The Paperchase

by Marcel Theroux

‘Back-to-school sales?’

  ‘Yeah. Wish they wouldn’t call them that,’ he said, as he flipped disconsolately between channels. ‘Makes me feel like a prisoner on furlough.’

  ‘That looks like a bad sprain,’ I said.

  ‘Tell me about it. The Fernshaws are discovering that stoic fortitude is not my strong suit. Personally, I think these shopping expeditions are just an excuse to get away from me. It’s Nathan’s fault. We were playing wiffleball in the yard. I ran backwards for a pop-up and must have stepped on the side of my foot. Felt like I’d broken it.’

  I told him I would be having a cookout before I left. It would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday in a week. I wanted to mark that and my own imminent departure.

  I liked Winks. I wished I could show him the stories: I would have welcomed his thoughts. He might even have been able to ease my worries by pointing out some trivial discrepancy between the fiction and reality. He would have been an ideal reader, but if any part of the story turned out to be true, it would have put him in a difficult position.

  Did I think Patrick had killed Mr Fernshaw? It was a literal-minded explanation of the story, I told myself. Equally, that didn’t prevent its being true. But what was truth in this case? I didn’t think that Patrick had ever had a boxing lesson; I was sure Mrs Fernshaw didn’t cook curry and had never been near the Indian subcontinent. I doubted Mr Fernshaw had ever had ‘oakum’ on his boots. Whatever that was.

  But what was true was that my uncle was an isolated old man who was troubled by memories of the past. His neighbours were a deaf family, minus one father, who it seemed had been abusive to his wife and children. And these were all spelled out in the story.

  It did violence to my memory of my uncle to think that he was capable of such an act, of course. I had never seen him so much as lose his temper, though I knew he was capable of it. I know that when his relationship with my father was at its nadir, my father was physically afraid of him. But this, I thought, was my dad being neurotic. It wasn’t based on a rational assessment of Patrick’s character.

  To accept that my uncle would attack someone, hurt someone in a premeditated way, was to accept that I didn’t know him at all. I hadn’t accepted this, but just thinking about it, entertaining the possibility, made Patrick seem stranger and more remote. I wanted to exonerate him, if only so that I could have my image of him restored to its former innocence. Looking back, I suppose I was guilty of a kind of sentimentality.

  When Patrick talked about writing, which he didn’t often, because he was superstitious, he sometimes said that a story was a way of asking a question so loosely that the writer wouldn’t even be aware of its real meaning. I think he was afraid of those questions, the ones he couldn’t control, and which couldn’t be answered with any of the vast array of facts that he had stored up in his cranium. I think that’s why he had virtually stopped writing. Better to make lists, better to crack jokes, better to dazzle without any risk of self-exposure. It wasn’t surprising that the stories had stayed on his desk. Mycroft was a dangerous character. He was capable of getting all of us into trouble.

  *

  It was another overcast day. The summer was already entering island mythology as one of the worst in fifteen or twenty years. I felt now that the Ionians were taking a grim pleasure in each fresh spell of rain and would be disappointed if the weather took a turn for the better.

  Nathan stood at the aft rail of the ferry watching Ionia recede into the distance as the engines churned the sea into froth right under him. Judging by the look on his face, he didn’t get off the island very much. I told him so. ‘It looks small, doesn’t it?’ he said. I told him it was small, then felt bad for saying it.

  ‘Which is bigger,’ Patrick had asked once, ‘Little England or Great Britain.’ And then: ‘Great Britain or the United States?’ I got the answer wrong in both cases. The gross disparity in size between Britain and the United States had come as something of a shock to me. Since then, America has always struck me as some kind of bigger and more glamorous younger brother. I think the Portuguese must feel the same away about Brazil. The younger brother who went away and made his fortune, while the older one stayed home and looked after the family farm. One night, there’s a knock at the door and it’s young Brazil, or Yankee Doodle Dandy, in a sharp new suit, flashing his money around and full of advice about how to modernise the cowshed.

