A Son of the Circus

by John Winslow Irving

  “Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we do not lose heart,” wrote the converted one. [II Corinthians 4:1] Skipping ahead, the doctor read: “We are hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed; we are perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed—always carrying about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body.” [4:8–10]

  Dr. Daruwalla felt small. He ventured into a pew in one of the side aisles—as if he wasn’t significant enough, in his lack of faith, to sit in a center-aisle seat. His own conversion seemed trifling, and very far behind him; in his daily thoughts, he barely honored it—perhaps he had been bitten by a monkey, he concluded. He noted that the church was without an organ; another, probably tuneless piano stood to the left of the folding table—another inappropriately shiny microphone stood on it.

  From far outside the church, the doctor was aware of the constantly passing mopeds—the snarling of their low-powered engines, the ducklike quacking of their infernal horns. The highly staged altarpiece drew the doctor’s eye: there was Christ on the Cross and those two familiar women forlornly flanking him. Mother Mary and Mary Magdalene, Dr. Daruwalla presumed. The life-sized figures of the saints, all in stone, were mounted on the columns that defined the aisles; these massive pillars each supported a saint, and at the saints’ feet were tilted oscillating fans—pointed down, in order to cool the congregation.

  Blasphemously, Dr. Daruwalla noticed that one of the stone saints had worked herself loose from her pillar; a thick chain had been secured around the saint’s neck, and this chain was attached to the pillar by a sizable steel grommet. The doctor wished he knew which saint she was; he thought that all the female saints too closely resembled the Virgin Mary—at least as statues. Whoever this saint was, she appeared to have been hung in effigy; but without the chain around her neck, she might have toppled into a pew. Dr. Daruwalla judged that the stone saint was big enough to kill a pew of worshipers.

  Finally, Farrokh said his good-byes to Martin Mills and the other Jesuits. The scholastic suddenly begged to hear the details of Dr. Daruwalla’s conversion. The doctor supposed that Father Julian had given Martin a cunning and sarcastic rendition of the story.

  “Oh, it was nothing,” Farrokh replied modestly. This probably concurred with the Father Rector’s version.

  “But I should love to hear about it!” Martin said.

  “If you tell him yours, I’m sure he’ll tell you his,” Father Julian said to Farrokh.

  “Maybe another time,” Dr. Daruwalla said. Never had he so much desired to flee. He had to promise that he’d attend Martin’s lecture at the YWCA, although he had no intentions of attending; he would rather die than attend. He’d heard quite enough lecturing from Martin Mills!

  “It’s the YWCA at Cooperage, you know,” Father Cecil informed him. Since Dr. Daruwalla was sensitive to those Bombayites who assumed that he barely knew his way around the city, the doctor was snappish in his reply.

  “I know where it is!” Farrokh said.

  Then a little girl appeared, out of nowhere. She was crying because she’d come to St. Ignatius with her mother, to pick up her brother after school, and somehow they’d left without her. There’d been other children in the car. It wasn’t a crisis, the Jesuits decided. The mother would realize what had happened and return to the school. It was merely necessary to comfort the child, and someone should call the mother so that she’d not drive recklessly in fear that her daughter was lost. But there was another problem: the little girl confided to them that she needed to pee. Brother Gabriel declared to Dr. Daruwalla that there was “no official peeing place for girls” at St. Ignatius.

  “But where does Miss Tanuja pee?” Martin Mills asked.

  Good for him! Dr. Daruwalla thought. He’s going to drive them all crazy.

  “And I saw several women among the sweepers,” Martin added.

  “There must be three or four women teachers, aren’t there?” Dr. Daruwalla asked innocently.

  Of course there was a peeing place for girls! These old men simply didn’t know where it was.

  “Someone could see if a men’s room is unoccupied,” Father Cecil suggested.

  “Then one of us could guard the door,” Father Julian advised.

  When Farrokh finally left them all, they were still discussing this awkward necessity to bend the rules. The doctor presumed that the little girl still needed to pee.

