Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Long Story Short

I was born in Berlin in 1937. My mother was eighteen. She hid me from everyone for a year and a half. My father must have been someone who was hated, a Jew or a Gypsy: I never knew who he was. My mother got permission to emigrate in 1943 under “refugee status” and married a man named Wolfie. We sailed to Australia. None of us spoke English. We were put in a rural refugee camp, living in dormitories. After a year, we were sent to a suburb of Melbourne, where we were happy, but six months later my mother and Wolfie crashed their car. Mother was killed, Wolfie was so badly injured he could not care for me.

When the authorities came to put me in the orphanage, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Dugger, said, “We could easily take him. He’s one of the family. Fritz is no bludger.” My name was Fred, but, being German, I was Fritz to everyone in Australia.

Mrs. Dugger didn’t insist. She watched me get into the car. Then she reached through the window and patted me on the head. She said in a strange tone, “Bye, Fritz. Mind how you go.”

I was put into the Fraser Boys’ Home. I was happy there, oddly enough. The bigger boys protected me. And I was terrified when, after three years, Wolfie showed up, limping from his injuries, to take me away. He arranged for us to go back to Germany. We went by ship. He was abusive for the whole voyage. I had no idea why he wanted me to go with him; I still don’t know. He abandoned me soon after we got to Hamburg. I was taken in by an old woman, and for the first time in my life I was held in the arms of someone who loved me. We both sobbed — the tears were endless. I was still young, but Germany was rebuilding, and I got a job in a restaurant. When I had saved some money, I went to hotel school. I worked in hotels, I became a manager, and eventually I became head of the company, a large hotel chain.

Long story short, our company was negotiating to buy a hotel in Melbourne. Forty years after I left that city, I returned. On my day off I went to the old neighborhood. I found Mrs. Dugger. She was blind, sitting on her porch.

“I used to live here,” I said. “Long ago.”

The moment she heard my voice, she began to cry and said, “Fritz is back!”

She died soon after that. Her son told me that she talked about me constantly, and it was only when I came back and she knew I was all right that she was able to let go. All those years of remorse for letting me be taken away by the authorities.

I have had an unusual life so far, difficult in many ways, but not so difficult as that of my father, who is sixty-something. He was my tormentor for almost the whole of my childhood.

I had a bad case of measles at the age of four. I had developed normally before then, but after the measles I became disobedient and willful. I didn’t listen. I didn’t pay attention. I defied my father, who was a stern disciplinarian — Marine Corps, two tours in Vietnam. “Listen to me!” But I didn’t. He spanked me, sometimes so hard I could still feel it days later. He smacked my hands, twisted my ears, pushed me into a corner, and forced me to stand. He made me call him “Sir.” As I grew older, the punishments became more severe. The worst one was having to kneel on a broomstick. I did this for hours at a time. I was seven or eight years old, and it went on for years. I was rude, I was defiant, you name it — so my dad said. I was a wreck, but I couldn’t cure myself of being an obstinate child. I was also terrible at school, where the punishments weren’t as bad as my father’s, but when he saw my report card he went ballistic.

When I was about thirteen, I was given an eye test at school. Everyone got one. I failed. The eye doctor gave me a prescription for glasses and also suggested that I get a hearing test. This hearing test was given to me many times over a lot of weeks. Some of the tests were administered by groups of doctors or with medical students watching. Sometimes they asked, “How’d you get all those bruises?” I said, “Fell down.”

The results showed that I was extremely deaf, as a result of the measles. I was fitted with two hearing aids. My whole life changed, though I was still pretty rebellious. The other kids laughed at my “earphones.” I improved at school, but my home life deteriorated.

My father became desolate and filled with guilt. Some days when I stop by, I think he is on the verge of suicide, and it takes all the energy I have to reassure him and coax him into better humor, which is a pretty big burden for both of us. He still apologizes. I say, “How were you to know?”

I was a Catholic in the 1950s, a student at an all-boys Catholic school, priests for teachers. I never heard of any of us boys being messed around with by a priest. I knew that I was afraid of them and probably would have done anything a priest asked me to.

But there was something else about them that impressed me and changed my life. In the ninth grade, we made weekly visits to the YMCA pool, where all the swimming was done in the nude. I was embarrassed, but I was the only one. We were all naked. And I recall how the priests would come into the changing room and find a locker. They wore long black cassocks, birettas, and black socks. They would undress with us, carefully folding their clothes and tucking them into the lockers.

