5
James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey was utterly in thrall to what little I’d been able to learn in search of a brother I’d never find—mute and agape would best describe Jimmy or rather His Grace’s intense listening posture. And because of our nearness, our constant and damn near unbreathable proximity to one another, he was always desperately appealing to my memory to summon up every little last detail I could about the Brigadier. And no matter how irrelevant or insignificant the detail seemed to me, Jimmy would invariably sigh theatrically and say, “Boyo, boyo, boyo, could I have used a grand Irish lad like that! And it wouldn’t have been for selling sea shacks on the sunny shores of Wogland either. Not by a long shot, sir! I’d have paid him ten, twenty, thirty times what he’d have made selling bleeding real estate!”
“Doing precisely what, Your Lordship?”
“Now, Frederick, me lurverly, there you go again, being a naughty, naughty boyo. You know it’s against the game to ask questions like that.”
“Listen, Your Grace, I wish I could get it through that thick Irish skull of yours that I haven’t the foggiest notion what you and Toby are up to. The other night I heard—as did half the guests in this Lodge!—you barking into that asshole kelly green phone of yours about a shipment arriving at Vladivostok at such and such oh-hundred hours, Greenwich Mean Time, and if that shipment was, let’s say, arms intended to be transported across Siberia to the Russkis, thence rerouted to your thug pals in the IRA, and had you even approached the Brigadier with any such lunatic scheme as this, you’d have found that lardass of yours—excuse the personal aspersion, Your Grace—in a federal prison quicker than the time it takes to kiss the bleeding fucking Blarney Stone.”
“Oh, but my dear Frederick, there you go speculating again, which I’ve repeatedly warned you, my dear, is also against the game, oh, very, very much against the game. And I doubt very much that your brother would have reacted in any such way. Remember, laddie, it took me three years to get you to admit that on your mother’s side you are a Maguire—the veritable warring clan of Ulster, years ago broken up and dispersed all over Eire by the bleeding Limeys, so in terror of the Maguires were the skulking cravenly Brits!—ergo, your brother was a Maguire, too, and had he been born in Derry I have no doubt whatever that he’d have been in the very thick of the Troubles. Further, let me remind you, me lurverly, that I’ve made it through both your books—true, it was a struggle, a monumental effort on my part, they never would have seen typeface in Dublin!—and beneath that gross syntactical clumsiness there nonetheless resides the mentality of a born radical, no, an out-and-out bleeding anarchist! Certainly two brothers born as close together as you could not vary that much in their ways of viewing the world. No way, me lurverly!”
I held my peace because I knew in my heart that had Bill and I been born in Londonderry we would indeed have been in the thick of it. Whether with the Provos or the Prods is open to question but not too much of a question. Somewhere along the dim line of our heritage, we had let go of our Catholicism, rather like releasing a kite to the indifferent winds; but we had nonetheless both been confirmed in the Anglican or High Church and I had no doubt whatever that the Brigadier bought it all, which cushioned him between Heaven and those acts duty demanded he perform on earth. Too, I have a provision in my will requesting that our local priest in Alexandria Bay, Father Meehan, who is everything a priest ought to be, perform a brief lay ceremony over my ashes. Hence I’ve never had any doubt that had I returned to the church, it would have been to the Roman. It was as though my brother and I had released the kite and instead of blowing out of view, the kite had got caught in shifting winds and hovered immovable there in azure skies. Many years ago, when The New Yorker did those marvelous parodies of famous writers, a guy did a beauty on Graham Greene, making the hero the pilot of a monoplane who wrote messages in the sky; and I suspect that as a writer my fear of returning to something as entrenched as our Maguire Catholicism is nothing other than the fear of cluttering up a yarn with the temptation to send messages from on high. O’Twoomey was right. Bill and I would most assuredly have been counted with the Provos.
The question most often posed by O’Twoomey, and the one that drove me completely round the bend, that would lead eventually to all our problems, including my “marriage,” was why, with the Brigadier’s distinguished career, he hadn’t at his interment been accorded full military honors.
