Last Notes from Home (24 page)

An the days before I shot my sister I spent endless time cultivating my left hand and cleaning the Brigadier’s guns, either activity able to fire in me sappy dreams of illustriousness. It was Llewellyn Rexford Bean, known interchangeably as Lew or Rex or Marilou Ellen, who as he jogged by the hour above me on the concave corrugated track—slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, watching me with wary intentness from the downward corner of his eye—grew piqued with my continuing to come from the right side, swoosh and swoosh and swoosh and swoosh, and suggested that if I weren’t going back to school I might put ‘—the days to better use by trying the same thing from the left side. Resting his elbows on the top pipe rail of the track, his hands folded, his right sneakered foot up on the middle rail, his thick blond curly hair—beneath his crazy green-and-white stocking sweatcap—so thick with perspiration it looked in the afternoon sun streaming through the windows a brownish red, Rex leaned his green-and-white head far out into the void above the gym and hollered down at me.

“Hey, Ex, my sweet pal, you got the right side down pat There’s no place from the right side you can’t hit. Besides, you’re boring me to tears.” As though Rex weren’t boring me, slap, slap, slap, slap. Tomorrow, why don’t you start from the left side? You know, try the left-handed layup, then when you get that down just keep moving out and out and out, the same way you do from the right side.”

“Hey, good idea, Rex!”

Rex beamed, proudly thrust out his chest, flicked his nutty stocking cap back over his right shoulder, pulled away from the rail, and once again began his distracting slap, slap. So it was the following morning at nine, about two hours before Rex, invariably hung over, showed up, I began the schooling of my left hand. It was the war year of 1944,1 was fourteen and a couple years from my top height of five-ten. Because that would be as tall as Id get, it is impossible not to credit Rex’s suggestion with my one day making the league all-star team, one of the dreams that turned out not to be as sappy as I’d supposed.

Other than Rex’s being rich, having his undergraduate degree from Princeton and his law degree from Yale, I can’t imagine anyone’s calling him Marilou Ellen or believing him a sissy or effeminate. Because my friends and I were poor and uneducated, I expect that Rex’s being all the things we weren’t not only aroused our envy but necessarily mitigated against him. Rex was thirty, tall and blond and stunningly handsome, always a sartorial vision in the clothes he ordered by mail from Brooks Brothers, and though his two older brothers, Jonathan and Hardy Bean, were fledgling surgeons—everyone said it was a toss-up who would become the best in the area—Rex neither practiced law nor did much of anything but greet and entertain our returning furloughed servicemen, attend all the high school games, work out, eat, drink, and woo an entire generation of the most marvelous-looking girls to blossom in upstate New York. This is not to say that Rex didn’t claim to work. But he wasn’t in the least earnest about his claim.

On Clinton Street Jonathan and Hardy, whom Rex referred to as Rick and Dick or Dick and Rick or sometimes as
Rickahdickahdoo,
had built the first professional or medical arts building in town, a tasteful one-story limestone and white-shuttered affair with only enough space for themselves and Rex. Fronting the street was a large spacious beautifully appointed common or waiting room, dominated by one of the most impressive limestone fireplaces I’d ever seen, in which on fall and winter afternoons there was always a splendid crackling log fire. Behind the waiting room Jonathan and Hardy had posh offices and diagnostic cubicles for themselves and another lavishly carpeted book-lined suite for Rex, commanded by a huge antique mahogany desk and oil paintings of Lincoln and Justice Holmes. On one of the two occasions I ever saw Rex partially serious, he told me the only time he’d ever used that magnificent desk he’d drawn up wills for himself and Jonathan and Hardy.

“One of them suckers, either Rick or Dick or Dick or Rick, is gonna go with a coronary before he’s forty—so devoted, don’t you know, Ex?—and old Rex has got to get his share of the swag to keep him in his old age.”

Even when Rex pontificated, as he often did in the days I was acquiring the left-handed touch and he was none too subtly trying to get me to do what I must do—horrible, abominable thought!—to be readmitted to school, he was totally incapable of carrying it off.

