A Son of the Circus

by John Irving

  “It was the best place we ever lived, because it was so fucking real!” Danny explained to his cowering dinner guests. “Isn’t that right, Marty?” But young Martin was silent; he was noticing the death agonies of a mynah—the bird was succumbing to a hawk, very near where the uneaten hors d’oeuvres still occupied a coffee table in the living room.

  In truth, Martin thought, Venice had seemed rather unreal to him. There were drugged hippies on South Venice Boulevard; Martin Mills was terrified of such an environment, but Danny touched and surprised him by giving him a dog for a pre-Christmas present. It was a beagle-sized mongrel from the pound—“Saved from death!” Danny said. He named it “Whiskey,” because of its color and in spite of Martin’s protests. This must have condemned the dog, to name it after booze.

  Whiskey slept with Martin, and Martin was allowed to put his own things on the ocean-damp walls. When he came “home” from school, he waited until the lifeguards were off-duty before he took Whiskey walking on the beach, where for the first time he imagined he was the envy of those children who can always be found in public playgrounds—in this case, those children who stood in line to use the slide on Venice Beach. Surely they would have liked a dog of their own to walk on the sand.

  For Christmas, Vera visited—albeit briefly. She refused to stay in Venice. She claimed a suite of rooms at a plain but clean hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica; there she ate a Christmas breakfast with Martin—the first of many lonely meals he would remember with his mother, whose principal measure of luxury was drawn from her qualified praise of room service. Veronica Rose repeatedly said that she would be happier living on reliable room service than in a house of her own—throw the towels on the floor, leave the dishes on the bed, that kind of thing. She gave young Martin a dog collar for Christmas, which profoundly moved him because he could remember no other instance of apparent collaboration between his mother and father; in this isolated case, Danny must have communicated with Vera—at least enough for Vera to know that Danny had given the boy a dog.

  But on New Year’s Eve, a roller skater (who lived in the turquoise duplex next door) fed the dog a big plate of marijuana lasagna. When Danny and Martin took Whiskey out for a walk after midnight, the stoned runt attacked a weight lifter’s Rottweiler; Whiskey was killed by the first snap and shake.

  The Rottweiler’s owner was a contrite sort of muscle man wearing a tank top and a pair of gym shorts; Danny fetched a shovel, and the apologetic weight lifter dug an enormous grave in the vicinity of the children’s slide. No one was permitted to bury a dead dog on Venice Beach; some civic-minded observer called the police. Martin was awakened by two cops very early on New Year’s morning, when Danny was too hungover to assist him and there was no weight lifter available to help him dig the dead dog up. When Martin had finished stuffing Whiskey in a trash bag, one of the cops put the body in the trunk of the police car and the other cop, at the moment he handed Martin his fine, asked the boy where he went to school.

  “I’m part of an accelerated educational program at Loyola Marymount,” Martin Mills explained to the cop.

  Not even this distinction would prevent the landlord from evicting Danny and Martin shortly thereafter, out of fear of further trouble with the police. By the time they left, Martin Mills had changed his mind about the place. Almost every day, he’d seen the weight lifter with his murderous Rottweiler; and—either entering or leaving the turquoise duplex next door—the roller skater with a fondness for marijuana lasagna was a daily presence, too. Once again, Martin wasn’t sorry to go.

  It was Danny who mindlessly loved the story. In the producer’s house on Kings Road, Danny seemed to prolong the telling of the tale, almost as if the ongoing bird deaths were an enhancement to the suddenness of poor Whiskey’s demise. “What a great fucking neighborhood that was!” Danny was shouting to his dinner guests. By now, all the men had put their heads under the table with the women. Both sexes were fearful that the swooping hawks would mistake them for rare birds.

  “Daddy, there are hawks in the house!” Martin had cried. “Daddy—the birds!”

  “This is Hollywood, Marty,” Danny Mills had replied. “Don’t worry about the birds—the birds don’t matter. This is Hollywood. The story is all that matters.”

  That screenplay wasn’t made into a movie, either; this was almost a refrain for Danny Mills. The bill for the rare, dead birds would reintroduce the Millses to more low-rent housing.

