Last Notes from Home

  At two minutes to nine, the dining room having cleared of its half dozen farers, we stroll there and turn on O’Twoomey’s Advent TV, which throws its picture onto a movielike screen mounted above the mantel of the great brick fireplace. If Toby is in residence (and more often than not he is off in the Cessna “on business”), Hannibal drives him the eleven miles down to White Manele Beach, from which Toby jogs back. Even walking the steep twisting badly potted two-lane road from White Manele to the village, fourteen hundred feet above the sea, would send the average man in good shape to bed for ten hours’ sleep. Toby’s condition is truly miraculous, Alissa, I can see that even Hannibal fears him, and it is yet another daydream of mine that my jailers one day have it out and neutralize each other. Although Hannibal goes out of his way to please Toby, Toby refuses to acknowledge Hannibal’s humanity, simple and savage though it is, by saying a single word to him, considering him little more than a robot to watch me while Toby is off doing O’Twoomey’s bidding.

  Having something to do with my chiding him for his abominable Irish taste in food, and in the hope that he can cultivate a more sophisticated palate, O’Twoomey and I daily watch The French Chef, which is hosted by an alien, or what would appear to be an alien, named Julia Child. I am using the one in ten dishes O’Twoomey favors, to assure that if the insane bastard doesn’t go with blood poisoning he’ll do so with a heart attack, massive, I expect. Ordinarily poor Julia no sooner forms the cooing Bostonian “O” of her flexible lips and announces, “Soupe aux Moules, today on The French Chef!” than O’Twoomey shrivels up his nose in horrified mock distaste and with sublime disgust cries, “Wrong-GOE! We’ll have no bleeding Frog dishes from the likes of you, you insufferable old faggot!” What other than Frog dishes O’Twoomey hopes to get from The French Chef is beyond me, and my unabridged allows no clue as to what an Irishman means when he calls a peculiar though likeable enough aging woman a faggot. More unbearable than anything, when Hannibal watches with us he repeats, throughout the half hour, everything O’Twoomey says, in a kind of Polynesian pidgin. “Wrong-GOE! No Fog shee-it, ‘sufferable old ‘aggot!” It is when the wrong-GOEs stop and O’Twoomey’s salivary glands start pumping passionately, wet thwap, thwap, thwaps, Pavlovian noises his swigs of stout are quite unable to stay, that I know Miss Julia has hit on a dish that strikes O’Twoomey’s fancy. You can be sure, too, Alissa, that it is a dish fit for swine. Or at least it is when Exley gets through with it. Three days ago, for example, Julia prepared a “Cassoulet for a Crowd,” dry white beans baked with goose, lamb, and sausage.

  “Can you do that, lurve?”

  “Nothing to it,” I said. “Of course TCI need a couple days for the confit d’oie and to soak the beans against intestinal motility.”

  “Speak English.”

  “You mean Irish?”

  “Please, lurve, do not push your bleeding fucking luck.”

  “Confit d’oie is preserved goose, a simple matter of pan frying the goose, then storing it in its own fat. As your dear departed mother”—here I actually blessed myself, Alissa—”should have taught you, one has to soak the beans a couple days to prevent flatulence or farting, a condition you already suffer from to such a degree, Seamus, that should I neglect this step you’d doubtless blow yourself to pieces and expire in your own vile stench.”

  Preserved goose and soaked beans, my ass, Al! For the goose I bought a dozen turkey legs and fried them in globs of lard, garlic, and heaps of pharmaceutical saltpeter. Then I cut a lamb shoulder into thick cubes, sliced some Italian sausage O’Twoomey has specially prepared by a Honolulu butcher, and braised this mixture in more lard, garlic, and saltpeter. Stripping the bone from the turkey, I broke this meat into edible pieces, then took the sausage and lamb, added it to the turkey, with its fatty skin, and stored it all overnight in the lard, garlic, and saltpeter drippings. The following day, having washed the beans and given them a twenty-minute boil so they’d at least be chewable, I prepared the casserole, a layer of beans here, then a layer of turkey, lamb, and El Wopo sausage in this marvelously glutinous, spreadable, and nauseous-looking fat, then another layer of beans and so forth. Before we went to the golf course yesterday, I put the casserole in the oven at 275 degrees Fahrenheit and let it go all the afternoon, telling Sissy, who ran the lodge, to check it every hour or so. If the top layer of beans appeared dry, I told her, throw two or three tablespoons of butter, together with a dash of saltpeter, on top of it. Last night O’Twoomey and Hannibal ate the whole thing, doused in ketchup.

