The Liar

Tobias Wolff The Liar

My mother read everything except books. Advertisements on buses, entire menus as we ate, billboards; if it had no cover it interested her. So when she found a letter in my drawer that was not addressed to her she read it. “What difference does it make if James has nothing to hide?”— that was her thought. She stuffed the letter in the drawer when she finished it and walked from room to room in the big empty house, talking to herself. She took the letter out and read it again to get the facts straight. Then, without putting on her coat or locking the door, she went down the steps and headed for the church at the end of the street. No matter how angry and confused she might be, she always went to four o’clock Mass and now it was four o’clock.

It was a fine day, blue and cold and still, but Mother walked as though into a strong wind, bent forward at the waist with her feet hurrying behind in short, busy steps. My brother and sisters and I considered this walk of hers funny and we smirked at one another when she crossed in front of us to stir the fire or water a plant. We didn’t let her catch us at it. It would have puzzled her to think that there might be anything amusing about her. Her one concession to the fact of humor was an insincere, startling laugh. Strangers often stared at her.

While Mother waited for the priest, who was late, she prayed. She prayed in a familiar, orderly, firm way: first for her late husband, my father, then for her parents — also dead. She said a quick prayer for my father’s parents (just touching base; she had disliked them) and finally for her children in order of their ages, ending with me. Mother did not consider originality a virtue aiiu UHLU iiiy iiaiiic came up her prayers were exactly the same as on any other day.

But when she came to me she spoke up boldly. “I thought he wasn’t going to do it anymore. Murphy said he was cured. What am I supposed to do now?” There was reproach in her tone. Mother put great hope in her notion that I was cured. She regarded my cure as an answer to her prayers and by way of thanksgiving sent a lot of money to the Thomasite Indian Mission, money she had been saving for a trip to Rome. She felt cheated and she let her feelings be known. When the priest came in Mother slid back on the seat and followed the Mass with concentration. After communion she began to worry again and went straight home without stopping to talk to Frances, the woman who always cornered Mother after Mass to tell about the awful things done to her by Communists, devil-worshipers, and Rosicrucians. Frances watched her go with narrowed eyes.

Once in the house, Mother took the letter from my drawer and brought it into the kitchen. She held it over the stove with her fingernails, looking away so that she would not be drawn into it again, and set it on fire. When it began to burn her fingers she dropped it in the sink and watched it blacken and flutter and close upon itself like a fist. Then she washed it down the drain and called Dr. Murphy.

The letter was to my friend Ralphy in Arizona. He used to live across the street from us but he had moved. Most of the letter was about a tour we, the junior class, had taken of Alcatraz. That was all right. What got Mother was the last paragraph where I said that she had been coughing up blood and the doctors weren’t sure what was wrong with her, but that we were hoping for the best.

This wasn’t true. Mother took pride in her physical condition, considered herself a horse: “I’m a regular horse,” she would reply when people asked about her health. For several years now I had been saying unpleasant things that weren’t true and this habit of mine irked Mother greatly, enough to persuade her to send me to Dr. Murphy, in whose office I was sitting when she burned the letter. Dr. Murphy was our family physician and had no training in psychoanalysis but he took an interest in “things of the mind,” as he put it. He had treated me for appendicitis and tonsillitis and Mother thought that he could put the truth into me as easily as he took things out of me, a hope Dr. Murphy did not share. He was basically interested in getting me to understand what I did, and lately he had been moving toward the conclusion that I understood what I did as well as I ever would.

Dr. Murphy listened to Mother’s account of the letter, and what she had done with it. He was curious about the wording I had used and became irritated when Mother told him she had burned it. “The point is,” she said, “he was supposed to be cured and he’s not.”

“Margaret, I never said he was cured.”

“You certainly did. Why else would I have sent over a thousand dollars to the Thomasite Mission?”

“I said that he was responsible. That means that James knows what he’s doing, not that he’s going to stop doing it.”

“I’m sure you said he was cured.”

“Never. To say that someone is cured you have to know what health is. With this kind of thing that’s impossible. What do you mean by curing James, anyway?”

“You know.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“Getting him back to reality, what else?”

“Whose reality? Mine or yours?”

“Murphy, what are you talking about? James isn’t crazy, he’s a liar.”

“Well, you have a point there.”

“What am I going to do with him?”

“I don’t think there’s much you can do. Be patient.”

“I’ve been patient.”

