Four Friends

by William D. Cohan

  The story Clif told me about what happened to his brother was a little different. He said there were actually two taxis heading north, parallel to each other, on Park Avenue, with one taxi slightly ahead of the other. Will could only clearly see the one taxi closer to him on the eastern corner of Park and did not see the other. “So he jaywalked,” he said. “He jogged across. A guy in the back of the second cab—in the police report afterward—said that the first cab, it was close enough that the first cab had to kind of swerve to get around Will, and that’s when the second cab and Will saw each other and it was too late. The taxi hit him, and it hit him waist-high, and his head hit the windshield and rearview mirror, causing an ultimately fatal brain hemorrhage. Will was conscious for a couple of minutes afterward. The guy in the back of the second cab, the one that hit him, was an off-duty police trainee, I think, and got out and went to Will and—and I think what the police reported—asked Will if he’d been drinking. And Will’s last words were apparently, ‘No.’ I don’t know whether he had been or not. But he lapsed into unconsciousness shortly after that and never woke up.”

  When he got the call from the doctors at New York Hospital, Clif had been in Indiana for the weekend with his wife and children, visiting his wife’s sister, who had a house on a lake. “The doctors are funny on the phone,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Well, he’s been hurt.’ Okay. How badly? ‘Well, I think you need to get up here.’ Okay. ‘Well, it’s a brain injury.’ All right. All I could think about was, Will was so smart. I thought, Shit, is this going to affect the way his thinking is? Because I don’t think he could stand that. And they said, ‘No. You need to—it’s not really a question of whether he—’ and they wouldn’t give me a straight answer. They wouldn’t say, He’s dying. Get on a plane. So finally, after repeated questioning, they said, ‘It’s a question of whether he’s going to wake up or not.’ And I thought, Okay. And so I flew home. It’s all a blur. Obviously, I drove myself back to Chicago and got on the plane the next morning, but I don’t remember making the reservation, or flying, or anything.”

  Mimi had gone up to Connecticut on Saturday morning without having a clue what had happened to Will just a few hours before and a few blocks from her small apartment. “I woke up the next morning, walked over to Fifth Avenue to get a cab to go to the train station, basically right where the accident had been, but I didn’t know about the accident yet,” she said. She ran into an old friend on the train. She noticed there were a few voice messages on her cell phone. But she ignored them. The actual party for her grandmother was on Sunday. Her phone rang a few more times that day, with the caller leaving a voice message each time. Finally she listened to the messages and heard that Will had been in an accident. “My first thought was that Will got into some bar fight,” she said. She went to see her father and then got a message to call Clif. That’s when the gravity of the situation hit her. “Yeah, you might want to come down here tonight,” he told her. “This is not good.”

  Will’s younger brother Thomas came to New York from his home in the northern mountains of Vermont. Seven years younger than Will, Thomas didn’t interact with Will very often. He went to boarding school in Millbrook, New York, and then to the University of Vermont for a year before transferring to Champlain College. He’s a software engineer working for a health care company in Burlington. “When you see your eighty-eight-year-old father in the hospital you’re definitely taken aback, you’re kind of shocked, but at the same time, it’s not—I don’t know—it’s almost expected,” he said. “But to see William, I mean, hooked up to machines and lying in a hospital bed, that definitely rocked my world because he just was always so energetic, so passionate, even physically imposing because he was such an athlete even then. You know he was exercising every day, at least once a day. Yeah, it was very disturbing, concerning to see him like that. And then I think you’re obviously thinking he’s one of the most physically strong people in the family, he’ll be fine. And then as you start to find out that you know this really isn’t going to turn around, it’s definitely very surreal in a situation like that.”

  Mimi got on the next train to New York from Hartford. She wasn’t exactly sure how Clif had gotten her number. But he told her he didn’t know any of Will’s friends and asked her to make a few calls, which she did from the train. When she got to New York, she took a cab to New York Hospital. Will’s brothers met her and took her upstairs to where Will was. His condition was poor, and not improving. “It got worse,” she said. His brain was swelling, he was in a coma, and there wasn’t much the doctors could do. She left that night at around two in the morning and came back six hours later. By then, there were more than thirty people in the waiting room, hoping to go in to see Will and say their goodbyes.

