Last Notes from Home

by Frederick Exley

  In many respects the bonds between the Brigadier and Wiley were far stronger than any brothers’ blood ties, characterized as they were by impossible codes, a lofty-toned morality, Watertownians’ esoteric handshakes reinforcing our unswervable belief that where others didn’t we knew precisely what was right and wrong with the world, that there was, as there was for everything, a time to die, and that at such a time a gentleman went into a limbo of mourning and would never think of laughing rather too affectedly at Robin’s trite tales or giving her affectionate pats on her full Levied thighs. Wiley sneered. For thirty years I’d owed Wiley an apology, for reasons I’ll go into, and the reason I’d never been able to make it was that the very self-righteousness he was revealing on this morning in his Hawaii Kai kitchen, while we drank and made our lasagne, was the kind of smugness that would not have allowed him to accept my apology gracefully.

  Wiley and I’d met when, freshly scrubbed of an early September morning in 1935, we were taken by our separate mothers to the Academy Street School in Watertown and enrolled in Miss Whitney’s kindergarten class. Neither Wiley nor I has any memory of that meeting and are united only in the memory of Miss Whitney and Old Charlie Reilly. Miss Whitney had snow-white, frazzled curly hair, the result I expect of too many permanents, a red face, and deceptively hawklike features, deceptive in that she was a tolerant charming woman who had an easy way with children. In the morning we were given chocolate milk in half-pint bottles, straws through which to drink it, and cookies. In the afternoons we took enforced naps on tumbling mats we used for exercise. We did projects and projects and projects, the only one I recall a watercolor of anything we chose to paint. At the time the Brigadier, my sister, and I were heavily into cowboys and spent a good deal of our home hours drawing, over and over again, the same cowboy, my sister and I copying or practically tracing the Brigadier’s.

  As he was older, at a higher grade level, and had therefore been subjected to more lessons attempting to reproduce the human anatomy in some semblance of dimensional perspective (as yet Grandma Moses hadn’t reached her sixtieth birthday, begun her art career, and with her paintings tacitly proclaimed to the world, “Fuck perspective”), I took my lead from the Brigadier, drew a cowboy cum Stetson, neckerchief, chaps, boots, lariat, cacti, mountain horizon, the works, and mine was deemed so superior by Miss Whitney that she paraded me from classroom to classroom and had me display my creation before my more learned upper-grade school mates. When we entered the Brigadier’s room, he put his head down on his folded arms on his desk, hid behind the kid in front of him, and sneered. To this day I don’t know what he sneered but whenever I summon up the incident I project the adult Brigadier into that third-grader, put an Antonio y Cleopatra into his mouth, and around it have him saying, “Look at that frigging hot dog!” Despite the Brigadier’s grandiose condescension, that plagiarized son of the prairie was the apex of my otherwise utterly undistinguished academic career in the Watertown public school system.

  Old Charlie Reilly was principal. His office was on the same side as but at the opposite end of the corridor from our kindergarten room. As mysterious and omniscient as the Dalai Lama, he sat behind his closed office door. He had the blackest hair I’d ever seen, was the constant bearer of a formidable and apparently ineradicable five o’clock shadow, and also wore the thickest glasses I’d ever seen. In the seven years I was in his charge I can honestly say that though to my recollection his eyes were brown I was never able to get them into focus long enough to know their precise pigmentation, such was the eerie effect of his prescription. During his childhood in Albany, Old Charlie Reilly had been inadvertently hit so severely in the eye with a baseball bat that the eye had been dislodged from its socket and the specialist had pleaded for its removal, which Old Charlie Reilly and his parents adamantly declined, ending forever Old Charlie Reilly’s dream of green, green outfields and leaving him with one eye so maverick in its cavity it seemed literally to hop and to skip behind those spooky lenses.