  Today on the golf course, on the 158-yard par three ninth hole, having bet me a thousand dollars he could put the ball from the tee onto the green with an eight iron, and do this straight into a Kona wind, O’Twoomey came slowly to the top of his backswing, paused ever so slightly, came ferociously forward, and at the impact of iron with ball evacuated.

  It was beautiful, Alissa. All the way round the course I’d seen—I should say heard and smelled—it coming. It is O’Twoomey’s left or power leg which contains the pins. Unable to plant it, he is forced on every stroke to go to the very top of his backswing and come into the ball with all the force of his upper body and arms. It requires the kind of terrible strain, really, that one employs when sitting on the throne after three days without voiding. Hence on every swing that afternoon his flatulence had been such that even Rabelais would have been shy of detailing it, so bad that even in that fierce Kona wind one could hear its thunderous rumbles, occasionally even pick up its odor at thirty paces. But I do not own the poetry to do it justice. These noises were no warm-up arabesques. There was something symphonic about them, the darkly vibrating romanticism of Wagner, something so debilitating one knew the composition had exhausted the composer. One had no doubt O’Twoomey’s evacuation was complete.

  As I dug a hole with my pitching wedge to bury O’Twoomey’s pants and underwear, Hannibal ran O’Twoomey’s electric golf cart (he makes us walk, “for the exercise, lurve”) back to the Lodge for fresh underwear, clean slacks, and a bucket of hot water, soap, and towels. While I dug, O’Twoomey stood hiding in the woods a few feet from me, his fat fishy face compressed tightly between a V limb, sneering hatefully.

  “Are you sure you washed those beans with detergent?”

  I laughed. “You don’t wash them in soap, Jimmy. You have to soak them. I did so for two days. So help me.” I raised my right hand and invoked the Almighty. I don’t know why I did that, Alissa. It was almost a dead giveaway that I was lying. And, save on those occasions I’m trying to wheedle a concession from the sinister bastard, I never, never call him Jimmy.

  After Hannibal completed the unhappy chore of scrubbing down and drying O’Twoomey’s monumental backside and got him into fresh linen and slacks, we made our way up the steep hill to the eighteenth green, which is so steep Hannibal often has to get behind O’Twoomey’s cart and assist the electric engine by pushing. The eighteenth green is, in fact, so elevated it is hidden from the tee, showing the driver only the top half of the pin and the flag. When we got to the top, alas, there was O’Twoomey’s ball three inches from the pin, a “gimme.”

  O’Twoomey smirked. “Let me see. That’s thirty-five hundred dollars you owe me on the day. Uhmmm.” He wet his scorecard pencil with his tongue. “For a total of a hundred and four thousand dollars altogether. And if you don’t think this is coming out of your bonus, Frederick, you have another think coming, sir. Indeed you have, sir.”

  I can’t imagine what my bonus is going to be, Alissa, but apparently it’s going to be a hefty one, “for the inconvenience, lurve.”

  9

  Tonight we returned to our usual mode of dining. After Hannibal woke us from our siestas at 6:15, we repaired to the backyard and the picnic table next to the outdoor fireplace. On the top grill, farthest from the coals, Hannibal already had O’Twoomey’s favorite dish simmering, one O’Twoomey claims not to eat but more often than not does. O’Twoomey claims he merely wants the odors pervading his senses, his very being. “
Ambrosial, utterly ambrosial.” His mouth waters, thwap, thwap, thwap. After lining a great iron skillet with olive oil and garlic powder, Hannibal throws in a half dozen Italian sausages, a dozen chopped bell peppers, and two or three sliced Maui onions. Often this mixture simmers away to blackness and nothing. O’Twoomey eats it anyway.

  At one end of the picnic table was the ice chest full of cubes, O’Twoomey’s Boodles gin and postprandial J&B Scotch, the bottle of Noilly Prat vermouth that has gone unopened for two years, and my Smirnoff red label vodka, along with a pitcher of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice. Besides her other staggering daily tip, Sissy gets an additional thirty dollars just for that pitcher of fresh juice. In front of that were seven inch-thick Delmonicos thawing on the morning Advertiser, three for Toby, who had returned from one of his nefarious errands, three for Hannibal, who is so in awe of Toby he does everything Toby does, even tries to dress like him, and one for me. Before the steaks lay a kettle of Toby’s special salad, one taught to him by one of his Chinese girls. As nearly as I can determine, mere are two kinds of lettuce, iceberg and romaine, cucumber, tomato, bamboo shoots, avocado, apple, and walnuts, topped by a delicious dressing whose ingredients Toby typically refuses to reveal. If it contains those prurience-inducing herbs, Alissa, I don’t appear to be getting any more man my customary infrequent hard-ons or having visions of sullying Playboy centerfolds (my blood pressure medication, don’t you know?). Next to the salad lay six Kona Gold joints, rolled so immaculately by Toby they honestly look like Camels. Hannibal is a mess after one, but because Toby smokes three during the course of an evening Hannibal smokes three also.

