Three Wogs Read online

  Alexander Theroux

  THREE WOGS

  An Owl Book

  Henry Holt and Company

  New York

  Also by Alexander Theroux

  NOVELS

  An Adultery

  Darconville’s Cat

  FABLES

  The Schinocephalic Waif

  The Great Wheadle Tragedy

  Master Snickup’s Cloak

  Julia de Chateauroux; or, The Girl with Blue Hair and Other Fables

  POETRY

  The Lollipop Trollops

  ESSAYS

  The Primary Colors

  The Secondary Colors

  An Owl Book

  Henry Holt and Company

  New York

  Back cover

  “Wogs” is a colloquial term of derogatory implications, employed by the natives of the British Isles to describe those inhabitants of their shores who are “not one of us.” It is used to designate people of color—East Indians, Jamaicans, Africans—and can, under duress, be extended to include Asians, Irishmen, Italians, and indeed all people of perceptibly foreign habits or appearance.

  Alexander Theroux’s Three Wogs is composed as a triptych, displaying three extravagantly archetypal Londoners, each of whom undergoes a fateful encounter with his own particular “wog.” The novel can perhaps be described as a fantasy, for it frequently assumes dreamlike dimensions; a farce, for it is often outlandishly funny; or a sharply honed social satire, since its theme lays bare the ignorance and blind prejudices that infect the organism of modern society.

  It would, however, probably be more just to consider the book as a highly original comic novel, which, like all true comic performances, contains, beneath its brilliantly diverting surface, intimations of tragedy. Through an extraordinary use of verbal and pictorial hyperbole, Mr. Theroux has managed to achieve a coolly perceptive and delicately balanced portrait of Human Folly as it prances and parades through the pubs and drawing rooms, the chapels, theaters, and tube stations of contemporary London and as its frenzied fingers extend a fraternal handclasp to all humankind.

  Alexander Theroux, who lives in West Barnstable, Massachusetts, has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of three highly regarded novels: Three Wogs (1972), Darconville’s Cat (1981), and An Adultery (1987); two books of essays, The Primary Colors (1994) and The Secondary Colors (1996); and a collection of poems, The Lollipop Trollops (1992); as well as several books of fables.

  “Three Wogs is an incredible performance: hilarious, moving, incisive, and flamboyant beyond description.... You will laugh. You will be astonished.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  ISBN 0-8050-4459-0

  Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Publishers since 1866

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, New York 10011

  Henry Holt® is a registered trademark of Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

  Copyright © 1972 by Alexander Theroux

  All rights reserved.

  Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Ltd.,

  195 Allstate Parkway, Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Theroux, Alexander.

  Three wogs/Alexander Theroux.

  p. cm.

  “An owl book.”

  I. Title.

  PS3570.H38T48 1997 96-30743

  813'. 54—dc20 CIP

  ISBN 0-8050-4459-0

  Henry Holt books are available for special promotions and premiums. For details contact: Director, Special Markets.

  First published in hardcover in 1972 by Gambit Press.

  First Owl Book Edition—1997

  Printed in the United States of America

  All first editions are printed on acid-free paper.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  “Fascinating Rhythm” (George and Ira Gershwin)

  © 1924 by New World Music Corp.

  Used by permission of New World Music Corp.

  All rights reserved.

  SPIRITVI SANCTO

  OMNIS SCIENTIAE ET SAPIENTIAE FONTI

  HIC LIBER DEDICATVS EST

  MRS. PROBY GETS HERS

  O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

  Missing so much and so much,

  O fat white woman whom nobody loves

  Why do you walk through the fields in gloves?

  —Frances Crofts Cornford

  1

  I

  Picric, antagonized, scuffing forward with a leer, Fu Manchu readily confirmed a common fear: a distorted mind proves that there is something on it. A girl in a diaphanous shift squirmed to bounce free of the ropes which held her, like a network of fistulae, to a scaled gold and emerald table, a simulated dragon of smooth wood; a purple gag she was unable to spit free. The yellow, moonshaped face of Fu Manchu, poised between inscrutability and simple lust, both of which disputed for mastery, twitched in a decisive way and then his ochre fingernails, as if plotting a map, curved over her arm, onto her shoulder, up to her clavicle. Suddenly in the midst of depositing into the ashtray a slice of cellophane from her second pack of cigarettes, Mrs. Proby screamed. An usherette came running down the aisle and ranged various shocked groups of people with the long beam of her flashlight. Several annoyed watchers, a few rows back, indicated with thumbs and umbrellas a quivering Mrs. Proby, her face the colour of kapok, hunched down into her seat, mumbling to herself, and puffing smoke. The beam caught her. She jerked her head toward the light; again she screamed. Mrs. Proby stood up quickly, faced the dark audience, and, like a fat statue come alive and gone mad, she swung her arms high and sent out a highpitched, terrifying howl. Then she stamped up the aisle, demanded her ticket back, and flung out of the theatre. “Simples,” said Mrs. Proby as she sat on the No. 22 bus which took her back to the Brompton Road roundabout, where she lived. It was her neighbourhood.

