Last Notes from Home (7 page)

As Ms. Glenn had promised, she took O’Twoomey’sorder first. He wanted whiskey. What kind? With volatile impatience, O’Twoomey told her whiskey, girl, whiskey. Trying to help, I explained to Ms. Glenn that he undoubtedly wanted Bushmills or Jameson or Powers Gold Label. She said she was sure they had none of these brands. Jimmy laughed contemptuously, said he wasn’t bleeding surprised that an airline as obviously barbaric as American—”It’s hardly Aer Lingus, now is it, me girl?”—didn’t know what whiskey was, then turned to me and asked what I drank. Looking across at the old lady to see if her Demerol was taking its effect (it was), and though I’d promised myself I wouldn’t drink on the flight but now knew that without alcohol I could in no way endure this nearly endless journey with Jimmy, I said I drank the eighty-proof or red label Smirnoff vodka with a splash of Schweppes quinine water, no lime. Jimmy stiffened, sighed disgustedly, and told her to bring us two each of “what the bleeding Limeys would call ‘a bird’s drink.’ “ Returning with the drinks, Ms. Glenn lowered the trays from the seat backs in front of us and placed on them two clear plastic cups of ice, four miniatures of vodka, and a freshly opened bottle of Schweppes, still fizzing. O’Twoomey moaned and shriveled his rumberried nose in mock-horrified distaste. He asked me to mix our drinks the way I ordinarily did. As I did so, he spoke to Ms. Glenn.

“This is my friend, Frederick.” He reached under the tray separating us and with the latent homosexuality so indigenous to the Irish again patted me lovingly on the thigh. “My dearest friend in all the world. If he should die before me, Lord forbid, may God have mercy on his immortal soul. Give him the check.”

As I red-facedly stood up to reach into my pocket for the money (O’Twoomey had, after all, ordered the drinks), Jimmy popped off his first in one gluttonous gulp and Ms. Glenn was explaining to him that though he had chosen to sit in the economy section with his friends, Jimmy himself had first class accommodations and hence his drinks were included in the price of his ticket. Unfazed and watching me with amused smug skepticism, as though he doubted my financial ability to negotiate the five-dollar transaction, he promptly told Ms. Glenn to give me my money back as he was just testing “boyo Frederick here to see if he lurves me.” He then told her to go forward and get the money from “whatziz-whozit, Padre Maguire or whoever in creation’s damnation he is.” Jimmy said that Maguire would pay for everyone on the tour, including his “new and lurverly friend, Frederick.”

‘That little culchie’s got a whole gunnysack full of twenty-dollar bills and they’re all mine!”

Jimmy threw his head back and roared. As Ms. Glenn began her turn to start toward the bulkhead and Father Maguire, Jimmy abruptly demanded to know what we were having for dinner. It was ten o’clock in the morning. Stopping jokingly in midturn, rather as if O’Twoomey had hurled an obscenity after her, Ms. Glenn turned back, widened those great gray vacuous eyes in amused irony, laughed, and said that dinner was a long way off. Soon we would have a sumptuous breakfast of choice of juices, scrambled eggs with ham or link sausage, toast or rolls with marmalade or jelly, a Danish if we chose, milk, and coffee. This was to be followed by “a super movie, Robert Redford in
Jeremiah Johnson?
then dinner, then Honolulu. Frederick and I, Jimmy assured her, wanted no bleeding mushy scrambled eggs, least of all did “we” want to view any “arsinine Hollywood flicker with a bleeding Limey named Robert ‘Med-ford.’” We were going to have ever so many “bird’s drinks,” some lurverly talk, after which we would be famished. So what, he again demanded of Ms. Glenn, was for dinner?

Ms. Glenn’s face reddened in stunned helpless sadness, excessively timid sadness, and I couldn’t help remarking how much this ruefulness, on the face of a girl airline-trained to an effusive near-nauseating ebullience, lent her a truly alarming beauty. Oh, Jesus Christ, O’Twoomey, I wanted to bellow at him, I don’t give a shit if you’re the bleeding prime minister of the Republic! Would you for godawmighty sakes leave the poor girl alone so she can do her job? Ms. Robin Glenn had by now explained the dinner choices in steerage were chicken luau or manicotti. Neither of these holding any meaning whatever for this porcine bleary-eyed potato-gobbling Irishman, he now demanded to know what was in them. Almost on the verge of tears, Ms. Glenn explained that chicken luau was a delicious dish of chicken fried in shortening, after which it was all mixed lovingly with spinach in a hot cream sauce made from coconut milk to create a casserole.

“Coconut cream?” O’Twoomey cried with shrill derision. “You mean it’s a bleeding Hawaiian dish?”