Stark naked, they led us into the swimming pool, which stank of chlorine. They dived, they gave us swimming lessons. They taught us to pick up objects from the bottom of the pool—“surface dive.” They showed us lifesaving maneuvers. “Never let a drowning man grab you. He’ll take you with him.”

What I remember of the priests were their naked bodies, big and pale without robes or cassocks. They were men, just white skin and hairy legs. After a while I did not believe they had any power at all, and certainly not spiritual power. As time passed, I liked them less and less — for their bodies — and as an adult, reflecting on the YMCA visits, I began to hate them for pretending to be powerful. I easily lost my faith.

Like many boys of my generation, I was sent away to school. My father was an officer in the Indian Army, based in Bareilly, and he had the choice of sending me to a hill-station school — say, one in Simla — or to an English boarding school. He opted for England. There I went at the age of seven, accompanied by my mother, who left me at the underschool, returning every two years to check up on me. I know this seems extraordinary, but it was quite usual then. The period I am speaking of is the 1930s, for I was born in 1928, and my prep school days ended with the outbreak of war in Europe.

My mother died. This I was told by the headmaster, who took me aside and was very kind to me. His wife, Winnie — we called her Poodle — made me tea.

“Your father is coming to fetch you.”

I was ten, but a small ten, a white weedy boy with bony bitten fingers and spiky hair. I was too nervous to be dreamy or lazy. I was a whiz at maths, chess, and Religious Knowledge, humiliated in all sports.

The day came. “Your father is in the foyer of Ashburnham.” I ran. I was in a panic. I saw two men. I clutched one and began to cry.

“Neville, I am your father,” the other man said.

This man I hugged was laughing: my uncle.

Nothing was right after that with my father. I began to think, Who is he? And maybe my uncle is my real father.

My aunt Rosalind, whom we called Rosebud, had a fantastic collection of jewelry. She had two habits related to the collection. One, she was passionate about collecting, continually adding pieces, delving in markets, attending auctions and estate sales, and dealing privately. The other habit was her always announcing her finds and acquisitions. This meant that we were all keenly aware of what she had bought and what she owned. In so doing, she educated us. This is a topaz, this is a sapphire, this is a yellow diamond, and that’s a black pearl. We learned the difference between white gold and platinum as settings, the virtue of one stone over another, the variety of hallmarks, the price of gold and diamonds — specific numbers and scarcity value.

Auntie Rosebud’s collection continued to grow while we watched, from a few boxes to many chests of drawers, glass cabinets, and trays. We became knowledgeable ourselves. That close attention was a way of pleasing Auntie Rosebud. We felt that she needed us to take an interest, that she enjoyed educating us, and I suppose our knowledge linked us to this valuable collection and gave us self-esteem.

We were young adults, in the working world, when Auntie Rosebud sold her collection of jewelry. It was like a sickness and a death. An auction house swept down and valued the pieces, photographed them, and in a few months the whole collection was gone. She said, “You can bid for the ones you really like.” But we didn’t: we couldn’t afford it. It wasn’t the money she wanted. She had plenty. After the big auction she was more powerful than ever, and more of a mystery, and we felt so weak.

I was in Central America, visiting schools for an aid project. Leaving one small school in a village, my guide, Ramon, said to me, “Did you see that small boy at the front desk, who was so slow? Alone, writing after school in his notebook?”

The boy with the crooked smile — I had seen him, and he had seen me, too.

“His story is so sad. His mother was only fifteen when she got pregnant. She had no boyfriend, no fiancé. She was just a schoolgirl. She gave birth, and afterward she moved out of the house and went to San Pedro.

“A few years later, visiting her parents, she saw her father hugging and kissing her younger sister, who was fourteen. She screamed at him to stop.

“Her father said, ‘It’s nothing. We’re just being friendly.’

“She said, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to her. Leave her alone!’

“But the father didn’t. So the older daughter went to the police station and said, ‘My father is having sex with my sister. He had sex with me, and this boy is the result.’

“The little boy looked at the policemen and smiled. They could see in his smile that there was something wrong with his head.

“The father was arrested. He went to trial and was given fifteen years and is in prison now. It’s so strange. How do these things happen?”

A few days later we passed a small house in the forest near that village. Ramon pointed.

“That’s the house of Señor Martin. He had seventeen children. Imagine! And now that I think of it, his second son was the one who committed incest with his daughters. He lived there.”

