Last Notes from Home

  Fairley seemed as unflappable as ever, rather as if he were going over the nightly figures at one of his gambling emporiums. He told one of the cops, Sid, to take me up onto the porch, then went into a lengthy mumbled huddle with Pat, interrupted once by Fairley and Pat’s going to the back seat of the police car to examine what appeared to be—oh, my Lord!—the orange-and-white beach towel. The only sign of Fan-ley’s ire was his frequently poking Pat severely on the chest with his index finger, as if admonishing him that Fairley did not ever, ever expect to hear a word of this again. When the police finally went, smiling and making weak jokes with Fairley as they pulled away from the curb, I bolted from the porch and started across the lawn. I never made it. Moving swiftly, Fairley intercepted me, grabbed me by the arm, swirled me around, and with doubled fist smashed me furiously in the face, knocking me to the ground. When I tried to get up, Fairley knocked me down again and this time the blood was gushing from my nose.

  From the Brigadier I’d learned many things about Fairley, precisely the kind of detail that would have held the Brigadier in thrall. Fairley was, for example, a Mangione on his mother’s side but I’d never until that moment seen the Sicilian in him. The Brigadier had told me that all Fairle/s business was conducted with “the guys in Utica.” It was from Utica that the weekly football pools came, and it was to someone in Utica that Fairley laid off his bets; that is, if Fairley had too much Notre Dame money on the USC-Notre Dame game, the guys in Utica were honor-bound to help him cover his bets. It turned out, too, that Fairley, for all his notions of Sicilian honor, cared little about Cass’s virginity. What had infuriated Fairley was my insisting to the cops, for Pat had apparently told him, that I was only one of regiments of guys who were screwing Cass.

  Still sitting on the wet grass, afraid to rise again, I began weeping. Fairley said, “For Christ’s sake, Ex, if Cass was fucking everyone, what the hell was that on the towel? Iodine? What do you want? To have Cass sent back to that fucking Home?” Furious saliva was coming from Fairley’s twisted mouth. “I ought to have your legs broken, Ex. I just wish your dad was alive. He’d break them for me. You’d better damn well know your brother Bill is going to hear about this anyway.” When he was going up the lawn toward the house, he turned abruptly back, pointed the finger with which he’d poked Pat on his chest, and very evenly said, “If you ever come around here again, Ex, your legs will get broken.”

  If my work has frequently evidenced a hatred for women, it is not women I hate but a woman, Cass—for Cass copped out, as assuredly as if she’d made that exhilarating leap from the Golden Gate Bridge, copped out with all the loops untied, with all the fences unmended, without giving me the chance to grovel in apology at her feet, without allowing Cass and me the time to grow into that happy maturity which would have permitted us to laugh heartily in the knowledge that we hadn’t—or at least Cass hadn’t—done anything at all, copped out and left me with a grief and guilt so burdensome it is something of a marvel that I survived. Oh, they have a fancy name for it today, anorexia nervosa, and every alternate month the women’s magazines have a piece on it, written in that ghoulish chitchat style, rather as if halitosis or feminine hygiene was under discussion. Of course I doubt any Watertown physician in the late forties had diagnosed Cass as anorectic-bulimic and it wasn’t until many years later, when I did my own researches into anxiety-related ejaculation, that I also unearthed what had happened to Cass.

  When she hadn’t shown up for the first two weeks of the fall semester, in alarm I sought out Shirl Carpenter, the babysitter from the Home whom Cass and I had used when we went out, and asked her where Cass was. Shirl told me Cass was “awful sick, Fred. She won’t eat, and even if she does, she sticks her finger down her throat and throws it all up again. All she does is sleep. She thinks she’s too fat. Imagine, Fred! Cass? Fat? God, Fred, there isn’t a girl in this school who wouldn’t give her eyeteeth to have Cass’s figure!”

  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.

  5

  After my January graduation, I worked on the railroad for months, loading great canvas bags of mail onto dolly carts that were taken by freight elevators up to platforms and thrown onto the boxcars of mail trains. It was dim-witted, backbreaking, brutalizing work; and in the fall, having at last heeded those teachers who for years had told me I should be getting Bs by just showing up for class, I went to stay with my aunt in Goldens Bridge, New York, and enrolled in the John Jay High School in Katonah for a postgraduate course. In one year I took physics, chemistry, biology, plane geometry, intermediate algebra, and trigonometry and stabbed Spanish II for my college entrance language requirement. Although I’m told it is no longer allowed, in those days stabbing meant that the student did not attend classes and either studied the material on his own or was tutored, or both (as in my case), and then took the New York State Regents Examination, the only obstacle being that, whereas a 65 was ordinarily a passing grade, on a stab a student had to get 75.

  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 fro
m 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 thr
ee 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?”