Five Little Deaths: A Story in Five Vignettes

1. Death and the Young Man

Eric, the younger brother of my former lover, Lucy, kept his promise. He did it while his mother and brother were out, engaged in the most ordinary activities — shopping for groceries, filling the car with gas.

Later, when his mother and brother came home, they called out from the back door for him to come out and help carry in the groceries. “Eric, we’re home. Come open the door.” They weren’t surprised when he didn’t answer, less so that the door didn’t open. He wasn’t a particularly helpful young man.

A few minutes later, they found Eric waiting for them in the most misnamed room in the house, at first seemingly engaged in the most banal of activities. Yes, he had turned on the TV — but whether he did this out of habit, or for some particular purpose, say to maintain a semblance of normalcy up to his final moment, we will never know. He had also poured himself a glass of orange juice that he apparently didn’t touch.

Eric was wearing a black tee shirt and blue jeans. He had not made himself up or dressed in symbolic clothing. There was no, as Roland Barthes might have observed, “whitened bust of the totemic theater,” nor was the boy wearing the “painted face of the Chinese theater, or the frozen features of the Japanese Noh mask.” The room, however, had been transformed into a kind of theater. The mise-en-scene: the moment of a young man’s death.

Eric had stage managed the transformation himself. At some point, he put the barrel of a 12-guage shotgun in his handsome mouth. Apparently, chipping his two front incisors. One can imagine him saying, “fuck,” before pulling the trigger.

There was, of course, a horrible mess. Blood and gore, as you might imagine from movies you have seen. Yes, there was also a terrible moment of perfect silence. Yes, it was shattered by the scream of his mother when she came into the room.

2. Death and the Father

If he had sensed that death had entered the room, he kept it to himself. In fact, he was uncharacteristically thoughtful, waiting for his current wife and his daughter to first leave the house. He had sent them on the most banal errand. He wanted a glass of orange juice and there wasn’t any in the house.

While they were away, my father, who was a very sick man, suffering from a range of illnesses that ran from a very very bad conscience to liver cancer, and, as improbable as it sounds at the dawn of the 21st century, gout, died.

He was by this time spending most of the day in bed.

No, it was not penitence’s bed. It was not an invalid’s cot. It was a king’s-sized bed. A roué’s wheel. One fitting for a man who had had three wives and many mistresses, girlfriends and casual partners.

In her own way, his long-suffering wife had also made it her bed. Which is to say if the sheets and linens were no longer Pratesi, they were certainly Egyptian cotton of a very high thread count. By this time she took comfort in quiet pleasures.

When at last he was alone, he did not simply sigh and give up the ghost. The man imploded.

It was, I understand, spectacular. Spectacular. Blood, out every orifice — his eyes, nose, ears, mouth and anus. Blood sprayed the room as if out of a garden hose.

Not long after the event, his dutiful wife, accompanied by her diligent daughter, returned to the room with a glass of orange juice. No, she didn’t drop the glass. She was a very fastidious person and somehow found a solid surface for it.

Because my father suffered from Hepatitis C his blood no longer the stuff of life but had a species of venom. This complicated matters somewhat as his remains had to be removed by specially trained men from the health department. After an eternity, or so it seemed to his wife and daughter, these men finally arrived. They came in hazmat suits, protective armor as isolating and self-contained as those worn by astronauts. You could say these careful men, as they cleaned and decontaminated the room, removed the mattress and bedding, resembled nothing so much as priests following a sacrifice. Which is to say, they wiped death from the room.

No, they were not able to salvage the linen.

My older brother, who was the last to see my father/the body before he/it was taken to be cremated, described our father’s face as twisted as a gargoyle’s. It was apparent to anyone who saw the scene — or who knew my father — that the devil, sensing his chance, had grabbed the man whom he had courted for so long by the ankles and dragged him straight to hell.

3. Death and the Stranger

I met Will K soon after moving to New York. We were introduced by his girlfriend who was a close friend of Sara C., a woman I first fell in love with in high school, and whom I have been in love with ever since.

Will was an advertising account executive, a handsome and gifted man who managed the nearly impossible — to be both extremely kind and very ambitious simultaneously. He was also a deeply closeted homosexual.

One thing I’d like you to know about Will was that in addition to his more conventional hobbies, which included astronomy and the works of Mozart, he was a collector of rare daggers. Now a dagger is a particular kind of knife. You don’t use one to carve a turkey or slice a pie. Mr. Webster defines a dagger as “a stabbing weapon with a short-edged blade.” A stabbing weapon.

The prize of his collection Will had found in a Paris thieves’ market. It was a 17th -century instrument with an elegant silver handle carved in the shape of Belial, or Beliar. For those unacquainted with such lore, (and it is my sincere hope that few of you have even brushed up against such things) Belial is also known as the Prince of Trickery, as well as the Demon of Sodomy.

