Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  “Schizophrenia. She was a goddamn hopeless schizophrenic, Pop.” Howie was fuming.

  “There’s no need to get nasty about it. And it’s your mother we’re talking about!”

  . “Yes, there is a need to get nasty. I hate it when you do that to me, Pop. Use me for your straight man, your educated son from Colgate. I got a B.A. in business—with a C minus average, I might add—and learned more in a month working for you than I did in four years at Hamilton. I was a fucking jock, Pop. I don’t give a goddamn if you do it in front of people we don’t care about. But this is Ex, for Christ’s sake. He’s family, he was there at the beginning and don’t think he can’t see through that dumb wop facade of yours. It’s humiliating, Pop. It’s goddamn humiliating.”

  Fairley was stony with shame, for that fleeting moment sagging under the weight of his sixty-five years.

  Howie turned to me and spoke, his voice considerably moderated. “You know what he did, Ex? He paid some quack shrink across the inlet in Palm Beach a hundred and fifty clams an hour for a solid year so he could talk about Cookie and her sister, Cass’s mom that is, and Cass. Before he even went to this clown, he must have read twenty volumes on schizophrenia. Ill take you into his bedroom and show them to you. He tortures himself with it. After a year of being reassured that he couldn’t have done anything to help either of them—the fucking quack even told Fairley he knew more about schizophrenia than the quack did—Fairley still tortures himself with the notion that he didn’t do enough. He refuses to dwell on the nice things he’s done for people. If I ever told you, Ex, you’d shit—the people’s houses and cars he saved from the banks, the fuel and grocery bills he paid so kids wouldn’t freeze or starve, I’m talking here about thousands and thousands of dollars. When he mentioned buying your brother Bill that Pontiac, it was the first time I ever heard him admit to having done anything for anyone. And what happens? He gets so flustered for having let that kindness slip out, he can’t talk for five minutes. He thought Bill had told you.” He turned back to Fairley. “Admit it, Fairley. You thought Bill had told Fred, didn’t you? Admit it, Fairley”

  Fairley didn’t speak.

  After Howie had mixed the drinks and we’d seated ourselves, the subject of the Brigadier was nearly the first order of business. Fairley had told me how proud he was of Bill and how sorry he was to have heard of his death. “Forty-six, Ex, that’s too young. Too young. I cried. Yeah, Ex, I bawled like a baby. Ask Howie.” As Fairley and Howie had been in Florida eight years, having I gathered made a lot of money (whether for Fairley or for Fairley and “the guys in Utica,” one didn’t ask) in the Orlando-Disney World boom and having come south to Palm Beach County two years before, I expressed surprise they’d heard of the Brigadier’s death. “Heard about it?” Howie said. “Come here and look at this shit, Ex.” Off the lavish master bedroom there was a tastefully furnished den with three oak filing cabinets, atop which lay a dozen or so copies of the most recent Watertown Times, apparently copies Fairley had yet to read and clip.

  Laughing and pulling out the appropriate drawer, Howie took out three manila folders astonishingly bearing the legends EXLEY I, III, and III. In my father’s Fairley had all kinds of clippings, concluding with his obituary, in Bill’s he had chronologically arranged clippings detailing his military career, his Silver Star, and his two Purple Hearts and I detected that those Fairley must have deemed most important, as Bill’s being awarded the Legion of Merit, were laminated so the newsprint wouldn’t fade. Fairley, Howie said, had a file on everyone he’d ever known “up home.” Howie repeated, “Look at this shit, Ex.”

  Going to another drawer and ripping out a thick file labeled ME, Howie, quite beside himself with laughter by now, pulled from a stack of tamer clippings two or three relating to Fairley’s having pleaded nolo contendere to violation of the gambling laws. “I mean, listen, Ex, he’s done this all his life. Nothing’s real to him until he reads it in The Watertown Times. I mean, anybody else in America says ‘I read it in the Times,’ they’re talking about the big guy in New York City, right? Not Fairley!” In mock exasperation Howie sighed and wagged his head. That wagging was charged with overwhelming affection for “Pop.”

  Back in the living room, Fairley was saying, “The last time I saw Bill was when he was home on leave after Korea. Remember, Ex, he was limping and had a cane? The jeep he was in was strafed by a MIG, rolled over on him, squashing his pelvis and hip? Remember the new Pontiac with all the trimmings?”

  “Sure do. Borrowed it to go on a date and ran it into a snowbank. Didn’t have the money to have it towed out, so I called the Brigadier. Boy, was he pissed. Fortunately for my ass, there was no damage.”

