Mr. Bones (7 page)

“I love work,” Dad said. “I could watch it all day.”

Mother went to the sink and leaned over. She had turned on the water, her bent back toward us, and I associated the water running into the dishpan with her tears.

 

He was a new man, even my brothers said so, though, being older than me, they were often out of the house in the evenings when Dad—Mr. Bones—was at his friskiest. He had swagger and assurance, and if I tried to get his attention, or if he was asked a question, he began to sing “Mandy.” He had somehow learned two other songs: “Rosie, You Are My Posie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody”—Lightning's song, and Tambo's, so he said.

I was used to my father singing, but not these songs; used to his good humor, but there was anger in these jokes. And he, who seldom went out at night except to Benediction or choir practice, was now out most nights. He stopped asking Mother to play the piano for him; he would simply break into song, drawling it out of the side of his mouth.

 

When you croon, croon a tune,

From the heart of Dixie . . .

 

He didn't look any different, he dressed the same, in a gray suit and white shirt and blue tie and the topcoat he disparaged as “too dressy.” One day the sleeve was limp. He flapped it at Mother and said, “I know what you're thinking: World War Two,” as though his arm was missing. Then he shot the arm out of the sleeve and said, “Nope. Filene's Basement. Bad fit!”

The variation that night and for nights to come was the tambourine he had somehow acquired. When he made a joke or a quip he shook it and rapped it on his knee and elbow and shook it again.
Shika-shika-shika.

“RSVP,” he said, holding up a piece of mail. “Remember Send Vedding Present,” and he jingled and tapped the tambourine.

One day after school I went to the store where he worked. Instead of walking in, I kept my head down and crept to the side window to get a glimpse of Dad. He was sitting in one of the chairs in the shoe department, his chin in his hand, not looking like Mr. Bones but sad and silent, a man trying to remember something. Other clerks in shirtsleeves had gathered at the back of the store and were laughing, but not Dad. Were they ignoring him? He paid no attention. He was reading—unusual, a shoe clerk reading. I didn't know this man either.

I began to be glad that he was out most evenings. At the other, smaller house we'd moved from, he was always at home after work, and in the early days of this new one—the bigger house that Mother hated—he was usually in his chair, dressed in flannel pajamas and a fuzzy bathrobe, reading the
Globe
under a lamp in the corner. But after that first night, with “Mandy,” and then the jokes, and the tambourine, as Mr. Bones, he was out at night, sometimes didn't come home for supper, or if he did, it was “Pass the mouse turd” or, holding the pepper shaker, “This is how I feel, like pulverized pepper—fine!”

“The oil burner's back on the fritz,” Mother said.

Any mention of a problem with the house these days made Dad smile his Mr. Bones smile and roll his eyes.

“Heard about the King of England? He's got a
royal
burner.”

“We'll have to get Mel to look at it.”

“Tambo is a busy man, yes he is. Says to me, ‘What is the quickest way to the emergency ward?' I says, ‘Tambo, just you stand in the middle of the road.'”

Mother did not react, except to say, “It's giving off a funny smell.”

“Giving off a funny smell!” Dad said, and put one finger in the air, what I now recognized as a Mr. Bones gesture—he was about to say something and wanted attention. “Mr. Interlocutor, what is the difference between an elephant passing wind and a place where you might go for a drink?”

“I don't think you understand,” Mother said in a strained voice. “This house hasn't been right since the day we moved in. First it was the roof, then the paint, then the plumbing. Now it's the heat. We're not going to have any hot water. Everything's
wrong.
”

Dad held his chin in his hand, as I'd seen him do at the store. He thought a moment, then looked around the table and said, “Mr. Interlocutor, the difference between an elephant passing wind and the place where you might go for a drink is—one is a barroom and the other is a
bar-rooom!
”

He said it so loud we jumped. He didn't laugh. He drew his chair next to Mother and sang.

 

Rosie, you are my posie,

You are my heart's bouquet.