“If I were you, Margaret, I wouldn’t make too much of this. James doesn’t steal, does he?”

“Of course not.”

“Or beat people up or talk back.”

“No.”

“Then you have a lot to be thankful for.”

“I don’t think I can take any more of it. That business about leukemia last summer. And now this.”

“Eventually he’ll outgrow it, I think.”

“Murphy, he’s sixteen years old. What if he doesn’t outgrow it? What if he just gets better at it?”

Finally Mother saw that she wasn’t going to get any satisfaction from Dr. Murphy, who kept reminding her of her blessings. She said something cutting to him and he said something pompous back and she hung up. Dr. Murphy stared at the receiver. “Hello,” he said, then replaced it on the cradle. He ran his hand over his head, a habit remaining from a time when he had hair. To show that he was a good sport he often joked about his baldness, but I had the feeling that he regretted it deeply. Looking at me across the desk, he must have wished that he hadn’t taken me on. Treating a friend’s child was like investing a friend’s money.

“I don’t have to tell you who that was.”

I nodded.

Dr. Murphy pushed his chair back and swiveled it around so he could look out the window behind him, which took up most of the wall. There were still a few sailboats out on the Bay, but they were all making for shore. A woolly gray fog had covered the bridge and was moving in fast. The water seemed calm from this far up, but when I looked closely I could see white flecks everywhere, so it must have been pretty choppy.

“I’m surprised at you,” he said. “Leaving something like that lying around for her to find. If you really have to do these things you could at least be kind and do them discreetly. It’s not easy for your mother, what with your father dead and all the others somewhere else.”

“I know. I didn’t mean for her to find it.”

“Well.” He tapped his pencil against his teeth. He was not convinced professionally, but personally he may have been. “I think you ought to go home now and straighten things out.”

“I guess I’d better.”

“Tell your mother I might stop by, either tonight or tomorrow. And, James — don’t underestimate her.”

While my father was alive we usually went to Yosemite for three or four days during the summer. My mother would drive and Father would point out places of interest, meadows where boom towns once stood, hanging trees, rivers that were said to flow upstream at certain times. Or he read to us; he had that grown-ups’ idea that children love Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. The four of us sat in the back seat with our faces composed, attentive, while our hands and feet pushed, pinched, stomped, goosed, prodded, dug, and kicked.

One night a bear came into our camp just after dinner. Mother had made a tuna casserole and it must have smelled to him like something worth dying for. He came into the camp while we were sitting around the fire and stood swaying back and forth. My brother Michael saw him first and elbowed me, then my sisters saw him and screamed. Mother and Father had their backs to him but Mother must have guessed what it was because she immediately said, “Don’t scream like that. You might frighten him and there’s no telling what he’ll do. We’ll just sing and he’ll go away.”

We sang “Row Row Row Your Boat” but the bear stayed. He circled us several times, rearing up now and then on his hind legs to stick his nose into the air. By the light of the fire I could see his doglike face and watch the muscles roll under his loose skin like rocks in a sack. We sang harder as he circled us, coming closer and closer. “All right,” Mother said, “enough’s enough.” She stood abruptly. The bear stopped moving and watched her. “Beat it,” Mother said. The bear sat down and looked from side to side. “Beat it,” she said again, and leaned over and picked up a rock.

“Margaret, don’t,” my father said.

She threw the rock hard and hit the bear in the stomach. Even in the dim light I could see the dust rising from his fur. He grunted and stood to his full height. “See that?” Mother shouted: “He’s filthy. Filthy!” One of my sisters giggled. Mother picked up another rock. “Please, Margaret,” my father said. Just then the bear turned and shambled away. Mother pitched the rock after him. For the rest of the night he loitered around the camp until he found the tree where we had hung our food. He ate it all. The next day we drove back to the city. We could have bought more supplies in the valley, but Father wanted to go and would not give in to any argument. On the way home he tried to jolly everyone up by making jokes, but Michael and my sisters ignored him and looked stonily out the windows.

Things were never easy between my mother and me, but I didn’t underestimate her. She underestimated me. When I was little she suspected me of delicacy, because I didn’t like being thrown into the air, and because when I saw her and the others working themselves up for a roughhouse I found somewhere else to be. When they did drag me in I got hurt, a knee in the lip, a bent finger, a bloody nose, and this too Mother seemed to hold against me, as if I arranged my hurts to get out of playing.

