Free Last Notes from Home by Frederick Exley Page A

separating the archdiocese’s entrance from Madison Avenue’s sidewalk that he slipped on a patch of ice and sustained a hairline fracture of the fibula in his left leg. Jimmy threw his great hairy head back and roared with laughter.
    “Oh, Frederick, me lurve, didn’t Cookie and me have a grand laugh over that leg! Here I am directly come from making sweet talk with a padre who practically sits on the right hand of God—yea, and to be sure, lurve, every bit as close to God as Dermot Ryan, Cookie is—just leaving this holy man’s domicile and I break my bleeding leg practically on his stoop!”
    O’Twoomey was quite beside himself with laughter. Again he reached under the tray, grabbed my thigh, pinched it at the inseam next to my left testicle, and again drained the blood from my face.

 

     
     

    7
     
    Mr. Jimmy Seamus Finbarr O’Twoomey was in public relations for Joe McGrath, Spencer Freeman, and the Hospital Trusts. For whatever reason, Jimmy appeared to find “public relations” a hilarious euphemism, for the term had no sooner issued from his furry tongue when he again, hysterically interrupting his own declamations, became somewhat sappily giddy with laughter, at the same time studying me diligently out of the corner of his rheumy eyes to determine if I had the foggiest notion what he was talking about. I did not. Detecting this, and with that somewhat terrifying impatience he’d already adopted regarding my calamitous ignorance of my Irishness, he now told me he no longer worked for Joe McGrath “as old Joe has joined the saints in heaven, God rest his soul,” rather, he now worked at the Hospital Trusts for Joe’s partner, Spencer Freeman, and Joe’s son, Patrick McGrath. As I’m certain my expression registered nothing whatever, in very sharp and accusatory tones Jimmy accused me of not even knowing what the Hospital Trusts was. My muteness served as my confession.
    Certainly I’d heard of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes? I’d heard of the sweepstakes but didn’t know it had anything to do with hospitals. In fact, in all my forty-plus years, I said, I couldn’t recall ever having seen a ticket, least of all ever having purchased one. With a kind of unspeakable and seething fury, Jimmy reached into the inside pocket of his gabardine jacket, violently ripped from it an expensive-looking and magnificently soft leather pocket secretary, sloppily wetted his fingers with his tongue and lips, snarlingly counted ten tickets onto our cup-stained vodka tray, loudly enunciating the number of each ticket as he counted, one, two, three, four, and so forth, ordered me to sign my name and address in the appropriate place, tear the ticket in half, give the parts with my name and address to him, and keep the other halves for myself. As I started to do so, I detected the tickets cost four dollars each, calculated immediately that the tickets would cost me forty dollars, and told Jimmy that one ticket would do me just fine.
    “But, Frederick, me lurve, you don’t understand—the bleeding tickets are on me! Look here what I’m doing, lurve. I’m transferring forty dollars from this slot in my wallet to this other slot with your stubs so Fll know exactly what it’s all about if you win. Even I, you see, darling, in the very higher echelons of the Hospital Trusts’ public relations—ha! ha!—have to account for every ticket which is dispersed. All the money, you see, goes to pay the hospital bills for Ireland’s poor, impoverished souls. All of course but for some minute sums we hold out for mundane and worldly things like expenses, salaries, and that sort of unavoidable crassness. Who do you think all these gentle souls are? Nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, all with years and years of dedicated, utterly devotional service to curing the sick, the broke, the downtrodden, the devoid of spirit—the Gaelic crackpots, that is—aye, that’s one of the reasons this bleeding tour was set up, a gift