Come out here in the moonlight,

There's something sweet, love,

I want to say.

 

Mother looked awkward and sad. She wasn't angry. In a way, by clowning, Dad took her mind off the problems of the house. She could not get his attention. And who was he anyway? He had a different voice, a jaunty manner.

It wasn't any kind of joking I'd heard before from him. His teasing was more like mocking and bullying. He wouldn't call Mel Hankey anything but Tambo, and John Flaherty was Lightning. They had never been close friends before—he had no friends—but now he had Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor.

“Morrie Daigle said he'd help you fix the roof.”

“Mr. Interlocutor is too hot to do that. He is so hot he will only read fan mail.”

That was how we found out who Mr. Interlocutor was.

“Have you lost your wallet?” Dad said to Floyd.

“No,” Floyd said, and clapped his hand to his pocket.

“Good. Then give me the five dollars you owe me.”

Floyd made a face, looked helpless, thrashed a little. It was true that Dad had given him five dollars, but he had not brought it up before this.

Dad said, “Hear about the Indian who had a red ant?”

I didn't understand that one at all. I pictured an Indian with an insect. It made no sense.

There was something abrupt and deflecting in his humor. He made a joke and seemed to expand, pushing the house and his job aside. He'd been at the new job for six months now and never mentioned it. I had seen him in the store, not working but sitting in the chair where the shoe customers were supposed to sit, and instead of waiting on them, or talking to the other employees, he was reading.

Mother seemed to be afraid of him. Before, she had always made a remark, or nagged, or blamed. But these days she relented. She watched him. When he made a joke she became very quiet and blinked at him, as though she was thinking, What do you mean by that?

Floyd was on the basketball team, Fred played hockey, so they were out most evenings—practicing, they said. I knew it was an excuse to stay away from home and Mr. Bones. Rose was just a little kid of seven, and she actually found Mr. Bones funny, and let him tickle her.

But I had nowhere to go, and I didn't like the angry jokes or the cruel teasing. Mr. Bones was always laughing or singing, and he never listened, except when he was thinking up another joke. He was a stranger to me, and for the first time I began to think, Who are you? What do you want?

 

What happened next was more shocking. Dad's change was a surprise, but when he changed again he seemed monstrous. We thought, What next? It frightened the whole family, but maybe me especially, because I went to bed thinking, Who are you?

The light went on and I had the answer.

Most of the lights in the house were bare bulbs with no shades, hanging on frayed black whips from the ceiling—another source of Mother's complaints—and the brightness of the one dangling in my bedroom made it worse. I had been woken up, so the light blazed and half blinded me. Yet I saw enough to be terrified.

A disfigured villain from a horror comic was bending over my bed—I realized only later that it was Dad—his whole face sticky black, a white oval outline around his lips. He wore a cap that even afterward I could not imagine was a wig, a red floppy bow tie, a yellow speckled vest, and a black coat, and he was emphatically holding his hands out in white gloves. He was smiling under that blackness that shone on his face, and he leaned over me and spoke, seeming to shriek.

“Give us a kiss, sonny boy!”

Then he laughed and stood up and waved his gloved hands again and jerked the light chain, bringing down darkness.

His voice had matched his face. He was so black that I dreamed he was still in my bedroom, standing there invisible in his floppy tie: Mr. Bones. I had not heard the door shut.

I even said into the menacing gloom, “Dad—are you there?”

Giving no answer was just the sort of thing he'd try as Mr. Bones.

I said again, “Dad?” And in a trembly voice, “Mr. Bones?”

I had not heard him leave. For all I knew he stayed there to scare me. But in the morning the room was empty.

At breakfast he was eating oatmeal as usual. He had a decorous way of holding his spoon. I looked closely at him and saw some streaks of black makeup caked in the lines on his neck. I sprinkled raisins on my oatmeal.

“Pass me the dead flies, sonny,” he said in his Mr. Bones voice.

