Last Notes from Home (5 page)

On entering the steerage section there seemed to be no more than thirty or forty passengers, which makes a Boeing 707 appear as sparsely filled as the Wrigley Field bleachers on an overcast April afternoon. Placing the old lady’s satchels beneath her seat, I clamped her seat belt, drew it tight, then took my seat across from her and clamped myself in. By now it was five minutes to nine or departure time, the engines were revving up vigorously. If d been a damn near perfect connection. At precisely nine the engines moderated to an odd calm, then the captain came on the intercom and said he was sorry but there would be a forty-minute delay to pick up some passengers from Toronto. He said he’d probably then go up to thirty-five thousand feet, and that if anyone were waiting for us in Honolulu we’d make up the lost time and doubtless be only a few minutes late, if we were late at all. Abruptly someone up front drew the curtain between first class and steerage sections, perhaps suggesting that whoever was delaying the flight didn’t want to be ogled by peons. Who the hell, I thought, had the power to delay a transpacific flight for forty minutes?

An extremely attractive attendant in her mid-twenties was coming down the aisle toward me. Her uniform was perfectly interchangeable with those of the girls on the Syracuse-to-Chicago leg of the trip, save that the predominant hue of the skirt and jacket was now an American-flag red, the blouse a checkered white and blue. Her red skirt was very tight, outlining precisely her fine full thighs. She was confidently aware of herself and walked with an oddly delicate muscular sureness. She had a great amount of black sepia—rather tobacco-colored—hair tucked neatly into her red, white, and blue cap. Her nose was chiseled fine, her mouth full and lightly painted. What startled more than her thighs were her eyes. They were huge and pale, pale gray flecked at the top with spots of vivid green. Save for the green flecks they were the biggest and most vacuous eyes I’d ever seen, something almost albino and haunted about them, something out of a horror movie. Like a traffic cop I threw the palm of my right hand rigidly upward to stop her. The identification tag on her red lapel identified her as
Robin.

“Forty damn minutes to pick up a Toronto flight? This damn well better be Prime Minister Trudeau and his child bride.”

Robin laughed and assured me it wasn’t.

“Is Robin first or last name?”

“First.”

“Last?”

“Glenn.”

“Miss, Mrs., or Ms.?”

“Miz”

“Oh me, oh my.”

Ms. Robin Glenn laughed again, with a shrill flightiness suggesting she might be as vacuous as her eyes, and in her muscularly delicate sure way proceeded to the rear of the cabin. I turned to study her bum moving away from me. I thought, “Oh, me, oh, my,
for fact.”
Looking across at the old lady to see if she wanted to talk, I saw her eyes were closed in calmness, she was relaxed now, she had taken God only knows how many Demerol, she was thankfully going down.

Each possessed his (it seems inevitable) drunkenness, garrulousness, wit, deviousness, scatology, humor, mysticism, blarney, amorality, poverty, xenophobia, blasphemy, reverence for language and tale-telling, his inclination to monologue, his bleeding leprechauns of Gort na Gloca Mora, ad infinitum, those things I despise, fear, and am most ashamed of in myself. This, then, is the distressing and somewhat frightening heritage with which I’m saddled.

Now, in Chicago, abruptly realizing, as laymen and nuns and priests began eagerly mobbing the economy section and settling into their seats, that the only reason an airline would delay a scheduled transpacific flight forty minutes was the almighty dollar a full complement of passengers would bring, I began to laugh aloud, which brought the old lady’s alarmed eyes to me and had her wagging her head
no
as if she abhorred what she imagined my boorish-ness. Seeing how shabbily most were dressed, unable to comprehend a word they were saying so that I initially honestly believed they were blabbing away in some foreign gibberish—something Slavic, I guessed—I could see the old lady thought me laughing rudely at this rum randy group and I therefore clenched my teeth, compressed my lips, let my eyes roll histrionically up into my brows, and shook my head emphatically
no
to indicate she had misread my laughter.