  I often had the feeling, though I tried to deny it, that England was tired and second-rate, and that it was precisely its tiredness and second-rateness that fated it to be a significant part of my life. I could not identify with the superiority that Americans – even Patrick – took for granted. English people took pride in failure. ‘Good losers’, people said of the English – but that was because they had so much practice. Primacy was the American obsession. ‘We’re number one!’ And its sportsmen had developed a repertoire of gesture – high fives, clenched fists, chest bumps – as complex as Ionian sign for signalling their superiority. In England, low self-esteem was part of the national character, although it was partly concealed by our grandiose insistence on our glorious past.

  I bought Nathan his boat from a shop in the Cape Cod Mall, a better-stocked version of the one on Ionia. I tried to persuade him to buy one that was more nautical, with little rowlocks and oars, but he wasn’t having any of it. I had to keep my own authoritarian tendency in check. I had a prejudice against the turtle boat. It was slightly effete. It was too young and gimmicky. It was a toy. I was being like my father, who refused to buy me the Wendy house I wanted for my eighth birthday and got me a pup tent instead. I realised that part of me wouldn’t be happy until I had cajoled Nathan into a mapping expedition in the sand dunes.

  We had two hours before the next ferry crossing, so I suggested we go to the flea market in Barnstable. I don’t think Nathan even knew what it was, but he must have liked the sound of it.

  It was bigger than I remembered. A faint drizzle lay heavily on the gathering; the air was thick and warm, like damp wool. The stalls were laid out in neat rows over several acres of wet grass. Nathan skipped off to examine a stall of rusty toy boats. Before he went I asked him to find out where we could buy some fleas. He gave me a pained look and rolled his eyes, and I watched him disappear into the crowd.

  The vendors, who were retirees for the most part, sat in deck chairs behind their trestle tables, selling things that were not really antiques at all. A velvet reproduction armchair was sprouting springs through the ripped fabric of its seat. It wasn’t antique furniture, it was senile furniture. There were little tins of gramophone needles, glass bottles, unloved LPs. If you were lucky, you might find a copper washbasin or a pair of snowshoes, but it would take a lot of searching.

  This had been one of Patrick’s favourite places. The flea market was guaranteed to get him on to the mainland. He’d sometimes show up at the house in Truro before seven in the morning to take us along with him. Or he’d appear afterwards, the boot of his car stuffed with treasures which he’d show my dad in the driveway.

  I rarely saw him happier than he was then, or at the flea market itself, his eyes bright with the prospect of imminent acquisitions.

  Occasionally, when we were with him, we saw a book we wanted and he’d urge us to haggle. ‘Offer him five dollars for two.’ ‘See if she’ll take fifty cents for it.’ I had seen him walk away a hundred times from things he desperately wanted for the sake of a dollar or two, or because he found the vendor churlish. It wasn’t exactly meanness. The arbitrary budgets acted as a brake on his desires. If he’d been a millionaire, there would have been something else he would have forbidden himself, as though a thousand small acquisitions could take the place of a single, inadmissible desire.

  I had lost sight of Nathan. Big fat raindrops had started to wash away the remaining charm of the flea market. Eventually, I spotted him far off, wandering among the stalls. Small and serious, he moved with the peculiar invisibility of a well-behaved child.


  Then, more than I ever had at Patrick’s funeral or living in his house, I felt I had lost Patrick, and with him a chunk of my own past. It was strange that only a few months earlier my reaction to the news of his death had been: Patrick who? But in answering, or trying to answer, that question, I had indirectly found a new enthusiasm for my own life. I felt it was an insight that depended on understanding who Patrick had been, how unhappy he had been, and how close I had come to turning into him. That recognition was a relief. I felt I understood that I had to live and trust people, not because people were innately trustworthy, but because the alternative was to turn into Patrick.

  My father had said he lacked ambition. It was a characteristically obtuse observation. I didn’t believe it. I thought Patrick had been wounded in some way, and had surrendered to despair because he lacked the faith that anyone could help him out of it. It was how I felt about myself. Discovering that he’d saved my letters seemed to confirm our kinship.

