Let Me Finish (29 page)

"You're putting a name on your station wagon?" Mother says in alarm.

"No, no," I say. "Try to pay attention. This is a joke. She wants to call it 'Beside the Point.'"

Andy doubles over, laughing into his napkin, and my mother, smiling and radiantly herself, shakes her head and begins to laugh, too.

T
HE
only piece of advice I ever got from William Shawn was something he said to me in 1956, in my very first week as an editor at the magazine. "It's no great trick," he said, "to edit a piece of fiction and turn it into the greatest story ever written. Anyone can do that. It's much harder to take a story and help that writer turn it into the best thing he is capable of this week or this month." I've tried to keep that in mind. What you hope for is that the writer will sense how this process works, and will learn to trust it. Sometimes, though rarely, this can happen almost at once, with a writer you've never met before, and when it does you remember it. One such meeting came early in 1976, after I read a manuscript called
O'Phelan's Daemonium,
by a writer I didn't know named John F. Murray. In the first sentence of the story we learn that the narrator, a man called O'Phelan, has tried to blow his brains out with a .16-gauge shotgun but has succeeded only in messily grazing his forehead. O'Phelan is middle-aged, and in his words, "an episodic paranoiac schizophrenic. Also manic depressive, also alcoholic." His brother, Martin, a well-to-do broker and apparently his self-appointed minder or keeper, meets him at the Islip Airport, on Long Island, and puts him on a plane to Boston, where he is to enter "St. Hogarth's Clinic," for treatment. In real life, this is McLean's. O'Phelan gets himself there, though unwillingly, since he has been through this many times. "No need to show me around," he says, "I've been here before."

The story unfolds quickly. In the clinic, we meet patients of every description—lawyers, children, shoplifters, securities analysts—all of them traumatized or drugged or despondent or crazily cheerful. Many have forgotten who they are. There are staff doctors and mental health specialists, of course, but no one knows quite what to do with O'Phelan this time around. On the way to keep an appointment at Mass General, he slips away from his attendant and goes to the Ritz Bar, where he begins to drink vodka. He calls a cab driver he has encountered, a man who also has a pilot's license, and arranges to have himself flown back to New York. In the city again, he goes to the apartment of a woman friend of his, called Lady Jane, and soon after he arrives there's a pounding on the door, and he knows that it's Martin, Martin his brother, there to take him back and start the whole thing over again.

There's much more—events unfold at breakneck speed—but what holds a reader is the story's unique style and spirit. It's depressing but also funny and surprising. You learn hopeless and frightening things about the narrator and his
plight, and you sense that he is both desperate and exhilarated. There is something stylish about him, almost jaunty. It's a hell of a story—one that stays with you.

We decided to buy this, of course, and to work with the writer on some necessary editing—it needed cuts and clarifications all the way along—but when I called the agent with the news, she seemed startled. "You're taking something by
Jake Murray?
" she said. I made a date for Murray to come in to the office and see me. When the moment arrived, I went out to the twentieth-floor reception room and found a tall, thin, shabby man with some missing teeth and a huge bandage over one side of his forehead. He was wearing an ancient orange parka, with rust-colored bloodstains all over it. "I'm Jake," he said, watching my expression. "It's all true."

What was also true was that Jake was an ideal writer to work with. We talked over the manuscript in some detail, and he agreed to take it back and work on some sections and passages, and bring it back in a week or two. When it came back, very quickly, he not only had fixed the rough places but had taken a few suggestions of mine and turned them into something much better. The story had taken on fresh life. He was excited and pleased, and so was I. The process had worked. The story went into galleys, and he took these back, after we'd met again, and made the same kind of sharpenings and smoothing he'd done before. The man was a pro.

I had learned a little more about him. John F. Murray belonged to a large and distinguished Catholic family from the South Shore of Long Island. They were society people,
and there was plenty of money there. Sometimes the Murrays had been compared with the Kennedys. Jake Murray was one of seven children. He had gone to Yale and served overseas in the Second World War. He had written a novel,
The Devil Walks on Water,
I now remembered—it's about the monster New England hurricane of 1938—which received enthusiastic reviews. He had also been a successful copywriter and executive with some top-level advertising companies, and he'd been married three times. He had three children.

