Last Notes from Home (14 page)

On the wall of his office Old Charlie Reilly actually had a razor strop mounted in a locked glass case but to my knowledge the case was never unlocked. It is true that he kept a wooden hazing paddle in his desk, and that he did not hesitate to administer corporal punishment to the bent-over student’s backside (fully condoned if not outright applauded by one’s parents, who were caught up in a Depression which allowed them to fret about little other than getting some macaroni and cheese or Spanish rice on the supper table), but he had no real facility for meting punishment and more often than not didn’t seem to know or care for what he was paddling a student. Once I took Old Charlie Reilly a note from our teacher seeking our class’s permission to go on an outing (oh, joy!) to the Roswell Memorial Library. Without reading it, Old Charlie Reilly told me to bend over, grip the edge of the desk, and assume the position. When I suggested he read the note before he began his lackadaisical business, he did so and told me
yeah, Exley,
it was okay and I could tell the teacher so, after which he excused me with a waft of his paw. Talk about trafficking with one’s luck. I might have interrupted Old Charlie Reilly when he was getting into Dante! Old Charlie Reilly died of uremia in 1951, age forty-nine. When Wiley and I had become his wards in 1935, Old Charlie had been thirty-two.

It is little wonder then that, spending such crucially formative years under the abstracted, unseen and unseeing eyes of Old Charlie Reilly, Wiley and I were neither model nor well-behaved students. Wiley was the richest kid in Academy Street School, or at least I thought he was. He wasn’t—there wasn’t any real money in the Academy Street School district—but he wore the same elastic navy blue socks and Buster Brown grained Bass shoes worn by doctors’ and lawyers’ sons west of Washington Street who went to Sherman Street School. Perhaps that was what delayed an early friendship between Wiley and me.

During the Depression any outward display of affluence aroused envy, bitterness, and even overt gestures of anger in one’s peers and by the time we reached South Junior High, where we had to bring our lunch (“brown-bag it”) in lieu of walking home for it, we thought anyone who brought chopped egg or tunafish sandwiches was hotdogging it. If the poor bastard brought roast beef or ham and cheese he wasn’t even allowed to sit at our table and bask in the stimulation of our newly acquired four-letter-ridden conversations. That’s if he were lucky. If he wasn’t lucky, he got mucked about a bit, a few cuffs to the ears, some solid sucker shots to the humerus muscles of his arms, had his roast beef sandwiches taken from him, and had them replaced with our peanut-butter-jellies to get him through the afternoon.

Sy Hampson, Wiley’s father, had attended Cornell, a family tradition. He was an extremely nice and easygoing man, always classify dressed in a three-piece suit, a starched white shirt, and a striped tie. He owned an auto parts store off Public Square on State Street, but though he was very bright and quick-witted he didn’t really have any head or affection for business, he drank too much, and I’m sure he always wished he were doing something else. I don’t know what Sy wished he were doing. At the back of the auto parts store Sy had a makeshift office with a half beaverboard partition behind which, between customers, he could hide with his whiskey glass. When one walked by and looked through the display windows from the street, one could see only a partially visible desktop atop which the propped-up heels and soles of his shoes could be seen, ankles crossed.

“The old man at work,” Wiley would say, after which, and not in the least a disparaging way, he’d spit on State Street, an adult spit.

“Yeah, the old man at work,” I’d say and I’d spit too.

Sy liked all Wiley’s friends and called me Ex, after my father, with whom he was on amiable terms, no doubt a drinking camaraderie. Unlike Wiley’s mother, Ethel, whatever Wiley and I were going to do was okay with Sy. If we were going to the fairgrounds to sneak into the high school football game, Sy said, “I wish I could go with you.” K we were going to the evening movie, probably to sneak into that too, Sy said, “I envy you.” Had we said we were going to knock ourselves off, I suspect Sy would have said, “I wish I had time to join you.”

