Tennessee Williams and the French Quarter
On a cold February day in 1983, I was at the entrance of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue at 81st Street. I was there to see Tennessee Williams.
He had died a few days earlier at the Hotel Elysée in New York.
I opened the heavy door to the respectable-looking five-story building. I was met by a young man in a dark suit. He looked distracted.
“Are you here to see Mr. Williams?” he asked, looking away.
I said yes, I was.
“Take the elevator to the second floor.”
I walked out of the elevator, and another young man extended his arm in the direction of an almost-empty room. A few people were there, less than I expected. I walked to the far side of the room, and there he was. He was in a casket, dressed in a coat and tie, arms folded over his chest.
He looked so small. It didn’t make sense for the colossal things he’d done that he be so diminutive. I leaned closer. I could see the make-up on his mustache caked at the bristles’ ends. They could’ve done better than that, I thought. I also thought how he would have relished writing about this small indignity.
His eyes were closed. The cause of his death would have darkly amused him, too. Or confirmed his clear-eyed vision of the absolute indifference of death. It will come when, and how, it will come. He had choked on a bottle cap. That cause of death has since been contested, but, really, who cares. He was dead.
I was the only one next to his coffin.
I spoke to him.
“Tennessee, thank you for everything you gave us. Thank you for Streetcar. Thank you for Glass Menagerie. Thank you for being brave. Thank you for everything you wrote. You were a great artist.”
I felt less secure in the world now that he was gone.
“Goodbye,” I said.
I absurdly thought he might reply in his famous deep, lilting cadence.
I turned and walked away from this momentous death.
(For the rest of the essay, please go to French Quarter Journal.)
