Part 33 (2/2)

He had no energy, and Lopate felt awkward. Fortunately, their visit was interrupted by a naked and squealing Katharine, who ran into the room dripping water. ”Don't look at me!” she shouted. ”I've just taken a shower!” Her presence cheered Don and gave Lopate an excuse to slip away.

A week later, Don showed up unexpectedly at the weekly lunch meeting of the creative-writing faculty. ”He said he was bored hanging around the house,” Lopate said. ”He also seemed to be telling us with this visit: I may be sick but it doesn't mean I'm giving up my stake in the program. Perhaps because he was up and about, and therefore one expected an improvement, his pasty, florid appearance shocked me even more than when I had seen him at home.” He was beardless and gaunt. ”He looked bad. We wanted him to go home and lie down, not sit through our boring agenda.”

Don's doctors had forbidden him to drink or smoke, and he pa.s.sed up his usual white wine. When he left the meeting, one of his colleagues said, ”That just wasn't Donald.” The others agreed.

Over the next several weeks, he showed up at readings and other public events, his face and neck marked by the blue lines the doctors had drawn on his skin to guide the radiation treatments. ”He was a walking art object,” one of his students said.

He went to Del Rio, a local rehab center, to kick booze and cigarettes. ”He quit drinking for about three months and when he thought he had it under control, he began slowly, occasionally, to take a gla.s.s of white wine,” Marion says. ”He discovered when he was in radiation that he didn't have the stamina to drink, write, and deal with cancer, so he cut out the drinking to protect his writing.” On the phone, he told Lynn Nesbit it had been ”easy” to kick alcohol. She thought, ”For Christ's sake, Donald, if it was easy, why didn't you do it long ago?” Talking to Anne, however, he admitted he worried about writing-what would losing booze do to his imagination?

The news that he had received the thirty-thousand-dollar Rea Award for the Short Story did little to console him. One day, an old pal and former colleague at the Houston Post, Houston Post, George Christian, came by the house. Several times that day, Don told Christian he wanted to die. He just wanted to ”go to sleep and never wake up.” Whenever Marion walked through the room, Don put on a cheerful face for her. But as soon as she went out, Christian said, ”Don resumed talking about how miserable he was.” George Christian, came by the house. Several times that day, Don told Christian he wanted to die. He just wanted to ”go to sleep and never wake up.” Whenever Marion walked through the room, Don put on a cheerful face for her. But as soon as she went out, Christian said, ”Don resumed talking about how miserable he was.”

The later medical ”follow-up he got from Methodist and Park Plaza Hospital was inadequate,” Marion says. But slowly, over the next few months, he appeared to gain strength and seemed to be in remission. He grew back his beard, though it was not as thick as before. He remained thin. In the fall, he resumed teaching part-time, though his cla.s.sroom duties strained his voice. ”He was talking through the blood etchings in his throat, all raspy,” says Eric Miles Williamson. ”It was scary and amazing.”

Little by little, he regained his old pluck. ”One day, a student read a story about a woman with a baby, sitting in a trailer house,” says George Williams. ”Nothing was happening in the piece, and the other students were asking, 'What could make the story interesting?' Don said, 'Kick the baby.'

”In another workshop, there was a student who was one of these therapist types who are now trying to run the world, you know, and he was challenging Don a little, making veiled references to Don's alcoholism. Don turned three shades of red. He was humiliated by this personal attack in the cla.s.sroom. But afterward he never treated this guy any differently. He just took it.”

At a party one night, Williams overheard Don say, ”Life is altogether too impoverished without booze.”

In the spring of 1989, Don and Marion flew to Rome. He had been awarded a senior fellows.h.i.+p by the American Academy there. He was offered a brief residency and studio s.p.a.ce in the Academy's villa atop Janiculum, the tallest, most glorious hill above the city.