  Far worse than anything else for Old Charlie Reilly, somewhere along the line he had cultivated a love for literature and, against his doctors’ strenuous objections and doubtless any number of new prescriptions for ever and ever thicker lenses, he read eight, nine, ten books a week, holding the volumes four to five inches from his eyes, a good deal of this reading taking place behind the closed door to his office, where I doubt his administrative duties were all that burdensome.

  Notwithstanding that Old Charlie Reilly was a lover of, a man obsessed with, words, we were impressed from the day of our enrollment in Miss Whitney’s kindergarten class that the last place in the world we wanted to be sent was to Old Charlie Reilly for disciplining. From the moment one reached the second or third grade, however, this prospect held out little trepidation to the students and by the time we graduated into junior high school it held out no fear whatever. By then Hitler had invaded Poland, the evacuation of Dunkirk had come and gone, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor; and Hollywood, fantasies at the ready, had joined the fray to make the world safe for democracy, General Motors, U.S. Steel, and Hollywood. A recurring vignette had the archetypal ugly Gestapo inquisitor confronting the befuddled bespectacled academic, always played by Hume Cronyn, and invariably the moment arrived where Cronyn dropped his glasses to the dungeon’s sleazy floor, and the rodentlike, swastika-emblazoned Gestapo officer, who held his cigarette cradled up between his middle finger and thumb and sucked on it in the most voraciously erotic and suggestive way, perpetrated the ultimate cruelty, smiled and ground the glasses back into sand beneath the heel of his shimmering black boot. I always imagined Old Charlie Reilly the hapless helpless academic.

  On the wall of his office Old Charlie Reilly actually had a razor strop mounted in a locked glass case but to my knowledge the case was never unlocked. It is true that he kept a wooden hazing paddle in his desk, and that he did not hesitate to administer corporal punishment to the bent-over student’s backside (fully condoned if not outright applauded by one’s parents, who were caught up in a Depression which allowed them to fret about little other than getting some macaroni and cheese or Spanish rice on the supper table), but he had no real facility for meting punishment and more often than not didn’t seem to know or care for what he was paddling a student. Once I took Old Charlie Reilly a note from our teacher seeking our class’s permission to go on an outing (oh, joy!) to the Roswell Memorial Library. Without reading it, Old Charlie Reilly told me to bend over, grip the edge of the desk, and assume the position. When I suggested he read the note before he began his lackadaisical business, he did so and told me yeah, Exley, it was okay and I could tell the teacher so, after which he excused me with a waft of his paw. Talk about trafficking with one’s luck. I might have interrupted Old Charlie Reilly when he was getting into Dante! Old Charlie Reilly died of uremia in 1951, age forty-nine. When Wiley and I had become his wards in 1935, Old Charlie had been thirty-two.

  It is little wonder then that, spending such crucially formative years under the abstracted, unseen and unseeing eyes of Old Charlie Reilly, Wiley and I were neither model nor well-behaved students. Wiley was the richest kid in Academy Street School, or at least I thought he was. He wasn’t—there wasn’t any real money in the Academy Street School district—but he wore the same elastic navy blue socks and Buster Brown grained Bass shoes worn by doctors’ and lawyers’ sons west of Washington Street who went to Sherman Street School. Perhaps that was what delayed an early friendship between Wiley and me.

  During the Depression any outward display of affluence aroused envy, bitterness, and even overt gestures of anger in one’s peers and by the time we reached South Junior High, where we had to bring our lunch (“brown-bag it”) in lieu of walking home for it, we thought anyone who brought chopped egg or tunafish sandwiches was hotdogging it. If the poor bastard brought roast beef or ham and cheese he wasn’t even allowed to sit at our table and bask in the stimulation of our newly acquired four-letter-ridden conversations. That’s
if he were lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, he got mucked about a bit, a few cuffs to the ears, some solid sucker shots to the humerus muscles of his arms, had his roast beef sandwiches taken from him, and had them replaced with our peanut-butter-jellies to get him through the afternoon.