  Walking to the outdoor wooden pantry, I unlocked it, opened a twelve-ounce can of Planters mixed nuts and one of cashews, then opened two cans of macadamia nuts, put the various nuts into three imitation cut glass ruby canapé dishes I picked up on sale at Liberty House at the Ala Moana Plaza, a set of four I bought as a present for O’Twoomey from his own money. “Aren’t you the thoughtful one, lurve?” He used to eat the fattening nuts directly from the cans, but in that way he could gauge how many he was eating and I wasn’t able to add more salt, as I do now, hidden behind the pantry. Nobody but O’Twoomey eats the nuts or the extra-sharp Monterey Jack cheddar cheese I cut up and put in the final canapé dish, along with four or five tablespoons of Plochman’s horseradish mustard. O’Twoomey hasn’t figured out why we forego the snacks. Like so many grossly obese people, O’Twoomey has affected a politesse of eating so grotesque as to be laughable. Until he gets a couple of those Boodles into him and goes for a fistful at a time, O’Twoomey airily picks up one or two nuts, with loving delicacy places them on his salivating tongue, chews elegantly, swallows, washes them down with a sip of Boodles, then in some shanty-Irish parody of fastidiousness extravagantly licks his fingers, thwap, thwap, thwap, all the while his eyes closed, moaning in orgasmic pleasure. Within three or four minutes every dish of nuts and a good deal of the cheese is covered, like heavy dew, with a nauseating film of his saliva.

  O’Twoomey has no idea why he keeps balooning up “on snacks,” he lives in blissful ignorance of the calories in a single Queensland nut, and one night I saw him eat two cans of these, one each of the mixed and cashew nuts and better than two pounds of the cheese, topped off by three or four shrunken sausages and the blackened peppers and onions swimming in olive oil and sausage fat. If his weight, the booze, the fat, and the salt don’t get him soon, Alissa, I don’t know what will. O’Twoomey manifests all the symptoms of a walking time bomb, but I worry so much about ridding the world of him that I expect I’ll be in a wheelchair before him and my hope is that high blood pressure is in fact, as the cautionary advertisements proclaim, the hidden disease.

  I’d be able to kill him a lot sooner if he didn’t take his “business calls” during Julia Child and was thereby able to listen to her prepare her Gratin of Potatoes à la Lyonnaise or her desserts, caramel-topped pear poached in white wine and set in gooey chocolate tarts, perhaps her Bombe aux Trois Chocolates, dishes I’m sure he’d have wanted prepared. At one time O’Twoomey took his calls—it is 9 P.M. in Ireland—on the wall phone of the veranda, but he talked so loudly, and the calls are often of such a sinisterly personal nature, that I suggested he have his own phone installed. He must have thought I meant installed near the TV so we wouldn’t miss Miss Julia, for that is where we found it when we came one afternoon from the golf course, a brilliant kelly green wall phone, with a long cord so Hannibal or I could hand it to him, mounted on the side of the fireplace. On the day—it was two days after Lord Mountbatten was blown up on his fishing boat. Shadow V, on Donegal Bay—that Julia did various pizzas, including an onion one that would have been great with Maui onions and on which I could have tripled the amount of provolone, O’Twoomey took one of his calls from Eire and talked so long I couldn’t get the go-ahead for six or eight of these. “Pizza? But that’s wog food, Frederick. You know I refuse to eat wog food.” O’Twoomey wouldn’t eat wog sausage, Alissa, until Toby and I ordered some in Honolulu and he decided to sample ours. The next thing we knew he was asking the proprietor where he got it, which led him to the butcher who now makes up twenty pounds a week for him and has it flown over, iced. It is these calls from Eire that make me certain O’Twoomey is with the provisional wing of the IRA and that, at the very least, whatever illicit monies—way too much to be realized from sweepstakes tickets—he and Toby are raking in hand over fist—are being channeled to those madmen, perhaps in the form of guns and explosives. But how, and why, from Hawaii, Alissa?

