Last Notes from Home

  1988

  This book

  is for Aunt Frances

  and for Frances and Connie.

  In the order I met them it is also

  for Letizia, Markson, Styron,

  Loomis and Riedel

  .

  It is alleged by a member of my family that I used to suffer from insomnia at the age of four; and that when she asked me how I managed to occupy my time at night I answered, “I lie awake and think about the past.”

  —Ronald Knox

  I have seen the hippopotamus, both asleep and awake; and I can assure you that, awake or asleep, he is the ugliest of the works of God. But you must hear of my triumphs. Thackeray swears that he was eye-witness and ear-witness of the proudest event of my life. Two damsels were just about to pass that doorway which we, on Monday, in vain attempted to enter, when I was pointed out to them. “Mr. Macaulay!” cried the lovely pair. “Is that Mr. Macaulay?” And having paid a shilling to see Behemoth, they left him in the very moment at which he was about to display himself—but spare my modesty. I can wish for nothing more on earth, now that Madame Tussaud, in whose Pantheon I hoped once for a place, is dead.

  —Thomas Babington Macaulay to Thomas Flower Ellis

  A Note to the Reader

  “After parts of this book appeared in Rolling Stone, I received a letter from a prominent academic in the Southwest. Apologetic about reading Rolling Stone, explaining that his teenage sons subscribed to it, he wondered about the propriety of introducing a “real” brother, Col. William R. Exley (1926-1973), into a work of fiction. Had I then answered I’d have said I hoped my brother would have laughed. Were I answering today I’d say I’m sure my brother would have laughed. Jann Wenner, editor and publisher of Rolling Stone, in which four excerpts of this book appeared, was among the first to give me financial assistance. Yet another excerpt, in somewhat different form, appeared in Inside Sports.

  Contents

  PART ONE: Pilgrimage

  PART TWO: Interment and New Beginnings

  PART THREE: In the Days Before I Shot My Sister

  PART FOUR: Blowjob

  PART FIVE: Marriage and Resurrection

  PART ONE

  Pilgrimage

  1

  At seven in the morning I go to Oahu. What was going to be a few jolly days of imbibing and, hopefully, copulating with heartbreakingly beautiful Eurasian girls (I was obsessed with loin fantasies of Tahitian nymphets) has turned into a death watch. My elder brother, Bill, with whom I was one day hoping to spend these larksome days, is dying of cancer, a malignancy that began in the caecum—a pouch or “blind gut” lying between the large and small intestines. Because cancer of the caecum, I am told by a top local thoracic surgeon, has such a high incidence of cure, I can only assume the Brigadier let it go until the pain was beyond enduring. The Brigadier, I should here append, was always, always, a hard head.

  Although years ago I laid on him the cognomen of the Brigadier, Bill is only a full colonel. The Brigadier is a joke we had. Just graduated from Watertown High School, he entered the military at seventeen in February 1944. He served in three wars. He was much decorated, over the years being awarded the Silver Star, the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal, the Joint Services Commendation Medal, and two Purple Hearts. He rose steadily from the rank of private, and I used to chide him that he’d never know repose until he got his brigadier’s star. Although in response Bill invariably grumbled “Shee-it,” he never denied it.

  Convinced at length, however, that the footwork involved in promotion above the rank of full bird was more arduous and devious than he cared to cope with, that as a high school graduate competing with his West Point-VMI-Citadel brethren he would, for brigadier, be “passed over” for the first time (if one is twice passed over one’s retirement is, at least tacitly, demanded), he decided to take his retirement in Honolulu where he is assigned to the 500th Military Intelligence Group, the army’s top secret intelligence unit for the entire Pacific.