  It was at this juncture in his memories that Martin Mills struggled to stop remembering; for if young Martin’s familiarity with his father’s shortcomings was well established before the boy was sent away to school, it was after he’d been sent away that his mother’s moral unconcern became more apparent and struck young Martin as more odious than any weakness to be found in Danny.

  Alone in his cubicle in Mazagaon, the new missionary now sought any means by which he might halt further memories of his mother. He thought of Father Joseph Moriarity, S.J.; he’d been young Martin’s mentor at Loyola Marymount, and when Martin had been sent to Massachusetts—where he was not enrolled in Jesuit (or even in Catholic) schools—it had been Father Joe who’d answered the boy’s religious questions, by mail. Martin Mills also thought of Brother Brennan and Brother LaBombard, his coadjutores, or “fellow workers,” in his novice years at St. Aloysius. He even remembered Brother Flynn inquiring if nocturnal emissions were “allowed”—for was this not the impossible? Namely, sex without sin. Was it Father Toland or Father Feeney who’d implied that a nocturnal emission was in all likelihood an unconscious act of masturbation? Martin was certain that it was either Brother Monahan or Brother Dooley who’d inquired if the act of masturbation was still forbidden in the case of it being “unconscious.”

  “Yes, always,” Father Gannon had said. Father Gannon was bonkers, of course. No priest in his right mind would call an involuntary nocturnal emission an act of masturbation; nothing unconscious is ever a sin, since “sin” implies freedom of choice. Father Gannon would one day be taken bodily from his classroom at St. Aloysius, for his ravings were considered to lend credence to those 19th-century antipapist tracts in which convents are depicted as brothels for priests.

  But how Martin Mills had approved of Father Gannon’s answer; that will separate the men from the boys, he’d thought. It was a rule he’d been able to live with—no nocturnal emissions, unconscious or otherwise. He never touched himself.

  But Martin Mills knew that even his triumph over masturbation would lead him to thinking of his mother, and so he tried to think of something else—of anything else. He repeated 100 times the date of August 15, 1534; it was the day St. Ignatius Loyola, in a chapel in Paris, had taken the vow to go to Jerusalem. For 15 minutes, Martin Mills concentrated on the correct pronunciation of Montmartre. When this didn’t work—when he found himself seeing the way his mother brushed her hair before she went to bed—Martin opened his Bible to Genesis, Chapter 19, for the Lord’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah always calmed him, and within the story of God’s wrath was also deftly planted that lesson in obedience which Martin Mills much admired. It was terribly human of Lot’s wife … that she should look back, even though the Lord had commanded all of them, “Do not look behind you …,” but Lot’s wife was nevertheless turned to a pillar of salt for her disobedience. As well she should have been, thought Martin Mills. But even his pleasure at the Lord’s destruction of those cities that flaunted their depravities did not spare the missionary from his keenest memories of being sent away to school.

  Turkey (Bird and Country)

  Veronica Rose and Danny Mills had agreed that their academically gifted son should attend a New England prep school, but Vera didn’t wait for young Martin to be of high-school age; in Vera’s view, the boy was becoming too religious. As if it wasn’t enough that the Jesuits were educating him, they’d managed to put it in the boy’s head that he should attend Mass on Sunday and get himself to Confession, too. “What does this kid have to confess?
” Vera would ask Danny. She meant that young Martin was far too well behaved for a normal boy. As for Mass, Vera said that it “screwed up” her weekends, and so Danny took him. A free Sunday morning was wasted on Danny, anyway; with hangovers like his, he might as well have been sitting and kneeling at a Mass.

  They sent young Martin first to the Fessenden School in Massachusetts; it was strict but not religious, and Vera liked it because it was close to Boston. When she visited Martin, she could stay at the Ritz-Carlton and not in some dreary motel or a cutesy-quaint country inn. Martin started Fessenden in the sixth grade and would stay through the ninth grade, which was the school’s final year; he didn’t feel especially sorry for himself—there were even younger boarders at the school, although the majority of boarders were of the five-day variety, which meant that they went home every weekend. The seven-day boarders, like Martin, included many foreign students, or Americans whose families were in diplomatic service in unfriendly countries. Some of the foreign students, like Martin’s roommate, were the children of diplomats in residence in Washington or New York.