  “Yes, poor, poor Mountbatten. A lurverly chap, they tell me. Educated at Osbourne and all that tommyrot, don’t you know? Liz and the family called him ‘Uncle Dickie’? That intimate, huh? Oh, but it’ll be a lurverly wake. Yes, yes, I know all about it. So they have McGirl and McMahon. They don’t know anything—stupid, stupid boyos. And the bleeding bastard fucking press. I told you it had to be spelled out for them. Who was supposed to paint a map of a partitioned India on the jetty? Every report I’ve seen thinks it’s just a senseless terrorist attack on a harmless senile old man because he’s royalty. I thought this was to be an act of war against the monster who partitioned India, then pulled out and left in his bleeding wake one of the great bleeding bloodbaths of fucking history. I thought it was supposed to be an illustration of what the bleeding Limeys might expect in Ireland—another India, that is—if they don’t soon get their troops out of there. Of course, they have twenty-two less troops now. Dear me, the shame of it all. I thought this was supposed to illustrate what the historical result of partition has always been. And always will be.”

  On and on it went. Because I didn’t want to hear I twice tried to walk away, but O’Twoomey signaled Hannibal to sit me back down, then pointed impatiently at the TV screen to inform me I should mind my business and watch Julia make her onion pizzas. Afterward—and I must have been temporarily deranged by O’Twoomey’s insouciant smugness, Alissa, for ordinarily I pretend I hear nary a word—I said, “Anybody who’d do that to Lord Mountbatten, a seventy-nine-year-old man out for a little fishing, is nothing but a cowardly savage.”

  O’Twoomey laughed raucously, cracked his fat hand against his fat thigh, and cried, “You may be right, lurve, you may just be right! But then, the Brit imperialists wrote the book on pusillanimity and savagery and assuredly it’s something they understand. In fact, lurve, it may be the only thing they understand!”

  Although as a citizen of the Republic O’Twoomey isn’t allowed to take his seat in the House of Lords, he claims to be a peer of the realm, the Duke of Lisdoonvarna. His heraldic crest is a Boheena, a freshwater mermaid passionately clasping to her ample bosom—so her nipples will be hidden to the Irish clerics, I assume—a great cumbersome knightly sword, a veritable Excalibur. Of course O’Twoomey refuses to mock his lineage by personally displaying his crest (he leaves that to us!)—says he won’t do so until Ireland is reunited—but his tailor does have it stitched in red, green, gold, and blac
k into the fly of his custom-made skivvies. Since 1921, when the Irish Free State declared its independence of England, Irish peers have not only been denied their seats in Parliament, they have, ironically, been refused the apostate gesture of disavowing their titles and, according to O’Twoomey, he is Lord Lisdoonvarna whether he chooses to be or not. Hence I expect his pee-stained heraldic crest is in a sense a tacit protest against what he appears to be attacking in a more devious and alarming way. As with everything else, O’Twoomey’s schizophrenia regarding his lineage is striking. Because the Dole field workers—O’Twoomey calls them rice-eyes—have Saturdays and Sundays off and take over the E. B. Cavendish Golf Course and White Manele Beach, O’Twoomey refuses to stay on Lanai and mingle with the wogs, and on Saturday mornings Toby flies us to Honolulu, where we check into the legendary Pink Palace, the Royal Hawaiian, invariably into the same rooms, a two-bedroom suite on the second floor of the main building for O’Twoomey and an armed Toby and adjoining rooms, 1600 and 1602, for Hannibal and me on the top floor of the relatively new Towers, overlooking the pool and Waikiki Beach. Except in our rooms or at the pool and beach, we are required at all times to wear the tailor-made kelly green linen jackets with O’Twoomey’s heraldic crest stitched on the pockets—we are, I gather, O’Twoomey’s royal entourage—over the heart, we all have kelly green bathing trunks with the crest on the right thigh, we even have it on our laundry bags. Doubtless we are the only group in history who ever checked into the Royal Hawaiian weekly, were taken to their rooms and immediately dialed room service to have a week or two weeks’ soiled linen picked up for twenty-four-hour service. If you can believe this, Alissa, whenever on these weekends we are in O’Twoomey’s presence we are required to address him as “your grace.” One late Saturday afternoon O’Twoomey, Toby, Hannibal, Robin, and I were seated at the outdoor Mai Tai bar debating where to go for dinner, O’Twoomey asked if I were ready for another vodka (whatkah in Hawaii, as in the Bahamas), without thinking I said, “No thanks, Seamus,” and the next thing I knew Toby was, as punishment for my indiscretion, flying Hannibal and me back to Lanai, only to drop us off at the airport and fly back to Oahu to complete his weekend guarding Lord Lisdoonvarna. For that reason, Al, in Honolulu I no longer address O’Twoomey by name at all, simply respond to his queries with a yes or no.