Rex did not know how to dribble a basketball. When Rex left the Y at 4:30, everyone in Watertown knew he trotted across lower Washington Street, crazily zigging in and out of the rush-hour traffic, actually feigning stiff-arming the hoods of honking overanxious cars. On gaining the other side of the street, Rex’d turn left at Smith and Percy, take a hard right at Stone Street, thence another hard right into Duffy’s Tavern, which was the meeting place for our servicemen on leave. He’d order his first martini of the day and search the bar for faces he recognized, despite the strange uniforms beneath the faces. If Rex saw any, he’d buy a round, there’d be embraces, laughter, tall tales, and they’d be mapping the evening’s strategy, all of which Rex would take care of, the drinks, the food, the girls. Although I never asked Rex, there were delicious rumors in town that Jonathan and Hardy’s secretaries and nurses had used to arrive at eight to find Rex, his on-leave pals, and various young ladies drunk and passed out all over the posh waiting room, so that on rotating weeks the girls now took turns getting to the office by seven to assure the party was sent on its way and the office stood in comely sedateness for its first patients.
If Jonathan or Hardy ever reprimanded Rex, I’m sure he did so with long-suffering head-wagging good humor. As everyone knew, Rex was the most pampered, coddled, and deferred-to kid brother ever reared in upstate New York, impossibly spoiled not only by his brothers but by everyone in the community. When Rex was eight, either Jonathan or Hardy had become enraged during the course of a children’s game and had coshed Rex over the head with a pinch bar, laying his skull open to the gray matter and sending him into a coma where for days he lingered near death. By the time he came round, the X rays had already indicated brain surgery, he was flown to New York City, a metal plate was inserted into his skull (the cause of the army’s rejecting him), and forever after his aberrant behavior was explained by our tapping our forefingers gravely at our temples and darkly whispering, “Brain damage.” As Rex had been Phi Beta Kappa, the damage hadn’t, apparently, impaired his learning or memory.
Although at fourteen I accepted this diagnosis as readily as everyone else did, in retrospect I’m not at all certain Rex’s peculiarness would have been markedly different had he not suffered the trauma. Cynicism had only recently, with the onset of puberty (aching, burning nipples, pubic hair, an ashamed need to strangle my cock every twenty seconds), become a part of my being, I wouldn’t understand for years that cynicism is nothing more than a mask that represses all enthusiasms for fear that that to which one lends an ungloved willingness of the heart might prove unworthy of one’s regard and that Rex’s behavior may have been as simply explained by saying he was without cynicism. Assuming that Rex’s problem was brain damage, it must have occurred to that area of the brain where the superego resides, for in the loveliest of ways Rex was utterly without the restraints that make for civilized behavior, marvelously oblivious to any sense of suffocating politesse.
Whether in the Y locker room lovingly scratching his balls, whiffing his sneakers, or in his insane cheering and various other shenanigans at the high school games, Rex embarrassed us only to the extent of our inability to unshackle ourselves from our own inhibitions. When Rex stormed rabidly onto the football field or basketball court to confront the officials, his camel hair coat and regimental necktie flowing crazily out behind him, his blond hair in great disarray from his theatrical pulling on it, his vivid blue eyes turned inward with indignant hurt at the obscene unfairness of the officiating, we laughed uproariously at his antics. Our faces red for him, we nonetheless applauded his sticking his nose smack into the face of the referee, a la Billy Martin, by wildly cheering his “cause,” knowing even as we did so that the official, like a plate umpire calling a third strike for which hell brook no quarrel, was even then dropping his right shoulder and contracting his right arm to throw it furiously out toward the nearest exit, signaling Rex was out of the game, which invariably rallied the crowd to one standing, sustained shriek of Booooooooooooo. Rex was the only fan in Watertown to be ejected from games more frequently than our coach.
In sports it was all very simple to Rex. There were our guys and there were their guys, never the twain should meet, our guys never committed a penalty or foul, never missed a long gain or twenty-foot jump shot which wasn’t the result of the other team’s knavery (undetected to everyone save Rex) and woe to the official who didn’t view the game through the same magically wondrous lenses as Rex. In the basketball season of 1942-43, our small parochial school, Immaculate Heart Academy, had been loaded with talent and our coach, with the greatest reluctance (everything to lose, nothing to gain), had scheduled them twice. Each time IHA tied the score or went into the lead, Rex, who sat with the town elders at the opposite side of the gym from the student bleachers, would cross his blue eyes, stick his thumbs into his ears, crazily wiggle his fingers at the officials, and let his tongue droop dopily out and blow on it, creating the harshest, wettest, eeriest, most tasteless raspberries imaginable, all of which sent the students into paroxysms of ecstatic hostility.
During the first game the referee, unable to stand it any longer, violently blew his whistle, pointed directly at Rex, and bellowed “Technical!” Onto the court came our coach and though it was too noisy for the crowd to hear, I was the ball boy seated on the bench and heard it all.
“How the hell yuh gonna call a technical on my crowd for something that crazy bastard Bean does?’’
“Okay, Bill,” the referee said. “I shouldn’t have pointed at Bean. But Bean’s got this crowd out of control, you’re responsible for it, no matter the instigator, and IHA gets a free one.”
During the second game poor Rex didn’t make it to the buzzer signaling the end of the first quarter before that same referee, detecting Rex’s tongue gingerly beginning to dangle with idiotic slack wetness over his chin, blew his whistle, pointed at Rex and screamed, “Okay, Bean, out, out, out, out, OUT!”
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.
5
Ordinarily on Friday nights Rex was the first fan at the gym, accompanied by his latest girl, who was, “Can you believe it?” we’d say, wagging our weak noodles in wonder, even nicer than her predecessor, arriving and taking his seat even before the jayvees had taken the court for their warmups. Hence I expect we should have known something was amiss when he not only showed up unescorted one night, for Rex without a girl was as a mutant camel without its hump, but during the jayvee game seemed abstracted, nervous, and so pensive he only challenged the referee’s calls nine times. Then, five minutes into a varsity game which already promised to be a corker, an unearthly stillness permeated the crowd and looking round for the reason I stared, with everyone, across the way and beheld Miss Sally Jane Hannigan dressed in a black Chesterfield coat with black velvet collar, black high-heeled pumps, and dark suggestive silk hose, her incredibly beautiful anthracite-black shimmering hair parted in the middle and flowing luxuriantly down to the small of her back. The hair framed that placid deep olive mask and those great bottle-green eyes covered with even greater great round black hornrimmed glasses. Yes, Miss Sally Jane Hannigan stood there as cold and as calm as a corpse in deep freeze, her black
leather-gloved hand cradled in the crook of the sleeve of Rex’s coat, which was, we could hardly credit it, a black Chesterfield precisely like that of Sally Jane!
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.
6
Had not the Princess died that spring, on June 6, 1944, the day the Allies invaded Normandy, I could not have got as friendly with Rex as I did the ensuing fall at the Y. Although Rex had been out of law school for six years, he had yet to pass his New York State bar examinations, indeed had not even bothered to take them. That spring, however, and I have no doubt he yearned to appear as solemnly industrious in the Princess’s eyes as he’d begun to appear at the basketball games, he spent a lot of time in Albany—we missed him at the baseball games—taking cram courses for those exams. Had she lived, Rex not only would have been practicing law by fall but would have forsaken both his role as Watertown’s one-man stage door canteen and that of upstate New York’s most eligible bachelor.
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 des
pite 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.