The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux [Theroux, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780618485338
Publisher: Clarion Books
Published: 2003-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

III. Seeing Truman

MOST DAYS in Medford nothing happened—or the same thing happened. But the day Harry Truman’s train made a whistle stop at Medford Station, everything happened, and a lot of it to me. I told my mother I was going to see him with my friend John Burkell. She said, “Mind your p’s and q’s,” helplessly, because she couldn’t prevent me from going, even though, as she sometimes said, Burkell was a bad influence. Seeing Truman was my excuse to stay out late in the early dark of October. But the event was bigger than she was. The president’s visit made me free.

In Miss Bunker’s class that afternoon, I passed Burkell a note saying Meet me outside the gate. As he tried to sneak a note back to me, Miss Bunker said, ‘And I’ll take that.” She picked it open and read it with no expression, which meant she was angry. “Mr. Burkell, you will stay after school.”

He didn’t look like a bad influence. He was fattish and pale, with spiky sweaty hair cut in a whiffle. He tried to shock the other kids with morbid songs, but he was teased for seeming weak, for looking uncertain, pink-eyed like a rabbit, his lids crusted (“It's conjunctivitis”) from his rubbing them. He was always chewing his necktie, or else poking wax out of his ears with the wire of a twisted paper clip. “Stop doing that, Mr. Burkell.”

Burkell's mother saw me as John’s protector—the Burkells were new to Medford, where I was born. His pretty mother always hugged me, crushing the cones of her bra against my ears, when I went to their house. This pressure and the aroma of cigarette smoke and perfume made my head ring. “You’re getting so big, Andy!”

I guessed his note was saying yes to seeing Truman, and so I hung around the schoolyard after the bell. There was so much shouting and pushing—everyone high-spirited because of the president’s visit—I did not see Burkell leave. His house was on the way to the trolley line, so I stopped there. I liked seeing his mother, I liked her smell and the way she hugged me.

I thought I was early because he wasn’t at home, then I thought I might be late because he wasn’t at home. Not knowing whether to stay or go, I just stood there looking at a Hood milk truck parked in front of a Nash Rambler with whitewalls. I was half hiding against Burkell’s big hedge. The truck confused me. Milk trucks were never parked in a street but always on the move, stopping and starting, the engine running, the empties clinking, the side doors open for the milkman to jump out with his rack of bottles. This truck was locked and silent.

Creeping past Burkell’s hedge, I went up the stoop to the piazza and looked into the front window. Staring at the slanted sunlight and furniture inside, I sensed footsteps—not heard them but felt the tramping movement through my own foot soles on the wooden piazza planks, maybe Burkell’s big feet.

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