A Son Of The Circus (62 page)

Then, in Boston on Saturday night, Vera wanted to stray no farther than the dining room at the Ritz; her heaven was a good hotel, and she was already in it. But the dress code in the Ritz dining room was even more severe than Fessenden’s. The captain stopped them because Martin was wearing white athletic socks with his loafers. Vera said simply, ‘I was going to mention it, darling — now someone else has.’ She gave him the room key, to go change his socks, while she waited with Arif. Martin had to borrow a pair of Arif s calf-length black hose. The incident drew V era’s attention to how much more comfortably Arif wore ‘proper’ clothes; she waited for Martin to rejoin them in the dining room before making her observation known.

‘It must be your exposure to the diplomatic life,’ Martin’s mother remarked to the Turk. ‘I suppose there are all sorts of dress-up occasions at the Turkish Embassy.’

‘The Turkish Consulate,’ Arif corrected her, as he had corrected her a dozen times.

‘I’m frightfully uninterested in details,’ Vera told the boy. ‘I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting – I give you one minute.’

This was embarrassing to Martin, for it seemed to him that his mother had only recently learned to talk this way. She’d been such a vulgar young woman, and she’d gained no further education since that trashy time of her life; yet, in the absence of acting jobs, she’d learned to imitate the language of the educated upper classes. Vera was clever enough to know that trashiness was less appealing in older women. As for the adverb ‘frightfully,’ and the prefatory phrase ‘I challenge you,’ Martin Mills was ashamed to know where Vera had acquired this particular foppery.

There was a pretentious Brit in Hollywood, just another would-be director who’d failed to get a film made; Danny had written the unsuccessful script. To console himself, the Brit had made a series of moisturizer commercials; they were aimed at the older woman who was making an effort to preserve her skin, and Vera had been the model.

Shamelessly, there was his mother in a revealing camisole, seated in front of a makeup mirror – the kind that was framed with bright balls of light. Superimposed, the titles read:
VERONICA
ROSE
,
HOLLYWOOD
ACTRESS
. (To Martin’s knowledge, this commercial had been his mother’s first acting job in years.)

‘I’m frightfully opposed to dry skin,’ Vera is saying to the makeup mirror (and to the camera). ‘In this town, only the youthful last.’ The camera closes on the corners of her mouth; a pretty finger applies the moisturizing lotion. Are those the telltale lines of age we see? Something appears to pucker the skin of her upper lip where it meets the well-defined edge of her mouth, but then the lip is miraculously smooth again; possibly this is only our imagination. ‘I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old,’ the lips say. It was a trick with the camera, Martin Mills was sure. Before the close-up, that was his mother; yet those lips, up close, were unfamiliar to him – someone else’s younger mouth, Martin guessed.

It was a favorite TV commercial among the ninth-grade boys at Fessenden; when they gathered to watch an occasional television show in one of the dorm masters’ apartments, the boys were always ready to answer the question that the close-up lips posed: ‘I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old.’ )

‘You’re
already
old!’ the boys would shout. Only two of them knew that Veronica Rose the Hollywood actress was Martin’s mother. Martin would never have identified her, and Arif Koma was a loyal roommate.

Arif always said, ‘She looks young enough to
me
.’

So it was doubly embarrassing, in the Ritz dining room, when Martin’s mother said to Arif, ‘I’m frightfully uninterested in details. I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting –I give you one minute.’ Martin knew that Arif must have known that the ‘frightfully’ and the ‘I challenge you’ had come from the moisturizer commercial.

In the roommates’ secret language, Martin Mills suddenly said, ‘Frightfully.’ He thought Arif would understand; Martin was indicating that his own mother merited an T’ word. But Arif was taking Vera seriously.

‘An embassy is entrusted with a mission to a government and is headed by an ambassador,’ the Turk explained. ‘A consulate is the official premises of a consul, who is simply an official appointed by the government of one country to look after its commercial interests and the welfare of its citizens in another country. My father is the consul general in New York — New York being a place of commercial importance. A consul general is a consular officer of the highest rank, in charge of lower-ranking consular agents.’

‘That took just thirty seconds,’ Martin Mills informed his mother, but Vera was paying no attention to the time.

‘Tell me about Turkey,’ she said to Arif. ‘You have thirty seconds.’

