Last Notes from Home

  By then it was 4 P.M., we were all to the point of inebriation past having even a pleasant time, digging into the steak-and-kidney pie and sundry other goodies and I was waging my not-so-subtle war with the insufferably Chesterfieldian Mrs. Dobbins, a war of which Tony had become eye-archedly and ironically aware. Three times in the first two days of my visit, Mrs. Dobbins had had to lean down close to my ear, as though at table we had forty guests to be excluded from her tart remonstrances, and remind me that when she’d served me I should return the sterling forks and ladles to her dishes convex side up so the utensils wouldn’t slither into the food mucking up the handles for the next chap. Chalk it to my shanty Irishness, Alissa, but with that third reminder Dobbins had drawn the line in the dirt before me, intrepidly defying me to step across, and I not only returned the servers convex side down, giving them a slurpy little push as I did so, but began looking forward to the nice runny gooey tomatoeylike dishes, the only one on Christmas Day being that marvelously liquescent creamed corn, peas, and mushrooms concoction. “Please, Mrs. Dobbins,” Tony said, “if you don’t mind,’’ and an utterly enraged Old Dobbie snapped out the linen she had folded over her apron string and without taking her harried unforgiving little eyes from me wiped the handle as clean as if she had silver-polished it.

  “So you have a brother who’s a bird colonel in the 500th MIG,” Tony said in response to a meager recitation I’d given on the Brigadier, the last member of my family I’d chosen to discuss. “An interesting outfit, the 500th MIG. That would be headed by Colonel X.” My abrupt loss of appetite wasn’t so much the result, Alissa, of Tony’s using what was to me the unfamiliar army shorthand MIG, when I had used Military Intelligence Group, as that, thirty years a Homerian scholar in exile, Tony apparently still had some inexplicable need to know who was running our various intelligence agencies. And he did know, Tony did know, for on our returning to the Bay my first order of business was to write the Brigadier and ask him if Colonel X was the commandant of the 500th MIG—he was indeed the commandant—and when I suggested to you that this was wondrously idiosyncratic information for Tony to possess you said only, “Tony knows the goddamndest things.”

  As dinner was breaking up Tony asked me, somewhat mystifyingly, if I’d mind meeting him in his study at ten the following, Boxing Day, morning. As drunk as I was that night I slept only sporadically with my door locked against you (no more scenes, thank you, Alissa), thinking the dotty bastard had summoned me there to ask how I intended supporting you, to explain how wealthy you were—as though I didn’t know!—and the responsibilities of money, to express the hope that I’d continue writing rather than devote my life exclusively to the enchantments of vodka. Imagine my surprise then, Alissa, when I arrived at the study to find this niddering popinjay Mr. Fowler, Tony’s tailor from Anderson and Shepard, 30 Savile Row, who, our hands having just separated from their limp introduction, began flitting around appraising me as though he were the casting director for an X-rated movie. Then suddenly he spread his tape measure across the unimposing breadth of my shoulders, dropped to a knee and with laughable British reserve measured my inseams not by flicking a ball aside and running down the inside but by coming down to the instep from a dimple in my haunch just below my ass.

  “I didn’t believe you’d come to London, Fred, until I picked Alissa up at Heathrow and actually saw you there. Yesterday I was embarrassed having no gift for you and as I was being fitted for some spring clothes today, I hoped that by way of apology you’d accept a suit to take back with you.”

  Tony did not of course ask me if I’d like a suit, least of all enquire what in the world I’d do with one in Alexandria Bay. Nor was it lost on me that Tony had had well over a week to get me some small gift and that seemingly he’d purposely chosen to present mine on Boxing Day, the day the gentry throw alms to their retainers who, for reasons quite unfathomable to an American, are rendered simperingly and absurdly appreciative. En route to the study I’d stopped by the kitchen for coffee and Mrs. Dobbins, profuse tears of gratitude in her eyes, had shown me her new blue leather gloves, her red knit scarf, and her GE electric Teflon fry pan you’d neglected, Alissa, winking at me as you did so, to declare at customs. After she’d poured my second cup of coffee, and knowing full well that, despite my promise to myself that morning to declare a truce, the war in all its majesty would begin anew, I said, “For all my kidding around, Mrs. Dobbins, your food is entirely too wonderful to cook in a piece of shit like that.” On the flight back to Montreal, you told me that Mrs. Dobbins had told Tony, spelling it out, s-h-i-t. I said, “Good.”

