by Paul Theroux
“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 driving a big wooden vehicle down a steep hill.
Mandy, is there 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 a 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. As if 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, though not to me. Words I had never heard before had 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, you’re 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 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 different, 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 back was turned, 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 a 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 often 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 the jokes and the tambourine, as Mr. Bones, he 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-room!”
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 playful 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 very few 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 the 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?
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 only realized later 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, and 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.
“Give us a kiss, sonny boy!”
Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness.
His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I dreamed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door shut.
I even said into the menacing gloom, “Dad, are you there?”
No answer was just the sort of thing he’d try as Mr. Bones.
I said again, “Dad?” And in a trembly voice, “Mr. Bones?”
I had not heard him leave. For all I knew he stayed there to scare me. But in the morning the room was empty.
At breakfast he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the lines on his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal.
“Pass me the dead flies, sonny,” he said in his Mr. Bones voice.
These days his remarks silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. I didn’t know how deeply Mother was upset, though I knew she was. Floyd and Fred were startled but sometimes pretended to find it funny, and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his “Toulouse and Toulon” joke, Floyd said, “Well, you’re like a town in Massachusetts—Marblehead.” Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, “I like that.”
But he kept on worrying Fred about college, and Floyd about trumpet lessons. We didn’t know what was coming next. We had not foreseen the songs or the jokes; we had not expected the black face. Maybe there was more.
His voice was hoarse from practicing, and now every night he came home in black makeup, his wig like a too-big woolly hat. He talked about Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor, and he told the same jokes. Hearing it again and again, I came to understand the one about the Indian and the red ant—red aunt was the point of it. We never pronounced it ant, but always awnt, the New England way.
I felt embarrassed and fearful. We were afraid to ask him about his job in the shoe department these days. If Mother mentioned the house, that there were drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, linoleum to be laid, painting to be done, I didn’t hear it. All our attention was on him, who he was now, Mr. Bones. To almost any question he began singing.
A million baby kisses I’ll deliver,
If you will only sing the “Swanee River”
The rhythm was there, a confident slowness and drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang and he raised his white gloves. And Mother sat at the piano, looking anxious, playing the melody.
It seemed so wrong, I was
always glancing at the door, scared that someone—a neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grampa—might come in and see him swaying and singing with a black face and that wig.
He had another song too.
When life seems full of clouds and rain
And I am filled with naught but pain,
Who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain?
He would always pause after that, lower himself, put his head out, and say, “Nobody!”
His voice was gargly and cross, as though he was in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one.
When all day long things go amiss,
And I go home to find some bliss,
Who hands to me a glowin’ kiss?
He was standing over Mother at the piano with her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.
“Nobody!”
The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I’d seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. The other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves as if they knew he was Mr. Bones.
Outside church one Sunday, Eddie Flaherty, one of the altar boys, said, “You going to the minstrel show?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you?”
“My old man’s in it. So’s yours.”
“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”
“It’s a pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Eddie said.
