Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  “Vic.”

  He went over and chucked Paige under the chin. She jerked her face away as if she expected to be slapped. “You behaving yourself?”

  “Have a coffee.”

  “I’ll have what he’s having.”

  “Lemonade,” Paige said. “It’s in the fridge. In a pitcher. I have to get some starch. I’ll be right back.”

  “I should go,” I said.

  “I won’t be a minute.”

  “Don’t go,” Vic said at the refrigerator, pouring himself a glass of lemonade.

  Then Paige was out the door and up the stairs.

  I sat down. Vic sat in the chair next to me, but only breathed, sighed, didn’t say anything. A sound came from my throat—a nervous noise, a whicker of anxiety, Heh-heh.

  “Heh-heh,” Vic said, the exact sound, and he stared at me. His face was mean and misshapen, with full lips. He was hunched forward in the chair, looking fatter, and I could hear his breathing, like gas escaping. He said, “I know who you are. You’re Eddie.”

  “No. I’m not Eddie.” My voice was high and terrified, and the way I said it seemed to convince him that I was lying.

  To calm myself, or maybe to show him I was calm, I raised my glass to my mouth, As I began to drink, he leaned over and punched me in the side of my face, cracking the edge of the glass against my teeth and jarring my head. I drunkenly set the glass on a side table and tasted blood and moved unsteadily to the stairs, just as Paige came down.

  “I have to go.”

  “What did you do?” she said angrily to Vic, but she knew.

  “You heard him. He has to go.”

  I hurried away, blind, stumbling downhill. I was so stunned by being hit in the face I could not think, and my head was ringing, my jaw hurt, and yet I felt glad to be away, and happy when I saw I was not being chased. My mouth was full of foul-tasting saliva but I did not spit until I got to the bottom of the hill, and then I bent over and spat blood. I had a tenderness on my tongue where my teeth, or the glass, had been forced against it by his punching me.

  Passing a pizza parlor, I saw my reflection in the window and was surprised to see myself as normal: no one would have guessed I’d been hit in the face. But I looked so young, so pale, with spiky hair and a rumpled shirt.

  That was how I looked. Inside I was sick, and the wound in my mouth, the taste of blood, made me afraid. I ran, feeling skinny and breathless, to North Station, pushed my token into the slot, and hurried onto the train.

  It was at Sullivan Square, as the train drew in, that I remembered the shoes. I’d left them at Paige’s apartment when I’d run, after Vic hit me. And I’d been so afraid I hadn’t thought of them until now. On the electric car I tried to think of an excuse. The truth was awful, impossible, unrepeatable.

  As soon as my father saw me entering the store, he said, “Shoes?” in his economical way, not wasting words on me. But it struck me that he was his other self, the one the woman had described, the good guy. He seemed, as I thought this, that he was summing me up too.

  “I lost them. I was on the train and looked down and they weren’t there.”

  “What else?”—meaning, And what other things happened to you?

  “Nothing.”

  He lifted my chin. The wound in my mouth hurt from his tugging my head. He leaned over and, sniffing my hair, he knew everything.

  “Sure.”

  Long Story Short

  Fritz Is Back

  I was born in Berlin in 1937. My mother was eighteen. She hid me from everyone for a year and a half. My father must have been someone who was hated, a Jew or a Gypsy: I never knew who he was. My mother got permission to emigrate in 1943 under “refugee status” and married a man named Wolfie. We sailed to Australia. None of us spoke English. We were put in a rural refugee camp, living in dormitories. After a year, we were sent to a suburb of Melbourne, where we were happy, but six months later my mother and Wolfie crashed their car. Mother was killed, Wolfie was so badly injured he could not care for me.

  When the authorities came to put me in the orphanage, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Dugger, said, “We could easily take him. He’s one of the family. Fritz is no bludger.” My name was Fred, but, being German, I was Fritz to everyone in Australia.

  Mrs. Dugger didn’t insist. She watched me get into the car. Then she reached through the window and patted me on the head. She said in a strange tone, “Bye, Fritz. Mind how you go.”

  I was put into the Fraser Boys’ Home. I was happy there, oddly enough. The bigger boys protected me. And I was terrified when, after three years, Wolfie showed up, limping from his injuries, to take me away. He arranged for us to go back to Germany. We went by ship. He was abusive for the whole voyage. I had no idea why he wanted me to go with him; I still don’t know. He abandoned me soon after we got to Hamburg. I was taken in by an old woman, and for the first time in my life I was held in the arms of someone who loved me. We both sobbed—the tears were endless. I was still young, but Germany was rebuilding, and I got a job in a restaurant. When I had saved some money, I went to hotel school. I worked in hotels, I became a manager, and eventually I became head of the company, a large hotel chain.

  Long story short, our company was negotiating to buy a hotel in Melbourne. Forty years after I left that city, I returned. On my day off I went to the old neighborhood. I found Mrs. Dugger. She was blind, sitting on her porch.

  “I used to live here,” I said. “Long ago.”

  The moment she heard my voice, she began to cry and said, “Fritz is back!”

