John Irving - A Son of the Circus

Then, in Boston on Saturday night, Vera wanted to stray no farther than the dining room at the Ritz; her heaven was a good hotel, and she was already in it. But the dress code in the Ritz dining room was even more severe than Fessenden’s. The captain stopped them because Martin was wearing white athletic socks with his loafers. Vera said simply, “I was going to mention it, darling—now someone else has.” She gave him the room key, to go change his socks, while she waited with Arif. Martin had to borrow a pair of Arif’s calf-length black hose. The incident drew Vera’s attention to how much more comfortably Arif wore “proper” clothes; she waited for Martin to rejoin them in the dining room before making her observation known.

“It must be your exposure to the diplomatic life,” Martin’s mother remarked to the Turk. “I suppose there are all sorts of dress-up occasions at the Turkish Embassy.”

“The Turkish Consulate,” Arif corrected her, as he had corrected her a dozen times.

“I’m frightfully uninterested in details,” Vera told the boy. “I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting—I give you one minute.”

This was embarrassing to Martin, for it seemed to him that his mother had only recently learned to talk this way. She’d been such a vulgar young woman, and she’d gained no further education since that trashy time of her life; yet, in the absence of acting jobs, she’d learned to imitate the language of the educated upper classes. Vera was clever enough to know that trashiness was less appealing in older women. As for the adverb “frightfully,” and the prefatory phrase “I challenge you,” Martin Mills was ashamed to know where Vera had acquired this particular foppery.

There was a pretentious Brit in Hollywood, just another would-be director who’d failed to get a film made; Danny had written the unsuccessful script. To console himself, the Brit had made a series of moisturizer commercials; they were aimed at the older woman who was making an effort to preserve her skin, and Vera had been the model.

Shamelessly, there was his mother in a revealing camisole, seated in front of a makeup mirror—the kind that was framed with bright balls of light. Superimposed, the titles read: VERONICA ROSE, HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS. (To Martin’s knowledge, this commercial had been his mother’s first acting job in years.)

“I’m frightfully opposed to dry skin,” Vera is saying to the makeup mirror (and to the camera). “In this town, only the youthful last.” The camera closes on the corners of her mouth; a pretty finger applies the moisturizing lotion. Are those the telltale lines of age we see? Something appears to pucker the skin of her upper lip where it meets the well-defined edge of her mouth, but then the lip is miraculously smooth again; possibly this is only our imagination. “I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old,” the lips say. It was a trick with the camera, Martin Mills was sure. Before the close-up, that was his mother; yet those lips, up close, were unfamiliar to him—someone else’s younger mouth, Martin guessed.

It was a favorite TV commercial among the ninth-grade boys at Fessenden; when they gathered to watch an occasional television show in one of the dorm masters’ apartments, the boys were always ready to answer the question that the close-up lips posed: “I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old.”

“You’re already old!” the boys would shout. Only two of them knew that Veronica Rose the Hollywood actress was Martin’s mother. Martin would never have identified her, and Arif Koma was a loyal roommate.

Arif always said, “She looks young enough to me .”

So it was doubly embarrassing, in the Ritz dining room, when Martin’s mother said to Arif, “I’m frightfully uninterested in details. I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting—I give you one minute.” Martin knew that Arif must have known that the “frightfully” and the “I challenge you” had come from the moisturizer commercial.

In the roommates’ secret language, Martin Mills suddenly said, “Frightfully.” He thought Arif would understand; Martin was indicating that his own mother merited an “F” word. But Arif was taking Vera seriously.

“An embassy is entrusted with a mission to a government and is headed by an ambassador,” the Turk explained. “A consulate is the official premises of a consul, who is simply an official appointed by the government of one country to look after its commercial interests and the welfare of its citizens in another country. My father is the consul general in New York—New York being a place of commercial importance. A consul general is a consular officer of the highest rank, in charge of lower-ranking consular agents.”

“That took just thirty seconds,” Martin Mills informed his mother, but Vera was paying no attention to the time.

“Tell me about Turkey,” she said to Arif. “You have thirty seconds.”

“Turkish is the mother tongue of more than ninety percent of the population, and we are more than ninety-nine percent Muslims.” Here Arif Koma paused, for Vera had shivered—the word “Muslims” made her shiver every time. “Ethnically, we are a melting pot,” the boy continued. “Turks may be blond and blue-eyed; we may be of Alpine stock—that is, round-headed with dark hair and dark eyes. We may be of Mediterranean stock, dark, but long-headed. We may be Mongoloid, with high cheekbones.”

“What are you?” Vera interrupted.

“That was only twenty seconds,” Martin pointed out, but it was as if he weren’t there at the dinner table with them; just the two of them were talking.

“I’m mostly Mediterranean,” Arif guessed. “But my cheekbones are a little Mongoloid.”

“I don’t think so,” Vera told him. “And where do your eyelashes come from?”

“From my mother,” Arif replied shyly.

“What a lucky mother,” said Veronica Rose.

“Who’s going to have what?” asked Martin Mills; he was the only one looking at the menu. “I think I’m going to have the turkey.”

“You must have some strange customs,” Vera said to Arif. “Tell me something strange—I mean, sexually.”

“Marriage is permitted between close kin—under the incest rules of Islam,” Arif answered.

“Something stranger,” Vera demanded.

“Boys are circumcised at any age from about six to twelve,” Arif said; his dark eyes were downcast, roaming the menu.

“How old were you?” Vera asked him.

“It’s a public ceremony,” the boy mumbled. “I was ten.”

“So you must remember it very clearly,” Vera said.

“I think I’ll have the turkey, too,” Arif said to Martin.

“What do you remember about it, Arif?” Vera asked him.

“How you behave during the operation reflects on your family’s reputation,” Arif replied, but as he spoke he looked at his roommate—not at his roommate’s mother.

“And how did you behave?” Vera asked.

“I didn’t cry—it would have dishonored my family,” the boy told her. “I’ll have the turkey,” he repeated.

“Didn’t you two have turkey two days ago?” Vera asked them. “Don’t have the turkey again —how boring! Have something different!”

“Okay—I’ll have the lobster,” Arif replied.

“That’s a good choice—I’ll have the lobster, too,” Vera said. “What are you having, Martin?”

“I’ll take the turkey,” said Martin Mills. The sudden strength of his own will surprised him; in the power of his will there was already something Jesuitical.

This particular recollection gave the missionary the strength to return his attention to The Times of India , wherein he read about a family of 14 who’d been burned alive; their house had been set on fire by a rival family. Martin Mills wondered what a “rival family” was; then he prayed for the 14 souls who’d been burned alive.