  As for the gift of the suit, my humiliation, Alissa, had never been more complete, my face throbbing with embarrassment, my body stony with shame, and for reasons that will become apparent I found myself thinking of a legend my grandfather in his dotage had used to repeat over and over again, that of the Irish schoolmaster Wright, a teacher of languages sentenced to five hundred lashes for a seditious note written in French and found on his person. Although the evidence suggested, if not proved, that the note had been composed by one of Wright’s pupils, the infamous magistrate, Thomas Judkin Fitzgerald, himself dragged Wright to the whipping triangle where, after fifty lashes, Wright’s entrails stood exposed, only to have Fitzgerald demand yet another hundred strokes. Wright was then cast into the mud to die.

  Despite my rhetorical and bombastic folderol directed against my Irishness, the Maguire in me had never been more salient than it was at that moment, and each time Mr. Fowler pinched, poked, prodded me with his tape measure, my body screamed and reeled with an agony nearly as excruciating as that of Wright’s feeling the cat. Yes, for the first time, Alissa, I truly understood empathy and the whole bloody and shameless history of England’s genocide of the Irish ran before me as in a nightmare. Had I not suddenly recalled that Wright had lived—yes, Alissa, Wright endured—I doubt I ever would have found the courage to break my clench-toothed silence. With a nonchalant shrug, which implied that my words had been inspired by the bookishness of Tony’s study, I said, ‘Tony, do you know Washington’s comment on the Irish Brigade who volunteered their services in the cause of our—should I say the American?—revolution? No? General Washington said that if defeated on all other fronts it was among these Irish troops that he’d take his final stand for freedom.”

  Tony arched that eyebrow, smiled, and said, “Oh” as though my words were completely lost on him. And then you backed him 100 percent that afternoon when we were, at my instigation, on our way to the library of the British Museum to see where Marx had done his research for and a good deal of the writing of Das Kapital, the polemics of which could hardly have found a more amenable milieu in which to be honed than among the most insufferably class-conscious boobs in the world.

  “Oh, oh, oh!” you screamed at me in the tube, and in case you hadn’t noticed it, Alissa, since the day you arrived in London the subway had become the tube, the TV the telly, the toilet the loo, panties had become knickers, a sausage a banger, a can of soup a tin of soup, and my all-time favorite, for which you damn near got a kick in the ass, a party became a rave-up. “That’s what I’d have said, too! Oh, oh, oh! You’re being measured for a suit that might be a gesture of generosity on Tony’s part because he likes you—likes? I think he’s afraid of you. What a joke!—and your sickening paranoia turns it into some attempt to humiliate you on Boxing Day. Hence you come up with a totally asinine piece of pedantry about George Washington and actually expect my poor father to make a connection between something as manifestly simple as Mr. Fowler’s fitting you for a suit and that cabalistic piece of Americana. Oh, oh, oh! You’re goddamn right that’s how I’d have responded. Under the circumstances what sane person would express anything other than the bewilderment Tony did? Oh, oh, oh!”

  “Shut up, Alissa. Did you just get As at Harvard or did you maybe once or twice draw analogies among what all them mugs were saying in all them fat books at Widener?”

  We neither of us spok
e or touched for perhaps an hour. Like an obedient and tentative little girl at my heels, sensing my enthralldom shrouded in fury, you followed me about the maze of the library. Then to rest we sat at that librarylike table in that alcove and you placed your leather-gloved hand on my inner thigh. “No.” “Please, Ex, don’t turn away from me now and stomp off in your churlish and childish anger. Which has, be honest, been the story of your life.” So in the most explosively erotic scene to which I’ve ever been a party, your russet hair came down spreading like a silken web over my lap, I gently stroked the back of your head, and then, at last and finally, I came. And though we would make love a few more times before I went to Hawaii to bury the Brigadier and there met Robin, it was never quite the same because you had to turn the heart-wrenching spontaneity of that moment away from love and make it yet another noble gesture whereby, in an almost clinical way, you were simply abating my psychotic hostility.

