He was patient in his insistence. I was equally patient in my reasoning. I even tried lifting him to show him how inadequate I was. He quieted down and seemed to have reconciled himself to the impossibility of his request. I lay back down. I was almost asleep when I heard Bill grunt, a sound made with great effort. Then another grunt. I got up.
He’d managed to move his body sideways on the bed and slide himself halfway toward the floor, onto my quilt. What he was doing was, given his condition, heroic. He was refusing to accept the limits imposed by the deterioration he was going through. He was determined that this act of his would prove that he was still who he was: a man faithful to his determination, no matter the difficulties arrayed against him. This was far, far beyond mere stubbornness. It was an assertion of self—and close to the time when he could have that self taken from him forever. Helpless, inadequate to his imperatives, his near-final response was a patient defiance.
All I could say was, “Oh, Bill.”
I managed to slide him back onto the bed and straighten him out so his head could rest again on the pillow. He didn’t resist. He said nothing. I kissed him goodnight and lay back down. My tears I kept to myself.
The last time Bill was able to get out of bed was after he had sold the van (for a thousand dollars) and Nina, who’d arranged the sale, came over to drive it off. It wouldn’t start. He had to get up, go outside and get the ignition to kick in.
But it was a negligible event and unworthy to claim so great a distinction in this narrative. I’ve chosen as his last experience of the outside air an afternoon in early June when Maria Friedlander came for what would be a final visit. She is the wife of Lee Friedlander, the noted photographer, a good friend of Bill’s—as was Maria.
As closely associated as Bill may have been to Lee, I strongly suspect it was Maria who was the more valued friend. It’s not all that difficult to elevate the suspicion to an assurance. Considering Maria, the word “lovely” comes first to mind, accompanied by a small smile as I set down the word. Quietly pretty, with long hair and a more than pleasing face, she was, perhaps primarily, with no effort whatsoever, a comforting, understanding, and easily responsive woman. She claimed that Bill had a too-idealized version of who she really was. If so, I confess to an equal inaccuracy, which, I protest, is not inaccurate.
So Maria and Bill could be alone together, I went outside with my notebook, sat on the bench near the basement door that opened onto the yard, and scribbled away at my novel in progress, The Uncle from Rome. It was the most perfect June day in history. The flowers were in aggressive bloom, the presiding cherry tree was sending down, like a blessing, a soft fall of white petals that the breeze arbitrarily dispersed throughout the yard. There were certainly enough to go around. I myself was a favored target and not once resented the distraction.
Maria and Bill came out, Bill in his bathrobe and slippers. He wanted to show Maria the results of his plantings. Aside from little more than a nodded acknowledgment, I let them continue their private meeting. But how could I not want to see them in among the tomatoes, Maria no doubt keeping her feet firmly on the planks. Their words were more murmured than spoken. Out of respect for the intimacy of the occasion, I did my best to concentrate on my work. But the two of them were more compelling than whatever I might achieve with my scribblings. Now they were in the side yard, Maria flicking the leaves of the grape arbor, then the two of them admiring a bush in the far corner. Slowly they moved, quietly their murmurings continued, on to the row of flowers along the side of the house. (Whether purposely or not, Bill seemed to have ignored the two posts of the never-to-be-completed fence. It could be that Maria had the good sense not to ask any questions.)
The sweet Williams, the hyacinths, the other flowers we’d planted fulfilled the purpose for which they’d been created: Extravagant as they were, they felt no need to do anything more than exist. It was enough. Bill knew it. Maria knew it. I knew it.
The soft sifting blossoms from the cherry tree continued. I stopped writing. It was enough. It was enough.
It was obvious that Bill was in his last days, but the signs went unnoted—not because they were ignored, dismissed, or denied—but because there were things to be done. I felt no need to place them into the larger context of which they were the central part. Little by little his appetite diminished until he’d eat only farina with chopped strawberries mixed in, or ice cream, mostly vanilla. After a time these had to be spoon-fed. Still, he seemed to enjoy them.
Only on one occasion was there a slight difficulty and that was very much of my own making. He was resisting his medicine but could usually be persuaded. One night after I’d had a busy day, he decided he didn’t want to take the sleeping pill the doctor had prescribed. I told him he needed the rest, which was a lie. He was bedridden and slept most of the time. I was the one who needed the sleep. And if he didn’t sleep, I didn’t sleep. There would be requests: he’d like some hot chocolate. He’d like me to read to him. None of this would I deny him. However, my own lack of sleep made me tired and I felt I’d be less effective the next day.
