Last Notes from Home (31 page)

1

Her name was Cassandra “Cass” Mclntyre, Cassandra of course being a healer of men, and she was an orphan and lived in the Jefferson County Home for Children on outer State Street in Watertown. I know now, in my fifties when with any luck and any smarts one might just begin to acquire that elusive thing called wisdom, that I loved her more than any woman I ever knew, more than Alissa, more even than dear, loony Robin. Of course I then did not know that I’d end by both denying and betraying Cass, or that backing a high school football line and loving to whack and put hurt on an opponent have nothing whatever to do with courage.

Long before I heard the Brigadier was involved with Cass, I had had a thing for her that had begun in junior high school when I was in the ninth grade and Cass in the eighth. It was, I expect, not unlike a case of angina where, when the patient walks too rapidly or goes abruptly up a staircase, a steady burning ache below the sternum begins, an illness that might easily be rectified by the afflicted’s losing twenty pounds and throwing away his cigarettes. When one learns, as I did when I first asked about Cass, that he is unable, be he the most iron-willed dude in Christendom, to shred either the weight or the weeds and must continue to live with the moroseness of a valetudinarian, it is no happy discovery.

Cass was, I was told, an orphan and lived at the orphan’s home on State Street. In what way was I told? In a way of course that emphatically signaled any further discussion of Cass as a human being, least of all a lass to be wooed, was precluded if not boringly time-consuming. In the first place, and this is what was so finally and formidably tacit among the guys, the girls at the Home were so rigorously supervised and confined that the idea of getting them alone long enough to hold hands was an insurmountable one. Even as seniors in high school, if one could persuade one’s mother to write a note to the head of the Home seeking permission to escort one of the girls to a dance, one had to have her back to the Home by 10
p.m.,
have her back, in effect, when the dance was only beginning.

And the idea of making such a request of one’s mother was an even more insurmountable one. Lord, how easily and smugly mothers transferred the stigma of abandoning parents to those faultless children, in their ignorance not in the least realizing, my mother included, that what they were really saying was that if they had to put up with their spouses and four spewing brats the rest of the world could damn well abide by the same schismless rules. Looking back, and I say this in utter sincerity, I doubt I had a single friend during the forties and fifties whose parents wouldn’t have split a dozen times—I know mine would have—had they not been bound together by an evangelical trepidation of a vengeful God visiting his wrath for violating their marriage vows and, foremostly, being blistered together by a Depression poverty so exacerbating they simply hadn’t the wampum to split. If the postwar affluence has done nothing else, then, it has allowed a man or a woman the exhilarating freedom to say, “Toodle-oooo, asshole, I can’t hack this shit one second longer,” a gesture, I hasten to add, that two ex-wives and uncountable girls have visited upon me.

So from the ninth grade to my senior year in high school, I learned to live with the burning ache, never in my wildest imagination dreaming that the angina would be cured by the cause of it, Cass herself. Although it is doubtless physiologically impossible, I cannot remember Cass changing in the four years from the day, in the halls of South Junior High, I first became smitten with her to the day I denied and betrayed her. In everyone’s past there is the pipsqueak adolescent who, like the Jolly Green Giant, sprouts eight inches over the summer holiday and is miraculously transmogrified from a perky runt to the star who leads his school to the state basketball championship. But what happened to Cass between the seventh grade, when I was totally oblivious to her, and the eighth grade was even more miraculous. Cass became a woman.