“Yes.”

Ms. Glenn was by now so intimidated that her affirmation made me recognize for the first time the validity of that cliché about people speaking mousily. Her voice was a demure peep. In the grand manner O’Twoomey threw his big hairy Irish head regally and haughtily back and proclaimed, “But I do not eat bleeding wog food! And manicotti?”

“Manicotti…”

Ms. Glenn hesitated, compressing her lips in touching bewilderment, and I could see she really didn’t know what manicotti was. Her distress and frustration verged on the pitiable.

“Look, Ms. Glenn,” I said, “you go take care of the rest of your passengers, ni explain to Jimmy here what it is.”

My effrontery in interrupting O’Twoomey was almost more than he could endure. Turning to me with a look of angry perplexity bordering on outrage, he instantly thrust his right arm and index finger violently outward, directed squarely at Ms. Glenn’s striking cleavage.

“Stay, if you please, madame.”

Now to his toothy mouth he lifted the second of his vodkas and quinine, which unbidden I’d already mixed (such was the extent of my own intimidation), and drank this down in one slurping draught, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. With great ceremony he folded his arms across his chest, leaned back in his seat, looked straight ahead, and allowed his crossed arms to slide down to rest upon his chocolate-brown and white-undershirted belly where, I’d already detected, the bottom two buttons did indeed appear to have been popped. He lifted his chinless chin up in the regal way he affected, his lips formed a kind of Robert Morleyish fish mouth, and his words took on a tone implying that there lurked in his lineage baronets, dukedoms, and princedoms.

“Well, Frederick, me lurve, just suppose you tell me what manicotti is.”

Jimmy sat there presidentially, rather petulantly Johnson-like, awaiting my arguments for pulling our troops from Vietnam. O’Twoomey was of course mad as a hatter. Insanity always instills in those of us who imagine we’re still functioning a kind of eerie and queasy deference.

“Well,” I hemmed, giving the petrified Ms. Glenn (for on O’Twoomey’s harsh instructions to stay put she had literally frozen) a meek and helpless shrug. “One takes some long tubular—pipelike, you might say—noodles and stuffs them with a mixture of chopped chicken, veal, spinach, and onion fried up in butter and garlic. You then add some ricotta and Parmesan cheese to the mixture, stuff the ingredients into the cooked noodles, top the noodles with some thin slices of mozzarella cheese, and bake the whole business at a high heat, about 425 degrees, I think. This done, you smother the noodles in some hot Italian red sauce and serve. Quite delicious, really. But listen, Jimmy, I can’t guarantee any food you’ll get on an airline.”

O’Twoomey of course picked up on one word only. “Italian?” he demanded, pronouncing it
Eye
talian and wrinkling his Santa Claus nose with monumental disdain. He looked on the verge of vomiting. “You mean it’s a bleeding dago dish?”

“Yes,” Ms. Glenn and I answered almost in unison. Our joint timidity amounted to no more than a sotto voce echo of one another, peep peep.

“But,” O’Twoomey said, his arms still folded over his brown-shirted belly, his head thrown grandly back, his fish mouth forming his words with a suddenly introduced and painfully articulated Oxford accent, “I’ve already told you I do not eat bleeding wog food.”

Ms. Glenn and I remained in trancelike and stunned silence. Presently Ms. Glenn reluctantly offered what she obviously prayed was hopeful solution.

“But, sir, you have first class accommodations. You can have just about anything you want to eat.”

For the first time since Jimmy had withdrawn into himself, he turned to her. His great bleary blue eyes lighted up. He smiled with a childlike pleasurable warmth, exposing a mouthful of huge Irish teeth. With the palm of his left hand he joyously slammed his perversely pronounced forehead, causing his great mass of salt-and-pepper hair to fly abandonedly about.

“Is that so? Is that so? Ah, let me see—ah, yes, in that case Frederick and I shall have thump.”

“Thump?” Ms. Glenn said.

“Thump!”

“Thump?” I said.

“Colcannon, Frederick. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, lurve, “I’m beginning to believe you really are a bleeding Limey!”

“But, Mr. O’Twoomey…”

Ms. Glenn started to explain, I imagine, that “just about anything you want” did not extend to having the airline prepare special dishes for O’Twoomey, when Jimmy interrupted by directing his index finger to a vivid green jade ring bordered in gold and worn on the third finger of Ms. Glenn’s left hand.

“Is that a wedding band?”

“Well, it’s not exactly—I mean, it’s sort of one. It’s a friendship ring the man I live with gave me until his divorce becomes final and we can marry.”

Ms. Glenn broke out in a brilliantly hued embarrassment of having allowed this virtual stranger to intimidate her into revealing such intimacies.

