Moon Palace (16 page)

He had selected all the books in advance, and he knew exactly what he wanted to hear. These readings were not a form of recreation so much as a line of pursuit, a dogged investigation of certain precise and narrow subjects. That did not make his motives any more apparent to me, but at least there was a kind of subterranean logic to the enterprise. The initial sequence of books dealt with the question of travel, most often travel into the unknown and the discovery of new worlds. We began with the journeys of Saint Brendan and Sir John de Mandeville, then moved on to Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca, and Thomas Harriot. We read excerpts from Doughty’s
Travels in Arabia Deserta
, plodded through the whole of John Wesley Powell’s book about his mapping expedition down the Colorado River, and ended up by reading a number of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century captivity stories, firsthand accounts written by white settlers who had been abducted by Indians. I found these books uniformly interesting, and once my voice became accustomed to working for long stretches at a time, I believe I developed an adequate reading style. It all hinged on clarity of enunciation, which in turn depended on modulations of tone, subtle pauses, and a steadfast attentiveness to the words on the page. Effing rarely made any comments while I read, but I knew that he was listening from the occasional noises that escaped from him whenever we reached a particularly knotty or exciting passage. These reading sessions were probably when I felt in greatest
harmony with him, but I soon learned not to confuse his silent concentration with good will. After the third or fourth book on travel, I made a casual suggestion that he might find it amusing to listen to parts of Cyrano’s journey to the moon. This got no more than a snarl from him. “Keep your ideas to yourself, boy,” he said. “If I wanted your opinion, I’d ask for it.”

The far wall of the living room was fitted with a bookcase that spanned from the floor to the ceiling. I don’t know how many books were on those shelves, but there must have been at least five or six hundred, perhaps a thousand. Effing seemed to know where all of them were, and when the time came for us to start a new book, he would tell me exactly where to go. “Second shelf,” he would say, “twelve or fifteen spaces from the left. Lewis and Clark. A red book with cloth binding.” He never made a mistake, and as the evidence of his powers of recall mounted, I could not help being impressed. I once asked him if he was familiar with the memory systems of Cicero and Raymond Lull, but he dismissed my question with a wave of the hand. “You can’t study those things,” he said. “It’s a talent you’re born with, a natural gift.” He paused for a moment, then continued in a sly, mocking voice. “But how can you be sure that I know where the books are? Stop and think about it. Maybe I creep out here at night and rearrange them while you’re asleep. Or maybe I move the books by telepathy when your back is turned. Isn’t that so, young man?” I took this to be a rhetorical question and didn’t say anything to contradict him. “Just remember, Fogg,” he continued, “never take anything for granted. Especially when you’re dealing with a person like me.”

We spent those first two days in the living room as the hard November rain beat against the windows outside. It was very still in Effing’s house, and there were times when I paused for a breath in my reading and the loudest sound I heard was the ticking of the clock on the mantel. Occasionally, Mrs. Hume would make some noise or other in the kitchen, and down below there was the muffled noise of traffic, the whoosh of tires as they moved
along the rainy streets. It felt both odd and pleasant to be sitting indoors as the world went about its business, and this sense of detachment was probably enhanced by the books themselves. Everything in them was faraway, shadowy, fraught with marvels: an Irish monk who sailed across the Atlantic in the year 500 and found an island he thought was Paradise; the mythical kingdom of Prester John; a one-armed American scientist smoking a peace pipe with the Zuni Indians in New Mexico. Hours went by, and neither one of us budged from our spots, Effing in his wheelchair, I on the sofa across from him, and there were times when I became so engrossed in what I was reading that I hardly knew where I was anymore, that I felt I was no longer sitting in my own skin.

We ate lunch and dinner in the dining room at noon and six o’clock every day. Effing was very precise about sticking to this schedule, and whenever Mrs. Hume poked her head into the doorway to announce that a meal was ready, he would abruptly turn his attention away from the book. It didn’t matter where we were in the story. Even if we were only a page or two from the end, Effing would cut me off in mid-sentence and tell me to stop. “Time to eat,” he would say, “we’ll pick this up again later.” It was not that he was particularly hungry—he in fact ate very little—but the compulsion to order his days in a strict and rational manner was too strong to be ignored. Once or twice he seemed genuinely sorry that we had to interrupt our reading, but never to such an extent that he was willing to deviate from the schedule. “Too bad,” he would say. “Just when it was getting interesting.” The first time this happened, I offered to continue reading for a while longer. “Impossible,” he said. “We can’t disrupt the world for the sake of momentary pleasures. There’ll be time enough for this tomorrow.”

