Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories

Mr. Bones

WHENEVER I GET sentimental and take on a reminiscing tone and talk about how my father used to read to me and encourage me, I realize that I’m lying. Is it a way of being kind to his memory, like “You look marvelous,” something he used to say? “Pretty as a picture”—seldom true. “Looks good enough to eat,” over my mother’s gristly meatloaf. But then generosity can often seem to verge on the satirical.

My father, apparently a simple cheery soul, seemed impossible to know. His smiles made him impenetrable. In his lifetime I found it hard to see through his niceness, and even now, ten years after his death, he seems more enigmatic than ever. There he stands, at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him, a satisfied man with the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associate with an old-fashioned servant. “Glad to oblige!”

A smile is the hardest expression to fathom — you don’t inquire, you don’t even wonder. He must have known that. I never thought: Who is he? What does he want? He said he was happy. He would not have said otherwise, but though I believed him, there were things I didn’t know. At the period I am thinking of, he had just lost his job. Never mind, he found another one. Did he like it? “I’m tickled to death!”

He was so thoroughly nice it did not occur to us that we did not know him. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He never went out at night except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after first becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidants — he wasn’t the confiding type. He wasn’t a joiner.

I was eleven. With two older brothers and a younger sister — there would be three more children eventually — I was invisible, in the lower middle of the pack, always a few steps behind, beneath notice. And my father was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a voice, a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. A hush. Dramatic departure, and then silence again.

This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder and tension and conflict in our household. It was crooked in the angular splinters in the woodwork, pulsing in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and without any voice, a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, and it was all masked by politeness, or sometimes hostile displays of affection. The quiet-seeming household is often more turbulent or intimidating than the household of the tyrant or the drunkard.

One of the unspoken conflicts in the house was the house itself, a constant reproach in the cabinets that failed to catch, in every creak of the floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the stains on the ceiling like mocking faces, every draft that scuttled under the doors. All these awkward reminders. My mother’s version of the story, which was the blaming version — the one that my mother wouldn’t let him live down — was that having decided that we had to move (four kids in a tiny house and a fifth on the way), my father would be the house hunter. My mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked us to make a decision, so that if we failed she could say, “Whose fault is that?” Deniability was a defense she mastered long before such a word was coined.

By directing my father to look for a new house, she became the one to be propitiated: a scolding silence if it was a good choice, loud blame if it was a bad one. Dad was like hired help, the house hunter. “And it better be a good one.”

Unused to the trick of spending a large amount of money, risking this big decision, Dad became more affable, more genial than I’d ever seen him. It was sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table risking everything on the turn of a card.

He saw three or four houses. They were unsuitable. He liked all of them. My mother was vexed. This was dinner table talk: we were discouraged from speaking during mealtime, so we listened. Buying anything involved endless deliberation. “What’s good about it?” my mother would say. “It’ll be hard to heat,” or “It’s not on a bus line,” or “That’s a bad neighborhood.”

One winter night Mother was in tears. Dad had seen another house he liked. He was told the price. He was in the nervous affable mood, his gambler’s anxiety. He did not bargain, or say “My wife will have to see it,” or “We’ll think it over.”

He said, “We’ll take it!” with a sudden flourish of money that startled even the seller of the house, who was a cranky old woman in a soiled apron.

That was my mother’s version, in the oral tradition of the family history, the only version that was ever allowed, all the blame on Dad. In a matter of an hour or so my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it in the dark. Because it was January and he worked until five-thirty, he would have driven there after work, tramped through the snow, looked it over, and by seven or so it was a deal.

The reason for my mother’s tears was that, anticipating his finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him, and the papers he signed that very night (the old woman had them handy in the pocket of her apron) specified a deposit of that amount, nonreturnable.

“Our whole life’s savings!” my mother cried, thumping the table. “How could you?”

Obviously he’d liked the house, he didn’t want to risk losing it, he wasn’t a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life’s savings — wasted!”

My father suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table — and other times too. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved — a huge disruptive event in a family with few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it memorable were my mother’s tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father — sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed orphan — looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poor Anna.”

The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and somehow unfinished — the kitchen not quite right, the doors either sagging or poorly fitting or missing, varnished cabinets of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There’s room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.

“Life’s savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much: my father’s new job was menial, a shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.

He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All’s well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures in the theater of discontent.

Dad said, “Say, I’ll see to that.”

