Last Notes from Home (20 page)

“No, no,
no.
We used to get bad ice storms up around Wanakena and extra gangs from Watertown used to come up and help repair the wires. My father said it once took six troopers twenty minutes to subdue your father in the bar of the hotel up there. And the fucking troopers were using their billies! The old man said your dad was a better athlete than me, too.”

“Is that where you’re from—Wanakena?”

“Forget about where I’m from.”

“Where’s your dad now?”

Toby seemed equally reluctant to answer even that. Finally he said, “He’s dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No need to be.”

I don’t know why I started anything as manifestly academic as I now started.

“How do you spell your last name, Toby?”

“F-A-R-Q-U-A-R-S-O-N.”

“Are you the one they call Farr?”

“Yeah, who the fuck’d yuh think I was?”

My irritation mounted moment by moment but I didn’t say what was really bothering me until we had left Interstate 81 at the Bay exit and were ten minutes from the old lady’s house.

“Don’t you ever,
ever
do that to me again, Toby!”

“Do
what,
for Christ’s sake?”

‘The Ass was in the parking lot all goddamn night, right where we goddamn well left it! Wherever in hell’s half acre you went, you went with somebody else, hot-wired a car, or walked. You went on a fucking caper, one that took you a helluva lot longer than you figured!”

“So what if I did?”

“So what if I did?
So this if you did:
if you think you’re ever going to set me up for a perjury rap by telling troopers you were drinking with me all night in some crowded bar—oh, very conveniently crowded!—you are bonkers, Toby,
bonkers
!”

Parked in front of the old lady’s house, we struck our “bargain” that night, shaking hands on it, the bargain in which I had only not to probe Toby where “home” was.

Toby never set me up again. Unlike the old lady’s prescribed Demerol, I got whatever Serax I couldn’t get from Alissa from Dr. Toby Farquarson III, unprescnbed and gratis. Toby Farquarson III was also part of home. And is it any wonder that he and the nefarious James Seamus Finbar O’Twoomey hit it off so quickly?

The only thing, Big Matt, that will surprise—
astonish
is perhaps the better word—is that at that moment just after Taps a very strange dude with a black eye patch and a black leather left hand, dressed in a double-breasted brown suit, shall step from a command car, scurry across the lawn to the end of the bier, accept and present the flags to Judy and the old lady, then vanish as quickly as he appeared.

Speaking of James Jones, one night after we’d visited the Brigadier at Tripler, Malia and Wiley took me for a drink to the top of the Sheraton Waikiki to the Hano Hano Room, where we were to meet Robin. As the back bar is floor-to-ceiling plate glass, they wanted me to see the glittering night lights along Waikiki. As I had been thinking a lot about Jones’s Twenty-fifth Infantry Division having its permanent home at Schofield Barracks in Honolulu, I abruptly found myself thinking of the scene in
From Here to Eternity
where Privates Prewitt and Maggio, drunk, are sitting on the curb in front of the Royal Hawaiian, nipping at a bottle, and debating whether to go in and make out with the movie actresses.

Years later, in a wonderfully poignant eulogy written on Jones’s death, Joan Didion would also call back that scene and when I asked Malia where the Royal Hawaiian was, to my astonishment she said it was right next door, to take the elevator to the lobby, walk out to Kalakaua and turn right. I did so, accompanied by Robin, and though I did not attempt to find the curb space Prewitt and Maggio had occupied, I did raise my plastic cup of vodka and take a sip, my salute to Jones, to which Robin of course laughed cruelly. In one of those grand .ironies that Jones would have loved, the Japanese now own the Royal Hawaiian, as they do eleven of the fourteen first class hotels along Waikiki, and whereas on that, my first view of the Pink Palace, one could see across a wide expanse of beautifully cropped lawn, gardened and lighted up by Oriental lanterns, the Japanese have now built an architectural monstrosity they call a mall, a building so relentlessly ugly the locals call it the Fortress, and the Oshkosh stroller on Kalakaua can no longer get even a glimpse of Waikiki’s most legendary hotel.

