Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Wiley had been in the islands fifteen years, and the old lady had cut the wheel in half and wrapped its separate pieces in aluminum foil as she felt it might remind Wiley of home. For the two of them she’d brought along some Croghan (another eye-blinking village in the area) bologna, which is shaped more like a sausage than the supermarket variety we upstate vulgarians call horsecock. Croghan bologna is terribly rich, terribly spicy, and terribly delicious. Both of these products are superb with saltines, horseradish, hot mustard, and a case of Molson’s Canadian ale, lolling around with the guys watching Sunday football. Touched, and though I knew Wiley would appreciate the gifts immensely, I’d heard enough about the Brigadier’s condition to know his cancer-ridden peritoneum wouldn’t be holding down any cheddar, least of all that spicy and mouthwatering Croghan bologna.

  At the dull, uniform, and nondescript room of the motel, which reminded me how far and how coarsely we have drifted from the American dream of distinction, I adjusted the color on the primordial ooze tube, then, on the pretext that the newsstand might not be open prior to our 6:30 A.M. boarding, and so that the old lady might make her toilette and get into the new nightgown I knew she’d purchased for her stay at the Brigadier’s home, I told her I was going to stroll back to the terminal and get some magazines to read on the long flight. Buying the first half dozen publications I put my hand to, I walked to the bar, ordered a double vodka with a splash of tonic, no fruit, reached into my shirt pocket, removed two thirty-milligram Serax capsules, popped them into my mouth, and washed them down with the drink.

  Abruptly, to my surprise and annoyance that I’d already ingested the downers which would very quickly be taking me into dreamy nether regions, I found myself talking with the Syracuse criminal lawyer John Ray, a fine, distinguished-looking, soft-spoken—no Kunstler courtroom tactics for John Ray!—and extremely considerate gentleman. Among upstate lawyers John Ray is considered the best in the area (I doubt he has ever lost a case—at least after appeals—up in our county of Jefferson). Many years ago, before the Appellate Division of the State of New York, he’d defended a friend of mine (alas, he’d lost this one!) in a disbarment proceeding brought by the grievance committee of the Jefferson County Bar Association, a case in which I was intricately and feloniously involved in a way that has no bearing on these pages. I had heard that John Ray had not originally wanted the case. The “rules of evidence,” at which John Ray was of course extremely learned and adept, did not apply in such a proceeding. The prosecutors for our local bar association would be allowed, for example, to introduce as “evidence” my friend’s drinking and sexual habits and so forth—his morality, which is of course utterly irrelevant in a criminal proceeding. Hence, an irony of ironies, attorneys don’t accord their peers the same due process that is accorded a genteel “priest” like sweet Charlie Manson.

  At first John Ray had recommended my friend to a Syracuse University law professor who had defended a number of lawyers against disbarment, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and who was as good an authority on the proceeding as John Ray knew. But my friend was desperately adamant and told John Ray he was in trouble, man, trouble and that he’d put his faith in no one else but John Ray. While the latter was reluctantly pondering accepting the case, the entirely unexpected—or so the story goes—happened. It is said, apocryphally for all I know, that one or two Watertown establishment lawyers approached John Ray, said they’d heard he was considering taking the case, and told him they’d much appreciate it if he didn’t

  Every time I heard the story I smiled sadly, and I desperately wanted to ask John Ray that night if it were true. Instead, against temptation, I squelched the urge to lure the great man into gossip. If true, such an intervention from one lawyer to another is not only unethical, it is grounds for severe rebuke from any bar association in America. More than that, though, and once again if true, it touchingly manifests the naive provincialism of my home county and shows how little our local gentry understand of a man like John Ray. Like most great criminal lawyers, John Ray has always been a loner. I’ve heard his offices are as spartan as a monk’s cell—no man for fancy carpeting, he! And though John Ray has been known to take more than several drinks (like most loners, I’d guess), he is totally abstemious when preparing and trying a case. An attorney friend of mine tells of the time he, John Ray, and a young lawyer were lunching across the street from a courthouse in which the young attorney was trying a case of his own. Detecting the young attorney was imbibing preprandial martinis, John Ray told him in his usual polite and gentlemanly way, but with no little severity nonetheless, that the young man was practicing the Law and had an absolute duty to his client not to do so with alcohol in him.