And, as I have said, and though I’m certain that by the eleventh grade the lines of her figure must have grown more alarmingly feminine, her flesh more pulpously appetizing, I stared at Cass so much during those four years—and I could hardly have been alone in this furtive, gnawing watching—it was as impossible to detect changes as it is for a spouse to detect the day-to-day weight loss of his scrupulously dieting mate. In an orange-and-white checkerboard cotton dress with a white dickey collar and a little orange bow, she came at me in the halls, her mountain of books cradled in her arms and quashed firmly to her lovely new-formed breasts, disguising them from guys buoyant with an inarticulated screaming lust. Thinking her a new addition to the school, and wanting to lay groundwork for a blissful future, I stared at her in the hope that she would look my way that I might play Joe Good Guy and give her a welcoming nod. As I gazed, I detected a habit Cass never lost in all the time I knew her. Deep in long thoughts, and I can understand now that Cass was beleaguered, distraught, stunned by how foolish—nay, downright simpleminded—her recent anatomical changes had rendered the young men about her, Cass’s response to perplexity was to lay the tip of her tongue on her lower lip and grip it with her upper, so that it looked the tip of a juicy peach suspended between puckered moist lips. When Cass came abruptly up from her heavy thoughts, a child drowning in a new sexuality that was frightening her beyond the bounds, her lovely blue eyes gone alarmingly wide at finding herself back in the pedestrian world of rowdy classmates and clanging lockers, and I gave her my nice-guy, strictly aboveboard, nothing-up-my-sleeves smile of greeting, not only Cass’s light copper-colored face but her entire body, ears and throat, dimpled knees and sturdy calves, seemed to diffuse instantly with the blood of self-conscious shyness, she nodded in response, the delectable peach was withdrawn and her enticing lips formed a word that sounded very like—surprise!—”Fred.”

It is now two, perhaps three, weeks later and, having ascended Thompson Boulevard on my bicycle, I am riding over Park Drive toward my home on Moffett Street. A walking Cass, whom I’ve met at the top of Thompson Boulevard near Gotham Street, is now an invited though reluctant passenger on the crossbar of my silver-gray balloon-tired beauty. In the two or three weeks since I learned, with that “Fred” spoken out of her moist lips, that Cass knew who I was, I have also learned that she is an orphan and has been since at least kindergarten when she enrolled in the Thompson Park Grammar School where the orphans went. Moreover, and talk about putting her out of reach, my informant told me Cass was so nice, and shy, she found it impossible to say hello to a guy without her face diffusing with blood.

Unless they were very special and trusted kids, which Cass obviously was, the Home kids had to return to the orphanage directly on school’s closing. Hence, coming from junior jayvee football practice, I was therefore mildly surprised to find Cass making her way home so long after the final bell. She was, I would learn, vice-president of her eighth-grade class and had attended a meeting of officers. If anyone from the Home saw her ensconced on my crossbar, Cass told me, she wouldn’t in the future be able to attend those meetings. Still, the meeting had run over, Cass was already late, abruptly she was on the crossbar, and I was the knight errant pumping like mad and flying over Park Drive, intent on getting the princess home before the foreboding stroke of midnight.

To say that during the past days I had in my mind fabricated such a chance and isolated encounter with Cass is putting it mildly; literally, I had thought of nothing else, even to forming in my mind those things I might say to most impress Cass. What those things were, I do not now recall. At fourteen, one is a long way from perfecting the high and ruthless art of guile, and I expect that something as preposterous as describing the rowdy, impoverished, argumentative, disorderly Exley clan as an adoring, high-minded, brilliant, dedicated, serene menage—to Cass, who of course had no family—was as far as I’d carried my mental courtship. Whatever, and however practiced and stylish this encounter was to have been, I ended saying nothing whatever.

Because Cass was in such a desperate rush, forcing me to lean into her as I strainingly pumped the pedals, my chin at her shoulder, her flaxen hair piebald with patches of honey at my face, her biscuity odor at my nostrils, the wind catching our hair and bringing her blouse so taut to her breasts she may as well have been nude, the blood now permeating her lovely copper-colored throat, the awful burning angina ache in my lower chest and upper abdomen, then suddenly the most insidiously monstrous erection imaginable, followed almost instantly, and I could not and still cannot credit it, by an effusive—on and on it went—seminal emission into my undershorts and light khaki trousers, the warm damp viscous fluid permeating the light khaki and leaving a dark stain half as big as a washcloth, yes, however practiced my wooing was to have been, I said nary a word, my face and my ears and my throat and my hands as charged with the blood of embarrassment as were those of Cass.

How to describe those four years, years in which my antisocial behavior became so pronounced that even after all this time, when I haven’t had a lapse or spell in four decades, it is all but impossible for me to enter a golf foursome with strangers, such is the terrible trepidation of having my long-dormant illness stand abruptly revealed in all its odious horror. Out of morbid curiosity, I have in the intervening years read what little literature (hardly the stuff of
The Reader’s Digest)
I could find in the subject. However, I so infrequently displayed the classic symptoms of the malaise that I can’t honestly say,
see,
I can cite case histories A, B, C, D, ad infinitum to prove I am at one with other men and as blameless as those dopey teenagers who contract mononucleosis. Hence, let me describe the last spell I had before taking up with Cass and describe this not because it was typical of my interludes but because it manifests those symptoms that would allow me to be at one with humanity.