  Despite the roommate, for Martin Mills would rather have had a single room, young Martin enjoyed the crowded cubicle; he was allowed to put his own things on the walls, provided that this could be done without damage to the walls and that the subject matter was not obscene. Obscene subject matter wouldn’t have tempted Martin Mills, but young Martin’s roommate was tempted.

  His name was Arif Koma, and he was from Turkey; his father was with the Turkish Consulate in New York. Arif stashed a calendar of women in bathing suits between his mattress and the bedsprings. Arif didn’t offer to share his calendar with Martin, and the Turk usually waited until he thought Martin was asleep before he made masturbatory use of the 12 women. Often a full half hour after the required lights out, Martin would notice Arif’s flashlight—the glow emerging from under the sheets and blanket—and the corresponding creak of Arif’s bedsprings. Martin had looked at the calendar privately—when Arif was in the shower, or otherwise out of the cubicle—and it appeared (from the more abused pages) that Arif preferred March and August to the other women, although Martin couldn’t fathom why. But Martin didn’t observe the calendar in great detail, or for long; there was no door on the cubicle he shared with Arif—there was only a curtain—and should a faculty member have found him with the swimsuit calendar, the women (all 12 months of them) would have been confiscated. Martin would have considered this unfair to Arif.

  It was less out of growing friendship than out of some silent, mutual respect that the two boys continued to be roommates into their final year at Fessenden. The school assumed that if you didn’t complain about your roommate, you must like him. Furthermore, the boys had attended the same summer camp. In the spring of his first year at Fessenden, when Martin was sincerely missing his father and actually looking forward to what residential horrors he might encounter in the summer months, back in L.A., Vera had sent the boy a summer-camp brochure. This was where he was going; it was a matter that had already been decided—it wasn’t a question—and as Martin leafed through the brochure, Arif looked at the pictures with him.

  “I might as well go to that one, too,” the Turk had told Martin. “I mean, I’ll have to go somewhere.”

  But there was another reason they stayed together; they were both unathletic, and neither was inclined to assert any physical superiority over the other. At a school like Fessenden, where sports were compulsory and the boys grew feverishly competitive, Arif and Martin could protect their lack of athletic interest only by remaining roommates. They joked to each other that Fessenden’s most rabidly despised athletic rivals were schools named Fay and Fenn. They found it comic that these were other “F” schools, as if the letter F signified a conspiracy of athleticism—a “frenzy” of the competitive spirit. Having concurred on this observation, the two roommates devised a private way to indicate their contempt of Fessenden’s obsessively athletic vigor; Arif and Martin resolved not only to remain unathletic—they would use an “F” word for all the things they found distasteful about the school.

  To the dominant colors of the faculty dress shirts, which were a button-down variety of pinks and yellows, the boys would say “fashionable.” Of an unattractive faculty wife, “far from fetching.” To the school rule that the top button of the shirt must always be buttoned when wearing a tie, they would respond with “fastidious.” Other favorites, for varying encounters with the faculty and their fellow students, included “faltering,” “fascistic,” “fatuous,” “fawning,” “featherbrained,” “fecal,” “fervid,” “fiendish,” “fishy,” “flatulent,” “fogyish,” “forbidding,” “foul,” “fraudulent,” “freakish,” “frigid,” “fulsome” and “fussy.”

  These one-word adjectival signals amused them; Martin and Arif became, like many roommates, a secret society. Naturally, this led other boys to call them “fags,” “faggots,” “fruits,” “flits” and “fairies,” but the only sexual activity that took place in their shared cubicle was Arif’s regular masturbation. By the time they were ninth graders, they were given a room with a door. This inspired Arif to take fewer pains to conceal his flashlight.

