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.