  For whatever reason, John Ray at last agreed to accept my friend’s case. At the airport bar we now bought each other drinks, with me going down, down, and down by the moment, talked about his summer home on Lake Ontario where he went to fish for bass, and then, and as was inevitable, came round to the Case. John Ray told me how much he’d liked my disbarred friend and his “lovely charming wife” and how sorry he’d been to lose that case above all. Five years later he’d petitioned the Appellate Court to have my friend reinstated, the petition being denied outright. And now—oh, my!—ten years has passed and the lovely charming wife was beseeching him to re-petition the court He now asked me what I thought about it all. Flattered that the brilliant John Ray would seek my opinion, I said I knew my friend was doing well in the construction business but that for his three sons by his first wife, all now approaching college age and doubtless having received, as they were going through their formative years, no little abuse from their Watertown schoolmates for their father’s disbarment, I suspected my friend wanted, if not vindication or exoneration, at least reinstatement as a sirely gift, humbly offered, to those sons.

  “That’s the point,” John Ray said. “His wife wants me to re-petition on the promise that if he’s readmitted hell never practice again.”

  Gloomily I pondered that for many moments, sipping pensively on my vodka. Then I spoke.

  “No, no, no. Under no circumstances would I ask those”—I almost said “fuckers” but knew John Ray wouldn’t brook that kind of language—”judges down in Rochester to give him back his shingle on the condition it doesn’t mean doodly-squat. I’d go in there with the idea that the guy’s paid his dues, that he’s supported and educated his children despite his disbarment, that he deserves reinstatement and that given his license back he can damn well do with it as he pleases. I know at his age he won’t attempt to start another practice anyway. He’s doing too well in the construction racket. But I certainly wouldn’t approach those judges so abjectly as to have them imagine it was any of their business what he does if he gets his license back.”

  “I think you might be right.”

  Sorry that I couldn’t get John Ray to reveal to me whether he planned to petition the court again (he was much too cautious for that), we shook hands and said goodbye. John Ray told me to give his affection to my friend and his lovely charming wife, and I dreamily, somnambulantly from the Serax and the booze, made my way across the parking lot to the Airport Inn. As I did so I was thinking how much the airport bar resembled every other airport bar in the world, with great picture windows opening onto macadam-and-concrete runways so we all could apparently go into orgies of ecstasy watching 747s land and depart. And I was thinking further that damnation might ultimately reside in having one’s past catch up with him in the bars of distant terminals, say, Timbuktu, Perth, or Addis Ababa.

  At the room the old lady, having taken her own pills, was asleep in her bed, her mouth open, her aging face wrinkled and drawn about the mouth and eyes. In vivid living color on the tube Matt Dillon and Festus in the persons of Jim Arness—also grown old with the times! Oh, no, not you, Matt!—and the shamelessly hammy Ken Curtis were in Mart’s spartan weather-beaten wood-paneled marshal’s office slurping black coffee from their tin cups. Festus had his spurs up on hi
s desk and, prefacing his every high-pitched yap with “gol dangs” and “golly gees”—this in a frontier town where the American’s love of the four-letter word was, if possible, even more pronounced than it is today!—was issuing his surprisingly acute and pertinent observations on the nature of life, while the ever-stoic and laconic Matt—all six feet seven of him from out of the Swede country of northern Minnesota—remained as wordless, stealthy, and scraggly as an old grizzly. To Festus’s every remark Big Jim shook his head with a solemn, ponderous, and rueful petulance which seemed to suggest that if God did in fact lay a burden on each of us—to make one pay his dues, as it were—then assuredly Festus was the marshal’s cross to bear.

  That the old lady had fallen asleep spoke more eloquently of her grief than anything else could have done. Gunsmoke had been her and my stepfather Wally’s—dead now six years himself—favorite TV show, one they had viewed religiously. To say the old lady “watched” is not precise. Although she has TV sets all over her house—it is she to whom the suave phrasemakers direct their nonsensical spiels and render the Ultimate Consumer—she presently (left to her own devices, her widowhood) has taken to falling asleep during a show, as well as we all should. The old lady had, however, taken great pleasure from Wally’s pleasure.

