A Son of the Circus

Southern California

Because he had a history of suffering in unfamiliar bedrooms, Martin Mills lay awake in his cubicle at the mission of St. Ignatius. At first he followed the advice of St. Teresa of Avila—her favorite spiritual exercise, which allowed her to experience the love of Christ—but not even this remedy would permit the new missionary to fall asleep. The idea was to imagine that Christ saw you. “Mira que te mira,” St. Teresa said. “Notice him looking at you.” But try as he might to notice such a thing, Martin Mills wasn’t comforted; he couldn’t sleep.

He loathed his memory of the many bedrooms that his awful mother and pathetic father had exposed him to. This was the result of Danny Mills overpaying for a house in Westwood, which was near the U.C.L.A. campus but which the family could rarely afford to live in; it was perpetually rented so that Danny and Vera could live off the rent. This also provided their decaying marriage with frequent opportunities for them not to live with each other. As a child, Martin Mills was always missing clothes and toys that had somehow become the temporary possessions of the tenants of the Westwood house, which he only vaguely could remember.

He remembered better the U.C.L.A. student who was his babysitter, for she used to drag him by his arm across Wilshire Boulevard at high speed, and usually not at the proper crosswalks. She had a boyfriend who ran around and around the U.C.L.A. track; she’d take Martin to the track and they’d watch the boyfriend run and run. She made Martin’s fingers ache, she held his hand so tightly. If the traffic on Wilshire had forced an uncommonly hasty crossing of the boulevard, Martin’s upper arm would throb.

Whenever Danny and Vera went out in the evening, Vera insisted that Martin sleep in the other twin bed in the babysitter’s bedroom; the rest of her quarters consisted only of a tiny kitchenette—a kind of breakfast nook where a black-and-white television shared the small countertop with a toaster. Here the babysitter sat on one of two barstools, because there wasn’t enough space for chairs and a table.

Often, when he lay in the bedroom with the babysitter, Martin Mills could hear her masturbating; because the room was sealed and permanently air-conditioned, more often he would wake up in the morning and detect that she had masturbated by the smell, which was on the fingers of her right hand when she stroked his face and told him it was time for him to get up and brush his teeth. Then she’d drive him to school, which she did in a manner of recklessness equivalent to her habit of dragging him across Wilshire Boulevard. There was an exit from the San Diego Freeway that seemed to draw out of the babysitter a dramatic catching of her breath, which reminded Martin Mills of the sound she made while masturbating; just before this exit, Martin would always close his eyes.

It was a good school, an accelerated program conducted by the Jesuits at Loyola Marymount University, which was a fair drive from Westwood. But although the traveling to school and back was hazardous, the fact that Martin Mills was first educated in facilities also used by university students seemed to have an austere effect on the boy. Befitting an experiment in early-childhood education—the program was discontinued after a few years—even the chairs were grownup-sized, and the classrooms were not festooned with children’s crayon drawings or animals wearing the letters of the alphabet. In the men’s room used by these gifted children, the smaller boys stood on a stool to pee—these were the days before there were urinals at wheelchair level for the handicapped. Thus, both at the towering urinals and in the undecorated classrooms, it was as if these special children had been granted the opportunity to skip over childhood. But if the classrooms and the urinals spoke of the seriousness of the business at hand, they also suffered from the anonymity and impersonality of the many bedrooms in young Martin’s life.

Whenever the Westwood house was rented, Danny and Vera also lost the services of the U.C.L.A. babysitter. Then—from other, unfamiliar parts of town—Danny would be the designated driver who spirited Martin Mills to his accelerated education at Loyola Marymount. Driving with Danny was no less dangerous than the trip from and to Westwood with the U.C.L.A. babysitter. Danny would be hungover at the early-morning hour, if he wasn’t still inebriated, and by the time Martin was ready to be picked up after school, Danny would have begun to drink again. As for Vera, she didn’t drive. The former Hermione Rosen had never learned to drive, which is not unusual among people who pass their teenage years in Brooklyn or Manhattan. Her father, the producer Harold Rosen, had also never learned to drive; he was a frequent limousine-user, and once—for several months, when Danny Mills had lost his driver’s license to a DWI conviction—Harold had sent a limo to take Martin Mills to school.