“Seventeen children in that house?” I said.

“Two bedrooms,” Ramon said. “Fantastic, eh, how these people can manage?”

I plan to retire soon. I have high blood pressure, yet my life has been uneventful — two children, both married; my wife is a real estate agent. I have spent my life in accountancy and tax planning. I used to think, I should get outside more. And then when my health problems prevented me, I was somewhat relieved not to have to get any exercise.

All my life there has been a shadow over me, one I could not identify, weighing me down.

I was at the supermarket — this was just the other day — and saw a young mother with her three children, one in a baby carriage, one holding her hand, and the third, the eldest, trying to help her. This big boy was about ten. He wore a baseball hat that was slightly too large for his head and tipping sideways. His eyeglasses were the cheap kind that make a kid self-conscious. He was pale, bucktoothed, very skinny, with an ill-fitting shirt and blue pants — not stylish, none of it. It was a poor family but an earnest one, conscious of decency and order. The boy was carrying a heavy bag, because his mother was burdened with the other children and the shopping. She chose each item very carefully, weighing the thing, looking several times at the price.

The boy was ugly, foolish-looking, really pathetic, trying to look anonymous but obviously what his schoolmates would have called a geek. His glasses were all wrong, he was weak, he was worried, he was trying to be helpful, but anyone could see he was miserably self-conscious and perhaps terrified. He knew what it was like to be mocked: he anticipated it every moment, glancing aside. I knew that his father either was dead or had deserted the mother. The father would have shown this boy how to dress and would have given him a manly example. But his mother nagged him. “You’re the oldest!” He was in despair — I could see the shadow over him.

Later I examined my sadness and my pity. I realized he was me. I understood my life after fifty years. I did not sorrow for myself but for that poor ugly boy.

I was living on the Upper East Side. Every morning I walked down Lexington to 77th Street and got the 6 train to Union Square, where I worked. I was at the station by eight, and without fail I would see a man reading the Wall Street Journal just inside the turnstile. He always smiled at me, and I kept thinking that he would talk to me one day. He didn’t, but he kept smiling whenever he saw me. This went on for about a year.

I moved to East 13th Street, a short distance from my office, and never thought about the man again. But after my boyfriend and I split up, I kept the apartment, though I hated staying home at night alone. I was in the bar section of a café in Union Square and saw the man from 77th Street. He smiled at me. I smiled back. We began talking. We were instantly on the same wavelength, as I had guessed we would be all along. I felt that I had known him for a year. We talked for about two hours — four drinks each — and then he said, “I want to make love to you in the worst way.”

That struck me as funny. I even made a joke about it, that word “worst.” We went to my apartment, and we devoured each other, making up for a whole year of eyeing each other and fantasizing. I was thinking how I would tell my ex-boyfriend that it was like a cannibal feast. The man from 77th Street pounded me and twisted my body sideways and made a meal of one of my feet, while I watched, not aroused but fascinated.

Afterward, exhausted, I fell asleep. When I woke up, I said, “I used to dream of you making love to me the whole time I saw you at the station on 77th Street.”

He stared at me. He said, “I’ve only been there a few times. I live in Brooklyn. I’ve never seen you before.”

My English friend Jane — very proper — gave me the name of this woman in London who would be glad to put me up for a few days until I got my InterRail paperwork sorted out. I just knew her as Victoria. When I called her from the airport, she said the best thing would be for me to meet her at her office in Westminster. I was totally impressed. She was a British civil servant, some kind of undersecretary in the Ministry of Health. These are the people who keep the British government running: the politicians and cabinet ministers come and go; these people stay. They brief the ministers on parliamentary bills and MPs’ questions in the House of Commons. All this Victoria told me as she tidied her office before we left. She was drearily dressed and had greasy hair and was wearing a white shirt and necktie, like a school uniform. She saw I was reading a framed certificate.

“That’s my MBE,” she said. It meant Member of the British Empire, a title. “I say it means My Bloody Efforts.”

She then explained that she couldn’t take any of the papers home, because they were secret.

“Lucky you,” I said. “You can make an explicit division between work stuff and home stuff.”

“Bang on!” she said, and she laughed harder than I would have expected.

We went to her house by tube. Her husband answered the door. He was Jamaican, named Wallace. He wore a wool hat in the house. He was a carpenter, he said. He said very little else. I tried not to look surprised. While Victoria made dinner, Wallace offered me a drink and showed me to my room. The room looked lived in, and I wondered where, in this small house, Wallace and Victoria slept.