  “Mrs. Cullinane, everyone has a neck,” Mrs. Proby concluded firmly, digging into the purse of her red handbag for a saccharine tablet and obviously piqued at her friend’s ridiculous suggestion that the Chinese head sprouts, mutatis mutandis, out of his shoulder blades, “even your Chinee.” It was high tea: the perfervid ritual in England which daily sweetens the ambiance of the discriminately invited and that nothing short of barratry, a provoked shaft of lightning, the King’s enemies, or an act of God could ever hope to bring to an end. “On top of that neck is a head between the ears of which is a yellow face, and that’s what made me scream, say what you will, dear, and you jolly well know I don’t just open my mouth at the first drop of rain.”

  “You wouldn’t say boo to a goose.” Mrs. Cullinane was trying to be helpful.

  “Not at the pictures I wouldn’t, would I?” Mrs. Proby asked archly and stirred her tea white. A blocky, cuboidal head, faced in pinks and whites and ruled in a fretwork of longitudes and latitudes which showed a few orthographic traces of worry, surmounted a body that made Mrs. Proby look like a huge jar or, when shambling along as she often did, something like a prehistoric Nodosaurus. In a neck somewhat like insipid dough showed occasional fatty splotches, her hair sort of a heap of grey slag scraped back into a lumpish mound at the back. Her eyes had a russet, copperish hue that recalled garden thistles or cold glints of steel, depending, as so much did, upon her moods. She was paradigmatic of those fat, gigantic women in London, all bum and elbow, who wear itchy tentlike coats, carry absurd bags of oranges, and usually wheeze down beside you on the bus, smelling of shilling perfume and cold air. She wore “sensible” shoes, had one bad foot, smoked too much, and cultivated a look as if she were always about to say no. In all, she was a woman with the carriage and s
tudied irascibility of a middle-aged prebendary in the Church of England, executrix of self-reliance, lawgiver, Diocletian reborn.

  “The cinema today is different. So much is, isn’t it?” Mrs. Cullinane philosophized. “It was only last week I took me to the cinema. The daily told me they were running a Conrad Nagel thing with what’s-her-name, you know, the one I love, but let me tell you there was precious little Conrad Nagel that afternoon, Mrs. Proby.” She brushed the shine on her skirt and struck a match for her friend’s cigarette. “The picture I saw was about a garage mechanic and another git, excuse me, but git he was, in a plastic suit, who spent all their time taking drugs and forcing grammar-school youngsters to take baths with them. Now, really. I blame the Queen.”

  “The Bishop.”

  “The Queen.”

  “The Bishop.”

  This froggy voice seemed convinced.

  “Well,” meekly offered Mrs. Cullinane in an inert and foam-sounding recovery, flustered but just managed, “it could be the Queen. It’s her must be allowing all this rubbish into the country in the first place. George the Fifth, sick as he was, wouldn’t have counted to seven before he sat down on the whole lot of them, looked up, and said, ‘That, for Dicky Scrub!’”

  Mrs. Cullinane had the pinched comic face of Houdon’s marble of Voltaire, a sort of thin, wide-mouthed suffragist who existed on an ounce of biscuits, the odd celery heart, and, as well, the persistent need to support and maintain ever fiscal sanity in Britain, a brave and full-time concern. She was the kind of woman who seemed to be always holding back a constant urge to knit, the type of person who believed that the statement, “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going,” was an utterance of the highest magnitude, its speaker invariably the impresario of a dreamland that alone could reshape the world and which surpassed, making quite superfluous, every single volume of philosophy, law, science, theology, literature, and general humanity through the long history of mankind, down to the last. She was a bottomless fund of those insane sermonizing anecdotes which explained, for instance, how big-city hoodlums and czars of the underworld, when riddled by bullets in the street, gasped only for their ice skates in the final minute; how there was a broken heart for every light in Piccadilly; how turtles would never do tinkle in public; and how ladies who worked in the large sweet factories actually hated, yes, hated sweets, to which credenda, then, were often added precious and reverendy delivered, if not memorable, didactic poems produced, she invariably felt, in the nick of time from the ragbag of tumbling skeltonics she kept at her easy disposal, like shewbread at a fair.