On the other hand, Vera’s uncle, the director Gordon Hathaway, was a veteran speedster behind the wheel, and his penchant for speed in combination with his permanently purple ears (of varying deafness) would result in the periodic suspension of his driver’s license. Gordon never yielded to fire trucks or ambulances or police cars; as for his own horn, since he couldn’t hear it, he never used it, and he was utterly oblivious to the warning blasts that emanated from other vehicles. He would meet his Maker on the Santa Monica Freeway, where he rear-ended a station wagon full of surfers. Gordon was killed instantly by a surfboard; maybe it flew off the roof rack of the station wagon, or out of the open tailgate—either way, it came through Gordon’s windshield. There were ensuing vehicular collisions spanning four lanes, in two directions, and involving eight automobiles and a motorcycle; only Gordon was killed. Surely the director had a second or two to see his death coming, but at his memorial service his renowned C. of M. sister, who was Harold Rosen’s wife and Vera’s mother, remarked that Gordon’s deafness had at least spared him the noise of his own death, for it was generally agreed that the sounds of a nine-vehicle collision must have been considerable.

Nevertheless, Martin Mills survived the harrowing trips to his advanced schooling at Loyola Marymount; it was the bedrooms—their foreignness, their disorientation—that got to him. The quintessential sellout, Danny had rashly bought the Westwood house with the money he’d received for a three-screenplay deal; unfortunately, at the time he took the money the screenplays were unwritten—none would be produced. Then, as always, there were more deals based on unfinished work. Danny would have to rent Westwood. This depressed him; he drank to blur his self-disgust. This also led him to live in other people’s houses; these were usually the houses of producers or directors or actors to whom Danny owed a finished screenplay. Since these philanthropic souls could stand neither the spectacle nor the company of the desperate writer, they would vacate their houses and run off to New York or Europe. Sometimes, Martin Mills learned later, Vera would run off with them.

Writing a script under such pressure was a process Danny Mills referred to as “ball-busting,” which had long been a favorite expression of Gordon Hathaway’s. As Martin Mills lay awake in his cubicle at St. Ignatius, the new missionary couldn’t stop himself from remembering these houses belonging to strangers, who were always people in a position of power over his feckless father.

There’d been the house belonging to a director in Beverly Hills; it was on Franklin Canyon Drive, and Danny lost the privilege of living there because the driveway was so steep—that was how Danny put it. What happened was, he came home drunk; he left the director’s car in neutral (with the brake off) and the garage door open, and the car rolled over a grapefruit tree and into the swimming pool. This wouldn’t have been so damaging had Vera not been having an affair with the director’s maid, who the next morning dove naked into the swimming pool and broke her jaw and collarbone against the submerged windshield of the car. This happened while Danny was calling the police to report that the car had been stolen. Naturally, the maid sued the director for having a car in his pool. The movie that Danny was writing at the time was never produced, which was not an infrequent conclusion to Danny busting his balls.

Martin Mills had liked that house, if not that maid. In retrospect, Martin regretted that his mother’s sexual preference for young women had been passing; her appetite for young men was messier. As for Martin’s particular bedroom in the house on Franklin Canyon Drive, it had seemed nicer than the rest. It was a corner room with enough natural ventilation that he could sleep without the air conditioner; that was why he’d heard the car sinking into the swimming pool—first the splash, then all the bubbles. But he’d not gotten out of bed to look because he assumed it was his drunken father; by the sound, Martin suspected that Danny was cavorting with about a dozen drunken men—they were belching and farting underwater, he deduced. He had no idea a car had been involved.

In the morning, up early (as always), Martin had been only mildly surprised to see the car resting on the bottom of the deep end. Slowly it occurred to him that his father might be trapped inside. Martin was naked and crying when he ran downstairs to the swimming pool, where he found the naked maid; she was drowning under the diving board. Martin would never be credited with rescuing her. He picked up the long pole with the net on one end, which was used for skimming frogs and salamanders out of the water, and he extended this to the brown, feral-looking little woman of Mexican descent, but she couldn’t speak (because her jaw was broken) and she couldn’t lift herself out of the pool (because her collarbone was broken, too). She held fast to the pole while Martin towed her to the pool curb, and there she clung; she looked beseechingly at Martin Mills, who covered his genitals with his hands. From the depths of the pool, the sunken car emitted another bubble.

