A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  It’s often embarrassing to discover the marital cuteness that exists among couples whose social importance is esteemed. Farrokh’s mother, Meher, was renowned for flirting with his father in public. Because there was nothing coarse in her overtures to her husband, Meher Daruwalla was recognized among Duckworthians as an exceptionally devoted wife; therefore, she’d attracted all the more attention at the Duckworth Club when she stopped flirting with Lowji. It was plain to everyone that Meher was feuding with Lowji instead. To young Farrokh’s shame, the whole Duckworth Club was put on edge by this obvious tension in the venerable Daruwalla marriage.

  A sizable part of Farrokh’s summer agenda was to prepare his parents for the romance that was developing for their two sons with the fabulous Zilk sisters—“the Vienna Woods girls,” as Jamshed called them. It struck Farrokh that the state of his parents’ marriage might make an unfavorable climate for a discussion of romance of any kind—not to mention his parents’ possible reluctance to accept the idea of their only sons marrying Viennese Roman Catholics.

  It was typical of Jamshed’s successful manipulation of his younger brother that Farrokh had been selected to return home for the summer in order to broach this subject. Farrokh was less intellectually challenging to Lowji; he was also the baby of the family, and therefore he appeared to be loved with the least reservation. And Farrokh’s intentions to follow his father in orthopedics doubtless pleased the old man and made Farrokh a more welcome bearer of conceivably unwelcome tidings than Jamshed would have been. The latter’s interest in psychiatry, which old Lowji spoke of as “an inexact science”—he meant in comparison with orthopedic surgery—had already driven a wedge between the father and his elder son.

  In any case, Farrokh saw that it would be poor timing for him to introduce the topic of the Fräuleins Josefine and Julia Zilk; his praise of their loveliness and virtues would have to wait. The story of their courageous widowed mother and her efforts to educate her daughters would have to wait, too. The dreadful American movie was consuming Farrokh’s helpless parents. Even the young man’s intellectual pursuits failed to capture his father’s attention.

  For example, when Farrokh admitted that he shared Jamshed’s passion for Freud, his father expressed alarm that Farrokh’s devotion to the more exact science of orthopedic surgery was waning. It was certainly the wrong idea to attempt to reassure his father on this point by quoting at length from Freud’s “General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks”; the concept that “the hysterical fit is an equivalent to coitus” wasn’t welcome information to old Lowji. Furthermore, Farrokh’s father absolutely rejected the notion of the hysterical symptom corresponding to a form of sexual gratification. In regard to so-called multiple sexual identification—as in the case of the patient who attempted to rip off her dress with one hand (this was said to be her man’s hand) while at the same time she desperately clutched her dress to her body (with her woman’s hand)—old Lowji Daruwalla was outraged by the concept.

  “Is this the result of a European education?” he cried. “To attach any meaning whatsoever to what a woman is thinking when she takes off her clothes—this is true madness!”

  The senior Daruwalla wouldn’t listen to a sentence with Freud’s name in it. That his father should reject Freud was further evidence to Farrokh of the tyrant’s intellectual rigidity and his old-fashioned beliefs. As an intended put-down of Freud, Lowji paraphrased an aphorism of the great Canadian physician Sir William Osler. A bedside clinician extraordinaire and a gifted essayist, Osler was a favorite of Farrokh’s, too. It was outrageous of Lowji to use Sir William to refute Freud; the old blunderbuss referred to the well-known Osler admonition that warns against studying medicine without textbooks—for this is akin to going to sea without a chart. Farrokh argued that this was a half-understanding of Osler and less than half an understanding of Freud, for hadn’t Sir William also warned that to study medicine without studying patients was not to go to sea at all? Freud, after all, had studied patients. But Lowji was unbudgeable.

  Farrokh was disgusted with his father. The young man had left home as a mere 17-year-old; at last he was a worldly and well-read 19. Far from being a paragon of brilliance and nobility, old Lowji now looked like a buffoon. In a rash moment, Farrokh gave his father a book to read. It was Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, a modern novel—at least it was “modern” to Lowji. It was also a religious novel, which was (in Lowji’s case) akin to holding the cape before the bull. Farrokh presented the novel to his father with the added temptation that the book had given considerable offense to the Church of Rome. This was a clever bit of baiting, and the old man was especially excited to learn that the book had been denounced by French bishops. For reasons Lowji never bothered to explain, he didn’t like the French. For reasons he explained entirely too often, Lowji thought all religions were “monsters.”

