When he strips a tin can of its paper labels and removes the top and bottom and bends them in and, on the cement floor of the chicken house, jumps to flatten the shining cylinder, it is like jumping on the face of a Jap or a Kraut. Chicken-dung dust rises from the cement with each impact. Mother doesn’t understand fighting—that you have to do it sometimes. On the walk back from fourth grade, the fifth-grade boys pick on Toby because he is still wearing knickers, or is a schoolteacher’s son, or lives in a big white house, or raises his hand too much in class. They know this even though they aren’t in class with him; he just has the annoying air of a boy with too many answers. Kids sneer to him, “You think you’re much,” when all he wants is to blend in, to be an ordinary boy.
Boys from the ordinary world keep attacking him. One time, one of the fifth-graders, Ricky Seitz, and Toby wrestled to a sort of standstill on the weedy asphalt behind the Acme’s loading porch, except that Toby was on the bottom and emerged with a bloody nose. When he came in the front door, his mother saw the bloody nose and in a minute was on the phone—to the Seitzes and then to the principal of the elementary school. The telephone stands next to the Philco radio on a little table like a thick-stemmed black daffodil of Bakelite.
An even more humiliating intervention of his mother’s once occurred on the softball field. The field is two minutes’ walk away, across the alley and along a little stand of corn, from the lower end of his yard, through the narrow space between the chicken house and the empty garage. Mother complains that this space smells of urine, and blames the men of the house, including Toby. It makes her wild just to think about it. “What’s the point of having indoor toilets?” she asks, getting red in the face. Still, Toby keeps doing it. Just being in this space between the two walls, the chicken house’s asbestos shingles and the old garage’s wooden clapboards with the red paint flaking off, makes him need to go wee-wee.
Daddy walks this way to the high school every day, wearing a coat and tie, out past the buzzing Japanese-beetle traps, down between the yard and the asparagus bed, out through the lower hedge. Mother almost never comes down here. She avoids the school grounds; that is part of what made what happened so shocking. It involved Warren Frye—Warren Frye of the bleeding head, who never came to the house any more and possibly resented Toby’s being here in the territory of the lower alley, where Warren lives in a tight row of asphalt-shingled houses. Behind the backstop of the softball game—not a school game, a league game, on a Saturday, with players graduated from high school and an older crowd of spectators—Warren pushed Toby, and Toby pushed back, and soon they were tussling on the dirt, before a small standing crowd that included Daddy.
Daddy was just standing there, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his combed head high, trying to forget his worries and watch the game, trying to blend in. Perhaps, teaching school all week, he was enjoying not having to enforce any discipline, letting nature take its course, ignoring the child’s fight in front of him and the crowd around him, which was noticing and loudly beginning to take sides. Toby was getting slightly the worse of the tussle—Warren had had a growth spurt, in the thickness dimension—and tears of fury were spouting in Toby’s eyes when his mother appeared.
She was just suddenly there, his tall young mother, seizing Warren by the hair and slapping him in the face, as smart a sound as a baseball being hit. Then, not missing a beat, holding Toby tightly by the hand, she wheeled and with the same amazing accuracy reached out and slapped Daddy in the face, for just standing there and letting nature take its course.
She pulled Toby home. He was blinded by his tears and burbled protests, while the part of his brain not dissolved in shame tries to figure out how she had known to appear. She must have heard crowd noise from inside the yard, and then somehow seen, out across the lower hedge, him and Warren tussling in the dirt. Why, Toby wonders at the center of this scene (the softball field fading behind them, the white house and side porch and grape arbor drawing closer, the asparagus bed on their left already beginning to turn frothy and go to seed, his tears warping everything like bubbles in window-panes), does he have to be the one with a mother living so close to the school grounds, a mother so magical and fierce and unwilling to let nature take its course? His arm feels pulled from its socket. He begins to resign himself to the fact that with such a mother he can never be an ordinary, everyday boy.
The Apparition
HER APPEARANCE startled Milford when she stopped his wife on the hotel stairs, to ask a question. There was a flushed urgency, a near-breathlessness, to the question: “Have you been to the hairdresser yet?”