After dinner, Wallace rolled a big fat joint and passed it to Victoria. She puffed and passed it to me. I didn’t inhale much. I looked at her and saw the civil servant who had shown me her secret papers and her MBE certificate in Westminster.

“I’m tired,” I said, but when I went into the bedroom they followed me. They looked pretty interested. I said, “I can’t do this.”

My English friend Jane said I really missed something.

I am pretty conservative on the whole and have a sales-and-marketing degree, which my parents urged me to get so that I could help them with their business. They are also conservative, you might even say puritanical. That is one of the reasons they chose this business, which is school uniforms.

Mainly it is girls’ uniforms, skirts and blouses, knee socks and blazers. What is thought of as an old-fashioned line of clothes is actually very up-to-date, since many schools these days are switching over to uniforms, not just Catholic schools but all sorts. My parents chose this business because they believed it was virtuous and fair, that they were promoting modesty. Uniforms are made to order, in batches: a certain plaid for the pleated skirt, a certain blouse and blazer. A lot of the sewing is outsourced to factories in the Dominican Republic and Guatemala.

When I graduated, I was put in charge of mail orders, generally orders from clients who found our website, or from schools or individuals we had not been in touch with before — random orders.

Many of these came from Japan, some from Great Britain and Germany, and quite a number from the United States. In most cases they were single orders, apparently unconnected to any school. I knew this from the patterns that were chosen. An individual would get in touch, specify colors and fabrics and sizes, enclosing the payment.

By tracking these orders, I found out some interesting things. The sizes were usually large, as though for a school for big and tall girls, adult-sized, and these made up at least twenty percent of our total orders. Some of the skirts were huge. The measurements did not make sense. Yet the customers were satisfied, and I found out that they were, most of them, repeat customers.

Where were these schools? Of course, there were no schools. A fifth of our school uniform sales were to prostitutes and fetishists — men around the world involved with sexual role-playing, dominatrixes, sadists, transvestites, and closet pedophiles. I did not tell my puritanical parents my conclusions, or they would probably have shut down the business, and where would we be then?

My father became wealthy importing timber from Southeast Asia, mainly teak but other hardwoods too. He was one of the first to farm it, which meant that when he died the company still prospered. My brother, Hank, and I inherited everything, the big company and a considerable income.

My visits to the plantations got me interested in Asian antiques, and when I began to sell them, I was so busy that I needed Hank to help me out. Soon I saw that he was taking trips to Asia purely to buy drugs. Like Dad, he was an innovator — an early smuggler of heroin inside little Buddhas and carved temple finials in small, hard-to-detect amounts, for his own use. His wealth ensured he’d never have to resort to dealing or relying on dealers in the States. He injected: his arm, his foot, his neck. He said, “I have it under control,” meaning that he could afford it.

But over time the heroin ate up most of his money, and he borrowed from me for a while. A very expensive habit, and destructive too, or so I thought. I made him a promise. I said, “If you give up the heroin, I will hand over half my own inheritance.” I had doubled my money with my antiques business anyway. Hank said, “Leave me alone. I’m like a person with an illness. Just leave me to my illness. A lot of people are in worse shape than me.”

But I begged him. Finally he agreed. Here is the weird part. As soon as he gave up heroin, after a long, painful process of rehab and treatment, he became very weak. As an addict, he had been full of life; as a clean straight guy, he was pale, feeble, prone to colds, and sometimes could not get out of bed. This went on for a few months. Very worried, I brought him to a specialist, who diagnosed cancer.

He said, “Your brother has had cancer for years, but his heroin use has masked it. If he had still been using it, he would have had a happy death — sudden anyway. Heroin has been keeping him out of pain.”

The next weeks were awful. He died horribly a month later.

A stern man is the helper fellow on a lobster boat, and he is at my dooryard at four-thirty every morning except Sunday, ready to go, and if he’s not there, I’ll go without him. He does lots of things — hauls traps, baits them, hoses rockweed off the deck, boxes the bugs, gets handy with the Clorox. When you haul in winter your stern man might say he’s cold, and you say, “Goddamn, if you’re cold, you’re not working hard enough.” The stern man gets fifteen percent of the profit on the catch.

