Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Mc-bleeding-Guire! My ancestral name on my mater’s side! The awful cigarette pressed between his pursed lips, the padre extended his nicotine-stained hand, which I accepted as gingerly as I would that of a leper.

  “Now there’s a good boyo,” Maguire said. He then turned and fled up the aisle toward the bulkhead. The plane began a slow taxiing toward the runway.

  Thrown considerably off schedule by our forty-minute delay, the captain now announced there would be yet another few minutes’ wait as there were a half dozen planes on the taxiway ahead of us awaiting the use of our designated runway. For that reason, he said, the stewardesses would use the time to acquaint us with the Boeing 707-323B, which American Airlines used on all its overseas flights. Although our plane had been moving steadily forward, and was now doing so somewhat jerkily as one after another unseen plane before us took the runway and became airborne, the truculent little Maguire—though, thankfully, he had been persuaded to discard his habitual cigarette—was the only passenger still standing. He was beside Ms. Glenn at the bulkhead. He seemed to be in some heated dialogue with her. Ms. Glenn had removed the microphone from its cradle attached to the bulkhead and apparently wanted to simper over the virtues of the 707-323B. As nearly as I could determine, she was refusing to do so until Maguire took his seat with everyone else. Presently, with no little angry frustration, she slammed the mike back into its cradle, pivoted and disappeared between the curtains leading into the first class section. Directly she was back with a uniformed man who, from his youth and the limited white hash marks on the sleeves of his blue jacket, was either the first officer or the engineer. That either officer would abandon his instruments so near to takeoff distressed me.

  The officer, together with Ms. Glenn, now angrily engaged Maguire in what, had one been able to hear it, was as nasty and strident as outright name calling. At length, apparently exhausted by whatever Maguire’s demands were and no doubt fearful of being away from his duties any longer, the officer conceded to Maguire, gave Ms. Glenn a rather hopeless little-boy shrug, rolled his eyes wildly around in their sockets, suggesting there was obviously no way of dealing with a loony like Maguire, pivoted, went through the curtains, and proceeded back toward the flight deck.

  Throughout all this, I might add, Jimmy O’Twoomey sat there giggling drunkenly and sneeringly repeating, “Wouldcha look at that wan now, my dear Frederick, that bleeding arsinine culchie?” As O’Twooney had already made scatological references to Ms. Glenn’s lovely, rather dream-of-sculptor’s behind, I thought “culchie” was some indecorously Irish or downright obscene allusion to Ms. Glenn’s vaginal area, say, as in “cunt,” and that O’Twoomey was deriding her in the worst possible taste. My indignation was becoming sublime. Infuriated by the delay these Micks had already cost us, and further irked by the prospect of spending well over eight airborne hours with this drunken “boyo,” I was also incensed that with the “courtesy” the airline had already extended his group by waiting forty minutes, O’Twoomey was so derisively and ungratefully able to deprecate the craft’s personnel. Unable to resist it, and with a good deal of strained delicacy and circumspection, I pointed out to O’Twoomey that he and his brethren were “guests in our country” (I was beautiful to behold: I almost stood up and sang the national anthem!), that I knew regulations forbade the pilot’s taking off until everyone, but everyone, “including your man of the cloth,” is seated and strapped in. I saw no earthly reason, I added, for so nastily insulting Ms. Glenn for doing a job she had an absolute mandate to do. Jimmy hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about.

  “You called the stewardess a culchie,” I said, whispering “culchie” and rolling the word with reverent naughtiness over my palate as though I were mouthing the ultimate Gaelic obscenity.

  Jimmy O’Twoomey found my ignorance downright hilarious. He threw his head back, roared with laughter, rolled around in an abandoned giggle as though he were Silly Putty, then leaned wheezingly and intimately toward me, with his right hand again patted me with patronizing affection on the thigh, his mouth all drunken foamy spittle, and said, “No, no, me dear bucko, Frederick, not the lurverly colleen! What kind of a bleeding Irishman are ye! That wan, that wan, that dirty little pompous fol dol di do Jesuit!”

