Last Notes from Home (37 page)

Cass died near the end of October, goddamn her rotten selfish soul. Even when years later I read the psychological claptrap suggesting the patient-victim refuses to eat “in response to an unconscious urge to make herself unattractive to boys” or, and more telling in Cass’s case, “there is an association between eating and oral sex and a refusal to eat is a refusal to admit the idea of fellation,” above and beyond all this pontificating dribble, yet the thing was to survive in order to discover just how innocuous and paltry our sins had been. As ridiculously ironical as it may seem, considering my own cringing cowardice in the matter, I never did forgive Cass.

It took me a quarter of a century and a lot of living even to say good-bye to Cass. One autumn day I bought a dozen long-stemmed white roses, went to the lovely shaded Brookside Cemetery on the south side of the city, and asked the caretaker to direct me to Cass’s grave, which, as it happened, wasn’t far from my father’s stone. Believe me when I say I’d fully intended to tell Cass I’d forgiven her as well as myself. But when I got to the grave I found I was sobbing so uncontrollably that snot was leaking from my nose, between terrifying, gasping sobs I spat out,
“Fuck you, Cass,”
then walked to my father’s grave and laid the long-stemmed white roses there, which in a way was really the first time I’d been mature enough to say good-bye to Dad.

Two days before the test, while cleaning my aunt’s garage, I took a Coke break (Coca-Cola in those ingenuous days) and skimmed an ancient dog-eared dust-ridden
Reader’s Digest.
In it there was an article on Bolivia or Argentina or Chile, one of those countries, and because I was at the time studying Spanish I naturally read it. On the test two days later, the student was asked to translate an article from Spanish to English and I hadn’t read three sentences before it occurred to me, my stomach in my mouth (as though I’d done something spooky, I actually looked over both shoulders), that it was the article I’d just read in my aunt’s garage, obviously taken from the
Digest’s
Spanish edition. Effortlessly I slipped through the translation, had it come out in glibly idiomatic English, was given twenty-nine of thirty points, a pat on the head from my proud tutor, and an overall 86 Regents grade. As I was that year named to the North Westchester Interscholastic League all-star basketball team, it was in many ways the most productive year of my life. As I’ve said elsewhere, four of our five starters got basketball scholarships, to Springfield College, Bowling Green, Bradley, and the University of Texas. The reason I didn’t was that my five-ten height, though not as grotesquely impossible as it would be today, mitigated against me.

Perhaps my reason for not recognizing Fairley nearly thirty years later was that, like Dorian Gray, he had changed so incredibly little. I was staying with friends on Singer Island, Florida, where I had spent a good deal of my adulthood. Whenever, at four, I made my afternoon pilgrimage to the Beer Barrel for draft beer, I’d find I’d no sooner be seated than Fairley and Howie, the latter now well into his thirties, would wheel their ten-speed bicycles into the bar, lean them against the brick wall fronting the street, take stools on the opposite side of the bar from me, and order two cans of Budweiser. They’d be sweating from their afternoon exertions. Although we invariably nodded politely at each other, there was on their part no sign of recognition either, and they invariably asked for blank paper and a ballpoint and went into a whispering huddle that seemed to involve a good deal of adding and subtracting. Fairley and Howie, I later learned, were buying and selling a good deal of Florida real estate, lots, homes, condominiums.

Not recognizing Fairley may have been understandable, not seeing Cookie Parish written all over Howie’s handsome mug was unforgivable. Of course Fairley was the last guy in the world anyone would have expected to see taking daily exercise, .his hair was still a vigorish black, and where his pallor had once evidenced the sickly gray of night people the sun had now turned him an olive dark and for the second time he manifested the Siciliano in him. Fairley had to be sixty-five, he looked forty-five; Howie had to be late thirties, he looked mid-twenties, athlete written all over him, including the badge of all contact sport jocks, a partial plate in the uppers of what were otherwise perfect teeth. One afternoon, having nodded politely at each other and going immediately to our own things, Exley to dreams, Fairley and Howie to the reality of figures, from the far end of the room the bartender Jaylene hollered, “Hey, Exley, you’re wanted on the phone.”