That was when Martin’s mother exited the maid’s bungalow, which was next to the shed for pool toys. Wrapped in a towel, Vera saw Martin standing naked by the deep end, but she failed to see her floundering lover of the night before.

“Martin, you know what I think of skinny-dipping,” Vera told the boy. “Go put on your trunks before Maria sees you.” Maria, of course, was also skinny-dipping.

As for putting on his clothes, that was the moment when Martin Mills identified one of his dislikes for his repeated use of someone else’s bedroom; their clothes were in the drawers—at best, the bottommost drawers had been emptied for Martin—and their clothes hung lifelessly but prepossessingly in the closets. Their old toys filled up a chest; their baby pictures were on the walls. Sometimes their tennis trophies or horse-riding ribbons were displayed. Often there were shrines to their first dogs or cats, apparently deceased; this could be discerned by the presence of a glass jar that contained a dog’s toenail or a tuft from a cat’s tail. And when Martin would carry his little triumphs “home” from school—his “A” papers and other evidence of his accelerated education—he wasn’t allowed to display these on their walls.

Then, in Los Angeles, there’d been an actor’s virtually unlived-in house on South Lorraine—a huge, grandly conceived mansion with many small, musty bedrooms all boasting blurry, enlarged photographs of unknown children of a conspicuously similar age. It seemed to Martin that the children who grew up there had died when they were six or eight, or that they’d uniformly become uninteresting subjects for photography upon reaching this approximate age; but there had simply been a divorce. In that house, time had stopped—Martin had hated it there—and Danny had at last outworn his welcome by falling asleep while smoking on the couch in front of the TV. The smoke alarm woke him, but he was drunk; he called the police instead of the fire department, and by the time that confusion was sorted out, the entire living room was consumed in flames. Danny took Martin to the pool, where he paddled about on an inflated raft in the form of Donald Duck—another relic of the permanently six- and eight-year-old children.

Danny waded back and forth in the shallow end of the pool, although he wore long trousers and a wrinkled dress shirt instead of a bathing suit, and he held the pages of his screenplay-in-progress against his chest; clearly, he didn’t want the pages to get wet. Together, father and son watched the firefighters subduing the disaster.

The actor, who was almost famous and whose living room was ruined, came home much later—after the fire was out and the firemen had left. Danny and Martin Mills were still playing in the swimming pool.

“Let’s wait up for Mommy, so you can tell her all about the fire,” Danny had suggested.

“Where’s Mommy?” Martin had asked.

“Out,” Danny had replied. She was “out” with the actor. When Vera and the actor returned together, Martin imagined that his father was slightly pleased with the smoldering wreck he’d made of the living room. The screenplay wasn’t going too well; it was to be an opportunity for the actor to do something “timely”—it was a story about a younger man with an older woman… “something bittersweet,” the actor had suggested. Vera was hoping for the role of the older woman. But that screenplay was never made into a movie, either. Martin Mills was not sorry to leave those permanently six- and eight-year-old children on South Lorraine.

In his stark cubicle at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon, the missionary was now looking for his copy of the Pocket Catholic Catechism; he hoped that these essentials of his faith might rescue him from reliving every bedroom he’d ever slept in in California. But he couldn’t find the reassuring little paperback; he presumed he’d left it on Dr. Daruwalla’s glass-topped table—in fact, he had. Dr. Daruwalla had already put it to use. Farrokh had read up on Extreme Unction, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, for this fit rather neatly into the new screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin; he’d also skimmed a passage about the crucifixion—he thought that he might make some sly use of it. The doctor was feeling mischievous, and the earlier hours of the evening had seemed interminable to him because nothing mattered to him as much as beginning this suddenly important piece of writing. Had Martin Mills known that Dr. Daruwalla was about to re-create him as a character in a romantic comedy, the unfortunate missionary might have welcomed the distraction of remembering his itinerant childhood in Los Angeles.