  Unsettled that this Irishman, now embarked on what seemed a religious outing or pilgrimage, could be so derisive of a priest, I asked what a culchie was. Unable to accept that I knew nothing whatever of Ireland, with no little exasperation Jimmy O’Twoomey explained that a culchie was what we Yanks called a hick or hayseed or rube. When I said that from the rather magisterial way Father Maguire acted, I’d rather gathered he was the head of the tour, Jimmy found this unbearably funny and all but disintegrated with coughing, choking laughter. As he did so, his stubby fingers patting my thigh tightened fiercely, his thumb and index fingers coming together so excruciatingly at the inseam near my left ball I sensed the blood evacuating my face. And among maniacal demented shrieks, Jimmy told me that Padre Maguire was nothing more than “wan of Ryan’s arse-kissing slaveys, brilliant though he may be, me boyo, just a bleeding Jesuit thug!” I had not the slightest idea who Ryan was and said so. My ignorance was severely trying Jimmy O’Twoomey. With an eye-popping and inflammatory impatience, coupled with that grating annoyance one employs with three-year-olds or retardates, and in pompously exaggerated and ever-so-patiently articulated words that rendered me rigid with a humiliation I didn’t believe I had any obligation to feel, O’Twoomey informed me, with grand flourishes and pumpings of his arm, that “Dermot Ryan, for the sake of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is the bleeding archbishop of Dublin!”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. So this group is from Dublin?” “And where else, me boyo?” Jimmy sighed theatrically. “The bleeding prerogatives of an archbishop. When I set up this bleeding tour as a gift to some of our more deserving workers, I asked the great wan to give me anywan but Maguire to make the arrangements, handle the money, that sort of thing. Ryan saddles me with thees eejit anyway. Maguire’s worthless at this kind of thing. He’s nothing but a culchie who spent twenty years studying with the Jesuits, good for nothin’ but scribblin’ interpretations or apologies for Ryan’s slightest pronouncements, written for those bleeding religious journals in that recondite gobbledygook which nobody but other culchie Jesuits can understand. I doubt he could And Hawaii on a map, lurve. And look at him now, me boyo, Frederick, just look at that wan! Thinks he’s got a direct pipeline not only to Archbishop Ryan but to Jesus Christ Himself, sure he does—the eejitl”

  Whatever Maguire’s argument with Ms. Glenn, it was now resolved, for though she still stood watchfully beside him, she had surrendered the microphone to him and was explaining how a button on its side had to be pressed down with the index linger in order that the sound be heard. Apparently satisfied, Father Maguire looked beseechingly back to Jimmy, obviously seeking Jimmy’s approval that he was doing a grand job. Still giggling drunkenly and repeatedly mumbling “the bleeding eejit, the bleeding eejit,” Jimmy raised his right forearm limply up from his elbow in a weary Nazi salute and impishly waggled his fingers at Maguire by way of assuring him what a lurverly conscientious boyo he was. Father Maguire now pressed the button and asked our “indulgence.” A stately silence engulfed the cabin.

  “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, from a sudden and unprovided-for death deliver us, O Lord.”

  O Lord indeed! What a prayer to offer a jammed plane about to embark on a five-thousand-mile journey! Like the Pope on the balcony above St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday rendering his hand benedictions to the mobs beneath, Father Maguire now blessed us in the same way, with his two yellow fingers repeatedly making the sign of the cross in the air space before his chest. All over the economy section passengers made the sign at forehead and chest and mumbled piously. Although O’Twoomey made the sign of the cross, all he mumbled, among dark, gleefully evil chuckles, was:

  “The bleeding eejit, the bleeding eejit. It’s all playacting, me dear Fred
erick. I doubt the little culchie’s administered the sacraments in his entire career and now wouldcha look at that wan? Just look at that wan! Playacting the bleeding Pope for us. And sure he is!”

  Memory is anarchic and I’m not sure I actually witnessed what happened next. I hope I did not. Ms. Glenn now had the microphone and welcomed us to American Airlines Flight 201, nonstop from Chicago to Honolulu. As though the group was indeed Russkis or Polacks in need of translation, the terrible little Maguire now usurped the mike and welcomed us to American Airlines Flight 201, nonstop from Chicago to Honolulu. Ms. Glenn said the Boeing 707-3 2 3B international model had twenty-two first class and 113 economy section seats. Maguire grabbed the mike from her hand and told us the same thing! Ms. Glenn informed us of the location of the lavatories and magazine racks. Maguire informed us also! On and on. Later, when we were airborne, which would be momentarily, the captain told us our cruising altitude, our arrival time at and the temperature in Honolulu, when he began pointing out the Continental Divide, a clouded-over San Francisco, and so forth, Maguire would leap furiously from his aisle seat hard by the bulkhead, snatch the mike from its cradle, and word for word repeat everything the captain had just told us. Did he really do that?