As it happened, that year a number of men were murdered under very similar circumstances. The victims were all gay men, and each was either strangled or knifed. Or both. Adding to the mystery, nothing was ever stolen from these victims; nor were there signs of struggle, although some of the dead had been quite athletic.

Will certainly was.

The police had their hypothesis: the murderer was the serial killer who preyed on gay men, who he met in gay bars. The man, it was presumed he was a man, might even have been gay himself. (Although he may have been troubled by that fact.)

The fiend must have had some charm though; he seemed to have little trouble persuading his victims to take him home. (Under this theory the killer might also have been a Vampire, since they cannot cross a threshold uninvited.)

Will was murdered by a man he brought home from a bar. At some point this person cut Will’s throat. The partially clothed body was found on its back. The Belial dagger, stained with Will’s blood, was found next to the body. In their search of the apartment, the police found, lurking behind some ordinary movie videos, Will’s stash of gay porn.

My friend came from a prominent, and politically connected New England family. Apprised of the peculiarities of Will’s death, they used their considerable influence to hush the circumstances of his death. The police called me once, called Sara once. Then, to paraphrase Mr. Poe, “Nothing more. “

Epilog: I would later describe in a poem how efficiently “they” covered up Will’s death.

Will they wronged you.
“Fixing things,”
is the expression used.|
As if you simply boarded a train
in the middle of the night|
and the train never stopped.

4. Death and the Spy

Walker Smith was a spy. He even had a secret identity — a drunken academic. His pretend area of expertise, the lonely country of Albania. He pretended so well he actually was considered an authority on the subject. Walker came from a good society family that had made its fortune building trestles, bridges and tunnels for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The man had a little money of his own, but the entire time I knew him, he was expecting to inherit a fortune. This event would immediately follow upon the death of his mother.

Once that happened, he could really begin to live. Until then he spied, worked on his book, and drank. As the years went by Walker retired from the CIA but continued to drink, he stopped writing his book, but continued to drink…until he began to resemble a character that Poe might have written about, especially around the eyes. During this time his mother continued to refuse to cooperate, she was a sturdy old oak.

Over the years, we discussed the weapon dealers he knew, the various crimes they committed, and the terrible things that happen where the Balkans intersect with the Levant. (And, this was years before the breakup of the former Yugoslavia or the formation of al Qaeda.) These were ancient places, he reminded me, where, if death was not a reliable friend, it was nevertheless, a constant companion.

Walker drank to the point of collapse and one day he did. He disappeared into a clinic and emerged months later with a clean bill of health. He was definitely better. Better, he no longer resembled Poe’s increasingly anxious murderer in the “Tell -Tale Heart.” Even better, not long afterward his recovery, his ancient mother gave up the ghost. Best of all, Walker would soon be a rich man.

(I wouldn’t have you think him craven; his attitude about death and money was not the least bit unusual for old families whose fortunes are too often tied up in interlocking trusts. Whenever a parent, or a great-aunt or uncle, or even a distant cousin dies, one’s share simply increased.)

I last saw Walker in London not long after he was back on his feet. He had stopped drinking and was in excellent spirits. He had gone back to work on his book. At lunch he ordered a glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. Afterwards we walked to Chelsea where he showed me a mews house, he was thinking of buying. He looked the picture of health.

Soon after I returned to New York, a mutual friend called to say that Walker had died. “Dead?” I asked. “I just had lunch with him last week. How?” “It was so sudden. A brain aneurism.”

I also learned that his son had found him a week or so after the event, lying just inside his front door, his arm reaching for the knob. At the service held for him in New York the consensus was: What a shame. The man had everything to live for. I believe he even found a publisher for his book.

5. Death and the Old Woman

My grandmother grew up in what was once called comfortable circumstances. (I believe those were her words, so I take no responsibility either for them, or for what they imply.)

In any case, there was a maid, a housekeeper, a cook and a chauffeur. Hers was a proper, old-fashioned upbringing, one filled with lines that were not crossed and voices that were never raised. She was taught well and proved an excellent student. One thing my grandmother was taught was that a well brought up young women washed her own underwear. My grandmother washed her own underwear her whole life. My grandmother died washing her underwear.

Before we get to that part, let me say a few more kind things about this woman. She spoke correct English, excellent French, decent Spanish and acceptable German. She had inherited a little money and some Blue-chip stocks that continued to appreciate throughout her life. Her income gave her independence, but she was never a creature of leisure. She worked during the depression as an efficiency expert and later as a teacher. But she wasn’t all work and no fun. Not long after the Second World War, she and a friend bought a little car and spent six months driving through France and Italy. She was also a very desirable woman — a woman who knew her attributes and how to set them off to her advantage. Who can I compare her to? My wife Charlotte suggested the actress Susan Hayward. These were some of the qualities that caught my grandfather’s eye. He would become her third husband.