  Sy Hampson, Wiley’s father, had attended Cornell, a family tradition. He was an extremely nice and easygoing man, always classify dressed in a three-piece suit, a starched white shirt, and a striped tie. He owned an auto parts store off Public Square on State Street, but though he was very bright and quick-witted he didn’t really have any head or affection for business, he drank too much, and I’m sure he always wished he were doing something else. I don’t know what Sy wished he were doing. At the back of the auto parts store Sy had a makeshift office with a half beaverboard partition behind which, between customers, he could hide with his whiskey glass. When one walked by and looked through the display windows from the street, one could see only a partially visible desktop atop which the propped-up heels and soles of his shoes could be seen, ankles crossed.

  “The old man at work,” Wiley would say, after which, and not in the least a disparaging way, he’d spit on State Street, an adult spit.

  “Yeah, the old man at work,” I’d say and I’d spit too.

  Sy liked all Wiley’s friends and called me Ex, after my father, with whom he was on amiable terms, no doubt a drinking camaraderie. Unlike Wiley’s mother, Ethel, whatever Wiley and I were going to do was okay with Sy. If we were going to the fairgrounds to sneak into the high school football game, Sy said, “I wish I could go with you.” K we were going to the evening movie, probably to sneak into that too, Sy said, “I envy you.” Had we said we were going to knock ourselves off, I suspect Sy would have said, “I wish I had time to join you.”

  By the time we were thirteen Wiley and I were hanging around the Victory and Eleanor diners on State Street until two or three o’clock in the morning, in blissful ignorance talking girls and smoking Camels and also those Wings and Sunshines which moved onto the counters when Lucky Strike green went to war. Wiley taught me how to inhale. Sy and Ethel didn’t really have any control over Wiley and by that time my father had begun his long losing ordeal with lung cancer and my mother was so preoccupied with that hard fact she had no idea where I was.

  In the early years, before alcohol had done its thing, when he was still die dapper and handsome, the three-piece suit and striped tie Sy, he one day after school, highball and cigarette in hand, read Wiley and me James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” from his current issue of The New Yorker (I find myself wondering what that issue in mint condition would be worth today). Although Wiley and I were suitably impressed and at the appropriate moments laughed with glee, clapped our hands, and did a good deal of histrionic rolling around the Hampsons’ Chianti-colored carpeting, I now so equate Walter Mitty’s drab life made bearable only by his hilariously touching fantasies with what may or may not have been Sy’s life that for years I have found myself unable to reread the Thurber classic.

  Barbara Jane Hampson, Wiley’s sister, was four years older than we and moved in an entirely different circle, one that Wiley and I in our naiveté had sneeringly and derisively dubbed “the goddamn four hundreds,” naive in the sense that though Barbara Jane’s group was what we would now call upwardly mobile we had no executive class in Watertown, no money at all in the sense of Back Bay or Southampton money, so that to be a four hundred one had only to be a doctor’s or lawyer’s child or be bright, well dressed, and attractive enough to be admitted into this rather touchingly amusing group west of Washington Street whose idea of a full life was getting into the right college (Cornell in Barbara Jane’s case), being admitted into the right sorority or fraternity, marrying well, and returning to Watertown to live in a large spacious-roomed red brick house on Paddock or Clinton street.

  Barbara Jane Hampson was bright, lovely, and incredibly well built and I expect that half her male contemporaries must have been in thrall to the possibility of being loved by her. To Barbara Jane Hampson, Wiley and I were just two bugs to be walked by, often walking by us half-dressed as though we had no existence whatever for her, and this at a time we were just discovering our cocks and were pulling our pollywoggers forty-two times a day. (I have just made a note to ask good buddy Alissa if Barbara Jane was not uncognizant of our sweaty-palmed, hollow-stomached, thrillingly lusty, and achingly forbidden desires.) Wiley and I showed each other the hair on our palms. We looked cross-eyed all the time, scientifically demonstrating the Boy Scout maxim that masturbation was rendering us crazies. Our favorite expression was Smile if you jerked off last night. Wiley and I smiled all the time.

