Three Wogs

by Alexander Theroux

  Suddenly, the door flew open and through it marched a little old snailshaped lady dressed in black surrah silk, who held a small crystal pot at arm’s length and, rolling her head from side to side, sprayed on her flavescent skin a heady perfume with cadenced squeezes from a grapesized syringe of lavender. A squawk of delectation. A sniff. She brushed the air and pushed her nose into it, sniffing, detective, her eyes closed. A sniff of delectation. A squawk. Two oval spots on her cheeks were rubbed the hue of prawn, one of which she mechanically turned in profile to her son, raising her neck and jutting out a very, very firm chin. The votive offering: Which bestowed upon her a dutiful kiss.

  “Mmmm, there’s a good boy.” Quickly she recoiled, sputtering, “Eccch, your tongue’s black!” Her son flinched and then, his hands flat on his hips, he paced to the other side of the only room to stare vacantly at a painting of two cows lolloping across a Constable heath.

  “A comfit.”

  “Oh,” she burbled. “Isn’t that just you all over.”

  “This is beastly inconvenient, you being late, if you must know, Mother. And to actually be amused by it all.” He split the infinitive deliberately.

  “Ours is a nasty life,” she matter-of-factly remarked to a placebo as she popped it into her mouth. She stuffed some keys and cigarettes into her handbag.

  “Well, it is all rather a mess, now you mention it,” Which petulantly replied and looked away.

  Tidying her hat, she feigned a whimper. “Aren’t we the stormy petrel?”

  “Dash it all, Mother, I’ve been sitting there one hell of a long time.” He pointed over her head.

  “Were you? Were you really? Pity. When I should know specifically you much prefer I hurry off without so much as a sprig of mums on my lappet to jolly myself up.” She paused; then with a glare through a cribriform veil she had just pulled over her face, she enunciated crisply, “Please however—” Which saw the danger signal of the conjunctive adverb and the load it carried coming into view “—shut up.” She looked up sweetly and smiled, then coolly arranged her bluewhitegrey hair with fluffing self-indulgent motions and, sporting the price of a few lives around her neck, ordered into trim six pieces of fur, the colour of henna: foxes, with eyes like small sepals, biting each other’s tails. They decided not to take the limousine and trundled out to find his car, Which’s mother moving along with a curious poultrylike flutter and refusing his assistance on the landing with a thwack of her cane. He hated this independence in her and thought of St. Genuina who always used the imperative when praying to the Holy Ghost.

  “It’s Sleeping Beauty.”

  “I saw that last year.”

  “You’re always ahead of me.”

  “One year to be exact.”

  Lady Therefore was a compulsive diarist.

  The trick was now to drive as quickly as possible to Covent Garden where, rising high out of the fruit carts and stacked cases of guava, the Royal Opera House sat dead center in the sacramental universe and sent out to the world from the primeval swamps of transpontine London its nights of song, its evenings of momentary illumination. They burred off down Wigmore Street and into Oxford Street with a hook movement, Which fulminating at the wheel and his mother hanging onto the bar at the passenger’s side like a dark silk mormoop.

  For Lady Fanny Therefore (a Spottswood-Sheets), born of an old family from Tittinhanger in the county of Hertford—the ancient manor house, “Runcible Acres,” used by Wolsey to stage rat fights after the dissolution of the religious almonries by Henry VIII, F.D., in 1536, still stood—the close relationship to her only child was paramount and shifted into the area of possession only when jeopardized, an alarming possibility, she knew, in a world now rife with alternative. She accepted her role as mediatrix of all graces to that glorious, if fading, past, down through which their good name echoed in histories, proclamations, and battle cries. The past alone mattered, an occasional rubber of Écarte—and her constitutional. Through all the civic rubbish did she walk of a morning, a starched and spotless figurine on a funereal drift, who frequently took tea at Lambeth Palace with the A.B.C., could fondly quote Castlereagh from memory, and never ceased to scoff at the new machines that clacked against her heart, a closed valve now to all the common wrangling and innovation, appropriately devalued, especially, when she summoned to memory either the resolute Elizabeth I who used to walk winglike in her jewelled dresses through her palaces on floors of straw, or thought of Queen Victoria who rocked across India on her howdah and, even if unamused, never so much as hinted for a glass of water, to say nothing of a rubber cushion. Now, was all a mess. Only last year at Wimbledon a company of Tory peeresses, with a duchess at their head, had hissed the Queen; Americans repeatedly refused to kerb their dogs in Belgravia; the sandwich had found general acceptance; and children, once loyal to their mothers, would now think absolutely nothing of pronouncing the word “exquisite” on the antepenult, grinding the salt at table, or blowing out the Christmas pudding before grace. Where now the days of Old King Cole, three-hour sermons, and the glissando of swans that mirrored the flight of young hearts, O where?

