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.