A Son of the Circus

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.

“Sure—I understand,” Arif had said. After all, in Turkey, seniority was the basic criterion for relationships of superiority and deference. “I’m used to deference to seniority,” Arif had added pleasantly.

Sadly, Danny drank too much; he fell almost instantly asleep and snored. Martin was disappointed that there’d been little conversation between them. But before Danny passed out, and as they both lay awake in the dark, the father had said to the son, “I hope you’re happy. I hope you’ll confide in me if you’re ever not happy—or just tell me what you’re thinking, in general.” Before Martin could think of what to say, he’d heard his father’s snores. Nevertheless, the boy had appreciated the thought. In the morning, to have witnessed Danny’s affection and pride, one would have presumed that the father and son had talked intimately.

Then, in Boston on Saturday night, Vera wanted to stray no farther than the dining room at the Ritz; her heaven was a good hotel, and she was already in it. But the dress code in the Ritz dining room was even more severe than Fessenden’s. The captain stopped them because Martin was wearing white athletic socks with his loafers. Vera said simply, “I was going to mention it, darling—now someone else has.” She gave him the room key, to go change his socks, while she waited with Arif. Martin had to borrow a pair of Arif’s calf-length black hose. The incident drew Vera’s attention to how much more comfortably Arif wore “proper” clothes; she waited for Martin to rejoin them in the dining room before making her observation known.

“It must be your exposure to the diplomatic life,” Martin’s mother remarked to the Turk. “I suppose there are all sorts of dress-up occasions at the Turkish Embassy.”

“The Turkish Consulate,” Arif corrected her, as he had corrected her a dozen times.

“I’m frightfully uninterested in details,” Vera told the boy. “I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting—I give you one minute.”

This was embarrassing to Martin, for it seemed to him that his mother had only recently learned to talk this way. She’d been such a vulgar young woman, and she’d gained no further education since that trashy time of her life; yet, in the absence of acting jobs, she’d learned to imitate the language of the educated upper classes. Vera was clever enough to know that trashiness was less appealing in older women. As for the adverb “frightfully,” and the prefatory phrase “I challenge you,” Martin Mills was ashamed to know where Vera had acquired this particular foppery.

There was a pretentious Brit in Hollywood, just another would-be director who’d failed to get a film made; Danny had written the unsuccessful script. To console himself, the Brit had made a series of moisturizer commercials; they were aimed at the older woman who was making an effort to preserve her skin, and Vera had been the model.

Shamelessly, there was his mother in a revealing camisole, seated in front of a makeup mirror—the kind that was framed with bright balls of light. Superimposed, the titles read: VERONICA ROSE, HOLLYWOOD ACTRESS. (To Martin’s knowledge, this commercial had been his mother’s first acting job in years.)

“I’m frightfully opposed to dry skin,” Vera is saying to the makeup mirror (and to the camera). “In this town, only the youthful last.” The camera closes on the corners of her mouth; a pretty finger applies the moisturizing lotion. Are those the telltale lines of age we see? Something appears to pucker the skin of her upper lip where it meets the well-defined edge of her mouth, but then the lip is miraculously smooth again; possibly this is only our imagination. “I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old,” the lips say. It was a trick with the camera, Martin Mills was sure. Before the close-up, that was his mother; yet those lips, up close, were unfamiliar to him—someone else’s younger mouth, Martin guessed.

It was a favorite TV commercial among the ninth-grade boys at Fessenden; when they gathered to watch an occasional television show in one of the dorm masters’ apartments, the boys were always ready to answer the question that the close-up lips posed: “I challenge you to tell me I’m getting old.”

“You’re already old!” the boys would shout. Only two of them knew that Veronica Rose the Hollywood actress was Martin’s mother. Martin would never have identified her, and Arif Koma was a loyal roommate.

Arif always said, “She looks young enough to me.”

So it was doubly embarrassing, in the Ritz dining room, when Martin’s mother said to Arif, “I’m frightfully uninterested in details. I challenge you to make the difference between an embassy and a consulate interesting—I give you one minute.” Martin knew that Arif must have known that the “frightfully” and the “I challenge you” had come from the moisturizer commercial.