By the time we were thirteen Wiley and I were hanging around the Victory and Eleanor diners on State Street until two or three o’clock in the morning, in blissful ignorance talking girls and smoking Camels and also those Wings and Sunshines which moved onto the counters when Lucky Strike green went to war. Wiley taught me how to inhale. Sy and Ethel didn’t really have any control over Wiley and by that time my father had begun his long losing ordeal with lung cancer and my mother was so preoccupied with that hard fact she had no idea where I was.

In the early years, before alcohol had done its thing, when he was still die dapper and handsome, the three-piece suit and striped tie Sy, he one day after school, highball and cigarette in hand, read Wiley and me James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” from his current issue of
The New Yorker
(I find myself wondering what that issue in mint condition would be worth today). Although Wiley and I were suitably impressed and at the appropriate moments laughed with glee, clapped our hands, and did a good deal of histrionic rolling around the Hampsons’ Chianti-colored carpeting, I now so equate Walter Mitty’s drab life made bearable only by his hilariously touching fantasies with what may or may not have been Sy’s life that for years I have found myself unable to reread the Thurber classic.

Barbara Jane Hampson, Wiley’s sister, was four years older than we and moved in an entirely different circle, one that Wiley and I in our naiveté had sneeringly and derisively dubbed “the goddamn four hundreds,” naive in the sense that though Barbara Jane’s group was what we would now call upwardly mobile we had no executive class in Watertown, no money at all in the sense of Back Bay or Southampton money, so that to be a four hundred one had only to be a doctor’s or lawyer’s child or be bright, well dressed, and attractive enough to be admitted into this rather touchingly amusing group west of Washington Street whose idea of a full life was getting into the right college (Cornell in Barbara Jane’s case), being admitted into the right sorority or fraternity, marrying well, and returning to Watertown to live in a large spacious-roomed red brick house on Paddock or Clinton street.

Barbara Jane Hampson was bright, lovely, and incredibly well built and I expect that half her male contemporaries must have been in thrall to the possibility of being loved by her. To Barbara Jane Hampson, Wiley and I were just two bugs to be walked by, often walking by us half-dressed as though we had no existence whatever for her, and this at a time we were just discovering our cocks and were pulling our pollywoggers forty-two times a day. (I have just made a note to ask good buddy Alissa if Barbara Jane was not uncognizant of our sweaty-palmed, hollow-stomached, thrillingly lusty, and achingly forbidden desires.) Wiley and I showed each other the hair on our palms. We looked cross-eyed all the time, scientifically demonstrating the Boy Scout maxim that masturbation was rendering us crazies. Our favorite expression was
Smile if you jerked off last night.
Wiley and I smiled all the time.

In all those years I remember Miss Barbara Jane Hampson directing her attention to me only once. Trying to act casual, she one day asked if Bill Exley were my older brother. I told her that the Brigadier was indeed my brother. As she turned her eyes away and it became apparent she was going to leave it at that, I started in search of Wiley only to hear her say, “Boy, if I were a year younger, could I go for him!” How proud I was, speechless, for if she could go for the Brigadier, could she not one day, when I “grew up,” go for me?

I put this down as having happened in the spring of 1943, for Barbara Jane would graduate that June, the Brigadier a semester later in January 1944. As that was the only conversation Barbara Jane ever initiated with me, and I could unearth no ulterior reason for her having done so, I did what I thought was expected of me and told the Brigadier. The Brigadier laughed, laughed at Miss Barbara Jane Hampson’s thinking he was the goods! He said, “She’s some fine-looking specimen, baby brother, but that chick’s not ready for me.” Nor was the Brigadier in the least kidding. Whereas I was so sexually naive I thought the penis went into a girl’s belly button until I was twelve, the Brigadier had been staying out all night since he was fifteen. I had no doubt he knew exactly where it went, and I’m also sure that Barbara Jane wasn’t in the least ready for him.

It was about this time, too, that I entered into the world of the jockstrap, a journey on which Wiley had neither the inclination nor the talent to travel. And though Wiley’s genuine grief, near hysteria, at the Brigadier’s predicament indicated he had long since forgiven me, I had never really forgiven myself for the hard abruptness with which I’d cut him from my life.

