Paul Theroux - The Lower River

ELLIS HOCKS WIFE gave him a new phone for his birthday. A smart phone, she said. And guess what? She had a coy, ham-actress way of offering presents, often pausing with a needy wink to get his full attention. Its going to change your life. Hock smiled because he was turning sixty-two, not an age of life-altering shocks but only of subtle diminishments. Its got a whole bunch of functions, Deena said. It looked frivolous to him, like a costly fragile toy. And itll be useful at the storeHocks Menswear in Medford Square. His own phone was fine, he said. It was an efficient little fist, with a flip-up lid and one function. Youre going to thank me. He thanked her, but weighed his old phone in his hand, as a contradiction, showing her that his life wasnt changing.

To make her point (her gift-giving could be hostile at times, and this seemed like one of them), Deena kept the new phone but registered it in his name, using his personal email account. After she was signed up, she received his entire years mail up to that day, all the messages that Hock had received and sent, thousands of them, even the ones he had thought hed deleted, many of them from women, many of those affectionate, so complete a revelation of his private life that he felt hed been scalped worse than scalped, subjected to the dark magic of the sort of mganga he had known long ago in Africa, a witch doctor diviner turning him inside out, the slippery spilled mess of his entrails stinking on the floor. Now he was a man with no secrets, or rather, all his secrets exposed to a woman hed been married to for thirty-three years, for whom his secrets were painful news.

Who are you? Deena asked him, a ready-made question she must have heard somewhere which movie? But it was she who seemed like a stranger, with mad gelatinous eyes, and furious clutching hands holding the new phone like a weapon, her bulgy features fixed on him in a purplish putty-like face of rage. Im hurt! And she did look wounded. Her recklessness roused his pity and made him afraid, as though shed been drinking.

Hock hesitated, the angry woman demanded to know everything, but really she already knew everything, his most intimate thoughts were all on that phone. She didnt know why, but neither did he. She screamed for details and explanations. Who is Tina? Who is Janey? How could he deny what was plainly shown on the screen of his new phone, covert messages, sent and received, that shed known nothing about? You snake! You signed them love!

He saw, first with relief, almost hilarity, then horror, and finally sadness, that nothing in his life was certain now except that his marriage was ending.

He put it down to solitude. He did not want to say loneliness. He owned a mens clothing store, and business had been you said slow, not bad for years. The store was failing. The history of the store was the history of his family in Medford, their insertion in the town, their wish to belong. Elliss grandfather, an Italian immigrant, had been apprenticed to a tailor on his arrival in New York. His first paying job was with the mans cousin, also a tailor, in rural Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he arrived on the train, knowing no English. He helped to make suits for the wealthy college students there. Though he was no older than they were, he knelt beside them, unspooling the tape against their bodies, and shyly spoke their measurements in Italian. Three years of this and then a job as a cutter in a tailor shop in Bostons North End. On his marriage, striking out on his own, he borrowed money from his widowed mother-in-law (who was to live with them until she died) and rented space in Medford Square, opening his own tailor shop.

The move to Medford involved another move, more tidying: he became a new man, changing his name from Francesco Falcone to Frank Hock. He had asked a tailor in the North End to translate falcone, and the man had said hawk, in the local way, and the scarcely literate man had written it in tailors chalk on a remnant of cloth, spelling it as he heard it. This was announced on a sign: Hocks Tailors. Frank became known as a master tailor, with bolts of fine-quality woolen cloth, and linen, and silk, and Egyptian cotton, stacked on his shelves. He smoked cigars as he sewed and, still only in his thirties, employed two assistants as cutters and for basting. His wife, Angelina, bore him three sons, the eldest baptized Andrea, called Andrew, whom he designated as his apprentice. Business was good, and Frank Hock so frugal he saved enough to buy his shop and eventually the whole building. He had income from the tenants on the upper floors and from the other shops, including a Chinese laundry, Yees, next door. Joe Yee pressed the finished suits and gave him a red box of dried lychees every Christmas.

When Andrew Hock returned from the Second World War, Medford Square began to modernize. Old Frank turned the business over to Andrew, who had worked alongside his father. But Andrew had no interest in the fussy drudgery of tailoring. Plagued with arthritis in his hands, the old man retired. Andrew sold the building and bought a premises in a newly built row of stores on Riverside Avenue the Mystic River ran just behind it and started Hocks Menswear, as an improvement on Franks tailor shop on Salem Street.

Ellis was born the year after Hocks Menswear opened, and later he, too, worked in the store throughout high school most afternoons, tramping the foot pedal and bringing down the lid of the pressing machine in the basement tailor shop, with the tailor Jack Azanow, a Russian immigrant. Ellis also buffed shoes and folded shirts and rearranged the jackets after customers fingered them, milking the sleeves his fathers expression. Now and then he made a sale. Christmases were busy, and festive with the frantic pleasure of people looking for presents, spending more money than usual, asking for the item to be gift-wrapped, another of Elliss jobs. The activity of the store at this season, and Easter, and Fathers Day the vitality of it, the obvious profit almost convinced him that he might make a career of the business. But the certainty of it alarmed him like a life sentence. He hated the notion of confinement in the store, but what was the alternative?

On graduation from Boston University, a biology major, facing the draft Vietnam he applied to join the Peace Corps and was accepted. He was sent to a country hed never heard of, Nyasaland, soon to be the independent Republic of Malawi, and became a teacher at a bush school in a district known as the Lower River. There was something mystical in the name, as though it was an underworld tributary of the River Styx distant and dark. But lower meant only south, and the river was obscured by two great swamps, one called the Elephant Marsh, the other one the Dinde.

He was happy in the Lower River, utterly disconnected from home, and even from the countrys capital, on this unknown and unregarded riverbank, where he lived in the village of Malabo on his own as a schoolteacher, the only foreigner; supremely happy.

After two years, he re-upped for another two years, and one afternoon toward the end of his fourth year, a message was delivered to him by a consular driver in a Land Rover, a telegram that had been received by the U.S. consulate: For Ellis Hock at Malabo. Dad very ill. Please call. There was no phone in the village, and the trunk line at the boma, the districts headquarters, was not working. Hock rode back to Blantyre in the Land Rover, and there, on the consuls own phone, he spoke to his tearful mother.