“No, not yet,” Jean answered, startled to be abruptly accosted, though, since they were all members of a thirty-person museum-sponsored tour of the temples of southern India, in theory they were all comrades in adventure. It was so early in the tour that the Milfords hadn’t yet thoroughly worked out the other couples, but he recognized this woman on the stairs as paired with a bespectacled, short, sharp-nosed man in a blue blazer, the two of them hanging back a bit shyly at the get-acquainted cocktail party beside the hotel swimming pool. Somewhere in their early forties, by Milford’s estimate, they were among the youngest people on the tour, whereas the Milfords, in their early seventies, were among the oldest. Yet age differences, and differences of wealth and class, were compressed to insignificance by the felt presence of the alien subcontinent all around them. “How was she?” Jean asked, abandoning her usual reserve. There was, Milford had often noticed, a heated camaraderie among women when they touched on the technology of beauty. Already, he saw them as sisters of a sort.
“Horrible,” came the swift, nearly breathless answer. “She didn’t understand my hair at all. It’s too curly.” The word was pronounced as a spondee—cur-lee. The woman, wearing her own, more snugly cut blue blazer, spoke with a faint strangeness—not an accent exactly but with her mouth held a little numbly, a bit frozen in the words’ aftermath, as if whatever she said slightly astonished her. Her hair, now that he looked, was indeed remarkably curly, bronze in color and so thick and springy it seemed to be fighting to expel the several tortoiseshell barrettes that held it close to her head.
Milford, standing lower on the curved stairs, his feet arrested on two different steps, recalled an earlier glimpse of this apparition, also on steps. Those on the tour not too distinctly infirm were climbing the six hundred fourteen steps carved into a stone mountain, Vindhyagiri Hill, at whose summit stood a monumental Jain statue, a giant representation of a fabled sage, Bahubali, who had stood immobile for so many days and months that (legend claimed) vines had grown over his body. At the beginning of the climb Milford had been shocked by his first sight of a live “sky-clad” holy man. The naked man moved upward, one deliberate step at a time, with ceremonial pauses for chanting and shaking his wrist bells. His stocky, even paunchy body was tanned an oily coffee brown unbroken but by patches of gray hair on his chest and elsewhere. The ugliness of such an aging male body disturbed Milford. Did the holy man proceed up and down the stairs all day long? Wasn’t there any law in India against indecent exposure? Or was it legal on sacred sites, in the vicinity of a giant nude statue whose penis, the guidebook calculated, was six feet long? Preoccupied by these questions, Milford felt himself being passed. A body brushed past his. He was being passed by a youngish woman in khaki slacks and white running shoes and a yellow baseball hat tipped rakishly forward on her head, as if her hair were too bulky, too springy, to fit into it. Without effort, it seemed to the gasping Milford, she moved upward and out of sight, amid the many other ascending pilgrims at Sravanabelgola. By the time he had made it all the way to the shrine at the top, out of which the huge effigy, symmetrical and serene, protruded like a jack-in-the-box, she had disappeared.
“But she shouldn’t have trouble with your hair, it’s so straight,” the woman was telling Jean, with that terminal emphasis, her lips ajar as if there was something about straight hair that left her stunned. “I’d love to have straight hair,”
she did add, and thrust out a shapely, heavily ringed hand for Jean to take. “I’m Lorena. Lorena Billings,” she said.
“I know.” Jean smiled. “I’m Jean Milford, and this is my husband, Henry.”
He wondered if Jean was lying, or if she had really known. Women lied, often for no other reason than simple politeness or the wish to round out a story, but, then, they did retain details that slipped by men. He had already forgotten the apparition’s name. Taking her hand—startlingly warm and moist—he said, to cover his betranced confusion, “You passed me on the Jain steps yesterday. Breezed right up by me—I was impressed. You must be in great shape.”
“No,” was the thoughtful, unsmiling response, as she looked at him for the first time. Her brown eyes were a surprisingly pale shade, almost amber. “I just wanted to get it over with quickly, before I lost heart.”
