Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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 was 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.