  She died soon after that. Her son told me that she talked about me constantly, and it was only when I came back and she knew I was all right that she was able to let go. All those years of remorse for letting me be taken away by the authorities.

  An Obstinate Child

  I have had an unusual life so far, difficult in many ways, but not so difficult as that of my father, who is sixty-something. He was my tormentor for almost the whole of my childhood.

  I had a bad case of measles at the age of four. I had developed normally before then, but after the measles I became disobedient and willful. I didn’t listen. I didn’t pay attention. I defied my father, who was a stern disciplinarian—Marine Corps, two tours in Vietnam. “Listen to me!” But I didn’t. He spanked me, sometimes so hard I could still feel it days later. He smacked my hands, twisted my ears, pushed me into a corner, and forced me to stand. He made me call him “Sir.” As I grew older, the punishments became more severe. The worst one was having to kneel on a broomstick. I did this for hours at a time. I was seven or eight years old, and it went on for years. I was rude, I was defiant, you name it—so my dad said. I was a wreck, but I couldn’t cure myself of being an obstinate child. I was also terrible at school, where the punishments weren’t as bad as my father’s, but when he saw my report card he went ballistic.

  When I was about thirteen, I was given an eye test at school. Everyone got one. I failed. The eye doctor gave me a prescription for glasses and also suggested that I get a hearing test. This hearing test was given to me many times over a lot of weeks. Some of the tests were administered by groups of doctors or with medical students watching. Sometimes they asked, “How’d you get all those bruises?” I said, “Fell down.”

  The results showed that I was extremely deaf, as a result of the measles. I was fitted with two hearing aids. My whole life changed, though I was still pretty rebellious. The other kids laughed at my “earphones.” I improved at school, but my home life deteriorated.

  My father became desolate and filled with guilt. Some days when I stop by, I think he is on the verge of suicide, and it takes all the energy I have to reassure him and coax him into better humor, which is a pretty big burden for both of us. He still apologizes. I say, “How were you to know?”

  My Priests

  I was a Catholic in the 1950s, a student at an all-boys Catholic school, priests for teachers. I never heard of any of us boys being messed around with by a
priest. I knew that I was afraid of them and probably would have done anything a priest asked me to.

  But there was something else about them that impressed me and changed my life. In the ninth grade, we made weekly visits to the YMCA pool, where all the swimming was done in the nude. I was embarrassed, but I was the only one. We were all naked. And I recall how the priests would come into the changing room and find a locker. They wore long black cassocks, birettas, and black socks. They would undress with us, carefully folding their clothes and tucking them into the lockers.

  Stark naked, they led us into the swimming pool, which stank of chlorine. They dived, they gave us swimming lessons. They taught us to pick up objects from the bottom of the pool—“surface dive.” They showed us lifesaving maneuvers. “Never let a drowning man grab you. He’ll take you with him.”

  What I remember of the priests were their naked bodies, big and pale without robes or cassocks. They were men, just white skin and hairy legs. After a while I did not believe they had any power at all, and certainly not spiritual power. As time passed, I liked them less and less—for their bodies—and as an adult, reflecting on the YMCA visits, I began to hate them for pretending to be powerful. I easily lost my faith.

  School Days

  Like many boys of my generation, I was sent away to school. My father was an officer in the Indian Army, based in Bareilly, and he had the choice of sending me to a hill-station school—say, one in Simla—or to an English boarding school. He opted for England. There I went at the age of seven, accompanied by my mother, who left me at the underschool, returning every two years to check up on me. I know this seems extraordinary, but it was quite usual then. The period I am speaking of is the 1930s, for I was born in 1928, and my prep school days ended with the outbreak of war in Europe.

  My mother died. This I was told by the headmaster, who took me aside and was very kind to me. His wife, Winnie—we called her Poodle—made me tea.

  “Your father is coming to fetch you.”

  I was ten, but a small ten, a white weedy boy with bony bitten fingers and spiky hair. I was too nervous to be dreamy or lazy. I was a whiz at maths, chess, and Religious Knowledge, humiliated in all sports.

  The day came. “Your father is in the foyer of Ashburnham.” I ran. I was in a panic. I saw two men. I clutched one and began to cry.

  “Neville, I am your father,” the other man said.

  This man I hugged was laughing: my uncle.

  Nothing was right after that with my father. I began to think, Who is he? And maybe my uncle is my real father.

  Auntie Rosebud’s Jewels

  My aunt Rosalind, whom we called Rosebud, had a fantastic collection of jewelry. She had two habits related to the collection. One, she was passionate about collecting, continually adding pieces, delving in markets, attending auctions and estate sales, and dealing privately. The other habit was her always announcing her finds and acquisitions. This meant that we were all keenly aware of what she had bought and what she owned. In so doing, she educated us. This is a topaz, this is a sapphire, this is a yellow diamond, and that’s a black pearl. We learned the difference between white gold and platinum as settings, the virtue of one stone over another, the variety of hallmarks, the price of gold and diamonds—specific numbers and scarcity value.