‘Turkish is the mother tongue of more than ninety percent of the population, and we are more than ninety-nine percent Muslims.’ Here Arif Koma paused, for Vera had shivered — the word ‘Muslims’ made her shiver every time. ‘Ethnically, we are a melting pot,’ the boy continued. ‘Turks may be blond and blue-eyed; we may be of Alpine stock – that is, round-headed with dark hair and dark eyes. We may be of Mediterranean stock, dark, but long-headed. We may be Mongoloid, with high cheekbones.’

‘What are you?’ Vera interrupted.

That was only twenty seconds,’ Martin pointed out, but it was as if he weren’t there at the dinner table with them; just the two of them were talking.

‘I’m mostly Mediterranean,’ Arif guessed. ‘But my cheekbones are a little Mongoloid.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Vera told him. ‘And where do your eyelashes come from?’

‘From my mother,’ Arif replied shyly.

‘What a lucky mother,’ said Veronica Rose.

‘Who’s going to have what?’ asked Martin Mills; he was the only one looking at the menu. ‘I think I’m going to have the turkey.’

‘You must have some strange customs,’ Vera said to Arif. ‘Tell me something strange –I mean, sexually.’

‘Marriage is permitted between close kin – under the incest rules of Islam,’ Arif answered.

‘Something stranger,’ Vera demanded.

‘Boys are circumcised at any age from about six to twelve,’ Arif said; his dark eyes were downcast, roaming the menu.

‘How old were you?’ Vera asked him.

‘It’s a public ceremony,’ the boy mumbled. ‘I was ten.’

‘So you must remember it very clearly,’ Vera said.

‘I think I’ll have the turkey, too,’ Arif said to Martin.

‘What do you remember about it, Arif?’ Vera asked him.

‘How you behave during the operation reflects on your family’s reputation,’ Arif replied, but as he spoke he looked at his roommate – not at his roommate’s mother.

‘And how did you behave?’ Vera asked.

‘I didn’t cry — it would have dishonored my family,’ the boy told her. ‘I’ll have the turkey,’ he repeated.

‘Didn’t you two have turkey two days ago?’ Vera asked them. ‘Don’t have the turkey
again —
how boring! Have something different!’

‘Okay – I’ll have the lobster,’ Arif replied.

‘That’s a good choice – I’ll have the lobster, too,’ Vera said. ‘What are you having, Martin?’

‘I’ll take the turkey,’ said Martin Mills. The sudden strength of his own will surprised him; in the power of his will there was already something Jesuitical.

This particular recollection gave the missionary the strength to return his attention to
The Times of India
, wherein he read about a family of 14 who’d been burned alive; their house had been set on fire by a rival family. Martin Mills wondered what a ‘rival family’ was; then he prayed for the 14 souls who’d been burned alive.

Brother Gabriel, who’d been awakened by roosting pigeons, could see the light shining under Martin’s door. Another of Brother Gabriel’s myriad responsibilities at St Ignatius was to foil the pigeons in their efforts to roost at the mission; the old Spaniard could detect pigeons roosting in his sleep. The many columns of the second-floor outdoor balcony afforded the pigeons almost unlimited access to the overhanging cornices. One by one, Brother Gabriel had fenced in the cornices with wire. After he’d shooed away these particular pigeons, he left the step-ladder leaning against the column; that way, he would know which cornice to re-enclose with wire in the morning.

When Brother Gabriel passed by Martin Mills’s cubicle again, on his way back to bed, the new missionary’s light was
still
on. Pausing by the cubicle door, Brother Gabriel listened; he feared that ‘young’ Martin might be ill. But to his surprise and eternal comfort, Brother Gabriel heard Martin Mills praying. Such late-night litanies suggested to Brother Gabriel that the new missionary was a man very strongly in God’s clutches; yet the Spaniard was sure he’d misunderstood what he heard of the prayer. It must be the American accent, old Brother Gabriel thought, for although the tone of voice and the repetition was very much in the nature of a prayer, the words made no sense at all.

To remind himself of the power of his will, which surely was evidence of God’s will within him, Martin Mills was repeating and repeating that long-ago proof of his inner courage. ‘I’ll take the turkey,’ the missionary was saying. ‘I’ll take the turkey,’ he said again. He knelt on the stone floor beside his cot, clutching the rolled-up copy of
The Times of India
in his hands.

