Yes, I have! It was Irwin’s favorite story. Yes, I have. Three words, and you cried.
—
And now it is April and the long campaign is ending. The winter was difficult, in and out of the hospital, his lungs filling with fluid and other problems no less grave. His son phoned from Europe — he was in the hospital again, heart trouble, lung trouble, kidney trouble. He was exhausted from the ordeal. His brother was there and some old friends, the Parrishes.
I set out to see Irwin for the last time. I landed in the morning. It was May. I had a bottle of Haut Brion with me that I was carrying on the off chance we could have a glass of it in the hospital room. They once wet the lips of newborn kings of France with such wine. I was thinking of that, and the journey he was soon to take.
On the train it began to grow dark. There was light only in the mountains to the west. The afternoon was moving towards America with the news, homeward, the yellow fields more bright as it went.
The hospital was in Davos, the same one in which Marian had lost a baby twenty-seven years earlier. The last connection I could make went no farther than a town about thirty miles from there. I called from the vestibule of a soiled-looking restaurant. At the apartment, a private nurse had no news. She suggested I call the hotel where the family was gathered. I did; Adam came to the phone. “Irwin died this afternoon, about an hour ago,” he told me gently.
“Oh, God.” I could think of nothing to say. “Well, I’ll be there in the morning.”
“There’s no point in flying over now,” he said.
“I’m already here. I’m in Landquart.”
“Landquart? I’ll be there in half an hour,” he said.
He had died at about seven in the long, soft evening. Beneath the window of the room in which he lay was a stream, I could hear it there in the dark. There was a clean blue pillowcase on the pillow. His clothes were neatly folded, a blue sport shirt of silk or cashmere, corduroy pants.
I wanted to see him. We went to look for the head nurse. Ein guter Freund had come, Adam explained to her. They spoke for a few moments and she led the way to another floor.
He lay on a smooth-wheeled rolling cart, beneath a sheet, his head on a pillow, a white bandage around his forehead and jaw to keep it closed. He was shaved. His nostrils were large and empty. He looked papal. There was a red curtain behind him concealing the niche in which he must lie while the modern clocks of the hospital ticked through the night and patients slept.
I touched his hair, something I had never done in life. It was like my own, curly, gray. I wanted to remember everything and at the same time never to have seen it. God bless us, a thing of naught. That was something he had never been and, lying there, still was not. After a while I leaned down to kiss his brow in farewell. It was cold.
—
He died afar, surrounded by women like a biblical king. He had come a long way, like Dickens or d’Annunzio, from his beginnings. He died with the best of everything, a cook, Hungarian vodka, a fine apartment on the main street over the Patek Philippe store, a housekeeper, a secretary, a nurse. There were books everywhere. On the desk, a picture of his son. Above, a photograph of the football team at Brooklyn College, the grass brown, Irwin in the center, taller than you remember, lean, kneeling above the mythic ball.
There had been cancer. It had spread. He hated what he had become in the end, his useless body. He always imagined he would have a vigorous old age. It hadn’t been that way. He had undergone a terrible beating at the last.
In the morning the phone was ringing with that strange European urgency, ring ring, ring ring, ring ring. The telegrams and calls were coming in from everywhere. You must know the immense sorrow into which I was plunged upon learning this morning …, cables in foreign languages. He was not a scholar or intellectual, though he was brighter than he looked. He was a kind of titleholder. He wrote a lot, among it much that people admired.
I wandered through the apartment, room by room, the kitchen into which he probably rarely ventured, the pharaonic bath in which he revealed himself to himself every day, two luxurious robes on the door. The presses of the city, of cities, had fallen silent. There was the murmur of foreign voices, the sound of women’s heels. The household was speaking quietly in Italian and French. They had packed the clothes he was to be laid out in. The cook was older than the others; it meant something different to her. “We are all born and we must all die,” a Swiss woman who knew him well told me. “I feel so sad. So many things …” The very things, of course, that in later years he wanted to gather and put in a book. “All these stories,” he had said, “all these people … It’s hopeless.”
My thoughts went back—1957, autumn. I had a wife and two small children. We lived in a cold house on the Hudson. Thinking every day of the life I had left, unable to stop recalling it or to believe in myself apart from it, I sat down and tried to write. It’s easy now to see how much I didn’t know — the making of notes, structure, selection, the most elementary aspects were a mystery to me. I had written one book, out of my own life, the book everyone can write, and beyond that lay desert. After much wavering of nerve I set out to cross it. A few years later, succeeding, a second novel was completed. It was published. It disappeared without trace. That was about the time I met Irwin Shaw.
He was much to me, father, great force, friend. He lived a life superior to mine, a life I envied and could barely fathom, his courage, loves, embrace, were all so large. We lived, I felt, in their shadow and I think of him in Byron’s lines about the sea:
And I have loved thee, Ocean! And my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward …
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane — as I do here.
Byron’s poems, as it happened, were at his bedside at the end.
I see him sometimes in the city, stepping out of a restaurant in the cold, his coat open, ready without hesitation to talk for a moment or invite you to join him. The lighted apartments float above, the bars are crowded, the parked cars washed with rain. The sixth game of the Series is on or there’s a play written by someone he’s interested in or admires.
I have loved thee. I was as it were a child … The poets, writers, the sages and voices of their time, they are a chorus, the anthem they share is the same: the great and small are joined, the beautiful lives, the other dies, and all is foolish except honor, love, and what little is known by the heart.
EUROPA
THE PARTS OF Paris that were revealed to me first, before Irwin Shaw, were, as I say, the least welcoming: the Champs-Elysées, the Avenue de l’Opéra, the grimness of the 1st Arrondissement, department stores and stations. At the time I had in my pocket, for an initial guidebook, three or four filing cards written on by a tall, avuncular man with a seductive charm named Herschel Williams who was a fellow student in Washington where we were attending Georgetown together as officers. In his youth he had escorted debutantes, written a hit play, Janie, and probably been to Europe as part of an education, though he certainly went later on. Taking out a fountain pen one evening in 1950 in Billy Martin’s, the leisurely act of a more polished world, he wrote down places and names for me as in years to come I would do for others.