The Bradbury Chronicles (41 page)

Ray Bradbury was in a conscious race against death, knowing full well that with each newly published book, his place in immortality was further solidified. But in November 2000, just one year after his stroke, perhaps the greatest honor of his career occurred. Ray was given the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. This governing board runs the annual National Book Award ceremony—the literary equivalent of Hollywood's Oscars. What was so special about this acknowledgment, to Ray, was that the award was not for fantasy. It was not for science fiction. It was not for any genre. The medal was awarded for
Literature
.

In conferring the award, the National Book Foundation issued the statement “Mr. Bradbury's life work has proclaimed the incalculable value of reading; the perils of censorship; and the vital importance of building a better, more beautiful future for ourselves and our children through self-knowledge, education, and creative, life-affirming attentiveness and risk-taking.”

And so, in November 2000, Ray arrived in New York. He was getting around again, lecturing at colleges, universities, and corporations across the country. He made the trip to New York alone. Maggie, at seventy-six, was even more reclusive than ever, opting to stay home with her four beloved cats, her cigarettes, her fine French coffee, and her seven thousand–plus books. Ray's daughters had their own lives to tend to. There were now eight grandchildren, four girls, four boys. Patrick Kachurka, on Jennifer Brehl's suggestion, had offered to accompany him, but Ray liked doing things on his own. When people offered to help him after his stroke to climb stairs, he fended them off. But the one man who had been with him for nearly his entire career in books was there at the awards ceremony by his side—Ray's agent, Don Congdon. And his “date” was his editor, Brehl. That evening, near the end of the ceremony, host Steve Martin introduced Ray, summing up a lifetime of literary achievement nonpareil.

“Novelist, short-story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter, and poet … how can we even begin to count all of the ways in which Ray Bradbury has etched his indelible impressions upon the American literary landscape? There are few modern authors who can claim such a wide and varied provenance for their work, spanning from the secret inner-worlds of childhood dreams, to the magic realism of everyday life, to the infinite expanses of outer space.”

Ray moved slowly to the stage, aided by others. No one but Brehl and Congdon knew it, but less than a week earlier, he had suffered yet another ministroke, losing the vision in his left eye. He had briefly pondered canceling his appearance at the awards but, decided against it. He had finally been accepted and acknowledged by the New York literary establishment as a literary writer. No, this was not to be missed. When Ray took the podium, in an instant, everyone in the packed auditorium forgot that this man was eighty years old and in declining health. He was the Ray Bradbury he had always been: entertaining, energetic, and hilarious.

“Well, here I am,” he said, after taking the stage. He wore a black suit that looked like a tuxedo (he hated wearing tuxes) with a red bow tie. “I have one good eye, one good ear, one good leg, and there's other things missing but I'm afraid to look.”

From the start, the audience in the vast room at the Times Square Marriott was captivated. Ray's speech was a rousing, epic survey of his entire career, centered upon his lifelong love of libraries and books.

“[W]ho you're honoring tonight is not only myself but the ghost of a lot of your favorite writers,” he continued. “And I wouldn't be here except that they spoke to me in the library. The library's been the center of my life. I never made it to college. I started going to the library when I graduated from high school. I went to the library every day for three or four days a week for ten years and I graduated from the library when I was twenty-eight.”

Ray's speech, like all of his speeches since the late 1940s, was completely extemporaneous: fifteen minutes of love, joy, and inspiration. That night, Ray Bradbury jumped off the cliff and built his wings on the way down.

When it was all over, Ray received a standing ovation. He stood looking out at the crowd, unable to see much because of the glare of the lights, the cacophony of the audience overwhelming his one good ear. But standing there, as he was so often prone to be, he was touched. He wanted to cry. As the big banquet room roared with gratitude, generations young and old cheering him on, thanking him, Ray Bradbury relished the moment. He was loved.

