Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
to add a word about his parents, Lenny and Jean, who are no longer alive but who were
thrilled by a son whose decency, humor, and sense of responsibility were so apparent to
everybody. His father, a world-class grouch, was tough on him, but he instilled in Billy a
sense that living in the world was not such an easy thing and that you had to fight for a
foothold in it. His mother doted on him and taught him, I think, that looking after other
people is not just a duty but a pleasure. I remember when we were teenagers, I showed
up at Billy's house one night when he hadn't finished dinner. His mother was watching
him eat, and I was trying to hurry him up, and she wouldn't let me. It was an occasion
that became famous among our friends.
“Don't rush him, he's eating his salad,” Mrs. Joseph said in her Minnie Mouse voice.
“Billy loves salad.”
The way she said it made it a point of pride. She was beaming at her son.
“Billy loves salad so much his middle name should be 'Salad,' ” she said. “They
should call him Billy 'Salad' Joseph.”
And so we did.
His disappointments—well, we know what some of them were. He had a tough time
the last few years of his life. He was divorced. He lost his job at Canon, and, of course,
his health went south. But he also lived with other disappointments, philosophical ones.
Billy was remarkably tolerant of people's petty foibles. His default mode when he met
someone was to be accepting.
But he was infuriated by powerful people who blindly exercised their power. He loved
the Knicks and he hated Isiah Thomas. He loved the Yankees and he hated George Stein-
brenner. He loved this country and he hated George W. Bush. He loved Israel but hated
its intractability and its reckless military might. He loved newspapers and the news but
thought Rupert Murdoch should burn in hell.
As for that other powerful being, God, in the end it's hard to know what he thought.
He was, I suspect, dubious, but not committed to any certainty. As he told me the story,
after he learned he was dying, his friend and neighbor, Kenny, a devout Christian, vis-
ited him in the hospital and urged him at his bedside to acknowledge Jesus as his savi-
or. They were discussing this when the rabbi came to call. Bill asked Kenny to let them
speak in private, but as Kenny was leaving the room, Billy couldn't resist a bit of mis-
chief. Gesturing at Kenny, he said to the rabbi, loud enough for Kenny to hear: “He thinks
I should accept Christ in my life.”
Bill was, in other words, not a fearless man, but he feared the right things, the big
men in the middle ready to swat away a jump shot, the forces in the world that prevent
the best things, the good things, the just things, from happening. Cancer, for him, was
the last of those forces. He died way, way too young; his death was not in the least just.
