Last Notes from Home (33 page)

Two or three nights a week Cookie went out to Morgia’s or Canale’s to dinner with Fairley (he would, I heard, order scrambled eggs, bacon, and English muffins), after which Cookie would take in a movie while Fairley went from club to club checking the nightly action. On those occasions they’d use Cass, who was a niece to Cookie, as a babysitter for Howie and because Cookie often joined Fairley for two or three drinks after the movie, and she’d find Cass asleep on the couch on her 1
a.m.
return, Cookie’d decide to let Cass sleep, waking her in the early morning and driving her to the Home in time for her to bathe and change for school. After exasperatingly explaining a dozen times that they couldn’t keep Cass overnight unless they signed papers to become her foster parents, the head of the Home signed with relief (another less mouth to feed, another stunningly nubile girl about whom he hadn’t to fret) when Fairley and Cookie did sign the papers, fixed up a bedroom for Cass, furnished it beautifully, as I recall, and moved her into the house, ordering that brat Howie to call her Sis. Cass would have been nearly seventeen then, a woman since she was thirteen.

It was only after I was well into my thirties that a number of things about the Brigadier, Fairley, and Cass became clear to me. At seventeen almost none of us is demi-world enough to understand that screwing is merely another bodily function, to be sure a rather more exalted one than one’s morning movement. A legend in our family has it that the Brigadier hardly spoke until he was six or seven (it was actually considered that he was “slow”), at which time, an ear of fresh corn in hand, he said, “Pass the butter, please,” that being, as it were, the first time he felt the urgency to communicate with the dummies around him. It was when I began to understand that Cookie, for all her foul mouth, was, like me, an intractably inconsolable romantic—Earl had been “my first love”—that I also came to see that on one of her bummers she’d hanged herself. She’d done this, the Brigadier informed me, with the midnight-blue sash of Fairley’s morning robe, a romantic gesture if there ever was one.

No, as I later thought all this through, the Brigadier had too much respect and affection for Fairley—an authentic meeting of two minds born effete—for him to enter Fairley’s house without Fairley’s encouraging and condoning it. What Fairley told him about Cass is lost to history, but when the Brigadier was home on leave Fairley must have convinced him—one hopes not too crudely—that a trip to his lovely home on Park Circle would bear erotic fruit. In defense of the Brigadier, he loved, worshiped, and adored women, in the way a man loves his first automobile; unlike his asshole sentimentalist kid brother he did not, even at his tender age, consider any girl he slept with a whore. To the Brigadier all conquests were “one sweet petunia,” “some kind of lovely chick,” and, “I mean, a really great person,” which I now have no doubt was the reason he did so well with women, their sensing instinctively that the mute mysterious Brigadier, who would later become such an adept spy, had too much class and too many other things on his mind to mention anything as casually offhand as inserting a penis into them. Although I’m sure the Brigadier could have spelled “epicurean” at twenty, and probably could have hewn a rough definition of it, “I’m also sure he was by nature an acolyte of that philosopher, a hedonist of the very first order, and believed that whatever sensuous pleasure could be derived in the face of the void was good.

Hence, even as I walked to the movie and grappled with the terrifying notion of telling the Brigadier of my malaise, he must have been solemnly pondering how to tell me Cass liked me and wondering further whether I were weather-beaten enough to handle what he had to tell me about her, wondering if I understood that a piece of ass was a piece of ass, if, as it were, I was the kind of guy who could walk through a fuck without getting angel dust on my shoulders. Moreover, and I cannot emphasize this enough, before he got around, in his gentlemanly polite tones (he was constitutionally incapable of epithets like
cocksucker),
to telling me Cass would please me “with her mouth” (as I write I can of course see Fairley telling the Brigadier the same thing) and that all that would be required of me was that I tell a fib and say I loved her, even before he got this far I became wild and flushed, dizzy and nauseous with anger and raging jealousy, I wanted to smash the Brigadier in the mouth, knock him down and beat him half to death. Could he not, for Jesus’s sake, see that I did love Cass? It goes without saying that I saw nothing of the movie, that twice I had to flee to the lavatory and throw up the roast pork dinner my mother had prepared specially for the Brigadier’s farewell, and remember hardly anything of putting him on that bus taking him back into a world in which people killed each other in a lot less subtle and considerably kinder ways. Ah, disenchantment, so this is all life was, a roast pork dinner, doing it to the Gook before he did it to you, and a blowjob? If that were so, I knew all about the pleasures of the (tinner, I would reverently dedicate myself to unearthing the forbidden raptures of the blowjob, and that would leave only a Fort Benning Georgia Top to get me into fighting trim, show me how to use an M-i, and point me in the direction of the Gook.

