Picture Palace by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

18

Boarders

THE BUNGALOW Mrs. Fritts ran as a boarding house was just south of Verona, behind a palm grove that gave it the look of an oasis. In her neat garden was a twisted tree laden with elongated seed pods; she called it her cigar tree. The bungalow was furnished with upholstered chairs and carpets with floral designs like puked fricassees. On most walls were religious mottoes, THE LORD WILL PROVIDE and PUT ON THE WHOLE ARMOR OF GOD, and on one was a coconut carved into a monkey’s face. Mrs. Fritts said there were “scorpshuns” on the grounds. There were also sheds of various sizes—an ostrich in one, a kangaroo in another. These animals, and some others I knew only as stinks and nighttime coughs, she looked after for Millsaps Circus, which had its winter quarters in Verona proper. She was a tidy damp-eyed little woman, seventy-odd, who had ceased to see anything extraordinary in either the animals or the people she boarded, the circus’s overflow.

Perhaps they weren’t so odd, I decided on my third day. They hadn’t changed—my eye had. I saw them all over the house, Mr. Biker the dwarf who played “Daisy” on his ocarina and sat on three telephone books to eat; Orrie, whose hands grew out of his shoulders; the Flying Faffners, Kenny and Doris, who cycled on the high wire—but they did no tricks here and looked quite colorless hunched over their checkerboards. There was a man called “Digit” Taft, from Georgia, whose specialty was sticking his finger in the knothole of a horizontal board and kicking himself upright and balancing on that finger: he had a bird tattoo on his cheek, which flapped when he chewed gum. Harvey and Hornette were bareback riders; there were no horses in Mrs. Fritts’s sheds; Harvey and Hornette read comic books. They were all very strong: Digit could tear Mr. Biker’s phone books in half, and Hornette, a pretty girl of about sixteen, could get the caps off cherryade bottles with her teeth.

The group portrait I did of them, Boarders, was one of my best—another pictorial fluke in available light, since anyone’s Aunt Fanny could have done the same with a Baby Brownie.

They are solemn, the seven of them, plus Mrs. Fritts. Orrie is old, Mrs. Fritts in her frilly church dress. They stand together: it might be a family portrait, a Sunday on a southern porch, a gathering of the clan in summer dresses and white suits.

But you miss it entirely unless you linger for a fraction of a second, and having accepted it as a plain family you are shocked: the nipper is not a nipper, that old man has hands but no arms, the shadow on that other man’s cheek is a bird tattoo, and those girls, Doris and Hornette, have muscular trapeze artist’s shoulders. Behind Mrs. Fritts, reflected on the parlor window, is the most bizarre detail, an ostrich, but so faint you won’t see it until you’ve seen the others. The picture celebrates the unexpected, as one person after the other is revealed.

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