  But my reaction to his story, I realised, was a howl of incomprehension. Where did it come from, this violence? This violence that he tried so hard to legitimise.

  If Patrick wasn’t who I thought he was, my optimism was founded on deceit. The empathy I felt with him was wishful thinking. And just when I should have been happy and excited about leaving, I felt as though the dark wing of some nightmare bird had come between me and the sun.

  The reason I didn’t give up, then, and wash my hands of the whole business, was that I thought the truth might be more complicated. It was characteristic of me, and Patrick – and Mycroft – to know everything in advance. In my life, I have been trying to commemorate Patrick by becoming more unlike him. It’s an ongoing and never wholly successful undertaking, but a key part of it is the effort to renounce damaging certainties, to try to know a little less every day.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MRS DIAZ WAS VAST, like a tiny planet – Mercury, maybe. She was standing on a chair holding a small green watering can up to a tier of hanging baskets. The fact that she was raised up into the atmosphere of the room – a conservatory that had obviously been added to the house – made her seem even rounder and bigger. She cut short the watering when she saw me come in. After stepping down with a nimbleness that belied her size, she sank into a huge wicker chair. She was squeezed into the seat like a coconut at a coconut shy.

  ‘Don’t tell my husband you saw me up there,’ she said, ‘but if I have to wait for him to water them, they’ll be nothing but potpourri!’

  She fanned her face with her hand. ‘I can’t bear this weather. There’s nowhere for the heat to go.’ She was very pale, except for her cheeks, where the red was unhealthily intense, as though they had been scrubbed too hard. Her light brown hair was very fine, like a toddler’s, and had been cut short.

  By way of small talk I mentioned that the bookshelf in her living room included two copies of Peanut Gatherers.

  ‘Your uncle gave me one of those. I forget which.’ She had the island accent, a pleasant low voice, and a fat woman’s throaty chuckle. ‘I was a big fan.’

  ‘Of him, or the work?’

  ‘Both. I used to run an auction house in Westwich – this is before I met Tony. Your uncle would be there every week. We had the auctions on Wednesdays. That’s how I got to know him. His taste was very … eclectic.’ She coughed. ‘Excuse me. Could you slide that stool over?’

  She propped her feet up on to the stool with audible relief. ‘I used to put bids in myself for certain things, so I’d notice who bought them. Books mainly, and cup-plates. We liked some of the same stuff.’

  It turned out that Mr Diaz – or Tony, as she Anglicised him – was her second husband. Her first husband had been older, a hard-drinking Ionian, who had run off, leaving her to bring up three kids. She began telling me how she had scratched a living from a restaurant she opened on the island. She sold it for a profit with which she bought a bigger restaurant, made a success of that, and then bought the auction house. It was an impressive story: she couldn’t resist a digression on the hardships they’d all undergone along the way: eating scrapple, wearing homemade clothes – and a long account of her fifteen-year-old son’s stepping in as auctioneer on the opening night when the real one showed up drunk. After twenty minutes I was starting to wonder how I could bring the conversation around to the Fernshaws without seeming rude. But the good thing about people who talk a lot is that sooner or later they touch on everything.

  ‘My first husband was from an old island family like the Fernshaws. He was a Cullity. They all came from up-island. Do you know what that means?’

  I said I didn’t.

  ‘That’s the west of the island – it’s from sailing. Because it’s “up” in terms of longitude. Harriet Fernshaw was from up-island, too. Now she was a Tregeser and a lot of them were deaf. I guess they carried the gene for it. Here, pass me that.’

  It was a high-school yearbook from 1970 bound in rubbery dark blue plastic. A mortarboard and a quill pen were raised in relief on the cover.

  ‘My brother’s yearbook,’ she said. ‘I loaned it to your uncle. He got interested in the Fernshaws, too.’

  I felt a momentary excitement at the thought that my uncle had passed this way: it was like coming across his footprint in a forest. ‘What did you tell him?’ I asked her. She was flipping through the glossy pages of the yearbook.

  ‘I asked him which Fernshaw he wanted to know about.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Funnily enough, that’s what he said.’ She paused. ‘Here we are. Dick Fernshaw.’