  “I bought him that Pontiac. But I’m sure you knew that. Yeah, I was so proud of Bill, winning the Congressional Medal and all.”

  “It was the Silver Star, Pop. For Christ’s sake, we’re talking to Ex now. He knows what medals Bill won.” By way of apology, Howie turned back to me. “Pop always does that. As though the Silver Star wasn’t good enough. Pop has to make it the Congressional. He does that with everybody he knows. Vince Lombardi never really cut me. I just decided because Pop was alone I’d come home and help him with business. Like you, Ex. You were only nominated for a National Book Award, right? Not when Pop tells it! You won. You better goddamn well believe you won. And Cookie, Mom, I should say. She was more beautiful than Elizabeth Taylor. And Cass was going to be even more beautiful than that!”

  “I don’t mean to sound phony, Howie, but I’d have rather had your mom on my arm any day than Liz.”

  As no one spoke for a moment, I said, “I didn’t know you bought that Pontiac for Bill.” And I was almost as immediately sorry; for everything Howie later pointed out to Fairley about himself was true. Instantly Fairley became flustered and jumpy, no, he withdrew into himself utterly and became near stricken, downright overwrought that he’d allowed anything as endearing as his own generosity to stand revealed. There was something awesomely decent and civilized about Fairley; and whether or not he’d spent his life in the company of thugs from what the fiction writers call “the brotherhood” or “la cosa nostra,” it occurred to me, at that moment came to me as an absolute fact, that for Fairley there were bonds a good deal more tenacious than those theatrical ones and that these ties were nothing other than what I shall here call “the bonds of home.”

  In Daniel Martin John Fowles has his narrator speak eloquently to the idea of Robin Hood and his merry men in Sherwood Forest being the quintessential British myth, that is, the myth of “hiding” and how he—the narrator—had once made the egregious error of penning a grimly realistic movie script based on this myth, not at the time realizing that, whether we were English or American “colonists,” Errol Flynn and Maid Marion and Friar Tuck and Little John sitting about the fireside deep, deep in the green, green forest, all gnawing ravenously on shanks of venison, was absolutely indispensable to the health of our psyches—this notion that there was actually a place—hence Heaven, perhaps the ultimate myth—to which we could all repair and be at peace. Fowles calls it both “the sacred combe” and “la bonna vaux” or “the valley of abundance.” And what else was Fairley’s den with its oak filing cabinets stuffed with Watertown Times clippings but a place for Fairley to go and hide and lovingly finger, caress, fondle, and ponder these articles while fantasizing that there was actually a time when the world was a younger, greener, and more lovely place?

  Not long ago I had a prominent editor and publisher call me from Utah, where he’d gone to ski. The day before he’d called from New York City to reject a piece of mine (a very flattering form of rejection), saying that though he’d loved it and how much he’d laughed at it, he found it too inward and explained it belonged “in the Exley corner.” When I countered with the truth that—despite nitwits (rushing to exclude the editor from this company) who persist in believing I write about nothing but myself—I have never written a single sentence about Frederick Exley except as he
exists as a created character—Robert Penn Warren was perceptive enough to see this years ago—and that Watertown was nothing other than a state of mind, he sighed and said okay and asked for a couple more weeks to mink about the piece. When he’d gone out to the tow that morning—”Listen to this, Ex!”—the first guy he’d encountered had a baseball cap bearing the legend WATER-TOWN. The editor was roaring with laughter. “I mean, what is it with you fucking guys?” Seeing my opening, I said, “But if he’d come from Bellow country, it could as easily have said CHICAGO. From Styron country, TIDEWATER. From Cheever country, WESTCHESTER. From James Jones country, SCHOFIELD BARRACKS. From O’Hara country, SCRANTON. Give me a break and try to understand.” “I’m trying, Ex, I’m trying.”

  When Fairley got on to Cass, I sensed instantly it was something I couldn’t bear to hear. Howie had come up on the edge of his chair, his wonderfully athletic body rigid, no, paralyzed with tension, the cords in his neck popping as though he were pumping iron, his entire being screaming, “Leave it alone, Pop.” But Fairley would have none of it. He had his hand up in the manner of a pompously imperious traffic cop signaling Stop. Directed squarely at Howie, Fairley’s entire demeanor was telling Howie that in this matter he wouldn’t under any circumstances be interrupted. When in reply to Fairley’s query whether I knew why Cass had come to live with him and Cookie, I related Cass’s version of the head of the Home’s not permitting her to stay overnight unless Fairley became her foster father, Fairley smiled sadly and said that hadn’t been the case at all.