  His plans were to remain permanently on Oahu with his army brat wife, the daughter of another colonel, and his fifteen-year-old son. The Brigadier owns a three-hundred-thousand-dollar home in Kailua, a Honolulu suburb on the northeast shore of Oahu much favored by the military. As nearly as I can determine, he was hiring out to a real estate firm to supplement his ample colonel’s pension. He would sell property part time, sit at the edge of his kidney-shaped pool sunning himself, drink chilled Olympia (oh-lee) beer from the can, and call back the days of sacrifice and slaughter, of cannon and carnage, of madness, cowardice, and heroism. Although I ever so elegantly disapproved of it all—and the Brigadier damn well knew it (a lot he gave a shit!)—and there were times when I actually wondered how we could have issued from the same old lady’s loins within three years of one another, I yet had hoped that on his retirement I might spend a year with him at the patio of that blue pool and that together we might relate the story of his life. The Brigadier served in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, and I thought his tale might tell us something of the mid-twentieth-century American nightmare.

  Alas, the Brigadier and I shall never—at least together—tell the story of his life.

  The Brigadier was not sick. Rather, he was very sick and did not know it. The physical examination for the retiring military is scrupulous. Should a disease or injury incurred during one’s term of service be detected, it may mean the difference between one’s being retired at full or half pay. There is an ironic eye-expanding joke, doubtless apocryphal, among career soldiers that doctors always find something “wrong” with officers above the rank of brigadier and that they are thus always retired at full pay. In my brother’s case, and though he wasn’t really a brigadier, the joke did not apply. After the quacks kept calling him back for further X rays, they finally cut on him last November, took a peek, closed him back up, stitched him, and put him on the new cancer-controlling drugs. That was when the telephone wires between my hometown, Alexandria Bay, New York, a St. Lawrence River village just north of Watertown where I grew up, and Honolulu began crackling.

  I can hear the word cancer (my father died of lung lesions at forty) spoken sibilantly the length of a football field. Still, I did not at first grasp the details or realize the full import of what was happening. At the time I was locked up in an upstairs study of my mother’s house in Alexandria Bay, “the Bay,” absorbed in writing Pages from a Cold Island, and as November became December, then January, the calls between the old lady and my sister-in-law became alarmingly frequent. Lifting my fingers from my typewriter keys, my ears cocked tensely, my breathing suspended, I could hear the old lady in her downstairs bedroom talking across the continent and halfway across the Pacific. In the early days she said oh and oh and oh as if she were being made to understand the situation. Then as the days passed she said oh and oh and oh as if in thrall to the desolation of the Brigadier’s predicament. And always now I heard that demonic word cancer.

  Unexpectedly we received a letter from the military surgeon attending the Brigadier at the Tripler Army Hospital in Honolulu. My twin sister is a laboratory technician at the E. J. Noble Hospital here in the Bay. The monies to build the latter were donated by the wag who started Life Savers, the candy with the hole in it, a guy much enamored of our Thousand Islands. My sister gave the letter to our friend, Dr. Bob Burton, and asked his interpretation. Bob’s interpretation was as succinct and hair-curling as masterful poetry. The Brigadier’s case was terminal.

  The old lady downstairs has had one stroke, has a bad ticker, high blood pressure, gall bladder trouble, and those various diseases attendant to aging. Thus Frances took her to Bob’s office at the hospital, had him first check her blood pressure, then let Bob explain to her the hard
unalterable facts.

  From that day on the old lady began to weep a great deal, to wring her hands in anguish, and to make plans to visit Hawaii and for the last time see her eldest. Knowing the old lady’s fear of flying, I did not think the plans would befall. Presently it was February and the entirely unexpected happened, something that was destined to take me from the ivory tower of my upstairs study and force my own confrontation with life’s distressing eventualities, make me leave my cold and eyeless typewriter keys. The Brigadier, momentarily released from Tripler Army Hospital, called from Kailua. He talked at length with my mother, assuring her that everything was okey-dokey, and that the new “wonder” drugs were doing things just short of miraculous. Then he asked to speak to me.

  The old lady called and asked me to pick up the upstairs extension. When the Brigadier heard her ring off, he demanded to know if she could hear my voice. I said no and that she did not hear well in any event. Now he spoke to me in the way he always had, with unflagging abruptness, as both Brigadier and older brother. Under no circumstances did he want the old lady, considering her health and her inordinate trepidation of flying, to come to Hawaii. He was being readmitted to the Tripler Army Hospital, he looked ghastly, man, ghastly, ‘like a piece of shit,” and in no way did he want the old lady to see him in that condition.

  “Do you know what I’m telling you, kiddo?”