  Many years ago, before Henry Ford the elder rendered the horse obsolete with his assembly line and turned America into the most clockwork and wheel-spinning joke of a civilization that ever desecrated the green earth and forced Wally into the automobile spring business, Wally, like his father before him, had been a blacksmith. As an apprentice to his father he had traveled all over upstate New York shoeing horses. To this day the old-timers remember him as the blacksmith and not as the owner of the Watertown Spring Service. One of the antiquarians gave it to me as indisputable fact that once when trying to shoe a particularly churlish dobbin, Wally became so incensed that he doubled his fist, slugged the horse, and knocked it down. So it is that when I now watch the lead-in to ABC’s Monday Night Football, and whether or not the old man’s tale was fantasy, and see the cowboy-betogged ex-Detroit Lion tackle Alex Karras saunter up to a horse, punch it, and flatten it—assuredly a case of art imitating life—whereas “I’m invariably watching this scene with fishing guide friends in the Bay and at this precise moment always feel crushed and walled in by peals of raucous laughter, I on the other hand am overwhelmed with nostalgic memories of Wally.

  Although I’d had three or four double vodkas and was still going dreamily down from the Serax capsules, I couldn’t resist—doubtless attempting to take my mind from the grave nature of the pilgrimage which lay ahead—watching the rest of the show. Removing my clothes except for my jockey shorts, and though it is ordinarily my wont to drop shirts and trousers in the middle of the floor where I stand, I now scrupulously folded them on hangers and hung them in the closet so that for the old lady I might look as spiffy as possible on the grueling flight ahead. Then I got into bed and snapped off the nightstand lamp, leaving the vivid multicolored TV image as the only light in the room. As was also my wont, I then started, sotto voce now because of the old lady’s being asleep, yapping at the screen.

  3

  Well, Matt, old pardner, says I, like the rest of us you’ve grown old with the times. Your puss, old boy, is drawn with lines and wrinkles. There is melancholy in your blue eyes. Your jowls, Big Jim, are drooping down like cows’ udders. That girth of yours appears to be held in by a corset, either that or that furry chest is sagging over your stomach. That Colt .45 sure don’t clear its holster the way it used to. For sure, pardner. Excuse me for laughing, marshal. I was just thinking that if old Wally were still around I’m sure he’d express awesome admiration—doubtless incredulity!—for the miracle horse that could carry that lardass over scalding parched wastes and frigid rock-cragged hills. Well, that’s okay, pardner. Shee-it, Matt, don’t get me wrong. I forgive you and most assuredly don’t mean to patronize. From the sidelines, and with the rest of us, you too have witnessed the jolly spectacles of Vietnam, the riots, the mindless and blasphemous assassinations, Haldeman, Erlichman, Colson, and that whole line of fascist pricks in their regimental neckties parading themselves before the very tube that you, Kitty, Chester—and don’t forget the wise ol’ Doc!—not only helped bring into every home in America but so institutionalized it became as sacred to the American as his odorless and spotless snowy vitreous china toilet bowl—yes, these tailored thugs parading themselves before your tube and straightfacedly confessing (most of them educated to the law, Matt!) to one stunning felony after another.

  Yeah, old pardner, the extent of your consternation and grief at the obscene spectacle America has become I can only guess at—Big Jim Amess from Swedish immigrant stock up yonder there in Minnesota, from Ms. Edna Farcer’s So Big country! Did you, too, have to read So Big in high school? Coming from your neck of the woods, you must have! My high school class loved the book. We laughed, we wept furtively, we were in thrall, we were fucking ennobled, old pardner, fucking ennobled! Of course Ms. Ferber’s farmers weren’t precisely Swedish or from Minnesota. Ms. Ferber’s farmers were Dutch and did their truck gardening in Illinois. Do you remember Selina DeJong? By our teacher she was foisted off on us as one sensitive broad. She said things like “Cabbages are beautiful!” and into Ms. Ferber’s prose there came a lot of “felicitous” phrases like “fresh green things peeping out of the earth.”