So rapidly was the cabin filling up that I was on the verge of crossing the aisle and sitting in the center seat next to the old lady, so as not to be separated from her on the long flight, when two nuns, hands muffled in their billowing sleeves, bobbing their heads politely up and down the way nuns do by way of seeming to excuse themselves (for being alive? one always wonders), were sliding past the old lady’s forcefully cramped-in legs and into the two empty seats. Before I could get her attention and hustle her over next to me, I was confronted immovably at eye level by the American-flag red of stewardess Ms. Robin Glenn’s skirt, its tautness breathlessly suggesting the shape of her marvelous full thighs, and I hence looked questioningly up into her great gray vacuous and haunting eyes. Ms. Glenn informed me that every blessed seat on the flight would be taken but one, and as a member of the tour had broken his left leg asked if he could occupy the window seat and stretch out his cast in the space between us. Looking solicitously across the aisle at the old lady, I saw she was caught up in that farcical head-bobbing with the lady penguins and suddenly sensing how much comfort their proximity would provide her (this was, after all, a voyage to death), I said sure and asked Ms. Robin Glenn if this group was Russkis or Polacks or what?

“You are some kind of very funny man,” Ms. Robin Glenn said. “By the looks of your kisser, you’re probably one of them!”

Even then I had no idea what Ms. Robin Glenn meant. One skinny fiery runt of a hunch-shouldered, tottering, and rather maniacal-looking priest appeared to be the head honcho. His pallor was ghostlike, the glowingly pale folds of his skin fell so droopily and scarily away from his facial structure he seemed some grotesque from a horror movie. His snow-white hair, which might have lent him a somewhat distinguished look, was so tinged—out-and-out stained—an agingly discomfiting and sickening-looking yellowish orange, almost an ocher, that he looked some back-alley Fagin, some dirty old man given to popping out of blind alleys and for little girls displaying what would assuredly be a sorry shriveled specimen.

Quite as unsettling as his yellowish-orange hair were the index and middle fingers of his right hand. Between these—or pursed in his lips—he constantly held and puffed at a Canadian nonfilter cigarette whose brand I recognized and knew to be as head-swimmingly strong as those Picayunes the good old boys down in the country-and-western roadhouses of Yazoo County inhale to their toenails. Ms. Robin Glenn and another stewardess were scurrying up and down the aisle with the priest making sure the members of the tour, so rapidly filling the cabin, were settled snugly into their seats, their belts clamped firmly. Although I could not hear what the girls were saying to him, the
no smoking
light was on, as it always is prior to takeoff, and I was almost certain that on two or three occasions they spoke to him about his smoking. His squinty little BB-blue eyes would widen in hurt apology, with a kind of terrible fury—not really anger, but his movements owned that terrible jerki-ness indicating fury—he would jam the butt into the recessed ashtray of a seat’s armrest and off he’d fly up the aisle, the breathless and intimidated stewardesses right at his erratic heels. The three would thereupon settle in the next members of the tour.

Almost immediately, and obviously totally unconsciously, the savage little squirt would reach into his pocket, without bringing out the pack, and remove another of those awful Canuck cigarettes, put it into his mouth, light it, and again be bounding up and down the aisle seeing to his flock. In a kind of terrifying way the little padre was rather endearing. There was something so excitable about him, a kind of Jesuitry gone bonkers, I couldn’t help laughing, silently now to appease the old lady, and as much as for any other reason laughed at the poor man’s utter helplessness to comply with the
no smoking
sign. Far funnier than anything else, when he held his habitual cigarette pursed in his lips, like a delighted child sucking an ice cream soda through a straw and trying to drain the elixir in one extended draught, his cigarette would burn a third of the way down on one voracious drag. As it did so, and he fled airily, with something like hurricane stealth, up and down the aisle, the poor girls stumbling bewilderedly at his frantic heels, the cigarette’s ashes would dribble snowily down his black silken rabat, forming a near-perfect four-inch column of silver gray running vertically from the base of his round collar to the bottom of his rabat and belt. It was rather as if he were from some privileged order of dandies given to designing their own priestly garments. There were three or four other priests, as well as eight or ten nuns and all kinds and shapes of ill-dressed lay people, both men and women, and as the priest ordered all of these about and seated them where he chose, I figured him for a monsignor at the very least, perhaps even a bishop.

