I KEPT HAVING THESE THOUGHTS OF ALL the years that had led up to here. I was loading every day and every night with memories of the life he’d led. He told me he was doing the same thing: trying to clear the decks, making sure he did his best to recall everything he could.
“The first time we saw television in color,” he said on the phone one night when I was back in Chicago. Breathing was becoming even more difficult; I could hear it across the miles.
“We saw it together,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “But where was it?”
“My grandmother’s,” I said. “On Brentwood. She had one of the first color television sets in town. In that sitting room on the second floor of her house.”
“Was it Peter Pan?” he asked.
“Right,” I said. “With Mary Martin.”
“I thought so,” he said. “That was something. To see it in color. From Broadway, to us.”
ONE DAY HE DIDN’T ANSWER HIS PHONE at all until midway through the evening, and when he did I could tell that something disquieting had happened.
“I had a real bad day,” he said.
“Did you have to go back to the hospital?” I asked.
“No, it wasn’t that,” he said. “They came to talk to us about the funeral arrangements.”
He had wanted to be involved in the planning. It had seemed like a good idea. But the reality of the meeting, and the talking about the details, had shaken him.
“I thought about all the people who would be sitting there,” he said. “And that I wouldn’t be there. Of Janice and Maren in the front row, and what was going to be said during the service.
“I could almost see it as we made the plans.”
His voice broke.
“So it’s all taken care of now?” I said. “You don’t have to do anything else?”
“Everything’s planned,” he said.
And then in the next sentence he said he’d made Chuck and Joyce a music CD to give them for their anniversary.
“A lot of Elvis, a lot of Beatles,” he said.
Funeral arrangements and Elvis Presley, all in one day.
“I’ll make you a copy if you want one,” he said. “But don’t tell Chuck yet. It’s a surprise.”
PEOPLE WANTING TO COME SEE HIM HAD to wait their turn; Janice was doing her best not to wear him out further by subjecting him to endless visits, but so many friends and relatives, some from out of town, were asking to spend time with him that she had to schedule his days.
“I want to see everyone,” he told me. “I can’t believe how many people want to come over. But I just get so tired.”
There was something else about it, too.
“I know why they’re coming,” he said. “I know why they’re in a hurry to get here.”
As we spoke every day I thought back to that year when, to keep us from talking, the elementary school teacher had separated us, had moved us apart in her classroom. Now, it seemed, the world was about to separate us, this time for good.
ONE MORNING I CALLED AND HE SAID, “Chuck was here last night.”
That wasn’t unusual, so I knew he had a reason for bringing it up.
“He came up to my room,” Jack said, “and he said to me, ‘You know, with all the people who are coming to visit you, we haven’t had a chance to talk alone in a while.’”
Jack knew that was true; there had been few times in recent weeks that people hadn’t been coming in and out of the house.
“I told him that if he wanted to talk alone, we could close the door so that it would just be the two of us,” Jack said.
Chuck had gone over and closed the bedroom door.
“He sat down,” Jack said, “and he told me, ‘I think you’ve done a very good job planning your estate.’ He told me he was impressed.
“And then he just started crying.”
Jack said he had never seen Chuck cry like that. He said he couldn’t stop.
When Chuck finally was able to compose himself, Jack said, he said some very private things meant to allay any fears Jack might be having about Janice’s and Maren’s future.
What struck me as being so kind—so intuitively right in its tone—was what Chuck had said to begin the conversation.
Chuck was always the one who could do business deals with his eyes closed; Chuck was always the one with the reputation for knowing all the financial angles, all the ways to gain an upper hand in a negotiation. It wasn’t lost on Jack that people had a different level of regard for Chuck’s business skills than they did for his.
So when Chuck had closed the door and said, “I think you’ve done a very good job planning your estate,” those were the perfect words. Those were words Jack so needed to hear. He didn’t know; as he’d struggled with his illness and tried everything he could to get his financial affairs in order, he didn’t know how well he was doing at it. Things had become so difficult, and so quickly; he was trying to take care of his family’s coming needs at the same time he was trying to stay alive.
And Chuck, by his choice of words, had made Jack feel as if he’d succeeded. By complimenting Jack on how he had planned for his family’s well-being, by telling him he was impressed, Chuck had lifted Jack up, had made him believe he had done well. Had made him feel proud.
I wanted to tell Chuck that I knew—that Jack had told me, and that I thought what he had said to Jack was the most considerate and generous combination of words he ever could have chosen.
But because Chuck and I have never been very good at saying anything serious to each other, I knew that, talking to him face-to-face, I’d never be able to find the words. What I wanted to say to him was the same thing he had said to Jack: I wanted to tell him what a good job I thought he had done. Throughout all of this, how magnificent I thought he had been.
But Chuck and I have never been able to look at each other and say such things, so these words, here, will have to do.
“THERE WERE TWO QUARTERS ON THE table near my bed today,” Jack said on the phone.
I was becoming accustomed to the sound of his voice mixed with the sound of the oxygen flowing into his nose. There was a halting quality to his cadence.
“I looked at the quarters,” he said, “and I thought, that would buy enough gas to get us through a whole night.”
