Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  Ms. Glenn and I remained in trancelike and stunned silence. Presently Ms. Glenn reluctantly offered what she obviously prayed was hopeful solution.

  “But, sir, you have first class accommodations. You can have just about anything you want to eat.”

  For the first time since Jimmy had withdrawn into himself, he turned to her. His great bleary blue eyes lighted up. He smiled with a childlike pleasurable warmth, exposing a mouthful of huge Irish teeth. With the palm of his left hand he joyously slammed his perversely pronounced forehead, causing his great mass of salt-and-pepper hair to fly abandonedly about.

  “Is that so? Is that so? Ah, let me see—ah, yes, in that case Frederick and I shall have thump.”

  “Thump?” Ms. Glenn said.

  “Thump!”

  “Thump?” I said.

  “Colcannon, Frederick. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, lurve, “I’m beginning to believe you really are a bleeding Limey!”

  “But, Mr. O’Twoomey…”

  Ms. Glenn started to explain, I imagine, that “just about anything you want” did not extend to having the airline prepare special dishes for O’Twoomey, when Jimmy interrupted by directing his index finger to a vivid green jade ring bordered in gold and worn on the third finger of Ms. Glenn’s left hand.

  “Is that a wedding band?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly—I mean, it’s sort of one. It’s a friendship ring the man I live with gave me until his divorce becomes final and we can marry.”

  Ms. Glenn broke out in a brilliantly hued embarrassment of having allowed this virtual stranger to intimidate her into revealing such intimacies.

  “Ah,” O’Twoomey cried, “you’re a bleeding Prod, eh?”

  “A what?”

  “A Protestant, me girl, a bleeding Protestant! If you were living with a married man in Dublin, you’d be flogged, and sure you would, me lurverly colleen, and I do mean bleeding flogged!”

  All teeth now, O’Twoomey was smiling with enormously sadistic pleasure, as though the very notion of stripping Ms. Glenn naked and beating her half to death with a truncheon appealed overwhelmingly to his Catholic morality.

  “But enough of your harlotry for the nonce,” Jimmy said. “Lend me your dastardly seenful ring and I’ll show you and me lurve Frederick here how to make thump.”

  Dutifully, quakingly would be more in the spirit of the gesture, Ms. Glenn removed the ring from her finger, handed it to O’Twoomey, and said, her voice breaking with humiliation and hurt, “Please, sir, can’t you just show Frederick? The plane is packed and I really have to—I mean, I must—help the other girls serve the passengers.”

  “Oh, be gone then and continue in your life of damnable seen!” Jimmy cried. “In Honolulu 1*11 have a Mass read for your immortal soul! Just make sure,” he hastened to add, “that me lurve Frederick’s and me glasses are bottomless. And wouldcha look at this, me girl, me bleeding cup already manifests a bottom.”

  I had taken but a couple sips of one of mine. Directly, and again unbidden, I mixed the second of mine and slid it across the tray toward O’Twoomey. In acknowledgment he gave me an enormously toothy smile and bobbed his head up and down with wooden jollity. “You are verily a lurverly chap, Frederick.” His hand again came under the tray to rest sensually on my thigh.

  “I will, sir,” Ms. Glenn said. “I swear. I swear you’ll get the best service on the plane.” She then forced a smile of tentative, grievous artifice and flew away to the aid of her sisters. Again I scrutinized her behind receding up the aisle, as O’Twoomey of course did also. With his thumb and middle finger brought up to his pursed lips he blew a wog’s kiss of delectation after her.

  On the tray between us O’Twoomey now had the green jade ring, a white button he’d taken from the pocket of his tan gabardine jacket, obviously one of the buttons his enormous belly had forced from his chocolate-brown shirt, and a Kennedy half dollar he’d asked me for. I am in no way sure I can tell one what thump or colcannon is, nor can I be sure it is in any way as disgustingly nauseating as Jimmy made it sound. Thump began of course with peeled boiled potatoes put through a sieve, by which I gathered O’Twoomey meant mashed. Dripping spittle over his chin, he went on to tell me that any one of the “grand Irish potatoes” would do, even lovingly and salivatingly identifying, as only a bonkers Irishman would do, the pretentious and pseudo-blarney-poetic names of some of their fucking spuds, Aran Banner, Skerry Champion, Ulster Chieftain, the latter of course being “a bleeding Orangeman’s potato.” To these Aran Banners mashed in hot cream one then added half as much chopped boiled kale smothered in hot butter.