  Miriam Cytryn and her husband were in the Hamptons for Labor Day weekend. They were closing on a new house out there. When they got back to New York City, there were a bunch of messages on her answering machine from Clif, asking her to call him. That’s how she found out about Will’s accident, and that he was on life support. “They were making decisions,” she said. “Will was pretty clear that he wanted to be a donor and we joked often about ‘Well, they are not taking your liver. There’s certain things we know they’re not taking. Maybe those pretty blue eyes they will take.’ They wanted people to be able to say goodbye. And so we went to the hospital. And I remember thinking he looked good. There was a bandage but it was not like his head was crushed. But I remember thinking, he looked fit and a little tan. But I remember saying, ‘Oh my God, this can’t be true.’ Yeah, wow. It still doesn’t seem real after all these years.”

  At some point on Monday, September 4, the doctors asked Clif and Thomas and their mother to go into a conference room to discuss Will’s condition. Mimi did not think it was appropriate for her to go, but Clif and Thomas asked her to go with them and the doctors. She felt very weird doing that. “But for Clifton and Thomas,” she said, “they were like, ‘We don’t know him as well as you do.’ And at the same time, I was like, ‘I don’t know him as well as half the people in that waiting room.’” She was not Will’s girlfriend but she was, it seemed, going to have to play that role in the moment. She said the doctors reviewed Will’s medical condition and shared the fact that there was nothing more they could do for him. The only question was whether or not Will wanted to donate his organs. He had not indicated his desire to do so on his license. But Mimi knew he wanted to. “Knowing the kind of person that he is, that is probably something he would want to do,” she told them. The family decided to donate Will’s organs. “Okay, well, if that’s the case,” the doctors said, “then the process needs to start pretty soon.”

  The doctors told Will’s friends to come and say their goodbyes, and one by one that happened. Terry Gruber from softball was there. Will’s colleagues from Columbia were there, including Conover and Susser, plus many of the people who had been at the party in Brooklyn. At first, they thought Will was going to pull through somehow. “When we arrived, some of them were leaving and they said, ‘Oh, he’s in good shape. He’s doing okay,’” Conover said. “And when we arrived the nurse said that he was, but now it doesn’t look like he’s going to make it. So we were shocked. So then at that point his brother Clif came in. And then the nurse whispered, ‘You know who he is?’ And we said no. And then his brother came over and explained more about who he was. And then we met his mother. And then we just watched him die. And it was just so sudden, and he was such a force of personality that, like, the next day I was in my car and I had just been in the car with him the day before. And when I got in the car I got this shiver because, you know, he was still there as a memory, this recent memory, but he was no more. It was just a horrible experience.”

  Not surprisingly, the news of Will’s accident hit his mother very hard. “She’d had a double whammy,” Clif said. “Dad had died that February, and there was Will gone in September.” He compared his mother to her own maternal grandmother, Madge Gates W
allace. Her husband, David Wallace, was an alcoholic who committed suicide in 1904. He was very frustrated in his life. He couldn’t make any money and his political aspirations went nowhere. After that, Clif said, “my great-grandmother Madge kind of folded up and became a virtual recluse, relied on my grandmother to run the household, take care of her younger brothers, and pay the bills, all of that stuff. And my mother sort of had done the same thing.” In 1996, his mother had almost died from necrotizing fasciitis, a flesh-eating bacteria. After that, she was afraid to leave 830 Park. “She just became reliant on the nurses, and the care, and being at home,” Clif said. “So she had sort of already made 830 Park Avenue her residence 24/7. She didn’t go out. And after that, it was more of the same. She was just more alone. She didn’t talk much about it.… My parents weren’t great on sharing their feelings. But it must have been hard for her because Will got hit right outside her window. If she had been awake and she had looked out the window at two forty-five in the morning, she would have seen him. Or at least seen the ambulance. And she didn’t know until the next day.”

