Burning the Days (30 page)

——

He went into the hospital for an aging man’s usual complaint and the operation had gone wrong—he very nearly died of an undetected hemorrhage. The patient, abdomen swollen with blood, and in great pain, lay for weeks in intensive care, longing to die. It was Marian who saved his life. She remembered something that had been done with her father, and kept after the doctors to do it. Finally they did; they injected a kind of gelatin, and some of it went to the spot and stopped the leaking.

He was never the same, even after he recovered. He had lost fifty pounds. There had been pneumonia, kidney failure, other unsuspected problems.

He opened the door in Southampton in the fall of 1981, thin, the shirt collar too big, his eyes unexpectedly large. It was a beautiful house, as always. Deep downy sofas, elegance, flowers. A young woman, his secretary, I assumed, was watching
Traviata
on television. “So, how’ve you been, Jim?” he greeted me cautiously. “What are you working on?”

He had an artificial hip, arthritis, and both knees were bad. It was September but he felt cold. In the restaurant—there were only a few people besides us—we talked about Europe. They were going back soon. He worked well there, he said, always had. He
was only twelve years older than I was, but that evening it seemed much more. It felt like Europe—the trees, the tranquility, the wide street in front of the restaurant—I thought of Antibes, where we used to go.

I was longing to go to Europe myself, I said. It was beckoning me.

“Well, why don’t you?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Difficulties. I suppose I’ve created them. But I’d like to go to Sicily. Ever since reading
The Leopard.”

“That’s a sad story,” he said. “Terrific book. He wrote it when he was sixty-five and sent it to a publisher. They rejected it and he died before it was published by someone else. Very sad.”

“You’re assuming there’s no afterlife,” I said.

The waiter interrupted, a young waiter who wanted an autograph. He placed a blue paper napkin on the table, which Irwin signed.

He couldn’t write any more, Irwin said, as if that had brought it to mind. He didn’t have the mental energy, he said. He envied me.

The first of many evenings and days. We walked out through the large kitchen of the house on the way to restaurants, or there were dinners and many voices at the long, lacquered dining table. When I remember it I think of waiting for them at the bar somewhere, in the fall in the Hamptons. That was part of the pleasure, the lovely anticipation. The leaves have turned. The place is warm and soon to be lit by their presence, a few cars passing outside.

——

He had moved into the front lines. Friends were dying, enemies, critics who had once wounded him. His life was like a deck of cards nearly all out on the table and he musing on them, his eye returning to the same ones again and again. He remembered football games of long ago, playing in Lowell in the cold afternoon, the earth hard as cement, the ball on the two-yard line, final minutes
and them with first and goal. On defense, he was safety. He remembers it with the skinny arms of age and a lessened frame.

He was also the quarterback; they stood waiting while he looked the other team over and then stepped into the huddle and told them what they would do. He guessed he was still that way.

“You
guess?”
Marian said.

“His trouble,” the old cook said, “is that he drinks too much.” She had a broad, handsome black face. She loved him, everyone did. “Drink and scratch, that’s all he does.”

He lay in bed thinking, like a blind sailor remembering the sea, of the happiest moments of his life, catching a pass, going out on the stage to cheers after the opening of
Bury the Dead.
They were not diamonds, they were sapphires perhaps or opals, but in them a shining star.

He was crumbling, he said. He was a fortress, but they were breaching the walls. “I’ve never breached them,” Marian commented. He was hunched. His smile was like an old dog’s, wry and faded. He was waiting for the end, for the angel of death. If necessary he was ready to do it himself, except that his mother was still alive, ninety-one, and he could not die before she did, the small woman filled with determination who had single-handedly kept the family alive during the hopeless 1930s. She was living in California. He seldom saw her but he was indissolubly attached. His father, he said, had been lucky—he had died suddenly, in a matter of seconds, while on a flight from Europe to New York. They were then going to make an emergency landing in London, but his mother said no, go on to America. She sat and held her husband the entire flight.

He did not complain, although he hated the fact that wealth had come to him at seventy, when he was in dissolution, rather than at forty, when he would have been able to enjoy it. This was not really true. In the second and third acts he had known all the material comforts of life and remained curiously undevoted to
them. He seemed to pay so little attention to
things.
He lived both in and beyond luxury.

When I saw him for the first time after having been away for a few months, he reported that he’d been moderate, he’d gotten drunk only once during the summer. Only once did he have to be helped home. “Carried home,” Marian corrected. There was something boyish about him, even as an old man, the clean pleasant face, the cordial manner.

There was a game he liked that he had once played all the time. It was who could get you to cry in the fewest words? There was a line in
The Three Sisters:
“You mean, I’m being left behind?” But Irwin always quoted the article by Gay Talese about Joe DiMaggio: On their honeymoon in Tokyo, Marilyn Monroe had gone off on a USO tour and come back and said, Joe, there were a hundred thousand people there and they were all cheering and clapping; you’ve never seen anything like it. Yes, I have, DiMaggio said.

Yes, I have!
It was Irwin’s favorite story.
Yes, I have.
Three words, and you cried.

——

And now it is April and the long campaign is ending. The winter was difficult, in and out of the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid and other problems no less grave. His son phoned from Europe—he was in the hospital again, heart trouble, lung trouble, kidney trouble. He was exhausted from the ordeal. His brother was there and some old friends, the Parrishes.

I set out to see Irwin for the last time. I landed in the morning. It was May. I had a bottle of Haut Brion with me that I was carrying on the off chance we could have a glass of it in the hospital room. They once wet the lips of newborn kings of France with such wine. I was thinking of that, and the journey he was soon to take.

