Last Notes from Home (34 page)

Most of what happened that night is lost to memory. What is not lost is that I neither got pleased “with her mouth” nor in fact sexually sated by Cass in any way at all. Explaining that she had some homework to finish, as she was going to the movies “with the girls” (she was becoming a regular social butterfly) the next afternoon, Cass took a chair at a lovely, ponderous, textbook-strewn mahogany desk at my right, I sat on a beautiful deep peach-colored brocaded couch (three decades later I would find myself sitting on this very same couch), stared about the room marveling at what seemed to me, at seventeen, to have been the mad Cookie’s exquisite taste in interior decorating (probably done by a professional, it occurs to me now), everything seemed so neat, tasteful, and well placed. So many years before I had detected Cass’s response to perplexity, so that even now as she pored over a textbook, scribbling answers on a piece of scrap paper, that pink tongue—oh, my heart!—was gently gripped and suspended between Cass’s moist lips.

When at length Cass joined me on the couch, sitting very close to me, I had again to hear Cass’s fantasy about her parents, with a good deal of new and colorful detail. Although her mother and Cookie had indeed been sisters, there had of course been no poliomyelitis, there was no warrant officer serving in the Pacific, and so forth—this having been told me by the Brigadier as we had waited for the bus that would take him back to whatever war he was going. And indeed, why the need for Cass to continue this tale? Had Cass the grades, Fairley had the dough—mostly tax-free, I might add—to send her off to Vassar wheeling a Cadillac convertible. At one point, too, having heard our voices and claiming he thought Fairley had come home early, the ten-year-old Howie descended the staircase dressed in playing-field-green flannel pajamas patterned with small beige footballs and I was dumbstruck at how much he resembled his late mother, the natural blond hair, the fine nose, the perfect teeth. Even at ten Howie owned Cookie’s athletic swagger, something of her arrogance in the way he carried his body, and I had no doubt Howie was going to be a killer with the girls. “You know darn well your father never gets home before morning on Saturday nights. You weren’t even asleep. You had that radio on tuned low. Get to bed, Howie, I’m warning you. If I tell your father, he won’t take you to the New Parrot for hot dogs tomorrow night.” Cass then introduced us, reluctantly and curtly.

“Goddamn,” Howie said, “are you the football player?”

“Stop that swearing,”
Cass said.

Smiling, I was sure that Howie, having grown up clutching the skirts of the breathtakingly bedeviled Cookie, owned a considerably larger stock of obscenities, any of which would make
goddamn
seem an epithet issuing from the mouth of a ten-year-old maiden. As Howie started up the staircase, in sneering defiance of Cass, he hollered,
“G
oddamn, goddamn, goddamn,
Exley, that’s what I want to be—a center!”

Cass sighed. “What a brat.”

Outside, one of those terrible late autumn rains, heralding the winter months, had begun blistering the storm windows. I moaned. We had only two more games, Onondaga Valley of Syracuse the following Saturday before closing out against Lackawanna of Buffalo on Thanksgiving Day. Both of these games, I was sure, would be played on wet cold muddy fields. It wasn’t so much that our running backs were so fleet, with great maneuverability, which would be severely hampered, but that we used the T, and I would be expected to lay the slimy ball into the quarterback’s opened hands on every offensive play, as well as make those long wet snaps back to our placekicker and punter. I hated cold wet fields.

When Cass at last asked what was bothering me, wondering aloud if it had something to do with the brat Howie’s interruption, I said hell no and told her the truth of what was so distressing me. As there didn’t seem to be any appropriate response Cass could make, and as she probably understood football as little as most girls (half the time our own cheerleaders, like a bunch of stick-legged mongoloids, were clapping and jumping idiotically up and down when they should have been hooting with derision), Cass abruptly rose, turned out the light on my mahogany end table, then the one on her side, we were suddenly laid out on the couch, with Cass facing me from the inside and were into some heavy petting, tongues exploring each other’s mouth, my right hand going up under her sweater to her bra-covered breasts, up her skirt to her smooth copper-toned thighs, we went through the goofy mock-ritualistic bumping and grinding of teenagers. How long it took, I don’t know, but not long. When my erection was most unbearable, I furtively reached down, unbuttoned my trousers, struggled to get it out of my underwear, then ardently took Cass’s left hand and placed it there.

