Last Notes from Home (6 page)

As I now stood up, stepped first out into the aisle, then backward a couple paces so O’Twoomey could slide unimpeded to his window seat and thereby be able to extend his cast on the floor between us, O’Twoomey offered up his hand to be shaken.

“Hello, lurve,” which I took to mean “love,” “the name’s James—call me Jimmy—Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey.” In a preposterously effusive way beyond my capacity to duplicate, Mr. James Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey told me what an altogether kind, generous, splendid, and lurverly chap I was, apparently for having done no more than stand up to allow him access to his seat. No sooner had he settled in and clamped his seat belt, I into my aisle seat and doing the same, Ms. Robin Glenn and the grubby priest hovering fawningly over us, when James Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey pointed at his cast, great histrionic hurt in his runny blue eyes, and demanded whiskey from Ms. Robin Glenn.

“ Tis for the pain, me girl, ‘tis for the pain!”

In the most good-natured and airline-trained way Ms. Glenn explained, with no little amused and exaggerated sympathy for O’Twoomey’s plight, that the airline forbade “the serving of beverages” until the craft was airborne, which would be momentarily, and that she—with those large haunting eyes—would herself and personally, verily personally, see to it that O’Twoomey was served first. Ms. Glenn now pivoted and with her previously described walk of sprightly purposefulness proceeded toward the bulkhead. As I watched her walk away, having again fallen in thrall to her marvelous behind, the maniacal priest bent his screwy yellow head over between Jimmy O’Twoomey and me, his foul ashes now fluttering into my lap, and Jimmy O’Twoomey, not in the least inhibited by our American niceties and expressing my own thoughts to the letter, spoke to the padre.

“Wouldcha look at that wan, padre? Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! And all glory to the American colleen! An arse on her like two rabbits twitching in a sack!”

Sucking voraciously in on his foul-smelling and dizzying Canadian cigarette, the priest abruptly raised the nauseatingly stained index finger of his right hand and wagged it in a “naughty-boy” way at Jimmy O’Twoomey.

“Tut, tut, my lamb.”

Now Jimmy O’Twoomey, in a typically circumspect and lyrical Irish way, said something about travel being “bruddening” and he thought—not thought but knew—that chatting “for some nice hours with ‘an Irish Yank’ “ like me would be “lurverly, oh, the real cheese!” Here O’Twoomey reached over the empty seat between us and patted me affectionately, somewhat erotically, on the thigh.

Rendered near paralytic by O’Twoomey’s so easily detecting my Irishness, I turned and spoke to him for the first time. With a very cultivated indignation in my voice—I was beautiful to behold!—I explained that my name was Frederick Earl Exley, the latter a quite prominent surname in England, and that in fact a certain Professor Exley, a cousin, I thought (I wasn’t certain about the cousin aspect but the rest was true) was the headmaster of a very uppity English public school. Mr. Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey laughed heartily, gave his own thigh above the cast a resoundingly loving slap, and between gurgling laughs said he didn’t much care if my name was Winston Churchill, there was “a nigger in the woodpile someplace, as you Yanks say,” and that if I weren’t Irish he would personally kiss my arse on the village green of Tara, the residing place of ancient Irish kings. Jimmy sighed. “And I wouldn’t be found dead in bleeding Orangemen’s country!”

Now hear me closely, gentle reader, believe me and try sincerely to imagine the extent of my ultimate humiliation. O’Twoomey, a great goofy and drunken smile on his face, said, “Well, Frederick Exley, my dear lurverly Limey, whatever you say. In any event, shake hands with my great and good friend, Father Maguire.”

Mc-bleeding-Guire! My ancestral name on my mater’s side! The awful cigarette pressed between his pursed lips, the padre extended his nicotine-stained hand, which I accepted as gingerly as I would that of a leper.

“Now there’s a good boyo,” Maguire said. He then turned and fled up the aisle toward the bulkhead. The plane began a slow taxiing toward the runway.