There’d been another L.A. house, on Kings Road, and Martin had cautiously loved that one; it had a fish pond, and the producer-owner kept rare birds, which were unfortunately Danny’s responsibility while he lived and wrote there. On the very first day, Martin had observed that the house had no screens. The rare birds weren’t caged; they were chained to their perches. One evening, during a dinner party, a hawk flew inside the house—and then another hawk flew inside—and to the considerable alarm of the assembled dinner guests, the rare birds fell victims to these visiting birds of prey. While the rare birds were shrieking and dying, Danny was so drunk that he insisted on finishing his version of how he was evicted from his favorite beach-view duplex in Venice. It was a story that never failed to bring tears to Martin’s eyes, because it concerned the death of his only dog. Meanwhile, the hawks swooped and killed; and the dinner guests—at first, just the women—put their heads under the dining-room table. Danny kept telling the story.

It had not yet occurred to young Martin that the declining fortunes of his father’s screenwriting career would occasionally result in low-rent housing. Although this was a step down from freeloading in the generally well-to-do homes of directors and producers and almost-famous actors, the cheap rentals were at least free of other people’s clothes and toys; in this sense, these rentals seemed a step up to Martin Mills. But not Venice. It had also not occurred to young Martin that Danny and Vera were simply waiting for their son to be old enough to send away to school. They presumed this would spare the child the continuing embarrassment of his parents’ lives—their virtually separate existences, even within the confines of the same residence, their coping with Vera’s affairs and with Danny’s drinking. But Venice was too low-rent for Vera; she chose to spend the time in New York, while Danny was pounding the keys of a portable typewriter and dangerously driving Martin to and from Loyola Marymount. In Venice, they’d shared the ground-floor half of a shocking-pink duplex on the beach.

“It was the best place we ever lived, because it was so fucking real!” Danny explained to his cowering dinner guests. “Isn’t that right, Marty?” But young Martin was silent; he was noticing the death agonies of a mynah—the bird was succumbing to a hawk, very near where the uneaten hors d’oeuvres still occupied a coffee table in the living room.

In truth, Martin thought, Venice had seemed rather unreal to him. There were drugged hippies on South Venice Boulevard; Martin Mills was terrified of such an environment, but Danny touched and surprised him by giving him a dog for a pre-Christmas present. It was a beagle-sized mongrel from the pound—“Saved from death!” Danny said. He named it “Whiskey,” because of its color and in spite of Martin’s protests. This must have condemned the dog, to name it after booze.

Whiskey slept with Martin, and Martin was allowed to put his own things on the ocean-damp walls. When he came “home” from school, he waited until the lifeguards were off-duty before he took Whiskey walking on the beach, where for the first time he imagined he was the envy of those children who can always be found in public playgrounds—in this case, those children who stood in line to use the slide on Venice Beach. Surely they would have liked a dog of their own to walk on the sand.

For Christmas, Vera visited—albeit briefly. She refused to stay in Venice. She claimed a suite of rooms at a plain but clean hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica; there she ate a Christmas breakfast with Martin—the first of many lonely meals he would remember with his mother, whose principal measure of luxury was drawn from her qualified praise of room service. Veronica Rose repeatedly said that she would be happier living on reliable room service than in a house of her own—throw the towels on the floor, leave the dishes on the bed, that kind of thing. She gave young Martin a dog collar for Christmas, which profoundly moved him because he could remember no other instance of apparent collaboration between his mother and father; in this isolated case, Danny must have communicated with Vera—at least enough for Vera to know that Danny had given the boy a dog.

But on New Year’s Eve, a roller skater (who lived in the turquoise duplex next door) fed the dog a big plate of marijuana lasagna. When Danny and Martin took Whiskey out for a walk after midnight, the stoned runt attacked a weight lifter’s Rottweiler; Whiskey was killed by the first snap and shake.

The Rottweiler’s owner was a contrite sort of muscle man wearing a tank top and a pair of gym shorts; Danny fetched a shovel, and the apologetic weight lifter dug an enormous grave in the vicinity of the children’s slide. No one was permitted to bury a dead dog on Venice Beach; some civic-minded observer called the police. Martin was awakened by two cops very early on New Year’s morning, when Danny was too hungover to assist him and there was no weight lifter available to help him dig the dead dog up. When Martin had finished stuffing Whiskey in a trash bag, one of the cops put the body in the trunk of the police car and the other cop, at the moment he handed Martin his fine, asked the boy where he went to school.