“Now listen, Jimmy, for Christ’s sake, for goddamn once listen to what I’m telling you! Puowaina is an extinct volcanic crater—they don’t call it Punchbowl for nothing!—the breezes are minimal there and when my sister-in-law saw the weather report, she felt full military honors, what with the caisson, the band, and so forth, would simply be too long a time to ask his comrades, the enlisted men’s firing squad, my elderly mother, et cetera, to stand in the heat for such a portentous ceremony. Why do you have to keep asking that question?”
Soon enough it became apparent why.
6
Wach Saturday morning, as I’ve said, Toby would fly His Grace, Hannibal, and me to Honolulu where O’Twoomey and Toby, the latter armed with a .32-caliber Walther, invariably took the same two-bedroom suite in the main building and Hannibal and I the same adjoining rooms on the twelfth floor on the newer addition to the Royal Hawaiian, the Towers, overlooking Waikiki Beach. It was a weekend to rest my “clumsy syntactical labors,” a weekend to sate myself on the luscious favors of Ms. Robin Glenn (for which, I had no doubt, James Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey paid her dearly), and also a weekend to pay homage to the Brigadier.
As we did not return to Lanai until first light on Monday, I made a practice of going to Punchbowl with Robin and Hannibal before dusk on Sundays. First I’d buy a couple leis from a fat jolly Hawaiian woman who had a kiosk on Kalakaua, then Robin, Hannibal, and I would pile into her Porsche, drive to Punchbowl, and place the leis on the Brigadier’s grave. I’d then briefly bow my head, Hannibal would do the same and pray aloud in either Hawaiian or that odd abrupt pidgin, often weeping for a man he hadn’t known. And all the while Robin would be recording—for posterity no doubt—on her expensive Nikon, which she clicked with the rapidity of a silenced automatic weapon. As often as not, and as was her helpless wont, Robin turned this brief commemoration into a farce. While she was clicking away, she’d holler, “Jesus Christ, Exley, can’t you pray or weep or do something? Look at Hannibal! Look at Hannibal! I mean, you really are an aloof haughty cock-sucker!” Yes, Robin turned these brief moments into high comedy and I would, I swear, often hear the Brigadier laughing beneath the sacred earth of Puowaina. Hannibal was another matter entirely and his grief rose from some strange spirituality in his soul.
7
One Sunday O’Twoomey informed me that he and Toby would be joining us at Punchbowl and that we shouldn’t bother with “those bleeding cheap leis” we were getting from “that fat wog swindler on Kalakaua” as Jimmy had taken care of the floral arrangements. When Robin, Hannibal, and I arrived at Bill’s grave, we found a smiling Toby and an impatient Jimmy already there, Jimmy gimpily pacing round and round the Brigadier’s headstone bearing the legend SS LM BSM JSCM PH, for Silver Star, Legion of Merit, Bronze Star Medal, Joint Services Commendation Medal, and Purple Heart. Atop the grave there now stood a metal wicker stand overflowing with the most flagrantly beautiful leis I’d ever seen, and though the mad O’Twoomey would be as mute on the subject of where he got the leis as he was on his and Toby’s “business,” Robin said they could only have been made by the woman the islanders had dubbed the Divine Kapiolani, after the ancient Queen Kapiolani. Robin said the Divine Kapiolani was legendary for her leis and “charged a small fortune for just one,” and one can be sure Robin would have known about the latter, not to mention—”Whoooeeeee”—what that mountain of leis must have cost O’Twoomey.
What came next was even more astonishing. On the headstone I had already noticed an expensive tape recorder, and it suddenly occurred to me that where the Brigadier
’s family, I included, had failed him, Jimmy would now damn well rectify. In the manner of a sergeant in the Irish Guards, Jimmy called us to attention, bent over, pressed the play button, and we were startled to hear what Jimmy later told us was the official U.S. Army Band beginning the A part of Frédéric Chopin’s “Funeral March” done in lento tempo. At the conclusion of the A part, the drum cadences used to keep everyone in step began, one could hear the sound of a single caisson rolling over what sounded a cobbled pavement, the sound now muted, and someone who sounded very like Richard Burton began reading selected passages from Pericles’ funeral oration:
“So died these men as became Athenians. You, their survivors, must determine to have as unaltering a resolution in the field, though you may pray that it may have a happier issue… you must realize yourselves the power of Athens, and feed your hearts upon her from day to day, till love of her fills your hearts; and then when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this, and that no personal failure in an enterprise could make them consent to deprive their country of their valor, but that they laid it at her feet as the most glorious contribution that they could offer.”