He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you’d see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.

Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.

Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You’re not going to paint that house yellow!”

So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray.

“That’s a lot better,” the neighbor said.

My mother pointed out that he’d dripped gray paint onto the white trim. He corrected it by repainting the trim.

Mother said, “Now you’ve gone and dripped white paint on the shingles.”

Dad smiled, repainting, never quite getting it right.

Anticipating warm weather and insects, he put up screens. The screens were wobbly and rusted; holes had been poked in them.

“Didn’t you look at the screens before?”

She was talking about January, when he’d bought the house. This was mid-March.

The stove was unreliable. The fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, and that had to be replaced by a plumber, Dad’s fellow choir member Mel Hankey. He worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled, like giving off a smell.

My father’s new job was a problem: long hours, low pay, my mother home with the small children, and pregnant — due in June. She was heavy and walked with a tippy, leaning-back gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved.

“I lost a child two years ago.”

As though she was threatening to lose this one.

Dad said, “It’s going to be fine.”

“How would you know?”

He smiled, he had no reply. As a sort of penance he washed the dishes, calling out, “Who’s going to dry for me?” And because of the tension, each of us said, “I’ll do it!” and pushed around trying to be helpful, like terrified children in a drunken household. But there was no drunkard here, only a disappointed woman and her smiling husband.

I said he had no recreations. He had one, the choir, legitimate because it was church-related. He had a strong, confident, rather tuneless voice, with a gravelly character, and even if thirty other people were singing, I could always discern my father’s voice in the “Pange Lingua” or “O Salutaris.”

“You’re not going out again?”

“Say, I’ve got choir practice.”

He prays twice who sings to the Lord was printed on the hymnal. He believed that. Choir practice was more than a form of devotion, an expression of piety; it was a spiritual duty. But Dad always went alone, never taking any of us as initiates to the choir, and he always came back happy — not in anything he said, but his mood was improved, you could tell by the tilt of his head, his movements, his breathing, the way he listened, with a different sort of smile, a relaxed posture, his walk. He weighed less. He was always happier after he sang.

April came.

“The house is full of flies.”

“I’ll take care of that.”

He patched the screens with little glued-on squares of screen.

“And the paint’s peeling.”

Instead of priming it or waiting until the summer, he’d painted over the grime and the paint hadn’t stuck.

“The faucet drips.”

“Say, I’ll pick up some washers on the way home from choir.”

“This is the second time I’ve mentioned it.”

Dad was putting on his hat, snapping the brim, looking jaunty.

“You never listen.”

All he did was listen, but there’s a certain sort of nagging repetition that can deafen you. We didn’t know we’d come to the end of a chapter, that we were starting a new chapter. And after it was over we knew Dad much better, or rather knew a different side of him.

The wickedest episodes of revelation can have the most innocent beginnings. This one began with a song. It seized my attention at the time, but looking back on it, it seems even weirder, scarier, almost unbelievable, except that I witnessed it all and even now remember it with reluctance because of my crush of embarrassment. I came to understand that my father’s smiles made him an enigma; but for a brief period I knew him, and though it was a kind of comedy, I was frightened and ashamed and shocked. The revelation unfolded obliquely, growing worse.

He came home carrying a large envelope with a tucked-in flap. Trying to look casual, he got his fingers inside and with a self-conscious flourish took out some pages of sheet music. The illustration on the cover showed a black man in a gleaming top hat, white gloves, mouth smilingly open in the act of singing. I could see from his features that he was a white man wearing makeup.

“Say”—Dad was rattling the pages—“can you play this, Mother?”

Asking a favor always made him shy. Being asked a favor made Mother ponderous and powerful. Oh, so now you want something, do you? she seemed to reply in the upward tilt of her head and triumphant smile.

She looked with a kind of distaste at the sheet music, plucking at it with unwilling fingers, as though it was unclean. And it was rather grubby, rubbed at the edges, torn at the crease where it was folded on the left side. It showed all the signs of having been propped on many music stands. Old, much-used sheet music had a limp cloth-like look.

After a while, Mother brought herself and her big belly to the piano. She spun the stool’s seat to the right height and, balancing herself on it, reached over her pregnancy as if across a counter. Frowning at the music, she banged out some notes — I knew from her playing that she was angry. Dad leaned into his bifocals.

Mandy

There’s a minister handy

And it sure would be dandy…

He gagged a little, cleared his throat, and began again, in the wrong key.