  6

  I don’t know at what point I knew O’Twoomey was insane. In my days in the bin, I was on quite friendly, even palsy, terms with guys who had built structures in the skies—oh, fiefdoms and principalities and castles—every bit as elaborate (but nowhere near as brilliant) as Kinbote’s lost Kingdom of Zembla. Had O’Twoomey’s insanity been as jolly as that of the “happy” homosexual Kinbote, or that of some of my pals in the bin—one guy, nineteen years old, told me he had invented the process for iodizing salt and spent his days in the hospital’s library preparing endlessly elaborate affidavits for suing Morton Salt and twenty-six other defendants—I would have been amused. Very early on, however, it became apparent that O’Twoomey’s delusions weren’t all that much “fun” and were charged with as much rage, malice, and prejudice as his person was brimming with booze.

  As Ms. Glenn had promised, she took O’Twoomey’sorder first. He wanted whiskey. What kind? With volatile impatience, O’Twoomey told her whiskey, girl, whiskey. Trying to help, I explained to Ms. Glenn that he undoubtedly wanted Bushmills or Jameson or Powers Gold Label. She said she was sure they had none of these brands. Jimmy laughed contemptuously, said he wasn’t bleeding surprised that an airline as obviously barbaric as American—”It’s hardly Aer Lingus, now is it, me girl?”—didn’t know what whiskey was, then turned to me and asked what I drank. Looking across at the old lady to see if her Demerol was taking its effect (it was), and though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t drink on the flight but now knew that without alcohol I could in no way endure this nearly endless journey with Jimmy, I said I drank the eighty-proof or red label Smirnoff vodka with a splash of Schweppes quinine water, no lime. Jimmy stiffened, sighed disgustedly, and told her to bring us two each of “what the bleeding Limeys would call ‘a bird’s drink.’ “ Returning with the drinks, Ms. Glenn lowered the trays from the seat backs in front of us and placed on them two clear plastic cups of ice, four miniatures of vodka, and a freshly opened bottle of Schweppes, still fizzing. O’Twoomey moaned and shriveled his rumberried nose in mock-horrified distaste. He asked me to mix our drinks the way I ordinarily did. As I did so, he spoke to Ms. Glenn.

  “This is my friend, Frederick.” He reached under the tray separating us and with the latent homosexuality so indigenous to the Irish again patted me lovingly on the thigh. “My dearest friend in all the world. If he should die before me, Lord forbid, may God have mercy on his immortal soul. Give him the check.”

  As I red-facedly stood up to reach into my pocket for the money (O’Twoomey had, after all, ordered the drinks), Jimmy popped off his first in one gluttonous gulp and Ms. Glenn was explaining to him that though he had chosen to sit in the economy section with his friends, Jimmy himself had first class accommodations and hence his drinks were included in the price of his ticket. Unfazed and watching me with amused smug skepticism, as though he doubted my financial ability to negotiate the five-dollar transaction, he promptly told Ms. Glenn to give me my money back as he was just testing “boyo Frederick here to see if he lurves me.” He then told her to go forward and get the money from “whatziz-whozit, Padre Maguire or whoever in creation’s damnation he is.” Jimmy said that Maguire would pay for everyone on the tour, including his “new and lurverly friend, Frederick.”

  ‘That little culchie’s got a whole gunnysack full of twenty-dollar bills and they’re all mine!”

  Jimmy threw his head back and roared. As Ms. Glenn began her turn to start toward the bulkhead and Father Maguire, Jimmy abruptly demanded to know what we were having for dinner. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Stopping jokingly in midturn, rather as if O’Twoomey had hurled an obscenity after her, Ms. Glenn turned back, widened those great gray vacuous eyes in amused irony, laughed, and said that dinner was a long way off. Soon we would have a sumptuous breakfast of choice of juices, scrambled eggs with ham or link sausage, toast or rolls with marmalade or jelly, a Danish if we chose, milk, and coffee. This was to be followed by “a super movie, Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson? then dinner, then Honolulu. Frederick and I, Jimmy assured her, wanted no bleeding mushy scrambled eggs, least of all did “we” want to view any “arsinine Hollywood flicker with a bleeding Limey named Robert ‘Med-ford.’” We were going to have ever so many “bird’s drinks,” some lurverly talk, after which we would be famished. So what, he again demanded of Ms. Glenn, was for dinner?