Established in 1894, and chartered as a private inst.i.tution by Congress in 1905, the American Academy awards fellows.h.i.+ps in a range of disciplines, among them literature, music, architecture, history, and design. In the spring, Ed Hirsch had also been awarded a Prix de Rome, and Don looked forward to seeing him in Italy. ”He didn't like to leave home,” Hirsch says, ”but having me there helped Marion convince him to go.”

Don loved the villa, ten buildings and eleven acres of gardens overlooking Rome's bell towers, stucco walls, and golden domes. Don and Marion's apartment had a huge living room with ”shabby old furniture and old paint,” Don said. A small terrace off the bedroom opened out above the city center. ”[J]ust looking [through] the window in the morning is a great joy,” Don wrote his parents. Each day, he and Marion breakfasted on the terrace, which offered a stunning view of the hills.

That spring, the Academy was busy replacing old furniture with new birch, plywood, and wire designs by the New York decorator Mark Hampton. Don enjoyed the mix of old and new things in the villa's rooms, and loved overhearing discussions of design. He and Marion relished short trips out of the city. They saw Mount Vesuvius and, with Katharine and Marion's parents, who had arrived for a visit, a ”tiny town called Ravello on the Amalfi coast which turned out to be the most beautiful place I've ever been,” Don told his folks.

Mostly he spent time working in the villa. He knew the Academy's rich history. Henry James had once been a guest. In the 1950s, architectural postmodernism had gotten a start here, as Robert Venturi stayed in the villa with several other architects, engaging them in lengthy discussions. Marion's great-uncle, Gorham Phillips Stevens, had been a temporary director of the American Academy after World War I. His portrait hung in the entrance hall.

Both Marion and Ed Hirsch attest to the fact that Don was surpa.s.singly happy during his stay in Rome. ”He was writing and he was in high spirits,” Hirsch says. ”It was a good moment for them as a family. Kate was with them. And the setup suited him. He loved the layers of Rome, the way the old and the new came together, contemporary life against the ancient backdrop. He was as relaxed as I'd ever seen him, more spiritually at ease than in either Houston or New York. Part of the pleasure of the experience for him was that his happiness there was so unlikely. Or so he'd thought. He had a flaneur's temperament, and he could indulge it in Rome.”

There was no more talk of a desire to die.

”I have neither television nor newspapers,” Don wrote in an unfinished ”diary” of his time in Rome-remarks found on a computer disc after his death. ”[One day] I followed a whistling man down the street for several blocks, just for the music. He was whistling the Marine Corps Hymn and I thought he might be a fellow countryman, but he looked very barbarico, as we say here, and I hesitated to speak to him.” On another occasion, Don wrote, ”I picked up the Corriere della Serra Corriere della Serra and it told me that BUSH INQUISITORE NON PESCARE. Our President menaced by fish, and me six thousand miles from home.” and it told me that BUSH INQUISITORE NON PESCARE. Our President menaced by fish, and me six thousand miles from home.”

In Italy, Don finished a draft of his novel The King. The King. A mythic and rueful meditation on dead societies and the ”worrisome” twentieth century, it would be published in 1990, a year after his death. A mythic and rueful meditation on dead societies and the ”worrisome” twentieth century, it would be published in 1990, a year after his death.

The story takes place during World War II. Britain is being pounded by the Axis military powers. In Don's version of history, King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table share the battlefield with Winston Churchill's army. The legendary figures know they're anachronisms. Contemporary technowarfare, with its tactics of bombing civilians and killing at a distance, has no place for courteous knights who wrestle face-to-face.

