Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

On Easter Sunday at eight o’clock Mass she glowed in a pink and white dress, wearing cream-colored gloves and a white hat with a gauzy veil over her face and the same scuffed shoes and falling-down socks. We were in the same pew, about ten feet apart — three people between us — but still I could see just beneath the hem of her Easter dress the same scrap of lace-trimmed slip like a lovely sin.

The day was warm and the sun so bright even the stained-glass windows poured bars of reddish light into the church.

People sang, their voices raised, their prayers flying up to Heaven.

I murmured earnestly but I knew that my prayers were not rising. I was glancing at Evelyn Frisch and not at the altar, imploring her, so that she would be kind to me, so that she would want me. I venerated her, I prayed to her, and all that I wanted from life was that she, or someone just like her, would want me.

I was frightened at the thought of seeing her outside, and perhaps having to speak to her, in the larger harsher world of light and air. I understood Judas — why he was tempted, why he gave in, why he was lost long before he betrayed Christ.

After the service, people left quickly, noticing each other’s new clothes. I waited, I looked around, and seeing that the church was empty except for us, I slid a few feet toward Evelyn Frisch. She slid toward me until we were close enough to touch — her thigh against mine. I let my hand stray until I could take hold of hers. I asked a question with my shy fingers, and she answered with her hot damp fingers, and we sat there a long time, holding hands and not looking up.

TO CONSOLE MYSELF at night when I was small, I used to prop up my blanket in bed, pretending I was in a tent in the wilderness. I crouched inside with a flashlight, reading. Only then could I get to sleep. I was nine, then ten. I dreamed mainly of monsters, lumpy potato men or wild children with bucketlike skulls, a huge particular woman in a cone bra, and bunny-faced girls in snug panties. I was naked and fleeing in all my dreams. Maybe it was the books I read— Trap Lines North, Campcraft, horror comics. I wanted to sleep outside the house. I thought: I’ll camp in the yard first, and later I will go to the ends of the earth.

My parents were confused by my books and hated the horror comics. “Those things belong in the trash. Why don’t you read Penrod and Sam? ” I was so closely peered at I couldn’t think straight. “Get a haircut!” “Wash your hands!” “Elbows off the table!” I felt lightheaded and helpless, like the tickle that teases your scalp the second before your hat blows off. Ever since Louie was born I had wanted to leave, and I was saving up for the journey. My books were my banks: I hid dollar bills, some between the pages of Rich Cargoes, some in Treasure Island. Eight dollars toward the voyage. I never bought anything new, always looked for bargains.

The confidence of my parents’ friends made me gape. The loud woman who said “Is this thing an ashtray?” as she mashed a cigarette butt into a good saucer. I had no obvious confidence, only shyness. I sensed I was a sneak, but sneaking gave me some of the freedom I needed. The aromas of perfume and cigarette smoke, the sight of red lipstick on that cigarette butt, aroused me, but nothing aroused me more than being outside the house alone.

One of my pleasures was to take the electric car, the ten-cent trolley, to Boston and walk past the wharves, the ship chandlers and outfitters and nautical supply stores, that lined the ocean side of Atlantic Avenue. The wind off the harbor had the smell of kelp and the sea. In the window of Bliss Marine was an old diver’s suit — a brass-domed helmet with a round goggling face of glass and breathing tubes, canvas arms and legs, heavy boots, and a belt of lead weights. The stores that attracted me most sold army surplus from the war. The war had been over for only five years and much of the equipment was new-looking — C rations you could eat, unused ammo boxes, polished leather belts, smooth helmets, gleaming bayonets.

Seeing these objects convinced me I could defend myself in battle, travel a great distance, survive hardships, endure severe heat or cold, even gunfire and enemies. I could live life in a foxhole or in the north woods.

They were piled on counters — tin mess kits, canteens, water bags, rucksacks, web belts, pistol holsters, flares, traps, goggles, field jackets and ponchos — all of them very cheap and most of them stenciled US Army. Gas masks too, and sterno stoves, German helmets looking wicked with upturned edges, sleeping bags, combat boots, jackknives, hatchets, khaki metal flashlights with dents in them. The things that interested me most were faded, scuffed, beaten up, “war-torn.” I looked for traces of blood on the bayonets.

“This has seen some action,” the salesman would say, turning over a holster or a worn canteen, and I could imagine gunfire, a muddy trench, Nazis, General Tojo's buckteeth. Most of all I imagined survival, making it through a dark night, watching the sun come up, being alone and self-reliant, like a fur trapper or a Canadian Mountie or a GI. I was a woodsman, alone in the forest, living in a tent.

Of all the tents, the cheapest and best was the pup tent. This was a model of simplicity that matched the lines of a church roof, steeply angled, with a ridge and guy ropes, supported by two poles and a clutch of tent stakes. A fly of two flaps was the door. Army surplus, ten dollars.

At Raymond's (motto: “Where U Bot the Hat”) on Washington Street, pup tents cost more because they were new and oily, smelling of fresh waterproofing. Not having the stink and scuff of battle on them, they seemed less reliable to me.

The pup tent I saw as my own space, a little Eden where I could do as I pleased, a way of leaving home and being safe. The tent was just my size and seemed a familiar extension of my upraised blanket in bed, where I lay and read Trap Lines North with an army surplus flashlight. When I had had enough of a fur trapper in snowy Canada, snaring foxes and muskrats, and skinning and curing the pelts, I read the horror comics: Tales of Terror and Weird Fantasy. I needed a place to hide my books, to hide myself, a place to dream.

I mentally rehearsed the buying of the pup tent, and when I had the full ten dollars I took the trolley to Sullivan Square and the El to North Station and walked to Atlantic Avenue. I was fretful, anxious at the thought of being alone and having to hand over money to a clerk. The process of taking possession of a purchase made me fearful of being mocked or cheated.

The pup tents, rolled up, poles inside, were stacked like little logs. I chose one that was tightly rolled and carried it in both arms to the cash register.

“What can I do you for?” the clerk said to me. This was the sort of banter I feared.

I showed him the bundle.

“That’ll be ten simoleons.”

I handed over the money. I didn’t answer or make eye contact, just held on to the pup tent and thought: When I get home and set it up and crawl inside, I will be safe.

Walking home from the electric car stop on the Fellsway, just past Hickey Park, I approached Evelyn Frisch playing hopscotch alone in front of her house, tossing a pebble onto a square, clapping her hands. When she saw me she held the ankle of one leg from behind and balanced on the other leg. Then she hopped toward me on the chalked squares as her short skirt jumped above her pink panties, five hops and she was in front of me, in white socks and buckled shoes, tugging down her short skirt.

She squinted and said, “What’s that for?”