“Did you really know her name?” Milford asked his wife when the other woman had gone off, with her horrible haircut. It had looked pretty good to him, actually. With hair that curly, always retracting into itself, how could a hairdresser go wrong?
“Of course,” Jean told him. “I looked over the list they gave us when we signed on to the tour and tried to match up names and faces. You would get much more out of these trips, Henry, if you did some homework.”
She had been a schoolteacher in her early twenties, before he had met her, but he had a clear enough vision of her standing in front of the second- or third-graders, slender and quick and perfectly groomed, demanding with her level, insistent voice their full attention, and rewarding them at the end of each class with her brilliant, gracious smile. She would have subdued those children to her own sense of a proper education, and she was still working to subdue her husband. Sometimes, when he sought to evade one of her helpful lectures to him and sidle past, she would sidestep and block his way, insisting, with a blue-eyed stare, “Look at me!”
He said, kiddingly, kidding being another form of evasion, “I prefer the immersion method—to let it all wash over me, unmuddied by preconceptions.”
“That’s so sloppy,” Jean said, endearingly enough. Physically she and the apparition were both, Milford supposed, his “type”—women of medium height with a certain solid amplitude, not fat but sufficiently wide in the hips to signal a flair for childbirth; women whose frontal presentation makes men want to give them babies. His and Jean’s babies were themselves of baby-making age, and even, in the case of their two older daughters, beyond it. Yet the primordial instinct was still alive in him: he wanted to make this apparition the mother of his child.
Lorena Billings’s body differed from Jean’s not only by thirty years’ less use but by being expensively toned. Though open to dowdy, education-minded New Englanders like the Milfords, the tour was basically composed of Upper East Side New Yorkers. They seemed all to know one another, as if the metropolis were a village skimmed from penthouses and museum boards, and their overheard talk dealt with, among other cherished caretakers of their well-being, personal trainers.
Much of the conversation among the women was in Spanish. The tour group included a strange number of wives from Latin America—remnants of an old wave of fashion, Henry surmised, in trophy mates. Lorena was one of them, the child of an adventurous American mining engineer and a Chilean banker’s daughter. This explained her charming, intent way of speaking—English was not her mother tongue, the language of her heart, though she had been sent off while young to American schools and spoke the acquired language fluently. She even spoke it with a pinch of New York accent, that impatient nasal twang so useful, in her husband’s mouth, for announcing rapid appraisals. Ian Billings was a lawyer, with unspoken depths of inherited, extra-legal resources lending his assertions a casual weight. Milford took what comfort he could, as their trip wore on and as acquaintance among the tourists deepened, in the observation that Billings had the thin skin and pink flush of a candidate for an early heart attack. He was no taller than his wife. In talking to Lorena, lanky Milford felt himself towering as if literally mounted on Proust’s figurative stilts of time. He was plenty old enough, if he thought about it, to be her father, but in the society of the tour bus—a kind of school bus, with the discipline problems in the back and the brown-nosers up front next to the lecturers—they were all in the same grade.
Dusty villages and green rice fields flowed past the windows of the bus. Vendors and mendicants clustered at the door whenever the bus stopped. Temple followed temple, merging in Milford’s mind into one dismal labyrinth of dimly lit corridors smelling of rotting food—offerings to gods who weren’t having any. At the end of some especially long and dark corridors stood the linga, a rounded phallic symbol periodically garlanded and anointed with oil and ghee. In especially well-staffed temples, robed priests guarded the linga and stared expectantly at the tourists.
Milford was not good at Hinduism. He kept confusing Vishnu and Shiva, missing the subtle carved differences in hairstyle that distinguished them. He kept forgetting whose consort was lovely Lakshmi, goddess of wealth and good fortune, and whose consort was Parvati/Durga/Kali, daughter of the Himalayas, goddess of strength, warfare, destruction, and renewal. Jean and Ian struck up an alliance, a conspiracy of star students, comparing notes and memorizing lists of primary and secondary deities and their interrelations and of the eminently forgettable long names of the temples nested in their various dirty, clamorous cities, among their endless one-man shops and mutilated beggars and heartbreakingly hopeful, wiry, grinning brown children.