  Cabbages, Big Jim? Then there was Selina’s son, Dirk DeJong—”So Big” himself! To his great misfortune the haughty Dirk didn’t find cabbages in the least pulchritudi-nous. Dirk went on to make a lot of bread in Chicago, rode to the foxes with that snooty North Shore crowd, and, alas, ended up with a Jap (as Ms. Ferber called him) houseman and valet named Saki (I shit you not pardner!) and lying facedown on his bed among his proper Peel evening clothes. It is a pitiable, pathetic vision—Ms. Ferber’s profound notion of the price one pays for scorning cabbages. And what can one say, save that these thirty years have rendered Ms. Edna Ferber and all her works as obsolete as the American Dream. Well, no, not entirely; one might take So Big and a box of maple sugar leaves to a terminal case at Roswell Memorial.

  We were lucky up yonder there in Watertown, though, marshal (as I pray you were too), for along with Ms. Ferber our teachers took Willie the Shake’s Caesar and Macbeth and Hamlet and shoved them up our asses. And do you know the only thing I consciously retain from high school English—I mean, I was a fucking jock, Matt—after, lo, these nigh onto three decades? The prettiest girl in our class was also the brightest. She was tanned and blonde and rich and wore lemon cashmere sweaters. She owned the cold silent hauteur of her brilliance, could play the cello to break your heart—for fact, Big Jim—and when she strolled by between classes, great dark blue eyes so aloofly and coldly forward, her mountain of textbooks and notebooks clutched lovingly against and erasing the outline of her tender young breasts, she had the entire football team (me included, pardner!) stepping fiercely on each other’s toes, self-consciously pummeling one another with our hands, ferociously butting heads, emitting great raucous belches, trying to score obscene “funnies” off one another, farting, spitting (yes, expelling flatus and expectorating right in the oily and hallowed halls of the old high school on Sterling Street!). We did anything that we might get her attention, anything that might crumple her stunning poise. Only once we wanted her to turn to us, if only in distaste, if only once we might get those great dark blue eyes to wince in nothing but dismay at our bestiality.

  We never of course got any reaction whatever. And was it not astonishing, Mistuh Dillon? With all her distaff classmates mooning nightly by their phones for a call from one jock or another, she had at seventeen already put the thug and hooligan footballer behind her. Yes, great dark blue eyes forward and walking ever unwaveringly, that distressing pile of texts crushing her anatomy where even then a man’s loving mouth should have been placing its wet caresses, she marched and marched and marched to some grander, nobler, more signi
ficant and dignified destiny.

  It must have been our senior year, marshal, for we were into Hamlet and I was one day struck nearly speechless to see her raise a beckoning arm—nearly dumb, old pardner, because this sweety pants (as we cornily called them) did not just have smartness, the kind of smartness-smartaleckyness which like some monstrous sci-fi fungus thrives on letting itself be heard, which indeed cannot live without letting itself be heard. Au contraire, this golden maiden had brilliance and was awesomely and smugly comfortable with it and had no need whatever to assure herself or us, by the sound of her own voice, of that brilliance. Indeed, since junior high I doubt I’d heard her voice but twice.

  As astonished as the rest of us, I think, the teacher deferentially acknowledged the questioning hand and whispering arm, sheathed in its lemon cashmere like a tulip peduncle in summer breeze, and my sweet cellist, to the incredulity of the entire class, and in very measured, articulate, and grave tones, expounded at no little length on the difficulty she’d had in absorbing Shakespeare since as sophomores we’d got into his heavier tragedies beginning with Caesar. Oh, as a freshman she’d liked Romeo and Juliet well enough, despite the unhappiness of its ending (that horny play was no play for freshmen, old pardner, but we were too dumb to know it, as was the New York State Board of Regents, never known for its wisdom), but since that first year it had been all madness, delusion, murder, vengeance, lies, assassinations, betrayal, mindless killing, fury, hatred, deceit, lust for power, incest—I didn’t even know the meaning of the latter; I mean, I was a fucking jock, I’ve told you that flat out, marshal—ad infinitum. Yes, to the speechlessness of the entire class, this pristine golden cellist’s litany was endless and almost stupefying in that she seemed to omit nothing that wasn’t supposedly held most disgusting and abhorrent by man.