  Mimi was the last one to leave Will, staying around even longer than Will’s mother and his brothers. She thought that was weird, too. “When we were in Norway, we went to this Viking burial ground, and while we were there, we had a pretty intense conversation about death and dying,” she said. “And one of the things that he said was that he didn’t want to die alone, and so I had this incredible guilt. If I left him there by himself, that would just be contrary to this intense conversation that we had had.” She left his room late that night. She asked the doctors if she should stay or go once they began the process of taking Will off life support. They said she should go. “So that was my permission to finally leave,” she said. She has often wondered what might have been different if she had agreed to let Will stay with her that Friday night, or if she had insisted that he come with her to her grandmother’s birthday party. “Even still to this day I think about that,” she said. “But there’s nothing that I can do about it. There are like a million scenarios.”

  The next morning, Mimi joined Clif and Thomas at the Frank Campbell funeral home. The family had just convened there seven months before for Clifton Daniel’s funeral. Now they were back again. There were decisions to be made: What kind of funeral would Will have? Would he be buried, or not? Who would identify his body at the medical examiner’s office? Who would handle the calls from the press?

  The day after Will died, the New York Times ran a story about the accident and his death, which the paper explained was still “under investigation.” The paper quoted both Clif and Mimi. “He was just coming to spend the night, to sleep in his old bed,” Clif said. “We have no clue what happened. We don’t know how fast the cabby was driving or whether he was even speeding.” Added Mimi, whom the paper described as Will’s girlfriend, “He was always the captain of everyone else’s good time. He was always arranging something or doing something spontaneous; the kind of guy who would hang glide across the Grand Canyon if someone challenged him.” The paper also spoke with Susser, who said Will’s co-workers at Columbia had no idea of his family lineage: “He never told anyone. I guess he wanted to be known for his work, not his family background.” People also ran a piece about Will’s death under the headline “Private Citizen” and the subtitle, “Before his untimely death, Harry Truman’s grandson William Daniel lived quietly and touched many lives.” There was a picture of Will, as a towheaded young boy, walking a few paces behind his grandfather, the former president of the United States, and a picture that Mimi snapped of Will in the canoe they had shared a few weeks earlier on a lake in Norway. Will’s softball friends placed a paid notice about his death in the Times, as well: “With profound heartfelt sadness we mourn Will: Great Friend, Wild Friend, Sweet Friend, El Jefe, Captain, Wolfman, our Ace. 20 year member of the Cats & Dogs Softball League. Founding member of The Fetchers, Bad DogsMad Dogs. Sundays and league play will never be as enjoyable without you. You will be sorely missed both on and off the field.”

  Will’s longtime friend Mark Bodden read about Will’s death in the Daily News. He had gone out for a run with a friend, and when they were finished, his friend noticed the obituary. Nobody had called Mark. He was surprised, obviously, but not shocked. “Will was the type of personality that this type of death was something that we both thought would happen,” he said. “Because that’s the way he lived his life. He did everything with passion—the things he wanted to pursue. And reading the account of how he died is consistent, as far as I know, with how he acted. This was two o’clock in the early morning. And he was crossing Park Avenue at two o’clock in the morning. Why are you going to visit your parents at that hour?” And then there was the fact that he had been drinking, and might still have been inebriated. “Having witnessed him and participated with him, I know what that does to him or what it did to him when he pursued it with abandon,” he continued. “So that’s my point about it in terms of not being surprised with the tragedy of his death and the way it occurred.”

  Will Iselin also did not get a call about the accident. He heard the news from another Andover classmate. Iselin’s first thought was “what a terrible waste.… the profound sensation was, Well, oh my God, I can’t believe I just lost my oldest friend, run over by a taxi. You never think it’s gonna happen that way.” He continued. “It was a real tragedy. Here’s a guy who, God, had so much, and underneath it all, what he ended up with, he didn’t want that. He wanted something more. People end up like that because they don’t care, but he actually, underneath it all, he really cared. That’s why, bit by bit, he saw less and less of a lot of his old friends. Because it was too difficult for him. Everybody was kind of moving on. He was still battling. I’m sure he was thrilled when he found the whole softball crowd, who didn’t know him.”