  Yes, it had been at that moment, more than at any other in our unending relationship as adversaries, when I saw not obscenity, as that laughably startled Limey who strolled by had, but love coupled with groveling penance, supplication, and heartfelt apologies for Tony’s unforgivable behavior to me, that moment when, as I have said, you became patient—and what so-called civilized person would not have viewed your sucking my cock in the British Museum library as an act of the most appalling dementia?—and I the vessel of your most repressed desires. Indeed, so much are you able to take things as they were and reconstrue them to your liking that I learned at our last unhappy meeting two years ago that in lieu of my taking up with Robin you had stopped spreading your legs for me because I was a psychopath. But this is nitpicking. When I said above that I didn’t like you as a person, and therefore was unable to tell you about myself, I also neglected to say that I’ve loved you since you were a child. Let me then attempt to put aside my contempt, Alissa, and try to make a new beginning by telling you about the time I shot my sister.

  4

  An the days before I shot my sister I spent endless time cultivating my left hand and cleaning the Brigadier’s guns, either activity able to fire in me sappy dreams of illustriousness. It was Llewellyn Rexford Bean, known interchangeably as Lew or Rex or Marilou Ellen, who as he jogged by the hour above me on the concave corrugated track—slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, watching me with wary intentness from the downward corner of his eye—grew piqued with my continuing to come from the right side, swoosh and swoosh and swoosh and swoosh, and suggested that if I weren’t going back to school I might put ‘—the days to better use by trying the same thing from the left side. Resting his elbows on the top pipe rail of the track, his hands folded, his right sneakered foot up on the middle rail, his thick blond curly hair—beneath his crazy green-and-white stocking sweatcap—so thick with perspiration it looked in the afternoon sun streaming through the windows a brownish red, Rex leaned his green-and-white head far out into the void above the gym and hollered down at me.

  “Hey, Ex, my sweet pal, you got the right side down pat There’s no place from the right side you can’t hit. Besides, you’re boring me to tears.” As though Rex weren’t boring me, slap, slap, slap, slap. Tomorrow, why don’t you start from the left side? You know, try the left-handed layup, then when you get that down just keep moving out and out and out, the same way you do from the right side.”

  “Hey, good idea, Rex!”

  Rex beamed, proudly thrust out his chest, flicked his nutty stocking cap back over his right shoulder, pulled away from the rail, and once again began his distracting slap, slap. So it was the following morning at nine, about two hours before Rex, invariably hung over, showed up, I began the schooling of my left hand. It was the war year of 1944,1 was fourteen and a couple years from my top height of five-ten. Because that would be as tall as Id get, it is impossible not to credit Rex’s suggestion with my one day making the league all-star team, one of the dreams that turned out not to be as sappy as I’d supposed.

  Other than Rex’s being rich, having his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale, I can’t imagine anyone’s calling him Marilou Ellen or believing him a sissy or effeminate. Because my friends and I were poor and uneducated, I expect that Rex’s being all the things we weren’t not only aroused our envy but necessarily mitigated against him. Rex was thirty, tall and blond and stunningly handsome, always a sartorial vision in the clothes he ordered by mail from Brooks Brothers, and though his two older brothers, Jonathan and Hardy Bean, were fledgling surgeons—everyone said it was a toss-up who would become the best in the area—Rex neither practiced law nor did much of anything but greet and entertain our returning furloughed servicemen, attend all the high school games, work out, eat, drink, and woo an entire generation of the most marvelous-looking girls to blossom in upstate New York. This is not to say that Rex didn’t claim to work. But he wasn’t in the least earnest about his claim.

  On Clinton Street Jonathan and Hardy, whom Rex referred to as Rick and Dick or Dick and Rick or sometimes as Rickahdickahdoo, had built the first professional or medical arts building in town, a tasteful one-story limestone and white-shuttered affair with only enough space for themselves and Rex. Fronting the street was a large spacious beautifully appointed common or waiting room, dominated by one of the most impressive limestone fireplaces I’d ever seen, in which on fall and winter afternoons there was always a splendid crackling log fire. Behind the waiting room Jonathan and Hardy had posh offices and diagnostic cubicles for themselves and another lavishly carpeted book-lined suite for Rex, commanded by a huge antique mahogany desk and oil paintings of Lincoln and Justice Holmes. On one of the two occasions I ever saw Rex partially serious, he told me the only time he’d ever used that magnificent desk he’d drawn up wills for himself and Jonathan and Hardy.