When I said that on learning Cass had become a foster child to Fairley and Cookie accounted for a number of things, I meant that in March of the previous spring I had sensed a new, shockingly confident, near-brazen Cass. At first unable to fathom it, it suddenly occurred to me what it was. Whereas I’d previously been moved to immeasurable sadness at how cleanly immaculate she’d kept her four or five outfits, two of which were faded cotton dresses so sprightly and starchy-looking that I had visions of things Dickensian, of this shy angel staying up half the night washing and mending her outfits to keep herself as presentable as she always was, abruptly something very strange was happening. Hardly detectable at first, and about three months before Cookie hanged herself, Cass began wearing expensive cashmere sweaters, pleated Black Watch plaid skirts, and those expensive buckskin saddle shoes (how Cookie must have relished dressing Cass up!) worn by the daughters of doctors and lawyers who lived west of Washington Street; after school I began seeing her in Musselman’s ice cream emporium drinking Fru-Tang with her classmates, once even overhearing her say “my treat” and ostentatiously laying a five-dollar bill on the Formica table; and finally, and wonder of wonders, about ten days after Cookie died, Cass came to our junior prom (she was a sophomore then) dressed in a lovely clinging black gown, without all those awful gaudy bosom frills and ruffles indigenous to the period, escorted by a poncy classmate of mine—a nice guy, for all that—who was active in little theater, band, and glee club. Further, and I could not keep my eyes from her the entire evening, she stayed until i
a.m.
and the final dance. What the hell was going on?

In the four years from the time I first fell in love with Cass until, my courage bolstered by Genesee at the Circle Inn, I at last mustered the nerve to call her at Fairley’s, knowing he’d be checking the nightly action, I’d spoken to her only twice, the first time when I’d sped her home on my bicycle. The previous fall, when I was a junior and Cass a sophomore, we’d drawn a first-period study hall together, in which Cass was seated next to me. One morning the teacher who manned the large hall, seated omnisciently on an elevated platform overlooking us, had had an auto accident on his way to school, had been taken to the emergency room with a concussion, and the period was nearly over before the noise level and the rowdiness announced to the rest of the building that there was no teacher present.

Having taken a deep breath, praying my face didn’t redden as badly as Cass’s, the spitballs and erasers flying furiously around me, I asked Cass—I was so very earnest—how she planned to spend her life. As she pondered this, her face reddening to that strange arousing copperish ocher, in perplexity her appetizing salmon-pink tongue suspended between her moist lips, I thought I would faint, so buoyant was I with love; and I may as well have fainted, for I later learned that everything Cass told me was fantasy. When she was two, she said, her mother had died of poliomyelitis (her mother was living in Palatka, Florida, with a gambler friend of Fairley who ran the cockfights in Putnam County) and that her father was a navy regular and warrant officer now stationed on a carrier in the Pacific. In two years, Cass said, her father intended to take his pension and Cass would go live with him in San Diego and study nursing. Cass would do this, devote her life to healing, because of what had happened to her mom, who, as I would also learn, hadn’t the foggiest idea who Cass’s father was, learn this from the Brigadier, who in turn had heard Cass’s story from Fairley. Be that as it may, on hearing Cass’s story in that clamorous, potentially explosive study hall, I was more in love with her than ever.

How, then, to live with this deviant, this loathsome, this aberrant Cass? Oh, I still stared at Cass in the oiled halls of the old high school, make no mistake about that, but I now stared at her in an entirely new way, grim-visaged, my jaw and my mouth set in lofty disdain, as though I were saying, “I know all about you, you no-good bitch.” Cookie, I would think, may have taught Cass the high, wily, and feminine arts of shaving her marvelously audacious legs, taught her how to do her brows and lashes, explained to Cass that with her wondrously stunning complexion she needed only a minimum of lipstick, Cookie may have armored Cass in pleated wool skirts, cashmere sweaters, and buckskin shoes, but for all that Cass was still a grubby orphan whore; whereas the astonishingly imperturbable Brigadier had merely meant to tell me that sex was the best of life and that I should enjoy. Lord, how the Brigadier had overestimated his sexually infantile brother.

