He had been driving to New Jersey after work nearly every day for over a month to see his dying father when he wound up badly short of breath in the City Athletic Club swimming pool one August evening in 1989. He had gotten back from Jersey about half an hour earlier and decided to recover his equilibrium by taking a quick swim before heading home. Ordinarily he swam a mile at the club early each morning. He barely drank, had never smoked, and weighed precisely what he'd weighed when he got home from the navy in '57 and started his first job in advertising. He knew from the ordeal with appendicitis and peritonitis that he was as liable as anyone else to falling seriously ill, but that he, with a lifelong regimen of healthful living, would end up as a candidate for cardiac surgery seemed preposterous. It was simply not how things were going to turn out.
Yet he couldn't finish the first lap without pulling over to the side and hanging there completely breathless. He got out of the pool and sat with his legs in the water trying to calm down. He was sure that the breathlessness was the result of having seen how far his father's condition had deteriorated in just the past few days. But in fact it was his that had deteriorated, and when he went to the doctor the next morning, his EKG showed radical changes that indicated severe occlusion of his major coronary arteries. Before the day was out he was in a bed in the coronary care unit of a Manhattan hospital, having been given an angiogram that determined that surgery was essential. There were oxygen prongs in his nose and he was attached by numerous leads to a cardiac monitoring machine behind his bed. The only question was whether the surgery should take place immediately or the following morning. It was by then almost eight in the evening, and so the decision was made to wait. Sometime in the night, however, he was awakened to discover his bed surrounded by doctors and nurses, just as the bed of the boy in his room had been back when he was nine. All these years he had been alive while that boy was dead — and now he was that boy.
Some sort of medication was being administered through the IV and he vaguely understood that they were trying to avert a crisis. He could not make out what they were mumbling to one another and then he must have fallen asleep, because the next he knew it was morning and he was being rolled onto a gurney to take him to the operating room.
His wife at this time — his third and his last — bore no resemblance to Phoebe and was nothing short of a hazard in an emergency. She certainly didn't inspire confidence on the morning of the surgery, when she followed beside the gurney weeping and wringing her hands and finally, uncontrollably, cried out, "What about me?"
She was young and untried and maybe she had intended to say something different, but he took it that she meant what would happen to her should he fail to survive. "One thing at a time," he told her. "First let me die. Then I'll come help you bear up."
The operation went on for seven hours. Much of that time he was connected to a heart-lung machine that pumped his blood and breathed for him. The doctors gave him five grafts, and he emerged from the surgery with a long wound down the center of his chest and another extending from his groin to his right ankle — it was from his leg that they had removed the vein from which all but one of the grafts were fashioned.
When he came around in the recovery room there was a tube down his throat that felt as though it were going to choke him to death. Having it there was horrible, but there was no way he could communicate that to the nurse who was telling him where he was and what had happened to him. He lost consciousness then, and when he came around again the tube was still there choking him to death, but now a nurse was explaining that it would be removed as soon as it was determined that he could breathe on his own. Over him next was the face of his young wife, welcoming him back to the world of the living, where he could resume looking after her.
He had left her with a single responsibility when he went into the hospital: to see that the car was taken off the street where it was parked and put into the public garage a block away. It turned out to be a task that she was too frazzled to undertake, and so, as he later learned, she'd had to ask one of his friends to do it for her. He hadn't realized how observant his cardiologist was of nonmedical matters until the man came to see him midway through his hospital stay and told him that he could not be released from the hospital if his home care was to be provided by his wife. "I don't like to have to say these things, fundamentally she's not my business, but I've watched her when she's come to visit. The woman is basically an absence and not a presence, and I have no choice but to protect my patient."
By this time Howie had arrived. He had flown in from Europe, where he'd gone to do business and also to play polo. He could ski now, skeet-shoot, and play water polo as well as polo from atop a pony, having acquired virtuosity in these activities in the great world long after he'd left his lower-middle-class high school in Elizabeth, where, along with the Irish-Catholic and Italian boys whose fathers worked on the docks at the port, he'd played football in the fall and pole-vaulted in the spring, all the while garnering grades good enough to earn him a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania and then admission to the Wharton School to earn an MBA. Though his father was dying in a hospital in New Jersey and his brother recovering from open-heart surgery in a hospital in New York — and though he spent the week traveling from the one bedside to the other — Howie's vigor never lapsed, nor did his capacity to inspire confidence. The sustenance the healthy thirty-year-old wife proved incapable of providing her ailing fifty-six-year-old husband was more than compensated for by Howie's jovial support. It was Howie who suggested hiring two private duty nurses — the daytime nurse, Maureen Mrazek, and the night nurse, Olive Parrott — to substitute for the woman he'd come to refer to as "the titanically ineffective cover girl," and then he insisted, over his brother's objections, on covering the costs himself. "You were dangerously ill, you went through hell," Howie said, "and so long as I'm around, nothing and nobody is going to impede your recovery. This is just a gift to ensure the speedy restoration of your health." They were standing together by the entrance to the room. Howie spoke with his brawny arms around his brother. Much as he preferred to appear breezily superior to the claims of sentiment, his face — a virtual replica of his brother's — could not disguise his emotions when he said, "Losing Mom and Dad I have to accept. I could never accept losing you." Then he left to find the limo that was waiting downstairs to drive him to the hospital in Jersey.