A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  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 swimming 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.

  That was when Martin’s mother exited the maid’s bungalow, which was next to the shed for pool toys. Wrapped in a towel, Vera saw Martin standing naked by the deep end, but she failed to see her floundering lover of the night before.

  “Martin, you know what I think of skinny-dipping,” Vera told the boy. “Go put on your trunks before Maria sees you.” Maria, of course, was also skinny-dipping.

  As for putting on his clothes, that was the moment when Martin Mills identified one of his dislikes for his repeated use of someone else’s bedroom; their clothes were in the drawers—at best, the bottommost drawers had been emptied for Martin—and their clothes hung lifelessly but prepossessingly in the closets. Their old toys filled up a chest; their baby pictures were on the walls. Sometimes their tennis trophies or horse-riding ribbons were displayed. Often there were shrines to their first dogs or cats, apparently deceased; this could be discerned by the presence of a glass jar that contained a dog’s toenail or a tuft from a cat’s tail. And when Martin would carry his little triumphs “home” from school—his “A” papers and other evidence of his accelerated education—he wasn’t allowed to display these on their walls.

  Then, in Los Angeles, there’d been an actor’s virtually unlived-in house on South Lorraine—a huge, grandly conceived mansion with many small, musty bedrooms all boasting blurry, enlarged photographs of unknown children of a conspicuously similar age. It seemed to Martin that the children who grew up there had died when they were six or eight, or that they’d uniformly become uninteresting subjects for photography upon reaching this approximate age; but there had simply been a divorce. In that house, time had stopped—Martin had hated it there—and Danny had at last outworn his welcome by falling asleep while smoking on the couch in front of the TV. The smoke alarm woke him, but he was drunk; he called the police instead of the fire department, and by the time that confusion was sorted out, the entire living room was consumed in flames. Danny took Martin to the pool, where he paddled about on an inflated raft in the form of Donald Duck—another relic of the permanently six- and eight-year-old children.

  Danny waded back and forth in the shallow end of the pool, although he wore long trousers and a wrinkled dress shirt instead of a bathing suit, and he held the pages of his screenplay-in-progress against his chest; clearly, he didn’t want the pages to get wet. Together, father and son watched the firefighters subduing the disaster.

  The actor, who was almost famous and whose living room was ruined, came home much later—after the fire was out and the firemen had left. Danny and Martin Mills were still playing in the swimming pool.

  “Let’s wait up for Mommy, so you can tell her all about the fire,” Danny had suggested.

  “Where’s Mommy?” Martin had asked.

  “Out,” Danny had replied. She was “out” with the actor. When Vera and the actor returned together, Martin imagined that his father was slightly pleased with the smoldering wreck he’d made of the living room. The screenplay wasn’t going too well; it was to be an opportunity for the actor to do something “timely”—it was a story about a younger man with an older woman … “something bittersweet,” the actor had suggested. Vera was hoping for the role of the older woman. But that screenplay was never made into a movie, either. Martin Mills was not sorry to leave those permanently six- and eight-year-old children on South Lorraine.

  In his stark cubicle at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon, the missionary was now looking for his copy of the Pocket Catholic Catechism; he hoped that these essentials of his faith might rescue him from reliving every bedroom he’d ever slept in in California. But he couldn’t find the reassuring little paperback; he presumed he’d left it on Dr. Daruwalla’s glass-topped table—in fact, he had. Dr. Daruwalla had already put it to use. Farrokh had read up on Extreme Unction, the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, for this fit rather neatly into the new screenplay that the doctor was dying to begin; he’d also skimmed a passage about the crucifixion—he thought that he might make some sly use of it. The doctor was feeling mischievous, and the earlier hours of the evening had seemed interminable to him because nothing mattered to him as much as beginning this suddenly important piece of writing. Had Martin Mills known that Dr. Daruwalla was about to re-create him as a character in a romantic comedy, the unfortunate missionary might have welcomed the distraction of remembering his itinerant childhood in Los Angeles.

  There’d been another L.A. house, on Kings Road, and Martin had cautiously loved that one; it had a fish pond, and the producer-owner kept rare birds, which were unfortunately Danny’s responsibility while he lived and wrote there. On the very first day, Martin had observed that the house had no screens. The rare birds weren’t caged; they were chained to their perches. One evening, during a dinner party, a hawk flew inside the house—and then another hawk flew inside—and to the considerable alarm of the assembled dinner guests, the rare birds fell victims to these visiting birds of prey. While the rare birds were shrieking and dying, Danny was so drunk that he insisted on finishing his version of how he was evicted from his favorite beach-view duplex in Venice. It was a story that never failed to bring tears to Martin’s eyes, because it concerne
d the death of his only dog. Meanwhile, the hawks swooped and killed; and the dinner guests—at first, just the women—put their heads under the dining-room table. Danny kept telling the story.

  It had not yet occurred to young Martin that the declining fortunes of his father’s screenwriting career would occasionally result in low-rent housing. Although this was a step down from freeloading in the generally well-to-do homes of directors and producers and almost-famous actors, the cheap rentals were at least free of other people’s clothes and toys; in this sense, these rentals seemed a step up to Martin Mills. But not Venice. It had also not occurred to young Martin that Danny and Vera were simply waiting for their son to be old enough to send away to school. They presumed this would spare the child the continuing embarrassment of his parents’ lives—their virtually separate existences, even within the confines of the same residence, their coping with Vera’s affairs and with Danny’s drinking. But Venice was too low-rent for Vera; she chose to spend the time in New York, while Danny was pounding the keys of a portable typewriter and dangerously driving Martin to and from Loyola Marymount. In Venice, they’d shared the ground-floor half of a shocking-pink duplex on the beach.