These days his remarks silenced the room. We all felt the effect of his angry humor. I didn't know how deeply Mother was upset—though I knew she was. Floyd and Fred were startled but sometimes pretended to find it funny, and occasionally they teased back. When Dad made his “Toulouse and Toulon” joke, Floyd said, “Well, you're like a town in Massachusetts—Marblehead.” Instead of being insulted, Dad smiled and said, “I like that.”

But he kept on worrying Fred about college, and Floyd about trumpet lessons. We didn't know what was coming next. We had not foreseen the songs or the jokes; we had not expected the black face. Maybe there was more.

His voice was hoarse from practicing, and now every night he came home in black makeup, his wig like a too-big woolly hat. He talked about Tambo and Lightning and Mr. Interlocutor, and he told the same jokes. Hearing it again and again, I came to understand the one about the Indian and the red ant—red aunt was the point of it. We never pronounced it “ant,” always “awnt.”

I felt embarrassed and fearful. We were afraid to ask him about his job in the shoe department these days. If Mother mentioned the house, that there were drips to be fixed, the oil burner to be mended, linoleum to be laid, painting to be done, I didn't hear it. All our attention was on him, who he was now, Mr. Bones. To almost any question, he began singing.

 

A million baby kisses I'll deliver

If you will only sing that “Swanee River”

 

The rhythm was there, a confident slowness and drawl, yet his voice was strained from overuse. He lifted his knees and did dance steps as he sang, and he raised his white gloves. And Mother sat at the piano, looking anxious, playing the melody.

It seemed so wrong, I was always glancing at the door, scared that someone—a neighbor, the Fuller Brush man, Grandpa—might come in and see him swaying and singing with a black face and that wig.

He had another song too:

 

When life seems full of clouds and rain,

And I am filled with naught but pain,

Who soothes my thumpin' bumpin' brain?

 

He would always pause after that, and lower himself and put his head out and say, “Nobody!”

His voice was gargly and cross, as though he was in pain. The weeks of rehearsals had taken away his real voice and given him this new one.

 

When all day long things go amiss,

And I go home to find some bliss,

Who hands to me a glowin' kiss?

 

He was standing over Mother at the piano, and her bleak plunking notes, and smiling angrily, his wig tilted, one glove in the air.

“Nobody!”

The next time I sneaked after school to the window of the store and looked in, I saw him sitting where I'd seen him before, in the chairs reserved for customers, reading. He was not in blackface, yet his assurance, his posture, the way he sat, like the owner of the store, made him seem more than ever like Mr. Bones. He looked thoughtful, his fist against his mouth, a knuckle against his nose. And the other clerks and floorwalkers seemed to avoid him, talking among themselves, as though they knew he was Mr. Bones.

At a funeral in church one Saturday, I stood beside Ed Hankey, both of us altar boys, in starched blouse-like surplices, holding tall smoking candles, preparing to follow the coffin down the main aisle. The priest was swinging a thurible—more smoke—and the relatives of the dead man were howling.

Hankey said in a whisper, “You going to the minstrel show?”

“I don't know. Are you?”

“My old man's in it. So's yours.”

“I don't even know what it's supposed to be.”

“It's a wicked pisser. Just a bunch of old guys singing, like a talent show,” Hankey said.

Then we saw the priest glaring at us. We straightened our candles and approached the coffin.

This big event was just a talent show to Hankey. And his white-haired father, who worked on the MTA buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had taken charge and intimidated us all.

He had a different complaint about each of us. These objections were clearer when he was in blackface and a wig than when he was just Mr. Bones in name. He was now a man in a mask, someone to fear, saying things he normally avoided, singing strange songs. In his minstrel show costume he could be as reckless as he wanted.

It was true that Fred told fibs and didn't want to go to college, true that Floyd owed him money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mother's nagging caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars was cheap and tasteless; “mouse turd” was a good name for it. The stale raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd hearing these things from his gleaming black face, his white-outlined mouth, his woolly wig askew, and rapping his tambourine after he spoke.