He could not read music, though he could carry a tune if he’d heard it enough times. In this first effort he struggled to find the melody.

“You’re not listening,” Mother said.

“Just trying to…,” he said, and clawed at the song sheet instead of finishing the sentence.

He started to sing again, reading the words, but too fast, and Mother was pounding the keys and tramping on the pedals as though she was at the wheel of some sort of vehicle, like a big wooden bus she was driving down a steep hill with her feet and hands.

Mandy

There’s a minister handy…

Hearing the blundering repetition of someone being taught something from scratch was unbearable to me, because, probably from exasperation, I learned it before they did. I was usually way ahead while they were still faltering. I was always in a fury for it to be over.

I left the room, but even two rooms away I heard,

So don’t you linger

Here’s the ring for your finger

Isn’t it a humdinger?

Against my will I listened to the whole thing until the song was in my head, not as it was meant to be sung, but in Dad’s tuneless and halting rendition.

Later, over dinner, in reply to a question I didn’t hear, Dad said, “Fella gave it to me — loaned it. I’ll have to give it back afterwards.”

“Who loaned it?”

“John Flaherty.”

“Why?”

“Mel Hankey loaned it to him.”

“What’s it for?”

“Minstrel show.”

Mother made a face. He was eating. As though to avoid further questions, Dad filled his mouth with food and went on eating, with the faraway look he assumed when he didn’t want to be questioned. I’m busy thinking, his expression said. You don’t want to interrupt.

Then, out of the side of his mouth, he said, “Pass the mouse turd, sonny.”

We stared at him. He was chewing.

“Tell you a great meal,” he said. “Lettuce. Turnip. And pea.”

He winked. We had no idea.

“Minstrel show,” he seemed to feel, explained everything — and perhaps it did, but not to me. Words I had never heard before had a significance for him, and a private satisfaction. But “mouse turd”?

After that, he practiced the song “Mandy” every night, singing with more confidence and tunefulness, Mother playing more loudly, thumping her pedaling feet. His voice was strong, assertive rather than melodious. Within a week, he grew hoarse, lost his voice, and from the next room it was as though another man was singing, not Dad but a growly stranger.

Around this time, having mastered the song, he revealed his new name. This was at the dinner table, Mother at one end, Dad at the other, Fred, Floyd, Rose, and me between them.

“Fella says to me, ‘Wasn’t that song just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you, Mr. Bones?’ I says, ‘No, but the fella that sang it touched me, and he still owes me five bucks.’”

“Who’s Mr. Bones?” I asked.

“Yours truly.”

“No, it’s not,” Fred said.

“Only one thing in the world keeps you from being a barefaced liar,” he said to Fred.

We were shocked at his suddenness.

“Your mustache,” Dad said, and wagged his head and chuckled.

“I don’t have a mustache,” Fred said.

Mother got flustered when she heard anyone telling a joke. She said, “Don’t be stupid.”

“You think I’m stupid,” Dad said eagerly. “You should see my brother. He walks like this.” He got up from the table and bent over and hopped forward.

He did have a brother, that was the confusing part.

“You’re so pretty and you’re so intelligent,” he said, striking a pose with Mother, using that new snappy voice.

“I wish I could say the same for you.”

Dad laughed, a kind of cackle, as though it was just what he wanted to hear. He said, “You could, if you told as big a lie as I just did.” He nudged me and said, “She was too ugly to have her face lifted. They lowered her body instead.”

With that, he skipped out of the room, his hands in the air, and I thought for a moment that Mother was going to cry.

He had become a different man, and it had happened quickly, just like that, calling himself Mr. Bones and teasing us, teasing Mother. She was bewildered and upset. The song he mastered he kept humming, and his jokes, not really jokes, were more like taunts.

“Maybe it’s his new job,” Fred said in the bedroom after lights out.

Floyd said, “It’s this house. Ma hates it. It’s Dad’s fault. He’s just being silly.”

“What’s a minstrel show?” I asked.

No one answered.

Trying to be friendly, Mother asked Dad about his job a few days later.

“They said I’d be a connoisseur, but I’m just a common sewer.”

Then that gesture with the hands, waggling his fingers.

“Said I’d be a pretty good physician, but I said, ‘I’m not good at fishin’.’ Or a doctor of some standing. I says, ‘No, I’m sitting — in the shoe department.’”