  In the early years, Cookie hadn’t wanted to take Cass for fear of becoming too attached to her—”An easy kid to love, right, Ex?”—and then have Cookie’s sister come back from Florida and take Cass from her. When it became apparent Cass’s mother and “that shithead” she was living with in Florida were never coming back, Cookie and Fairley had begged Cass to come and live with them but by then Cass was into her fantasy about her admiral father—”Warrant officer,” Howie interjected, only to be cut dead by Fairley’s icy stare—and absolutely refused to come and live with them as “the admiral” would be sending for her any day.

  One day Fairley’s attorney had come unannounced to Fairley’s kitchen when he was having coffee—in his midnight-blue robe?—and asked Cookie if he might speak with Fairley alone. One of the attorney’s present clients, who had gone down twice before, was now being held on a breaking and entering, a potential three-time loser unable to make bail and in return for Fairley’s posting bond, the client had information he wanted to trade.

  Fairley said, “The creep’s going to run, isn’t he?”

  “Probably. Look, Fairley, I’m only here as an intermediary and I’m so goddamn nervous—look at my hands—about even passing on this information that all my courtroom decorum and diplomacy will of necessity be cast to the winds. You’ve got to bear with me on this, Fairley.”

  “Shoot.”

  It seems that for a couple years past Cass had been going out the window of the Home nights, by prearranged appointments had met with three, four, and five guys in a car, by Cass’s requirements men over twenty-five and unlikely to have contact with her classmates, and for five dollars apiece had gone down on them. Removing a scrap of paper from his pocket, the attorney had shown Fairley the inked figure $2,225, which, the attorney said, was Cass’s current balance—”Obviously a good deal of it babysitting money,” the attorney had said, nervously attempting to balm Fairley—in the Watertown National Bank. Although he needn’t have told me, Fairley said he went crazy, headed immediately to the Home and on the pretext of using Cass as a babysitter that night had brought her back to Park Circle and to Cookie and Howie’s horror, screams, and sobs, for Cookie and Howie were totally ignorant of what was taking place, had beaten Cass half to death with his belt.

  When I looked over at Howie, he had in memory of it collapsed utterly, his mother’s great blue eyes pools of shimmering grief. It was all coming back to me now, but I of course daren’t say what I now knew. When I was a kid, the client in question had been a great high school halfback, everything after that was downhill and though we were all saddened by his steady deterioration we were all nevertheless shocked when we picked up The Watertown Times and saw that the aging halfback—he was twenty-five—had “hanged” himself in his cell. Apparently the halfback’s information hadn’t been forthcoming soon enough or whipping Cass hadn’t by any means sated Fiorello Mangione Parish’s fury.

  “You gotta understand, Ex, Cass was going to come to me and Cookie with a check for three grand or so and tell us it was from the admiral and she was off to study nursing in San Diego. And remember, Ex, I was only thirty-five and dumber than dogshit. When I told Bill about her, though I certainly didn’t tell him what she’d done at the Home—and he in turn told you, right?—I thought poor Cass had enjoyed what she’d done. I was so fucking stupid it didn’t occur to me ‘til years later that she’d loathed every minute of it. You know, I thought that with Bill I’d at least know who she was with. And by then she was so terrified of me—”

  “That’s not true, Pop! Cass worshipped you!”

  “—she was so terrified of me, she probably thought she had to do it. You know, Ex, a horny USO hostess or some-thin’ giving her all for the good of the services.”

  When I had first entered the apartment I had been struck immediately by the couch to which Fairley had directed me. Detecting that I was bouncing nervously about on it, that I kept looking down on it and was actually lovingly and bewilderingly fingering the brocade, Fairley started laughing and said, “Yeah, Ex, it’s the same couch, Cookie’s favorite. Of course it’s been redone a few times since those days.” Howie laughed, too. “Redone? Redone? Listen, Ex, the last time we couldn’t find the material and had to have the material made. Hey, we’re not talking here about an accomplished carpenter remaking a leg. We’re talking about a small fortune creating material from scratch. Fairley better live to be Methuselah’s age—the old bastard probably will. Looks great, doesn’t he, Ex? We’ve got enough material up home in storage to last until four thousand A.D.”

  Now I was sitting there stricken with distress at what I’d just heard about Cass, staring down at the floor, my head throbbing with a grief burdensome enough to detonate the cosmos. Then suddenly, lo, there was Cass as I’d seen her last, on the carpet at my feet, her blouse unbuttoned, her skirts pulled up, the orange-and-white candy-striped beach towel beneath her shanks, her arms outstretched to me in urgent, desperate, utterly unfettered invitation, yes, despite what I’d just heard about Cass, at that long-ago moment it had been on Cass’s part nothing less than a tendering of love. Then I fainted dead away.