  Tetracycline

  Dr. Daruwalla was on his way back to the Hospital for Crippled Children when he realized that he’d started another screenplay; he knew that this one would not be starring Inspector Dhar. In his mind’s eye, he saw a beggar working the Arab hotels along Marine Drive; he saw the Queen’s Necklace at night… that string of yellow smog lights… and he heard Julia saying that yellow wasn’t the proper color for the necklace of a queen. For the first time, Farrokh felt that he understood the start of a story—the characters were set in motion by the fates that awaited them. Something of the authority of an ending was already contained in the beginning scene.

  He was exhausted; he had much to talk about with Julia, and he had to talk to John D. Dr. Daruwalla and his wife were having an early dinner at the Ripon Club. Then the doctor had planned to write a first draft of a little speech he would be giving soon; he’d been invited to say something to the Society for the Rehabilitation of Crippled Children—they were such faithful sponsors of the hospital. But now he knew he would write all night—and not his speech. At last, he thought, he had a screenplay in him that justified the telling. In his mind’s eye, he saw the characters arriving at Victoria Terminus, but this time he knew where they were going; he wondered if he’d ever been so excited.

  The familiar figure in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room distracted the doctor from the story he’d imagined; among the waiting children, the tall man indeed stood out. Even seated, his military erectness immediately captured Farrokh’s attention. The taut sallow skin and the slack mouth; the lion-yellow eyes; the acid-shriveled ear and the raw pink smear that had burned a swath along his jawline and down the side of his throat, where it disappeared under the collar of Mr. Garg’s shirt—all this captured Dr. Daruwalla’s attention, too.

  One look at the nervously wriggling fingers of Mr. Garg’s locked hands confirmed Farrokh’s suspicions. It was clear tc the doctor that Garg was itching to know the specific nature of Madhu’s “sexually transmitted disease”; Dr. Daruwalla felt only an empty triumph. To see Garg—guilty and ready to grovel, and reduced to waiting his turn among the crippled children—would be the full extent of the doctor’s slight victory, for Dr. Daruwalla knew, even at this very moment, that something more than professional confidentiality would prevent him from disclosing Mr. Garg’s guilt to Deepa and Vinod. Besides, how could the dwarf and his wife not already know that Garg diddled young girls? It may have been Garg’s guilt that compelled him to allow Deepa and Vinod to attempt their circus rescues of so many of these children. Surely the dwarf and his wife already knew what Farrokh was only beginning to guess: that many of these little prostitutes would have preferred to stay with Mr. Garg. Like the circus, even the Great Blue Nile, maybe Garg was better than a brothel.

  Mr. Garg stood and faced Farrokh. The eyes of every crippled child in Dr. Daruwalla’s waiting room were fixed on the acid scar, but the doctor looked only at the whites of Garg’s eyes, which were a jaundice-yellow—and at the deeper, tawny lion-yellow of Garg’s irises, which offset his black pupils. Garg had the same eyes as Madhu. The doctor passingly wondered if they might be related.

  “I was here first—before any of them,” Mr. Garg whispered.

  “I’ll bet you were,” said Dr. Daruwalla.

  If it was guilt that had flickered in Garg’s lion eyes, it seemed to be fading; a shy smile tightened his usually slack lips, and something conspiratorial crept into his voice. “So… I guess you know about Madhu and me,” Mr. Garg
said.

  What can one say to such a man? Dr. Daruwalla thought. The doctor realized that Deepa and Vinod and even Martin Mills were right: let every girl-child be an acrobat in the circus, even in the Great Blue Nile—even if they fall and die. Let them be eaten by lions! For it was true that Madhu was both a child and a prostitute—worse, she was Mr. Garg’s girl. There was truly nothing to say to such a man. Only a strictly professional question came to Dr. Daruwalla’s mind, and he put it to Garg as bluntly as he could.

  “Are you allergic to tetracycline?” the doctor asked him.

  17. STRANGE CUSTOMS

  Southern California

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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