  I paused. I said yes. I wet my lips. Yet I paused again, my breathing labored. Taciturn, bewildered, painfully obstinate, I did not know what to say. At great length, and as though my voice were discrete and issuing from some soft-spoken man I did not know, I at last said I wanted to get away from my manuscript for a few days and might come to Oahu for an R & R. Knowing my pompously articulated distaste of the military, the Brigadier—as I hoped he would—got a kick out of my employing the jargon R & R. He laughed, around, I suspect, his ever-present Antonio y Cleopatra cigar. I said I could stay with my boyhood chum Wiley Hampson, with whom I’d started kindergarten and gone all through the Watertown public schools. Wiley had been on Oahu fifteen years, and from what I’d heard from mutual friends was doing well and owned a large pool hall and commercial fishing boats. As though it were a trifling afterthought, I said I’d then be able to get together with the Brigadier to chat and to tip ever so many drinks.

  “That might be a good idea.”

  From the day of that circumspect conversation I, like the old lady, went on my own walkabout, sans hand wringing and tears, in my thermal hunter’s underwear walking for miles on the Goose Bay Road with my boxer, the Killer. Atop the hill, where the February winds coming off the St. Lawrence whip furiously across the village’s golf course, the gasping cold cut to the marrow and the Killer licked his chops uneasily, his cropped ears lay timidly on his fawn dome, and he looked bewilderedly and beseechingly at me. But still I did not weep. Walking with my tuqued head downward to the icy shoulders of the Goose Bay Road, my face burnt cerise by the cold, I was one day abruptly conscious of something hard, acrid, alien, and ugly in my mouth. I removed my glove, spat into my instantly frigid palm, and realized, astonishingly, that I had been gnashing my teeth so severely I’d loosened a great silver filling from an upper left molar. As if it could somehow be reused, I put the filling in my pocket. Turning swiftly on our heels, the Killer and I—à corps perdu—ran all the way home.

  When we got to the house, both suffering tachycardia, I found a note from the old lady informing me she’d gone to Watertown shopping. Directly getting Honolulu information, I asked for Wiley Hampson’s number and presently was through to him at his home in Hawaii Kai, a suburb on the southeast shore of Oahu, not far south of Kailua. I hadn’t seen Wiley Hampson since 1949, during his mother, Ethel’s, wake, when he’d joined me at the Crystal Restaurant on Watertown’s Public Square and we’d tipped a few to help put Ethel’s ghost on its way. So we exchanged pleasantries for a time, then I came to the point. My brother, Col. William R. Exley, whom Wiley had known as long as he’d known me, which is to say forever, was doubtless dying over there in the Tripler Army Hospital. I could not remember the doctor’s name. Would Wiley get through to the attending quack and find out what was going on?

  “Look, Wiley, old buddy. These fucking jokers are awfully jealous of their prerogatives and reluctant as hell to discuss cases with nonrelatives. I don’t give a fuck how you do it. Explain you’re a lifelong friend, say you’re our half-brother, whatever. But make the fucker tell you what’s going on. And,” I added, “the old lady’s in Watertown shopping. So get back to me as soon as you can, will yuh?”

  Wiley was back to me within an hour, when I was halfway through my third can of Budweiser. The Brigadier, according to the military surgeon, was not leaving the Tripler Army Hospital alive. If I were going to see him in this life, I’d better come immediately. Would I, Wiley wanted to know, stay with him or with my sister-in-law?

  “Stay with me,” he said.

  “I probably will.”

  Now I called my sister-in-law in Kailua and explained to her what Wiley had just told me. She authenticated it. Had she made any plans to return the Brigadier’s body to the mainland for burial? She had not. The Brigadier’s request was that he be buried among his comrades in the famous Honolulu military cemetery in the extinct volcanic crater called Punchbowl. This did not surprise me. Although on the army’s idiocy the Brigadier could be supercilious, caustic, sardonic, downright abrasive, he loved and took pride in the military. He had seen more friends than he could count fall in battle, and I found his desire to lie among them altogether in character. Telling his wife about the Brigadier’s last call, in which he told me that under no circumstances did he want the old lady to come to Hawaii to see him, I said there was no way I could tell her I was going to Honolulu and get out of the house without her.