I have had them all, the drug addicts, the numb ones, the stealers, and one was crazy as a shithouse rat. A Christless little son of a whore from Belfast went off with my punt. Another one phoned me with death threats when I fired him, and he also talked about cutting the lines on my pots. It is a hell of a business.

But Alvin was the best stern man I ever had. Never late, not a talker, a good worker. God knows where he came from. I’d ask him where he came from, and he’d go all friggin’ numb or else change the subject. Also, he went quiet when I talked about women. Mention a piece of tail or a fellow’s teapot or a pair of bloomers, and Alvin just began scrubbing the deck or hosing rockweed.

I was talking about Vietnam one day. He was the right age. My son was there, one tour. But Alvin said, “I didn’t join up.”

“Why not?”

“Couldn’t.”

“Nothing wrong with you,” I nagged him a bit.

“Warner, I was in prison,” Alvin said after a while. First time he ever used my name, but all this time he never looked me in the eye.

“How long for?”

“Bunch of years.”

“‘Bunch of years’! So what’d you go and do?”

“I killed my wife.”

“She probably deserved it,” I said.

I knew I was right, because he didn’t say anything else, though he left me a month later. Damn, I never found a better stern man.

Everyone has always liked us. “Here come Mort and Irma.” They’d see us holding hands. We are small of stature — Irma’s barely five feet — like a couple of kids. We had no kids ourselves, so we never had to grow up. We considered ourselves good mixers and had lots of friends. But we went kaput, and here’s how.

As I’m in restaurant supplies, I travel quite a bit, and it’s no fun, those cheap hotels you have to stay in to keep the profit margin up and the overhead down. Many of my accounts are in Florida, so we relocated to West Palm. But Florida is a huge state, and I still had to deal with the hotels and lots of nights away.

Irma got a little blue on her own and talked of buying a dog, and she didn’t even like dogs. One Friday I returned home from the road, assuming we were going out to dinner, as we usually did. But:

“Can’t. I’ve got my group,” Irma said.

Just like that, a women’s group. She had joined it while I was away; some neighbor introduced her. It made her happy. Good. My turn to stay home alone.

The next week, same thing but a little worse. I say, “Hon, how about a juicy steak instead of the group.”

“I’m a vegan.” Just like that. “We decided.”

They had all turned vegetarian, the group. It was wives of working guys and some divorcées, kind of a support group. I told her I’m all for it, and I am. Traveling and sales is no picnic, but if this made her happier while I was away, hey, great. Then the name issue came up.

“Irma,” I says one Friday, and she stops me, makes a face.

“Don’t call me that. I’m Cheyenne.”

“And I’m Tonto.”

I had to sleep on the couch. This was no damn joke. And that wasn’t the end of it. How could I be so insensitive? She was Cheyenne. They were all something. She had new stationery printed. She says she can take or leave the holidays. Imagine that. I’m still traveling, but when I come home these days, I don’t know this woman.

I had been married for twenty-two years, living on the windward side of Oahu in Hawaii. No children. Originally I had come to Hawaii, as a young salesman, to advise people on how to set up Jiffy Lube franchises, but when my consultancy work was done, I decided to stay. I got myself a franchise, realized this was where I wanted to live, and sent for Diana, my high school sweetheart. She had a lot of complaints about living in Hawaii — the rats, the cockroaches, the way people talked English like it was another language, the lousy food, the terrible traffic, and many more, which is maybe the point of this story.

I was happy. I would have done anything to make Diana happy. I hardly noticed her criticisms of me, although our whole being in Hawaii was my doing, as she said. I was in kind of a daze, but so what? I never got rock fever, like they say. I was rock happy.

We were driving one wet afternoon over the Pali, and just beyond the tunnel there was one of these speed traps. Cop flags me down. I drive onto the shoulder and get out my license and registration.

The cop was a big moke, six-something, way over two hundred pounds, hands like pieces of meat. But he was very polite, very professional. It was true, I had probably been speeding. I laughed and agreed with him while he wrote out the citation.

A horrible choking honk like an animal’s sudden fury made him stop writing. But it was a familiar sound to me.

“Billy! You tell him we’re going to court! You hear me, Billy!”

The cop took a step back and looked into the car, at Diana’s pudgy purple face, the veins standing out on her neck, the spit on her lips.

“Is that your wife?” He said it in a disgusted and pitying voice.

I said yes, and I almost added, What’s the problem?