The tape then went into the more cheerful, almost lullaby tempo of the B part, after which the drum cadences began again, again muted, and again someone who sounded very like Burton:
“Turning to the sons and brothers of the dead, I see an arduous struggle before you. When a man is gone, all are wont to praise him, and should your merit be ever so transcendent, you will still find it difficult not merely to overtake, but even to approach, their renown. The living have envy to contend with, while those who are no longer in our path are honored with a goodwill into which rivalry does not enter.”
The tape then returned to the grave A theme of Chopin’s work, and this was followed by what was obviously a twelve-gun salute, going immediately after into the most moving—it broke one’s heart—rendition of Taps I’ve ever heard. The entire ceremony took no more, than fifteen minutes, and when we returned to the Royal Hawaiian we repaired to a table at the outdoor Mai Tai bar and Jimmy ordered a round of drinks. When I thanked and toasted him for his kindness, I said to Jimmy that the voice reading sounded very like Richard Burton’s. “And just who in the bleeding hell’s voice do you think it was, you bleeding culchie! Of course it was Dickie’s voice! Dickie’s been one of us for years, contributed more cash than I could ever tell you. You of course must know that Welshmen hate the bleeding Limeys more even than the Irish do, and that, me lurverly, would have to make it the very essence of loathing. Even Dickie’s drinking buddy, Dylan, as broke as he was and no matter the unhappy circumstance of his drunken demise, contributed a fiver from time to time.” How did one enter a conversation with this fat mad Irishman? “And who do you think was playing Taps?”
As I knew it wouldn’t be in the least necessary to say who I held my peace.
“Chuck Mangione.”
“Chuck Mangione, for Christ’s sake? You mean Chuck hates the bleeding Limeys, too?”
“But of course, you silly oaf. He’s one of us, always has been. Mangione is not just one of those bleeding wog El Wopos, he’s Siciliano”—didn’t I know it!—”from that gorgeous island of rebellious, Machiavellian dukes and princes. The bugle has no range, me lurverly, and though Chuck’s flugelhorn has a lower range than the trumpet, my guess is, me lad, that you never heard Taps played like that before.’’ I just sat there, agape, staring at this madman, then poured down my vodka and grapefruit juice and, while O’Twoomey smirked and lovingly caressed his great belly, ordered another, adding, “Make that a double.”
On a Sunday at the Punchbowl two months later, O’Twoomey had no sooner pressed the PLAY button than dark thunderheads rushed over the head of Columbia’s statue, an immediate tropical downpour began, we fled to the vehicles—I to Jimmy’s enclosed Jeep—and we were no sooner into the semicircular drive of the Royal Hawaiian when the sun broke brilliantly through azure skies. In the manner of General Rommel ordering his corporal back to the front, O’Twoomey told Toby to return to Punchbowl, then stuck his arm out the window and violently signaled for a rain-drenched Robin and Hannibal to follow us. At the cemetery we were shocked and enraged—”Bleeding fucking grave looters!”—to discover all the Divine Kapio-lani’s leis had been stolen. Prior to this time we had always assumed that Punchbowl’s caretakers had removed them as they rotted during the week, or that the Divine Kapiolani had had them removed when she had fresh ones delivered before our weekly dusk ceremony. Obviously this hadn’t been the case and Robin, herself the possessor of a larcenous heart, came up with the most trenchant solution. Early on someone had spotted the leis as the work of Kapiolani, and that someone had waited for our weekly departure from Punchbowl and had doubtless stolen them to sell at a kiosk on Kalakaua. “Probably that bleeding fucking fat wog swindler with whom Exley does business. The Maguires were a warring clan. They knew bleeding nothing about barter. The Maguires just took what they bleeding well wanted!”