A prostitute had tried to eat his
culpa
beads, then she’d thrown them away; a dwarf had his whip; he’d rashly told Dr Daruwalla to dispose of his leg iron. It would take a while for the stone floor to hurt his knees, but Martin Mills would wait for the pain – worse, he would welcome it. ‘I’ll take the turkey,’ he prayed. He saw so clearly how Arif Koma was unable to raise his dark eyes to meet Vera’s fixed stare, which so steadily scrutinized the circumcised Turk.

‘It must have been frightfully painful,’ Vera was saying. ‘And you honestly didn’t cry?’

‘It would have dishonored my family,’ Arif said again. Martin Mills could tell that his roommate was about to cry; he’d seen Arif cry before. Vera could tell, too.

‘But it’s all right to cry now,’ she was saying to the boy. Arif shook his head, but the tears were coming. Vera used her handkerchief to pat Arif s eyes. For a while, Arif completely covered his face with Vera’s handkerchief; it was a strongly scented handkerchief, Martin Mills knew. His mother’s scent could sometimes make him gag.

‘I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey,’ the missionary prayed. It was such a steady-sounding prayer, Brother Gabriel decided; oddly, it reminded him of the pigeons, maniacally roosting on the cornices.

It was a different issue of
The Times of India
that Dr Daruwalla was reading — it was the current day’s issue. If the sleeplessness of this night seemed full of the torments of hell for Martin Mills, Dr Daruwalla was exhilarated to feel so wide awake. Farrokh was merely using
The Times of India
, which he hated, as a means to energize himself. Nothing enlivened him with such loathing as reading the review of a new Inspector Dhar film.
USUAL
INSPECTOR
DHAR
IDIOM
, the headline said. Farrokh found this typically infuriating. The reviewer was the sort of cultural commissar who’d never stoop to say a single favorable word about
any
Inspector Dhar film. That dog turd which had prevented Dr Daruwalla from more than a partial reading of this review had been a blessing; it was a form of foolish self-punishment for the doctor to read the entire thing. The first sentence was bad enough: ‘The problem with Inspector Dhar is his tenacious umbilical bindings with his first few creations.’ Farrokh fell: that this sentence alone would provide him with the desired fury to write all night.

‘Umbilical bindings!’ Dr Daruwalla cried aloud. Then he cautioned himself not to wake up Julia; she was already angry with him. He made further use of
The Times of India
by putting it under his type writer; the newspaper would keep the typewriter from rattling against the glass-topped table. He had set up his writing materials in the dining room; his writing desk, which was in the bedroom, was out of the question at this late hour.

But he’d never tried to write in the dining room before. The glass-topped table was too low. It had never been a satisfactory dining-room table; it was more like a coffee table – to eat at it, one sat on cushions on the floor. Now, in an effort to make himself more comfortable, Farrokh tried sitting on two cushions; he rested his elbows on either side of the typewriter. As an orthopedist, Dr Daruwalla was aware that this position was unwise for his back; also, it was distracting to peer through the glass-topped table at his own crossed legs and bare feet. For a while, the doctor was additionally distracted by what he thought was the unfairness of Julia’s being angry with him.

Their dinner at the Ripon Club had been hasty and quarrelsome. It was a difficult day to summarize, and Julia was of the opinion that her husband was condensing too much interesting material in his recitation of the day; she was ready to speculate all night on the subject of Rahul Rai as a serial killer. Moreover, she was perturbed with Farrokh that he thought her presence at the Duckworth Club lunch with Detective Patel and Nancy would be ‘inappropriate’; after all, John D. was going to be there.

‘I’m asking him to be present because of his memory,’ Dr Daruwalla had claimed.

‘I suppose I don’t have a memory,’ Julia had replied.

Even more frustrating was that Farrokh had not been successful in reaching John D. He’d left messages at both the Taj and the Oberoi concerning an important lunch at the Duckworth Club, but Dhar hadn’t returned his calls; probably the actor was still miffed about the unannounced-twin business, not that he would deign to admit it.

As for the efforts now under way to send poor Madhu and the elephant-footed Ganesh to the Great Blue Nile Circus, Julia had questioned the wisdom of Farrokh involving himself in ‘such dramatic intervention,’ as she called it; she wondered why he’d never so directly undertaken the dubious rescue of maimed beggars and child prostitutes before. Dr Daruwalla was irritated because he already suffered from similar misgivings. As for the screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin, Julia expressed further criticism: she was surprised that Farrokh could be so self-centred at such a time — implying that it was selfish of him to be thinking of his own writing when so much that was violent and traumatic was happening in the lives of others.