If the milieu of Dodge City, Big Jim, is divided into white and black Stetsons, I ought to say that for a good part of the ceremony I found myself thinking of the writings of Edmund Wilson, and especially of a brief passage in his attack on the Internal Revenue Service,
The Cold War and the Income Tax.
There had been a period in my life when I’d gone systematically through every book Wilson had written (he not only taught me how to read but did more for me than any psychiatrist had been able to do), and I was thinking of this particular passage because it illustrated that all members of the State Department’s Watertown mafia were not ipso facto black hats.

When I said earlier, for example, that for all practical purposes the twentieth century began with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, it is because of one of the Watertown mafia, Charles “Chip” Bohlen, our man from twenty-five miles upriver at Cape Vincent, that we now know the twentieth century—at least the abomination we have been forced to live with—need never have begun at all. According to Wilson, it had been known for some time before the attack on Hiroshima that the Japanese had told Stalin of their desire to negotiate a peace. For a long time we made Stalin the fall guy by claiming he withheld this information in order to prolong the conflict so he could declare war on Japan and, in victory, claim his share of the booty. According to our Cape Vincent man, Chip Bohlen, however, Stalin fully informed President Truman at Potsdam and Truman refused to listen to this peace initiative. Oh, how very different, Marshal Dillon, the twentieth century might indeed have been.

Saigon airport or what was familiarly known as Pentagon East and living a short distance away at BOQ One. He had been there during the Tet offensive, the worst of times, the Cong or Charlie or the Gook was in the streets of Saigon, the Brigadier and his friends were working eighteen- and twenty-hour days and so unsure of getting back to BOQ One for four hours’ sleep, they were carrying army-issue .45 sidearms and automatic weapons to ward off ambush. It was during this time that the now famous film of the police chief of Saigon blowing away the head of an alleged Cong in the middle of a street came out.

Arriving at the desk of the midtown hotel, I asked if a Col. William Exley had checked in, was told no but that a Bill Exley had. I smiled. Although the distinguished reporter, Seymour M. Hersh, hadn’t as yet broken the complete story of My Lai 4, morale in the military was at an all-time low. They had been stripped of any remnants of pride. Gone were the pomp and ceremony. Not only did they never caparison themselves and primp about in their uniforms, they seldom if ever volunteered their rank. In response to what he did for a living, I’d once heard the Brigadier say he was “in government.” Learning that there was a refrigerator in the room, I walked across the street and at a grocer’s bought two six-packs of Budweiser, for which, in 1969, they charged me seven dollars apiece. Welcome to Manhattan. Then I returned to the lobby and stepped into the elevator. I was ready for the Brigadier and was going to do it to him good.

When I unlocked the door and stepped into the room, I intended to say, my voice brimming with histrionically amused irony, “Hey, Brigadier! Hey, old pukka sahib, how’s your good buddy—ha, ha, ha!—Willie Westmoreland?” One had only to look at the Brigadier to think better of any such opening sally and to my abruptly culled alternative, “Hi! How are you? I brought you some beer,” he neither responded nor even looked up from his chair or the movie he was watching on TV. Indeed, so much had the Brigadier always intimidated me that I, who was going to be in complete control, abruptly found myself in a damn near hysterical monologue.

“That’s either channel five or channel thirteen,” I capaciously and gingerly volunteered, rather as if the Brigadier was a spaced-out muscle-bound dude with a switchblade at my Adam’s apple and I was coweringly offering up my wallet. “They show great old movies down here in the afternoon. Late at night too. Anyone with chronic insomnia ought to move into the Manhattan area
al instante.
No shit. A fact. Besides, the Establishment—you know, the multinationals, the guys on the floor of the exchange, Kojak, the various intelligence services”—that didn’t even get a rise!—“et cetera, et cetera—can keep Negroes and Puerto Ricans off the streets during the witching hours. They’re all home watching Jimmy Cagney plan his bank heists. You and me? During the commercials we go to our Sears Coldspots, make a ham-and-cheese sandwich. These guys? They lift up boards in their floors and pore with loving myopia over their caches of bomb components, Pento-Mex and ammonium nitrate, their M-16s and sawed-off shotguns. They’re all going to skyjack a 747, fly down, suck Fidel’s cock, and luxuriate beneath palm trees drinking coconut milk and copulating with chiquitas. Nobody’s told them Fidel throws their sorry asses into a pokey that makes the Tombs look like the Yale Club. Even if they read it in
The New York Times,
they wouldn’t believe it. To them the
Times
is written for Jews and liberal Episcopalians, the
Daily News
for the fascist hard hats and mackerel snappers. Since Muhammad Ali, all these guys have become Muslims. What else can they do but gloat over their alarm clocks and dynamite sticks? They don’t have ham or cheese or Sears Coldspots.”