Among relaxing rounds of golf, we spent the following week on Lanai mapping strategy for ensnaring the miscreants, O’Twoomey, on his kelly green phone, filling in Robin as the plan matured and resolved itself. With a credit card Toby would steal from a hotel room on Saturday night (a trifling matter for Toby), he and I would go to the Honolulu International Airport on Sunday morning and rent two nondescript Fords or Chevrolets, preferably basic black or gray. On Sunday afternoon Toby, Hannibal, and I would drive one of the cars to the back of the memorial, then make our way down past the frangipani trees (Plumeria acuminata) and the Courts of the Missing and hide behind the enclosure of Court Two, from which we could get the best view of section T, in which the Brigadier was buried in grave 358. At the usual time, Robin and O’Twoomey would come to the grave and proceed with the service, then depart in the other rented car.
Everything went exactly as planned. Toby was wearing a black wig. Naturally a master at this sort of thing, Toby said that should anyone come up with an accurate description of Hannibal the cops would feel it so exaggerated as to be farcical. Robin and O’Twoomey’s rented black Ford was hardly off the grounds of Punchbowl when two Samoans, damn near as tall as Hannibal but a good deal fatter, began taking the leis off the wicker stand and began stringing them along their massive forearms as though they were beads. Reaching under the flowing aloha shirt he wore when armed, Toby went to the small of his back, undipped the holster holding the Walther, handed it to me and whispered, “You won’t be worth a shit on this caper, Exley. I just want you in the car with the motor running when Hannibal and I get back there.”
To Hannibal he then said, “Look, Hannibal, and listen closely. I don’t need your help with these fat slobs. Even if their arms weren’t encumbered with those leis, those gobs of puke couldn’t move fast enough to get their hands up against me. Agreed?” Hannibal nodded solemnly. “Okay, then, all I want you to do is make sure we get every one of those leis, every blessed one of them, back to the car. I don’t want a petal left behind, any indication whatever of what this fight was about. Got it?” As the two Samoans had already started walking nonchalantly away from the grave, Toby said, “Let’s go,” and he and Hannibal broke into a feverish run toward them, while I, Toby’s holster and .32 stuffed in my belt at my belly, started back up the marble stairs past the Courts of the Missing. When I reached the Court of Honor and was passing Bruce Moore’s statue of Columbia, who has breasts almost as beautiful as Robin’s, standing on the prow of a carrier, I for the first time noticed the words inscribed below the carrier’s prow, Lincoln’s message to a bereaved mother: THE SOLEMN PRIDE THAT MUST BE YOURS TO HAVE LAID SO COSTLY A SACRIFICE UPON THE ALTAR OF FREEDOM.
Presently Toby and Hannibal jumped into the car. Both were garlanded about the neck and arms with the Divine Kapiolani’s leis, both were sweating profusely, and both were laughing like hyenas, Toby, among ga
sping breaths, saying, “Jesus, Hannibal, Jesus, Hannibal, that slob’s moronic head split like a fucking pumpkin!” Hannibal said, “Like a fuckin’ papaya. That prick no rob no more grave.” Later, Toby was even to remember the name of the master sergeant whose gravestone the Samoan’s head had hit: Peter Rasbeck, also the winner of a Silver Star, state: New York. And Hannibal could not have described the Samoan’s condition more succinctly.
The article was buried in the morning Advertiser. Fortunately for us the Samoans had a rap sheet longer than Hannibal’s lingam, everything from breaking and entering to aggravated assault to sodomy to incest, both had twice done time in the state penitentiary and their description of Toby as “a black-haired skinny guy” and Hannibal as “the biggest meanest bruh” they’d ever seen was said to be taken lightly by the state police as they felt it was some nitpicking “lower-echelon thug feud.” After O’Twoomey read the article, he sighed relievedly and said, “Serves the bleeding fucking grave robbers right.”
Last Notes from Home Page 33