  “Kale?” I said.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Frederick, I’ve given up—but given up—on your Irishness. It’s a bleeding cabbage, a headless cabbage.”

  I could not even envision a “headless” cabbage but held my peace. Pretending now that one of his empty plastic cups was the kettle into which this slop apparently went, Jimmy now wrapped the button in a used damp cocktail napkin, threw that in the cup, followed by the jade ring and the Kennedy half dollar. With great hyperbolic vigor he twirled his chubby hand round and round, indicating he was violently stirring these three items into the mixture of buttered kale, potatoes, and hot cream. He then explained—still salivating of course—that one piled one’s plate with a mountain of thump, with a spoon built a great volcanic indentation into the middle of this Aran Banner and kale Everest, and into this valley poured some lurverly hot melted butter.

  “One eats from the outside, Frederick. You take a forkful, dip it into the melted butter in the middle, and simply let it ooze rather gloriously down your throat. Ah, and to be sure, me lurve, there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.”

  Great and sudden wealth, according to Jimmy, would accrue to the one who got the coin in his mouth. The ring foretold an early and splendid marriage, and the button signaled to the recipient that he would walk in blessedness all his days, the button and ring being wrapped in paper so the “blessed soul” wouldn’t swallow them. Reaching again under the tray for my thigh, Jimmy now brought his spittle-covered lips almost up to mine—I thought the zany bastard was going to plant one full on—and with an air of great secretiveness whispered to me.

  “I was going to ask the colleen Glenn to join us, Frederick. But it’s impossible, don’t you see? I mean, supposing she got the button for single blessedness, living as she is in such seenful harlotry! Sacrilegious and all that, don’t you know, lurve?”

  Until we were a thousand-plus miles out over the Pacific, where Jimmy at last passed out completely and went into a deep heavy snore for the remainder of the flight to Honolulu, so that he would have neither chicken luau, manicotti, nor his glorious thump, his monologue was unceasing. As quickly as Ms. Glenn set up his vodkas, he’d down them, continue his lyrical and nonsensical spiel, throw his hairy head back into his seat, catnap and snore lightly for five, ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes, waken, furiously jab my elbow, and begin his rambling blarney all over again. No matter that I feigned reading magazines, that without turning up the sound I at one point put the earplugs in and feigned watching Jeremiah Johnson—the “Limey Robert Medford” had a lot of snow in his beard, throughout the flicker he kept looking higher and higher up some mountain or other, and at the climax—I think it was the climax—he single-handedly took on, mano a mano, a whole shitload of redskins—no matter what I did, the fierce jab at the elbow invariably came.

  Whenever I tried to introduce more mundane subjects, hoping to bore him into silence so I could get back to memories of my brother, his replies to these timid overtures were, if possible, even nuttier than his nonstop monologue. When, for example, I asked him how he’d broken his leg, he told me that this tour he’d arranged for some of his “more deserving workers” (he’d tell me who they were soon enough) had begun in New York City. Upon their arrival, as was Jimmy’s duty and custom whenever he was in New York City, he had one day strolled up to the archdiocese on Madison Avenue and had passe
d some lurverly hours swapping yarns with his great and good friend, Terence Cardinal Cooke.

  “With whom?” I cried.

  “Terence Cardinal Cooke. My bosom brother in Jesus, Cookie.” O’Twoomey never batted an eye. “Jesus, Frederick, as a New York State Irishman you don’t even know who your own bleeding cardinal is?”

  Cookie indeed! I mean, really, what the hell could one say to this crazy bastard?

  Whatever, it was after passing some lurverly hours with “Cookie,” when Jimmy was leaving the cardinal’s quarters and crossing the piazza separating the archdiocese’s entrance from Madison Avenue’s sidewalk that he slipped on a patch of ice and sustained a hairline fracture of the fibula in his left leg. Jimmy threw his great hairy head back and roared with laughter.

  “Oh, Frederick, me lurve, didn’t Cookie and me have a grand laugh over that leg! Here I am directly come from making sweet talk with a padre who practically sits on the right hand of God—yea, and to be sure, lurve, every bit as close to God as Dermot Ryan, Cookie is—just leaving this holy man’s domicile and I break my bleeding leg practically on his stoop!”

