O.

F.W.

K.

Leonard R.

B.

I wrote the list of initials carefully on the sheet of hotel stationery. I was sitting at the escritoire. I imagined the hotel inventory called it an escritoire. The initials were the initials of friends who had died. It was because now with the rain falling I was thinking of what friends there were to telephone and how few I had had and of those few how almost none remained. They had all been close to my age, or a little younger, when they died.

O.

F.W.

K.

Leonard R.

B.

They had died in different ways. O. in a hospital; cancer; F.W. under the stairs in a tenement where the women usually kept their baby carriages; suicide; B. had sat up in bed one night and coughed: a catastrophic cough; K. of booze; Leonard R. in a hot bath. Their deaths had not thinned the crowds on Broadway: nevertheless, without them, the city was emptier. It was as though they had, as when I was a boy, been sent away for the summer; I was left alone to play cards on the tenement stoop. Except, of course, they would not be coming home after Labor Day.

O.

F.W.

K.

Leonard R.

B.

They had all died unexpectedly. To us; to themselves, too. One was somewhere else and a friend died. I abruptly realized there had been no last words. I did not know what any of them had said, if they had said anything at all, just before they died. My friends, my generation, seemed to die unexpectedly and in silence. A quick, or a slightly prolonged, suffering, of a kind different from the way they had suffered before, had taken place, attended by nurses, pierced by needles, fed by tubes, and then, whatever it was or had been for fifty years, in O.’s case fifty-six, in Leonard R.’s fifty-three, B. had almost reached sixty, darkened, and stopped being. And there were no deathbed speeches. Nothing memorable took place. They had coughed, and died; a vein had gouted, and they had died; an abnormal distension had taken place, and they had died. Something had looked out of their eyes. I knew my friends: the silence in which they died had been falling on them for a long time, and at the end, in the intervals between the pain and the sedatives, something had looked out of their eyes. There had been nothing to say, not even to their children, and they had had children. There had been nothing to pass on. No admonition; no counsel; no summing up at all. Silence had proliferated in them with possibly the same completeness as the disease which had killed some of them and which may be, after all, the disease of silence. I stood up and walked to the window and looked out at the dangerous park. Where did one start when it was no longer clear how one had gotten to where one was now? By what folly? By what minute surrenders? By what self-neglect? Up in the Bronx there was an old woman. Perhaps that was the point at which to start. Because one had to. At precisely 7:05 the sun would rise. As over a battlefield. As over a junkyard. As over a devastated star.