He tore up the ticket. “I ain’t giving you this. You got enough problems, bruddah.”

After a few months we separated, and within a year were divorced. Diana’s back on the mainland now.

It was at the three-day wedding event for my eldest daughter, who was marrying a very nice man, Brian, a successful contractor in Oregon. Taylor said, “I want a huge bash. You only get married once.” I kept my big mouth shut.

The bash was held at a resort in Hawaii and involved all the guests being shuttled to lunches, rehearsals, dinners, activities, and so forth, getting in and out of vans and minibuses, and doing lots of socializing. We were sent a three-page itinerary. Movable feast!

I went with Tim, my second husband. On the first afternoon there was an important cocktail party at a function room on the property. The van was parked where it should have been, near the porte-cochère, but there was no sign of the bus driver. I walked up and down looking for him.

A gruff-looking man approached the van and waited at the front passenger door.

I was annoyed that he was late and not even apologetic. I said, “Are you the bus driver?”

He said, “No,” and a second later seemed to change his mind about getting aboard. This really annoyed me, because I was sure he was the bus driver, and I muttered something, which I wish I could remember now. He walked away. I waited awhile, and then it hit me.

That man, the gruff stranger I had spoken to, was my ex-husband, Taylor’s father, to whom I had been happily married for sixteen years, until he went off with a much younger woman, who I heard had dumped him, couldn’t stand his drinking. I looked back and did not see him. Later, we said hello but not much else. We never discussed my gaffe, which I think says a lot.

I was unhappily married and living in Connecticut, your typical bored housewife. Then I took a course: radiology. X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs. Two years. I got my diploma and left my husband and came here to Maine. There’s a lot of work in radiology, and the hours aren’t too bad. I chose Maine because of the winters.

I spend the whole winter skiing, except last winter, when I had some medical procedures. I have five screws in my shoulder and a permanently damaged rotator cuff that screams in damp weather. I’ve broken both arms, my collarbone, and my left ankle. I need to have my knees replaced. That’ll be fun. Basically, they make lateral incisions, sever your legs, put in metal, and give you some kind of ID so you can go through a metal detector in an airport.

The ankle was something else. I read my own CAT scan and opted for ankle replacement. Basically, they got me an ankle from a cadaver, and they removed my bad ankle and fitted me with this donor ankle. But it’s too small. I’m getting pain. They might have to redo it.

I hate cross-country skiing. My ex was huge on it. I hated hearing him say, “Oh, look at that yellow spruce,” or “Oh, look, a rose-breasted grosbeak,” or “Oh, gosh, let’s sit on that log and have a bagel.” Cross-country is for, I want to say, fairies.

He didn’t understand that pain is pleasure, if properly applied. What I want is black runs, all-day black runs. I want to ski straight down on black runs with my legs banging and the tears streaming out of my eyes and freezing on my face. And snot pouring out of my nose and streaking on my cheek, and my whole face burning from the cold. I am hardly able to breathe on a black run, which no man I have ever known can understand, which is also why I fired my husband, I’ve fired every boyfriend I’ve ever had, and basically it’s just me and my dog.

Mother and Grace — let’s just say they weren’t best buddies. So as the elder daughter, and single, I began to look after Mother when she began to fail. And she was a wreck. Got confused in stores, left the oven on, real muddled about time. I made her stop driving, so of course I had to take the wheel. God, the hills. I wrote Grace that I was moving in with Mother. The big Polk Street house had been in Mother’s family for years; Mother was lost in it. Grace understood completely and said she was relieved. She had been in a Minnesota convent since taking her vows, though she sometimes spent extended periods in Nevada and Florida as a hospital worker, “and doing spiritual triage too,” on Indian reservations. We seldom heard from her, but Mother sent her money now and then. Because of the strictness of her religious order, she was never able to visit us in San Francisco. “And just as well,” Mother said.

It got so that Mother could only manage with my assistance. I resigned from my secretarial job, lost my retirement and my medical plan, and became Mother’s full-time caregiver. I updated Grace on Mother’s condition and mentioned the various challenges we faced. Grace wrote saying that she was praying for us, and she asked detailed questions because these infirmities were to be specified in the prayers, or intercessions, as she called them.

About three years into my caregiving, Grace called. She said, “Why not take a few months off? My Superior has given me special dispensation to look after Mom for a while. It’ll be a break for me. And you can have a real break. Maybe go to Europe.”