  O’Twoomey was quite beside himself with laughter. Again he reached under the tray, grabbed my thigh, pinched it at the inseam next to my left testicle, and again drained the blood from my face.

  7

  Mr. Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey was in public relations for Joe McGrath, Spencer Freeman, and the Hospital Trusts. For whatever reason, Jimmy appeared to find “public relations” a hilarious euphemism, for the term had no sooner issued from his furry tongue when he again, hysterically interrupting his own declamations, became somewhat sappily giddy with laughter, at the same time studying me diligently out of the corner of his rheumy eyes to determine if I had the foggiest notion what he was talking about. I did not. Detecting this, and with that somewhat terrifying impatience he’d already adopted regarding my calamitous ignorance of my Irishness, he now told me he no longer worked for Joe McGrath “as old Joe has joined the saints in heaven, God rest his soul,” rather, he now worked at the Hospital Trusts for Joe’s partner, Spencer Freeman, and Joe’s son, Patrick McGrath. As I’m certain my expression registered nothing whatever, in very sharp and accusatory tones Jimmy accused me of not even knowing what the Hospital Trusts was. My muteness served as my confession.

  Certainly I’d heard of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes? I’d heard of the sweepstakes but didn’t know it had anything to do with hospitals. In fact, in all my forty-plus years, I said, I couldn’t recall ever having seen a ticket, least of all ever having purchased one. With a kind of unspeakable and seething fury, Jimmy reached into the inside pocket of his gabardine jacket, violently ripped from it an expensive-looking and magnificently soft leather pocket secretary, sloppily wetted his fingers with his tongue and lips, snarlingly counted ten tickets onto our cup-stained vodka tray, loudly enunciating the number of each ticket as he counted, one, two, three, four, and so forth, ordered me to sign my name and address in the appropriate place, tear the ticket in half, give the parts with my name and address to him, and keep the other halves for myself. As I started to do so, I detected the tickets cost four dollars each, calculated immediately that the tickets would cost me forty dollars, and told Jimmy that one ticket would do me just fine.

  “But, Frederick, me lurve, you don’t understand—the bleeding tickets are on me! Look here what I’m doing, lurve. I’m transferring forty dollars from this slot in my wallet to this other slot with your stubs so Fll know exactly what it’s all about if you win. Even I, you see, darling, in the very higher echelons of the Hospital Trusts’ public relations—ha! ha!—have to account for every ticket which is dispersed. All the money, you see, goes to pay the hospital bills for Ireland’s poor, impoverished souls. All of course but for some minute sums we hold out for mundane and worldly things like expenses, salaries, and that sort of unavoidable crassness. Who do you think all these gentle souls are? Nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, all with years and years of dedicated, utterly devotional service to curing the sick, the broke, the downtrodden, the devoid of spirit—the Gaelic crackpots, that is—aye, that’s one of the reasons this bleeding tour was set up, a gift to the saintliest among us!”

  “Oh, I see. I used to do public relations myself. Your job is kind of employee relations, setting up tours like this, planning annual company picnics, that kind of thing?”

  “Oh, no, Frederick, me lurve. Don’t slight me. As I’ve said, this tour is only one of the reasons that this outing was set up. My personal public relations is a rather more discreet and delicate operation than this little group would suggest.”

  Although O’Twoomey would say no more, I never for a moment doubted that sooner or later he would. Shortly before Jimmy passed out completely, when at last I could get back to the memory of my brother, when we were about midway between San Francisco and Honolulu, Ms. Robin Glenn, inevitably joined by Padre Maguire, who would take the mike from her hand and repeat her every word, gave us American Airline’s canned spiel on the Hawaiian niceties. Across the aisle, the old lady, her head back, her mouth open, the Demerol doing its work, still slept. A must word in the islands was mahalo, which meant “thank you.” Ms. Robin Glenn pronounced it for us, as Father Maguire did directly after her. “Maw-how-low!” In unison we were all asked to pronounce it. Save for O’Twoomey, we did so. “Mah-how-low!” (In the first bar I would enter in Hawaii, that of the Honolulu International Airport, a classily dressed mainlander, after having a mere two highballs, would leave the bartender a five-dollar tip and start for the door. “Mahalo!” the bartender would cry after him. The guy would turn back, smile, wave and say, “Yeah, bah-fungoo or whatever!”) We had of course all heard the word aloha. This meant both hello and good-bye and many other things as well, as, for example, in the expression “aloha spirit” which would be interpreted as “the true spirit of hospitality.” Parroting both Ms. Glenn and Father Maguire, we all, save Jimmy, twice chirped “Ah-low-haw!”