  It was surely idealistic of young Farrokh to imagine that he could draw his fierce, old-fashioned father into his recently acquired European sensibilities—especially by as simple a device as a favorite novel. Naively, Farrokh hoped that a shared appreciation of Graham Greene might lead to a discussion of the enlightened Zilk sisters, who, although Roman Catholics, did not share the consternation caused the Church of Rome by The Power and the Glory. And this discussion might lead to the matter of who these liberal-thinking Zilk sisters might be, and so on and so forth.

  But old Lowji despised the novel. He denounced it as morally contradictory—in his own words, “a big confusion of good and evil.” In the first place, Lowji argued, the lieutenant who puts the priest to death is portrayed as a man of integrity—a man of high ideals. The priest, on the other hand, is utterly corrupted—a lecher, a drunk, an absent father to his illegitimate daughter.

  “The man should have been put to death!” the senior Daruwalla exclaimed. “Only not necessarily because he was a priest!”

  Farrokh was bitterly disappointed by this pig-headed reaction to a novel he so loved that he’d already read it a half-dozen times. He deliberately provoked his father by telling him that his denouncement of the book was remarkably similar to the line of attack taken by the Church of Rome.

  And so the summer and the monsoon of 1949 began.

  Stuck in the Past

  Here come the characters who comprise the movie vermin, the Hollywood scum, the film slime—the aforementioned “unscrupulous cowards of mediocrity.” Fortunately, they are minor characters, yet so distasteful that their introduction has been delayed as long as possible. Besides, the past has already made an unwelcome intrusion into this narrative; the younger Dr. Daruwalla, who’s no stranger to unwanted and lengthy intrusions from the past, has all this time been sitting in the Ladies’ Garden of the Duckworth Club. The past has descended upon him with such lugubrious weight that he hasn’t touched his Kingfisher lager, which has grown undrinkably warm.

  The doctor knows he should at least get up from the table and call his wife. Julia should be told right away about poor Mr. Lal and the threat to their beloved Dhar: MORE MEMBERS DIE IF DHAR REMAINS A MEMBER. Farrokh should also forewarn her that Dhar is coming home for supper, not to mention that the doctor owes his wife some explanation regarding his cowardice; she will surely think him a coward for not telling Dhar the upsetting news—for Dr. Daruwalla knows that, any day now, Dhar’s twin is expected in Bombay. Yet he can’t even drink his beer or rise from his chair; it’s as if he were the second bludgeoned victim of the putter that cracked the skull of poor Mr. Lal.

  And all this time, Mr. Sethna has been watching him. Mr. Sethna is worried about the doctor—he’s never seen him not finish a Kingfisher before. The busboys are whispering; they must change the tablecloths in the Ladies’ Garden. The tablecloths for dinner, which are a saffron color, are quite different from the luncheon tablecloths, which are more of a vermillion hue. But Mr. Sethna won’t allow them to disturb Dr. Daruwalla. He’s not the man his father was, Mr. Sethna knows, but Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to Lowji is unquestionably e
xtended beyond the grave—not only to Lowji’s children but even to that mysterious fair-skinned boy whom Mr. Sethna heard Lowji call “my grandchild” on more than one occasion.

  Such is Mr. Sethna’s loyalty to the Daruwalla name that he won’t tolerate the gossip in the kitchen. There is, for example, an elderly cook who swears that this so-called grandchild is the very same all-white actor who parades before them as Inspector Dhar. Although Mr. Sethna privately may believe this, he violently maintains that this couldn’t be true. If the younger Dr. Daruwalla claims that Dhar is neither his nephew nor his son—which he has claimed—this is good enough for Mr. Sethna. He declares emphatically to the kitchen staff, and to all the waiters and the busboys, too: “That boy we saw with old Lowji was someone else.”

  And now a half-dozen busboys glide into the failing light in the Ladies’ Garden, Mr. Sethna silently directing them with his piercing eyes and with hand signals. There are only a few saucers and an ashtray, together with the vase of flowers and the warm beer, on Dr. Daruwalla’s table. Each busboy knows his assignment: one takes the ashtray and another removes the tablecloth, precisely following the exact second when Mr. Sethna plucks up the neglected beer. There are three busboys who, between them, exchange the vermillion tablecloth for the saffron; then the same flower vase and a different ashtray are returned to the table. Dr. Daruwalla doesn’t notice, at first, that Mr. Sethna has substituted a cold Kingfisher for the warm one.