It was one of the great highlights of his career. And, just as his first story, “Hollerbochen's Dilemma,” published in 1938, had given him the energy and confidence to continue writing, the National Book Foundation medal fueled Ray on. He continued prepping his forthcoming novel,
From the Dust Returned
. He worked on his mystery novel,
Let's All Kill Constance
. And, as he had done for six decades, Ray was still writing a short story a week.

“Every time I've completed a new short story or novel,” he said, “and mailed it off to Don Congdon, I say to the mailbox, ‘There, Death, again one up on you!'”

Yet even as Ray found life and immortality in his work, as the new millennium began, many of his inner circle were vanishing forever. Sitting in his large leather chair in the television room of the Cheviot Hills house, Ray often sadly noted that most of the names in his brown leather telephone directory were of friends who had died.

On an early January morning in 2001, Ray Bradbury was walking slowly up a concrete pathway of his Palm Springs home. He was on a mission. After his stroke, he used a four-pronged cane, but gradually he relied more heavily on the walker he was now using. If he had long walks ahead of him, Ray acquiesced to a wheelchair. Despite these physical hindrances, his spirits were high.

Ray had always approached life in this manner. Though he lamented that his impatience kept him from writing his astounding experiences in a daily journal, a rare diary entry written in 1939, when he was eighteen, confirmed this outlook on life: January 21, Saturday: “It rained glorious rain all day....”

Now, more than sixty years later, when he walked, he chuckled and talked as he dragged his feet behind the walker. He sank his thick fingers into the pocket of his white tennis shorts (a uniform of comfort he began adopting in the early seventies), and withdrew a set of keys. The key chain had attached to it a small pewter fish, a gift from film director John Huston, given in 1953 when Ray was in Ireland working on the
Moby Dick
screenplay. He unlocked the door. The curtains and shutters were closed. The stout, white-haired man wearing the white tennis shoes, white socks, white shorts, white Oxford shirt, and a tie emblazoned with a colorful pattern of Easter eggs, stood at the doorway and peered into the darkness.

Ray slid his walker down the front hallway and threw wide the white shuttered doors of the coat closet. More boxes, more books, more toys. For a moment, Ray looked about until he located a cardboard box. He moved to a table near the living room, next to a sliding glass door that overlooked the small backyard and the swimming pool, and began to rummage through the box. He took out a stack of old newspaper clippings—yellowed cartoon strips torn from the funny pages of a bygone era. They were from his childhood hometown newspaper, the
Waukegan News-Sun;
the dates along the top read “1929,” and dozens of clips made up the pile. They were his
Buck Rogers
comic strips.

As Ray sat gingerly leafing through these old remnants, he grew quiet. He looked at the pieces of newsprint with a bittersweet mix of nostalgia and wonder. He had traveled two hours so that he could find these mementos of his past.

On March 16, 2001, Ray's beloved aunt Neva died at the age of ninety-two. The great inspirer, “Glinda the Good,” was gone. Ray, Patrick Kachurka, and Neva's longtime partner, Anne Anthony, were the only ones who gathered for a private memorial service. Neva was laid out peacefully, her long, gray tresses fanning out beneath her. Afterward, Ray arranged to have her remains cremated. When he received the tin with his beloved aunt's ashes, he placed them on a small card table in his dining room, with two old photographs of Neva placed nearby, alongside a small painting that Neva had done in the 1920s. It was a shrine to the one person who had most profoundly influenced him.

After that, he put together yet another collection of short stories,
One More for the Road,
published in 2002. His murder mystery,
Let's All Kill Constance,
the third book in his mystery-noir trilogy, begun in a hospital bed shortly after his stroke, was released in 2003. That year also, one hundred of his “Most Celebrated Stories” were collected and published with
Bradbury Stories
. He raced to publish 2004's
The Cat's Pajamas,
another collection of short stories old and new, spanning his entire career.

