Death does not come quickly for Babe. Death pilfers Babe piece by piece, pound by pound.
But not before Babe conspires with Death in his own dissolution.
Babe opens the door, and Death steps through.
Babe’s doctors are anxious about his weight. Babe weighs three hundred and fifty pounds. Babe is also worried. The heart attack suffered in England has focused Babe’s mind, and another heart attack has followed since then. Babe has gall bladder problems, and a kidney infection.
And Babe loathes his appearance. Babe was ever unable to descry his own beauty. Mirrored, Babe sees only an obese, unlovable man.
In 1956, on the advice of a quack, Babe starts eating beets.
Nothing but beets.
Babe’s weight drops.
Three hundred pounds.
Two-eighty.
Two-fifty.
Two-twenty.
Two-ten.
Babe is pleased at this unburdening, even as his system reels in shock, even as his acquaintances cannot bear to look upon him because Babe no longer resembles the man they have cherished. When Babe sees how they react, Babe sequesters himself. Only he is allowed to visit, and Ben Shipman, and a handful of other old friends.
Two hundred pounds.
One-seventy.
One-fifty.
A cancer sets in.
Death has Babe now.
September 1956: another heart attack.
Stroke.
Paralysis.
Babe’s power of speech stolen
away.
When Babe wants Lucille to come to him, his desire must be communicated by crying. Babe’s eyes, once so expressive, perhaps even the aspect that made Lucille first fall in love with him, are clouded by sickness. Lucille struggles to remember Babe as Babe once was. Babe is no longer recognizable to her as himself.
Lucille takes Babe to her mother’s home. Lucille will not allow Babe to be sent to a convalescent facility. Lucille hopes that Babe’s condition may improve, but if it does not, she will not permit him to die among strangers. Myrtle sends another process server to pursue her vexatious claims, but the messenger is too ashamed to serve the papers on a dying man, and so departs.
Babe drifts. Babe cannot always identify faces. But the encroaching silence is the worst. In moments of lucidity, Babe struggles to form words. Babe still has so much left to say.
He visits whenever Babe’s mind is clear. Lucille summons him, and he comes. He ignores his own pain. He sits by Babe’s bedside, and he listens. He takes Babe’s hand, gathering it gently up as a man might cup the body of a bird, and replies to every word, every phrase, that Babe manages to whisper. He does not wish to leave. He does not wish to miss a moment. When Babe finally lapses into unconsciousness, he replays on the journey home all that has been said, Babe’s every gesture, consigning each exchange to the treasury of his memory.
And when, finally, Babe can no longer speak at all, he elects not to speak either, and so their last hours together are spent in silence. Lucille and Ida leave them alone, and they are as they once were on the screen: two men using only their eyes to communicate everything that they feel, and have always felt, about each other.
He leaves, and he cannot stop crying. In the car, he sheds every tear he has for Babe.
All those times, he tells Ida. All those times I could have been with him, and chose not to be.
All those moments that might have been.
On the night of August 6th, 1957, Babe endures stroke after stroke, and his body is contorted by spasms. Lucille climbs into bed beside her husband, and cradles him in her arms, this child of a man, the frailty of him, heedless of the stink of mortality as she buries her face in his scalp and his skin, knowing only that this is his essence, the best of him in noble rot, and each aspect particulate is to her a transference, and she does not relinquish her hold until Babe dies the next morning, and she feels his passing as an exhalation, an exclamation, as though Babe, in his agonies, has at last comprehended a matter elusive but long guessed.
He does not sleep on the night Babe dies. He thrashes in his bed while Ida comforts him, and he wants to say to her that he would do this for Babe, that he would lie beside him, if it were permitted, and he would seek to receive Babe’s torment as his own, so that Babe’s suffering might be lessened in the acceptance; and he would whisper that he loved him, and would not be without him; and he would ask to whom shall he speak in Babe’s absence, knowing that the unsaid infused every word, and to whom shall he not speak, knowing that in silence he would be understood?
He does not wish this catalog of errors to be termed a life.
201
The call comes.
He knows what it portends. His hand hovers above the receiver, as though by resisting its summons he might keep Babe with him. And even in this he is mimicking Babe: Babe, who would not answer a telephone for fear of what might be communicated; Babe, who was too much hurt by the world.
He listens to the message.
He hangs up.
He cannot speak. No words are adequate.
Seconds pass. Minutes.
To utter is to make real. To articulate is to accept.
Ida approaches, and by her presence unlocks his tongue.
– My pal is dead.
202
Alone in his office, lit by a banker’s lamp, his door closed, the drapes drawn against the emptiness of this new age, against all the dull days to come, Ben Shipman sits, his face in his hands, his spectacles on the desk before him, and Ben Shipman cries for two men, and for all that Ben Shipman has done and all that Ben Shipman has failed to do.
Then Ben Shipman, the lawyer, takes the first of the documents from the file on his desk, and prepares to turn into paper this passage from life.
Ben Shipman will guide Lucille.
Ben Shipman will handle the details.
Ben Shipman will look after everyone.
And none will speak to Ben Shipman of his loss.
None, save one.
203
At the Oceana Apartments, at the closing of the last days, in the pale moonshine of memory, Babe is with him and of him, as Babe has always been, even in the days before they met, when Babe was an unnamable absence; even in the days after Babe’s passing, when Babe was the void in the heart, just as one was ever destined to be for the other because their characters were fixed, and nothing could change this, not even death, and there is no plot because there is no reason, and there is no resolution because there can be no alteration, only the sand-slip of moments and the fading of light, and the smoke ascending through flickering beams of luminescence, and footsteps moving in slow cadence, slipping inexorably into accord, and he feels only gratitude that he did not have to dance alone, that each tread had its echo, each shadow its twin, and as the journey from silence to silence is completed, as the lens closes and the circle shrinks, he knows that he loved this man, and this man loved him, and that is enough, and more than enough.
And the waves rush in: applause, applause.
AUTHOR’S NOTE