The book presages the Cold War's end: A Polish fellow from the ”s.h.i.+p-yards”-a clear reference to Lech Walesa and the Solidarity movement-agitates for justice as the fighting escalates. (Within months of Don's pa.s.sing, the Berlin Wall would collapse.) As he had done so often, Don contrasted old and new. But if, in The Dead Father, The Dead Father, tradition seems exhausted, it has much to offer in tradition seems exhausted, it has much to offer in The King. The King. (Just as (Just as Paradise Paradise reverses the story of reverses the story of Snow White, The King Snow White, The King is a mirror image of is a mirror image of The Dead Father. The Dead Father.) Few contemporary commanders in chief would refuse to develop a tactical weapon, but that is precisely what Don's Arthur does out of concern for civilian lives. Knowingly, the King gives away his future: He is bound by the traditions of chivalry, courtliness, and politeness-and though his prolonged existence is the chief irony in a heavily ironic book, he is a dignified figure.

Perhaps the novel's gentle treatment of Arthur can be traced to Don's feelings of loss, his suspicion that this would be his last book. He had witnessed modernism's failure to change the world. He had watched American postmodernism fall from critical favor, and he had grown weary of the concept himself. Safe to say that he-like Daumier in his his day-felt eerily anachronistic. day-felt eerily anachronistic.

In quoting the sad, anti-Semitic ravings of Ezra Pound, The King The King portrays the modernist spirit as blind and mad instead of innovative and hopeful. Contrast the exuberance of the Dead Father's good-bye speech with its playful echoes of portrays the modernist spirit as blind and mad instead of innovative and hopeful. Contrast the exuberance of the Dead Father's good-bye speech with its playful echoes of Finnegans Wake Finnegans Wake-”I was Papping as best I could like my AndI before me”-with Pound's venom in The King: The King: ”[T]he Talmud...is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever codified.” ”[T]he Talmud...is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever codified.”

The King appears to be Don's final argument with himself, a valentine to the ethos that nurtured him as well as recognition of its dark side: its potential for tyranny and ”messianic impulses”; its tendency to value aesthetics and technical advancement over human needs. appears to be Don's final argument with himself, a valentine to the ethos that nurtured him as well as recognition of its dark side: its potential for tyranny and ”messianic impulses”; its tendency to value aesthetics and technical advancement over human needs.

The argument is conducted through now-familiar dialogues, punctuated by only a little exposition. Many of the chapters start with participial fragments: ”Guinevere...sitting in a chair b.u.t.tering an apple”; ”Launcelot whanging away at the helm of the Yellow Knight.”

These sentences establish an eternal present-the action is ongoing, like the lives of the mythical figures. Yet they (and their humane qualities) belong to the past, and they know it. At one point, Guinevere tells Launcelot that Arthur chants for strength in his sleep. ”Always before,” she adds, ”he's had had strength, don't you see.” strength, don't you see.”

Arthur paces the world, but he's fading. So are his companions. Deftly, Don ill.u.s.trates their predicament with subtle grammatical twists. The present-participial phrases mix with past-tense verbs to create a simultaneous then and now: At the Cafe Balalaika, Launcelot and Guinevere drinking coffee.”All these people who don't know who we are!””Anonymity,” said Launcelot, ”is something I have always cherished.”

The lovers are here and not here: drinking drinking continuously in the present, but speaking ( continuously in the present, but speaking (said) in the past. Linguistically, thematically, these characters are caught in a time warp-like their author, wondering if he'd outlived his historical moment.

Toward the end of the book, the wors.h.i.+pful knights begin to vanish. Their time is finally up. ”You, dear Arthur, are a bit at sixes and sevens, in terms of legend. You require, legend requires, a tragic end,” Guinevere reminds the king. ”No particular hurry, I suppose?” he replies, but he has already doomed himself by refusing to develop the atomic bomb. The age of chivalry is dead.

In the book's final scene, two unidentified speakers, who have served throughout as a chorus, watch Launcelot dream: ”He is dreaming that there is no war, no Table Round, no Arthur, no Launcelot!””That cannot be! He dreams, rather, of the softness of Guinevere, the sweetness of Guinevere, the brightness of Guinevere, and the s.e.xuality of Guinevere!””How do you know?””I can see into the dream! Now she enters the dream in her own person, wearing a gown wrought of gold bezants over white samite and carrying a bottle of fine wine, Pinot Grigio by the look of it!””What a matchless dream!””Under an apple tree...”

