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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.

We went through a squadron of nurses, mostly useless. Finally, we got Leto, a sixty-year-old grandfather who looked twenty years old. Leto agreed to a twenty-four-hour vigil sleeping on a sofa beside Howard’s hospital bed. Hallucinations were now returning. He always kept asking what day of the week it was, “Because Thursday I’m being let out of here.” He had decided that we were both in some sort of governmental hospital prison. When, he wondered, would I be let go? I said when he was. In the mornings when I’d come into his room, Leto would be tidying him up and Howard would follow me with his eyes as if trying to fix me in his memory.

Next he developed pneumonia and Edward, a Russian nurse—actually an M.D. but not allowed to practice in the United States except as a nurse (disgusted, he went to an American law school and gave up medicine for law)—would come at dawn to plug Howard into antibiotics. One morning Howard announced to me in near-pentameter, “At first light the angel of death, all in white, arrived with the sun.”

Montaigne would now want to know how he looked. He had good color. An excellent appetite. A television set was almost always on—for Leto. Howard was ranking the commercials according to which ones he most hated.

A sort of swinging cage had been set up above his hospital bed and he was lifted in it as Leto cranked until he was able to swing him from bed to an armchair where he could sit and look out the window at tall trees as well as at a datura bush growing on the next property; he also had a view of the Italianate tile roof of the garage apartment opposite.

Each midnight he would start to sing. Leto, who had been a piano prodigy in Manila, would accompany him on the downstairs piano. He pronounced Howard’s voice better than Andy Williams’s, which it was. Howard had sung professionally until he realized, sadly, that he was a minor latecomer to that golden age of male singers, headed by Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett. Unlike most of the great stars higher up the list, Howard never lost his voice though emphysema was reducing volume. He had worked in advertising before we met, putting himself through New York University by working eight years at Walgreens drugstore next to the Paramount Theater in Times Square. He still sang; he had a repertoire of several hundred songs and despite all the recent surgeries and hallucinations he never forgot a lyric. Cole Porter, Sondheim, and his favorite “Our Love Is Here to Stay” echoed through the house at the end. Also, in Ravello, when he couldn’t sleep, he would play Barbra Streisand’s final concert which she had invited us to London to attend. He always felt that he had somehow invented her because he’d seen her with me on The Tonight Show when she was unknown: she had sung Arlen’s “A Sleeping Bee.” Not long after her first Carson appearance, we gave a small dinner party in New York to celebrate Paul Newman’s fortieth birthday. Howard invited Streisand and we introduced her to Beluga caviar. She never looked back. How did she start her day? interviewers would ask. “With five thousand eggs,” she’d reply. We toasted Paul’s birthday. “I guess,” said Howard, “forty must seem very old to you.” “Yes,” said the practical Streisand, “it does.” So, as Howard was dying he listened over and over again to her last album.

Near the end he asked me, “How old am I?” I told him he was seventy-four. He frowned. “That’s when people die, isn’t it?” I said that I hadn’t and so far he hadn’t. I was sitting beside his armchair looking out over the tile roof opposite. For a moment he looked puzzled; then he said: “Didn’t it go by awfully fast?” Of course it had. We had been too happy and the gods cannot bear the happiness of mortals. Montaigne paid for his wisdom with agonizing kidney stones.

Several times I asked Leto to wake me when Howard began to sing but Leto never did. I suppose, at the end, Howard wanted to do a benefit for himself alone. I can understand this, sadly, because I loved his singing. One winter at the Bamboo Bar in Bangkok’s Oriental Hotel he sang regularly at popular request. It seemed all of young Bangkok wanted to hear this heir to Tony Bennett. Then there was a memorable session with the band at Brasilia airport, wonderful musicians who cheered him on as did a crowd of Brazilian parliamentarians, waiting for the weekend plane to take them home to Rio de Janeiro, far from Brasilia, their truly ugly jungle capital.

Leto never did wake me at concert time. With the aid of Valium I was sleeping too heavily, or so he said. Heavy sleep is my own natural response to the unbearable and yet, for most of this time, I had convinced myself that Howard was going to survive indefinitely due to the magic of radiation. But then “Denial,” as Bill Clinton once so neatly put it, “is not just another river in Egypt.”