“Ah,” O’Twoomey cried, “you’re a bleeding Prod, eh?”

“A what?”

“A Protestant, me girl, a bleeding Protestant! If you were living with a married man in Dublin, you’d be flogged, and sure you would, me lurverly colleen, and I do mean bleeding flogged!”

All teeth now, O’Twoomey was smiling with enormously sadistic pleasure, as though the very notion of stripping Ms. Glenn naked and beating her half to death with a truncheon appealed overwhelmingly to his Catholic morality.

“But enough of your harlotry for the nonce,” Jimmy said. “Lend me your dastardly seenful ring and I’ll show you and me lurve Frederick here how to make thump.”

Dutifully, quakingly would be more in the spirit of the gesture, Ms. Glenn removed the ring from her finger, handed it to O’Twoomey, and said, her voice breaking with humiliation and hurt, “Please, sir, can’t you just show Frederick? The plane is packed and I really have to—I mean, I must—help the other girls serve the passengers.”

“Oh, be gone then and continue in your life of damnable seen!” Jimmy cried. “In Honolulu 1*11 have a Mass read for your immortal soul! Just make sure,” he hastened to add, “that me lurve Frederick’s and me glasses are bottomless. And wouldcha look at this, me girl, me bleeding cup already manifests a bottom.”

I had taken but a couple sips of one of mine. Directly, and again unbidden, I mixed the second of mine and slid it across the tray toward O’Twoomey. In acknowledgment he gave me an enormously toothy smile and bobbed his head up and down with wooden jollity. “You are verily a lurverly chap, Frederick.” His hand again came under the tray to rest sensually on my thigh.

“I will, sir,” Ms. Glenn said. “I swear. I swear you’ll get the best service on the plane.” She then forced a smile of tentative, grievous artifice and flew away to the aid of her sisters. Again I scrutinized her behind receding up the aisle, as O’Twoomey of course did also. With his thumb and middle finger brought up to his pursed lips he blew a wog’s kiss of delectation after her.

On the tray between us O’Twoomey now had the green jade ring, a white button he’d taken from the pocket of his tan gabardine jacket, obviously one of the buttons his enormous belly had forced from his chocolate-brown shirt, and a Kennedy half dollar he’d asked me for. I am in no way sure I can tell one what thump or colcannon is, nor can I be sure it is in any way as disgustingly nauseating as Jimmy made it sound. Thump began of course with peeled boiled potatoes put through a sieve, by which I gathered O’Twoomey meant mashed. Dripping spittle over his chin, he went on to tell me that any one of the “grand Irish potatoes” would do, even lovingly and salivatingly identifying, as only a bonkers Irishman would do, the pretentious and pseudo-blarney-poetic names of some of their fucking spuds, Aran Banner, Skerry Champion, Ulster Chieftain, the latter of course being “a bleeding Orangeman’s potato.” To these Aran Banners mashed in hot cream one then added half as much chopped boiled kale smothered in hot butter.

“Kale?” I said.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Frederick, I’ve given up—but given up—on your Irishness. It’s a bleeding cabbage, a headless cabbage.”

I could not even envision a “headless” cabbage but held my peace. Pretending now that one of his empty plastic cups was the kettle into which this slop apparently went, Jimmy now wrapped the button in a used damp cocktail napkin, threw that in the cup, followed by the jade ring and the Kennedy half dollar. With great hyperbolic vigor he twirled his chubby hand round and round, indicating he was violently stirring these three items into the mixture of buttered kale, potatoes, and hot cream. He then explained—still salivating of course—that one piled one’s plate with a mountain of thump, with a spoon built a great volcanic indentation into the middle of this Aran Banner and kale Everest, and into this valley poured some lurverly hot melted butter.

“One eats from the outside, Frederick. You take a forkful, dip it into the melted butter in the middle, and simply let it ooze rather gloriously down your throat. Ah, and to be sure, me lurve, there’s nothing like it on God’s green earth.”

Great and sudden wealth, according to Jimmy, would accrue to the one who got the coin in his mouth. The ring foretold an early and splendid marriage, and the button signaled to the recipient that he would walk in blessedness all his days, the button and ring being wrapped in paper so the “blessed soul” wouldn’t swallow them. Reaching again under the tray for my thigh, Jimmy now brought his spittle-covered lips almost up to mine—I thought the zany bastard was going to plant one full on—and with an air of great secretiveness whispered to me.

“I was going to ask the colleen Glenn to join us, Frederick. But it’s impossible, don’t you see? I mean, supposing she got the button for single blessedness, living as she is in such seenful harlotry! Sacrilegious and all that, don’t you know, lurve?”