  He was square-jawed, with a smart crew cut. Not much like Nathan, maybe a little like Terry in the eyes.

  ‘Looks like the all-American boy, doesn’t he? He was a nasty piece of work, though. My brother once saw him stuffing a kid into a gym locker. You know—’ She mimed it with uncharacteristic ferocity. It sent her fine hair flying around her head. ‘He stopped – at least this is how my brother tells it – he stopped and said: “You don’t see anything, do you?” My brother just nodded and got the hell out of there. He was a bad kid. Grew up to be a bad man. No one was sorry to see you go.’ This last sentence she said to the photograph itself. ‘He’s the father of Harriet’s eldest.’

  ‘He was lost at sea?’

  ‘Him? Oh no, he was killed in Vietnam. Brave soldier too, by all accounts.’

  ‘Killed in Vietnam?’ I was confused. ‘I’ve had it from two or three different people that Mrs Fernshaw lost her husband in an accident at sea.’

  ‘That’s right.’ She took the book from me and turned the page. There was no photo here, just an entry and a list of the school associations of which Zachary Fernshaw had been a member.

  ‘There’s no photo,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t turn up for it, I guess. A few people didn’t. It was a way of saying screw you to the school authorities. Zac wouldn’t have meant it like that. He was a good kid. I guess he was ill or something. This one photo does for the two of them.’ She turned back to the previous page. ‘Their mother couldn’t tell them apart.’

  ‘Twins?’

  ‘Yup. Zac was the elder by a couple of hours. A nicer guy you could never hope to meet anywhere. He was an angel.’

  The story Mrs Diaz then told me was like all stories – full of what Patrick called ‘pavanes and divagations’. I couldn’t remember her every digression, even if I wanted to, or the way my questions prompted her to clarify and elaborate her original narrative. I’m sure there are more artful ways of relating what she said – my uncle’s story was, in a very lateral way, one of them – but I’m more comfortable with a digest of the facts.

  Richard and Zac Fernshaw were the only children of a relatively elderly island couple. They were identical twins, born within an hour of each other, into a family where twins occurred in every other generation. ‘The Fernshaws had the genes for that,’ said Mrs Diaz, meaning, I suppose, that it was a more benign legacy than the gene for deafness carried by a disproportionatel
y large number of island families in the nineteenth century.

  I had the feeling that Mrs Diaz embellished her account of their childhood slightly. She was making the point that while Zachary was conscientious and good-natured, Richard was selfish, violent and eventually delinquent. She dwelled on this contrast as though it were something essential in the boys’ natures – a Manichaean split; Cain versus Abel. I didn’t say what I felt: that faced with a Goody Two-shoes of a sibling, behaving badly might be a necessary way of carving out your own identity.

  There were no academic expectations placed on the two kids. Zac finished high school and joined his father’s fishing business. Richard left home to hang out with a gang of self-styled hoods in town, where he got involved with petty crime and earned the disapproval of the town’s elders and the sneaking admiration of their children. In a quiet town like Westwich in the early seventies, young men like Richard had the status of dangerous, glamorous outsiders. They were followed from afar by some of the town’s good girls, who probably saw in them a vicarious way of chafing at the strictures of their own parents. Richard got one of these girls pregnant – a pretty, deaf teenager called Harriet Tregeser. Then he left the island to join the army.

  From the way Mrs Diaz told it, I couldn’t figure out if he knew about the pregnancy before he went away. She implied that he’d joined to evade his responsibilities as a father, but it seemed just as likely that he hadn’t known, and had gone off to the mainland blithely unaware of the impending birth.

  I don’t think I had the reactions to her story that Mrs Diaz wanted. It was hard for me to think of Richard Fernshaw as a monster, even if he had upped and run when he heard about the pregnancy. He would have been more than fifteen years younger than I was then when he found out that Harriet was pregnant. Abortion was unthinkable in that close-knit island community. Richard Fernshaw was just a boy, panicky and inadequate, who had shirked responsibility ever since he had learned to walk. He disappeared.