  When I came round, I was on the carpet between the couch and the great Danish coffee table, Howie had my head bent over between my legs, and I heard him say, “God, Pop, he’s wet himself. You go too far, Pop. Too far.” When I got to my feet, it was terrible, with Fairley as jittery and ashamed as a maiden aunt, in the Italian way jumping excitedly about and begging me to take a shower, put on some of his underwear and trousers, and not leave him at that moment. “Not now, Ex, not now, please. I’ve got some baked ziti we can warm up, we’ll have an oil-and-vinegar salad, a glass or two of vino, and a few laughs. Like the old days, Ex. Like the old days.”

  I did not of course stay. When Howie was driving me home, I said, “I don’t mean to be alarmist, Howie, but how do you feel? Your Mom’s illness, I’ve read, can be endemic in families.” Howie said that when he’d been teasing Pop about his visits to the suave Palm Beach psychiatrist, he’d neglected to mention he’d gone every day Pop had and the quack had assured him he was one of the sanest people he knew. “He said the Mangione in me saved me.” As I was getting out of his Aston Martin, Howie told me how lonely Fairley was and said that I had, absolutely had, to come back and see Fairley. “I will, I will.” When Howie asked for my phone number, I substituted an eight for the nine in the final digit.

  After showering and pouring myself a stiff
vodka, I lay down on the couch and stared unseeing at the dramatization of the Hemingway story, thinking instead of a TV interview I’d seen some years before with an intellectual who’d been in Paris in the twenties with Hemingway, Joyce, et al. The intellectual was utterly perplexed by the Joyce-Hemingway friendship and saw them as a kind of Mutt and Jeff strolling the boulevards and hitting the bistros of Paris together. An odd couple, to the intellectual’s way of thinking, this big brusque laconic midwestern Hemingway with his contemptible high school diploma out of Oak Park, Illinois, mucking about with this petite half-blind vitriolic Irish genius educated to Latin and Greek by the Jesuits. As with most intellectuals and academics, the interviewee had missed the point of the relationship entirely. Hemingway had only to read a single paragraph of Joyce, Joyce reciprocate, to understand that Joyce and Hemingway were bound together by being on the same arduous, near-reverent pilgrimage, that is, of what the French call “breaking the language,” of doing nothing less than taking English and making it their very own. And this in turn got me laughing as I thought of yet another academic myth, that of Joyce’s bold brave lonely impoverished exile on the Continent. Joyce never approached paper with pen, however indignantly and sardonically, without finding himself smack dab in the middle of his loathed and beloved Dublin. Joyce never left home. And though I shouldn’t, in my zaniest and most ill fantasies, presume to mention my name in the same sentence with Joyce or Hemingway, this is precisely what I’d been trying to tell the editor who’d called me from that ski resort off yonder there in Utah.

  PART FIVE

  Marriage and Resurrection

  1

  Frederick Exley, the author, is going to have a good long slumbering sleep, Alissa. With any luck, perhaps he won’t wake up. This afternoon, in the company of Ms. Robin Glenn and his warder Hannibal, he walked for two and a half hours on the breathtaking White Manele Beach, back and forth, back and forth, the three of them taking a dip in the natural coral pool at the east end of the beach on the completion of every fifth lap. By the third lap, the tide was up, the ocean broke crashingly on the coral barrier, creating a spray luminous with rainbow colors stunning enough to break the heart. What, you might well ask, prompts this sudden health kick? On getting from bed two mornings ago, Frederick detected not only that his head was continually snapping to the right side, like so, but that these snaps were compounded by an alarming vertigo. Worse still, after slipping into his T-shirt and Bermuda shorts intent on joining Hannibal on the Lodge’s porch for coffee and his snarling arguments—Hannibal likes the latter very much—with the morning Advertiser’s ghastly headlines (a world gone mad?), he took four steps, his legs gave out completely, and, falling sideways, he crashed into his writing table, toppling his Olympia portable, fortunately for once secured in its plastic case, onto the linoleum floor, creating a thunderous thud. You shall be pleased to hear, Alissa, in fact, I suspect you shall gloat, that at that moment Exley, the guy you have so often dubbed the Terminal Skeptic, appealed to God. Yes he did. As he was going down, Frederick Exley said, “Dear God, if this be a stroke, don’t let me come round leaking spittle from the side of my mouth, my typing fingers gone—let me, Christ, you fatherless bastard, take the deep six now.”