Joe Greene

Joe Greene has died, suddenly, just short of his ninetieth birthday. We first met at the Universita di Perugia in 1955. He was an ex-GI like me but he remained in Perugia only a month. He knew what he wanted to do with his life: international banking.

He returned to Philadelphia to work in a local bank for about two years. Then he applied for a job with the Bank of America – an international bank – a kind of internship that required maybe two years at the Bank’s New York city office.

He got the job. The Bank knew what it was getting: an honor student at Haverford College, where he had read War and Peace, in Russian. He had read Proust, all of it in French. He learned some Japanese in the Army, while stationed in Japan, monitoring Russian radio broadcasts. He completed a master’s degree in Far Eastern Studies at NYU while he worked at the Bank by day.

I returned from Italy, about nine months before Joe left for Singapore. I took a job with Pan American Airways and settled in Brooklyn. I took a Spanish course at NYU. It fell on the same night Joe had a class. We’d meet sometimes before class, at Chock Full ‘O Nuts, for soup and a sandwich. After class we’d go to the Cedar Tavern for a beer, a mingy hamburger and french fries. Individually, these meals were not sufficient to sustain life.

We’d see each other at Lynn Mallet’s monthly soirees. One night Joe and I were partners at Charades. The clue was a Broadway play. I began to push my hair down over my forehead. “Caligula” Joe cried out almost before I began.

We were great walkers, lean as wolves. One Sunday, we walked from Lynn’s apartment on McDougall Street in the Village, down to Battery Park, then back uptown to the Guggenheim Museum at 89th Street! Joe walked, I trotted a half step behind, for he was 6’1” tall, I was 5’4”.

Joe worked for the Bank of America in Singapore for many years, during the years of that city’s economic miracle. He moved hundreds of million dollars.  In the Spring of 1968 the Bank sent Joe to Saigon, just in time for Tet.

When China opened its borders up to the West, the Bank sent him to Beijing, a dream come true. Joe, alone, was the Bank of America in China. He lived in the former British Embassy compound. His food was cooked in a separate building of the compound and delivered to his rooms. His office was in the compound too. The Chinese government supplied an English-speaking secretary and they assigned a man, who sat at a desk behind Joe’s, whose job was to watch Joe all day long.

The English-speaking colony in Beijing during those early years, sometimes entertained itself by sitting around a phonograph player. Not Joe. He went to Chinese opera, to Kabuki theatre. He walked the neighborhoods, he’d eat street food.

He retired from the Bank after five years in Beijing. He was fifty-eight years old; the best thing he ever did he said. He reoccupied his apartment in Brooklyn Heights which he had been renting out.

Every January we’d receive Joe’s annual letter listing the twenty or so best Broadway plays he’d seen that year; the thirty or so best movies he’d seen; the thirty or so best books he had read.

He haunted the art galleries in Chelsea and on 57th Street. He was a regular at the Sotheby’s auctions, but owned only the few prints and and scrolls he had acquired while was in the East.

Margie phoned Joe every week to discuss the Sunday Time’s crossword puzzle. Joe did the puzzle in pen and ink, with his handsome fountain pen. Margie would turn the phone over to me when they finished. We’d meet for lunch four or five times a year, alternately in Brooklyn and New Jersey. I’d cede the bill to Joe when it arrived at meal’s end.

A joint bill was child’s play to a banker. He’d add the tip to the total, divide the new total by the number of diners and announce what each of us owed. He always tipped twice the amount of the tax. He’d hand the bill to me together with the amount of his share.

We were having lunch on 57th Street, in the days before cell phones. I needed to make a call. “Joe, please lend me your pen while I use the phone in the lobby.” He handed it over. “Don’t lose it,” he said, “It’s solid gold.”

He abandoned Brooklyn for two months every summer because the air conditioning in his pre-war building wasn’t up to the job. At first he’d rent a house in a New Jersey for a month or two in Ocean City. In July or August we’d get a page of the calendar with our date filled in.

When he grew tired of beaches, so he sought out cities with cool summer climates. We received a calendar page one year from San Francisco, with our week filled in. He knew we’d be visiting my son that summer.

He tried Seattle one summer and he liked it. He tried Vancouver and he was bored: “It’s beautiful but it’s a one weekend city.” Fortunately, there was good walking there.

He went to Ireland twice. and he went to London two or three years running. He’d rent a spacious apartment in neighborhoods that afforded good walking.

Two years ago he took the Queen Elizabeth on a leisurely transatlantic crossing. He stayed in London for a couple of weeks where he visited old friends, especially his godson, Mowbray Mallet Jackson. Mowbray was his last connection to the Mallets, the family that so enriched his life after he’d met Gina and Lynn Mallet in Perugia in 1955.

He traveled First Class on the Queen Elizabeth. The food was excellent and he walked the decks. He said it was easy to pack for First Class. All you need is your tuxedo. Joe, being Joe, washed his socks in his cabin’s sink.

He took the Queen last year too; he stayed in London for a while, then boarded another Queen for a seventeen day cruise to the Norwegian fjords, to Helsinki and to Saint Petersburg. He planned to take a Queen cruise this summer.

I’d call him or he’d call me every week, sometimes twice a week, but never on weekday evenings between 7:00 PM and 7:30 PM. That’s when Joe watched Jeopardy. He hadn’t missed a show in decades.

Around mid-day on February 11, I left a message on Joe’s answering machine. He always returned my calls promptly. He didn’t answer that evening – strange – so I called next morning. When he failed to call by noon I knew something was wrong.

I knew no one in Joe’s building, and the number of the front desk was unlisted. I called Stephen who somehow got the building’s superintendent who told him that Joe had suffered a stroke and was dying in the hospital.

Next day I received an email from Hayden, Joe’s Houston friend, saying that Joe had died, and that he, Hayden, was executor of Joe’s will. He said Joe wanted no religious ceremony, but that he, Hayden, was going to arrange a get together of Joe’s friends in Brooklyn Heights. Would I attend? Of course. Then came Covid19.

Days later Hayden emailed again: The lawyer has requested your mailing address; please send it. I called Stephen. He’d got a similar email. We were named in the will.

“What do you think you got, Dad?” I have no idea. The gold fountain pen would be nice. What about you? “I can’t guess.” I think you’ll get the Krugerrands.

Joe was a social liberal but a financial conservative; he feared a collapse of Wall Street and the Stock Market. But come the crash, he had a survival plan.

His apartment was a five minute walk to the train to Forest Hills; from there a direct train to JFK: at JFK he’d jump onto the first plane to Dublin, or to London, or to Stockholm – or to any other city with a cool summer climate.

Joe kept a small suitcase in his closet, packed and ready to go. In it he kept a drawstring pouch containing the 10 Krugerrands, coin of the realm, in any realm he might choose to alight.