It was my hostess informing me that her husband had called from his office and was actually taking her to the Top of the Spray for dinner that night. “Can you believe that shit, Ex?” In fact, Moose invariably took Veronica out once a week but it utterly behooved Veronica’s homemaker martyrdom to see the mysterious miracle of an ongoing
affaire de coeur
in something as unredeemably American as a New York strip steak and a baked potato with sour cream and chives.

As Moose and Veronica had long since given up suggesting I put on a necktie and join them, I was, one must understand, getting directions for the preparation of my supper. There was a tuna casserole and a tossed salad in the refrigerator. Veronica told me at what temperature to set the oven and how long to bake the casserole. As for the tossed salad, all I had to do was put the dressing of my choice on it. Exley is saying yeah, yeah. Veronica also told me that a Hemingway short story was being dramatized on the public TV channel that night. Exley gave his bored yeah, bored because I knew when I got home all this would be neatly spelled out (itemized A, B, C, etc.) on a note under the salt and pepper mills on the kitchen table. If I dwell at length, laughingly imagining my liberated woman reader cringing at what a loutish subservient boob this Veronica must be, I dwell at this length so that I might disarm that reader by saying that Veronica is one of the brightest, most competent, and tough-minded women I’ve ever known, and I defy any honest reader, however exaltedly liberated, to challenge the truth that a woman never, never gets over the intransigent myth that there is something basically and despicably infantile—as indeed there may be—in a man. My all-time favorite came from a girl—a Berkeley Phi Beta Kappa—with whom I once lived briefly. “Dearest Ex, When you do our laundry today, please,
please
don’t roll your socks into balls. Naturally, for convenience’s sake, you’ll want to pair them. But just lay them flat, one atop the other. Rolling them wrecks the elastic that holds them up, shortens their life span, and if one day you dress hurriedly—and you, asshole, never dress any other way!—and go to some nice place, you’ll find that in embarrassment you are continually reaching down to your ankles to pull them up to your calves. Where they belong! Love and XXXXXXXXs, G.”

When I returned to my barstool, I sensed immediately that there was something terribly wrong in the room, some palpable absence of motion and muted sound, an eerie feeling that time had suspended itself, no, that time had fleetingly regressed and, my face already reddening in abruptly queasy recognition, my breathing stayed, my jaw slack, I looked up and across the bar to find both Fairley and Howie equally agape in astonishment.

“Fred?” Fairley said.

“Fairley? Howie?
Howie?”

Fairley and Howie had adjoining spacious apartments on one of the top floors of the Cote d’Azur, one of the new, extremely costly condominiums that had sprung up on and all but ruined the Singer Island I’d first known twenty years earlier. The island had then been a place of first-name familiarity, of one-story sidewalk cafes where, in one’s bathing trunks, a guy could buy a can or shell of beer and with it in hand wander from one cafe to the next in search of friends, a place where (and I kid you not) the billionaire, John D. MacArthur, had electric eye doors installed in his Colonnades Beach Hotel so that a buddy of his, a tramp Basset hound with one ball (that one dragged on the pavement, too!), could enter the lobby, walk through the dining room, exit the back door, and take a dip in the pool. And screw the sensibilities of the guests.

On the lower floors of the Cote d’Azur Fairley owned four other condominiums, three of which he leased, the fourth a one-bedroom he kept for guests from “up home.” I expect it was at this point in our conversation, for Fairley and Howie, after vigorous handshakes and embraces, had immediately asked me over for a drink, that Fairley suggested that any time I wanted the one-bedroom—“You know what I mean, Ex, to write or somethin’” —for the winter, I shouldn’t hesitate to ask, I expect it was at this point that I was finally and relievedly certain that Fairley hadn’t brought me to his apartment for ancient and futile recriminations. There was, in fact, something so touchingly urgent and self-effacing in his invitation that I had no doubt Fairley genuinely wanted me in that apartment, that for whatever reason he desperately yearned for some proximity to me. Unless we are psychopathic, we spend our lives as psychologically self-flagellating penitents and Fairley was in some odd way making amends, struggling mightily to articulate apologies that weren’t necessary, being crumbled into old age by all the days and acts that waste the soul. And for what was Fairley trying to apologize? For smashing and bloodying my nose? No, if anyone ever had it coming, I had. In his contrivedly dramatic way, Fairley was groping for something quite else.