On the train it began to grow dark. There was light only in the mountains to the west. The afternoon was moving towards America
with the news, homeward, the yellow fields more bright as it went.

The hospital was in Davos, the same one in which Marian had lost a baby twenty-seven years earlier. The last connection I could make went no farther than a town about thirty miles from there. I called from the vestibule of a soiled-looking restaurant. At the apartment, a private nurse had no news. She suggested I call the hotel where the family was gathered. I did; Adam came to the phone. “Irwin died this afternoon, about an hour ago,” he told me gently.

“Oh, God.” I could think of nothing to say. “Well, I’ll be there in the morning.”

“There’s no point in flying over now,” he said.

“I’m already here. I’m in Landquart.”

“Landquart? I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said.

He had died at about seven in the long, soft evening. Beneath the window of the room in which he lay was a stream, I could hear it there in the dark. There was a clean blue pillowcase on the pillow. His clothes were neatly folded, a blue sport shirt of silk or cashmere, corduroy pants.

I wanted to see him. We went to look for the head nurse.
Ein guter Freund
had come, Adam explained to her. They spoke for a few moments and she led the way to another floor.

He lay on a smooth-wheeled rolling cart, beneath a sheet, his head on a pillow, a white bandage around his forehead and jaw to keep it closed. He was shaved. His nostrils were large and empty. He looked papal. There was a red curtain behind him concealing the niche in which he must lie while the modern clocks of the hospital ticked through the night and patients slept.

I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it.
God bless us, a thing of naught.
That was something he had never been and, lying there, still was
not. After a while I leaned down to kiss his brow in farewell. It was cold.

——

He died afar, surrounded by women like a biblical king. He had come a long way, like Dickens or d’Annunzio, from his beginnings. He died with the best of everything, a cook, Hungarian vodka, a fine apartment on the main street over the Patek Philippe store, a housekeeper, a secretary, a nurse. There were books everywhere. On the desk, a picture of his son. Above, a photograph of the football team at Brooklyn College, the grass brown, Irwin in the center, taller than you remember, lean, kneeling above the mythic ball.

There had been cancer. It had spread. He hated what he had become in the end, his useless body. He always imagined he would have a vigorous old age. It hadn’t been that way. He had undergone a terrible beating at the last.

In the morning the phone was ringing with that strange European urgency,
ring ring, ring ring, ring ring.
The telegrams and calls were coming in from everywhere.
You must know the immense sorrow into which I was plunged upon learning this morning …
, cables in foreign languages. He was not a scholar or intellectual, though he was brighter than he looked. He was a kind of titleholder. He wrote a lot, among it much that people admired.

I wandered through the apartment, room by room, the kitchen into which he probably rarely ventured, the pharaonic bath in which he revealed himself to himself every day, two luxurious robes on the door. The presses of the city, of cities, had fallen silent. There was the murmur of foreign voices, the sound of women’s heels. The household was speaking quietly in Italian and French. They had packed the clothes he was to be laid out in. The cook was older than the others; it meant something different to her. “We are all born and we must all die,” a Swiss woman who knew him well told me. “I feel so sad. So many things …” The very
things, of course, that in later years he wanted to gather and put in a book. “All these stories,” he had said, “all these people … It’s hopeless.”

My thoughts went back—1957, autumn. I had a wife and two small children. We lived in a cold house on the Hudson. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to stop recalling it or to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down and tried to write. It’s easy now to see how much I didn’t know—the making of notes, structure, selection, the most elementary aspects were a mystery to me. I had written one book, out of my own life, the book everyone can write, and beyond that lay desert. After much wavering of nerve I set out to cross it. A few years later, succeeding, a second novel was completed. It was published. It disappeared without trace. That was about the time I met Irwin Shaw.

He was much to me, father, great force, friend. He lived a life superior to mine, a life I envied and could barely fathom, his courage, loves, embrace, were all so large. We lived, I felt, in their shadow and I think of him in Byron’s lines about the sea:

And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward …
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.

Byron’s poems, as it happened, were at his bedside at the end.

I see him sometimes in the city, stepping out of a restaurant in the cold, his coat open, ready without hesitation to talk for a moment or invite you to join him. The lighted apartments float above, the bars are crowded, the parked cars washed with rain. The sixth game of the Series is on or there’s a play written by someone he’s interested in or admires.

I have loved thee. I was as it were a child …
The poets, writers, the sages and voices of their time, they are a chorus, the anthem they share is the same: the great and small are joined, the beautiful lives, the other dies, and all is foolish except honor, love, and what little is known by the heart.

EUROPA

T
HE PARTS OF
Paris that were revealed to me first, before Irwin Shaw, were, as I say, the least welcoming: the Champs-Elysées, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the grimness of the 1st Arrondissement, department stores and stations. At the time I had in my pocket, for an initial guidebook, three or four filing cards written on by a tall, avuncular man with a seductive charm named Herschel Williams who was a fellow student in Washington where we were attending Georgetown together as officers. In his youth he had escorted debutantes, written a hit play,
Janie,
and probably been to Europe as part of an education, though he certainly went later on. Taking out a fountain pen one evening in 1950 in Billy Martin’s, the leisurely act of a more polished world, he wrote down places and names for me as in years to come I would do for others.

More or less, I thus inherited Paris. The cards he jotted on are gone, but I still remember landmarks like a seaman who has seen, briefly and just once, a secret map. Curtained restaurants. Bourgeois streets. The nightclub he liked that has long since closed—it had violinists in dinner jackets and a bar of generous dimensions where after eleven-thirty girls who had failed to find a client for the evening would show up, girls like those on the train in Maupassant’s
story, of whom the old peasant woman says, “They are sluts who are off to that cursed place, Paris.”