  “For Christ’s sake, shell be sitting on her packed suitcase on the front stoop!”

  If I couldn’t dissuade her, my sister-in-law suggested I bring her with me, park her in the waiting room, and at an appropriate moment in the conversation explain to the Brigadier she was outside and wanted to see him. Knowing something of the Brigadier’s temper and that ours is a family in which the elder’s wishes are damn near commands (almost Italian in character in this sense), the prospect did not seem a happy one. But having no choice, I agreed.

  I go forewarned. The Brigadier has wasted away. Besides his intestines, his liver and kidneys are now gone. There is a great amount of fluid on his stomach, and due to the “wonder” drugs he drifts between sleeping and waking, between rationality and irrationality. And as a weak man, and as rude as it may seem to my sister-in-law, I know I shall have no choice but to stay with Wiley. To get through this will take me a great deal of vodka, and the thought of doing a quart to a quart and a half a day in front of her, my nephew, and the old lady is—well—a dismally unnerving vision.

  Ironically, and for whatever morbid or odd reason—perhaps simply because Bill was military—I have over the years, in one article or another, read about Punchbowl Cemetery. Though dedicated as the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in September 1949, the first interment or reinterment in Punchbowl actually occurred in January of that year and was the remains of an unknown serviceman killed during the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Among those reinterred in Punchbowl that first year was Ernie Pyle, the World War II correspondent whom I’ve recently reread and was happy to discover read nearly as well as he had to a fifteen-year-old. Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gun fire at Ii-shima, a small island off the northern tip of Okinawa. It was of course the Americans’ securing of Okinawa (within weeks of Pyle’s death), a battle in which a hundred thousand Japanese were killed, that put our air force within easy reach of the metropolitan areas of Japan. At various times since the dedication, the remains of troops from World War II (reinterred), Korea (where the Brigadier received his wounds, the second time near fatally), and of course Vietnam have been buried there. Hence there emanates from this ext
inct volcanic crater a morose and ugly reminder of America’s century-long preoccupation with the South Pacific. The Hawaiian word for the cemetery is Puowaina. During the Hawaiian monarchy years ago heavy camion were mounted on the crater’s rims to protect Honolulu Harbor. Depending on which Hawaiian is translating Puowaina, it means “reverence in the highest degree” or “hill of sacrifice.’’ As much as I would later come to love Hawaii and the Hawaiians, I wonder if either of these translations is apposite to such a place.

  2

  Because the first leg of our American Airlines journey from Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport to Chicago’s O’Hare International—where after a forty-minute layover we were to connect with that line’s nine-hour-plus direct flight to Honolulu—left at seven in the morning, my brother-in-law John drove us the hundred miles from Alexandria Bay to Syracuse in the late afternoon of the preceding day. At the airline counter we first checked our suitcases through on the morning flight to Hawaii, I holding out only my toilet kit, the old lady two small overnight bags. We then registered at the Airport Inn, asked that our room be rung at 5:30 A.M., and said thanks and good-bye to John, who promised he’d be in daily contact with us by phone. For an in-law John has had over the years a surprisingly close and harmonious relationship with the Brigadier, in many respects a closer relationship than mine.

  After a solemn and speechless dinner in the dining room of the inn, the old lady having deep-fried fantail shrimp (as with many people distress causes the old lady to eat more heartily than otherwise), and I nibbling at a dreadful charcoaled filet mignon which tasted of chemicals and an equally dreadful salad (all raw carrots and tasteless winter tomatoes), I picked up the old lady’s two overnight bags, one a rouge zippered plastic satchel, the other an open black wool crocheted carpetbag patterned with red, orange, and yellow flowers, and led the way to our room. Detecting that the bags seemed inordinately heavy, I asked the old lady what the hell was in them. Rather sheepishly she explained she’d got a twelve-pound wheel of Heath cheddar cheese (probably the best in upstate New York) from the factory at Rodman, little more than a four corners southeast of Watertown, our county seat. It was a cheese the Brigadier much loved and was always asking to have mailed to him at the various ends of the earth where he was stationed.