“Jesus!” Cass cried, struggling out from behind me, bolting stiffly upright and snapping on the light, while I, as red-faced as I’d ever seen Cass, furiously forced my penis back into my underwear and with shaking hands buttoned my fly. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“But I thought—”

“I know what you thought. Your brother told you about me, didn’t he? The difference between you and him is that he’s a gentleman. Besides, he was going back to his base.” Here was that entire nursing healer-of-men syndrome again, one that I wouldn’t understand until many years later. “And I thought you were going to take me to the movies.” Was it as simple as that with Cass? In retrospect I expect that it was, this unctuous pathetic need for Cass, who had for so long, all her short life, been deprived not only of normal family intimacy but of any normal access to her school friends—I had had to speed her “home” from something as ludicrously mundane as a class meeting—so that Cass wanted nothing less than the bogus dignity that would accrue to her should she date a jock. Perhaps I would even give her one of my cleats on a gold chain? Lord, what a pompous, arrogant, aloof, pampered, snot-nosed bunch we jocks were and how I now loathe (even thinking of it causes the sinuses to contract and the neck muscles to stiffen) every moment of that epoch of my life, so much so that, whereas I should be boundlessly sympathetic, I now smile with sadistic relish at the nemesis of an athlete, to drugs, to armed robbery, to exposing himself to little girls in the park.

Apparently I had been that drunk in the phone booth. Certainly I remembered thinking of suggesting a movie to Cass. “I will, I will,” I said. “Who takes care of Howie?” Cass mentioned a friend from the Home. We sat in sulky silence, watching the rain pelt the windows, and unless I was much mistaken some of it had turned to snow.

“God,” Cass said, “you’ll never be able to walk home in this.” She rose, walked to the desk, took a slip of paper from the upper right-hand drawer and looked back at the mantlepiece clock, which read five till two. It was apparently a list of phone numbers at which Fairley could be reached at certain hours. Cass got him at the second number she tried (in those day we didn’t dial and instead asked the operator for a four-digit number) and I heard her say things like, “Yes, Bill’s got a brother. Fred. He’s in the class ahead of mine. He’s only got this old silk basketball warm-up jacket and he’ll get soaked.” A long pause. “Okay, Uncle Fairley, I understand. If he’s not asleep, though, I’ll kill him.” Cass laughed. “Okay, Uncle Fairley, if he’s not asleep, I’ll tell him you’ll kill him.”

Cradling the black receiver, Cass made a shush gesture with a finger to her lips, slipped from her loafers to her baby-pink anklets or bobby socks, and started stealthily up the staircase. Suddenly I heard Cass shout, “Damn you, Howie! There won’t be any hot dogs for you tomorrow!” As Cass bounded down the carpeted staircase two at a time, I heard her hiss
“shit,”
an epithet doubtless acquired during her own long proximity to her aunt Cookie. “What’s the problem, anyway?” Her uncle Fairley, Cass said, had told her she could drive me home if Howie was asleep. Don’t worry about it, I said, I’ll be all right and picked up the basketball jacket from a chair across the room. “Hold it!” In her bobby socks Cass fled through the kitchen into an enclosed back porch or shed. When she returned, she had a long rubberized wool-lined yellow raincoat and one of those yellow hats Maine lobstermen wear in nor’easters. As I was putting on the coat, I detected that on its inside
Watertown Fire Dept.
was stenciled. Smiling, I was recalling the Brigadier’s tales about how much money Fairley spread around among every department in our municipality (once they had caught city workers paving his driveway). Fairley was doubtless an “honorary fireman” but even imagining him got up in that outfit tickled the funny bone. When I was going down the front steps, Cass said, “Don’t be too hard on Howie, Ex. It was he who found Cookie that day in the garage. He really hasn’t slept well since then.”

