by Robin Green
I would like to say that my father died peacefully and beautifully, like Count Rostov in War and Peace, his deathbed surrounded by family whose forgiveness he begged for having left them penniless, forgiveness they tearfully, gladly granted. Or that he died suddenly in his sleep or in his car or anywhere and anything but the agonizing and protracted three years it took him to die after the initial diagnosis of cancer that had already spread outside the walls of the prostate gland and was making its way slowly and inexorably into his bones.
It was as if life were punishing him—and us—for the happiness he’d brought to the world, the way we’d all basked in the quality of his attention, laughed with him with our whole bodies, enjoyed the cocktails he made, the jokes he told. I felt lucky to have a father who lit up whenever I walked into the room—or had until that day I’d flown from California to see him and bounded upstairs to find him sitting at the edge of his bed, a panicked skeleton on the phone who, instead of lighting up at the sight of me, scowled and waved me off with a bony arm, desperate to hear what his doctor was saying. As if anything the doctor could say would have made a difference.
The time before when I’d been back to see him, I was with my mother and we were taking him home from the hospital well into his illness and after he’d survived a heart attack. I was pushing his wheelchair and when the elevator doors opened, a young man there waiting gasped in fright at the sight of him, my once-beautiful, handsome father, and I hated that kid. But now I was seeing what he’d seen: death personified, a wild-eyed, soon-to-be corpse.
The day of the elevator incident, my mother and I had driven my father home, and by prearrangement, his friends Frank and Raymond were waiting at the back door of the house on Wayland Avenue. They helped my father out of the car, into the house, and up the few stairs to the living room (we’d sold the grand piano), past the couch where he’d sat for the past three months, wearing away the chintz fabric, any tiny movement bringing what he called a “niggling” pain in his upper back, watching my mother go about her chores, up and down the stairs.
“She never stops,” he’d told me. “She never sits still.” It sounded like a complaint.
Now he stood between Frank and Raymond at the foot of the stairs, needing to be taken up to bed. I watched as his friends, one older, one younger, both still hale and strong, made a seat between them by clasping each other’s wrists, the way you learn to carry someone when you’re a child and are astounded when you find you can. They made a seat between them and my mother and I helped my father to sit and the two men carried their friend upstairs, never to come down again.
My brother’s small bedroom had long ago been made into a kind of den/TV room and it was there that my mother served my father breakfast, lunch, and dinner, always just so, with a full place setting and cloth napkin the way he liked it. And then, when he couldn’t make it into the den for meals, she served him in bed along with the many pills she administered in spoonfuls of ice cream. And there came a day when my brother drove down from New Hampshire to see him and my father had pleaded, “Please, help me out,” his meaning clear, but my brother, who’d taken the Hippocratic oath, could only say, “I love you, Pop.”
There had been a crisis before this trip home, one night at the hospital. In the morning they were to perform an orchiectomy, which meant the surgical removal of his testicles, in hopes it would slow the cancer down, and either from the fear of losing his balls or fear period, he’d had a heart attack. I told my boss at the Music Center I had to go back to Providence and she said she couldn’t spare me. I went around her to her boss and he said of course you should go and I went, a good thing, because I was summoned to a phone at the hospital by a doctor who needed to talk to someone besides my mother, who’d been unwilling to hear what he had to say.
I told him my-brother-the-doctor was coming, but I couldn’t say exactly when he’d get there because there was a snowstorm and he was on the road, but the doctor said, “Look, someone has to sign a do-not-resuscitate right now because if we have to do CPR, the bones in his chest have been so compromised by cancer that they will crumble under the pressure, do you understand?” What I understood was the expression I felt as if a ton of bricks had fallen on me, hit as I was by the full force of realizing that my father was actually going to die.
He had been dying for me in increments for a long time, as when my mother called to tell me he had fainted in the bathroom when he’d gotten up in the night to pee and she’d heard a crash and found him wedged between the toilet and the wall. It was at the exam that followed that the cancer was found.
Even before that, there had been a moment of foreshadowing when I’d answered my parents’ front door to find a colleague of my father’s who worked for Gibson Cards. The man looked shabby—suit shiny, dandruff on the lapels—and I remember thinking that this was what it looked like when a salesman got too old for a job that depended on customers being cheered when he stopped in to take an order.
“How are you today, Ira?” customers would say to my dapper father when he showed up.
“Much better now that I’ve seen you,” he’d say.
I’d read Death of a Salesman and now I was living it. I hoped my father would get off the road before he started to look like the Gibson salesman.
And then there was a day when we were taking a brisk walk together down Blackstone Boulevard, my father and I.
“I’m having a sort of, I guess you’d call it, moral dilemma,” he said. “I’d like to know what you think.”
“Sure, Dad, what?” I said, though he’d never said anything even vaguely like this to me before.
“You know Herb Sackett is a customer of mine,” he said. “He’s a friend but he’s also a buyer. I sell him a lot of greeting cards for his stores.”
“Sure,” I said, “I know.”
“Well, his business has expanded,” my father said. “His father left him one store, but he’s got thirty-two now and, really, it would be nothing to him, but if he increased my order by, say, just five thousand dollars, it would really make a big difference to me.”