  With this memory, the 39-year-old missionary, who was alone and wide awake in his cubicle at St. Ignatius, realized that the subject of masturbation was insidious. In a desperate effort to distract himself from where he knew this subject would lead him—namely, to his mother—Martin Mills sat bolt upright on his cot, turned on his light and began to read at random in The Times of India. It wasn’t even a recent issue of the newspaper; it was at least two weeks old and rolled into a tube, and it was kept under the cot, where it was handy for killing cockroaches and mosquitoes. But thus it happened that the new missionary began the first of the exercises with which he intended to orient himself in Bombay. A more important matter—that being whether there was anything in The Times of India that could defuse Martin’s memory of his mother and her connection to the unwelcome theme of masturbation—would remain, for the moment, unresolved.

  As Martin’s luck would have it, his eyes fell first upon the matrimonials. He saw that a 32-year-old public-school teacher, in search of a bride, confessed to a “minor squint in one eye”; a government servant (with his own house) admitted to a “slight skewness in the legs,” but he maintained that he was able to walk perfectly—he would also accept a handicapped spouse. Elsewhere, a “60-ish issueless widower of wheatish complexion” sought a “slim beautiful homely wheatish non-smoker teetotaller vegetarian under 40 with sharp features”; on the other hand, the widower tolerantly proclaimed, caste, language, state and education were “no bar” to him (this was one of Ranjit’s ads, of course). A bride seeking a groom advertised herself as having “an attractive face with an Embroidery Diploma”; another “slim beautiful homely girl,” who said she was planning to study computers, sought an independent young man who was “sufficiently educated not to have the usual hang-ups about fair complexion, caste and dowry.”

  About all that Martin Mills could conclude from these self-advertisements, and these desires, was that “homely” meant well suited for domestic life and that a “wheatish” complexion meant reasonably fair-skinned—probably a pale yellow-brown, like Dr. Daruwalla. Martin couldn’t have guessed that the “60-ish issueless widower of wheatish complexion” was Ranjit; he’d met Ranjit, who was dark-skinned—definitely not “wheatish.” To the missionary, any matrimonial advertisement—any expressed longing to be a couple—seemed merely desperate and sad. He got off his cot and lit another mosquito coil, not because he’d noticed any mosquitoes but because Brother Gabriel had lit the last coil for him and Martin wanted to light one for himself.

  He wondered if his former roommate, Arif Koma, had had a “wheatish” complexion. No; Arif was darker than wheat, Martin thought, remembering how clear the Turk’s complexion had been. In one’s teenage years, a clear complexion was more remarkable than any color. In the ninth grade, Arif already needed to shave eve
ry day, which made his face appear much more mature than the faces of the other ninth graders; yet Arif was utterly boyish in his lack of body hair—his hairless chest, his smooth legs, his girlishly unhairy bum … such attributes as these connoted a feminine sleekness. Although they’d been roommates for three years, it wasn’t until the ninth grade that Martin began to think of Arif as beautiful. Later, he would realize that even his earliest perception of Arif’s beauty had been planted by Vera. “And how is your pretty roommate—that beautiful boy?” Martin’s mother would ask him whenever she called.

  It was customary in boarding schools for visiting parents to take their children out to dinner; often roommates were invited along. Understandably, Martin Mills’s parents never visited him together; like a divorced couple, although they weren’t divorced, Vera and Danny saw Martin separately. Danny usually took Martin and Arif to an inn in New Hampshire for the Thanksgiving holiday; Vera was more inclined to visits of a single night.

  During the Thanksgiving break in their ninth-grade year, Arif and Martin were treated to the inn in New Hampshire with Danny and to a one-night visit with Vera—that being the Saturday night of the long weekend. Danny returned the boys to Boston, where Vera was waiting for them at the Ritz. She had arranged a two-bedroom suite. Her quarters were rather grand, with a king-sized bed and a sumptuous bathroom; the boys received a smaller bedroom, with two twin beds and an adjacent shower and toilet.

  Martin had enjoyed the time at the inn in New Hampshire. There’d been a similar arrangement of rooms, but different; at the inn, Arif was given a bedroom and a bathroom of his own, while Danny had shared a room with twin beds with his son. For this enforced isolation, Danny was apologetic to Arif. “You get to have him as your roommate all the time,” Danny explained to the Turk.