And so we return to the garden, and to an ordinary yet marvelous vision of Paradise. The King The King is heavily elegiac-a catalog of wonders about to disappear from the earth. Though the novel echoes Malory's is heavily elegiac-a catalog of wonders about to disappear from the earth. Though the novel echoes Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, Le Morte d'Arthur, this final exchange sounds more like Puck's last speech in this final exchange sounds more like Puck's last speech in A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Midsummer Night's Dream: ”Think.../ That you have but slumb'red here /While these visions did appear. /And this weak and idle theme, /No more yielding but a dream...” ”Think.../ That you have but slumb'red here /While these visions did appear. /And this weak and idle theme, /No more yielding but a dream...”

Fragile and brief. The supply of strange ideas is not endless, but in Don's stories and novels-technical and imaginative achievements of the highest order-matchless dreams, with each rereading, continue.

On Don's last day in Rome, Ed Hirsch lunched with him on a terrace at the Academy. Don drank several gla.s.ses of wine and smoked a cigarette. ”Don't tell Marion about the cigarette,” he warned his friend. ”If you tell her, I'll never speak to you again.” (Marion knew about the cigarettes because she could smell them. ”I did not bug him about these things,” she says.) ”We had a terrific lunch,” Hirsch recalled. ”[P]asta in cream sauce...We took a long walk, since it was one of those days when the singing sunlight turns you every way but loose. He was going home in the morning. 'So long, see you but not tomorrow,' I said, ever the glib one. 'See you,' [Don said,] 'but not in Paradise.' ”

Back in the apartment on West Eleventh Street, Don didn't appear any frailer than he had in Rome, ”but he did seem disconnected some of the time, irritated by loud noises,” Marion says. ”He showed uncharacteristic irritation if Katharine yelled too loudly.”

Marion recalls that ”the ceiling in the living room had partially fallen-the molding, actually-and we were fixing it.” For this reason, Don may have postponed a medical check-up he had scheduled in Houston, but eventually, in late June, he decided to fly to Texas to see the doctor. He asked Marion to stay in New York to finish the ceiling job and other repairs. ”I don't think he felt well, but he never said that,” she recalls.

In Houston, Don was alone in the house on South Boulevard. One afternoon, he phoned his brother Pete and asked if he would accompany him on a ”test drive.” Don wanted to see if he could ”function as a driver.” He was ”not really coherent,” Pete discovered, and the short drive was ”terrifying.” Pete forced Don to pull over; he took the wheel and drove them back to the house.

”Some time later, maybe the next day, Donald had the check-up with the internist that he had gone to Houston for. It included blood samples,” Marion says. ”Following the appointment, Donald went home. I talked to him then and he told me he was going to take a nap. Meanwhile, the lab found his blood electrolytes-I guess calcium, too-to be way out of whack, and telephoned him to go to the hospital. He didn't answer because he was asleep. I got a call from a friend he'd listed as a contact that the hospital was looking for him. I told her to go bang hard on the door because he was asleep. She did and then waited for him to pack a few things which he put into his computer bag. He told her to stop rus.h.i.+ng him and she sat quietly until he was ready. She drove him to the hospital.”

Shortly afterward, having arrived from New York, Marion moved Don to M. D. Anderson. ”Donald's blood stabilized with IVs and we hoped he would be able to start chemo, but he never became strong enough,” she says.

Pete had fully recovered from his own bout with throat cancer. He speculated that Don's withdrawal from alcohol had weakened his stamina. Doctors told Marion that ”cells from [Don's] original cancer either spilled during the surgery or were already circulating in his system and took up sites in other areas of his body-his heart, head, femur.”

Calcium was streaming into his blood, causing him to hallucinate. Doctors met with Don's family in a plush office filled with potted plants and framed pictures of the doctors' children. Calmly, the medical men outlined the seriousness of Don's condition.

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