The night he refused the pill, he later asked for some ice cream. I brought it—but I had slipped the pill inside. I was spooning the ice cream into his mouth. After about three spoonfuls, he gagged and started to reach his fingers into his mouth. “There’s a walnut,” he complained.
I prefer not to imagine his reaction if he’d discovered the deception. From that day to this, my shame has only increased. It was a betrayal, an act of selfishness at a time when my needs were very much beside the point. My fingers were swifter than his and were into his mouth, retrieving the pill before he could take it into his own hand and see it for what it was.
He was satisfied that the “walnut” had been removed. I spooned in the rest of the ice cream. He went to sleep, the ice cream possibly a more effective soporific than the one I tried to sneak down his throat. I, of course, was the restless one that night.
One day he told me to turn off the television. I told him it was already off. He shouted, “Turn off the television!”
I turned the television on. “See? Now it’s on.” I turned it off. “See? Now it’s off.” He was convinced, but I was troubled that he’d experienced some disturbance that had no verifiable source.
Another time he told me to turn off the radio in the living room. That, too, was not on. “It’s off.”
“Pull the plug! Pull the plug!”
I crawled under the table and pulled the plug. “Okay. I pulled the plug.” He was satisfied.
Soon after, he asked me who were all those people in the house. “I’m the only one here.”
“The only one?”
“Yes.”
“I thought there were a lot of people.”
“No, just me.” This puzzled him. I could think of nothing to say.
Since his temperature remained frighteningly high, I would put some cold, cold water in a basin, and, with a wash cloth, sponge him down. From the look on his face and the hummed sounds of gratification coming from his mouth, I knew it was giving him some much needed, if temporary, relief. On the day before he died, when I was passing the cloth slowly across his face, under his chin, then across his neck, he arched his head back and hummed an even longer hum. As I was applying the cold cloth to the back of his left hand, he said in a quiet voice, “You’re so tender.”
“I learned that from you,” I said. And I spoke the truth. He neither moved nor said anything more.
Because his condition was so obviously critical, it had been arranged for his brother Dick to fly in from the West. He and Bill had never been all that close. From what Bill told me at an earlier time, a baby brother, all curls and smiles, had too effectively laid claim to all available attention. Then, too, as was necessary, an impregnable barrier had been erected to protect the required secrecy of Bill’s sexuality. In an earlier phase of the illness, Dick had come to
visit his older brother. This was during the time my own visits were random and not particularly needed. After Dick had been there and gone, Bill reported that it had been, for them both, a deeply significant meeting. “We told each other things we’d never mentioned before.” I didn’t ask for specifics and they weren’t offered. But it was apparent that a long-suppressed affection between the two brothers had finally surfaced and I could see in Bill a degree of relaxation not seen before.
His eagerness for his brother’s arrival expressed itself in an oft-repeated phrase, “I’ll wait ’til my brother comes,” even when his brother’s presence would affect in no way any activity I might propose. “I’m going to give you a bath,” I’d say. “I’ll wait ’til my brother comes.” “Let me change your T-shirt.” “I’ll wait ’til my brother comes.”
The day Dick was to be there, a call came from Marion, Dick’s wife. Air Force One on an airport tarmac with President George H. W. Bush on board had caused the cancellation of Dick’s flight. He would arrive tomorrow.
Bill had been particularly restless that day, a restlessness made evident by an unending series of requests. He had sipped only a few spoonfuls of his morning coffee, most of it spilling down onto his already unpresentable T-shirt. Less than ten minutes later he asked for hot chocolate. Two sips of that were enough. I stayed nearby. Ice cream. Coffee again. And so it went. At one point he decided he’d have some of the pecan pie Nina had brought weeks before, which he’d repeatedly refused and which I’d finished off quite some time ago. Hot chocolate was the chosen substitute—he tasted only sips of it, freshly made, spoon-fed.
A little later, the phone call from Marion came about his brother’s delay. The news didn’t seem to distress Bill. He was calmer and I let him sleep. I did the laundry. I hung it out on the line. In the bright breezy day it dried by midafternoon. I brought it in, took a few sweet whiffs, folded it and put it away.
Bill wanted nothing to eat and I knew better than to try to force him. I didn’t articulate it to myself then, but I articulate it now. Bill, by his first enthusiasm for me, then his withdrawal those thirty years ago, had given me instead of the continuation of the lasting love as first proclaimed, instead of the expected companionship into which it may have evolved, a life of everlasting loss, but also a life of everlasting yearning. No day came, no day went, during which my longing for him wasn’t lurking somewhere within me.