“Well, Ex, my luscious pal, as my old pappy used to say,
1
gotta work, you gotta work, we all gotta work,’“ after which he’d throw his head back and roar with idiotic, inner-directed laughter. Rex’s father had foreseen the market crash of 1929, had done what money people did acting on that happy piece of sagacity, had gotten out forty-eight hours before that dismal October day, and as ostentatiously given to homilies as that father may have been—apparently he’d succeeded with Jonathan and Hardy—he had, leaving his sons those millions to do with as they damn pleased, failed out of hand with Rex. For example, Rex was at his loony best when, at four, after a day’s workout, he’d say, “Well, Ex, my sweet pal, I reckon old Rex ought to meander back to the sweatshop and answer the afternoon mail.” Then he’d literally double over, fiercely clutch his stomach, and go right off his tree with orgiastic laughter, enlisting me in his uncontrollable zaniness. When his laughter subsided, Rex would lean back against his locker, spread his legs so his balls rested on the bench, light a Camel, and smile his perverse smile. Certainly without insolence, Rex’s smile was nevertheless that of a man privy to insights not given to other men and those insights appeared to have confirmed his preconceived notions that none of the cliches of the workaday world—”I gotta work…” “I reckon old Rex ought to meander back to the sweatshop…”—were essential to sanity.

By then Rex would have showered, he’d be waiting for the steam to lift so he could see in the mirror to shave and outfit himself in a beautifully cut tweed jacket, neatly pressed gray flannel slacks, and custom-made shoes, and from the pile of filthy sweat clothes at his feet he’d pick up a sneaker, a jock, his crazy stocking cap, take a long loving whiff of it, grimace in odoriferous but ecstatic agony, and say, “Jesus, Ex, my sweet pal, decadent, I mean,
depraved.
Remind me to bring some fresh workout clothes tomorrow.” When I was supposed to remind him I hadn’t the foggiest, or did I have any doubt that Rex didn’t want reminding. Early on I’d discovered it wasn’t the Brooks Brothers suits that were Rex, that his essential being of boyish randiness (goldfish in the mouth, toads in the pocket, garter snakes in mason jars) was more readily epitomized by those foul putrefying garments than by those ironically worn double-breasted navy blue polo coats with great mother-of-pearl buttons. It was a randiness I’m certain proved a challenge to be remedied by that unending parade of nubile beauties on his cashmere-covered arm. In those days at the Y it was as if I were playing hide-and-seek with a child.

Although it was permissible to peek through my fingers to see where the kid had hid, it would have been grievously unsporting to find him out too quickly. And though I doubt any of those girls understood the true extent of Rex’s adoration of the indecorous, when I at last read that smile, as though caught hiding behind the ancient stand-up Hoover in a distant closet, and learned that he’d elevated the raunch-ily trivial to a godhead, that he was congenitally promiscuous, lovably rotten, and hopelessly ribald, I knew he was beyond the redemption of any of those girls he was said to take at bar’s closing to the Clinton Street office where, after banking a fire in the great limestone fireplace, he’d lay them—we hoped he did—on the carpeted forefront of the hearth, throwing kisses, one somehow imagines, at Rickah-dickahdoo as he did so.

Finally dressed and ready to face his day, Rex’d shake my hand formally and say, “See you tomorrow, my luscious pal. Boy, that left hand is coming swell. You’re gonna be a hummer, pal, and I do mean
a hummer
!”
Going out the door, he’d holler back, “And don’t forget, my dear pal, who it was that taught you!”

Rex did not know how to dribble a basketball. When Rex left the Y at 4:30, everyone in Watertown knew he trotted across lower Washington Street, crazily zigging in and out of the rush-hour traffic, actually feigning stiff-arming the hoods of honking overanxious cars. On gaining the other side of the street, Rex’d turn left at Smith and Percy, take a hard right at Stone Street, thence another hard right into Duffy’s Tavern, which was the meeting place for our servicemen on leave. He’d order his first martini of the day and search the bar for faces he recognized, despite the strange uniforms beneath the faces. If Rex saw any, he’d buy a round, there’d be embraces, laughter, tall tales, and they’d be mapping the evening’s strategy, all of which Rex would take care of, the drinks, the food, the girls. Although I never asked Rex, there were delicious rumors in town that Jonathan and Hardy’s secretaries and nurses had used to arrive at eight to find Rex, his on-leave pals, and various young ladies drunk and passed out all over the posh waiting room, so that on rotating weeks the girls now took turns getting to the office by seven to assure the party was sent on its way and the office stood in comely sedateness for its first patients.