Mother wasn’t overjoyed, but she could see that I was exhausted. Grace flew in. It was an emotional reunion. I hardly recognized her — not because she had gotten older, though she had. But she was dressed so well and in such good health. She even mentioned how I looked stressed and obviously could do with some time off.

I went on one of those special British Airways fares, a See Scotland package. It was just the break I needed, or so I thought.

Long story short, when I got back to San Francisco, the Polk Street house was being repainted by people who said they were the new owners. Everything I possessed was gone. Mother was in a charity hospice. She had been left late one night at the emergency room of St. Francis Hospital. There was no money in Mother’s bank account. Everything she had owned had been sold. I saw Mother’s lawyer. He found a number for Grace — the 702 area code, a cell phone. Nevada.

“I’m glad you called,” Grace said. I could hear music in the background and a man talking excitedly, a fishbowl babble, aqueous party voices. I started to cry but she interrupted me with a real hard voice. “Everything I did was legal. Mother gave me power of attorney. I never want to see you again. And you will never undo it.” Unfortunately for me, that was true.

Giulio was recommended to me as a hard worker, a good man, very skillful in all sorts of building. This proved to be the case. When I praised him, he said, “I come from Sicily. We build the whole house there — foundation, brickwork, framing, plastering, carpentry, roofing, shingles, tiling, plumbing.” He could do anything. He worked one whole summer, first brickwork, then replacing shingles, then glazing the cracked windows, then painting — every job I’d put off at last getting done.

He was seventy-seven years old. He asked for $40 an hour — a lot of money, the weekly bills were high — but he earned it.

After the second week, he brought his son Paulie, a big, boyish fellow of forty-three, tattooed, potbellied, very funny, not a good worker but strong. He could heave the big sacks of cement, he dug holes, he lugged the bricks. He was also to get $40 an hour, but some days he didn’t show up. “He’s goofing around,” “He’s sick,” “He’s sleeping,” Giulio would say, seeming both dignified and somewhat ashamed of having to make excuses.

Then, one day: “Paulie’s in jail.” It turned out he’d been in jail before, spent several years inside for theft, credit-card fraud, and receiving stolen goods. What astonished me was the contrast between father and son: the honest old man, so talented and hardworking; the lazy son, who was a petty thief and a druggie.

Time passed, Paulie stayed in jail, but as I got to know Giulio better, I realized that he was cheating me on his time sheet, charging me for tools he bought or broke, not quite truthful about the work, carelessly hiding the scrap wood and the mistakes, a subtle thief. And I began to see, first faintly, then powerfully, how prideful Giulio the sly worker was more like Paulie the jailbird than anyone could ever guess.

I left my small village in Norway as a young man — I was hardly seventeen — and became a student in the USA, first in Michigan, where I had an aunt and uncle, then in Massachusetts, where I attended MIT and where I eventually settled. My life’s work has been in developing radar sensitivity — defense work, but I justify it to myself by saying that I was creating a shield, not weapons of destruction. This was not entirely true. Missiles are guided by radar. In this work, my colleagues were from India, Pakistan, China, Korea, Japan, and many other countries. I must emphasize the diverse nationalities and how well we got along — it is important to this story.

I lived through the 1960s in the USA, working on defense projects. Of course, I was seen as one of the bad guys. I married an American, raised two children. I am proud of the life I have made here. My interests are sailing, skiing, and gardening. I am now retired — a happy man.

Here is the strange part. About every four years I go back to my village, which is near Bergen. It is always a horrible visit. I become enraged when I see what has happened. It has gotten so bad that I dread going home. The visits disturb me, because I see that I am a bigot. My lovely village is now the residence of Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, Vietnamese — brown people, who have come there as refugees, so called, because Norwegians are so happy to provide houses and welfare.

When I was a boy, we had one religion, one language, one culture — one race. Now it’s a filthy mess. Skullcaps, shawls, smells. There is crime. So many languages. A mosque! A temple! Not refugees but opportunists. I am so angry when I am there: my lovely village spoiled. I think I will never go back again. I know I am a bigot there, and I hate myself when I am home.

Mrs. Springer, a longtime resident of our facility, was born in 1900. She was vain about the date, being the same age as the century. She clearly remembered the First World War. “I was at school. The school bell rang when the war ended, and we were given the day off.” She remembered talk of Al Capone and Prohibition, the Great Depression and Lindbergh’s flight. She was married to a science-minded German, living in Munich when the Second World War started. Her husband’s family was wealthy — Springer was their name. She volunteered for war work, knitting socks. She told us all her stories. She had met Hitler. “He had very fine hands, small and pale, like a woman’s.”