  The Age of Shoddy was alive. Everything had become all that it could ever be, she felt, just about the time Rupert Brooke gave up the ghost (and poetry) in the Aegean, deluded in thinking, poor boy, that some corner in a foreign field might be England, just when all those young men who looked like Donatello turned, waved goodbye, and were gunned down in the sun and sea-shells—a time when England, esto perpetua, was a land of fat green pastures; policemen had walrus moustaches and hearts of gold; and handsome men in plus fours, crewelled pullovers, and boaters joshed each other goodheartedly with cricket bats and noisy love on the trimmed lawns of Swanage Bay in Dorsetshire, where Lady Therefore had been taken as a girl at the start of every season. She looked back mistily upon that age—enacted, signed, and enforced—when a large annuity meant safety, England meant civilization, Thackeray meant romance, and women piped cakes rather than slovenly made do with a rough icing.

  Here, nip. There, tuck. An age of random piety this now was, slackly trained to believe that sincerity was an excuse for nearly everything. She took umbrage at the slurs against the aristocracy, for if they were in-bred and out-of-touch, as was alleged, was not this the lesson of pedigree, that a good wine needs a good bush? And to be out of touch with the modern world—the peculiarly noisome allowance of Bolsheviks; thick cups stamped with the name of the Bangkok Railway used at tea (where people never bothered to take off their gloves); and crimes as horrific as Peter the Pointer’s now committed every day—well, this was more praise than indictment. But hers, she knew, was a creed outworn; her husband (an Old Blue), long dead now these past twenty-five years, was ever to point that out—that is, before she lost him in Somaliland (Br.) where, doing research on a brief history of the world (which his father had brought down to A.D. 17 from the Creation), he was poisoned by a tribe of hydrocephalic Pygmies, all with creased skin, wide mouthfuls of broken teeth, and fly swatters, and, being flown in a mail-shuffle back to London where he showed himself swollen to such extreme they couldn’t see his eyes and no more of his nose than the tip of it which looked like a wart, he fatally succumbed—but not before he rose on one elbow, squinted over the counterpane, and proved himself the Christian everybody had hoped he had been. “Read to me of The Four Last Things, Fanny,” he managed just before he drooped into Eternity.

  “Blast!” sibilated the cleric as he spun the wheel through whizzing mopeds and some flimsy curricles, and, missing by inches two men wheeling a pushcart, he swerved rattling into one of those dark narrow streets within Covent Garden, where, not a century ago, rotting match girls with hollow eyes and skin the colour of paper sat huddled in the doorways, whooping, rheumy, consumptive.

  “They’re all out tonight, seems.”

  “They?”

  “Fruiterers,” Which shrugged. “I suppose.”

  “Yids.” Lady Therefore peered into the outer darkness. “To a man.�
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  “These were black chaps,” her son replied. He paused. “By the way,” he snapped impatiently, suddenly aware of a bitterly literal realization he had thus far managed to repress but which had been nagging at him all day, “I find out yesterday I’m to be on the qui vive for a new choirmaster.” He honked a pedestrian leaping onto the kerb and angrily mashed the accelerator to the floor.

  “Signifying?”

  The answer came hard. “Cyril is leaving.”

  “Cyril?” Her eyebrows arched into pyrrhics. “Your nigger?”

  “Not,” Which pushed his face an inch from his mother’s, “your common garden variety, may I add?”

  “Bonzo the Magnificent,” said Lady Therefore with a dry spatter of croaks that might have signified laughter; Which heard the sound, but when he looked into her face he could not find even the slightest trace of amusement, only chagrin. Then she added, her mouth thin with disapproval, “One of the descendants of Cush, cut the cake as you will.”