Mother said coldly, “We need new linoleum in the upstairs bathroom.”

“And you need new clothes, because your clothes are like the two French cities, Toulouse and Toulon.”

“Don’t be a jackass.”

“Mister Jackass to you.”

“I wish John Flaherty hadn’t given you that music.”

“Lightning Flaherty said I needed it. Tambo gave it to him. Play it for me again, I need a good physic.”

Mother began to clear the table.

“I love work,” Dad said. “I could watch it all day.”

Mother went to the sink and leaned over. She had turned on the water, her bent back toward us, and I associated the water running into the dishpan with her tears.

He was a new man, even my brothers said so, though, being older than me, they were often out of the house in the evenings when Dad — Mr. Bones — was at his friskiest. He had swagger and assurance, and if I tried to get his attention, or if he was asked a question, he began to sing “Mandy.” He had somehow learned two other songs: “Rosie, You Are My Posie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”—Lightning’s song, and Tambo’s, so he said.

I was used to my father singing, but not these songs; used to his good humor, but there was anger in these jokes. And he, who seldom went out at night except to Benediction or choir practice, was now out most nights. He stopped asking Mother to play the piano for him; he would simply break into song, drawling it out of the side of his mouth.

When you croon, croon a tune,

From the heart of Dixie…

He didn’t look any different, he dressed the same, in a gray suit and white shirt and blue tie and the topcoat he disparaged as “too dressy.” One day the sleeve was limp. He flapped it at Mother and said, “I know what you’re thinking: World War Two,” as though his arm was missing. Then he shot the arm out of the sleeve and said, “Nope. Filene’s Basement. Bad fit!”

The variation that night and for nights to come was the tambourine he had somehow acquired. When he made a joke or a quip he shook it and rapped it on his knee and elbow and shook it again. Shika-shika-shika.

“RSVP,” he said, holding up a piece of mail. “Remember Send Vedding Present,” and he jingled and tapped the tambourine.

One day after school I went to the store where he worked. Instead of walking in, I kept my head down and crept to the side window to get a glimpse of Dad. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the shoe department, his chin in his hand, not looking like Mr. Bones but sad and silent, a man trying to remember something. Other clerks in shirtsleeves had gathered at the back of the store and were laughing, but not Dad. Were they ignoring him? He paid no attention. He was reading — unusual, a shoe clerk reading. I didn’t know this man either.

I began to be glad that he was out most evenings. At the other, smaller house we’d moved from, he was always at home after work, and in the early days of this new one — the bigger house that Mother hated — he was usually in his chair, dressed in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe, reading the Globe under a lamp in the corner. But after that first night, with “Mandy,” and then the jokes, and the tambourine, as Mr. Bones, he was out at night, sometimes didn’t come home for supper, or if he did, it was “Pass the mouse turd” or, holding the pepper shaker, “This is how I feel, like pulverized pepper — fine!”

“The oil burner’s back on the fritz,” Mother said.

Any mention of a problem with the house these days made Dad smile his Mr. Bones smile and roll his eyes.

“Heard about the King of England? He’s got a royal burner.”

“We’ll have to get Mel to look at it.”

“Tambo is a busy man, yes he is. Says to me, ‘What is the quickest way to the emergency ward?’ I says, ‘Tambo, just you stand in the middle of the road.’”

Mother did not react, except to say, “It’s giving off a funny smell.”

“Giving off a funny smell!” Dad said, and put one finger in the air, what I now recognized as a Mr. Bones gesture — he was about to say something and wanted attention. “Mr. Interlocutor, what is the difference between an elephant passing wind and a place where you might go for a drink?”

“I don’t think you understand,” Mother said in a strained voice. “This house hasn’t been right since the day we moved in. First it was the roof, then the paint, then the plumbing. Now it’s the heat. We’re not going to have any hot water. Everything’s wrong.”

Dad held his chin in his hand, as I’d seen him do at the store. He thought a moment, then looked around the table and said, “Mr. Interlocutor, the difference between an elephant passing wind and the place where you might go for a drink is — one is a barroom and the other is a bar-rooom!”

He said it so loud we jumped. He didn’t laugh. He drew his chair next to Mother and sang.

Rosie, you are my posie,

You are my heart’s bouquet.

Come out here in the moonlight,

There’s something sweet, love,

I want to say.