She became a refugee after the war. She went to Los Angeles; her husband followed her later, and he became a metallurgist for Hughes Tool Company. He died. She lived alone a few years and then entered our facility.

We went to her ninetieth birthday party. We predicted that she would live to be a hundred. She accomplished this, but it was a decade of failing health. She lost most of her hearing. Her sight dimmed. At her hundredth she needed to be steered to the cake. We shouted for her to blow out the candles, but she couldn’t hear us or see the candles. Even so, she smiled and said it was a great day.

Her hundred-and-first she spent in her room. We were away a lot after that, and each time we got back, we were surprised to see her still alive. Her other friends were less attentive too, even a little irritated when they had to run an errand for Mrs. Springer. We missed her hundred-and-second birthday. That year I saw her once. It seemed inconvenient and somewhat unfair, her living into another century. Her nurse called and complained that no one bought her medicine anymore. Her son died, not of any specific cause. “He was getting on,” someone said.

We forgot about Mrs. Springer, we guessed she had died, and we were astonished to hear that she had a hundred-and-fourth birthday. We were not invited. Only her nurse, her cleaning woman, and — somehow — the plumber were there. She kept to her room. People said she was alert, that she asked about elections and the weather. No one visited her. We were embarrassed and, I’m sorry to say, a bit bored by her, and none of us saw her again until her funeral.

It was my first winter cruise. I was a waiter on the Allegra, most of the passengers well-to-do people who spent part of the winter cruising in the warm waters of the Pacific, from Puerto Escondido to Singapore and back, including stops in Australia and New Zealand. That winter we stopped along the South American coast too, from Guayaquil to Santiago, and then to Hawaii via Easter Island. Often the passengers did not bother to go ashore — just stayed on deck and looked at the pier and drank and made faces.

Ed and Wilma Hibbert avoided the others. They were in their mid- to late seventies, from Seattle. Always dined alone, did not socialize, Ed very attentive to Wilma, who seemed the frail type. I heard whispers. “Snobs,” “Stuffed shirts,” “Pompous,” “Cold.” They must have heard them too.

Wilma fell ill at Callao, stayed in her suite, and was taken to a hospital in Lima, where she died. Ed Hibbert left the Allegra but did not vacate his suite. His table was empty until Honolulu, where he rejoined the ship.

And then the invitations began, one widow after another inviting him to dinner, to drinks, to the fancy-dress ball. They were not amateurs but persistent and alluring seducers.

Amazingly, Ed obliged. He seemed to welcome the attention, not like a bereaved spouse at all but like the most discriminating bachelor. The same women who had made demeaning remarks now praised him and competed for his affection. And I had the feeling that in obliging them, dallying with them, without committing himself, he was having his revenge, perhaps revenge on his wife, too.

He went on two more cruises, same routine, didn’t remarry.

I did not know Dennis Concannon. I was invited to his funeral by a friend of his son’s who needed a ride. As it was a rainy day and I had nothing else to do, I stayed for the service, sitting in the back. The whole business was nondenominational, according to Mr. C’s wishes. The turnout was very large — the church was filled. A reading of his favorite poem, by Robert Frost, with the memorable line “That withered hag.” Several sentimental songs. Then the eulogies. One man got up and said, “I never met anyone else like Dennis. I worked for him for almost twenty-five years, and in all that time he didn’t even buy me a cup of coffee.” He went on — people laughed.

A woman: “I used to tremble whenever I was called to his office. I never knew whether he was going to make a pass at me or fire me.”

Another man: “The salesmen put in their expense reports that they’d had their cars washed. ‘Salesmen have to have clean cars.’ But Dennis said, ‘This was the fourteenth of last month. I compared the car washes to the weather report. It was raining that day. I’m not paying.’”

Someone else: “His partner, George Kelly, would be sitting next to him at some of the meetings. One would talk. Then the other, but saying the same thing. It was terrible. We called it ‘Dennis in Stereo.’”

There were more speakers, with equally unpleasant stories of this man. At the end of the funeral I knew Dennis Concannon as a mean, unreasonable, bullying bastard who had gotten rich by exploiting and intimidating these people, the attendees at his funeral — not mourners but people who were having the last word.