I knew what he was asking me but I didn’t know what to say. I felt a seismic shift, not just in our relationship but in my relationship to the world.
“So, what do you think?” he finally said as we walked. “Should I ask him?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
I knew why not, of course, but the damage was already done. He’d broken my heart when he asked the question. It didn’t make me love him any less, just differently. And I figured that Herb Sackett would probably take it the same way.
And then he died for real. I flew through the night after my brother called to say this really looked like it. I didn’t make it in time. My brother told me how, that night, when my mother had tried to administer the spoonful of ice cream containing that hour’s pill, he’d pleaded, “Please don’t make me.”
Those were his last words. Shortly after, he looked at my brother, pointed to his heart, and then he was gone. He died at quarter to twelve on July 12, 1984, fifteen minutes before my mother’s sixty-seventh birthday. “No, it can’t be!” she wailed, in complete denial even then. At dawn, my brother called Sugarman’s, the funeral parlor on Hope Street that dealt with all the East Side Jewish dead. They sent a van and my mother hid in the basement while they carried my father out.
My brother drove me to the funeral parlor to say goodbye. They’d already worked on my father and placed him in a temporary casket (we’d pick out his permanent one, a plain pine box, later that day), the lid of which was closed. Someone opened it so I could see him, and it was my father, all right, a white shroud placed over what had become his tiny body. Gone now, though, was the mask of pain he’d worn the last times I’d seen him and, in its place, peaceful repose.
“He’s really handsome, isn’t he?” I said and the funeral worker agreed. I asked if I could touch him and was told I could. The flesh of his cheek felt like cold wax. I could see his spirit was gone
and he was in no way there. I said a silent goodbye as they closed the casket, and my brother put his arm around me as we went outside to the car, and we were less than a minute away—he’d taken the left down Doyle Avenue hill—when I let out a single wail, a primal scream, I even then realized, overcome by a terrible feeling of loss I right then remembered feeling for the first time when I was four and my parents were going away to Cape Cod for the weekend with friends and I’d wailed like a banshee at the idea of being without them. There in the car with my brother, I stifled the scream and that was that—except for the sea of sadness and depression and mourning in which I would drown in the coming months.
The year of my father’s death, my life as I had known it stopped. When I’d returned from the penultimate trip to see my father, I’d been fired from my job at the Music Center. For one thing, I’d drunk too much champagne at a donors’ gala recently. “She has a foul mouth,” the president of Exxon told my boss when he called to complain about me the next day, “and it gets worse the more she drinks.” She’d forgiven that infraction, but my going over her head to her boss to get leave to see my father was too much. She called me into her office. “The time has come,” she said, “for us to part company.”
I was hurt. I was angry. I was insulted. Until the realization hit me: I’d been fired, so for the first time in my life, I could collect unemployment, six whole months of not having to work, six months in which I would do pretty much nothing but eat, sleep, and walk around the neighborhood.
It was on one of these walks that I saw someone pruning the bougainvillea in front of a small Spanish apartment house I’d admired and asked if there were any vacancies. It turned out there were only two apartments—the owners inhabited the entire top floor—but one of the apartments was for rent. I moved in.
It was a sunny place with blond-wood floors, a fireplace, and views out the back onto Beachwood Canyon with its beautiful homes and gardens. It was down a hill from the Hollywood sign and Lake Hollywood, a man-made reservoir, an oasis in the city that you could then walk all the way around. One day and for the first time in my life—this was just after I’d returned home from my father’s funeral—I found a twenty-dollar bill and some loose change in a gutter, money that I knew was a gift from my dad, a sign that he was with me and would always be.
Still, I sank deeper and deeper into depression. I gained weight, but I have no recollection of eating anything except popcorn and the mango I’d devour after I walked around the lake. I began to watch the small TV my parents had bought me a few years before—the first one I’d ever owned. I’d had absolutely no interest in TV since leaving home for college, but now I watched anything and everything, including, one New Year’s Eve, all twelve hours of Shoah, a French documentary composed of interviews with Holocaust survivors and visits to extermination camps.
My six months were coming to an end. I would have to find work. At nearly forty, I felt too old to waitress. I could be a salesgirl, I thought, at a downtown department store. I was mulling this over one afternoon while I was watching TV, an old black-and-white movie about a newspaper reporter who was a drunk and who sank all the way into the gutter. A fellow newspaperman found him there and helped him get sober and his old job back. In the movie’s last scene, the fellow newsman was stopping by the deserted newsroom to pick something up and saw the reformed drunk reporter at his desk, editing copy.
“Jim,” he said. “What are you doing here so late? It’s almost midnight. Go home.”
“I am home,” Jim said. And with that, I burst into tears. It was time to look for writing work again.
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
The Bitch Is Back!
Dying when he did, my father missed everything. He missed all those times on the red carpet at the Emmys, the limos, the private jets, the first-class plane tickets when there were no private jets. He missed seeing me on TV accepting my and Mitch’s own private writing Emmy with the whole world watching. He missed seeing my credit on the many shows I wrote and produced and then that Mitch and I wrote and produced, and he missed seeing the show we created ourselves, still running after all these years.