  “One of them suckers, either Rick or Dick or Dick or Rick, is gonna go with a coronary before he’s forty—so devoted, don’t you know, Ex?—and old Rex has got to get his share of the swag to keep him in his old age.”

  Even when Rex pontificated, as he often did in the days I was acquiring the left-handed touch and he was none too subtly trying to get me to do what I must do—horrible, abominable thought!—to be readmitted to school, he was totally incapable of carrying it off.

  “Well, Ex, my luscious pal, as my old pappy used to say, 1 gotta work, you gotta work, we all gotta work,’“ after which he’d throw his head back and roar with idiotic, inner-directed laughter. Rex’s father had foreseen the market crash of 1929, had done what money people did acting on that happy piece of sagacity, had gotten out forty-eight hours before that dismal October day, and as ostentatiously given to homilies as that father may have been—apparently he’d succeeded with Jonathan and Hardy—he had, leaving his sons those millions to do with as they damn pleased, failed out of hand with Rex. For example, Rex was at his loony best when, at four, after a day’s workout, he’d say, “Well, Ex, my sweet pal, I reckon old Rex ought to meander back to the sweatshop and answer the afternoon mail.” Then he’d literally double over, fiercely clutch his stomach, and go right off his tree with orgiastic laughter, enlisting me in his uncontrollable zaniness. When his laughter subsided, Rex would lean back against his locker, spread his legs so his balls rested on the bench, light a Camel, and smile his perverse smile. Certainly without insolence, Rex’s smile was nevertheless that of a man privy to insights not given to other men and those insights appeared to have confirmed his preconceived notions that none of the cliches of the workaday world—”I gotta work…” “I reckon old Rex ought to meander back to the sweatshop…”—were essential to sanity.

  By then Rex would have showered, he’d be waiting for the steam to lift so he could see in the mirror to shave and outfit himself in a beautifully cut tweed jacket, neatly pressed gray flannel slacks, and custom-made shoes, and from the pile of filthy sweat clothes at his feet he’d pick up a sneaker, a jock, his crazy stocking cap, take a long loving whiff of it, grimace in odoriferous but ecstatic agony
, and say, “Jesus, Ex, my sweet pal, decadent, I mean, depraved. Remind me to bring some fresh workout clothes tomorrow.” When I was supposed to remind him I hadn’t the foggiest, or did I have any doubt that Rex didn’t want reminding. Early on I’d discovered it wasn’t the Brooks Brothers suits that were Rex, that his essential being of boyish randiness (goldfish in the mouth, toads in the pocket, garter snakes in mason jars) was more readily epitomized by those foul putrefying garments than by those ironically worn double-breasted navy blue polo coats with great mother-of-pearl buttons. It was a randiness I’m certain proved a challenge to be remedied by that unending parade of nubile beauties on his cashmere-covered arm. In those days at the Y it was as if I were playing hide-and-seek with a child.

  Although it was permissible to peek through my fingers to see where the kid had hid, it would have been grievously unsporting to find him out too quickly. And though I doubt any of those girls understood the true extent of Rex’s adoration of the indecorous, when I at last read that smile, as though caught hiding behind the ancient stand-up Hoover in a distant closet, and learned that he’d elevated the raunch-ily trivial to a godhead, that he was congenitally promiscuous, lovably rotten, and hopelessly ribald, I knew he was beyond the redemption of any of those girls he was said to take at bar’s closing to the Clinton Street office where, after banking a fire in the great limestone fireplace, he’d lay them—we hoped he did—on the carpeted forefront of the hearth, throwing kisses, one somehow imagines, at Rickah-dickahdoo as he did so.

  Finally dressed and ready to face his day, Rex’d shake my hand formally and say, “See you tomorrow, my luscious pal. Boy, that left hand is coming swell. You’re gonna be a hummer, pal, and I do mean a hummer!” Going out the door, he’d holler back, “And don’t forget, my dear pal, who it was that taught you!”