Friendship in the plague years: Steinberg on keeping contact during COVID

COVID doesn’t just kill people — 1,200 Americans a day, quite a lot really — but it kills friendships too. Or at least makes them even harder to navigate.

Especially that middle zone of business associations — those quasi-friends whom you become closer to than merely doing your job requires. People you like, when you run into them. But not anybody you’d hang out with in a pandemic.

I liked Ken Price, the director of public relations at the Palmer House. We had things in common. We both thought that being in the newspaper was really important. We both liked eating lunch at the Palmer House, though he’d nibble something dietetic while ordering plate after plate of whatever was new and fattening on the menu and jamming the plates in front of me. He’d send me off with gift brownies — invented at the Palmer House! — and, leaving the hotel, I’d hand them to the first homeless person I passed on State Street.

Ken was such as booster of the hotel that he was baffled, almost hurt when I declined a pitch. Three years ago we had lunch, not in the restaurant, but in the gorgeous lobby, next to a scaffold where work was going on restoring the ceiling. I talked with a restorer, admired the work. But somehow... the topic just didn’t... gel. Maybe next time.

That happens. Uncle Ken — I called him “Uncle Ken” — was still interesting and flamboyant, with his elaborate eyeglasses and his beloved dogs. And warm. He always asked about Edie and the boys. He was one of the few to whom, when COVID struck, I sent an inquisitive email now and then, asking how he was. Rattling the doorknob. He never replied. Which bugged me. I took his silence personally: Of course not. The Palmer House is shut down. No need for publicity. No need to talk to me.

In this business, you don’t want to be so cynical that you assume people interact with you only because they want something. I know a popular chef who once confessed that she worried people were her friends only for the free food. I felt sorry for her, but also understood. I have old friends who only contact me when they have new books to promote. I try not to think about about them in between, try to tell myself that friends are like comets, close for a time, then suddenly a dot dwindling against the black cosmos. You can’t go chasing after them. They’ll be back.

Ken circled back, by proxy. On March 8, Dean Lane, general manager of the Palmer House, sent an email: Ken was dying. Had been hospitalized in September. Oh right, I reminded myself: not everything is about me. Ken hadn’t told many people he was sick. He wanted to be remembered as he was, necktie pristine, pocket square sharply folded. He wasn’t accepting calls or visits. But he’d appreciate a letter, Lane said. I started mine the next morning.

“I hope you realize how loved you are,” I wrote, “and how many people include you as an integral part of their Chicago adventure.”

But bad luck, I had a magazine article due Monday morning — the Washington Monthly! A beginner’s guide to Michael Madigan! — and the letter got set aside, half finished, until I turned the assignment in. Then I finished my message to Ken.

“You’ve been unfailingly kind, supportive, wise and generous; never a spokesman, always a friend,” I wrote. “I hope you’ll reconsider having people visit; I’ll come by in a heartbeat.”

I leashed up the dog. “I better get this to the post office,” I told my wife.

Ken Price died a day later — the letter didn’t get to him in time. Which I guess is the moral of the story. We think we have enough time, and usually we do. But the years click by and suddenly we don’t. I wish I could explain or understand the self-exile that some people disappear into when they get sick. Maybe they’re embarrassed. Maybe they don’t have the mental energy that friendship requires. Myself, I’d want a conga line of everyone I ever felt close to, cha-cha-ing past the foot of my bed. One-two-three, kick! I draw strength from people; even a chat with a stranger while walking the dog, leaving the encounter feeling buoyed, better. Something in the brain’s chemistry. We are social animals. Some of us anyway.