Now Cass, alarmingly, began broaching my gaze by riveting those great blue eyes on me; and though she hadn’t yet cultivated enough serene self-assurance to stay her face from reddening, she yet seemed to be suggesting, with that blatantly disarming return of my stare, that she was glad, glad, glad that the Brigadier had told me—it was what Cass had intended!—and that she was confident she could please me ever so much more than those sanctimonious, endearing girl-children with whom she’d so often seen me.

In any event, there now came the time of the great wash in which for thirteen heart-quickening days, between the Sunday I put the Brigadier on the bus and I made my first trembling call to Cass, that in shuddering anticipation I had the cleanest penis, scrotum, and backside in upstate New York. Whereas, as I’ve already indicated, I had previously, because of my oddity, been charged with anxiety at the mere thought of entering the shower with my teammates, often lingering until most of the guys were dressed and departing, after practice I was now the first guy into the shower, devoting—oh,
devotion
does not adequately describe it—so much time to lathering my genitalia and backside, only to rinse and relather, that the guys grew amused at my bathhouse fastidiousness and laughingly chided me.

“Hey, guys, you think Ex’s going down to Severance Studios and have it photographed?” “Naw, Ex’s going to have it bronzed; you know, the way his mummy bronzed his baby shoe!” Or, “Naw, Ex had his first wet dream last night, he just discovered his cock and is trying to scrub the hair away so it won’t grow on his palms!”

Mornings I started rising half an hour early, drawing a scalding bath to which, from a cut glass container, I’d pour my sister’s pink crystal salts—the genitals were going to smell ambrosial too—and linger in the bathtub until the other members of my family were so anguished they were ready to bash in the door. Snaking my penis after urinating was hardly enough. I’d wait for the boy’s room to empty, would bring my hands to a ripe foaming lather, would apply it to my crotch, scrub the area thoroughly, rinse, and dry myself with paper towels. Caught once in a lavatory whose towel supply was exhausted, I began to carry in my back pocket one of those farmer’s great red bandanas, so poised I was to experience the thrillingly forbidden. How exactly I knew that the moment Cass brought me to climax, I’d be forever rid of the daimon within me, I don’t know; but know I did, I swear I’d become clairvoyant, perhaps even numinous, an inspired augur capable of seeing a long, happy, and damnless life in my future.

The Saturday following the Massena game we played on the road, defeating Oswego 47-0; on the next Saturday we were back in Watertown for a home game. I knew it had to be that night. From the Brigadier I’d learned that Saturday was Fairley’s busiest night and that he was often still making his rounds when the Romans were making their way to early Mass. To bolster my courage I waited too long, drinking five or six Ginnys with the guys at the Circle Inn, hoping they’d give the jukebox a rest so Cass wouldn’t know I was in a bar, as the minutes ticked away practicing in my mind what I’d say. “Golly, Cass, I only just looked at the clock when you were picking up the phone. I’m
really sorry
about the hour. Did I wake you?” Neither the Genesee nor the contrived script was necessary. At Cass’s abrupt and lively hello on the phone’s first ring, I said, “This is Fred,” Cass said something I didn’t catch, I drunkenly appended “Exley,” and embarked on my mock good-guy profusions of apology for the lateness of the hour and my unforgivable boorishness for calling at 11
p.m.
Until it occurred to me what Cass had said—”Do you want to come over?”—I was sanguine with all kinds of preposterous rhetoric, would Cass maybe go to a movie some night and so forth. Then, like an unexpected blow to the diaphragm, it occurred to me what Cass had said on my announcing my name and I now said, “Well, sure, 111 be there in twenty minutes.”

As in most dives, there was no lock on the men’s room door of the Circle Inn—fear of a drunk’s passing out on the seat and having to break in—and whenever one of the guys had to ascend the throne, he’d have a buddy guard the door for him, a silent solemn sentinel, arms crossed forbiddingly over the chest, standing watch over, of all things, a broken-mirrored, graffiti-walled, urine- and excrement-odored water closet. Corralling a guy for whom I’d just stood watch, I entered the men’s room, removed my pants and underwear, laid them neatly over the toilet well, from my jacket took a bar of Camay wrapped in toilet paper, did my reverently fastidious business, returned to the barroom, told a friend with a car that the beer was making me dizzy, and asked for a ride to town. Outside Fairley’s house I paced, heart-thumpingly, for some moments, then taking the bull by the horns walked up the steps and gingerly rang the bell.