  Auntie Rosebud’s collection continued to grow while we watched, from a few boxes to many chests of drawers, glass cabinets, and trays. We became knowledgeable ourselves. That close attention was a way of pleasing Auntie Rosebud. We felt that she needed us to take an interest, that she enjoyed educating us, and I suppose our knowledge linked us to this valuable collection and gave us self-esteem.

  We were young adults, in the working world, when Auntie Rosebud sold her collection of jewelry. It was like a sickness and a death. An auction house swept down and valued the pieces, photographed them, and in a few months the whole collection was gone. She said, “You can bid for the ones you really like.” But we didn’t: we couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t the money she wanted. She had plenty. After the big auction she was more powerful than ever, and more of a mystery, and we felt so weak.

  The Child with the Crooked Smile

  I was in Central America, visiting schools for an aid project. Leaving one small school in a village, my guide, Ramon, said to me, “Did you see that small boy at the front desk, who was so slow? Alone, writing after school in his notebook?”

  The boy with the crooked smile—I had seen him, and he had seen me, too.

  “His story is so sad. His mother was only fifteen when she got pregnant. She had no boyfriend, no fiancé. She was just a schoolgirl. She gave birth, and afterward she moved out of the house and went to San Pedro.

  “A few years later, visiting her parents, she saw her father hugging and kissing her younger sister, who was fourteen. She screamed at him to stop.

  “Her father said, ‘It’s nothing. We’re just being friendly.’

  “She said, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to her. Leave her alone!’

  “But the father didn’t. So the older daughter went to the police station and said, ‘My father is having sex with my sister. He had sex with me, and this boy is the result.’

  “The little boy looked at the policemen and smiled. They could see in his smile that there was something wrong with his head.

  “The father was arrested. He went to trial and was given fifteen years and is in prison now. It’s so strange. How do these things happen?”

  A few days later we passed a small house in the forest near that village. Ramon pointed.

  “That’s the house of Señor Martin. He had seventeen children. Imagine! And now that I think of it, his second son was the one who committed incest with his daughters. He lived there.”

  “Seventeen children in that house?” I said.

  “Two bedrooms,” Ramon said. “Fantastic, eh, how these people can manage?”

  The Shadow

  I plan to retire soon. I have high blood pressure, yet my life has been uneventful—two children, both married; my wife is a real estate agent. I have spent my life in accountancy and tax planning. I used to think, I should get outside more. And then when my health problems prevented me, I was somewhat relieved not to have to get any exercise.

  All my life there has been a shadow over me, one I could not identify, weighing me down.

  I was at the supermarket—this was just the other day—and saw a young mother with her three children, one in a baby carriage, one holding her hand, and the third, the eldest, trying to help her. This big boy was about ten. He wore a baseball hat that was slightly too large for his head and tipping sideways. His eyeglasses were the cheap kind that make a kid self-conscious. He was pale, bucktoothed, very skinny, with an ill-fitting shirt and blue pants—not stylish, none of it. It was a poor family but an earnest one, conscious of decency and order. The boy was carrying a heavy bag, because his mother was burdened with the other children and the shopping. She chose each item very carefully, weighing the thing, looking several times at the price.

  The boy was ugly, foolish-looking, really pathetic, trying to look anonymous but obviously what his schoolmates would have called a geek. His glasses were all wrong, he was weak, he was worried, he was trying to be helpful, but anyone could see he was miserably self-conscious and perhaps terrified. He knew what it was like to be mocked: he anticipated it every moment, glancing aside. I knew that his father either was dead or had deserted the mother. The father would have shown this boy how to dress and would have given him a manly example. But his mother nagged him. “You’re the oldest!” He was in despair—I could see the shadow over him.

  Later I examined my sadness and my pity. I realized he was me. I understood my life after fifty years. I did not sorrow for myself but for that poor ugly boy.

  The Man from 77th Street

  I was living on the Upper East Side. Every morning I walked down Lexington to 77th Street and got the 6 train to Union Square, where I worked. I w
as at the station by eight, and without fail I would see a man reading the Wall Street Journal just inside the turnstile. He always smiled at me, and I kept thinking that he would talk to me one day. He didn’t, but he kept smiling whenever he saw me. This went on for about a year.

  I moved to East 13th Street, a short distance from my office, and never thought about the man again. But after my boyfriend and I split up, I kept the apartment, though I hated staying home at night alone. I was in the bar section of a café in Union Square and saw the man from 77th Street. He smiled at me. I smiled back. We began talking. We were instantly on the same wavelength, as I had guessed we would be all along. I felt that I had known him for a year. We talked for about two hours—four drinks each—and then he said, “I want to make love to you in the worst way.”

  That struck me as funny. I even made a joke about it, that word “worst.” We went to my apartment, and we devoured each other, making up for a whole year of eyeing each other and fantasizing. I was thinking how I would tell my ex-boyfriend that it was like a cannibal feast. The man from 77th Street pounded me and twisted my body sideways and made a meal of one of my feet, while I watched, not aroused but fascinated.

  Afterward, exhausted, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I said, “I used to dream of you making love to me the whole time I saw you at the station on 77th Street.”

  He stared at me. He said, “I’ve only been there a few times. I live in Brooklyn. I’ve never seen you before.”