“I’m part of an accelerated educational program at Loyola Marymount,” Martin Mills explained to the cop.

Not even this distinction would prevent the landlord from evicting Danny and Martin shortly thereafter, out of fear of further trouble with the police. By the time they left, Martin Mills had changed his mind about the place. Almost every day, he’d seen the weight lifter with his murderous Rottweiler; and—either entering or leaving the turquoise duplex next door—the roller skater with a fondness for marijuana lasagna was a daily presence, too. Once again, Martin wasn’t sorry to go.

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.

Turkey (Bird and Country)

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.

“I might as well go to that one, too,” the Turk had told Martin. “I mean, I’ll have to go somewhere.”

But there was another reason they stayed together; they were both unathletic, and neither was inclined to assert any physical superiority over the other. At a school like Fessenden, where sports were compulsory and the boys grew feverishly competitive, Arif and Martin could protect their lack of athletic interest only by remaining roommates. They joked to each other that Fessenden’s most rabidly despised athletic rivals were schools named Fay and Fenn. They found it comic that these were other “F” schools, as if the letter F signified a conspiracy of athleticism—a “frenzy” of the competitive spirit. Having concurred on this observation, the two roommates devised a private way to indicate their contempt of Fessenden’s obsessively athletic vigor; Arif and Martin resolved not only to remain unathletic—they would use an “F” word for all the things they found distasteful about the school.

To the dominant colors of the faculty dress shirts, which were a button-down variety of pinks and yellows, the boys would say “fashionable.” Of an unattractive faculty wife, “far from fetching.” To the school rule that the top button of the shirt must always be buttoned when wearing a tie, they would respond with “fastidious.” Other favorites, for varying encounters with the faculty and their fellow students, included “faltering,” “fascistic,” “fatuous,” “fawning,” “featherbrained,” “fecal,” “fervid,” “fiendish,” “fishy,” “flatulent,” “fogyish,” “forbidding,” “foul,” “fraudulent,” “freakish,” “frigid,” “fulsome” and “fussy.”

These one-word adjectival signals amused them; Martin and Arif became, like many roommates, a secret society. Naturally, this led other boys to call them “fags,” “faggots,” “fruits,” “flits” and “fairies,” but the only sexual activity that took place in their shared cubicle was Arif’s regular masturbation. By the time they were ninth graders, they were given a room with a door. This inspired Arif to take fewer pains to conceal his flashlight.

With this memory, the 39-year-old missionary, who was alone and wide awake in his cubicle at St. Ignatius, realized that the subject of masturbation was insidious. In a desperate effort to distract himself from where he knew this subject would lead him—namely, to his mother—Martin Mills sat bolt upright on his cot, turned on his light and began to read at random in The Times of India. It wasn’t even a recent issue of the newspaper; it was at least two weeks old and rolled into a tube, and it was kept under the cot, where it was handy for killing cockroaches and mosquitoes. But thus it happened that the new missionary began the first of the exercises with which he intended to orient himself in Bombay. A more important matter—that being whether there was anything in The Times of India that could defuse Martin’s memory of his mother and her connection to the unwelcome theme of masturbation—would remain, for the moment, unresolved.

As Martin’s luck would have it, his eyes fell first upon the matrimonials. He saw that a 32-year-old public-school teacher, in search of a bride, confessed to a “minor squint in one eye”; a government servant (with his own house) admitted to a “slight skewness in the legs,” but he maintained that he was able to walk perfectly—he would also accept a handicapped spouse. Elsewhere, a “60-ish issueless widower of wheatish complexion” sought a “slim beautiful homely wheatish non-smoker teetotaller vegetarian under 40 with sharp features”; on the other hand, the widower tolerantly proclaimed, caste, language, state and education were “no bar” to him (this was one of Ranjit’s ads, of course). A bride seeking a groom advertised herself as having “an attractive face with an Embroidery Diploma”; another “slim beautiful homely girl,” who said she was planning to study computers, sought an independent young man who was “sufficiently educated not to have the usual hang-ups about fair complexion, caste and dowry.”

