Mr. Bones
Page 36
I returned to my own empty room in my mother’s house. I relived all the hopes and fantasies one feels in a childhood bedroom. I suffered the overfamiliar ceiling, the walls, the window: like a cell I’d served a sentence in, that I was confined to again. I hardly stirred from the house until a month later, to accompany Mother to the gravesite. “I want to visit Dad,” she had said at breakfast that day, cutting a sausage, then putting down her knife.
We were standing at the grave when Mother said, “Your teacher Murray Cutler died. It was in the paper.”
I couldn’t speak.
“Dad respected him so much. He was a Harvard graduate, you know. Dad was so proud that he took you under his wing. What’s wrong?”
I had begun to cry, sniffling, then sobbing with an odd hopeless honk of despair.
“He thought the world of you,” she said. “Dad knew that. He used to talk about it to me.” And then she was comforting me. “Go on, let it out, Jay, I know how much he meant to you.”
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include Ghost Train to the Eastern Star and Dark Star Safari. He lives in Hawaii and on Cape Cod.