Last Notes from Home (32 page)

If sex, then, separated the Brigadier and me forever—and it did,
it did
—it also reunited us and healed me in the person of Cass. Or was I in the least surprised that the Brigadier would come to know—even in the biblical sense—an outsider, a shadow person, an orphan like Cass. Almost from the day we were, literally, taken from one another the Brigadier began to inhabit the mysterious nether world of the spy, a world of audacity, silence, stealth, resourcefulness, and intelligence. At fifteen he went to work as a stock and bag boy at the A&P, he began sneaking into our room, shoes in hand, at all hours of the night, occasionally with the ghostly light of dawn diffusing the room. Often wakened by him, I remember hoping it was some older co-worker at the A&P, a ravishing widow perchance, who was showing him the ropes, teaching him how to screw, no, no, not that way,
this way.

In any event, I knew I’d never learn who it was from the mute and gentlemanly Brigadier. It was not until much later when I heard his older friends say of Bill, “Ex’d screw a snake in the bush—or just the bush if there was no snake there” that it occurred to me that there may have been more than one girl. Nor do I now have any doubt that my parents knew as well as I what time he was getting home. But what does a parent say to someone who is taller, better-looking, and brighter than they, who is getting high Bs and As without cracking a book, and who is self-supporting into the bargain? Yes, the Brigadier left home forever shortly after we were separated from each other by his semen.

The only football game the Brigadier would ever see me play was the Massena game, when he was on leave. And I am sorry about that, for everything the coach predicted for me came true. His name was Ike Borgosian, a fullback and linebacker (his son, Ike Jr., would later be named All-American at West Point). On the very first play from scrimmage he moved in off my nose, and on the snap of the ball hit me the hardest I’d ever been hit, thereby establishing from the opening whistle who was to control the center of the line. Although I survived until the game’s final gun, and though we upset Massena 14-0, I cannot impress enough upon the reader what an excruciatingly long afternoon it was. On one occasion, for example, Borgosian hit me so hard and drove me so quickly backward that I stepped on the foot of our quarterback, who was setting up for a pass, forcing him to trip to the ground. Of course, using Borgosian, the best tackier Massena had, in this way defeated their purposes. The two quarterbacks we alternated, both very bright kids, saw immediately that all we had to do was run away from the center of the line, allowing Borgosian to expend his considerable energies pounding me to a pulp.

“It was a long afternoon for yuh, huh?” the Brigadier said.

“Oh, the very longest,” I replied.

It was the following afternoon, Sunday, and the Brigadier and’ I were walking to the four o’clock showing at the Olympic Theater, after which he’d catch a 7
p.m.
bus to Syracuse and connect with a train to whatever base he was returning. The Brigadier did not say any more, and I was grateful for that. As I’d had a lapse only two days before in the Holy Family Church, I was actually debating whether to broach the subject of my abominable illness. As brilliant as I considered the Brigadier, he was only twenty on that Sunday afternoon and because I did not begin my own research into spontaneous ejaculation until I was well into my thirties, I knew his only horrified advice would have been that it was a grave matter indeed and that, now that Dad was dead, I hadn’t any choice but consulting the family physician, who of course would have been just as horrified and bewildered as the Brigadier. On the verge—the words dancing on the tip of my tongue—of telling Bill what had happened to me during the High Mass, and buttressing this spell with a dozen other equally shameful, obscene, and insane interludes, I was suddenly stunned by what the Brigadier was wondering aloud. Had he said that?

“Pardon?”

“Do you know Cass Mclntyre?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, the blood zoomed upward, I became giddy, somewhat nauseous, thinking I was literally going to faint. Among his other accomplishments, was the Brigadier telepathic?

In the end, what it amounted to was this. Cass was one of the girls the Brigadier was “seeing” during his seven-day pass; and the only reason he was bringing her up to me—as I say, the Brigadier was too much of a gentleman to discuss his love life—was that on the two occasions he’d been with Cass all she’d done was talk about me.

“She talked about me?”

The Brigadier laughed, at my naivet6 no doubt. “She said you stare at her all the time, and that she knows you like her.”

“Oh, she knows that, does she?”

The Brigadier laughed again. “C’mon, stupid, don’t get sore. Cass feels the same way about you.”

What the Brigadier told me next was to account for a number of things, including how the Brigadier was to elude the Home’s rigid security long enough to spend any time with Cass. Cass hadn’t lived at the Home since the previous spring, when she’d become a foster child and live-in baby sitter for Fairley Parish’s ten-year-old son, Howie.

“Fairley Parish, for Christ’s sake?”

That the Brigadier was a friend of Fairley Parish says more about Bill than any words could, for I doubt another twenty-year-old in Watertown had a first-name back-slapping familiarity with Fairley. Fairley was a bookmaker and gambler. For a percentage of the pots he ran the card and crap games at the American Legion, the VFW, and the Elks Club, supplied the cards and dice, and settled disputes. He ran an Italian domino game in a loft on the north side of Public Square. At one time, for a two-year period before the city forced Fairley to take them out, he had a couple dozen dime, quarter, and half-dollar one-armed bandits in the American Legion. With monotonous regularity, at about yearly intervals, Fairley was arrested, paid a hundred-dollar fine, went back to work that night, and our more seemly citizens balmed themselves with the notion that we didn’t allow anything as diabolical as gaming in Watertown.