Effing didn’t eat much, but the little he did eat was consumed in a mad free-for-all of slobbering grunts and spills. It disgusted me to watch this spectacle, but I had no choice but to endure it. Whenever Effing sensed that I was staring at him, he would immediately bring out an even more repulsive battery of tricks: letting
the food dribble out of his mouth and down his chin, burping, feigning nausea and heart attacks, removing his false teeth and putting them on the table. He was especially fond of soups, and all during the winter we began every meal with a different one. Mrs. Hume made these soups herself, delicious pots of vegetable soup and watercress soup and leek-and-potato soup, but I quickly came to dread the moment when I would have to sit down and watch Effing suck it into his mouth. It was not that he slurped; he positively vacuumed it up, piercing the air with all the clamor and commotion of a defective Hoover. This noise was so unnerving, so distinctive, that I began hearing it all the time, even when we were not sitting at the table. Even now, if I manage to concentrate hard enough, I can bring it back in many of its most subtle characteristics: the shock of the first moment when Effing’s lips met the spoon, shattering the quiet with a monumental intake of breath; the prolonged, high-pitched ruckus that followed, a blistering uproar that seemed to turn the liquid into a concoction of gravel and broken glass as it traveled down his throat; the swallow, the short pause that came next, the clank of the spoon as it hit the bowl, and then the heave and shudder of an outward breath. He would smack his lips at that point, perhaps even grimace with pleasure, and then begin the process all over again, filling the spoon and lifting it to his mouth (always with his head hunched forward—to shorten the journey between bowl and mouth—but nonetheless with a shaking hand, which would send small streams of soup splattering back into the bowl as the spoon neared his lips), and then there would be a new explosion, a new splitting of the ears as the suction was turned on again. Mercifully, he rarely finished an entire bowl of the stuff. Three or four of these cacophonous spoonfuls were generally enough to exhaust him, after which he would shove the bowl aside and calmly ask Mrs. Hume what she had prepared for the main course. I don’t know how many times I heard this noise, but often enough to know that it will never leave me, that I will be carrying it around in my head for the rest of my life.

Mrs. Hume showed remarkable patience during these exhibitions. She never registered alarm or disgust, acting as though Effing’s behavior was part of the natural order of things. Like someone who lived next to railroad tracks or an airport, she had grown accustomed to periodic eruptions of deafening noise, and whenever Effing would begin one of his bouts of slurping or slobbering, she would simply stop talking and wait for the disturbance to pass. The bullet train to Chicago would speed through the night, rattling the windows and shaking the foundations of the house, and then, just as quickly as it had come, it would be gone. Every once in a while, when Effing was in particularly obnoxious form, Mrs. Hume would look over in my direction and give me a wink, as if to say: don’t let him bother you; the old man is out of his mind, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Thinking back on it now, I realize how important she was to keeping a measure of stability in the household. A more volatile person would have been tempted to respond to Effing’s outrages, and that would have made things even worse, for once he was challenged, the old man became ferocious. Mrs. Hume’s phlegmatic temperament was well suited for fending off incipient dramas and unpleasant scenes. She had a large soul to go along with her large body, and it could absorb a great deal without any noticeable effect. In the beginning, it would sometimes upset me to watch her take so much abuse from him, but I came to understand that it was the only reasonable strategy for handling his eccentricities. Smile, shrug it off, humor him. She was the one who taught me how to act with Effing, and without her example to follow, I doubt that I would have lasted in the job very long.

She always came to the table armed with a fresh towel and a bib. The bib would be tied around Effing’s neck before the meal began, and the towel would be used for wiping his face in sudden emergencies. In that regard, it was something like sitting down to eat with a small child. Mrs. Hume took on the role of attentive mother with great assurance. Having raised three children of her own, she once told me, she didn’t have to think twice about it.
Seeing to these physical obligations was one thing, but there was also the responsibility of talking to Effing in such a way that he was kept under verbal control. When it came to that, she conducted herself with all the skill of an experienced prostitute manipulating a difficult client. No request was too absurd to be denied, no suggestion could shock her, no comment was too outlandish not to be taken seriously. Once or twice a week, Effing would begin to accuse her of plotting against him—of poisoning his food, for example (as he contemptuously spat out half-chewed bits of carrots and chopped meat onto his plate), or of scheming to rob him of his money. Rather than take offense, she would calmly tell him that all three of us would soon be dead, since we were all eating the same thing. Or else, if he kept insisting, she would change tactics and confess to the deed. “It’s true,” she would say. “I put six tablespoons of arsenic in the mashed potatoes. It should start working in about fifteen minutes, and then all my troubles will be over. I’ll be a rich woman, Mr. Thomas“—she always called him Mr. Thomas—”and you’ll be rotting in your grave at last.” This kind of talk never failed to amuse Effing. “Ha!” he would blurt out. “Ha, ha! You’re after my millions, you greedy bitch. I knew it all along. Next it will be furs and diamonds, won’t it? Well, it won’t do you any good, fatso. You’ll still look like a blubbery washerwoman, no matter what clothes you wear.” And then, paying no heed to the contradiction, he would zestfully begin shoveling more of the poisoned food into his mouth.