When at length everyone was settled comfy in, a great hush fell over the plane, very amusing in its own way, the curtains separating the first-class and economy sections parted, my broken-legged seatmate came gimping through, and bedlam ensued. Great wild uncontrollable cheers rose up to greet him. Although he was dressed in layman’s clothes, there was something so boundlessly shameless in the tumultuous accord with which he was being hailed by this staid religious group, I thought this preposterously sloppy man might be an archbishop or even a cardinal in mufti. In a grating crescendo these Russkies or Polacks or whatever they were, even the priests and nuns, though these acted somewhat more subdued, kept saluting him over and over again in some strange ritualistic chant which sounded like “Oh Too Me! Oh Too Me!” I could not imagine what this signified and for a time thought it might be some Slavic mystical chant translating as “Oh, come to me!”

Why I didn’t then and there recognize the object, now proceeding down the aisle toward me, of this inordinate adulation as Irish I shall never know. For despite the farcical smile (so many even white teeth glowing—nay, gleaming brilliantly—with spittle that the smile all but obliterated his chin) with which he acknowledged these raucous hosannas, he was nonetheless drunkenness and defeat and death personified. He was fiftyish, with a full head of abundant and unkempt—Chicago windswept—graying wavy hair. His long forehead was one of the most pronounced I’d ever seen. It appeared hypertrophied, as if his entire brow had received a devastating blow from some aborigine’s thighbone club and its swelling had obstinately refused to recede. His blue eyes were now so red and runny with drink he appeared to have pinkeye or terminal pneumonia. He wore a light tan suit of an obviously expensive winter gabardine, a chocolate-brown button-down shirt, and a snow-white worsted tie sloppily knotted and so far off center from his Adam’s apple that most of the white knot was hidden by the right side of his chocolate-brown collar. There was something gangsterish in his choice of attire. Although his outfit had no doubt cost him dearly, he was so monstrously sanguine and brimmingly puffy with booze, his alarmingly flushed Irish cheeks pushing his red rheumy eyes right up into his copiously haired eyebrows which hung down, like black and gray bunting, from his massively precipitate forehead, his jowls dribbling like globs of dough over his chocolate-brown collar, his potbelly so saggingly and disgustingly pronounced it fell with a kind of damp obesity over his unseen belt, the enormous belly having undone or popped the bottom two buttons of his shirt revealing a pyramid of white undershirt framed in chocolate—so brimming with drink and gluttony and sloth that all his clothes appeared to be crawling up his person, his jacket and shirt up into his lardy neck, his cuffs snaking up his heavy hairy forearms, his breeches up into his balls and sphincter.

If his doctor had recommended crutches, the guy had scorned them and now made his way down the aisle on one of those knee-to-foot casts with built-in metal braces. Protruding from the cast’s instep was a couple-inch aluminum pipe tipped with a rubber traction cup of the kind used on crutches. Never once abandoning the great spittle-toothed smile that rendered him chinless, he would take four or five wildly theatrical steps, putting his right leg scrupulously and precisely forward, now bending over and swinging his casted leg gingerly up beside his good leg, then pirouetting crazily on his rubber-tipped spoke, all the while his globular gabardine-covered ass swaying in monumental arcs from the seats on one side of the aisle to the seats on the other. Having painfully completed these few steps, he’d pause. In acknowledgment of the ritualistic cries of “Oh Too Me,” he’d straighten up, stretch his arms so exuberantly and loonily Nixon-like above his head I thought his trousers would drop to his knees, a salute the tour members reacted to by going berserk with cheers and applause. Now the four-or five-step charade would begin all over again. “Oh Too Me!” As abruptly as if some laborer had flipped and hit me flush in the diaphragm with his sledgehammer, it occurred to me that this “revered” figure, hobbling gimpily down the aisle and almost upon me, the little padre and Ms. Robin Glenn solicitously bringing up his heels, was being hailed by his name, O’Twoomey. Lord have mercy on us all. This was a group of Irishmen!