Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “I lost a child two years ago.”

  As though she was threatening to lose this one.

  Dad said, “It’s going to be fine.”

  “How would you know?”

  He smiled, he had no reply. As a sort of penance he washed the dishes, calling out, “Who’s going to dry for me?” And because of the tension, each of us said, “I’ll do it!” and pushed around trying to be helpful, like terrified children in a drunken household. But there was no drunkard here, only a disappointed woman and her smiling husband.

  I said he had no recreations. He had one, the choir, legitimate because it was church-related. He had a strong, confident, rather tuneless voice, with a gravelly character, and even if thirty other people were singing, I could always discern my father’s voice in the “Pange Lingua” or “O Salutaris.”

  “You’re not going out again?”

  “Say, I’ve got choir practice.”

  He prays twice who sings to the Lord was printed on the hymnal. He believed that. Choir practice was more than a form of devotion, an expression of piety; it was a spiritual duty. But Dad always went alone, never taking any of us as initiates to the choir, and he always came back happy—not in anything he said, but his mood was improved, you could tell by the tilt of his head, his movements, his breathing, the way he listened, with a different sort of smile, a relaxed posture, his walk. He weighed less. He was always happier after he sang.

  April came.

  “The house is full of flies.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  He patched the screens with little glued-on squares of screen.

  “And the paint’s peeling.”

  Instead of priming it or waiting until the summer, he’d painted over the grime and the paint hadn’t stuck.

  “The faucet drips.”

  “Say, I’ll pick up some washers on the way home from choir.”

  “This is the second time I’ve mentioned it.”

  Dad was putting on his hat, snapping the brim, looking jaunty.

  “You never listen.”

  All he did was listen, but there’s a certain sort of nagging repetition that can deafen you. We didn’t know we’d come to the end of a chapter, that we were starting a new chapter. And after it was over we knew Dad much better, or rather knew a different side of him.

  The wickedest episodes of revelation can have the most innocent beginnings. This one began with a song. It seized my attention at the time, but looking back on it, it seems even weirder, scarier, almost unbelievable, except that I witnessed it all and even now remember it with reluctance because of my crush of embarrassment. I came to understand that my father’s smiles made him an enigma; but for a brief period I knew him, and though it was a kind of comedy, I was frightened and ashamed and shocked. The revelation unfolded obliquely, growing worse.

  He came home carrying a large envelope with a tucked-in flap. Trying to look casual, he got his fingers inside and with a self-conscious flourish took out some pages of sheet music. The illustration on the cover showed a black man in a gleaming top hat, white gloves, mouth smilingly open in the act of singing. I could see from his features that he was a white man wearing makeup.

  “Say”—Dad was rattling the pages—“can you play this, Mother?”

  Asking a favor always made him shy. Being asked a favor made Mother ponderous and powerful. Oh, so now you want something, do you? she seemed to reply in the upward tilt of her head and triumphant smile.

  She looked with a kind of distaste at the sheet music, plucking at it with unwilling fingers, as though it was unclean. And it was rather grubby, rubbed at the edges, torn at the crease where it was folded on the left side. It showed all the signs of having been propped on many music stands. Old, much-used sheet music had a limp cloth-like look.

  After a while, Mother brought herself and her big belly to the piano. She spun the stool’s seat to the right height and, balancing herself on it, reached over her pregnancy as if across a counter. Frowning at the music, she banged out some notes—I knew from her playing that she was angry. Dad leaned into his bifocals.

  Mandy

  There’s a minister handy

  And it sure would be dandy . . .

  He gagged a little, cleared his throat, and began again, in the wrong key.

  He could not read music, though he could carry a tune if he’d heard it enough times. In this first effort he struggled to find the melody.

  “You’re not listening,” Mother said.

  “Just trying to . . . ,” he said, and clawed at the song sheet instead of finishing the sentence.

  He started to sing again, reading the words, but too fast, and Mother was pounding the keys and tramping on the pedals as though she was at the wheel of some sort of vehicle, like a big wooden bus she was driving down a steep hill with her feet and hands.

  Mandy

  There’s a minister handy . . .

  Hearing the blundering repetition of someone being taught something from scratch was unbearable to me, because, probably from exasperation, I learned it before they did. I was usually way ahead while they were still faltering. I was always in a fury for it to be over.

  I left the room, but even two rooms away I heard,

  So don’t you linger

  Here’s the ring for your finger

  Isn’t it a humdinger?

  Against my will I listened to the whole thing until the song was in my head, not as it was meant to be sung, but in Dad’s tuneless and halting rendition.

  Later, over dinner, in reply to a question I didn’t hear, Dad said, “Fella gave it to me—loaned it. I’ll have to give it back afterwards.”

  “Who loaned it?”

  “John Flaherty.”

  “Why?”

  “Mel Hankey loaned it to him.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Minstrel show.”

  Mother made a face. He was eating. As though to avoid further questions, Dad filled his mouth with food and went on eating, with the faraway look he assumed when he didn’t want to be questioned. I’m busy thinking, his expression said. You don’t want to interrupt.

  Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Pass the mouse turd, sonny.”