  Ms. Glenn’s face reddened in stunned helpless sadness, excessively timid sadness, and I couldn’t help remarking how much this ruefulness, on the face of a girl airline-trained to an effusive near-nauseating ebullience, lent her a truly alarming beauty. Oh, Jesus Christ, O’Twoomey, I wanted to bellow at him, I don’t give a shit if you’re the bleeding prime minister of the Republic! Would you for godawmighty sakes leave the poor girl alone so she can do her job? Ms. Robin Glenn had by now explained the dinner choices in steerage were chicken luau or manicotti. Neither of these holding any meaning whatever for this porcine bleary-eyed potato-gobbling Irishman, he now demanded to know what was in them. Almost on the verge of tears, Ms. Glenn explained that chicken luau was a delicious dish of chicken fried in shortening, after which it was all mixed lovingly with spinach in a hot cream sauce made from coconut milk to create a casserole.

  “Coconut cream?” O’Twoomey cried with shrill derision. “You mean it’s a bleeding Hawaiian dish?”

  “Yes.”

  Ms. Glenn was by now so intimidated that her affirmation made me recognize for the first time the validity of that cliché about people speaking mousily. Her voice was a demure peep. In the grand manner O’Twoomey threw his big hairy Irish head regally and haughtily back and proclaimed, “But I do not eat bleeding wog food! And manicotti?”

  “Manicotti…”

  Ms. Glenn hesitated, compressing her lips in touching bewilderment, and I could see she really didn’t know what manicotti was. Her distress and frustration verged on the pitiable.

  “Look, Ms. Glenn,” I said, “you go take care of the rest of your passengers, ni explain to Jimmy here what it is.”

  My effrontery in interrupting O’Twoomey was almost more than he could endure. Turning to me with a look of angry perplexity bordering on outrage, he instantly thrust his right arm and index finger violently outward, directed squarely at Ms. Glenn’s striking cleavage.

  “Stay, if you please, madame.”

  Now to his toothy mouth he lifted the second of his vodkas and quinine, which unbidden I’d already mixed (such was the extent of my own intimidation), and drank this down in one slurping draught, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. With great ceremony he folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his seat, looked straight ahead, and allowed his crossed arms to slide down to rest upon his chocolate-brown and white-undershirted belly
where, I’d already detected, the bottom two buttons did indeed appear to have been popped. He lifted his chinless chin up in the regal way he affected, his lips formed a kind of Robert Morleyish fish mouth, and his words took on a tone implying that there lurked in his lineage baronets, dukedoms, and princedoms.

  “Well, Frederick, me lurve, just suppose you tell me what manicotti is.”

  Jimmy sat there presidentially, rather petulantly Johnson-like, awaiting my arguments for pulling our troops from Vietnam. O’Twoomey was of course mad as a hatter. Insanity always instills in those of us who imagine we’re still functioning a kind of eerie and queasy deference.

  “Well,” I hemmed, giving the petrified Ms. Glenn (for on O’Twoomey’s harsh instructions to stay put she had literally frozen) a meek and helpless shrug. “One takes some long tubular—pipelike, you might say—noodles and stuffs them with a mixture of chopped chicken, veal, spinach, and onion fried up in butter and garlic. You then add some ricotta and Parmesan cheese to the mixture, stuff the ingredients into the cooked noodles, top the noodles with some thin slices of mozzarella cheese, and bake the whole business at a high heat, about 425 degrees, I think. This done, you smother the noodles in some hot Italian red sauce and serve. Quite delicious, really. But listen, Jimmy, I can’t guarantee any food you’ll get on an airline.”

  O’Twoomey of course picked up on one word only. “Italian?” he demanded, pronouncing it Eyetalian and wrinkling his Santa Claus nose with monumental disdain. He looked on the verge of vomiting. “You mean it’s a bleeding dago dish?”

  “Yes,” Ms. Glenn and I answered almost in unison. Our joint timidity amounted to no more than a sotto voce echo of one another, peep peep.

  “But,” O’Twoomey said, his arms still folded over his brown-shirted belly, his head thrown grandly back, his fish mouth forming his words with a suddenly introduced and painfully articulated Oxford accent, “I’ve already told you I do not eat bleeding wog food.”