Paul Theroux - The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

One night a week, usually Saturday, I slept in my pup tent, my father sitting in the house listening to the radio, looking defeated. Most afternoons I spent there, and when my mother yelled at me I fled there. I was safe, I was alone except for those times when Evelyn Frisch showed up, I was still too young to take the pup tent into the woods, where I sometimes hiked.

Hurrying out of the tent one evening, I had left my flashlight behind, switched on, and when I looked back I could see the pup tent glow, a magic place suspended in the dusk, a shining refuge, a small sheltered island of light.

Anything I read there I remembered. Ideas I had there stayed in my memory. Food tasted better in the tent. I brought oranges, bread and baloney, Drake's cakes and Hoodsies. I ate out of my army mess kit, I drank water out of my army canteen, and the battle-dented canteen made the water taste of struggle. Evelyn Frisch joined me, bringing slices of Velveeta cheese and chocolate milk in a small waxy carton. We sat cross-legged, keeping our knees from touching, our heads brushing the canvas.

“I’m not even supposed to be here,” Evelyn said one late-summer evening, licking her fingers. “I’m supposed to be home, taking a nap.”

She was a year younger than me, but even so — a nap?

She said, “If you eat a lot of trashy food does your mother give you an Ex-Lax to get rid of it?”

“Nope.”

“Mine does. Or an enema.”

“Does it work?”

“Yup.”

She was lying confidently on her back, her hands behind her head, a slash of light across her body from the crack in the tent fly, not the sun but lamps shining from the back windows of my house.

“I’m taking my nap here.”

I wanted to object but I couldn't find the words.

“Like my new panties?”

White ones, with a pattern of tiny rosebuds, and pink trim of silken ribbon, small tight bows on the sides, the smug bulges of her bum and a wrinkle-smile between her legs.

“Don’t you want a nap, too?”

I lay down beside her, being careful not to brush her with my arm. There was less room in the pup tent with two of us inside. I liked her there, and I liked lying next to her, my hand near the pink bows on her panties; and I wanted her to go away and leave me alone in my pup tent.

“Andy?”

“Yuh?”

“I have to tinkle.”

I went anxious and damp-faced and mute. She said nothing more. She duck-walked through the tent flap and I heard her moving in the bushes, not talking but somehow fussing audibly.

Finally she said, “If only I could just see something.”

I took my army flashlight and crept out and shone it at her.

“Not in my face, silly. Shine it down there.”

She snapped the elastic of her panties with her thumbs and pushed them down, stretching them between her knees, and in the same movement squatted, sitting on her heels, while I lighted her white legs and the smooth white smile between her legs.

The day had grown dark and we crouched like conspirators in the shadow thrown by the pup tent and the lilacs with old withered blossoms. An accelerating car in the street labored from gear to gear, the crackle-gulp of a cricket started and stopped, my hand was shaking.

“Only don’t look at me,” Evelyn said, teasing me with a giggle, but she was looking down, too, concentrating on the lighted earth between her legs.

She sighed and the next sound was a splash, an uncertain spill and a sideways piddle, and my flashlight made the falling droplets flicker like drizzle against a street lamp, not a stream but a leak that came in spurts, in an interrupted spill. Evelyn was squatting, hunched over and marveling like a monkey with nothing else to look at.

Suddenly she stood up, pulling at her panties and hoisting them into place, snapping the elastic and setting the pretty bows on either side of her thighs.

“See ya, Andy.”

She walked into the darkness and through the gap in our fence where the pickets were missing.

In the tent my mind was racing. I could not think. I picked up Weird Tales but let it drop, and turned off my flashlight. I lay in the dark and reflected that what I had just seen was stranger than anything I had ever read. And that bold and unexpected oddness beckoned to me. I wanted her to come back and do it again; I wanted a better look. I had had no prior notice of it, and only a little glimpse when it happened, yet the sight filled me with thirst and eagerness: I wanted more.

Entering the house that night, I squinted in the glare of the kitchen, my eyes dazzled and half blinded after the darkness outside, and saw in a terrifying blur my mother and father watching me from across the room. My father had just finished shaving and he was fingering his cutthroat razor, easing the blade into the tortoiseshell handle, folding it like a jackknife. Without a word, my mother turned her back on me, saying something sweetly to Louie, who was at the supper table.

My father’s eyes were dark and unreadable, he watched me closely, and I was blinking and wiping my eyes as I grew accustomed to the light. The better I saw, the more frightened I felt.

“I’ve got a bone to pick with you.”

Of all my father’s repeated phrases, that one held the severest warning.

I braced myself, narrowing my eyes at the brightness.

“What’ve you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Shame on you.”

My mother’s face was hidden in her shoulder as she held Louie; but I also had the feeling she was fearful of my father’s anger, and her timidity made me afraid.

“You should be horsewhipped,” my father said, “within an inch of your life.”

Now I was shaking, nervous, afraid, clutching my dented army flashlight.

“Your body is a temple. You’ve soiled it with impurity, you’ve blackened it. God is everywhere, God sees everything — you think that’s funny?”

My eyes still hurt from the glare of the kitchen lights, and as I strained to see, it might have seemed that I was smiling. But I was not smiling, I was terrified. I shook my head and knew I looked pitiful, and now I saw that my father had put his razor down but was holding his razor strop in his hand. It lay folded on his palm, the metal clip at one end, the narrow stitched handle at the other.

“You’re filthy,” he said, and speaking these words his face was like that of an angry yellow-faced brute in a horror comic.

Seeing what was coming, I turned away as he lifted the strop and struck at me with it, using it like a whip, slashing my shins, raising a red welt on the flesh of my skinny legs. The end of the leather strop gripped my knee and tripped me, and as I fell my father lashed at my legs, cut at me again, while my mother screamed.

I was too timid, too guilty, too afraid to cry out: I deserved my thrashing for my dirty mind.

“Get out!”

My mother was saying no, no, but I hurried outside and didn’t stop until I got into my pup tent, my heart pounding, and thinking: It doesn’t hurt that much now, at least it’s over, he won’t hit me again. I lay there not caring that I had been thrashed, but feeling that I had been punished fairly; and not hating my father but fearing him and feeling sorry for him, for he was angry that I had disappointed him. He did not know what to do.

I was so sorry — sorriest because I knew I would never change. I lost Evelyn Frisch. My mother must have said something to her parents. I was alone. That was how I wanted it. I was a sinner, and would stay that way because I wasn’t sorry. I didn’t care. I only knew that my life would be harder because of my sins and my secrets, but at least I was on my own and in the world.

MOST DAYS in Medford nothing happened — or the same thing happened. But the day Harry Truman’s train made a whistle stop at Medford Station, everything happened, and a lot of it to me. I told my mother I was going to see him with my friend John Burkell. She said, “Mind your p’s and q’s,” helplessly, because she couldn’t prevent me from going, even though, as she sometimes said, Burkell was a bad influence. Seeing Truman was my excuse to stay out late in the early dark of October. But the event was bigger than she was. The president’s visit made me free.