John Irving - A Son of the Circus

“I think it’s… excessive,” her son told her.

“ I think masturbation is quite healthy for boys your age. Have you discussed masturbation with your father?” Vera asked him.

“Discussed” wasn’t the right word. Martin had listened to Danny go on and on in reassuring tones in regard to all the desires Danny presumed that Martin was experiencing—how such desires were perfectly natural… that was Danny’s theme.

“Yes,” Martin told his mother. “Dad thinks masturbation is… normal.”

“Well, there—you see?” Vera said sarcastically. “If your sainted father says it’s normal, I suppose we should all be trying it!”

“I’ll be late for Mass,” Martin said.

“Run along, then,” his mother replied. Martin was about to close the door to her bedroom behind him when his mother gave him a parting shot. “Personally, dear, I think masturbation would be better for you than Mass. And please leave the door open—I like it that way.” Martin remembered to take the room key in case Arif was still sleeping when he came back from Mass—in case his mother was in the bathroom or talking on the telephone.

When Mass was over, he looked briefly at a window display of men’s suits in a Brooks Brothers store; the mannequins wore Christmas-tree neckties, but Martin was struck by the smoothness of the mannequins’ skin—it reminded him of Arif’s perfect complexion. Except for his pausing at this window, Martin came straight back to the suite at the Ritz. When he unlocked the door, he was happy he’d brought the room key because he thought his mother was talking on the phone; it was a one-sided conversation—all Vera. But then the awful words themselves were clear to him.

“I’m going to make you squirt again,” his mother was saying. “I absolutely know you can squirt again—I can feel you. You’re going to squirt again soon —aren’t you? Aren’t you?” The door to his mother’s bedroom was still open—a little wider open than the way she liked it—and Martin Mills could see her naked back, her naked hips and the crack in her shapely ass. She was riding Arif Koma, who lay wordlessly under her; Martin was grateful that he couldn’t see his roommate’s face.

He quietly let himself out of the suite as his mother continued to urge Arif to squirt. On the short walk back to Isabella Street, Martin wondered if it had been his own revelation of Arif’s penchant for masturbation that had given Vera the idea; probably his mother had already had the seduction in mind, but the masturbation story must have provided her with greater incentive.

Martin Mills had sat as stupefied in Our Lady of Victories Church as he’d sat waiting for the Mass at St. Ignatius. Brother Gabriel was worried about him. First the late-night-prayers—“I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey”—and then, even after Mass was over, the missionary knelt on the kneeling pad as if he were waiting for the next Mass. That was exactly what he’d done in Our Lady of Victories on Isabella Street; he’d waited for the next Mass, as if one Mass hadn’t been enough.

What also troubled Brother Gabriel were the bloodstains on the missionary’s balled-up fists. Brother Gabriel couldn’t have known about Martin’s nose, for the wound had stopped bleeding and was almost entirely concealed by a small scab on one nostril; but Brother Gabriel wondered about the bloody socks that Martin Mills clutched in his hands. The blood had dried between his knuckles and under his nails, and Brother Gabriel feared that the source of the bleeding might have been the missionary’s palms. That’s all we need to make our jubilee year a success, Brother Gabriel thought—an outbreak of stigmata!

But later, when Martin attended the morning classes, he seemed back on track, so to speak; he was lively with the students, humble with the other teachers—although, as a teacher, he’d had more experience than many of the staff at St. Ignatius School. Watching the new scholastic interact with both the pupils and the staff, the Father Rector suspended his earlier anxieties that the American might be a crazed zealot. And Father Cecil found Martin Mills to be every bit as charming and dedicated as he’d hoped.

Brother Gabriel kept silent about the turkey prayer and the bloody socks; but he noted the haunted, faraway smile that occasionally stole over the scholastic’s repertoire of otherwise earnest expressions. Martin seemed to be struck by some remembrance, possibly inspired by a face among the upper-school boys, as if the smooth, dark skin of one of the 15-year-olds had called to mind someone he’d once known… or so Brother Gabriel guessed. It was an innocent, friendly smile—almost too friendly, Brother Gabriel thought.

But Martin Mills was just remembering. Back in school, at Fessenden, after the long Thanksgiving weekend, he’d waited until the lights were out before saying what he wanted to say.

“Fucker,” Martin quietly said.

“What’s that?” Arif asked him.

“I said ‘fucker,’ as in motherfucker,” Martin said.

“Is this a game?” Arif inquired after too long a pause.

“You know what I mean, you motherfucker ,” said Martin Mills.

After another long pause, Arif said, “She made me do it—sort of.”

“You’ll probably get a disease,” Martin told his roommate. Martin didn’t really mean it, nor would he have said it had it occurred to him that Arif might have fallen in love with Vera. He was surprised when Arif pounced on him in the dark and began to hit his face.

“Don’t ever say that… about your mother!” the Turk cried. “Not about your mother! She’s beautiful! ”

Mr. Weems, the dorm master, broke up the fight; neither of the boys was hurt—neither of them knew how to fight. Mr. Weems was kindly; with rougher boys, he was entirely ineffectual. He was a music teacher, and—with hindsight, this is easy to say—most likely a homosexual, but no one thought of him that way (except a few of the brassier faculty wives, women of the type who thought that any unmarried man over 30 was a queer). Mr. Weems was well liked by the boys, despite his taking no part in the school’s prevailing athleticism. In his report to the Discipline Committee, the dorm master would dismiss the altercation between Martin and Arif as a “spat.” This unfortunate choice of a word would have grave consequences.

Later, when Arif Koma was diagnosed as suffering from gonorrhea—and when he wouldn’t tell the school doctor where he might have acquired it—the suspicion fell on Martin Mills. That word “spat” connoted a lover’s quarrel—at least to the more manly members of the Discipline Committee. Mr. Weems was instructed to ask the boys if they were homosexuals, if they’d been doing it. The dorm master was more sympathetic to the notion that Arif and Martin might be “doing it” than any of the faculty jocks would have been.

“If you boys are lovers, then you should see the doctor, too, Martin,” Mr. Weems explained.

“Tell him!” Martin said to Arif.

“We’re not lovers,” Arif said.

“That’s right—we’re not lovers,” Martin repeated. “But go on—tell him. I dare you,” Martin said to Arif.

“Tell me what?” the dorm master asked.

“He hates his mother,” Arif explained to Mr. Weems. Mr. Weems had met Vera; he could understand. “He’s going to tell you that I got the disease from his mother—that’s how much he hates her.”

“He fucked my mother—or, rather, she fucked him,” Martin told Mr. Weems.

“You see what I mean?” Arif Koma said.

At most private schools, the faculty is composed of truly saintly people and incompetent ogres. Martin and Arif were fortunate that their dorm master was a teacher of the saintly category; yet Mr. Weems was so well-meaning, he was perhaps more blind to depravity than a normal person.