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

memorable were my mother’s tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father—sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed orphan—looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poor Anna.”
    The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and somehow unfinished—the kitchen not quite right, the doors either sagging or poorly fitting or missing, varnished cabinets of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There’s room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.
    â€œLife’s savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much: my father’s new job was menial, a shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.
    He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All’s well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures in the theater of discontent.
    Dad said, “Say, I’ll see to that.”
    He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you’d see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.
    Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.
    Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You’re not going to paint that house yellow!”
    So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray.
    â€œThat’s a lot better,” the neighbor said.
    My mother pointed out that he’d dripped gray paint onto the white trim. He corrected it by repainting the trim.
    Mother said, “Now you’ve gone and dripped white paint on the shingles.”
    Dad smiled, repainting, never quite getting it right.
    Anticipating warm weather and insects, he put up screens. The screens were wobbly and rusted; holes had been poked in them.
    â€œDidn’t you look at the screens before?”
    She was talking about January, when he’d bought the house. This was mid-March.
    The stove was unreliable. The fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, and that had to be replaced by a plumber, Dad’s fellow choir member Mel Hankey. He worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled, like giving off a smell.
    My father’s new job was a problem: long hours, low pay, my mother home with the small children, and pregnant—due in June. She was heavy and walked with a tippy, leaning-back gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved.
    â€œI lost a child two years ago.”
    As though she was threatening to lose this one.
    Dad said, “It’s going to be fine.”
    â€œHow would you know?”
    He smiled, he had no reply. As a sort of penance he washed the dishes, calling out, “Who’s going to dry for me?” And because of the tension, each of us said, “I’ll do it!” and pushed around trying to be helpful, like terrified children in a drunken household. But there was no drunkard here, only a disappointed woman and her smiling husband.
    I said he had no recreations. He had one, the choir, legitimate because it was church-related. He had a strong, confident, rather tuneless voice, with a gravelly character, and even if thirty other people were