The Brigadier did not look up from Bogart-Edward G. On the dresser’s plate glass cover he had quartered three or four limes with his pocket knife and the opened knife, the lime pieces, and the lime juice spread out in an eerie Rorschach design atop the glass. The solid maple stand next to his chair held a quart of Gordon’s gin, a quart of Canada Dry quinine water, an ebony glass ashtray for the ashes of his Antonio y Cleopatra Grenadier (stuck as always in the side of his mouth, Bat-Guana fashion), and a half-empty gin, tonic, and squeezed lime in an escutcheoned gold leaf hotel glass. A small brass bucket placed between his feet held ice cubes. Although the Brigadier could easily do a case of beer a day, even when he was working, he seldom if ever drank hard stuff and I was surprised to see him doing so. I didn’t then know he’d been into gin since his return from Nam.

More than anything else, it was the Brigadier’s farcically touching attempt to travel in mufti that disarmed and amused me. At that moment I of course did not dare laugh. As always, his hair was shorn skin-close, still dark and vigorous at the dome, the bristles at his temples touched with gray. He wore his glasses with thick black shell rims; as his Antonio y Cleopatra was a constant in his mouth, he might have been said to be wearing that too. For the rest, he wore a button-down shirt of candy-striped white and pastel blue. Beneath the knot of his fortyish thin black knit necktie, as though for security reasons he were “double-checking his coordinates” as he hadn’t faith in his “shirt-buttoned right flank,” he had also attached a gold collar pin. His Weber & Heilbroner suit was of an expensive summer sharkskin, finely patterned with nubbly microdabs of red and gold and over all a more dark than medium blue. His feet were shod in those thick dark burgundy cordovans indigenous to the marine corps and other young males of the forties and fifties, perhaps the last shoe made in America, like the Model A Ford, which didn’t contain built within itself its own obsolescence. Staring at those shoes, I had to summon all my discipline to stay the laughter. In the late sixties there was no place in America, least of all would there be the next day at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, where the Brigadier wouldn’t instantly be recognized as fuzz, military, FBI, or CIA. To distract myself from the silliness welling up within me, I tore the cardboard from the six-packs, then put the cans of Budweiser into the refrigerator.

“Guess you don’t wannany beer, huh?”

The Brigadier did not deign to respond. For the first time he looked at me. With his index finger he slid his black shell-rimmed glasses up to the bridge of his handsome nose, his way of conveying to me he had me in riveting, inescapable focus. Under any circumstance I did not appreciate the Brigadier’s looking at me. He had a mocking, impertinent way of staring at one’s lips as though he were sardonically prepared for any idiocy that might fall from them. He had a face bereft of flesh, candid eyes, a nose too sane and knowing, and a slender neck topping his slender frame. His whole bearing suggested the cynicism and skepticism of the Greek, and like the Greek he seemed forever poised to counter one’s notions with a dazzling piece of sophistry. Long ago I had determined that he always unraveled my premises with what surfacely seemed the most rational and stunning counterarguments, but on a day or two’s hindview I would be able to see—too late, alas, for our immediate dialogue—that not only hadn’t he addressed himself to my arguments, he hadn’t really said anything at all. I wondered if this knack wasn’t something he’d picked up in one of the spook’s training schools. It probably was. He was also Greek in his unflagging belief in the moral rectitude of military might. Looking at him, though, I could see he no longer possessed the Anglo-Saxon stamina for field command, that he had cultivated a Gallic respect for the quick flourish, the abrupt insight, the devious thrust, that he was in effect perfect for what he was doing.