Last Notes from Home (13 page)

“Forty-six years old! A bird colonel. Three fucking wars! Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts coming out his tuppy. Then the Big C starts eating away at his interior. How do you figure it, Ex? It isn’t fair, you know?”

When Wiley would turn to me, seated next to him in the MG, his upper lids and lashes would flutter furiously and for the first time I oddly understood his childhood cognomen of Twitch. When he took his wild eyes from the freeway and turned back to Malia, who was seated in the jump seat of the brilliant red sports car, he’d be poised and primed for new horizons.

“You know what I’m going to do, Malia? I’m goddamn well selling everything, the house, the pool hall, the fishing boats, the cars, every goddamn thing and moving to Kauai or Lanai. Yeah, Lanai. No Cadillacs, no smog, no concrete, no hotels, no nothin’! I don’t give a shit if I have to go into the field with the flips and pick pineapple! Mark my word, Malia. It all goes so quickly, you know? Unfair.
Yeah, unfair.
”

When I’d turn back to Malia, she’d wink at me, I at her, our way of agreeing that the Brigadier’s imminent death had sent Wiley round the bend and into some deranged region. At forty-three, Wiley and I had been born in the same year, the same month—though different astrological signs—and Malia and I were agreeing that Wiley had made his life and that there were now no islands left for him. In either of our lives, I doubt Malia and I would ever be more smugly in error.

At Wiley’s typically suburban three-bedroom two-bathroom house, Wiley went agape with pleasure at the old lady’s gifts of Heath cheese and Croghan bologna, and before I’d taken a sip of the Budweiser he’d given me he was preparing grilled cheese sandwiches with half-inch-thick slabs of Heath, cutting Malia great chunks of bologna, and off on a nonstop reminiscence of home. In droll exasperation, Malia at length interrupted by saying, “Lanai? Why don’t you go back to your precious St. Lawrence River?”

“Naw,” Wiley said. “I really don’t miss anything about that goddamn freeze-your-goodies-off place. Oh, maybe Ex here and a couple of other guys. Yeah, and one other thing—
Guinea food.
These chop-chop slant-eyes don’t even know what wop food is, Ex.” When I looked at Malia to study her reaction to “chop-chop slant-eyes,” she was laughing affectionately and I understood that Wiley’s chatter was the kind of rhetoric allowable between lovers. It was Wiley’s salivating memories of Italian food that sent us to the supermarket at the Coco Marina Plaza in search of ingredients for lasagne.

We’d go to the hospital that night, we decided, and before returning there the following afternoon I’d make Malia and Wiley the biggest pan of lasagne ever seen in Christendom or, I added, in Buddhadom, nodding in amused deference to Malia, so much that they’d have to cut it into portions, freeze it, and be eating it for the next eleven and a half years. At the supermarket, as I hadn’t any idea how long the Brigadier’s dying would take, and as Wiley had told me he’d neither fish nor bother going into his pool hall however long it took, I first bought six quarts of Jim Beam for Wiley, six quarts of Smirnoff red label vodka for me, and, though Malia protested she didn’t drink, I bought a gallon of good dry white Chablis for her.

“You guys,”
Malia said in mock and humorous disgust.

In the months ahead Malia would say
“you guys”
very often.

“It’s the Irish way, Malia. At a wake one drinks himself into a stupor, sings songs about his mom, and no one ever dies.”

Trying to find the lasagne ingredients from the long detailed list I’d made up, I’d been in the supermarket twenty-five minutes when I bumped, in the literal sense, smack into Ms. Robin Glenn. Like comics in a high hedge-rowed maze, I came from the paper towel-toilet tissue-baby diaper-Kleenex alley, Ms. Robin Glenn from the canned tomatoes-tomato puree-pasta-condiments alley, we turned directly into each other, and our carts met head-on. At first I did not recognize her. Her tobacco-sepia hair was down and brushed so lovingly and lengthily below her shoulders I was amazed to think she’d ever got all that tucked up beneath her petite American-flag-red-white-and-blue attendant’s cap. She had scrubbed every trace of makeup from her face and she had on a pair of great round black shell-rimmed prescription glasses, a man’s chocolate-brown full-sleeved velour shirt too big for her, and a pair of torn faded Levi’s. She was barefooted. Behind those huge spectacles those equally huge gray haunting and vacuous eyes came to mine, told me nothing and to my “Excuse me” she spoke nary a word or even nodded, apparently still angry from my treatment of her on the flight. Abruptly she withdrew her cart three steps, started around us, stopped joltingly, turned to me, and said, “These must be your Hawaiian friends?”