Thrown considerably off schedule by our forty-minute delay, the captain now announced there would be yet another few minutes’ wait as there were a half dozen planes on the taxiway ahead of us awaiting the use of our designated runway. For that reason, he said, the stewardesses would use the time to acquaint us with the Boeing 707-323B, which American Airlines used on all its overseas flights. Although our plane had been moving steadily forward, and was now doing so somewhat jerkily as one after another unseen plane before us took the runway and became airborne, the truculent little Maguire—though, thankfully, he had been persuaded to discard his habitual cigarette—was the only passenger still standing. He was beside Ms. Glenn at the bulkhead. He seemed to be in some heated dialogue with her. Ms. Glenn had removed the microphone from its cradle attached to the bulkhead and apparently wanted to simper over the virtues of the 707-323B. As nearly as I could determine, she was refusing to do so until Maguire took his seat with everyone else. Presently, with no little angry frustration, she slammed the mike back into its cradle, pivoted and disappeared between the curtains leading into the first class section. Directly she was back with a uniformed man who, from his youth and the limited white hash marks on the sleeves of his blue jacket, was either the first officer or the engineer. That either officer would abandon his instruments so near to takeoff distressed me.

The officer, together with Ms. Glenn, now angrily engaged Maguire in what, had one been able to hear it, was as nasty and strident as outright name calling. At length, apparently exhausted by whatever Maguire’s demands were and no doubt fearful of being away from his duties any longer, the officer conceded to Maguire, gave Ms. Glenn a rather hopeless little-boy shrug, rolled his eyes wildly around in their sockets, suggesting there was obviously no way of dealing with a loony like Maguire, pivoted, went through the curtains, and proceeded back toward the flight deck.

Throughout all this, I might add, Jimmy O’Twoomey sat there giggling drunkenly and sneeringly repeating, “Wouldcha look at that wan now, my dear Frederick, that bleeding arsinine culchie?” As O’Twooney had already made scatological references to Ms. Glenn’s lovely, rather dream-of-sculptor’s behind, I thought “culchie” was some indecorously Irish or downright obscene allusion to Ms. Glenn’s vaginal area, say, as in “cunt,” and that O’Twoomey was deriding her in the worst possible taste. My indignation was becoming sublime. Infuriated by the delay these Micks had already cost us, and further irked by the prospect of spending well over eight airborne hours with this drunken “boyo,” I was also incensed that with the “courtesy” the airline had already extended his group by waiting forty minutes, O’Twoomey was so derisively and ungratefully able to deprecate the craft’s personnel. Unable to resist it, and with a good deal of strained delicacy and circumspection, I pointed out to O’Twoomey that he and his brethren were “guests in our country” (I was beautiful to behold: I almost stood up and sang the national anthem!), that I knew regulations forbade the pilot’s taking off until everyone, but everyone, “including your man of the cloth,” is seated and strapped in. I saw no earthly reason, I added, for so nastily insulting Ms. Glenn for doing a job she had an absolute mandate to do. Jimmy hadn’t the slightest idea what I was talking about.

“You called the stewardess a culchie,” I said, whispering “culchie” and rolling the word with reverent naughtiness over my palate as though I were mouthing the ultimate Gaelic obscenity.

Jimmy O’Twoomey found my ignorance downright hilarious. He threw his head back, roared with laughter, rolled around in an abandoned giggle as though he were Silly Putty, then leaned wheezingly and intimately toward me, with his right hand again patted me with patronizing affection on the thigh, his mouth all drunken foamy spittle, and said, “No, no, me dear bucko, Frederick, not the lurverly colleen! What kind of a bleeding Irishman are ye! That wan, that wan, that dirty little pompous fol dol di do Jesuit!”

Unsettled that this Irishman, now embarked on what seemed a religious outing or pilgrimage, could be so derisive of a priest, I asked what a culchie was. Unable to accept that I knew nothing whatever of Ireland, with no little exasperation Jimmy O’Twoomey explained that a culchie was what we Yanks called a hick or hayseed or rube. When I said that from the rather magisterial way Father Maguire acted, I’d rather gathered he was the head of the tour, Jimmy found this unbearably funny and all but disintegrated with coughing, choking laughter. As he did so, his stubby fingers patting my thigh tightened fiercely, his thumb and index fingers coming together so excruciatingly at the inseam near my left ball I sensed the blood evacuating my face. And among maniacal demented shrieks, Jimmy told me that Padre Maguire was nothing more than “wan of Ryan’s arse-kissing slaveys, brilliant though he may be, me boyo, just a bleeding Jesuit thug!” I had not the slightest idea who Ryan was and said so. My ignorance was severely trying Jimmy O’Twoomey. With an eye-popping and inflammatory impatience, coupled with that grating annoyance one employs with three-year-olds or retardates, and in pompously exaggerated and ever-so-patiently articulated words that rendered me rigid with a humiliation I didn’t believe I had any obligation to feel, O’Twoomey informed me, with grand flourishes and pumpings of his arm, that “Dermot Ryan, for the sake of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, is the bleeding archbishop of Dublin!”