When I got to meet him Murray was down on his luck, and almost down and out. I'm not sure I ever passed an hour with him when he wasn't drunk or getting over being drunk. Early on, he asked for an advance on our payment for the story, and I was able to get him a check for two hundred dollars. When he came back the next morning, it was gone—he told me he had been robbed. But I'd been warned that this would happen. I'd had a call from a brother of his, Tom Murray, a stockbroker, who asked if we would please not give Jake any more cash; just send the rest of the money to the agent. In the story, O'Phelan's broker brother is called "the hateful Martin," but Tom Murray, I found, was the opposite. He was a sweet man. He seemed to know where Jake was every day, and he had set up a network of friends and cops and bartenders who kept an eye out for him. There was a powerful strain of attachment among the Murrays, I began to realize after a conversation about Jake I had with his sister Jeanne (an old acquaintance of mine), who told me that late one Christmas Eve she'd had to call the Southampton Police Department to come
over and get her brother, who was carrying on noisily under her windows. The next morning, Christmas, she turned up early at the jail and bailed him out. She told this with laughter, and Jake laughed, too, when I mentioned it to him. "Just like her," he said. But no one was happier about the story the magazine had bought than Tom, or more proud of what his troubled brother had managed to do.

The story ran that spring, and was much admired and talked about. There was a flurry of mail from readers, and inquiries from publishers. Everyone at the magazine was delighted, Shawn above all. I'd brought Jake in to meet him, and they talked about more stories up ahead. We'd found a new writer, and there was no telling what would happen next.

 

Nothing happened until the following January, when another manuscript came in from Jake. It was called
O'Phelan Drinking,
and turned out to be a direct continuation of the first one. I was disheartened—how could he expect to do this all over again—but when I'd reread it I saw that it was written with more confidence than the first one and that there was more to it. Picking up the first story, it takes our man to "St. Justin's Hospital" in the Village, for alcoholic rehab—to St. Vincent's, that is—where once again O'Phelan knows the ropes and remembers the doctors. The patients and their dilemmas are done with greater skill this time—it's riveting but appalling to meet them. Again, the tone is strong and certain, but there is much more feeling. There's a sustained flashback in which O'Phelan picks up
his young children at their mother's house in Connecticut—the family has busted up—and takes them on a vacation to Nantucket. He holds things together, just barely, and delivers them home again. Every moment for him has become risky and terrifying. O'Phelan wakes up in the hospital again, and later that day, when he slips out of an A.A. meeting in the Village and buys a pint of 100 proof Smirnoff, you want to cry out "Stop—my God, don't do that!" But you also understand the calm that O'Phelan finds in the booze, and the sense of order it restores.

When Jake Murray came into the office this time, he looked worse than before, and there were fewer traces of his old élan. He was looking forward to our sitting down again and going through the editing process, so he was disappointed when I told him that this would have to be put off for a couple of weeks. We were in a busy time of year, and I was swamped with other stories and writers. I'd call him in a couple of weeks, the first chance I got. But Jake didn't want this pause. Some days when I came to work or back from lunch, he'd be sitting there in the reception room, waiting for me. Other times he turned up late in the afternoon. One morning when I came in early, around seven-thirty, I found him there, asleep, with his old work boots sitting side by side on the next chair. Wait a couple of weeks, I begged him when he woke up. But he was back that same afternoon, and in bad shape. Shawn and I conferred, and agreed to do nothing. It was January, full winter, and we didn't know if Jake had anyplace to go. Tom Murray said that he'd take him off our hands, but he was back again in
a day or two, and noisy. Shawn called me in and said he was sorry, but this had to stop. The receptionists were getting upset, and there were other visitors to think about.

When I went out and gave Jake this news, he grew stubborn. "I'm a staff member and I demand to see Mr. Shawn," he said.