  With abruptly seething, near-obscene, and terrifying bitterness, Jimmy grumbled, “Aloha, me bleeding arse!”

  Alarmed, nearly unmanned at the vastness of Jimmy’s loathing, I, agape and wide-eyed, turned to him. Jimmy gave me a rueful but sneering smile of apology, the smile seeming to suggest that of a rabid fox.

  “Oh, I forget, lurve, this is your first trip to Hawaii. I suspect you imagine it Elysium. It is true, Frederick, as your Mr. Samuel Clemens has claimed, that they are the lurvliest group of islands on God’s green earth. It’s what’s on them that sours the bleeding stomach and has one eating Turns like popcorn. Nothing but a bunch of bleeding wogs and dagos, bleeding savages come right down to it. They can’t even speak English, Frederick. You’ll have the bleeding devil’s time trying to comprehend a word the bleeding eejits are saying to you.”

  Here, adopting his most hyperbolic Oxford accent to date, Jimmy gave me a lesson in the pidgin he claimed all Hawaiians used. When they want to know where you have “been” (Jimmy said “bean”), “Instead of saying, ‘Where have you bean?’ these wogs say, ‘Where you went?’” For “What do you want?” it was, “What you like?” Rather than answer. “I do not want anything,” one heard, “I no like nawting.” By this time Jimmy was working himself into such a state—he’d already told me “I’m peloothered, lurve, bleeding peloothered”—that I felt he’d be unable to proceed, so excruciatingly difficult had it become for him to form his fish mouth and articulate. But proceed he did, his exasperation far outweighing his inebriation.

  “Suppose, Frederick, I wished to exhort you to make your best effort. Do you know what these bleeding wogs will say to you? These bleeding dagos will say, ‘Geev-um!’ Now tell me, lurve, if I hadn’t told you that, would you have known what anyone was saying to you when you got to Hawaii? Of course you wouldn’t!”

  “Nevertheless, having read a lot of Irish writers I know that ‘peloothered’ would be the equivalent of one of us quaint Yanks saying he was ‘drunk out of his skull.�
� But how many Hawaiians would know what you were saying if you threw peloothered at them?”

  “Peloothered can be found in any serious dictionary in the English-speaking world!”

  “I take serious exception to that. If it were found at all, I’m sure it would be either slang or a colloquialism.”

  ‘To hell and back with your bleeding exception!” Jimmy cried.

  If I found myself eating with any of these bleeding wogs, I shouldn’t be allowed to say, “It tastes delicious.” I’d have to say, “It break da mouth.” But even this was inaccurate as these bleeding savages were incapable of handling an h. “It break da mout.” For some reason I found this vastly amusing and was thinking what a field day Ireland’s James Joyce would have had in Hawaii. I almost said as much to O’Twoomey. Not only did I suspect, however, that Jimmy would deny James Joyce’s existence but O’Twoomey’s monologue was not about to be interrupted. Something as simple as “How are you today?” became “Howzit?” When and if I finally became accepted, I’d know because “these creatures or whatever they are” would start calling me “brother.” Of course these “dagos” couldn’t be expected to handle anything as simple as “brother.” This came out “bruh-duh” or, even worse—and here Jimmy shook himself feverishly, as though the malaria was on him—simply “bruh.” “The day you are completely at one with them, Frederick, you’ll be walking down the street and on meeting you every one of these apes will cry, ‘Howzit, bruh?’” Jimmy turned to me, his hand slid under the tray and came over to pat me affectionately on the left thigh. He sighed. “I told you I was going to tell you something, lurve. Then I told you what I said I was going to tell you. Now I’m telling you that I’ve just told you. You get my point, Frederick?”

  Oh, dear reader, Jimmy sat there as complacent as Gibraltar. The pleasure he took in himself had its boundaries somewhere in infinity. It was at this point I thought I might slip in my observation on what Ireland’s Joyce would have done with pidgin. There would be no such luck. Jimmy had removed his hand from my thigh, had gone back to looking straight ahead, and as he again began talking his head bobbed up and down and his mass of graying hair flopped all round his enormous forehead.