With his defection he had deeded to me an emotional life of infinite riches. “Though nothing can bring back the hour/ Of splendour in the grass” (as Wordsworth wrote), the yearning and its attendant inability to settle into mere satisfaction brought with it a never-ending agitation that kept active a constant reaching toward something forever to be desired, forever to be denied. Yearning—that most primal of all emotions, more tenacious than love—still lives even when all hope has fled. What riches. Without end. A gift from him.
Maybe equally important, he’d also given me during all these days with him a generous glimpse into what a shared life might have been like, the unnoted contentments of everyday companionship, the exchange of encouragements, the barely conscious compromises and concessions, the domesticated affection that would suffuse every act.
There is more that should be said. I wanted him to die. Only that would prevent him from leaving me for someone else. Not only had my revered St. Vincent mantra been repealed but its exact opposite put in its place: demand and expectation, both equally unacceptable. Yet another truth must be added to this. I felt neither shame nor guilt.
My defense, if a defense is possible, is that this is a natural, if shameful, human response and I lacked the equipment, moral or psychological, to effect a reversal. In the end, all I can say most sincerely is “Forgive me, Gale. Forgive me, Bill.”
That night I decided to sleep next to him instead of on the quilt. He was already asleep. I crawled past him to the far side of the bed and got under the sheet. A few moments later he raised his knees and began moving them toward me. If they touched something unexpected, he’d probably wake up. This I decidedly did not want. I got out of the bed as cautiously as I could. He didn’t wake up. I lay down on the quilt by the side of the bed and went to sleep.
A sound like a deep and difficult cough woke me up. “Bill?” Another cough. “Bill?” I got up and stood next to the bed. “Bill?” By the first pale light of morning I could see him there, lying on his back, eyes closed in sleep. The sound came again, a gargled growl that seemed like an impossible try for a deep breath. His chest heaved. The gargled growl came again. Then a stillness.
I sat next to him on the side of the bed. He didn’t move. Then it came again, the heaving chest, the desperate attempt to take a breath even if it meant tearing up his throat and gargling his ravaged lungs.
“Bill?”
I waited to hear the sound again. I took his hand and held it in mine. I continued to wait. No movement. No sound. Nothing. He had died.
I kept hold of his hand a little while longer. The digital clock on the bookshelf above the far side of the bed told me it was five twenty. Ten minutes later than the time on the tower clock the day we’d met thirty years and twenty-nine days before.
I reached up and smoothed his forehead. The fever had begun to recede, or it could have been the cooling sweat from the unrelenting fever. I got up and, bending over him, kissed him lightly on the lips, then on the forehead. I let go of his hand and climbed past him. Again I slipped under the sheet and lay at his side, facing him. I reached over and let my right arm lie gently across his chest. Nothing moved. I went back to sleep.
The world is a very strange place in which to live—made stranger still by the people in it.
Acknowledgments
For my publisher, Lori Milken, thanks and praise for the continuing survival of Delphinium Books after the untimely death of her friend and co-founder, Cecile Engel. And I thank her as well for my editor, Joseph Olshan, who, for starters, encouraged me to write this book, then gave me the right title to replace the wrong one I’d originally chosen. Then, too, I’m grateful for the relentless scrutiny he gave the text, very much to its benefit, and finally, for his persisting belief in the book itself. I also give thanks for having found my new agent, Caron Knauer, who’s not afraid to take risks, and I acknowledge Yaddo for the necessary gift of time and solitude.
I thank as well my faithful first responders who unfailingly made sure that my “work in progress” was actually progressing: Mark Nichols (who encouraged me to write the book), Martha Witt, David Barbour, Debbie Hall, and Daniel D’Arezzo. With all of this, small wonder that I consider myself the most fortunate writer I know.
About the Author
Joseph Caldwell is an acclaimed playwright and novelist who was awarded the Rome Prize for Literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of five novels in addition to the Pig Trilogy, a humorous mystery series featuring a crime-solving pig. Caldwell lives in New York City.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This work is a memoir. It reflects the author’s present recollections of his experiences over a period of years. Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed in order to protect the identity of certain individuals. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
Copyright © 2019 by Joseph Caldwell
Cover design by Colin Dockrill
978-1-5040-5992-3
Published in 2019 by Delphinium Books, Inc.
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JOSEPH CALDWELL
FROM DELPHINIUM BOOKS AND OPEN ROAD MEDIA
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