Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

Her readers visited her now and then. They marveled at the old remote farmhouse, full of books, at the edge of its empty fields. She gave these visitors lemonade on her porch. In the Southern way they brought her fruit or cookies. They asked serious questions and listened gratefully when she replied.

Sometimes she said, “I would trade everything I’ve written to have composed a ditty that people would go on humming,” and then stared and hummed a tune that strangely vibrated behind her face.

No one in her family had read a word she’d written. Reading was such a pleasant pastime that their refusal had to be deliberate, or hostile. They could so easily know me by reading me.

They don’t want to know me, she felt, and not reading her stories was their saying “See, we don’t care.” It wasn’t her son’s absence that pained her — it was his indifference. And what sharpened it was the attention of so many others, those strangers. She imagined herself an artist whose family refused to look at her paintings.

Returning home late one night, Kate stumbled on the front stairs and injured her lower back. “Trauma to your left kidney and some spinal bruising.” In the hospital she was reminded of Ivan Illych in the great story, how a fall had injured him, how he lay dying, the mention of his “floating kidney.”

Kate’s fall seemed like that, provoking a fatal illness; in her physical pain she felt immensely old and feeble. She lay in bed in her hospital room wondering whether her son and his family would walk through the door. How did they know she wasn’t dying?

On the second day — why the delay? — her son visited. “I just got the news” could not have been true. She stared, as you do at a lie. He held her hand and uttered the conventional formulas of concern. She wanted to tell him: I’ve written better commiserations than that.

“Not good,” she said, to test him when he asked how she felt.

The next day Brenda came. She took the bedside seat, stone-faced, empty-handed, as if commencing a deathwatch.

“I don’t know how much longer I have,” Kate said, “but I don’t want to die without saying this.”

She could hear Brenda’s breathing from the scrape of air in the hairs in her nostrils.

“I know you don’t like me much,” Kate said, without any bitterness, as though naming a color. “But I don’t know why. I just want to say that whatever the reason, if there was ever anything I said or did to hurt you,” and she paused, “I’m sorry.”

At first Brenda said nothing, and the only sound was the protest of the nose hairs. She swallowed a little, and the way she swallowed changed her expression and shaped her mouth to a rueful smile.

She faced Kate, unsmiling then. She had become a heavy plump-jowled woman.

“I accept your apology,” she said, barely opening her mouth, as if someone else inside her was speaking.

Kate Collier Delombre didn’t die. She lived for ten more years — ten years of solitude, not writing, looked after by Perta Mae, a respected figure in Peavy and elsewhere. Her fame grew and she won awards when she stopped writing, a paradox that amused her.

I met her in that period, and she told me how she had lost the affection of her son. Could it have been as simple as his adoption? Hated by her daughter-in-law, doubted by her granddaughter.

“My heartache.”

That was the lunch at Louleen’s when I urged her to fictionalize it, to ease her pain.

But she didn’t write it, she died of heartache, and I did not begin to write it myself until after I accepted Perta Mae’s invitation to visit the old house outside Peavy, set in the desolate fields her husband’s family had once farmed, the furrows grubbed and scabby in winter.

I took Perta Mae, who seemed much older, to Louleen’s, so as to be away from Kate’s aura in the house. But even so, her spirit lingered there in the diner. Why is it, on a return to such a homely place, you so often choose the same table? The familiar entrance, people looking up from their food, Perta Mae limping ahead of me.

Perta Mae ordered fried catfish and mentioned how Miss Kitty had liked it that way, with two sides, rice and gravy, coleslaw, and a biscuit, a sort of homage set out on a plastic tray.

“You were true to her,” I said. “The only one.”

“Had to be.”

“She was so grateful.”

“Never told her why.” Perta Mae worked her biscuit apart with her thumbs. “Old Mr. Jack and me was kinfolk.”

I thought, What? But I suppressed my shock. “Why didn’t you tell her?”

“Heh. Tell that woman anything and you see in her eye she fixin’ to make it a story.” She became serious and added, “Later on, I tell young Mr. Jack.”

“But he was adopted.”

“That’s why he need to know. For his wife sake too.” And she laughed and lifted half a buttered biscuit. “That’s why they gee and haw when they see me and Miss Kitty.”

I WAS WALKING DOWN High Street to the funeral home when I spotted Ed Hankey coming toward me. He said, “Jay,” then, “Guess who’s sick?” then blinked and, “Murray Cutler.”

Sometimes bad news takes the form of a greeting. I hadn’t seen Hankey for more than twenty years, and felt this abrupt announcement was a tactic to overcome his awkwardness. Another reason I didn’t want to reply by saying that my father had just died, and that was why I was there. I wondered if he’d ask why I was in Medford Square after so long. Family tangles, bereavement, and failure send us home; seldom happiness. Perhaps he knew about my father’s death and was avoiding it by mentioning Murray Cutler. I was headed to Gaffey the mortician to meet my mother and sister, to choose a coffin and arrange the viewing.

When I asked how sick, Hankey said, “He’s at a hospice.” His lisp made the word juicier and more emphatic. He cocked his head to look straight into my face, clamping his mouth shut and widening his eyes, and this meant everything.

Instead of replying, I took a deep breath and nodded, reflecting on the news. Murray Cutler had been our high school English teacher. He was one of those people whose death, I knew, would be a problem for me unless I was somehow part of it. I was resigned to my father’s passing, though. We had no unfinished business, and he knew I loved him. What I dreaded were the futile formulas of consolation from people who didn’t know him. I felt fragile in my grief, hypersensitive to sound. Voices on the car radio grated on me, so did music, so did pity.

I said, “Maybe I’ll go see him.”

“Visit the sick, one of the Corporal Works of Mercy,” Hankey said, and he laughed. We’d been altar boys together, we’d been classmates, we’d sat side by side in English class, where Murray Cutler was a tease. “What can I do you for?” Or, showing me two copies of an exam, saying, “This is mine and that is urine.” “Copper Knickers,” he said, “he of the heliocentric theory.” He talked about the Huguenots simply so that he could call them the Huge Nuts. He had the tease’s gift for spotting a victim’s weakness.

All this time Hankey was talking about his wife and children, reminding me that he had married one of our classmates, how happy they were. Then: “I never really knew Cutler. He was a funny guy.”

“I know,” I said. I debated again whether to tell him my father had died. No, a death is not something you mention briefly in passing to someone you bump into, even an old friend. And it was better to keep these two dramas separate. Individually they were tragedies, lumped together they were merely news.

“Everyone said he was a wicked-big influence on you.”

“In what way?”