“Malia and Wiley Hampson, Ms. Robin Glenn, the flight attendant I was lucky enough to draw on my way over.”

So it ends and so it begins. Bird colonels don’t die from the shrapnel in their legs and back but are eaten up by a carcinoma of the soul. Old friends don’t miss much of home but Guinea food, and the last Watertown Exley male bumps his silly wired grocery cart into that of perhaps one of two women he’d ever love.

By the next day at noon, Wiley had gone from the simple ravings of the disaffected to the kind of hysterical monologue that under its own momentum achieves after a time its own inner logic, and though, behind Wiley’s back, Malia and I continued to twirl our index fingers at our temples, our smiles grew increasingly forced and implied we’d begun to understand that, at forty-three, Wiley intended doing everything he damn well said he’d do. Wiley’s life, as I knew better than anyone, had been the pursuit of some last island and I could see and hear in his endless ranting some need to exalt his life from merely pretty achievement to a plateau in the realms of art.

A month after the old lady and I returned to the Bay, she asked again if I’d sent Malia a thank-you note. I said no but I’d do so that day. I did so and ten days later the letter was returned stamped
gone, left no forwarding address.
Two days after that, Wiley called, exuberant. He and Malia were on Lanai, living in a rented plantation house, he was working in the pineapple fields with the flips, he’d sold his pool hall, his commercial fishing boats were on the market, and Ms. Robin Glenn was house-sitting his three-bedroom home in Hawaii Kai, trying to find him an appropriate renter, the monies from which would take care of the house’s mortgage. “When are you coming over, Ex? It’s paradise, fucking paradise.”

If Wiley had been hyper driving from the airport to Hawaii Kai, he was, as I say, demented the next morning after having seen my brother the night before at Tripler. Wiley hadn’t, I suspect, seen the Brigadier since Bill had entered the service in 1944, a very tall, very handsome, very slender young man of seventeen; and what Wiley’d seen the night before was a young man old at forty-six, his close-cropped hair having gone gray, his limbs wasted—he weighed only 120 pounds over a six-two frame—and that sheeted cage over his distended stomach. Malia had invited Robin over for brunch, and Malia and I were enchanted with both Robin’s beauty and the history (we did not then know how much of it was pathological bullshit) she revealed at Malia’s and my eager solicitations. Wiley was not impressed. Eyeing us over his bloody Marys and his uneaten scrambled eggs and bacon, he brooded on the Brigadier and his own dream of some final island, once actually sneering at me when he thought I’d laughed too effusively at one of Robin’s tales, as though he were telling me that he found my gushing attempt to strip Ms. Robin Glenn of her panties nothing short of despicable at such a time.

In many respects the bonds between the Brigadier and Wiley were far stronger than any brothers’ blood ties, characterized as they were by impossible codes, a lofty-toned morality, Watertownians’ esoteric handshakes reinforcing our unswervable belief that where others didn’t we knew precisely what was right and wrong with the world, that there was, as there was for everything, a time to die, and that at such a time a gentleman went into a limbo of mourning and would never think of laughing rather too affectedly at Robin’s trite tales or giving her affectionate pats on her full Levied thighs. Wiley sneered. For thirty years I’d owed Wiley an apology, for reasons I’ll go into, and the reason I’d never been able to make it was that the very self-righteousness he was revealing on this morning in his Hawaii Kai kitchen, while we drank and made our lasagne, was the kind of smugness that would not have allowed him to accept my apology gracefully.