On a weekend evening we would pull up to Luke’s Shell Station at the corner of Roosevelt and Main, ask for fifty cents’ worth of regular, and it was the ticket to whatever lay ahead, it was a passport to everything. Fifty cents had been quite sufficient; fifty cents’ worth of gas could take us anywhere we wanted to go by midnight, and get us back home safe and on time. Fifty cents, night after night, was the price of admission for joy.
We’d watch the numbers roll by on the gas pump at Luke’s—he’d slow it down as it approached 50, the numbers would speed through the twenties and thirties, and then when it would hit forty-one cents Luke would do something with the pump handle—42, 43, 44, the numbers would move like molasses, and sometimes Luke would let it get to 51 by mistake, but usually he would stop it right on the 50. Not a penny more, not a penny less.
“I saw those two quarters sitting there,” Jack said to me. “It made me want to get up and go out cruising the town.”
WHERE HE FOUND HIMSELF GOING NEXT would require an expenditure of more than the two quarters on the nightstand.
He wanted to see the ocean. He didn’t say one last time, but that was understood.
The man in New York with whom he’d done business over the years—the man who had invited Jack and Janice to stay in his Manhattan apartment when Jack was at Sloan-Kettering—also owned a place in Florida. He sent word: If Jack wanted to use it for a few days, that was fine with him. It would be sitting empty otherwise.
Getting down there was going to be a problem. Jack was in bed much of the time now; the oxygen tank was always with him. He could most likely physically get through an airport, and through the lines, and the screening procedures, and the inevitable wintertime delays, but it would undoubtedly take so much out of him that the trip would be worthless. By the time he arrived in Florida he would probably be so wiped out that it would have been better for him to stay in Ohio.
He wanted to see the ocean. He wanted to feel warmth in the air.
Chuck called a company that chartered corporate jets. He asked if they had a small plane on hand with a pressurized cabin—one in which a person breathing with the assistance of an oxygen tank would not feel uncomfortable.
Such a plane was available, for the right fee. Chuck said he would like to rent it.
So on a frigid day in Columbus, at a private airstrip, Jack and Janice and Maren, with Chuck and Joyce, boarded the airplane.
“Oh, Greene, you should see this place,” Jack said to me when they arrived. “My bed is next to this open deck. I can hear the ocean as I’m falling asleep.”
THEY STAYED THREE DAYS. IT SEEMED TO revive his spirits; he was strong enough to go out for dinner some of the nights, unembarrassed about the oxygen in restaurants where he knew no one other than the people at his table. He told me he wanted to come back to this place by the ocean again; he asked me if I would come next time.
But there was somewhere else he said he wanted to visit first.
“I’d like to go back to Colorado,” he said. “To ski.”
“Do you think your lungs can take the altitude now?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said. “I’ll talk to the doctor.”
I assumed, when he said he wanted to ski, he meant that he wanted to watch as the others skied.
“No,” he said. “I want to ski myself.”
Later, when Chuck and I could talk on the phone with just the two of us hearing, I repeated the conversation to him—the part about Jack planning to ski.
There was a short silence, and then, from Chuck: “He really said that?”
“I was surprised,” I said. “He said he was feeling better, but I didn’t think he was anywhere near that strong.”
More silence, and when Chuck spoke again his voice was unsteady.
“Bob, Jack can’t walk across a room without having to sit down and rest.”
He was dreaming. Jack was awake, but he was dreaming.
I HAD TO BE IN WASHINGTON.
For the last several years, I’ve had a routine every time I go there.
In the morning I will leave my hotel and walk along the banks of the Potomac River on the District of Columbia side. When I get to the Memorial Bridge I’ll walk across it to Virginia, where a roadway leads to the entrance of Arlington National Cemetery.
I’ll visit the cemetery, one of the most stirring and beautiful places I’ve ever been, and I’ll just walk the paths and think. It’s an overpowering, sanctified place, lovely and heartbreaking at the same time, and I’ve found few places in my life that are more conducive to quiet and private reflection. The morning walks have become intrinsic to the Washington experience for me.
Usually, before heading back, I’ll go to the gravesite of John F. Kennedy, to pause at the eternal flame for a moment, then turn and look at the unobstructed view of the District across the river.
But on this trip, there was somewhere else in the national cemetery where I wanted to stop. I’d asked one of the uniformed guards on duty. He told me where it was. He said to go to the Tomb of the Unknowns; using that as a reference point, he explained exactly how to walk from there to the place I was seeking.
It took me a little while. There are so many grave markers in the cemetery that finding a specific one, even if you’ve been given directions, can be difficult.
But then there it was. It was at the end of a row of other gravestones, no different from the rest, just as weathered, not any larger or more ornate than its neighbors.
There was a cross engraved at its top, and then the simple, unadorned words.
AUDIE L.
MURPHY
TEXAS
MAJOR INFANTRY
WORLD WAR II
JUNE 20, 1924
MAY 28, 1971
MEDAL OF HONOR
I stood for a long time. I was the only visitor.
When I got back to my hotel I called and told him about it.
“It wasn’t a big monument?” he said. “They didn’t have it set off by itself?”
“No,” I said. “It’s at the end of a row, next to a road, so I suppose that’s on purpose, to make it easy for people to see. But other than that it’s no different from any other gravesite there. It’s almost as if he didn’t want to be considered any more special than anybody else.”
“Kind of figures, doesn’t it?” Jack said. “Like he didn’t want a fuss made over him. Anything else would probably feel wrong.”