In the fall of my senior year I was, at 145 pounds, the starting center and noseguard for Watertown. Scheduled to play the Massena Red Raiders, who hadn’t been beaten in three years, our coach did not let up on me the entire week preceding the game, telling me Massena had a number of surprises in store for us and particularly for me, at 145 especially vulnerable in the offensive line. What the coach was really saying, it must be understood, was that the year before the center who had preceded me, a 190-pounder named John Barnard, had on defense continually moved from his linebacker position into the scrimmage where he so badly mauled their 150-pound center the guy was eventually removed with a broken arm. Hardly notorious for Christian amnesty, Massena, I was constantly reminded throughout the week, would deem me at my weight too defenseless to resist and would reciprocate in kind by continuing to bring the worst animal they had into the line to play off my nose and put some real hurt on me. Had the coach been the kind of psychologist who spent the week assuring me I’d be up to the challenge, I might have been okay; instead, his style was one of defiance, assuring me I hadn’t the stuff to make it and wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass.

We didn’t know how anxious the coach was until the Friday night before the game when, prior to the pep rally, he scheduled a 7
p.m.
High Mass at the Holy Family Church on Winthrop Street, a ploy he used only every three or four years. Whether we were Catholic or not, we were expected to attend, those non-Romans among us taking our cues from the anointed, standing when they stood, sitting when they sat, going to our knees in the supplicatory position of prayer when they did. It was while I was in the latter position, nearing the end of the Mass when the Catholics among us had filed to the altar to receive the wafer and the wine, the flesh and blood of the Lamb, that it happened, the abrupt, unforgivable, agonizing, terrible erection, followed immediately by an ejaculation so pronounced that my whole body shuddered to an extent I all but swooned, rather as if I’d actually made contact with the Christ. As, indeed, who knows that I hadn’t?

Literature of the malaise confirms that this emission was classic, heralded as it was by a week of threats of pain, fear of failure at public performances, fear of not being able to finish tasks, of not being ready, threats of being punished. Moreover, I filled the bill in that my erection was not induced (in my case it never was!) by what the quack psychologists call “direct sexual precipitants,” that is, I was not so hopelessly and lustfully corrupt that during that sacredly serene moment, with my teammates coming together with God to the greater glory of the Watertown Golden Cyclones (did we really call ourselves that?), there abruptly came into my thoughts the vision of a naked Ava Gardner, ivory thighs parted and a gracious hand beckoning me to umber places and a carnal knowledge of her. Oh, no, never that! What always did happen, however, was that at the first seminal discharge, a drip, a drop, there came, obliterating everything in the real world, the overpowering image of Cass on the crossbar of my bicycle, the smell of her flaxen-honey hair, the blood of shyness diffusing her lovely cheeks and throat, the outline of her new breasts directed to the wind, the exhilarating freshness she cast.

If this, then, is a classic example of spontaneous or anxiety-related orgasm, preceded as it was by threats of pain and so forth, most of my attacks, coming at four- to six-month intervals, were so far removed from anxiety or anything I can unearth in psychological tomes as to remove me from the land of men and place me in Satanic worlds. As the reader may have guessed, these spells or lapses began within months of the time I assumed heroic stature, sped a worried Cass to the Home on my bicycle and did not end until four years later when, shortly after my desecration of the High Mass, Cass first performed fellatio on me. So unexpected were these attacks that it required a genuinely ironfisted act of willpower for me to strip myself from my football and basketball gear and step naked into the shower with my teammates.

But, as only one example, and I could relate twenty, look at this can of worms. On Sunday nights in Watertown the high school kids used to congregate on the sidewalk in front of the Avon Theater on Arsenal Street. When the early showing let out at 8:30 or whenever, we’d all crowd through the doors discharging the six o’clock viewers, scoot like mad up the stairs and take seats in the upper balcony. Once seated, and apparently safe, we’d take stock of how many of us had been caught by the ushers, take up a collection of small change, and send someone—usually a volunteer—back to make certain everyone had enough money to get in.