He would have loved my flying him out to LA for the Emmys as I did my niece and her husband, loved his lavish suite at the Peninsula for which HBO footed the bill, loved donning the tuxedo from his salad days at the downtown Providence Biltmore that would have fit him still to walk the red carpet, watch the witty, glitzy show from the best seats, and then afterward attend the exclusive parties, would have loved all the special treatment, the handlers who would whisk him through crowds to the head of the line.
He would have loved the TV people too, the other writers and producers. Oh, and the actors! James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli, Dominic Chianese…and Lorraine Bracco, are you kidding me? And that’s just The Sopranos. He would have loved all of them as I did through the years. And they would have loved him.
He missed seeing me rich. He missed seeing me married. He missed seeing me happy.
Instead, he was buried on a ninety-five-degree July day in an all-but-treeless Jewish cemetery crowded with gravestones in Warwick just off the exit to the Theodore Francis Green Airport (no relation, of course—our family name had been Gerstle or some such Litvak thing before my grandfather changed it). At the gravesite, someone read a prayer, then in the distance someone played taps; a gun salute was fired; an American flag was lowered and expertly folded into a neat triangle that a man in a U.S. Army uniform brought forward and handed to my mother, seated at the graveside. Then my brother gave what was meant to be a humorous little speech that fell flat.
“You’re no Ira Green,” Jane Sackett told him afterward, “and you shouldn’t try to be.”
In the limo on the way home from the cemetery, my mother gave me the folded-up flag “to hug when you miss your father,” she said. Then why wouldn’t she want to keep it and hug it? Later she gave me his Tiffany key ring, “because it was something he touched every day,” she said. I knew she didn’t want the flag and she had her own key chain, but I did want them and do. The flag is downstairs in the office next to Mitch’s father’s folded-up Marine World War II veteran’s flag. The key chain is in my pocketbook on the hall table.
Back at the house on Wayland Avenue on the one afternoon of sitting shivah my mother would allow—she found the prescribed week of it “ridiculous”—my father’s friend Raymond cornered me as I was coming out of the downstairs lavette and ushered me back into the tiny powder room, where he pressed on me a check for seven-thousand-some dollars, saying it was money he owed my father—a lie, of course—and that my mother should use it to pay for the funeral. He and everyone else knew my father had left no money but that his life insurance would pay off the mortgages to the house and his continuing monthly Social Security checks would provide enough for my mother to live on.
I went back to LA and lived out the rest of my California State–sponsored six months of mourning and ease until the afternoon I burst into tears watching the old movie about a newspaper reporter on TV in my pretty apartment overlooking Beachwood Canyon and realized it was time for me to look for real work—just as I had done when I telephoned Alan Rinzler at Rolling Stone so many years before. I put in a call to Harold Hayes.
Harold Hayes had been the editor of Esquire in the ’60s and ’70s, was there somewhere on my one visit to its offices when I’d only had eyes for Rolling Stone. I’d come to appreciate since then that he’d practically invented New Journalism, publishing Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Jean Genet, and the like, and now he was right here in LA, helming California magazine. I’d heard he was hard to please and, setting out to please him, I did what I’d never done before: wrote a piece on spec as a kind of calling card.
My essay, called “Gandhi Goes to a Party,” about a press event I’d gotten wind of, led off like this:
“Anybody with the money to hire a P.R. firm and throw a party thinks they can get editorial space in your paper,” said
a reporter. True, perhaps, but it had to be a party with some kind of draw, which this one certainly had: Join Yogesh Kothari Gandhi (great-grandnephew of the mahatma) the invitation said, and someone named John-Roger for an evening at Chasen’s. And who—especially a member of the chronically hungry press—would turn down an invitation to Chasen’s? Who wouldn’t want to see Gandhi—any Gandhi—at the same party as Zsa Zsa, who was also expected?
And so it went for a thousand-some words as I skewered John-Roger, a New Age huckster raising money for his “upliftment” (sic) institute, his acolytes, including then famous-for-being-famous jet-setting Arianna Stassinopoulos and TV actress Leigh Taylor-Young (“Had John-Roger taught her to hyphenate her name?” I wryly wrote), observing also that Zsa Zsa didn’t show but Jerry Brown did, archly refusing a newspaper photographer’s request to pose with Gandhi and John-Roger, and I even took a shot at my schnorring fellow journalists: “The salmon’s not bad,” said one scribe, “but stay away from the enchiladas.”
The bitch was back!
I sent the piece to one of the editors at California and the word came that it would be published as a “Westword” essay on the closing page of the magazine, a coveted spot. After that, I got a few little freelance assignments there, but I had never spoken to, much less met, Harold Hayes, so it was startling to me, fat and depressed on the couch in my sunny little apartment, my eyes still wet from the movie on TV, when I telephoned and his secretary immediately put him on the line.
I explained who I was and that I wanted a job at the magazine, any job.
“Well, sure,” he said in his booming Southern accent. “I know who you are! C’mon in!”