They made an interesting match. My grandfather was self-made and self-destructive, Runyonesque character, who, it was said, put half of Brooklyn’s bookies’ children through college. My grandmother, on the other hand, took pleasure in the acquisition and retention of things. Her Champagne was Dom Perignon, her watch Cartier, her luggage Lark.

In their early days, they had a lot of fun. She met Fidel in Havana, a city she regularly visited with my grandfather, to whom it was inconceivable that anyone would ever be foolish enough to close a casino. She witnessed voodoo ceremonies in Haiti — another haunt of my grandfather’s.

Throughout their marriage she refined her peculiarities. All her furniture was custom-made. She turned a damaged, although some thought, priceless, 17th-century Chinese screen into the panels of the breakfront that held her Baccarat crystal, her Limoges china and Georg Jensen silver. She turned an ancient Japanese silk press into a lamp base and collected damaged bronzes and other objects that she liked for their bruised authenticity. She lived a high-bourgeois life with a touch of bohemia. Why not? She had her own money…and a sense of right and wrong that was as rigid as the Decalogue. She hewed to her values in everything, except those things where my grandfather was concerned. Despite his run of bad luck, she adored him. Only death parted them. I thought it was his bruised authenticity that she admired most. Charlotte explained their attraction by saying, “The sex must have been spectacular.”

As is often the case with happy couples, one death hastens the other. Soon after my grandfather died, an earthquake rocked Los Angeles. (You could not convince my grandmother that the events were not related.) The force of the shock threw my grandmother out of her bed. As she regained her wits, and use of her limbs, she crawled out of her bedroom and towards the front door. Passing by the kitchen, she was snapped out of her panic by the smell of alcohol. As she tells it, a hundred-year old bottle of Armagnac had fallen from its perch. The tragedy, she admitted later, was that there was too much glass on the floor to lick it up.

Her insurance was ample — Chubb, of course — which enabled her to move into a nice hotel while her apartment was repaired. That some treasures were banged up did not upset her. The new damage merely increased their authenticity. When everything that could be set right was set right, she decided to leave California immediately, and start a new life in Florida, where she had five close friends living in Palm Beach and Boca Raton.

She took a small apartment in Boca. She was happy for all of twelve minutes. As much as she had despaired leaving New York for Los Angeles, she found Florida the worst of all. To her surprise, the place was packed with old people. My grandmother had forgotten that she was 88-years old. She also forgot that her friends were in their 80s and 90s. A fact she became conscious of only when they began to die.

Within a year, things began to go horribly wrong. She crashed her car. She stopped eating. She forgot the name of the couple who she hired to store her treasures, and to shop and run errands for her. On her 91st birthday, we took her to Morton’s steakhouse, where she ordered the lobster bisque. That evening we discovered she couldn’t chew very well, and a piece of lobster tail hung out her mouth like a second tongue, until my stepmother got up the courage to remove it. When she began to empty packets of sugar into her palm and licking it clean, we called for the check. In short order we moved her into an assisted-living facility. It was a lovely place, inspired by a Tuscan Villa. Her apartment was pleasant, well lit, the size of a junior hotel suite. It seemed everything would be fine.

But a few days later, we heard from the director of the facility. My grandmother had begun to shit herself. She shit her bed, and so the nice cotton sheets were replaced with a kind of prophylactic. She shit herself, and feeling terribly ashamed of herself, tried to hide the evidence. In the process the carpet was spotted with shit and where she held herself up, the walls were marked by shit. Her nightgown, her robe, her slippers, you get the idea.

Arrangements were made, an aide hired to sit with her, walk, talk, and read to her. The final indignity, for a woman who did The New York Times crossword puzzle in pen, she was now compelled to wear a diaper. Still she managed to outsmart everyone. Late at night, she’d get up and wash her soiled diaper. It should be apparent at this point that my grandmother had lost her mind.

No one knew what to do. Even at $8,000 a month, plus the additional fee for the aide, the facility was at its wit’s end. No one could understand how this little woman, who pecked at her food like a sparrow, could shit in such quantities. One afternoon we received another call from the director of the facility who told us it was time to move my grandmother to the Alzheimer wing. We asked for a few days to think about it. We were spared the decision.

Early the following day, my grandmother, a proper lady to the very end, was found in front of the sink in a growing puddle of water. It seems that she had dropped dead while washing the shit out of her diapers. The water? Oh, her diaper had blocked the drain. No, she didn’t drown. It was a massive stroke that killed her.