Last Notes from Home (2 page)

When we got to the house, both suffering tachycardia, I found a note from the old lady informing me she’d gone to Watertown shopping. Directly getting Honolulu information, I asked for Wiley Hampson’s number and presently was through to him at his home in Hawaii Kai, a suburb on the southeast shore of Oahu, not far south of Kailua. I hadn’t seen Wiley Hampson since 1949, during his mother, Ethel’s, wake, when he’d joined me at the Crystal Restaurant on Watertown’s Public Square and we’d tipped a few to help put Ethel’s ghost on its way. So we exchanged pleasantries for a time, then I came to the point. My brother, Col. William R. Exley, whom Wiley had known as long as he’d known me, which is to say forever, was doubtless dying over there in the Tripler Army Hospital. I could not remember the doctor’s name. Would Wiley get through to the attending quack and find out what was going on?

“Look, Wiley, old buddy. These fucking jokers are awfully jealous of their prerogatives and reluctant as hell to discuss cases with nonrelatives. I don’t give a fuck how you do it. Explain you’re a lifelong friend, say you’re our half-brother, whatever. But make the fucker tell you what’s going on. And,” I added, “the old lady’s in Watertown shopping. So get back to me as soon as you can, will yuh?”

Wiley was back to me within an hour, when I was halfway through my third can of Budweiser. The Brigadier, according to the military surgeon, was not leaving the Tripler Army Hospital alive. If I were going to see him in this life, I’d better come immediately. Would I, Wiley wanted to know, stay with him or with my sister-in-law?

“Stay with me,” he said.

“I probably will.”

Now I called my sister-in-law in Kailua and explained to her what Wiley had just told me. She authenticated it. Had she made any plans to return the Brigadier’s body to the mainland for burial? She had not. The Brigadier’s request was that he be buried among his comrades in the famous Honolulu military cemetery in the extinct volcanic crater called Punchbowl. This did not surprise me. Although on the army’s idiocy the Brigadier could be supercilious, caustic, sardonic, downright abrasive, he loved and took pride in the military. He had seen more friends than he could count fall in battle, and I found his desire to lie among them altogether in character. Telling his wife about the Brigadier’s last call, in which he told me that under no circumstances did he want the old lady to come to Hawaii to see him, I said there was no way I could tell her I was going to Honolulu and get out of the house without her.

“For Christ’s sake, shell be sitting on her packed suitcase on the front stoop!”

If I couldn’t dissuade her, my sister-in-law suggested I bring her with me, park her in the waiting room, and at an appropriate moment in the conversation explain to the Brigadier she was outside and wanted to see him. Knowing something of the Brigadier’s temper and that ours is a family in which the elder’s wishes are damn near commands (almost Italian in character in this sense), the prospect did not seem a happy one. But having no choice, I agreed.

I go forewarned. The Brigadier has wasted away. Besides his intestines, his liver and kidneys are now gone. There is a great amount of fluid on his stomach, and due to the “wonder” drugs he drifts between sleeping and waking, between rationality and irrationality. And as a weak man, and as rude as it may seem to my sister-in-law, I know I shall have no choice but to stay with Wiley. To get through this will take me a great deal of vodka, and the thought of doing a quart to a quart and a half a day in front of her, my nephew, and the old lady is—well—a dismally unnerving vision.

Ironically, and for whatever morbid or odd reason—perhaps simply because Bill was military—I have over the years, in one article or another, read about Punchbowl Cemetery. Though dedicated as the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in September 1949, the first interment or reinterment in Punchbowl actually occurred in January of that year and was the remains of an unknown serviceman killed during the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Among those reinterred in Punchbowl that first year was Ernie Pyle, the World War II correspondent whom I’ve recently reread and was happy to discover read nearly as well as he had to a fifteen-year-old. Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gun fire at Ii-shima, a small island off the northern tip of Okinawa. It was of course the Americans’ securing of Okinawa (within weeks of Pyle’s death), a battle in which a hundred thousand Japanese were killed, that put our air force within easy reach of the metropolitan areas of Japan. At various times since the dedication, the remains of troops from World War II (reinterred), Korea (where the Brigadier received his wounds, the second time near fatally), and of course Vietnam have been buried there. Hence there emanates from this extinct volcanic crater a morose and ugly reminder of America’s century-long preoccupation with the South Pacific. The Hawaiian word for the cemetery is
Puowaina.
During the Hawaiian monarchy years ago heavy camion were mounted on the crater’s rims to protect Honolulu Harbor. Depending on which Hawaiian is translating
Puowaina,
it means “reverence in the highest degree” or “hill of sacrifice.’’ As much as I would later come to love Hawaii and the Hawaiians, I wonder if either of these translations is apposite to such a place.

After a solemn and speechless dinner in the dining room of the inn, the old lady having deep-fried fantail shrimp (as with many people distress causes the old lady to eat more heartily than otherwise), and I nibbling at a dreadful charcoaled filet mignon which tasted of chemicals and an equally dreadful salad (all raw carrots and tasteless winter tomatoes), I picked up the old lady’s two overnight bags, one a rouge zippered plastic satchel, the other an open black wool crocheted carpetbag patterned with red, orange, and yellow flowers, and led the way to our room. Detecting that the bags seemed inordinately heavy, I asked the old lady what the hell was in them. Rather sheepishly she explained she’d got a twelve-pound wheel of Heath cheddar cheese (probably the best in upstate New York) from the factory at Rodman, little more than a four corners southeast of Watertown, our county seat. It was a cheese the Brigadier much loved and was always asking to have mailed to him at the various ends of the earth where he was stationed.

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.”