While their consorts matched notebooks and one-upped each other with snatches of Hindi and Sanskrit, Henry and Lorena were thrown into a default alliance of willful ignorance. They became, with sideways glances and half-smiles, connoisseurs of irrelevant details—the tour leader’s increasing vexation with aggressive Japanese and Korean groups; the dead-on mimicry by Indian officials and maître d’s of an obsolete imperial Englishness, bluff and haughty; a startlingly specific sex act included in a time-worn temple frieze; a lonely bouquet of withering flowers at the base of an outof-the-way shrine to Parvati, goddess of (among much else) fertility.
In the bat-cave recesses of the larger temples, wild-eyed Brahman priests appeared, selling blessings to the tourists. The tourists learned how to put their hands together in offering their namaste, and how to bow their heads and receive a stab of bright henna or oily ash on the center of their foreheads. Lorena, it seemed to Milford, retained the fresh mark all day, a third eye above her two topaz-colored own. She had an aptitude for being blessed. In several of the larger and busier temples, a tethered elephant had been trained to receive a piece of paper currency in the prehensile, three-lobed end of its trunk, and to swing the trunk backwards to pass the note to the trainer’s hand, and then to lower the pink termination of its uncanny and docile proboscis upon the head of the donor for a moment. At every opportunity, Lorena submitted to this routine, her eyes piously closed, her canary-yellow baseball cap tipped jauntily forward on the dense mass of her curls. The cap, Milford supposed, served as something of a prophylaxis, but it was with a wide-eyed merriment that after one such blessing she complained to Henry, “He spit at me! Right in my face!”
Wanting to feel an elephant’s blessing as she felt it, he submitted to one, for the price of a pink ten-rupee note bearing the image of Gandhi, and did feel, on the top of his head, a fumbling tenderness, a rubbery heaviness intelligently moderated, as if by an overworked god.
. . .
He did not want to draw too close to Lorena. At his age he preferred to observe at a safe distance, to embrace her with a wry sideways attention. She was beyond his means in every way. On the one occasion when, in the informal rotation of the couples and widowed singles and gay bachelors whereby the tour group sought to vary the round of thrice-daily meals, the Milfords and the Billingses shared a dinner table, the younger couple radiated an aura of expenditure, as their conversation revealed details of second homes in Southampton, Long Island, and Dorset, Vermont, no
t to mention a Miami apartment and annual trips back to Chile. Though to the Milfords they seemed youthful, they were old enough to be much concerned with their children’s admissions to preferred day schools and, eventually, Ivy League colleges. Like the solar beads that wink through the moon’s mountain valleys during a total eclipse, an undeclared fortune twinkled in their humorous offhand complaints about the unbridled expenditures of nouveau-riche condo boards and the levies that New York City, in taxes and charities, extracts from its fortunate on behalf of its omnipresent poor.
Not that the Billingses were anything but pleasant and tactful with the elderly New England provincials. Milford observed that Lorena warmed in her husband’s presence, her eyes and voice taking on a cosmopolitan quickness and gleam as she touched on plays, fashions, art exhibits, and Manhattan architectural disputes of which, she slowly realized, the Milfords knew almost nothing—only what had been laggardly reported in the Boston Globe. Her mouth lapsed into that frozen, uncertain look with which she had addressed the strangers on the stairs; but then she decided, with an inaudible click, that the Milfords were happy to bask in a reflected glitter, and talked on.
Billings, Henry saw with a vicarious husbandly pride, permitted her to be herself, to display herself. Her expanding curls softly bobbed, the faint formality of her English melted into brassy New York diphthongs. “People keep telling us Jap is so wonderful, but—no doubt it’s my stupidity—I find his post-Pop stuff to be so dry, so—so difundido. But then we don’t own any of him, except for a few prints Ian picked up when he was still doing the alphabet and numbers. Compare him, say, with Botero, who’s just done a super series of drawings on the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib—utterly savage, like nothing else he’s ever done. They absolutely rank with Goya, Los desastres de la guerra.” When she dropped into Spanish, a truer self leaped forth, sharp edges and trilled “r”s, her voice a bit deeper, on bedrock.