  In all those years I remember Miss Barbara Jane Hampson directing her attention to me only once. Trying to act casual, she one day asked if Bill Exley were my older brother. I told her that the Brigadier was indeed my brother. As she turned her eyes away and it became apparent she was going to leave it at that, I started in search of Wiley only to hear her say, “Boy, if I were a year younger, could I go for him!” How proud I was, speechless, for if she could go for the Brigadier, could she not one day, when I “grew up,” go for me?

  I put this down as having happened in the spring of 1943, for Barbara Jane would graduate that June, the Brigadier a semester later in January 1944. As that was the only conversation Barbara Jane ever initiated with me, and I could unearth no ulterior reason for her having done so, I did what I thought was expected of me and told the Brigadier. The Brigadier laughed, laughed at Miss Barbara Jane Hampson’s thinking he was the goods! He said, “She’s some fine-looking specimen, baby brother, but that chick’s not ready for me.” Nor was the Brigadier in the least kidding. Whereas I was so sexually naive I thought the penis went into a girl’s belly button until I was twelve, the Brigadier had been staying out all night since he was fifteen. I had no doubt he knew exactly where it went, and I’m also sure that Barbara Jane wasn’t in the least ready for him.

  It was about this time, too, that I entered into the world of the jockstrap, a journey on which Wiley had neither the inclination nor the talent to travel. And though Wiley’s genuine grief, near hysteria, at the Brigadier’s predicament indicated he had long since forgiven me, I had never really forgiven myself for the hard abruptness with which I’d cut him from my life.

  3

  Although I know that subtlety and irony don’t rest easy on the biscuit-beefsteak-eating cast iron stomachs of the folks out yonder there in Dodge City, Matt, I nevertheless ought to tell you, old pardner, that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, who for a time and as a front for his brother, Foster, headed our Central Intelligence Agency, were from Watertown, the sons of our Presbyterian minister. I shit you not, Matt—from Water-town! The red brick First Presbyterian Church of their father, Alan Mace Dulles, still stands at the corner of Washington and Academy streets, a mere two blocks from our Public Square. Implanted in the facade of the church is a plaque commemorating the elder Dulles’s pastorship.

  Watertown and Jefferson County also gave the world Robert Lansing, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Charles M. Yost, an undersecretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations, was from there. And Charles (Chip) Bohlen, the Soviet expert and ambassador to Russia, spent a good part of his youth at Cape Vincent, twenty-five miles upriver from where I now live. On holiday, Bohlen would continue to return to the Cape all his life, as the Dulles brothers continued to return to Duck Island. Indeed, so much did Watertown’s view of the world permeate America’s that once, many years ago in Washington, I was told by a guy conversant in the way of the capita] that there was a clique in the State Department known as the Watertown mafia; and though I later tried unsuccessfully to verify that any such epithet ever did exist, I still laugh heartily in the knowledge of understanding completely what the guy meant. It has something to do with the impertinence of imposing a WASP-Old Boy Club mentality on a world that could care less.

&nb
sp; But bear with me, Matt, for out of necessity I am forced into circumspection. If, for example, we all come from Yazoo County, as Willie Morris came to understand, then we all also come from Watertown and Jefferson County. And what has been both very right and very wrong with America for the better part of this century is what was both very right and very wrong with a Presbyterian minister’s son and by extension both very right and very wrong with Water-town and Yazoo City and Duluth and Ogden.

  John Foster Dulles, Big Jim, was an enigmatic, per-fervid, devious, and infuriating man. Until 1939 he was nothing more than the successful lawyer son of a tank-town Presbyterian minister; and in that capacity had risen to a partnership in Cromwell & Sullivan, America’s leading corporate law firm, where one of his clients was a group of New York City bankers with heavy holdings in German bonds. The Nazi regime seemed not to arouse the moral furor of our minister’s son. The first we hear of him on the national scene he is excoriating the Franklin Roosevelt administration for supporting England and France against Germany. A month after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he is still insisting that the only way the United States can “fulfill its destiny” is to stay out of the war.