  We stared at him. He was chewing.

  “Tell you a great meal,” he said. “Lettuce. Turnip. And pea.”

  He winked. We had no idea.

  “Minstrel show,” he seemed to feel, explained everything—and perhaps it did, but not to me. Words I had never heard before had a significance for him, and a private satisfaction. But “mouse turd”?

  After that, he practiced the song “Mandy” every night, singing with more confidence and tunefulness, Mother playing more loudly, thumping her pedaling feet. His voice was strong, assertive rather than melodious. Within a week, he grew hoarse, lost his voice, and from the next room it was as though another man was singing, not Dad but a growly stranger.

  Around this time, having mastered the song, he revealed his new name. This was at the dinner table, Mother at one end, Dad at the other, Fred, Floyd, Rose, and me between them.

  “Fella says to me, ‘Wasn’t that song just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you, Mr. Bones?’ I says, ‘No, but the fella that sang it touched me, and he still owes me five bucks.’”

  “Who’s Mr. Bones?” I asked.

  “Yours truly.”

  “No, it’s not,” Fred said.

  “Only one thing in the world keeps you from being a barefaced liar,” he said to Fred.

  We were shocked at his suddenness.

  “Your mustache,” Dad said, and wagged his head and chuckled.

  “I don’t have a mustache,” Fred said.

  Mother got flustered when she heard anyone telling a joke. She said, “Don’t be stupid.”

  “You think I’m stupid,” Dad said eagerly. “You should see my brother. He walks like this.” He got up from the table and bent over and hopped forward.

  He did have a brother, that was
the confusing part.

  “You’re so pretty and you’re so intelligent,” he said, striking a pose with Mother, using that new snappy voice.

  “I wish I could say the same for you.”

  Dad laughed, a kind of cackle, as though it was just what he wanted to hear. He said, “You could, if you told as big a lie as I just did.” He nudged me and said, “She was too ugly to have her face lifted. They lowered her body instead.”

  With that, he skipped out of the room, his hands in the air, and I thought for a moment that Mother was going to cry.

  He had become a different man, and it had happened quickly, just like that, calling himself Mr. Bones and teasing us, teasing Mother. She was bewildered and upset. The song he mastered he kept humming, and his jokes, not really jokes, were more like taunts.

  “Maybe it’s his new job,” Fred said in the bedroom after lights out.

  Floyd said, “It’s this house. Ma hates it. It’s Dad’s fault. He’s just being silly.”

  “What’s a minstrel show?” I asked.

  No one answered.

  Trying to be friendly, Mother asked Dad about his job a few days later.

  “They said I’d be a connoisseur, but I’m just a common sewer.”

  Then that gesture with the hands, waggling his fingers.

  “Said I’d be a pretty good physician, but I said, ‘I’m not good at fishin’.’ Or a doctor of some standing. I says, ‘No, I’m sitting—in the shoe department.’”

  Mother said coldly, “We need new linoleum in the upstairs bathroom.”

  “And you need new clothes, because your clothes are like the two French cities, Toulouse and Toulon.”

  “Don’t be a jackass.”

  “Mister Jackass to you.”

  “I wish John Flaherty hadn’t given you that music.”

  “Lightning Flaherty said I needed it. Tambo gave it to him. Play it for me again, I need a good physic.”

  Mother began to clear the table.

  “I love work,” Dad said. “I could watch it all day.”

  Mother went to the sink and leaned over. She had turned on the water, her bent back toward us, and I associated the water running into the dishpan with her tears.

  He was a new man, even my brothers said so, though, being older than me, they were often out of the house in the evenings when Dad—Mr. Bones—was at his friskiest. He had swagger and assurance, and if I tried to get his attention, or if he was asked a question, he began to sing “Mandy.” He had somehow learned two other songs: “Rosie, You Are My Posie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”—Lightning’s song, and Tambo’s, so he said.

  I was used to my father singing, but not these songs; used to his good humor, but there was anger in these jokes. And he, who seldom went out at night except to Benediction or choir practice, was now out most nights. He stopped asking Mother to play the piano for him; he would simply break into song, drawling it out of the side of his mouth.

  When you croon, croon a tune,

  From the heart of Dixie . . .

  He didn’t look any different, he dressed the same, in a gray suit and white shirt and blue tie and the topcoat he disparaged as “too dressy.” One day the sleeve was limp. He flapped it at Mother and said, “I know what you’re thinking: World War Two,” as though his arm was missing. Then he shot the arm out of the sleeve and said, “Nope. Filene’s Basement. Bad fit!”

  The variation that night and for nights to come was the tambourine he had somehow acquired. When he made a joke or a quip he shook it and rapped it on his knee and elbow and shook it again. Shika-shika-shika.

  “RSVP,” he said, holding up a piece of mail. “Remember Send Vedding Present,” and he jingled and tapped the tambourine.

  One day after school I went to the store where he worked. Instead of walking in, I kept my head down and crept to the side window to get a glimpse of Dad. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the shoe department, his chin in his hand, not looking like Mr. Bones but sad and silent, a man trying to remember something. Other clerks in shirtsleeves had gathered at the back of the store and were laughing, but not Dad. Were they ignoring him? He paid no attention. He was reading—unusual, a shoe clerk reading. I didn’t know this man either.