  Which, zooming along, offered a bit of muddy resistance, one of earth’s old fierce simplicities, as he explained a semi-carbonized people in terms of the wicked equatorial sun that had grilled the lower Africas for centuries; but his mother, beeping out in a voice of an angry peewit, pointed out in what had for some time now even exceeded her bimensual fit of pique that the rays (which Phoebus avert) could have done the same thing to England, but did not; that it had, for instance, left the good people in Lapland perfectly wax-white, God bless them; and that he had best mind his driving. Deedum, deedum, deedee, thought Which.

  “He is really such an amusing fellow and says such absurd things, well, I’d have thought you’d rather adore him.”

  “Poppycock,” she grunted.

  “You know, they’re not really foreign, not quiteish. Rather like you and me, in a way,” exclaimed Which from the side of his mouth as he ducked his head out of the window in order to negotiate a parking space. There was no room. He drove on in bumps, like the conversation: systole, diastole.

  “Anyway,” replied Which, “that thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.”

  “Well,” she said, shifting in her seat, “that was rather well put.”

  “I can’t claim it.”

  “Who can?”

  “He of Stratford-super-Avon.”

  But Lady Therefore was thinking of Cyril. “That blackamoor has the manners of Wat Tyler,” she snorted, sitting up explosively as she remembered the day she had been seated across from him at one of the church buffets for the Barnardo Homes, a curious act of commensality during which time—establishing himself somewhat as an African Heliogabalus, who would eat anything that didn’t crack his teeth, shriek, or make his eyes water—he had consumed an entire bag pudding, four large bowls of Gooseberry Fool, and then proceeded to attack a whole baron of beef. He had drawn the platter toward him by the tablecloth, and, smocking the joint with consecutive blows of his fork, dangled huge slices before his hidden face, at which moment, as the center concaved and disappeared, everyone sat back aghast as he slurped and chewed until the rest of the beef followed in with a loud cloacinal suction, while the juices streamed down his chin. After that he ate a few spoonfuls of butter, burped, and walked away.

  “Still, in a way, he’s clean,” Which smiled, unable to repress an amused, if fleeting, thought of St. Bridget who was, according to legend, vouchsafed in a vision that she could, without sin, wash herself twice and even perhaps thrice a month.

  “Perfectly grotty!” barked Lady Therefore, amplifying that with a sour face. “And we don’t need a full-blown psychotic episode about him.”

  She pictured Cyril mythopoeically: a Dark Morlock, sloppy, smokeyed, limping through her dreams with his socks down, a salivating anthropophagus chewing khat, punching mandrils and hartebeest, and, with his thousand tribal members sitting on their haunches in the clearings, drinking strip-me-naked from wooden bowls, polishing their teeth with pieces of soft stick, and farting into the grass.

  Rev. Therefore noticed his mother, her mouth locked on the cigarette she had lighted which was half-coated in red lipstick and which she constantly yanked away to make her remarks through a smoking rictus.

  “I wonder how their lot ever got into the Ark,” she puffed.

  “They’re—what?” Which looked for a word on his trimmed nails. “Basic.”

  “Cuckoo Pie!” his mother protested with a frown, her little face with its high colour and wrinkles twitching like a turkey’s caruncle. Which tried to explain himself, but Lady Therefore, jaw firm, held up her hand as a semaphore that nothing further would either be said or listened to. They rode on, a solved antinomy.

  “Park here,” she said.

  He did.

  Together, linked without a fumble, Which and his mother joined the enfeoffed gentry stepping grandly from without Rolls-Royces and Bentleys in front of the Opera House. A sense of metier prevailed: a flow of juristic faces, bordered in fur and spanking white collars, beamed a fugle of salutes, blown kisses, and effable recognitions. Infatuated with continental swish, Which Therefore felt at such moments that a gorgeous angel hung pendant in the sky, somewhere overhead, blowing out a silver incipit on his trumpet and having, doubtless, a whacking good time himself. Ever solicitous of his mother, he now skittered at her side from group to group as she spoke to friends her vatic wisdom in backchat and tiny paragraphs: one could see them begin, gain momentum, lengthen, and snap off into quick dead ends. She moved among and remonstrated freely with old rouged dukes, M.P.s, and the Men Who Moved Affairs, embarrassing Which only on one occasion, when—purchasing her program—she peevishly confronted Lady Glendower (who was neither): “Why in hell weren’t you at Mass Sunday?” Then she marched away like a ruffed bustard, confiding to her son, with alarm and indignation, that the woman in question was in fact a Christian Scientist, born of crofters in Huntingtonshire, a county not only sunken in fens and a hotcupboard of Nonconformism but which also suffered the reproach of being suburban.