Even things I did well got on her nerves. We all loved puns except Mother, who didn’t get them, and next to my father I was the best in the family. My specialty was the Swifty—” ‘You can bring the prisoner down,’ said Tom condescendingly.” Father encouraged me to perform at dinner, which must have been a trial for outsiders. Mother wasn’t sure what was going on, but she didn’t like it.

She suspected me in other ways. I couldn’t go to the movies without her examining my pockets to make sure I had enough money to pay for the ticket. When I went away to camp she tore my pack apart in front of all the boys who were waiting in the bus outside the house. I would rather have gone without my sleeping bag and a few changes of underwear, which I had forgotten, than be made such a fool of. Her distrust was the thing that made me forgetful.

And she thought I was cold-hearted because of what happened the day my father died and later at his funeral. I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral, and showed signs of boredom during the eulogy, fiddling around with the hymnals. Mother put my hands into my lap and I left them there without moving them as though they were things I was holding for someone else. The effect was ironical and she resented it. We had a sort of reconciliation a few days later after I closed my eyes at school and refused to open them. When several teachers and then the principal failed to persuade me to look at them, or at some reward they claimed to be holding, I was handed over to the school nurse, who tried to pry the lids open and scratched one of them badly. My eye swelled up and I went rigid. The principal panicked and called Mother, who fetched me home. I wouldn’t talk to her, or open my eyes, or bend, and they had to lay me on the back seat and when we reached the house Mother had to lift me up the steps one at a time. Then she put me on the couch and played the piano to me all afternoon. Finally I opened my eyes. We hugged each other and I wept. Mother did not really believe my tears, but she was willing to accept them because I had staged them for her benefit.

My lying separated us, too, and the fact that my promises not to lie anymore seemed to mean nothing to me. Often my lies came back to her in embarrassing ways, people stopping her in the street and saying how sorry they were to hear that. No one in the neighborhood enjoyed embarrassing Mother, and these situations stopped occurring once everybody got wise to me. There was no saving her from strangers, though. The summer after Father died I visited my uncle in Redding and when I got back I found to my surprise that Mother had come to meet my bus. I tried to slip away from the gentleman who had sat next to me but I couldn’t shake him. When he saw Mother embrace me he came up and presented her with a card and told her to get in touch with him if things got any worse. She gave him his card back and told him to mind his own business. Later, on the way home, she made me repeat what I had said to the man. She shook her head. “It’s not fair to people,” she said, “telling them things like that. It confuses them.” It seemed to me that Mother had confused the man, not I, but I didn’t say so. I agreed with her that I shouldn’t say such things and promised not to do it again, a promise I broke three hours later in conversation with a woman in the park.

It wasn’t only the lies that disturbed Mother; it was their morbidity. This was the real issue between us, as it had been between her and my father. Mother did volunteer work at Children’s Hospital and St. Anthony’s Dining Hall, collected things for the St. Vincent de Paul Society. She was a lighter of candles. My brother and sisters took after her in this way. My father was a curser of the dark. And he loved to curse the dark. He was never more alive than when he was indignant about something. For this reason the most important act of the day for him was the reading of the evening paper.

Ours was a terrible paper, indifferent to the city that bought it, indifferent to medical discoveries — except for new kinds of gases that made your hands fall off when you sneezed — and indifferent to politics and art. Its business was outrage, horror, gruesome coincidence. When my father sat down in the living room with the paper Mother stayed in the kitchen and kept the children busy, all except me, because I was quiet and could be trusted to amuse myself. I amused myself by watching my father.

He sat with his knees spread, leaning forward, his eyes only inches from the print. As he read he nodded to himself. Sometimes he swore and threw the paper down and paced the room, then picked it up and began again. Over a period of time he developed the habit of reading aloud to me. He always started with the society section, which he called the parasite page. This column began to take on the character of a comic strip or a serial, with the same people showing up from one day to the next, blinking in chiffon, awkwardly holding their drinks for the sake of Peninsula orphans, grinning under sunglasses on the deck of a ski hut in the Sierras. The skiers really got his goat, probably because he couldn’t understand them. The activity itself was inconceivable to him. When my sisters went to Lake Tahoe one winter weekend with some friends and came back excited about the beauty of the place, Father calmed them right down. “Snow,” he said, “is overrated.”