During the days we talked of usual matters. Particularly, the presidential threats of war in the Middle East. Howard regretted that in all the years we had spent living outside the United States we had continued to pay, as law required, full income tax to a federal government plainly gone berserk. One of the last public occasions he had been able to attend was my speech at UCLA’s Royce Hall where I talked to a thousand people against the coming wars.

At these times, during such an illness, the mind keeps finding new reasons for hope—at least mine did and I think that his did, too; not long before the end he had a serious workout with a physical therapist who found him unexpectedly strong, physically and even more so mentally as he drove himself to rebuild his body.

Logistically, I had a difficult time being alone with him. There was always something Leto had to do—swinging him from armchair to bed and back again, changing the uncomfortable diapers he was obliged to wear. The hospital bed also had a railing around it and one could barely poke a hand through in order to hold his hand. Since we usually watched the evening news together I decided one night that he should stay in his armchair and I’d sit next to him and so we watched together, talking to the screen as much as to each other. When the news was off, he was silent. Leto was out of the room. “Don’t you want to talk?” I asked. There was a long silence, then he shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “there’s too much to say.”

The next morning Edward gave him his intravenous antibiotics. The coughing was still bad from an ominous bout with pneumonia but, as he noted triumphantly, “Green to beige.” I was too slow to get this. Exasperated, he said, “What I’ve been coughing up was green—poison—now it’s a beige color, almost healthy.” We celebrated “green to beige.” The next day the physiotherapist would be back and I vowed that I would not take Valium and so be able to listen to the midnight concert. Leto arrived with his supper which he put on a table in front of the armchair. I went downstairs to get a sandwich. A few minutes later Leto shouted, “Mr. Auster has stopped breathing!” I ran upstairs. He was still in the armchair, facing the window. He had eaten most of his dinner. In front of him was a tin of some vitamin concoction that he liked. Leto said, “He just drank that drink and took a deep breath and then he—stopped.” I sat in the chair opposite and did all the things that we have learned from movies to determine death. I passed a hand in front of his mouth and nose. Nothing stirred. Montaigne requires that I describe more how he looked—rather than how I felt. The eyes were open and very clear. I’d forgotten what a beautiful gray they were—illness and medicine had regularly glazed them over; now they were bright and attentive and he was watching me, consciously, through long lashes. Lungs, heart may have stopped but the optic nerves were still sending messages to a brain which, those who should know tell us, does not immediately shut down. So we stared at each other at the end. He had been sitting straight up when I came in the room but now, very slightly he slumped to the left in his chair. Leto had gone to ring 911. “Can you hear me?” I asked him. “I know you can see me.” Although there was no breath for speech, he now had a sort of wry wiseguy from the Bronx expression on his face which said clearly to me who knew all his expressions, “So this is the big fucking deal everyone goes on about.” In my general state of confusion I was oddly comforted that in death he was in perfect easy character much as he would have been that evening if he had lived to sing “New York,” the song the people in Ravello often begged him to sing fortissimo.

Jim Carney who works for us at times kept me company while the newly arrived team from 911 hurled him onto the wood floor time and again. If he’d had a spark of life, all that pummeling would have extinguished it. When they finally finished, I thought they were going to take him to whatever hospital they had come from, so I said, “Could you take him instead to Cedars-Sinai, that’s his regular hospital.” One of the medics said, “He’s not going to a hospital, he’s going to the mortuary.”

Then Jim and I were left with Howard on the floor between us covered by a sheet, black socks on his feet. Leto wept. I envied him—the WASP glacier had closed over my head. It took over an hour for the ambulance to come take him away. During the wait, I pulled back the sheet for one last look at those clear gray eyes—could they still see?—but the substance of the eyeballs had collapsed and two gelatinous streaks of the sort snails make had coursed down his cheeks. I would not see him in any corporal form again until the ashes at Rock Creek Cemetery.

But, curiously, last night I finally saw him clearly in a dream—a frustration dream. We were in a side street in Rome where the entrance to our old flat should have been but was nowhere to be found. Yet everything else was as it should have been, including a greengrocer whom we knew. Howard had grabbed a handful of fava beans and started to shell them. For what it is worth the fava bean itself resembles a miniature fetus and the Pythagorean cult believed that each bean contains the soul of someone dead, ready to be reborn. In the dream Howard was eating these forbidden fetuses—preparing for rebirth?