a shaky walk on the steamy tarmac. Equatorial heat. Howard slept, snoring, from the Azores to Iceland to Indianapolis, as we zigzagged across the Atlantic and North America. Then back to the house in the Hollywood Hills.

More trips through the bowels of Cedars-Sinai. This time to a special radiation room. Howard’s head was bolted in place against a piece of metal as the gamma rays were zapped at his skull theoretically knocking out remnants of the original cancer which I could not help but think that the great Roman surgeon might have been tempted to excise on his first visit to the site. As always, I was struck by the euphoric good humor of the various oncologists, as cancer specialists are known. Since most of their patients will die more soon than late, they exude a depersonalized charm that is positively presidential in its effect. Howard emerged from the agony of the gamma ray room looking haggard but very much in his right mind. “I don’t think I want to do that again,” he said as we drove home.

The next few days were sunny and peaceful. He sat outside one Sunday morning reading the newspapers while I sat nearby restoring my novel
Creation
to its original state, undoing a deranged editor’s handiwork. “Come up,” he said. “And sit here, next to me.” I said I would in a minute but in a minute he’d gone upstairs. Then all hell broke loose. He was having heart spasms. An emergency ambulance arrived. Then back to the emergency room at Cedars-Sinai. But it was not a heart attack, only a spasm that had something to do with emphysema. He was now also permanently attached to an oxygen tank. Needless to say, when the tank was switched off, he would, somehow, find a cigarette and puff on it. I made no fuss.