Then the news, or what passed in the paper for news: bodies unearthed in Scotland, former Nazis winning elections, rare animals slaughtered, misers expiring naked in freezing houses upon mattresses stuffed with thousands, millions; marrying priests, divorcing actresses, high-rolling oilmen building fantastic mausoleums in honor of a favorite horse, cannibalism. Through all this my father waded with a fixed and weary smile.

Mother encouraged him to take up causes, to join groups, but he would not. He was uncomfortable with people outside the family. He and my mother rarely went out, and rarely had people in, except on feast days and national holidays. Their guests were always the same, Dr. Murphy and his wife and several others whom they had known since childhood. Most of these people never saw each other outside our house and they didn’t have much fun together. Father discharged his obligations as host by teasing everyone about stupid things they had said or done in the past and forcing them to laugh at themselves.

Though Father did not drink, he insisted on mixing cocktails for the guests. He would not serve straight drinks like rum-and-Coke or even Scotch-on-the-rocks, only drinks of his own devising. He gave them lawyerly names like “The Advocate,” “The Hanging Judge,” “The Ambulance Chaser,” “The Mouthpiece,” and described their concoction in detail. He told long, complicated stories in a near-whisper, making everyone lean in his direction, and repeated important lines; he also repeated the important lines in the stories my mother told, and corrected her when she got something wrong. When the guests came to the ends of their own stories he would point out the morals.

Dr. Murphy had several theories about Father, which he used to test on me in the course of our meetings. Dr. Murphy bad by this time given up his glasses for contact lenses, and lost weight in the course of fasts which he undertook regularly. Even with his baldness he looked years younger than when he had come to the parties at our house. Certainly he did not look like my father’s contemporary, which he was.

One of Dr. Murphy’s theories was that Father had exhibited a classic trait of people who had been gifted children by taking an undemanding position in an uninteresting firm. “He was afraid of finding his limits,” Dr. Murphy told me: “As long as he kept stamping papers and making out wills he could go on believing that he didn’t have limits.” Dr. Murphy’s fascination with Father made me uneasy, and I felt traitorous listening to him. While he lived, my father would never have submitted himself for analysis; it seemed a betrayal to put him on the couch now that he was dead.

I did enjoy Dr. Murphy’s recollections of Father as a child. He told me about something that happened when they were in the Boy Scouts. Their troop had been on a long hike and Father had fallen behind. Dr. Murphy and the others decided to ambush him as he came down the trail. They hid in the woods on each side and waited. But when Father walked into the trap none of them moved or made a sound and he strolled on without even knowing they were there. “He had the sweetest look on his face,” Dr. Murphy said, “listening to the birds, smelling the flowers, just like Ferdinand the Bull.” He also told me that my father’s drinks tasted like medicine.

While I rode my bicycle home from Dr. Murphy’s office Mother fretted. She felt terribly alone but she didn’t call anyone because she also felt like a failure. My lying had that effect on her. She took it personally. At such times she did not think of my sisters, one happily married, the other doing brilliantly at Fordham. She did not think of my brother Michael, who had given up college to work with runaway children in Los Angeles. She thought of me. She thought that she had made a mess of her family.

Actually she managed the family well. While my father was dying upstairs she pulled us together. She made lists of chores and gave each of us a fair allowance. Bedtimes were adjusted and she stuck by them. She set regular hours for homework. Each child was made responsible for the next eldest, and I was given a dog. She told us frequently, predictably, that she loved us. At dinner we were each expected to contribute something, and after dinner she played the piano and tried to teach us to sing in harmony, which I could not do. Mother, who was an admirer of the Trapp family, considered this a character defect.

Our life together was more orderly, healthy, while Father was dying than it had been before. He had set us rules to follow, not much different really than the ones Mother gave us after he got sick, but he had administered them in a fickle way. Though we were supposed to get an allowance we always had to ask him for it and then he would give us too much because he enjoyed seeming magnanimous. Sometimes he punished us for no reason, because he was in a bad mood. He was apt to decide, as one of my sisters was going out to a dance, that she had better stay home and do something to improve herself. Or he would sweep us all up on a Wednesday night and take us ice-skating.

He changed after he learned about the cancer, and became more calm as the disease spread. He relaxed his teasing way with us, and from time to time it was possible to have a conversation with him which was not about the last thing that had made him angry. He stopped reading the paper and spent time at the window.