Wiley and I’d met when, freshly scrubbed of an early September morning in 1935, we were taken by our separate mothers to the Academy Street School in Watertown and enrolled in Miss Whitney’s kindergarten class. Neither Wiley nor I has any memory of that meeting and are united only in the memory of Miss Whitney and Old Charlie Reilly. Miss Whitney had snow-white, frazzled curly hair, the result I expect of too many permanents, a red face, and deceptively hawklike features, deceptive in that she was a tolerant charming woman who had an easy way with children. In the morning we were given chocolate milk in half-pint bottles, straws through which to drink it, and cookies. In the afternoons we took enforced naps on tumbling mats we used for exercise. We did projects and projects and projects, the only one I recall a watercolor of anything we chose to paint. At the time the Brigadier, my sister, and I were heavily into cowboys and spent a good deal of our home hours drawing, over and over again, the same cowboy, my sister and I copying or practically tracing the Brigadier’s.

As he was older, at a higher grade level, and had therefore been subjected to more lessons attempting to reproduce the human anatomy in some semblance of dimensional perspective (as yet Grandma Moses hadn’t reached her sixtieth birthday, begun her art career, and with her paintings tacitly proclaimed to the world, “Fuck perspective”), I took my lead from the Brigadier, drew a cowboy cum Stetson, neckerchief, chaps, boots, lariat, cacti, mountain horizon, the works, and mine was deemed so superior by Miss Whitney that she paraded me from classroom to classroom and had me display my creation before my more learned upper-grade school mates. When we entered the Brigadier’s room, he put his head down on his folded arms on his desk, hid behind the kid in front of him, and sneered. To this day I don’t know what he sneered but whenever I summon up the incident I project the adult Brigadier into that third-grader, put an Antonio y Cleopatra into his mouth, and around it have him saying, “Look at that frigging hot dog!” Despite the Brigadier’s grandiose condescension, that plagiarized son of the prairie was the apex of my otherwise utterly undistinguished academic career in the Watertown public school system.

Old Charlie Reilly was principal. His office was on the same side as but at the opposite end of the corridor from our kindergarten room. As mysterious and omniscient as the Dalai Lama, he sat behind his closed office door. He had the blackest hair I’d ever seen, was the constant bearer of a formidable and apparently ineradicable five o’clock shadow, and also wore the thickest glasses I’d ever seen. In the seven years I was in his charge I can honestly say that though to my recollection his eyes were brown I was never able to get them into focus long enough to know their precise pigmentation, such was the eerie effect of his prescription. During his childhood in Albany, Old Charlie Reilly had been inadvertently hit so severely in the eye with a baseball bat that the eye had been dislodged from its socket and the specialist had pleaded for its removal, which Old Charlie Reilly and his parents adamantly declined, ending forever Old Charlie Reilly’s dream of green, green outfields and leaving him with one eye so maverick in its cavity it seemed literally to hop and to skip behind those spooky lenses.

Far worse than anything else for Old Charlie Reilly, somewhere along the line he had cultivated a love for literature and, against his doctors’ strenuous objections and doubtless any number of new prescriptions for ever and ever thicker lenses, he read eight, nine, ten books a week, holding the volumes four to five inches from his eyes, a good deal of this reading taking place behind the closed door to his office, where I doubt his administrative duties were all that burdensome.

Notwithstanding that Old Charlie Reilly was a lover of, a man obsessed with, words, we were impressed from the day of our enrollment in Miss Whitney’s kindergarten class that the last place in the world we wanted to be sent was to Old Charlie Reilly for disciplining. From the moment one reached the second or third grade, however, this prospect held out little trepidation to the students and by the time we graduated into junior high school it held out no fear whatever. By then Hitler had invaded Poland, the evacuation of Dunkirk had come and gone, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor; and Hollywood, fantasies at the ready, had joined the fray to make the world safe for democracy, General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Hollywood. A recurring vignette had the archetypal ugly Gestapo inquisitor confronting the befuddled bespectacled academic, always played by Hume Cronyn, and invariably the moment arrived where Cronyn dropped his glasses to the dungeon’s sleazy floor, and the rodentlike, swastika-emblazoned Gestapo officer, who held his cigarette cradled up between his middle finger and thumb and sucked on it in the most voraciously erotic and suggestive way, perpetrated the ultimate cruelty, smiled and ground the glasses back into sand beneath the heel of his shimmering black boot. I always imagined Old Charlie Reilly the hapless helpless academic.