About all that Martin Mills could conclude from these self-advertisements, and these desires, was that “homely” meant well suited for domestic life and that a “wheatish” complexion meant reasonably fair-skinned—probably a pale yellow-brown, like Dr. Daruwalla. Martin couldn’t have guessed that the “60-ish issueless widower of wheatish complexion” was Ranjit; he’d met Ranjit, who was dark-skinned—definitely not “wheatish.” To the missionary, any matrimonial advertisement—any expressed longing to be a couple—seemed merely desperate and sad. He got off his cot and lit another mosquito coil, not because he’d noticed any mosquitoes but because Brother Gabriel had lit the last coil for him and Martin wanted to light one for himself.

He wondered if his former roommate, Arif Koma, had had a “wheatish” complexion. No; Arif was darker than wheat, Martin thought, remembering how clear the Turk’s complexion had been. In one’s teenage years, a clear complexion was more remarkable than any color. In the ninth grade, Arif already needed to shave every day, which made his face appear much more mature than the faces of the other ninth graders; yet Arif was utterly boyish in his lack of body hair—his hairless chest, his smooth legs, his girlishly unhairy bum… such attributes as these connoted a feminine sleekness. Although they’d been roommates for three years, it wasn’t until the ninth grade that Martin began to think of Arif as beautiful. Later, he would realize that even his earliest perception of Arif’s beauty had been planted by Vera. “And how is your pretty roommate—that beautiful boy?” Martin’s mother would ask him whenever she called.

It was customary in boarding schools for visiting parents to take their children out to dinner; often roommates were invited along. Understandably, Martin Mills’s parents never visited him together; like a divorced couple, although they weren’t divorced, Vera and Danny saw Martin separately. Danny usually took Martin and Arif to an inn in New Hampshire for the Thanksgiving holiday; Vera was more inclined to visits of a single night.

During the Thanksgiving break in their ninth-grade year, Arif and Martin were treated to the inn in New Hampshire with Danny and to a one-night visit with Vera—that being the Saturday night of the long weekend. Danny returned the boys to Boston, where Vera was waiting for them at the Ritz. She had arranged a two-bedroom suite. Her quarters were rather grand, with a king-sized bed and a sumptuous bathroom; the boys received a smaller bedroom, with two twin beds and an adjacent shower and toilet.

Martin had enjoyed the time at the inn in New Hampshire. There’d been a similar arrangement of rooms, but different; at the inn, Arif was given a bedroom and a bathroom of his own, while Danny had shared a room with twin beds with his son. For this enforced isolation, Danny was apologetic to Arif. “You get to have him as your roommate all the time,” Danny explained to the Turk.

“Sure—I understand,” Arif had said. After all, in Turkey, seniority was the basic criterion for relationships of superiority and deference. “I’m used to deference to seniority,” Arif had added pleasantly.

Sadly, Danny drank too much; he fell almost instantly asleep and snored. Martin was disappointed that there’d been little conversation between them. But before Danny passed out, and as they both lay awake in the dark, the father had said to the son, “I hope you’re happy. I hope you’ll confide in me if you’re ever not happy—or just tell me what you’re thinking, in general.” Before Martin could think of what to say, he’d heard his father’s snores. Nevertheless, the boy had appreciated the thought. In the morning, to have witnessed Danny’s affection and pride, one would have presumed that the father and son had talked intimately.

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.

Brother Gabriel, who’d been awakened by roosting pigeons, could see the light shining under Martin’s door. Another of Brother Gabriel’s myriad responsibilities at St. Ignatius was to foil the pigeons in their efforts to roost at the mission; the old Spaniard could detect pigeons roosting in his sleep. The many columns of the second-floor outdoor balcony afforded the pigeons almost unlimited access to the overhanging cornices. One by one, Brother Gabriel had fenced in the cornices with wire. After he’d shooed away these particular pigeons, he left the stepladder leaning against the column; that way, he would know which cornice to re-enclose with wire in the morning.

When Brother Gabriel passed by Martin Mills’s cubicle again, on his way back to bed, the new missionary’s light was still on. Pausing by the cubicle door, Brother Gabriel listened; he feared that “young” Martin might be ill. But to his surprise and eternal comfort, Brother Gabriel heard Martin Mills praying. Such late-night litanies suggested to Brother Gabriel that the new missionary was a man very strongly in God’s clutches; yet the Spaniard was sure he’d misunderstood what he heard of the prayer. It must be the American accent, old Brother Gabriel thought, for although the tone of voice and the repetition was very much in the nature of a prayer, the words made no sense at all.