  I began to be glad that he was out most evenings. At the other, smaller house we’d moved from, he was always at home after work, and in the early days of this new one—the bigger house that Mother hated—he was usually in his chair, dressed in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe, reading the Globe under a lamp in the corner. But after that first night, with “Mandy,” and then the jokes, and the tambourine, as Mr. Bones, he was out at night, sometimes didn’t come home for supper, or if he did, it was “Pass the mouse turd” or, holding the pepper shaker, “This is how I feel, like pulverized pepper—fine!”

  “The oil burner’s back on the fritz,” Mother said.

  Any mention of a problem with the house these days made Dad smile his Mr. Bones smile and roll his eyes.

  “Heard about the King of England? He’s got a royal burner.”

  “We’ll have to get Mel to look at it.”

  “Tambo is a busy man, yes he is. Says to me, ‘What is the quickest way to the emergency ward?’ I says, ‘Tambo, just you stand in the middle of the road.’”

  Mother did not react, except to say, “It’s giving off a funny smell.”

  “Giving off a funny smell!” Dad said, and put one finger in the air, what I now recognized as a Mr. Bones gesture—he was about to say something and wanted attention. “Mr. Interlocutor, what is the difference between an elephant passing wind and a place where you might go for a drink?”

  “I don’t think you understand,” Mother said in a strained voice. “This house hasn’t been right since the day we moved in. First it was the roof, then the paint, then the plumbing. Now it’s the heat. We’re not going to have any hot water. Everything’s wrong.”

  Dad held his chin in his hand, as I’d seen him do at the store. He thought a moment, then looked around the table and said, “Mr. Interlocutor, the difference between an elephant passing wind and the place where you might go for a drink is—one is a barroom and the other is a bar-rooom!”

  He said it so loud we jumped. He didn’t laugh. He drew his chair next to Mother and sang.

  Rosie, you are my posie,

  You are my heart’s bouquet.

  Come out here in the moonlight,

  There’s something sweet, love,

  I want to say.

  Mother looked awkward and sad. She wasn’t angry. In a way, by clowning, Dad took her mind off the problems of the house. She could not get his attention. And who was he anyway? He had a different voice, a jaunty manner.

  It wasn’t any kind of joking I’d heard before from him. His teasing was more like mocking and bullying. He wouldn’t call Mel Hankey anything but Tambo, and John Flaherty was Lightning. They had never been close friends before—he had no friends—but now he had Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor.

  “Morrie Daigle said he’d help you fix the roof.”

  “Mr. Interlocutor is too hot to do that. He is so hot he will only read fan mail.”

  That was how we found out who Mr. Interlocutor was.

  “Have you lost your wallet?” Dad said to Floyd.

  “No,” Floyd said, and clapped his hand to his pocket.

  “Good. Then give me the five dollars you owe me.”

  Floyd made a face, looked helpless, thrashed a little. It was true that Dad had given him five dollars, but he had not brought it up before this.

  Dad said, “Hear about the Indian who had a red ant?”

  I didn’t understand that one at all. I pictured an Indian with an insect. It made no sense.

  There was something abrupt and deflecting in his humor. He made a joke and seemed to expand, pushing the house and his job aside. He’d been at the new job for six months now and never mentioned it. I had seen him in the store, not working but sitting in th
e chair where the shoe customers were supposed to sit, and instead of waiting on them, or talking to the other employees, he was reading.

  Mother seemed to be afraid of him. Before, she had always made a remark, or nagged, or blamed. But these days she relented. She watched him. When he made a joke she became very quiet and blinked at him, as though she was thinking, What do you mean by that?

  Floyd was on the basketball team, Fred played hockey, so they were out most evenings—practicing, they said. I knew it was an excuse to stay away from home and Mr. Bones. Rose was just a little kid of seven, and she actually found Mr. Bones funny, and let him tickle her.

  But I had nowhere to go, and I didn’t like the angry jokes or the cruel teasing. Mr. Bones was always laughing or singing, and he never listened, except when he was thinking up another joke. He was a stranger to me, and for the first time I began to think, Who are you? What do you want?

  What happened next was more shocking. Dad’s change was a surprise, but when he changed again he seemed monstrous. We thought, What next? It frightened the whole family, but maybe me especially, because I went to bed thinking, Who are you?

  The light went on and I had the answer.

  Most of the lights in the house were bare bulbs with no shades, hanging on frayed black whips from the ceiling—another source of Mother’s complaints—and the brightness of the one dangling in my bedroom made it worse. I had been woken up, so the light blazed and half blinded me. Yet I saw enough to be terrified.

  A disfigured villain from a horror comic was bending over my bed—I realized only later that it was Dad—his whole face sticky black, a white oval outline around his lips. He wore a cap that even afterward I could not imagine was a wig, a red floppy bow tie, a yellow speckled vest, and a black coat, and he was emphatically holding his hands out in white gloves. He was smiling under that blackness that shone on his face, and he leaned over me and spoke, seeming to shriek.