Last Notes from Home (25 page)

The two on-duty cops were detailed, one on each arm, to escort a dignified Rex, shaking his head from side to side in incomprehensible hurt at the majestic injustice of it all, from the premises, while the high school fans screamed bloodcurdling epithets to the effect that the cops were unredeemable “fascists,” a word that had of course come into great vogue in those years. People said that Rex could not have gone into an alien community and lasted five minutes without getting himself locked up, the keys thrown away, our way of congratulating ourselves on our tolerance. Like Highwater Louie, who had been shell-shocked in World War I, and Woody, the peanut man at the games who drew pennies and nickels from the ears of pop-eyed little kids, Rex was one of our town’s acknowledged and protected eccentrics, Rex was, as it were,
ours,
as familiar as the Roswell P. Fowler Memorial Library at the bottom of Washington Street.

All the guys called Sally Jane Hannigan, without irony, “the Princess.” She was eighteen, extremely intelligent, beautiful beyond adolescent fantasies, so retiring the older guys in the locker room made book that butter wouldn’t melt in her armpit (“I’ll bet hair doesn’t even grow there!”) and that, assuming she mounted the throne mornings as other people did, which the older guys in the locker room, shuddering distastefully, said she obviously didn’t do, oh, no, not the
Princess,
she defecated lilac stalks in the full fruit of their fragrant cluster of white and lavender flowers.

Everyone liked her save our parents, who did not know her but did know that her mother, Jenny Hannigan, who looked,
really,
a more stunning, sexier kid sister to the Princess, was the undisputed luminary of Hilary’s brothel on Court Street and was said to have been, hands down, the particular favorite of the Oklahoma Indians of the Forty-fifth Infantry Division. Having trained at nearby Pine Camp, the Forty-fifth Infantry Division, under Patton (who else could have commanded them?), had invaded Sicily that July, going in at Scoglitti. By January 1944, as support troops to General John P. Lucas’s Sixth Corps, they would enter Italy at Anzio. When called upon to check the Germans’ Twenty-sixth Panzer Division at the Carroceto Creek on the Albano-Anzio road (how even today these names resound and permeate my being), they fought with the desperation, savagery, and nobility of their ancestors, thinking of Jenny, one somehow imagines, as they did so and happy that the historical stars had been in such conjunction that they could have left her a wealthy woman in Watertown.

Astonishment does not do justice to what the crowd was undergoing. It would be more accurate to say that for no few moments everyone’s heart stopped beating. In the first place, no one had ever seen the Princess with a boy other than her cousin, Juice Dooley. On December 7,1941, Juice’s father had been a pilot in naval reserve, he’d been called back, and because Juice’s mother had wanted to go with him (she was now in Honolulu, where he was training carrier pilots), Juice had moved in with his Aunt Jenny and the Princess. Like the Princess, Juice was very bright, except for grotesque ears he was very handsome, and, as anyone who’d ever mentioned his aunt’s occupation to him knew full well, he was “one tough Mick.” He and the Princess had graduated near the top of their class in June 1943, Juice had gone into the navy as a seaman, and the Princess had enrolled at St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York, where she’d dropped out after a few weeks, claiming it was too easy and mat she’d come home to await the following fall, when she’d deign to enroll in a university better equipped to challenge her intelligence. Although I was only thirteen the winter Rex took up with her, I never believed the older guys in the locker room when they said the reason they didn’t take the Princess out was social pressure from their parents. Nobody asked the Princess out for fear of her demurral.

In the second place, our incredulity rose dizzyingly because on what was obviously their first date the Princess was in such complete control that unlike her predecessors she wasn’t about to sit through a dopey jayvee game. Like those New York City sophisticates who pay thirty bucks for a theater ticket and arrive near the close of the first act, she’d had the serene audacity not even to show until five minutes after the varsity tipoff. Moreover, with mysterious guile she’d persuaded Rex, an authentic maverick, and
our
maverick at that, to wear a costume matching hers, and all during that first evening they sat, the two of them, and gave us a preview of what we might expect throughout that endless winter. Yes, all that winter they sat, the two of them, the pain in the asses, their hands folded primly on their laps, attired in matching clannish tam-o’-shanters, yellow slickers, navy pea jackets, beige camel hairs, the perfect couple—
ugh.
That night Rex never once leapt from his chair or allowed himself any gesture but that of polite applause, at which the Princess would allow that calm olive mask to open, exposing the most perfectly beautiful great white teeth imaginable, a smile of approval at Bucky Donahue’s displaying his breathtakingly nonchalant left-handed hook shot.

It was the weirdest scene I’d ever witnessed, and it would, as I say, continue that way to a lesser degree throughout the season. It wasn’t so much that the Princess diminished Rex but that by diminishing him she diminished us. Since we were toddlers we’d looked to Rex to take the lead at games and now that his eyes had glazed over; now that he bore a permanently absurd, rather crapulous smile; now that he was living concussed, conversant with cheru-bims, suffering brain trauma more severe than anything he’d known as a child, oblivious to everything but the warm pulsing presence (and, oh, dear heart, what a presence!) of the Princess; now that he was unmistakably in love and we knew in the discomfiting place where truth resides that the Princess was one girl—despite our parents’ suffocatingly moral hackneyisms to the effect that, like her mother, the Princess was damned and doomed—who wouldn’t be lying down on the rich carpeting before the great limestone hearth; now that we knew if the Princess ever did lie down, it would be at her time on her direction (poor Rex had been rendered such wispy flesh he couldn’t have directed a girl to the ladies’ room); now that, as abruptly as the guillotine does its bloody work, Rex was no longer among the living, what a sad and sorry, dejected and listless, rudderless and skipperless crowd we became, adrift on silent measureless seas.