To remind himself of the power of his will, which surely was evidence of God’s will within him, Martin Mills was repeating and repeating that long-ago proof of his inner courage. “I’ll take the turkey,” the missionary was saying. “I’ll take the turkey,” he said again. He knelt on the stone floor beside his cot, clutching the rolled-up copy of The Times of India in his hands.

A prostitute had tried to eat his culpa beads, then she’d thrown them away; a dwarf had his whip; he’d rashly told Dr. Daruwalla to dispose of his leg iron. It would take a while for the stone floor to hurt his knees, but Martin Mills would wait for the pain—worse, he would welcome it. “I’ll take the turkey,” he prayed. He saw so clearly how Arif Koma was unable to raise his dark eyes to meet Vera’s fixed stare, which so steadily scrutinized the circumcised Turk.

“It must have been frightfully painful,” Vera was saying. “And you honestly didn’t cry?”

“It would have dishonored my family,” Arif said again. Martin Mills could tell that his roommate was about to cry; he’d seen Arif cry before. Vera could tell, too.

“But it’s all right to cry now,” she was saying to the boy. Arif shook his head, but the tears were coming. Vera used her handkerchief to pat Arif’s eyes. For a while, Arif completely covered his face with Vera’s handkerchief; it was a strongly scented handkerchief, Martin Mills knew. His mother’s scent could sometimes make him gag.

“I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey,” the missionary prayed. It was such a steady-sounding prayer, Brother Gabriel decided; oddly, it reminded him of the pigeons, maniacally roosting on the cornices.

Two Different Men, Both Wide Awake

It was a different issue of The Times of India that Dr. Daruwalla was reading—it was the current day’s issue. If the sleeplessness of this night seemed full of the torments of hell for Martin Mills, Dr. Daruwalla was exhilarated to feel so wide awake. Farrokh was merely using The Times of India, which he hated, as a means to energize himself. Nothing enlivened him with such loathing as reading the review of a new Inspector Dhar film. USUAL INSPECTOR DHAR IDIOM, the headline said. Farrokh found this typically infuriating. The reviewer was the sort of cultural commissar who’d never stoop to say a single favorable word about any Inspector Dhar film. That dog turd which had prevented Dr. Daruwalla from more than a partial reading of this review had been a blessing; it was a form of foolish self-punishment for the doctor to read the entire thing. The first sentence was bad enough: “The problem with Inspector Dhar is his tenacious umbilical bindings with his first few creations.” Farrokh felt that this sentence alone would provide him with the desired fury to write all night.

“Umbilical bindings!” Dr. Daruwalla cried aloud. Then he cautioned himself not to wake up Julia; she was already angry with him. He made further use of The Times of India by putting it under his typewriter; the newspaper would keep the typewriter from rattling against the glass-topped table. He had set up his writing materials in the dining room; his writing desk, which was in the bedroom, was out of the question at this late hour.

But he’d never tried to write in the dining room before. The glass-topped table was too low. It had never been a satisfactory dining-room table; it was more like a coffee table—to eat at it, one sat on cushions on the floor. Now, in an effort to make himself more comfortable, Farrokh tried sitting on two cushions; he rested his elbows on either side of the typewriter. As an orthopedist, Dr. Daruwalla was aware that this position was unwise for his back; also, it was distracting to peer through the glass-topped table at his own crossed legs and bare feet. For a while, the doctor was additionally distracted by what he thought was the unfairness of Julia’s being angry with him.

Their dinner at the Ripon Club had been hasty and quarrelsome. It was a difficult day to summarize, and Julia was of the opinion that her husband was condensing too much interesting material in his recitation of the day; she was ready to speculate all night on the subject of Rahul Rai as a serial killer. Moreover, she was perturbed with Farrokh that he thought her presence at the Duckworth Club lunch with Detective Patel and Nancy would be “inappropriate”; after all, John D. was going to be there.

“I’m asking him to be present because of his memory,” Dr. Daruwalla had claimed.

“I suppose I don’t have a memory,” Julia had replied.