  The orchestra struck up. The lights dimmed to that artificial sundown that silences the chatter of voices and rustling pages; a sea of heads lifted toward the stage. Lady Therefore, who would have been much happier playing out a hand of Piquet at home, sat like Boadicea with a lorgnette. She glanced at Which who asked wasn’t it wonderful, and then for the opera glasses; he sat smiling, translated to heaven, waiting for the curtain. The priest’s figure lacked consequence—sex. She thought of that day at Sotheby’s several years ago, when Which had worn green gloves and sipped soda and Campari through a straw all afternoon, and of the remark one of her acquaintances had made, unaware that the man in question was her son, that he looked terribly tapette and was he?—the answer to which a more energetic, because a slightly younger, Lady Therefore provided, umbrella foremost, in the form of a quick kung-foo shot to the ribs.

  Rev. Which Therefore—an old name he thought more a Divine Wisecrack than a parental choice (though an odd, quasi-ecumenical temptation had suggested itself to Lady Therefore at her son’s christening when, the faith aside, she seriously considered calling him after one of the beautiful names of Leo XIII’s encyclicals: Humanum genus, Aeterni patris, or Longinqua oceani, all arguably better than a relative pronoun)—looked as spruce as an onion, wearing an off-white shirt of satinet with Wildean flounce at the sleeves. He had eyes the colour of clarified butter, showing a kind of flexibility and openness betrayed neither by his slight but energetic body nor his volleyballshaped head that looked like the full, round topside of an Harrovian boater. His hair was thinning somewhat, often prompting recollections, uninvidious to be sure, of St. Nichodemus of Thyatria, patron saint of bald heads, who was circumspectly martyred by having a goatskin nailed to his pate with a tenpenny nail. Which welcomed the chances to go clubbing with Mother, never bruised the gin, and believed in the importance of being earnest. He had, in short, the soul of an interior decorator—and found damnable any and all of the popular space theology so rampant in the England of today, especia
lly in the Blavatskyite and theosophical underground. No mystagogue, he was ordained according to the Order of Melchisedech, which he considered himself more ambassador from than representative of; nevertheless, he occasionally surprised himself with a passion, which perhaps exigency forces out, for amplifying the Gospels and pigeonholing for the young at heart the vouchsafing graces of the sweet, multifaceted, and adaptable Jesus over Whom he couldn’t help but poeticize, even during summer. He did so, however, in the same non-precipitant and assured way that one recognizes with specific discretion and passes along to another of worth the deep-chested soundness of some Piebald Ten-Year-Old at Ascot or the very place where one can find a disquietingly toothsome poulet de concombres in the London area. The rest was quibble.

  Religion for him did not involve the ascetic preoccupations of wearing hair shirts, fire-walking, hanging oneself up by hooks, avoidance of baths, or nakedness at vigil. Depressing to him were the various ecstatici and trancists howling for universal repentance from soap-boxes and then, especially dispiriting were the Salvation Army girls in their unbecoming coal-scuttle, poke bonnets, who gathered together on weekends passing out copies of War Cry, booming away on drums, and singing out with seamless optimism a monochrome “Jesus Is Our Baby Brother” or, a favourite, “The Bottle’s Only a Downpayment, There’s No Way of Counting the Cost.” Neither could he abide the neurotic malaise in England that spawned and sent shuttling out into the traffic little pavid sandwichmen who gave their lives to religion but feared to search for God (lest He somehow turn out to be a Latitudinarian) and who squeaked angry destruction from behind placards which broadcasted grim, fatalistic warnings from Isaiah and Paralipomenon, nor those odd faiths, animated contumely, which goosed thin, hawklike anythingarians, aswarm with pockmarks and spicate hair, into prooftexting the Bible to and barking for maniacal repentances from the night crowds and theatre-goers lolling around Piccadilly and Regent Street on any given night.