After the game, I’d had to remove the blood and pus globs of cotton from between my toes, the bloodied bandage from my foot. I’d then scrubbed the foot clean in a pail of near-scalding water, loaded with disinfectant, was given a tight shoe rubber, and was allowed to complete my shower. When this was done and I’d thoroughly dried myself and my foot (the towel would be thrown away), the trainer repainted the infected areas and gave me a new white silk sock to wear under my regular one. He also gave me two extra socks and two towels, to be used Sunday and Monday mornings. When at last, through the rain, snow, and gale winds, I reached home and struggled up the stairs, I slipped from my loafers, dropped the
Watertown Fire Dept.
raincoat and wide-brimmed nor’easter cap to the foot of the bed, threw back the covers, and, fully clothed, crawled into bed and slept soundly until five the following afternoon.

Waking somewhat refreshed, I put on a new white silk sock, a slipper on my right foot, and made my way downstairs, for the first time detecting an odd throbbing soreness in my right foot. As with most lower-middle-class families, the Exleys ate their main meal between noon and one on Sundays; on Sunday nights it was popcorn, fudge, and radio night. My mother had, however, kept my dinner—chicken, chicken gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas—warm; at the kitchen table I ate what I could of it (not much), repaired to the living room, tried to concentrate on the radio, but could think only of Cass, and forsaking the popcorn ate two or three large pieces of chocolate fudge. By eight I was back upstairs, where I slept until I was forcibly awakened for school.

Had the coach ordered me to run the first two days, he would have seen immediately that I wasn’t up to it. Instead, for fear of further aggravating my foot, he had it dressed in the same way as he did for a game, allowed me to wear a loosely tied sneaker on my right foot, and excused me from calisthenics and the mandatory two-mile run that closed our practices. All I had to do was run offensive plays against cutoff telephone poles, creosoted and buried in the ground, these to make sure everyone understood his blocking assignment. Only Bruno Grant (the best football player I ever played with), our fullback, middle linebacker, and punter—against Rome Free Academy that year, and to the ooohs and moans of their alien crowd, he’d boomed his first punt sixty yards in the air—saw that something was terribly wrong with me.

Ordinarily we spent twenty to thirty minutes a day practicing the snap from center, after which Bruno would punt away to guys in our defensive secondary, who alternated fielding the ball. “Jesus, Ex,” Bruno kept crying, “what the hell yuh doin’?” My snaps were literally dribbling along the ground, so that he had to scoop them from the turf. When Bruno became particularly irate and I put all my strength into my snaps, the ball came in such a slow-motion underwater banana loop it had a hang time longer than a pro’s sixty-yard pass, which would have allowed the entire Onondaga Valley line to be atop Bruno before he took his first step into the ball. “I’ll be okay,” I kept assuring Bruno. But in my heart I knew that I wouldn’t. Even when I bent over to frame Bruno between the inverted V of my legs, the vertigo would seize me instantly and, like a drunk, between my legs I’d see two and three Brunos, a phenomenon I’m sure our opponents were glad they never saw.

To see a Red Skelton movie at the Olympic, Cass had suggested she pick me up at the corner of Franklin and Moffett Streets at 6:45
p.m.
Tuesday, this in order to see the early screening. To that I’d laughed disparagingly. Misinterpreting, an irritated Cass said, “I know I’ve only got a junior operator’s, but if I get caught Uncle Fairley can fix it. Uncle Fairley can fix anything.” Explaining to Cass that I wasn’t laughing at her driving at night, I said the coach often kept us until eight or later and that we’d be safer to plan on the late showing.

“He makes you practice in the dark?”

In weather like this, I said, we didn’t even practice on the main field, we’d do too much damage to the turf. Instead we practiced in the area bordering South Hamilton Street between the track and the street. He had a telephone pole over there, mounted with klieg lights, and though the visibility was hardly that of high noon or that of the fully lighted playing field one could see enough to go through the motions.