  It’s only after they’ve departed that Dr. Daruwalla appears to appreciate how the dusk has softened the brightness of both the pink and the white bougainvillea in the Ladies’ Garden, and how his brimming glass of Kingfisher is freshly beaded with condensation; the glass itself is so wet and cool, it seems to draw his hand. The beer is so cold and biting, he takes a long, grateful swallow—and then another and another. He drinks until the glass is empty, but still he stays at the table in the Ladies’ Garden, as if he’s waiting for someone—even though he knows his wife is expecting him at home.

  For a while, the doctor forgets to refill his glass; then he refills it. It’s a 21-ounce bottle—entirely too much beer for dwarfs, Farrokh remembers. Then a look crosses his face, of the kind one hopes will pass quickly. But the look remains, fixed and distant, and as bitter as the aftertaste of the beer. Mr. Sethna recognizes this look; he knows at once that the past has reclaimed Dr. Daruwalla, and by the bitterness of the doctor’s expression, Mr. Sethna thinks he knows which past. It’s those movie people, Mr. Sethna knows. They’ve come back again.

  5

  THE VERMIN

  Learning the Movie Business

  The director, Gordon Hathaway, would meet his end on the Santa Monica Freeway, but in the summer of ’49 he was riding the fading success of a private-investigator movie. Perversely, it had inflamed his long-dormant desire to make what movie people call a “quality” picture. This picture wouldn’t be it. Although the director would manage to shoot the film, overcoming considerable adversity, the movie would never be released. Having had his fling with “quality,” Hathaway would return with a modest vengeance, and more modest success, to the so-called P.I. genre. In the 1960s, he would make the downward move to television, where he awaited the unnoticed conclusion of his career.

  Few aspects of Gordon Hathaway’s personality were unique. He called all actors and actresses by their first names, including the ones he’d never met, which was the case with most of them, and he wetly kissed on both cheeks both the men and women he was saying adieu to, which included those he’d met for only the first or second time. He would marry four times, in each marriage goatishly siring children who would revile him before they were teenagers. In each account, Gordon would be unsurprisingly cast as the villain, while the four respective mothers (his ex-wives) emerged as highly compromised yet sainted. Hathaway said he’d had the misfortune to sire only daughters. Sons, he claimed, would have taken his side—to quote him, “At least one out of four fuckin’ times.”

  As for his dress, he was a marginal eccentric; as he aged—and as he more peaceably embraced a directorial career of complete compromise—he grew more outlandish in his attire, as if his clothes had become his foremost creative act. Sometimes he wore a woman’s blouse, open to the waist, and he arranged his hair in a long white ponytail, which became his trademark; in his many films and TV crime dramas, there could be found no such identifying features. And all the while, he decried the “suits”—which was his word for the producers—“the fuckin’ three-piece mentalities,” who, Hathaway said, had “a fuckin’ stranglehold on all the talent in Hollywood.”

  This was an odd accusation, in that Gordon Hathaway had spent a long and modestly profitable career in close cahoots with these same “suits.” Producers, in truth, loved him. But none of these details is original, or even memorable.

  In Bombay, however, the first truly distinctive element of Gordon Hathaway’s character was brought to light: namely, he was so frightened of the food in India—and so hysterically conscious of those diseases that, he was certain, would destroy his intestinal tract—that he ate nothing but room-service food, which he personally washed in his bathtub. The Taj Mahal Hotel was not unused to such habits among the foreign, but by this extremely selective diet Hathaway had severely constipated himself and suffered from hemorrhoids.

  In addition, the hot, damp weather of Bombay had excited his chronic proneness to fungal infections. Hathaway stuck cotton balls between his toes—he had the most persistent case of athlete’s foot that Dr. Lowji Daruwalla had ever seen—and a fungus as unstoppable as bread mold had invaded his ears. Old Lowji believed that the director was capable of producing his own mushrooms. Gordon Hathaway’s ears itched to the point of madness, and he was so deaf from both the fungus and the fungicidal ear drops—not to mention the cotton balls that he stuck in his ears—that his communication on the film set was comedic with misunderstanding.