  * * *

  MIMI WENT TO THE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S office and answered the questions about Will. She also shared her insights about him with the staff at Frank Campbell, including the fact that Will had told her he thought his father’s funeral was “very lonely.” (For some reason, seven months later, Clifton Daniel’s ashes were still at the Campbell funeral home. “When we sat there,” Mimi said, “They were like, ‘Can you take these, too?’”) To try to avoid that feeling of loneliness that Will so disliked about his father’s funeral, Mimi and Will’s brothers decided to have his funeral in a small room upstairs at the funeral home, rather than the large one downstairs where his father’s had been. But when on Friday, September 8, at four o’clock in the afternoon, more than three hundred people showed up for Will’s funeral, they ended up moving his service to the larger room downstairs. There was a makeshift program that featured color pictures of Will and a request that donations be made in his honor to United Neighborhood Houses.

  After the service, everyone was invited to walk to the Heckscher Ballfields in Central Park (at around 65th Street). That was where Will’s ashes would be spread. It was technically against the law but nobody seemed to be worried, and of course it was exactly what Will would have wanted, given the importance softball ended up having in his life. About half of the people who were at the service showed up, sitting in the bleachers around the ball field and telling stories about Will. According to Cytryn, about eight “beautiful women” stood up and spoke about Will, causing some guy in the group to remark that Will “got more action dead than I got alive.”

  Then they spread his ashes on the mound. “There was a cop car right there, and the cop didn’t do anything about it,” Mimi said. Clif remembered it being a pretty funny scene. “It was hilarious coming into Central Park and seeing seventy-five or a hundred people all dressed in black, all trying to look nonchalant,” he said. “They were just all standing around sort of whistling. It was ridiculous because there were so many of us. But that was his funeral.” After Will’s ashes were spread, the group then went off to the Saloon Grill, on 64th Street and Broadway, to celebrate Will’s life.

 
As the tragic events unfolded that Labor Day weekend, Clif came to the realization that he did not know his brother very well, and had not known much about him for years. “When Will died, he was a surprise to me,” he said. “I did not know my brother at all. I met his friends for the first time. I found out what he had really been like to them for the first time. It was a very different person than the guy I grew up with; because of the family relationship, because of our relationship, he shut me out of a lot of it. I don’t know how intentional it was on his part, but I didn’t know what his life was like. And he didn’t tell me and I, to be fair to him, I didn’t ask. It wasn’t my life. We had a standoffish relationship. So when he died and all of these people started telling stories about him, this was somebody I had never known, somebody who worked hard to make sure that everybody else was okay. If they were down, he would try to lift them up. If they needed help, he would help them.… I learned all sorts of things about him that I did not know. I learned that he was kind and thoughtful to all these people. I had an adversarial relationship with him for years. But that was just us. For everybody else, it was the opposite. He took care of a lot of people and he did not like being associated with our grandfather. I found that out the hard way.… He led a completely different life from the one that he led around me.”

  * * *

  IN MARCH 2001, SIX MONTHS AFTER Will died, Margaret Truman Daniel sued Mohamed Dawoud and Kinky Cab Corp., the cab company that owned Dawoud’s taxi, for $4 million. The suit accused Dawoud of being “negligent, careless and reckless.” The suit said that Will had been a “lawful pedestrian” when he was crossing Park Avenue at 2:40 a.m. on September 2 when Dawoud “suddenly and without warning violently struck and knocked down [Will] causing him to sustain severe and serious injuries resulting in his death [two days later], following conscious pain and suffering.” The suit further argued that Will “in no way contributed to said occurrence and [Will’s] injuries were due solely to the negligence and carelessness” of Kinky and Dawoud. The Times dutifully—and briefly—reported the filing of the lawsuit and also contacted Dawoud for a comment. He denied the allegations against him and told the paper, “I drive carefully.” Dawoud continued to deny having any responsibility for Will’s death in his legal filings. He claimed Will, and Will alone, was responsible for the accident that led to his tragic death. For the next seven months or so, the case proceeded through the typical legal paces in state court, and looked to be heading to a trial. But then, on November 13, 2001, the case was suddenly settled “without costs to either party against the other.”