Mother looked awkward and sad. She wasn’t angry. In a way, by clowning, Dad took her mind off the problems of the house. She could not get his attention. And who was he anyway? He had a different voice, a jaunty manner.

It wasn’t any kind of joking I’d heard before from him. His teasing was more like mocking and bullying. He wouldn’t call Mel Hankey anything but Tambo, and John Flaherty was Lightning. They had never been close friends before — he had no friends — but now he had Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor.

“Morrie Daigle said he’d help you fix the roof.”

“Mr. Interlocutor is too hot to do that. He is so hot he will only read fan mail.”

That was how we found out who Mr. Interlocutor was.

“Have you lost your wallet?” Dad said to Floyd.

“No,” Floyd said, and clapped his hand to his pocket.

“Good. Then give me the five dollars you owe me.”

Floyd made a face, looked helpless, thrashed a little. It was true that Dad had given him five dollars, but he had not brought it up before this.

Dad said, “Hear about the Indian who had a red ant?”

I didn’t understand that one at all. I pictured an Indian with an insect. It made no sense.

There was something abrupt and deflecting in his humor. He made a joke and seemed to expand, pushing the house and his job aside. He’d been at the new job for six months now and never mentioned it. I had seen him in the store, not working but sitting in the chair where the shoe customers were supposed to sit, and instead of waiting on them, or talking to the other employees, he was reading.

Mother seemed to be afraid of him. Before, she had always made a remark, or nagged, or blamed. But these days she relented. She watched him. When he made a joke she became very quiet and blinked at him, as though she was thinking, What do you mean by that?

Floyd was on the basketball team, Fred played hockey, so they were out most evenings — practicing, they said. I knew it was an excuse to stay away from home and Mr. Bones. Rose was just a little kid of seven, and she actually found Mr. Bones funny, and let him tickle her.

But I had nowhere to go, and I didn’t like the angry jokes or the cruel teasing. Mr. Bones was always laughing or singing, and he never listened, except when he was thinking up another joke. He was a stranger to me, and for the first time I began to think, Who are you? What do you want?

What happened next was more shocking. Dad’s change was a surprise, but when he changed again he seemed monstrous. We thought, What next? It frightened the whole family, but maybe me especially, because I went to bed thinking, Who are you?

The light went on and I had the answer.

Most of the lights in the house were bare bulbs with no shades, hanging on frayed black whips from the ceiling — another source of Mother’s complaints — and the brightness of the one dangling in my bedroom made it worse. I had been woken up, so the light blazed and half blinded me. Yet I saw enough to be terrified.

A disfigured villain from a horror comic was bending over my bed — I realized only later that it was Dad — his whole face sticky black, a white oval outline around his lips. He wore a cap that even afterward I could not imagine was a wig, a red floppy bow tie, a yellow speckled vest, and a black coat, and he was emphatically holding his hands out in white gloves. He was smiling under that blackness that shone on his face, and he leaned over me and spoke, seeming to shriek.

“Give us a kiss, sonny boy!”

Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness.

His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I dreamed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door shut.

I even said into the menacing gloom, “Dad — are you there?”

Giving no answer was just the sort of thing he’d try as Mr. Bones.

I said again, “Dad?” And in a trembly voice, “Mr. Bones?”

I had not heard him leave. For all I knew he stayed there to scare me. But in the morning the room was empty.

At breakfast he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the lines on his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal.

“Pass me the dead flies, sonny,” he said in his Mr. Bones voice.

These days his remarks silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. I didn’t know how deeply Mother was upset — though I knew she was. Floyd and Fred were startled but sometimes pretended to find it funny, and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his “Toulouse and Toulon” joke, Floyd said, “Well, you’re like a town in Massachusetts — Marblehead.” Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, “I like that.”

But he kept on worrying Fred about college, and Floyd about trumpet lessons. We didn’t know what was coming next. We had not foreseen the songs or the jokes; we had not expected the black face. Maybe there was more.

His voice was hoarse from practicing, and now every night he came home in black makeup, his wig like a too-big woolly hat. He talked about Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor, and he told the same jokes. Hearing it again and again, I came to understand the one about the Indian and the red ant — red aunt was the point of it. We never pronounced it “ant,” always “awnt.”

I felt embarrassed and fearful. We were afraid to ask him about his job in the shoe department these days. If Mother mentioned the house, that there were drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, linoleum to be laid, painting to be done, I didn’t hear it. All our attention was on him, who he was now, Mr. Bones. To almost any question, he began singing.

