Mr. Bones by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online Page A

sometimes hostile displays of affection. The quiet-seeming household is often more turbulent or intimidating than the household of the tyrant or the drunkard.
    One of the unspoken conflicts in the house was the house itself, a constant reproach in the cabinets that failed to catch, in every creak of the floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the stains on the ceiling like mocking faces, every draft that scuttled under the doors. All these awkward reminders. My mother’s version of the story, which was the blaming version—the one that my mother wouldn’t let him live down—was that having decided that we had to move (four kids in a tiny house and a fifth on the way), my father would be the house hunter. My mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked us to make a decision, so that if we failed she could say, “Whose fault is that?” Deniability was a defense she mastered long before such a word was coined.
    By directing my father to look for a new house, she became the one to be propitiated: a scolding silence if it was a good choice, loud blame if it was a bad one. Dad was like hired help, the house hunter. “And it better be a good one.”
    Unused to the trick of spending a large amount of money, risking this big decision, Dad became more affable, more genial than I’d ever seen him. It was sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table risking everything on the turn of a card.
    He saw three or four houses. They were unsuitable. He liked all of them. My mother was vexed. This was dinner table talk: we were discouraged from speaking during mealtime, so we listened. Buying anything involved endless deliberation. “What’s good about it?” my mother would say. “It’ll be hard to heat,” or “It’s not on a bus line,” or “That’s a bad neighborhood.”
    One winter night Mother was in tears. Dad had seen another house he liked. He was told the price. He was in the nervous affable mood, his gambler’s anxiety. He did not bargain, or say “My wife will have to see it,” or “We’ll think it over.”
    He said, “We’ll take it!” with a sudden flourish of money that startled even the seller of the house, who was a cranky old woman in a soiled apron.
    That was my mother’s version, in the oral tradition of the family history, the only version that was ever allowed, all the blame on Dad. In a matter of an hour or so my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it in the dark. Because it was January and he worked until five-thirty, he would have driven there after work, tramped through the snow, looked it over, and by seven or so it was a deal.
    The reason for my mother’s tears was that, anticipating his finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him, and the papers he signed that very night (the old woman had them handy in the pocket of her apron) specified a deposit of that amount, nonreturnable.
    â€œOur whole life’s savings!” my mother cried, thumping the table. “How
could
you?”
    Obviously he’d liked the house, he didn’t want to risk losing it, he wasn’t a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life’s savings—wasted!”
    My father suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table—and other times too. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved—a huge disruptive event in a family with few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it