He and I became close. He taught me to play poker and sometimes helped me with my homework. But it wasn’t his illness that drew us together. The reserve between us had begun to break down after the incident with the bear, during the drive home. Michael and my sisters were furious with him for making us leave early and wouldn’t talk to him or look at him. He joked: though it had been a grisly experience we should grin and bear it — and so on. His joking seemed perverse to the others, but not to me. I had seen how terrified he was when the bear came into the camp. He had held himself so still that he had begun to tremble. When Mother started pitching rocks I thought he was going to bolt, really. I understood—! had been frightened too. The others took it as a lark after they got used to having the bear around, but for Father and me it got worse through the night. I was glad to be out of there, grateful to Father for getting me out. I saw that his jokes were how he held himself together. So I reached out to him with a joke: “‘There’s a bear outside,’ said Tom intently.” The others turned cold looks on me. They thought I was sucking up. But Father smiled.

When I thought of other boys being close to their fathers I thought of them hunting together, tossing a ball back and forth, making birdhouses in the basement, and having long talks about girls, war, careers. Maybe the reason it took us so long to get close was that I had this idea. It kept getting in the way of what we really had, which was a shared fear.

Toward the end Father slept most of the time and I watched him. From below, sometimes, faintly, I heard Mother playing the piano. Occasionally he nodded off in his chair while I was reading to him; his bathrobe would fall open then, and I would see the long new scar on his stomach, red as blood against his white skin. His ribs all showed and his legs were like cables.

I once read in a biography of a great man that he “died well.” I assume the writer meant that he kept his pain to himself, did not set off false alarms, and did not too much inconvenience those who were to stay behind. My father died well. His irritability gave way to something else, something like serenity. In the last days he became tender. It was as though he had been rehearsing the scene, that the anger of his life had been a kind of stage fright. He managed his audience — us — with an old trouper’s sense of when to clown and when to stand on his dignity. We were all moved, and admired his courage, as he intended we should. He died downstairs in a shaft of late afternoon sunlight on New Year’s Day, while I was reading to him. I was alone in the house and didn’t know what to do. His body did not frighten me but immediately and sharply I missed my father. It seemed wrong to leave him sitting up and I tried to carry him upstairs to the bedroom but it was too hard, alone. So I called up my friend Raiphy across the street. When he came over and saw what I wanted him for he started crying but I made him help me anyway. A couple of hours later Mother got home and when I told her that Father was dead she ran upstairs, calling his name. A few minutes later she came back down. “Thank God,” she said, “at least he died in bed.” This seemed important to her and I didn’t tell her otherwise. But that night Ralphy’s parents called. They were, they said, shocked at what I had done and so was Mother when she heard the story, shocked and furious. Why? Because I had not told her the truth? Or because she had learned the truth, and could not go on believing that Father had died in bed? I really don’t know.

“Mother,” I said, coming into the living room, “I’m sorry about the letter. I really am.”

She was arranging wood in the fireplace and did not look at me or speak for a moment. Finally she finished and straightened up and brushed her hands. She stepped back and looked at the fire she had laid. “That’s all right,” she said. “Not bad for a consumptive.”

“Mother, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry? Sorry you wrote it or sorry I found it?”

“I wasn’t going to mail it. It was a sort of joke.”

“Ha ha.” She took up the whisk broom and swept bits of bark into the fireplace, then closed the drapes and settled on the couch. “Sit down,” she said. She crossed her legs. “Listen, do I give you advice all the time?”

“Yes.”

“I do?”

I nodded.

“Well, that doesn’t make any difference. I’m supposed to. I’m your mother. I’m going to give you some more advice, for your own good. You don’t have to make all these things up, James. They’ll happen anyway.” She picked at the hem of her skirt. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“I think so.”

“You’re cheating yourself, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. When you get to be my age you won’t know anything at all about life. All you’ll know is what you’ve made up.”

I thought about that. It seemed logical.

She went on. “I think maybe you need to get out of yourself more. Think more about other people.”

The doorbell rang.

“Go see who it is,” Mother said. “We’ll talk about this later.”

It was Dr. Murphy. He and Mother made their apologies and she insisted that he stay for dinner. I went to the kitchen to fetch ice for their drinks, and when I returned they were talking about me. I sat on the sofa and listened. Dr. Murphy was telling Mother not to worry. “James is a good boy,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about my oldest, Terry. He’s not really dishonest, you know, but he’s not really honest either. I can’t seem to reach him. At least James isn’t furtive.”

“No,” Mother said, “he’s never been furtive.”