A million baby kisses I’ll deliver

If you will only sing that “Swanee River”

The rhythm was there, a confident slowness and drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang, and he raised his white gloves. And Mother sat at the piano, looking anxious, playing the melody.

It seemed so wrong, I was always glancing at the door, scared that someone — a neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grandpa — might come in and see him swaying and singing with a black face and that wig.

He had another song too:

When life seems full of clouds and rain,

And I am filled with naught but pain,

Who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain?

He would always pause after that, and lower himself and put his head out and say, “Nobody!”

His voice was gargly and cross, as though he was in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one.

When all day long things go amiss,

And I go home to find some bliss,

Who hands to me a glowin’ kiss?

He was standing over Mother at the piano, and her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.

“Nobody!”

The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I’d seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. And the other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves, as though they knew he was Mr. Bones.

At a funeral in church one Saturday, I stood beside Ed Hankey, both of us altar boys, in starched blouse-like surplices, holding tall smoking candles, preparing to follow the coffin down the main aisle. The priest was swinging a thurible — more smoke — and the relatives of the dead man were howling.

Hankey said in a whisper, “You going to the minstrel show?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“My old man’s in it. So’s yours.”

“I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.”

“It’s a wicked pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Hankey said.

Then we saw the priest glaring at us. We straightened our candles and approached the coffin.

This big event was just a talent show to Hankey. And his white-haired father, who worked on the MTA buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had taken charge and intimidated us all.

He had a different complaint about each of us. These objections were clearer when he was in blackface and a wig than when he was just Mr. Bones in name. He was now a man in a mask, someone to fear, saying things he normally avoided, singing strange songs. In his minstrel show costume he could be as reckless as he wanted.

It was true that Fred told fibs and didn’t want to go to college, true that Floyd owed him money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mother’s nagging caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars was cheap and tasteless; “mouse turd” was a good name for it. The stale raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd hearing these things from his gleaming black face, his white-outlined mouth, his woolly wig askew, and rapping his tambourine after he spoke.

“Dad,” we said, pleading.

“Dad done gone. ‘That was prior to his decease, Mr. Bones.’ I says, ‘He had no niece.’”

Shika-shika-shika went the tambourine.

He was happy, not just smiling but defiantly happy, powerfully happy, talking to us, teasing us in ways I’d never heard before. He had once been remote, with a kindly smile that made him hard to approach. Now he was up close and laughing at us and he wouldn’t go away.

He was someone new, convincingly a real man, as though he’d been turned inside out, the true Dad showing. Swanking in the role of a comical slave, he’d become a frightening master to us, and because he was so strange we had no way of responding to his tyrannical teasing.

Something else I discovered, because I kept going to the store to lurk and spy on him, was that instead of sitting silently alone in the shoe department he’d been hired to run, he now had company: Mel Hankey, John Flaherty, Morrie Daigle, and two men I’d never seen before. All of them with their heads together, sitting in the customers’ chairs, whispering, as if they were cooking something up. So odd to see this in a store where everyone else was working or shopping or being loudly busy.

That was his secret. Mine too. The whole affair looked more serious than just black faces and songs and jokes. These men were like conspirators, with a single plan in their minds, and the sight of them impressed me, because Dad was in charge. I could see it in his posture, sitting upright like a musician holding an instrument; but the instrument was his hand. Wearing white gloves, he seemed to be giving directions, issuing energetic commands. Mr. Bones was their leader.

So, after all, he had friends — these five whispering white men, who were black conspirators. We had taken him to be a man with no friends outside the family, no interests outside the house and the church; but here he was with his pals, Tambo, Lightning, Mr. Interlocutor, and the rest whose names I didn’t know.

But that same night, as though to dispute all this, he came home after dinner in blackface and floppy coat and wig, and said, “Listen to Mr. Bones.”

Fred was fiddling with the radio, Mother was at the sink with Floyd, I was looking at a comic book.

“I says, listen to Mr. Bones!”

He spoke so loud we jumped, and as we did, he banged and clicked his tambourine. He was like a drunk you couldn’t talk back to, yet he hadn’t had a drink.

I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody,

I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time!

And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,

I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!

He searched us, shaking his head, and moaned, “Nobody, no time!”

Was it a song? Was it a poem? Was it a speech? It was too furious to be entertainment. We sat horrified by the sight of Dad in blackface, rapping his tambourine on his knees and his elbow and then bonking himself on the head with it.