Even more frustrating was that Farrokh had not been successful in reaching John D. He’d left messages at both the Taj and the Oberoi concerning an important lunch at the Duckworth Club, but Dhar hadn’t returned his calls; probably the actor was still miffed about the unannounced-twin business, not that he would deign to admit it.

As for the efforts now under way to send poor Madhu and the elephant-footed Ganesh to the Great Blue Nile Circus, Julia had questioned the wisdom of Farrokh involving himself in “such dramatic intervention,” as she called it; she wondered why he’d never so directly undertaken the dubious rescue of maimed beggars and child prostitutes before. Dr. Daruwalla was irritated because he already suffered from similar misgivings. As for the screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin, Julia expressed further criticism: she was surprised that Farrokh could be so self-centered at such a time—implying that it was selfish of him to be thinking of his own writing when so much that was violent and traumatic was happening in the lives of others.

They’d even had a spat about what to listen to on the radio. Julia chose those channels with programs that made her sleepy; “song miscellany” and “regional light music” were her favorites. But Dr. Daruwalla became caught up in the last stages of an interview with some complaining writer who was incensed that there was “no follow-through” in India. “Everything is left incomplete!” the writer was complaining. “We get to the bottom of nothing!” he cried. “As soon as we poke our noses into something interesting, we take our noses away again!” The writer’s anger interested Farrokh, but Julia flipped to a channel featuring “instrumental music”; by the time Dr. Daruwalla found the complaining writer again, the writer’s anger was being directed at a news story he’d heard today. A rape and murder had been reported at the Alexandria Girls’ English Institution. The account that the writer had heard went as follows: “There was no rape and no murder, as previously and erroneously reported, at the Alexandria Girls’ English Institution today.” This was the kind of thing that drove the writer crazy; Farrokh guessed it was what he meant by “no follow-through.”

“It’s truly ridiculous to listen to this!” Julia had said, and so he’d left her with her “instrumental music.”

Now Dr. Daruwalla put all this behind him. He thought about limps—all the different kinds he’d seen. He wouldn’t use Madhu’s name; he would call the girl in his screenplay Pinky, because Pinky was a real star. He would also make the girl much younger than Madhu; that way, nothing sexual could threaten her—not in Dr. Daruwalla’s story.

Ganesh was the right name for the boy, but in the movie the boy would be older than the girl. Farrokh would simply reverse the ages of the real children. He would give his Ganesh a bad limp, too, but not nearly so grotesquely crushed a foot as the real Ganesh had; it would be too hard to find a child actor with such a nasty deformity. And the children should have a mother, because the screenwriter had already planned how he would take their mother away. Storytelling was a ruthless business.

Briefly Dr. Daruwalla considered that he’d not only failed to understand the country of his origin; he’d also failed to love it. He realized he was about to invent an India he could both comprehend and love—a simplified version. But his self-doubt passed—as self-doubt must, in order to begin a story.

It was a story set in motion by the Virgin Mary, Farrokh believed. He meant the stone statue of the unnamed saint in St. Ignatius Church—the one that needed to be restrained with a chain and a steel grommet. She wasn’t really the Blessed Mother, but she had nevertheless become the Virgin Mary to Dr. Daruwalla. He liked the phrase well enough to write it down—“a story set in motion by the Virgin Mary.” It was a pity that it wouldn’t work as a title. For a title, he would need to find something shorter; but the simple repetition of this phrase enabled him to begin. He wrote it down again, and then again—“a story set in motion by the Virgin Mary.” Then he crossed out every trace of this phrase, so that not even he could read it. Instead, he said it aloud—repeatedly.

Thus, in the dead of night, while almost five million residents of Bombay were fast asleep on the sidewalks of the city, these two men were wide awake and mumbling. One spoke only to himself—“a story set in motion by the Virgin Mary”—and this allowed him to get started. The other spoke not only to himself but to God; understandably, his mumbles were a little louder. He was saying, “I’ll take the turkey,” and his repetitions—he hoped—would prevent him from being consumed by that past which everywhere surrounded him. It was the past that had given him his tenacious will, which he believed was the will of God within him; yet how he feared the past.

“I’ll take the turkey,” said Martin Mills. By now his knees were throbbing. “I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey, I’ll take the turkey.”