Dr. Murphy clasped his hands between his knees and stared at them. “Well, that’s Terry. Furtive.”

Before we sat down to dinner Mother said grace; Dr. Murphy bowed his head and closed his eyes and crossed himself at the end, though he had lost his faith in college. When he told me that, during one of our meetings, in just those words, I had the picture of a raincoat hanging by itself outside a dining hall. He drank a good deal of wine and persistently turned the conversation to the subject of his relationship with Terry. He admitted that he had come to dislike the boy. Then he mentioned several patients of his by name, some of them known to Mother and me, and said that he disliked them too. He used the word “dislike” with relish, like someone on a diet permitting himself a single potato chip. “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong,” he said abruptly, and with reference to no particular thing. “Then again maybe I haven’t done anything wrong. I don’t know what to think anymore. Nobody does.”

“I know what to think,” Mother said.

“So does the solipsist. How can you prove to a solipsist that he’s not creating the rest of us?”

This was one of Dr. Murphy’s favorite riddles, and almost any pretext was sufficient for him to trot it out. He was a child with a card trick.

“Send him to bed without dinner,” Mother said. “Let him create that.”

Dr. Murphy suddenly turned to me. “Why do you do it?” he asked. It was a pure question, it had no object beyond the satisfaction of his curiosity. Mother looked at me and there was the same curiosity in her face.

“I don’t know,” I said, and that was the truth.

Dr. Murphy nodded, not because he had anticipated my answer but because he accepted it. “Is it fun?”

“No, it’s not fun. I can’t explain.”

“Why is it all so sad?” Mother asked. “Why all the diseases?”

“Maybe,” Dr. Murphy said, “sad things are more interesting.”

“Not to me,” Mother said.

“Not to me, either,” I said. “It just comes out that way.”

After dinner Dr. Murphy asked Mother to play the piano. He particularly wanted to sing “Come Home, Abbie, the Light’s on the Stair.”

“That old thing,” Mother said. She stood and folded her napkin deliberately and we followed her into the living room. Dr. Murphy stood behind her as she warmed up. Then they sang “Come Home, Abbie, the Light’s on the Stair,” and I watched him stare down at Mother intently, as if he were trying to remember something. Her own eyes were closed. After that they sang “0 Magnum Mysterium.” They sang it in parts and I regretted that I had no voice, it sounded so good.

“Come on, James,” Dr. Murphy said as Mother played the last chords. “These old tunes not good enough for you?”

“He just can’t sing,” Mother said.

When Dr. Murphy left, Mother lit the fire and made more coffee. She slouched down in the big chair, sticking her legs straight out and moving her feet back and forth. “That was fun,” she said.

“Did you and Father ever do things like that?”

“A few times, when we were first going out. I don’t think he really enjoyed it. He was like you.”

I wondered if Mother and Father had had a good marriage. He admired her and liked to look at her; every night at dinner he had us move the candlesticks slightly to right and left of center so he could see her down the length of the table. And every evening when she set the table she put them in the center again. She didn’t seem to miss him very much. But I wouldn’t really have known if she did, and anyway I didn’t miss him all that much myself, not the way I had. Most of the time I thought about other things.

“James?”

I waited.

“I’ve been thinking that you might like to go down and stay with Michael for a couple of weeks or so.”

“What about school?”

“I’ll talk to Father McSorley. He won’t mind. Maybe this problem will take care of itself if you start thinking about other people.”

“I do.”

“I mean helping them, like Michael does. You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

“It’s fine with me. Really. I’d like to see Michael.”

“I’m not trying to get rid of you.”

“I know.”

Mother stretched, then tucked her feet under her. She sipped noisily at her coffee. “What did that word mean that Murphy used? You know the one?”

“Paranoid? That’s where somebody thinks everyone is out to get him. Like that woman who always grabs you after Mass — Frances.”

“Not paranoid. Everyone knows what that means. Sol-something.”

“Oh. Solipsist. A solipsist is someone who thinks he creates everything around him.”

Mother nodded and blew on her coffee, then put it down without drinking from it. “I’d rather be paranoid. Do you really think Frances is?”

“Of course. No question about it.”

“I mean really sick?”

“That’s what paranoid is. is being sick. What do you think, Mother?”

“What are you so angry about?”

“I’m not angry.” I lowered my voice. “I’m not angry. But you don’t believe those stories of hers, do you?”