Watertown and Jefferson County also gave the world Robert Lansing, President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state. Charles M. Yost, an undersecretary of state and ambassador to the United Nations, was from there. And Charles (Chip) Bohlen, the Soviet expert and ambassador to Russia, spent a good part of his youth at Cape Vincent, twenty-five miles upriver from where I now live. On holiday, Bohlen would continue to return to the Cape all his life, as the Dulles brothers continued to return to Duck Island. Indeed, so much did Watertown’s view of the world permeate America’s that once, many years ago in Washington, I was told by a guy conversant in the way of the capita] that there was a clique in the State Department known as the Watertown mafia; and though I later tried unsuccessfully to verify that any such epithet ever did exist, I still laugh heartily in the knowledge of understanding completely what the guy meant. It has something to do with the impertinence of imposing a WASP-Old Boy Club mentality on a world that could care less.

But bear with me, Matt, for out of necessity I am forced into circumspection. If, for example, we all come from Yazoo County, as Willie Morris came to understand, then we all also come from Watertown and Jefferson County. And what has been both very right and very wrong with America for the better part of this century is what was both very right and very wrong with a Presbyterian minister’s son and by extension both very right and very wrong with Water-town and Yazoo City and Duluth and Ogden.

John Foster Dulles, Big Jim, was an enigmatic, per-fervid, devious, and infuriating man. Until 1939 he was nothing more than the successful lawyer son of a tank-town Presbyterian minister; and in that capacity had risen to a partnership in Cromwell & Sullivan, America’s leading corporate law firm, where one of his clients was a group of New York City bankers with heavy holdings in German bonds. The Nazi regime seemed not to arouse the moral furor of our minister’s son. The first we hear of him on the national scene he is excoriating the Franklin Roosevelt administration for supporting England and France against Germany. A month after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, he is still insisting that the only way the United States can “fulfill its destiny” is to stay out of the war.

In 1943 our minister’s son accepts his first prominent political position as foreign policy advisor to New York State Republican Governor Thomas E. Dewey, who is preparing to run for the presidency against Roosevelt in 1944. In that campaign Dewey (almost as if our minister’s son were holding him on his knee, a la Charlie McCarthy) puts forward the idea of a postwar world with a “lasting peace” that would of course exclude our ally Russia, an idea that could only further stimulate the paranoia of Stalin and drive him further and further into his demented self. Such an idea also infuriated the Roosevelt administration, whose wartime policy was that any lasting peace must include not merely Mr. Dulles’s Anglo-American Big Two but all the allies, including Russia, which had after all, marshal, endured the siege of Stalingrad and was just as committed—if not more so—to the defeat of the Axis as we.

By 1946 our minister’s son has moved from the shameful isolationism of his 1939 hope that we wouldn’t intervene against Hitler to become a flagrant, verbal, nearly hysterical internationalist and in his public utterances is given over to phrases like “the menace of Sovietism,” to calling Russia “atheistic and materialistic” (this, Matt, coming from a citizen of the most materialistic nation in the history of mankind and a nation whose very constitution guarantees one’s right to atheism), to saying the Soviet regime “rejects the concept of moral law,” and it has become apparent that our minister’s son who, as late as 1943, was advocating a “Christian” postwar peace with H Duce and Hitler’s thugs is now advocating a “Christian” war with Russia. It becomes apparent, too, that his isolationism of 1939 had not so much to do with his legally representing New York banks holding German bonds as with his “Christian” loathing of the possibility of any accommodation whatever with “the godless Bolsheviks.” By 1947 he has become the most feared and despised man in Russia, the object of searingly vitriolic attacks by Vishinsky. Our minister’s son has almost single-handedly become the architect of the Cold War. From 1947 on, in his capacity as delegate to the World Council of Churches, to the United Nations, as Republican party advisor to Truman’s secretaries of state, and finally as Ike’s secretary of state, our minister’s son is everywhere—but everywhere, Big Jim—spreading the Cold War gospel of the Soviet menace. It was a dormant Cold War destined to volcanically erupt in both Korea and Vietnam.