"You're not a staff member, Jake," I said. "You're a trusted contributor, and you can't see him right now. Come back when I'm done with my other stuff, and we'll do the story together."

"I just want a place to hunker down," he said.

"You can't hunker here," I said.

He stood up and looked at me. "This is it?" he said.

"This is it, Jake," I said. "See you soon."

He shook my hand and gave me one of his extraordinary smiles. "Roger, goodbye," he said.

As far as I know, I was the last person who knew him to see him alive. Some time that day or the next day, he went into the river. Tom called me later in the week and told me how worried he was. "He always lets me know where he is," he said. But no word came, and when it became clear what had happened Tom came to see me, and told me, at length, not to blame myself. "This was inevitable," he said. "It's been coming for a long, long time."

John Murray's body reappeared in the spring, and a few days later there was a service for him at St. Thomas More, that trim little church on East 89th Street. Tom spoke and told us how much he'd admired and loved Jake all these years—the older brother who was always smarter in school and a better athlete, and better with girls. He also mentioned the magazine, and said that Jake's experience with
The New Yorker
had been the best news for him in many years. It was springtime and the service was crowded, and there was a sense of joy to it.

A few weeks later, I consulted with Tom Murray, and met with Jake's children, Matt and Jeff, who were still in their teens, and consulted their older sister, Melinda, by telephone, and together we talked about
O'Phelan Drinking
and how he might have made the fixes that the story needed. It came out in October—another smash hit—with no mention of what had happened to the author. This good-sized excerpt arrives about halfway through the story—the flashback of O'Phelan's, mentioned above, which comes to him at a time when he's in residence in the awful rehab center. The children's names, it will be noticed, were not fictionalized.

 

That night, in my room, I must have dreamed about Nantucket, because I woke up while it was still dark and found that I was thinking about 'Sconset. Years ago, when I was in the advertising business, I lived in a house in Darien, with my first wife and my three children. But my wife divorced me and took the house and got my insurance policies and whatever alimony payments I managed to keep up with. She did not, however, take my children; my children could see me freely, and I could take them on vacations. One summer, I rented a house on Nantucket for two weeks, and I was determined that the children and I would go there and have a good time. I was anxious
to be with them, because I had been in a big hospital up in Westchester, from which I escaped and to which I had been returned, and I hadn't seen them in months.

The day came, and I drove to Darien, to my old house, where my kids were waiting for me. Melinda was sixteen then, and Jeff was fourteen, and Matt was nine. Matt was very excited about our vacation. We packed the kids' things into the Volkswagen, and I distributed them inside, and we made for the ferry at Woods Hole. Halfway up the Connecticut Turnpike, I slowed the car and pulled over to the shoulder of the road. Jeff was sick. I let him out, and a state trooper pulled up behind us. I almost started up the car again, because I had been hiding from the police when I escaped from the mental hospital. But the trooper said, Do you need any help, and I said no, just a small emergency, thank you very much. He tipped his hat and drove on. Jeff got back in the car and we drove to Woods Hole in time to pick up our reservation for the afternoon boat to Nantucket.

It was a pleasant trip. We sat in deck chairs on the foredeck listening to a conversation at the rail between two lawyers, one young and one old, who were discussing some mutual friends who had spent part of the summer at Westhampton Beach. The young lawyer was saying that he did not like people who went to Westhampton Beach, and he wondered why his friends had gone there. The old lawyer simply shrugged, but Melinda and I decided that although
he probably felt the same way as the young lawyer did about Westhampton, he did not think it was something you went around saying.

We arrived in Nantucket as the sun was going down, and drove to 'Sconset, across the island. Our house looked like a boat and lay very near the beach, and when we had unpacked we went outside and played with a Frisbee. We had eaten on the boat and we weren't very hungry for dinner, so we came back inside and I broke open a deck of cards, and I taught my children the game of crazy eights, which I had learned at the hospital in Westchester. They loved it. We played for a long time. Then they got sleepy and went to their rooms.