“Well, no, not exactly. I don’t think she knows what she’s saying, she just wants someone to listen. She probably lives all by herself in some little room. So she’s paranoid. Think of that. And I had no idea. James, we should pray for her. Will you remember to do that?”

I nodded. I thought of Mother singing “0 Magnum Mysterium,” saying grace, praying with easy confidence, and it came to me that her imagination was superior to mine. She could imagine things as coming together, not falling apart. She looked at me and I shrank; I knew exactly what she was going to say. “Son,” she said, “do you know how much I love you?”

The next afternoon I took the bus to Los Angeles. I looked forward to the trip, to the monotony of the road and the empty fields by the roadside. Mother walked with me down the long concourse. The station was crowded and oppressive. “Are you sure this is the right bus?” she asked at the loading platform.

“Yes.”

“It looks so old.”

“Mother—”

“All right.” She pulled me against her and kissed me, then held me an extra second to show that her embrace was sincere, not just like everyone else’s, never having realized that everyone else does the same thing. I boarded the bus and we waved at each other until it became embarrassing. Then Mother began checking through her handbag for something. When she had finished I stood and adjusted the luggage over my seat. I sat and we smiled at each other, waved when the driver gunned the engine, shrugged when he got up suddenly to count the passengers, waved again when he resumed his seat. As the bus pulled out my mother and I were looking at each other with plain relief.

I had boarded the wrong bus. This one was bound for Los Angeles but not by the express route. We stopped in San Mateo, Palo Alto, San Jose, Castroville. When we left Castroville it began to rain, hard; my window would not close all the way, and a thin stream of water ran down the wall onto my seat. To keep dry I had to stay away from the wall and lean forward. The rain fell harder. The engine of the bus sounded as though it were coming apart.

In Salinas the man sleeping beside me jumped up, but before I had a chance to change seats his place was taken by an enormous woman in a print dress, carrying a shopping bag. She took possession of her seat and spilled over onto half of mine, backing me up to the wall. “That’s a storm,” she said loudly, then turned and looked at me. “Hungry?”

Without waiting for an answer she dipped into her bag and pulled out a piece of chicken and thrust it at me. “Hey, by God,” she hooted, “look at him go to town on that drumstick!” A few people turned and smiled. I smiled back around the bone and kept at it. I finished that piece and she handed me another, and then another. Then she started handing out chicken to the people in the seats near us.

Outside of San Luis Obispo the noise from the engine grew suddenly louder and just as suddenly there was no noise at all. The driver pulled off to the side of the road and got out, then got on again dripping wet. A few moments later he announced that the bus had broken down and they were sending another bus to pick us up. Someone asked how long that might take and the driver said he had no idea. “Keep your pants on!” shouted the woman next to me. “Anybody in a hurry to get to L.A. ought to have his head examined.”

The wind was blowing hard around the bus, driving sheets of rain against the windows on both sides. The bus swayed gently. Outside the light was brown and thick. The woman next to me pumped all the people around us for their itineraries and said whether or not she had ever been where they were from or where they were going. “How about you?” She slapped my knee. “Parents own a chicken ranch? I hope so!” She laughed. I told her I was from San Francisco. “San Francisco, that’s where my husband was stationed.” She asked me what I did there and I told her I worked with refugees from Tibet.

“Is that right? What do you do with a bunch of Tibetans?”

“Seems like there’s plenty of other places they could’ve gone,” said a man in front of us. “Coming across the border like that. We don’t go there.”

“What do you do with a bunch of Tibetans?” the woman repeated.

“Try to find them jobs, locate housing, listen to their problems.”

“You understand that kind of talk?”

“Yes.”

“Speak it?”

“Pretty well. I was born and raised in Tibet. My parents were missionaries over there.”

Everyone waited.

“They were killed when the Communists took over.”

The big woman patted my arm.

“It’s all right,” I said.

“Why don’t you say some of that Tibetan?”

“What would you like to hear?”

“Say ‘The cow jumped over the moon.’” She watched me, smiling, and when I finished she looked at the others and shook her head. “That was pretty. Like music. Say some more.”

“What?”

“Anything.”

They bent toward me. The windows suddenly went blind with rain. The driver had fallen asleep and was snoring gently to the swaying of the bus. Outside the muddy light flickered to pale yellow, and far off there was thunder. The woman next to me leaned back and closed her eyes and then so did all the others as I sang to them in what was surely an ancient and holy tongue.