Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley Read Free Book Online Page B

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