Fairley was a very handsome guy, with a cinema star’s slender dark good looks, though his skin always seemed to me to have the pasty jailhouse pallor of people who inhabit the night, so much so that even freshly shaven his black beard was strikingly evident against his milky complexion. His wife, Cookie Parish, who had committed suicide the previous June by hanging herself in the garage, was, I thought, the most beautiful woman I’d ever known, a natural blonde with a trim athletic figure and strikingly even white teeth. From the time I was twelve until I was fourteen, I had caddied at the Thompson Park Golf Course. Cookie played two or three mornings a week and would refuse to go out on a round unless I caddied for her, so that the caddy master, Karl, often had to send another caddy out onto the links to find and replace me and I’d return to the first tee and an impatiently cursing Cookie.

How a psychiatrist would have diagnosed Cookie is beyond me, but there were elements of both the schizophrenic and the manic-depressive in her. Because of Fan-ley’s occupation, Cookie was a social pariah, she always played alone, and because, as she never wearied of reminding me, my father had taken her virginity when she was fifteen and “a dumb piece of catshit from the North Side,” my father the lifeguard at the St. Mary’s Pool who had taught her how to swim, Cookie felt we were bound by crummy impoverished beginnings and assumed I was the only caddy with whom she’d feel comfortable. Cookie was a superb golfer (I did not know how good until years later when I myself took up the game). There were days when, after a muffed shot, her language was the foulest I’d ever heard, she’d furiously throw her seven iron twenty yards, bellow, “Fuck, suck, cuntlicking cocksucker,” and still come in three over par for eighteen. As I say, she must have thought it tacit between us that both she and my father were “catshit North Siders,” when in fact I not only now lived on the South Side, as did Cookie, but came from a household in which a guy could have his mouth soaped for saying “shit.” On the other hand, and I never knew in what mood to expect Cookie, there were days when she had a dreadful round, say, twelve or fifteen over par, and she’d laugh joyously at her every mistake, saying things like, “Holy Crimminy, Ex, I mean, am I terrible, or what? I mean, did you ever?” Even on those days, however, she never completed a round without at some point reminding me that my father had been her “first love,” though in her high moods her language was considerably more digestible than when she was on a bummer. Whereas in the latter mood Cookie would be sanguine with self-loathing as well as hateful recriminations against my father, saying things like, “Yeah, every noon when the pool closed for lunch, that prick Earl would drag my ass into the bathhouse, stick that disgusting cock into me, and fuck me half to death”; on Cookie’s highs these animal scenes took on a kind of lace-curtain purity and she’d tell me that Earl had been her first and only love and how happy she’d been “making love” and sharing the sandwiches “Ex’s mom had made for him.” Of course I never knew if any of it were true, for I certainly wasn’t about to confront Earl with it. The only reason I have for suspecting it was true was that once, studying his high school annual, I saw that no few of the females had an inked X over their heads and when I asked my mother what this signified, her face reddened and she said that my father had marked, like Hawthorne’s Hester, I expect, the classmates he’d “kissed.” What was beyond dispute, though, was that Cookie contained within her sad and troubled being the impossible polarity of an errant romantic solipsism, which she tried to anchor in a bedrock of the most distressingly corrupt vileness. Cookie hadn’t needed a psychiatrist. So unalloyable were her component parts, she needed one of those brilliant physicists capable of bringing polonium together with lithium to activate a nuke. Whatever, God had assuredly dealt Cookie an impossible hand. It was as though He’d conceived her, full-blown, with a pin in her left hand and a fully inflated balloon in her right and unfairly—as the expression goes: “nobody said it would be fair”—demanded from her the incredibly ironfisted feat of not bringing the two together. One does not need a psychiatric bent to know Cookie eventually went bang.

When the Brigadier was sixteen the A&P began to use him to deliver, in the red-and-white-paneled pickup, groceries customers had ordered by phone. Almost immediately enamored of Fairley and Cookie Parish, the Brigadier never ceased telling me what great people they were, and characters into the bargain. Delivering the groceries about five in the afternoon, the Brigadier was always invited to sit at the kitchen table with Fairley, was given a Coke or a 7-Up and a two- or three-dollar tip, depending on how many cardboard boxes of groceries he’d delivered. Invariably, having just risen, Fairley was seated at the kitchen table in a midnight-blue satin dressing robe, drinking black coffee and chain-smoking Lucky Strikes, the green of which had gone to war, and his first words to the Brigadier were always, “ ‘Cha get laid last night, Ex?” He’d then throw his head back and roar with laughter. Oh, Fairley was a card all right! Cookie, however, was nuttier than a fruitcake, according to the Brigadier, a fact I certainly wouldn’t have challenged, having already told him how she’d acted and the things she’d said during my caddying days. Subject to her highs and lows, and as she busied herself putting the groceries away, she’d either say, “Oh, Fairley, Ex’s just a baby; would you for crying out loud leave the poor boy alone?” or, feet first, jump right into Fairley’s perverseness and say, “I can tell by the evil smile on Ex’s face he screwed himself silly last night.” She’d then join Fairley in his ribald laughter.