Loving Graham Greene: A Novel

The frightening postcard from Antibes, with his message written in that tiny, tight English handwriting, said he would not be at home in France when she was planning to visit, for he was going to Switzerland for treatment of anemia. Alas, Graham Greene wrote. Molly Benson knew what anemia meant; an American would have named the disease, but she thought only his close friends would be properly notified. A blood disorder, the family would say. He gave a telephone number for the apartment in Corseaux where he was moving, to be near the hospital, to have the innumerable blood transfusions that he would find so intolerable; but it was two weeks before she managed to call. It was never her habit to ring him; for years, she only used the mail. Her panic grew so acute that she dialed clumsily, reached a wrong number, and was chided by a cantankerous woman, who suspected a wicked prank. Then she was able to reach him. His voice was higher and thinner now, and all that was required of her, she thought, was to make him laugh, hardly one of her gifts. She spoke too rapidly and in a loud voice, although his hearing was very good. It was his eyes that were failing, he said; he could not read. This was unthinkable. "I wanted you to know that the kiosk from The Third Man that Harry Lime used to get down into the sewer," she said, as if medication or pain might have blurred memory of his own great film, "has been re-created in an arcade on Fifty-fifth Street. It looks strange, because it is gilt. It is called Gottfried's and sells magazines and newspapers." She was certain that he gave a low chuckle, and then provided an end to the conversation, for she would have gone on too long and he had to be careful of this. "Thank you for calling," Graham Greene said. "And good-bye." It was such a drawn out good-bye, his voice lifting at the end of the word, as if he were leaning out the window of a steam-engine train beginning to pull out and hoped to be heard. It was not yet two in the afternoon, but she could do nothing except rush to bed and pull the quilt over her head, not caring that she still had her clothes and shoes on, wanting it to be very dark, wishing she had sent him her love, although he did not need that from her. Hours later Molly thought she should fix a drink, something new to her, but there was no gin in the kitchen cupboard, which is what she needed to make a toast in his honor. She stood in front of the three shelves where the work of his lifetime was arranged so carefully, year by year. All the countries where he went for material--Mexico, Vietnam, Sierra Leone, and the Congo; Cuba, Paraguay, and Argentina; Spain and Panama; Sweden and England. Muddled, Molly remembered that Graham Greene drank gin that afternoon in Antibes, from the bottle of Tanqueray she had bought at the airport as a gift for friends, which she impulsively bestowed on him, to his amusement. She was also, now, in her hour of grief, persuaded that his great and most haunting male characters always drank gin, forgetting that Fowler, among others, in The Quiet American, preferred scotch at home in the old Saigon when it belonged to the French, or a beer on the terrace of the Continental. She made her silly toast, something about the talent and generosity of the man, his courage and wit, holding up a mug of tea to the books, and felt no better for it. "To Graham Greene," she said out loud before the weeping began. She could not hear the noise coming from her own throat, which was a harsh gurgle. "His genius and his goodness." She even prayed, back in bed, that he be spared more tubes and needles, the fiddling of nurses, the ring of solemn, neat doctors around his bed, and slide calmly into a coma, curious and happy to finally see what was waiting for him. It made her hiccup, as she had as a child when excited or upset, so she put her faGloria Emerson is the author of 'Loving Graham Greene: A Novel', published 2000 under ISBN 9780679463245 and ISBN 0679463240.