  As for the ear drops, they were a solution of gentian violet, an indelible purple dye. Therefore, the collars and shoulders of Hathaway’s shirts were dotted with violet stains, for the cotton balls frequently fell out of his ears—or else Hathaway, in his frustration at being deaf, plucked out the cotton balls himself. The director was a born litterer; everywhere he went, the world was colorfully marked by his violet ear-cottons. Sometimes the purple solution streaked Hathaway’s face, giving him the appearance of someone who’d been deliberately painted; he looked like a member of a religious cult, or of an unknown tribe. Gordon Hathaway’s fingertips were similarly stained with gentian violet; he was always poking his fingers in his ears.

  But Lowji was nevertheless impressed by the fabled artistic temperament of the first (and only) Hollywood director he’d ever met. The senior Daruwalla told Meher (she told Farrokh) that it was “charming” how Hathaway had blamed his hemorrhoids and his fungus neither on his bathtub diet nor on the Bombay climate. Instead, the director faulted “the fuckin’ stress” of the compromising relationship he was compelled to conduct with the film’s philistine producer, a much defamed “suit,” who (coincidentally) was married to Gordon’s ambitious sister.

  “That cunt of misery!” Gordon would often exclaim. Failing originality in all his cinematic pursuits, Gordon Hathaway was nevertheless rumored to be the first to coin this vulgar phrase. “Fuckin’ ahead of my time” was a way he often spoke of himself; in this coarse instance, he may have been correct.

  It was a great source of frustration to Meher and Farrokh to hear Lowji defend the grossness of Gordon Hathaway on grounds of the man’s “artistic temperament.” It was never clear if the philistine producer’s success in exerting certain pressures on Gordon was because of Gordon’s desire to please the suit himself, or whether the true force of the exertion emanated from Gordon’s sister—the so-called C. of M. herself. It was never clear who had whom “by the balls,” as Gordon put it; it was unclear who “jerked” whose “wire,” as he otherwise put it.

  As an admitted newcomer to the creative process, Lowji
was undeterred by such talk; he sought to draw out of Gordon Hathaway the presumed aesthetic principles that guided the director through the frenzy with which this particular movie was being made. Even a novice could sense the hectic pace at which the film was being shot; even Lowji’s untested artistic sensibilities could detect the aura of tension with which the screenplay underwent revision every evening in the dining room of the Duckworth Club.

  “I trust my fuckin’ instinct for storytellin’, pal,” Gordon Hathaway confided to the senior Daruwalla, who was in such earnest search of a retirement career. “That’s the fuckin’ key.”

  How it shamed Farrokh and his poor mother: to observe, throughout dinner, that Lowji was taking notes.

  As for the screenwriter, whose shared dream of a “quality” picture was nightly and disastrously changing before his eyes, he was an alcoholic whose bar bill at the Duckworth Club threatened to exceed the Daruwalla family’s resources; it was a tab that pinched even the seemingly bottomless purse of the well-heeled Promila Rai. His name was Danny Mills, and he’d started out with a story about a married couple who come to India because the wife is dying of cancer; they’d promised themselves that they would go to India “one day.” It was originally titled, with the utmost sincerity, One Day We’ll Go to India; then Gordon Hathaway retitled it One Day We’ll Go to India, Darling. That small change initiated a major revision of the story, and sank Danny Mills all the deeper into his alcoholic gloom.

  It was actually a step up for Danny Mills—to have begun this screenplay from scratch. It was, if only in the beginning, his original story. He’d started out as the lowliest of studio contract writers; his first job, at Universal, was for 100 dollars a week, and all he did was tamper with existing scripts. Danny Mills still had more screen credits for “additional dialogue” than for “co-script,” and his solo screenplay credits (there were only two) were for flops—utter bombs. At the moment, he prided himself for being an “independent,” which is to say he was under no studio contract; however, this was because the studios thought he was unreliable, not only for his drinking but for his reputation as a loner. Danny wasn’t content to be a team player, and he became especially cantankerous in the cases of those screenplays that had already engaged the creative genius of a half-dozen or more writers. Although it clearly depressed Danny to revise on demand, which he was doing as a result of the nightly whims of Gordon Hathaway, it was entirely rare for Danny to be working on a story that had at least originated with him. For this reason, Gordon Hathaway thought that Danny shouldn’t complain.