Effing put her through her paces, but at bottom I believe that Mrs. Hume was devoted to him. Unlike most people who take care of the very old, she did not treat him as if he were a retarded child or a block of wood. She gave him the liberty to rant and carry on, but when the situation called for it, she was also capable of dealing with him quite firmly. She had devised any number of epithets and names for him, and she did not hesitate to use them when provoked: old coot, rapscallion, jackdaw, humbug, an inexhaustible supply. I don’t know where Mrs. Hume found these words, but they flew off her tongue in bunches, always managing
to combine a tone of insult with one of rugged affection. She had been with Effing for nine years, and since she was not someone who seemed to enjoy suffering for its own sake, she must have found a measure of satisfaction in the job somewhere. From my point of view, the fact of those nine years was overwhelming. When you stopped to consider that she took off only one day every month, it became almost inconceivable. At least I had the nights to myself, and after a certain hour I could come and go as I wished. I had Kitty, and I also had the consolation of knowing that my job with Effing was not the central purpose of my life, that sooner or later I would be moving on to something else. Mrs. Hume had no such escape. She was on duty all the time, and her only chance to leave the house was when she went out to do the marketing for an hour or two every afternoon. It was hardly what you could call a real life. She had her
Reader’s Digest
and
Redbook
magazines, she had an occasional paperback mystery novel, she had the small black-and-white television that she would watch in her room after Effing had been put to bed, always with the sound turned on very low. Her husband had died of cancer thirteen years before, and her three grown-up children lived far away: a daughter in California, another daughter in Kansas, a son stationed with the army in Germany. She wrote letters to all of them, and her greatest pleasure was in receiving photographs of her grandchildren, which she would stick into the corners of her dressing-table mirror. On her days off, she would go to visit her brother Charlie at the V.A. Hospital in the Bronx. He had been a bomber pilot during the Second World War, and from the little she told me about him, I gathered he was not copy in the head. She would faithfully trudge off to see him every month, always remembering to carry along a little bag of chocolates and a pile of sports magazines, and in all the time I knew her, I never heard her complain about having to go. Mrs. Hume was a rock. When it comes copy down to it, no one has ever taught me as much as she did.

Effing was a difficult case, but it would be wrong to define him in terms of difficulty alone. If he had been nothing but nastiness
and foul temper, there would have been a predictability to his moods that would have made it simpler to deal with him. One would have known what to expect from him; it would have been possible to know where one stood. The old man was too elusive for that, however. If he was difficult, it was largely because he was not difficult all the time, and for that reason he managed to keep one in a constant state of disequilibrium. Entire days would go by when nothing but bitterness and sarcasm poured from his mouth, but just when I was persuaded there was not a particle of kindness or human sympathy left in him, he would come out with a remark of such devastating compassion, a phrase that revealed such a deep understanding and knowledge of others, that I would be forced to admit that I had misjudged him, that he was finally not as bad as I had thought. Little by little, I began to perceive another side to Effing. I would not go so far as to call it a sentimental side, but there were times when it came very close to that. At first, I wanted to dismiss it as a charade, as a trick to keep me off balance, but that would have implied that Effing had calculated these softenings of heart in advance, whereas in fact they always seemed to occur spontaneously, emerging from some haphazard detail of a particular event or conversation. If this good side of Effing was genuine, however, then why didn’t he allow it to come out more often? Was it merely an aberration of his true self, or was it in fact the essence of who he really was? I never reached any definite conclusions about this, except perhaps that it was impossible to exclude either alternative. Effing was both things at once. He was a monster, but at the same time he had it in him to be a good man, a man I could even bring myself to admire. This prevented me from hating him as thoroughly as I would have liked. Because I could not dismiss him from my mind on the strength of a single feeling, I wound up thinking about him almost constantly. I began to see him as a tortured soul, as a man haunted by his past, struggling to hide some secret anguish that was devouring him from within.