John Irving - A Son of the Circus

It was Danny who mindlessly loved the story. In the producer’s house on Kings Road, Danny seemed to prolong the telling of the tale, almost as if the ongoing bird deaths were an enhancement to the suddenness of poor Whiskey’s demise. “What a great fucking neighborhood that was!” Danny was shouting to his dinner guests. By now, all the men had put their heads under the table with the women. Both sexes were fearful that the swooping hawks would mistake them for rare birds.

“Daddy, there are hawks in the house!” Martin had cried. “Daddy—the birds! ”

“This is Hollywood, Marty,” Danny Mills had replied. “Don’t worry about the birds—the birds don’t matter. This is Hollywood. The story is all that matters.”

That screenplay wasn’t made into a movie, either; this was almost a refrain for Danny Mills. The bill for the rare, dead birds would reintroduce the Millses to more low-rent housing.

It was at this juncture in his memories that Martin Mills struggled to stop remembering; for if young Martin’s familiarity with his father’s shortcomings was well established before the boy was sent away to school, it was after he’d been sent away that his mother’s moral unconcern became more apparent and struck young Martin as more odious than any weakness to be found in Danny.

Alone in his cubicle in Mazagaon, the new missionary now sought any means by which he might halt further memories of his mother. He thought of Father Joseph Moriarity, S.J.; he’d been young Martin’s mentor at Loyola Marymount, and when Martin had been sent to Massachusetts—where he was not enrolled in Jesuit (or even in Catholic) schools—it had been Father Joe who’d answered the boy’s religious questions, by mail. Martin Mills also thought of Brother Brennan and Brother LaBombard, his coadjutores , or “fellow workers,” in his novice years at St. Aloysius. He even remembered Brother Flynn inquiring if nocturnal emissions were “allowed”—for was this not the impossible? Namely, sex without sin. Was it Father Toland or Father Feeney who’d implied that a nocturnal emission was in all likelihood an unconscious act of masturbation? Martin was certain that it was either Brother Monahan or Brother Dooley who’d inquired if the act of masturbation was still forbidden in the case of it being “unconscious.”

“Yes, always,” Father Gannon had said. Father Gannon was bonkers, of course. No priest in his right mind would call an involuntary nocturnal emission an act of masturbation; nothing unconscious is ever a sin, since “sin” implies freedom of choice. Father Gannon would one day be taken bodily from his classroom at St. Aloysius, for his ravings were considered to lend credence to those 19th-century antipapist tracts in which convents are depicted as brothels for priests.

But how Martin Mills had approved of Father Gannon’s answer; that will separate the men from the boys, he’d thought. It was a rule he’d been able to live with—no nocturnal emissions, unconscious or otherwise. He never touched himself.

But Martin Mills knew that even his triumph over masturbation would lead him to thinking of his mother, and so he tried to think of something else—of anything else. He repeated 100 times the date of August 15, 1534; it was the day St. Ignatius Loyola, in a chapel in Paris, had taken the vow to go to Jerusalem. For 15 minutes, Martin Mills concentrated on the correct pronunciation of Montmartre. When this didn’t work—when he found himself seeing the way his mother brushed her hair before she went to bed—Martin opened his Bible to Genesis, Chapter 19, for the Lord’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah always calmed him, and within the story of God’s wrath was also deftly planted that lesson in obedience which Martin Mills much admired. It was terribly human of Lot’s wife… that she should look back, even though the Lord had commanded all of them, “Do not look behind you …,” but Lot’s wife was nevertheless turned to a pillar of salt for her disobedience. As well she should have been, thought Martin Mills. But even his pleasure at the Lord’s destruction of those cities that flaunted their depravities did not spare the missionary from his keenest memories of being sent away to school.

Veronica Rose and Danny Mills had agreed that their academically gifted son should attend a New England prep school, but Vera didn’t wait for young Martin to be of high-school age; in Vera’s view, the boy was becoming too religious. As if it wasn’t enough that the Jesuits were educating him, they’d managed to put it in the boy’s head that he should attend Mass on Sunday and get himself to Confession, too. “What does this kid have to confess?” Vera would ask Danny. She meant that young Martin was far too well behaved for a normal boy. As for Mass, Vera said that it “screwed up” her weekends, and so Danny took him. A free Sunday morning was wasted on Danny, anyway; with hangovers like his, he might as well have been sitting and kneeling at a Mass.

They sent young Martin first to the Fessenden School in Massachusetts; it was strict but not religious, and Vera liked it because it was close to Boston. When she visited Martin, she could stay at the Ritz-Carlton and not in some dreary motel or a cutesy-quaint country inn. Martin started Fessenden in the sixth grade and would stay through the ninth grade, which was the school’s final year; he didn’t feel especially sorry for himself—there were even younger boarders at the school, although the majority of boarders were of the five-day variety, which meant that they went home every weekend. The seven-day boarders, like Martin, included many foreign students, or Americans whose families were in diplomatic service in unfriendly countries. Some of the foreign students, like Martin’s roommate, were the children of diplomats in residence in Washington or New York.

Despite the roommate, for Martin Mills would rather have had a single room, young Martin enjoyed the crowded cubicle; he was allowed to put his own things on the walls, provided that this could be done without damage to the walls and that the subject matter was not obscene. Obscene subject matter wouldn’t have tempted Martin Mills, but young Martin’s roommate was tempted.

His name was Arif Koma, and he was from Turkey; his father was with the Turkish Consulate in New York. Arif stashed a calendar of women in bathing suits between his mattress and the bedsprings. Arif didn’t offer to share his calendar with Martin, and the Turk usually waited until he thought Martin was asleep before he made masturbatory use of the 12 women. Often a full half hour after the required lights out, Martin would notice Arif’s flashlight—the glow emerging from under the sheets and blanket—and the corresponding creak of Arif’s bedsprings. Martin had looked at the calendar privately—when Arif was in the shower, or otherwise out of the cubicle—and it appeared (from the more abused pages) that Arif preferred March and August to the other women, although Martin couldn’t fathom why. But Martin didn’t observe the calendar in great detail, or for long; there was no door on the cubicle he shared with Arif—there was only a curtain—and should a faculty member have found him with the swimsuit calendar, the women (all 12 months of them) would have been confiscated. Martin would have considered this unfair to Arif.

It was less out of growing friendship than out of some silent, mutual respect that the two boys continued to be roommates into their final year at Fessenden. The school assumed that if you didn’t complain about your roommate, you must like him. Furthermore, the boys had attended the same summer camp. In the spring of his first year at Fessenden, when Martin was sincerely missing his father and actually looking forward to what residential horrors he might encounter in the summer months, back in L.A., Vera had sent the boy a summer-camp brochure. This was where he was going; it was a matter that had already been decided—it wasn’t a question—and as Martin leafed through the brochure, Arif looked at the pictures with him.