If Jonathan or Hardy ever reprimanded Rex, I’m sure he did so with long-suffering head-wagging good humor. As everyone knew, Rex was the most pampered, coddled, and deferred-to kid brother ever reared in upstate New York, impossibly spoiled not only by his brothers but by everyone in the community. When Rex was eight, either Jonathan or Hardy had become enraged during the course of a children’s game and had coshed Rex over the head with a pinch bar, laying his skull open to the gray matter and sending him into a coma where for days he lingered near death. By the time he came round, the X rays had already indicated brain surgery, he was flown to New York City, a metal plate was inserted into his skull (the cause of the army’s rejecting him), and forever after his aberrant behavior was explained by our tapping our forefingers gravely at our temples and darkly whispering, “Brain damage.” As Rex had been Phi Beta Kappa, the damage hadn’t, apparently, impaired his learning or memory.

Although at fourteen I accepted this diagnosis as readily as everyone else did, in retrospect I’m not at all certain Rex’s peculiarness would have been markedly different had he not suffered the trauma. Cynicism had only recently, with the onset of puberty (aching, burning nipples, pubic hair, an ashamed need to strangle my cock every twenty seconds), become a part of my being, I wouldn’t understand for years that cynicism is nothing more than a mask that represses all enthusiasms for fear that that to which one lends an ungloved willingness of the heart might prove unworthy of one’s regard and that Rex’s behavior may have been as simply explained by saying he was without cynicism. Assuming that Rex’s problem was brain damage, it must have occurred to that area of the brain where the superego resides, for in the loveliest of ways Rex was utterly without the restraints that make for civilized behavior, marvelously oblivious to any sense of suffocating politesse.

Whether in the Y locker room lovingly scratching his balls, whiffing his sneakers, or in his insane cheering and various other shenanigans at the high school games, Rex embarrassed us only to the extent of our inability to unshackle ourselves from our own inhibitions. When Rex stormed rabidly onto the football field or basketball court to confront the officials, his camel hair coat and regimental necktie flowing crazily out behind him, his blond hair in great disarray from his theatrical pulling on it, his vivid blue eyes turned inward with indignant hurt at the obscene unfairness of the officiating, we laughed uproariously at his antics. Our faces red for him, we nonetheless applauded his sticking his nose smack into the face of the referee, a la Billy Martin, by wildly cheering his “cause,” knowing even as we did so that the official, like a plate umpire calling a third strike for which hell brook no quarrel, was even then dropping his right shoulder and contracting his right arm to throw it furiously out toward the nearest exit, signaling Rex was out of the game, which invariably rallied the crowd to one standing, sustained shriek of
Booooooooooooo.
Rex was the only fan in Watertown to be ejected from games more frequently than our coach.

In sports it was all very simple to Rex. There were our guys and there were their guys, never the twain should meet, our guys never committed a penalty or foul, never missed a long gain or twenty-foot jump shot which wasn’t the result of the other team’s knavery (undetected to everyone save Rex) and woe to the official who didn’t view the game through the same magically wondrous lenses as Rex. In the basketball season of 1942-43, our small parochial school, Immaculate Heart Academy, had been loaded with talent and our coach, with the greatest reluctance (everything to lose, nothing to gain), had scheduled them twice. Each time IHA tied the score or went into the lead, Rex, who sat with the town elders at the opposite side of the gym from the student bleachers, would cross his blue eyes, stick his thumbs into his ears, crazily wiggle his fingers at the officials, and let his tongue droop dopily out and blow on it, creating the harshest, wettest, eeriest, most tasteless raspberries imaginable, all of which sent the students into paroxysms of ecstatic hostility.

During the first game the referee, unable to stand it any longer, violently blew his whistle, pointed directly at Rex, and bellowed
“Technical!”
Onto the court came our coach and though it was too noisy for the crowd to hear, I was the ball boy seated on the bench and heard it all.

“How the hell yuh gonna call a technical on my crowd for something that crazy bastard Bean does?’’

“Okay, Bill,” the referee said. “I shouldn’t have pointed at Bean. But Bean’s got this crowd out of control, you’re responsible for it, no matter the instigator, and IHA gets a free one.”

During the second game poor Rex didn’t make it to the buzzer signaling the end of the first quarter before that same referee, detecting Rex’s tongue gingerly beginning to dangle with idiotic slack wetness over his chin, blew his whistle, pointed at Rex and screamed, “Okay, Bean, out, out, out, out, OUT!”