Though Ray was lecturing occasionally in the Los Angeles area, his primary passion these days had become the theater. His own troupe, the Pandemonium Theatre Company, was mounting several productions a year. As ever, Ray's longtime theatrical partner, the soft-spoken Charles Rome Smith, handled the director's duties on the majority of the productions. Ray was still very active, dining regularly with his friends, attempting to eat better, and limiting his drinking to one glass of wine with each meal. And, of course, he spent his mornings writing. Since his strokes, he had tried to type, but he could barely move his left hand. And so in 2001, he took to dictating almost all of his stories by telephone to his daughter Alexandra. It was a difficult way to write, and Ray never quite felt the same rhythm as he had as a prolific and fast typist, but it was his only recourse. On rare occasions, he jotted stories down by hand, usually with a thick Sharpie, or he attempted to type on his trusty Selectric.

Late mornings and afternoons usually consisted of opening mail. Ray received, on average, three hundred letters a week from fans in China, Argentina, Japan, everywhere. He did his best to answer them all. “If it's a love letter, you have to answer it,” he asserted. By midafternoon, as he had done for his entire life, Ray was napping. A good part of the remainder of the day, postnap, was spent in front of the television with Maggie. They were there, like the majority of the nation, staring in shock as the events of September 11, 2001, unfolded. Ray called the terrorist attacks “the darkest day in American history.” And, ever the oracle, when asked how the world's problems might be solved, he was quick to insist that everyone was ignoring the real problem, the relationship between Palestine and Israel. “When that is solved, only then will we have real peace,” Ray said.

On Saturday, February 1, 2003, he and Maggie were watching television, as usual, when reports of the space shuttle
Columbia
burning up on reentry, killing the seven astronauts on board, aired on all the news channels. Ray was sitting in much the same spot as he had been, thirty-six years earlier, watching in horror the coverage of the
Apollo 1
tragedy. As the
Columbia
space shuttle debris streaked across the blue Texas sky, Ray sat in disbelief. This tragedy was eerily reminiscent of his own story “Kaleidoscope,” in which an astronaut, falling from the sky, was thought to be a falling star. Ray did the only thing he could to keep from despairing—he began another short story that morning. “Work is the only answer,” he said.

By early 2003, Maggie was growing increasingly and markedly wearied. She rarely left the house anymore. When she made appointments with friends, the hairdresser, the doctor, she'd inevitably cancel them. She spent her days reading and talking to her four cats, Jack, Win-Win, Dingo, and her favorite, Ditzy. From the sofa in the TV room in which she sat, Maggie could look out the screen door and marvel at her glorious rose garden, reports of which she'd rattle off to friends on the telephone.

On Halloween night, 2003, Ray and his daughter Alexandra sat at the small table in the breakfast room, carving pumpkins. As he had done over decades, Ray stood at the front door with a large bowl of candy and a Polaroid camera to snap photos of young trick-or-treaters in their elaborate costumes. That evening, Maggie was noticeably tired, noticeably frail, and didn't come to the door to hand out treats. Two weeks later, when she could not climb out of bed, Ray dialed 911 for the paramedics, though Maggie refused to go to the hospital. When the paramedic crew arrived, they took her to Brotman Medical Center in nearby Culver City, where she was admitted. Because Maggie had skipped all her doctor's appointments in the last few years, the diagnosis came as a shock to everyone. She had advanced lung cancer. In the days that followed, her daughters visited her at the hospital, Patrick Kachurka kept a regular vigil by her bedside, and Ray and Maggie's dear friends, bookstore owners Craig and Patty Graham, came by with flowers and laughter. Ray stopped in each afternoon and sat by her side and held her hand and cried. “I love you, Mama,” he mustered, choking back tears. “I love you.” To the end, Maggie's sense of humor remained. Even when she could no longer speak through the tangle of feeding tubes and the oxygen mask, if someone in the room cracked a joke to cheer her up, she chuckled, her spirit unbreakable.