Although I could see Howie fidgeting anxiously, irritably repressing the urge to help his father put into words what he must have known Fairley was building up to, for a time at least Howie neither intruded on whatever Fairley felt was between himself and me nor once interrupted the don. When I say don, I of course do so in the most blatantly tongue-in-cheek way. If Fairley was part of an organization, as he most certainly was, he would have been something a good deal more than what romance novelists call “a soldier.” It was, however, obviously a question that out of simple courtesy—not fear—one did not put to Fairley. For all that, I had no doubt whatever that had I, in an academic way, put such a question to Fairley, he knew enough about me, I about him, to know that without blinking an eye he would have given me the larger upstate New York picture, chapter, verse, and numbers.

Fairley and Howie, for example, had recently seen
The Godfather
and Howie told me how “Pop” had, to the consternation and extreme ire of those viewers seated around them, laughed all the way through it, including laughing at those places the audience was accepting with a reverent solemnity. When they were leaving the theater, Howie said, Pop, still chuckling helplessly, had turned to him and said, “Howie, that was the most hilarious Guinea fairy tale I ever saw.” Caught up in the spirit of it, and laughing in reminiscence, Fairley leaped from his chair, disappeared and returned wearing a shoulder holster over his cyclist’s sweatshirt, bearing a great iron skillet in his right hand. For my present edification, Fairley now put on his best mock-Siciliano accent, with his left hand made an urgent stirring motion in the skillet and said, “You know, Ex, first-ah we make-ah up some-ah nice-ah spicy meatballs, then we go make-ah dun hits.” Howie and I laughed. Fairley couldn’t have more eloquently exonerated himself from any notion that however he’d spent his days, it had been just as dreary and time-consuming—though doubtless extremely more lucrative—than an insurance man’s showing up at the same underwriter’s desk for thirty years.

Howie blew his stack only once. An hour and three vodka and tonics into the conversation we were on to the subject of Cookie. “It was what the shrinks call—what is it they call it, Howie?”

“Schizophrenia. She was a goddamn hopeless schizophrenic, Pop.”
Howie was fuming.

“There’s no need to get nasty about it. And it’s your mother we’re talking about!”

. “Yes, there is a need to get nasty. I hate it when you do that to me, Pop. Use me for your straight man, your educated son from Colgate. I got a B.A. in business—with a C minus average, I might add—and learned more in a month working for you than I did in four years at Hamilton. I was a fucking jock, Pop. I don’t give a goddamn if you do it in front of people we don’t care about. But this is Ex, for Christ’s sake. He’s family, he was there at the beginning and don’t think he can’t see through that dumb wop facade of yours. It’s humiliating, Pop. It’s goddamn humiliating.”

Fairley was stony with shame, for that fleeting moment sagging under the weight of his sixty-five years.

Howie turned to me and spoke, his voice considerably moderated. “You know what he did, Ex? He paid some quack shrink across the inlet in Palm Beach a hundred and fifty clams an hour for a solid year so he could talk about Cookie and her sister, Cass’s mom that is, and Cass. Before he even went to this clown, he must have read twenty volumes on schizophrenia. Ill take you into his bedroom and show them to you. He tortures himself with it. After a year of being reassured that he couldn’t have done anything to help either of them—the fucking quack even told Fairley he knew more about schizophrenia than the quack did—Fairley still tortures himself with the notion that he didn’t do enough. He refuses to dwell on the nice things he’s done for people. If I ever told you, Ex, you’d shit—the people’s houses and cars he saved from the banks, the fuel and grocery bills he paid so kids wouldn’t freeze or starve, I’m talking here about thousands and thousands of dollars. When he mentioned buying your brother Bill that Pontiac, it was the first time I ever heard him admit to having done anything for anyone. And what happens? He gets so flustered for having let that kindness slip out, he can’t talk for five minutes. He thought Bill had told you.” He turned back to Fairley. “Admit it, Fairley. You thought Bill had told Fred, didn’t you?
Admit it, Fairley”