Even though it was painful to hear, it was being spoken by a man who had our full attention. We had to listen; we couldn’t look away. That proved he was the opposite of the poor soul he was describing — he was stronger than we were, but I recognized the “nobody” he spoke of. It wasn’t Mr. Bones, it was Dad.

After that, he went over to Fred and said, “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

“College,” Fred said, blinking fiercely.

“Know the difference between a college professor and a railway conductor?”

“No.”

“No what?”

“No, Mr. Bones.”

“One trains minds and the other minds trains. Which one do you want to be?”

“College professor, Mr. Bones.”

But Mr. Bones had turned to Floyd. “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

“Trumpet lessons, Mr. Bones.”

“You always were good at blowing your own horn. Ha!” Then he had me by the chin and was lifting it, as Dad had never done. “Who was that lady you saw me with last night?”

With his white-gloved hand gripping my chin, I couldn’t speak.

“That was no lady. That was my wife!”

Mother muttered as he shook his tambourine.

“You’ll need some Karo syrup for that throat,” Mother said, and handed him a bottle and a spoon.

He took a swig straight from the bottle, then said to Fred, “Here, want to keep this bottle up your end?”

I didn’t know it was a joke until he lowered his shoulders and swung his arms and shook his tambourine.

I had been dreading going to the show for weeks, and when the day came I said, “I don’t want to go. I’ve got a wicked bad stomachache.”

“Everyone’s going,” Mother said, trembling with a kind of nervous insistence that I recognized: if I defied her, she might start screaming.

On a wet Saturday night in May we went together to the high school auditorium in our old car, Mother driving. I could tell she was upset from the way she drove, riding the brake, stamping on the clutch, pushing the gearshift too hard. Dad had gone separately. “Tambo’s stopping by for me.”

I hurried into the auditorium and slid down in my seat so that no one would see me. When the music began to play and the curtain went up, I covered my face and peered through my fingers.

Dad — Mr. Bones — was sitting in a chair onstage, and the others, too, sat on chairs in a semicircle. Mr. Bones looked confident and happy; he was dressed like a clown, but he looked powerful. He was wearing his floppy suit, shiny vest, big bow tie, white gloves and tilted wig, and his face was black. All of them were in blackface except Morrie Daigle, in the center, who wore a white suit and a white top hat.

“Mr. Bones, wasn’t that music just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you?”

I pressed my fingers to my ears, closed my eyes, and groaned so that I wouldn’t hear the rest. I wanted to disappear. I was slumped in my seat so my head wasn’t showing, and even though I kept my hands to my ears I heard familiar phrases: physician of good standing and that was prior to his decease.

The songs I knew by heart penetrated me as I sat there trying to deafen myself. Mr. Bones sang “Mandy.” “Rosie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby” were sung by others. Someone else sang “Nobody.”

I heard, You should see my brother, he walks like this, and knew it was Mr. Bones. I heard, bare-faced liar. I heard, Toulouse and Toulon. Even so, my eyes were shut, my palms stuck against my ears, and I was groaning.

There was much more, skits and songs. People laughing, people clapping, the loud music, the shouts, the tambourines, the familiar phrases. This was silly and embarrassing, yet the same jokes and songs had intimidated us at home. And Mr. Bones had been different at home too, not this ridiculous man clowning, far off on the stage, but someone else I didn’t want to think of as Dad, teasing us and making fools of us and getting us to agree with him and make decisions. That was who he was — Dad as Mr. Bones.

When the people onstage were taking their bows and the auditorium was still dark, I said, “I have to go to the bathroom,” and ran out and hid in our car.

Back home afterward, no one said anything about the show. Dad was in his regular clothes, with the faint greasy streaks of black on his neck and behind his ears. He was excited, breathless, but he didn’t speak. The strange episode and uproar were over. Later, I got anxious when he hummed “Mandy” or “Rosie” while he was shaving in the kitchen, but he didn’t make any jokes, didn’t tease or taunt anymore. Looking through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, in the shoe department, smiling at the front door as though to welcome a customer.

The following year there was talk of a minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the schools, black children protected by National Guardsmen, white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened black students who were being liberated. The bald-headed president made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, maybe thinking how Mr. Bones had been liberated too, or banished. It was not what he had expected. The expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long Dad was smiling.