No, I’d never seen anything quite like it. Watertown lost that first night 58-57, with the score changing hands at almost every turnover of the ball, and what ordinarily would have been a full-fanged ravenously lunatic crowd sat as forlorn as basset hounds, our hands buried beneath our stolid thighs, looking with sick unbelieving longing across the way at Rex. Over all, I’m sure, there was this sense of irreparable injured betrayal at the same time we thought, wrongly of course, that at any moment he would throw off his cancerous aberration, rise up from the yoke of his palpable and diseased apathy, and rally us by at least allowing his tongue to slither out or stuff his thumbs into his ears. In our ingenuousness that was how little we knew of the murderously numbing effect of love on the human heart. In their snug-fitting short purple satin skirts the cheerleaders’ bums looked as appetizing as ever. Rena Ruth Gillis still had her lovely old wazoos. Even in defeat in the locker room, Bucky Donahue could yet say of Inez Sue Dobbins that his vision of the beatific death was to go with his head between her thighs. Save for Rex—now gone somewhere far, far away—the participants were the same, but as hard as the poor girls tried they were quite unable to ignite the crowd and they finally gave it up and sat in stunned disbelief with the rest of us.

To this day I’m not precisely certain what happened to the Princess, though I like to think of her being as much a casualty of war as some of Jenny’s Injun pals had been at the Carroceto Creek in Latium. In February 1944, her cousin, Seaman First Class Juice Dooley, had been forced to abandon his destroyer escort in a battle, near Kwajalein, for the Marshall Islands. Before he was picked up from the ocean he’d received oil burns on his upper torso, as well as first- and second-degree sunburn on his face and neck. By late May he was home on thirty-day leave, an authentic walking wounded and Pacific hero, looking handsomer than ever despite his strange ears. That night the Princess was said to have had her usual date with Rex, he’d dropped her home at midnight, and by 2:30 she was dead on arrival at the House of the Good Samaritan. As nearly as I could determine, after going into the house she and Juice had decided to go for a nocturnal spin in Jenny’s 1940 Cadillac convertible, had ended in the lovers’ lane we knew as the Gotham Street stone quarry, a “loose” rock had fallen from high up the quarry’s cliff, had hit the Princess on the head, and by the time Juice Dooley carried the bloody and—oh, my—naked Princess into the emergency room she was already dead.

Two nights later I was at Wiley Hampson’s for supper. Wiley’s father Sy had gone into the kitchen to help Mrs. Hampson with the dishes, and suddenly Wiley was violently shushing me that we might hear their conversation, a conversation that was, in unending variations, being bantered about in every kitchen and bedroom in Watertown. Mrs. Hampson demanded to know why the Dooley boy hadn’t had the decency to dress the Princess before rushing her to the emergency room, then added that as cousins engaging in sex they were nothing more than lace-curtain trash and God—”the Devil, I should say”—would have done well to take them both under an avalanche of stone.

Usually a mild-mannered man, Sy Hampson would nevertheless have none of this and I’d never heard his voice so angry. He pointed out that the Princess’s and Juice’s mothers were stepsisters, that no blood was binding Juice and the Princess, and that there was no way their acts could be construed as incestuous. Sy Hampson said further that it was certainly not unreasonable, indeed it was doubtless inevitable, as the Dooley boy had certainly taken enough lumps defending the honor of both the Princess and her mother Jenny, that the Princess would be in love with him. Who else had the girl had to turn to in all her years of isolation from the community? In all the years Mama Hampson and the rest of the town biddies had ostracized her for her mother’s vocation? In the brief year since the Dooley boy had left home he’d undergone his boot training at the Sampson Naval Station (he’d been taught how to react, that is), he’d fought the battle for the Marshall Islands, he’d been left in Pacific waters for three days before being rescued, he’d become a man, Sy Hampson’s voice seemed to suggest, and to expect him to waste time bothering to reclothe a beautiful, intelligent young woman with blood gushing from her scalp, that he might spare the sensibilities of Mrs. Hampson and her sisters in charity—‘Talk about lace-curtain trash!”—was so laughable as to be demented.

“Go tell it to your precious Reverend Donaldson. You know what he’ll tell you, don’t you, Ethel? He’ll tell you to mind your Ps and Qs.”

About the whole business Wiley and I kidded ourselves that we didn’t harbor a terrible secret. We never spoke of it. The Gotham Street quarry was in our, the Thompson Park, section of town and since we were kids we’d sneaked from the house on Friday and Saturday nights, had made our way up a trail on the back side of the quarry, and had rained pebbles down on lovers’ cars. During puberty, sensing that at thirteen we were only three or four years from parking there ourselves, Wiley and I had abandoned such foolishness, which is not to say we hadn’t initiated younger kids in the neighborhood into the “sport.” And though everyone in Watertown seemed perfectly willing to accept the Princess’s (she was after all the daughter of the infamous Jenny, an Indian love goddess) demise as an act of God, in that a rock as big as a melon loosened itself and fell from high up the precipice smack atop her astonishingly lovely head, in fact everyone had known for years about the “park rats,” as we were called, and our causing
coitus interruptus
in uncountable upstate lovers. Balming my conscience all these years has been no easy matter. Without ever having checked—I daren’t do so—the morgue of the local newspaper, I’ve chosen to believe the weather was cloudy that night, the sky moonless, and that one of our nitwit park-rat protégés, standing so high up there in the darkness, had only been able to make out the vaguest outline of Jenny’s convertible and had no idea whatever that the canvas was down.