“Oh, I’m sorry. So this group is from Dublin?” “And where else, me boyo?” Jimmy sighed theatrically. “The bleeding prerogatives of an archbishop. When I set up this bleeding tour as a gift to some of our more deserving workers, I asked the great wan to give me anywan but Maguire to make the arrangements, handle the money, that sort of thing. Ryan saddles me with thees eejit anyway. Maguire’s worthless at this kind of thing. He’s nothing but a culchie who spent twenty years studying with the Jesuits, good for nothin’ but scribblin’ interpretations or apologies for Ryan’s slightest pronouncements, written for those bleeding religious journals in that recondite gobbledygook which nobody but other culchie Jesuits can understand. I doubt he could And Hawaii on a map, lurve. And look at him now, me boyo, Frederick, just look at that wan! Thinks he’s got a direct pipeline not only to Archbishop Ryan but to Jesus Christ Himself, sure he does—
the eejitl”

Whatever Maguire’s argument with Ms. Glenn, it was now resolved, for though she still stood watchfully beside him, she had surrendered the microphone to him and was explaining how a button on its side had to be pressed down with the index linger in order that the sound be heard. Apparently satisfied, Father Maguire looked beseechingly back to Jimmy, obviously seeking Jimmy’s approval that he was doing a grand job. Still giggling drunkenly and repeatedly mumbling “the bleeding eejit, the bleeding eejit,” Jimmy raised his right forearm limply up from his elbow in a weary Nazi salute and impishly waggled his fingers at Maguire by way of assuring him what a lurverly conscientious boyo he was. Father Maguire now pressed the button and asked our “indulgence.” A stately silence engulfed the cabin.

“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews, from a sudden and unprovided-for death deliver us, O Lord.”

O Lord indeed! What a prayer to offer a jammed plane about to embark on a five-thousand-mile journey! Like the Pope on the balcony above St. Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday rendering his hand benedictions to the mobs beneath, Father Maguire now blessed us in the same way, with his two yellow fingers repeatedly making the sign of the cross in the air space before his chest. All over the economy section passengers made the sign at forehead and chest and mumbled piously. Although O’Twoomey made the sign of the cross, all he mumbled, among dark, gleefully evil chuckles, was:

“The bleeding eejit, the bleeding eejit. It’s all playacting, me dear Frederick. I doubt the little culchie’s administered the sacraments in his entire career and now wouldcha look at that wan? Just look at that wan! Playacting the bleeding Pope for us. And sure he is!”

Memory is anarchic and I’m not sure I actually witnessed what happened next. I hope I did not. Ms. Glenn now had the microphone and welcomed us to American Airlines Flight 201, nonstop from Chicago to Honolulu. As though the group was indeed Russkis or Polacks in need of translation, the terrible little Maguire now usurped the mike and welcomed us to American Airlines Flight 201, nonstop from Chicago to Honolulu. Ms. Glenn said the Boeing 707-3 2 3B international model had twenty-two first class and 113 economy section seats. Maguire grabbed the mike from her hand and told us the same thing! Ms. Glenn informed us of the location of the lavatories and magazine racks. Maguire informed us also! On and on. Later, when we were airborne, which would be momentarily, the captain told us our cruising altitude, our arrival time at and the temperature in Honolulu, when he began pointing out the Continental Divide, a clouded-over San Francisco, and so forth, Maguire would leap furiously from his aisle seat hard by the bulkhead, snatch the mike from its cradle, and word for word repeat everything the captain had just told us. Did he really do that?

6

I don’t know at what point I knew O’Twoomey was insane. In my days in the bin, I was on quite friendly, even palsy, terms with guys who had built structures in the skies—oh, fiefdoms and principalities and castles—every bit as elaborate (but nowhere near as brilliant) as Kinbote’s lost Kingdom of Zembla. Had O’Twoomey’s insanity been as jolly as that of the “happy” homosexual Kinbote, or that of some of my pals in the bin—one guy, nineteen years old, told me he had invented the process for iodizing salt and spent his days in the hospital’s library preparing endlessly elaborate affidavits for suing Morton Salt and twenty-six other defendants—I would have been amused. Very early on, however, it became apparent that O’Twoomey’s delusions weren’t all that much “fun” and were charged with as much rage, malice, and prejudice as his person was brimming with booze.