  “We never had any trouble, mind you, until America began to send over shipfuls of dirty books and whole potloads of those smouldering films with toreadors, enormous b-e-d-s,” Mrs. Cullinane spelled, “and girls in masks and open dust-coats down in Florida in the sunshine, winking at the plumber who came there just because and is supposedly fixing the dip-bulb in the w.c., but we know better, dear, and I wish we didn’t, I wish we did not.” Mrs. Cullinane paused, thinking nostalgically perhaps on those old, harmless sepia-tinted reels of “Movietone News” or the long lost three-handkerchief weepies. “Fancy someone like Elizabeth Two, once a princess, mind you, watching something like Erotic Nights in Dewsbury, Miss Rod Shrieks, The Woolwich Turk, or Motel Wives of Pigwiggen, never mind hearing about them. It makes one want to go sick.”

  “It’s a dicey business, that. It’s not enough in the street they’re calling her Lizzie, Liz, Betsy, and Bess. Pretty soon it’ll be Libby,” Mrs. Proby grunted. “Beth, please and thank you. Or maybe just Betty the Mop.”

  “I’ve heard Tetty.”

  Exasperated, Mrs. Proby threw out an arm thick as a cutlet bat.

  “No doubt, no doubt. Mrs. Cullinane, no doubt you’ve heard Tetty. It’s a very coarse word. But, tell me this, haven’t you also heard Eliza? Lisbeth? Elsie? Elsie, for godsakes? Come on, own up to it. Show a little bone.”

  “Well, Elspeth.”

  “You’ve never heard Elspeth.”

  “Elspeth,” Mrs. Cullinane assured her, “yes.”

  “A pipe dream, Mrs. Cullinane.”

  “I’m certain of it. Elspeth.”

  “Never.”

  And Mrs. Proby glared at Mrs. Cullinane, who nipped some biscuits which were dipped, self-consciously, in the tea, several times, again—in jerks.

  Mrs. Proby quickly interrupted Mrs. Cullinane who had begun humming “When the Old Dun Cow Caught Fire.”

  “I’m afraid to go out, Mrs. Cullinane. Even with my Weenie. I mean, if he should stop to go doo-doo by a post, who’s to guarantee some big hairy thing in a mask won’t come flashing out of a doorway and do me god-knows-what kind of brain damage, bash me with a cosh he might, snatch me handbag, even tamper about here and there in the you know.” Mrs. Proby nodded knowingly and licked a bubble of tea off an upper lip whistle-split and slightly mystacial.

  “You’re smarter than Mrs. Shoe.”

  “Mrs. Shoe goes out?”

  “Frequently.”

  “Alone?”

  “This is my point.”

  “God.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “My God.”

  “That’s just what I said.”

  Mrs. Proby set her tea and saucer down on the tray, walked to the door of the living room, shut it, and sat down again. She shrugged, shook her head slowly, and leaned forward. “Mrs. Cullinane, I’m not sure I know how to say this to you, you wouldn’t either.” Biting the inside of her cheek, she threw a glance toward the aspidistra in her window and joined the tips of her fingers. “The reason I screamed, the reason you, I, anybody—even Prince Andrew himself—would scream was this: I thought of Mr. Yunnum Fun.”

  “Mr. Yunnum Fun?” Mrs. Cullinane stopped her jaws, her mouth full of scone.

  “Mr. Yunnum Fun downstairs.” Mrs. Proby’s eyes narrowed. She nodded gravely, waiting for the shock of recognition. It came and was gone. Mrs. Proby’s eyes widened as a reinforcement. “Their how is not necessarily our how, nor is yours theirs.”

  “He’s only a simple twit.”

  “He’s sneaky.”

  “He just sells rice.”

  “He’s got things on his mind.”

  “He’s harmless, Mrs. Proby.”

  “He’s Chinese, Mrs. Cullinane.”

  The small Chinese market and its proprietor, Mr. Fun, hadn’t become an object of interest for Mrs. Proby until about five or six months ago, when, at that time, a highly publicized altercation took place between the police and a body of cultural attaches at the Chinese Embassy. Not that, previous to this, harmony reigned between the English lady and the Chinese merchant; they had harrassed each other for years (listening at doors, depositing curt notes, leaving footprints on each other’s mail).

  A dot of a man, Mr. Fun had owned the grocery store and, in closed circuit, had lived on-premise at the back of the bottom floor of the building for eight years. Mrs. Proby, widowed and full of the spurge of the no-longer-attached, occupied the first floor for three years, a period of time that had passed slowly without the companionable, if occasionally warlike, dialectic she had found in her husband. Mr. Proby faulted her only occasionally, never, certainly, by low dodges of the heart, but merely on the odd Saturday night when, out on a toot, he would lurch home glassy-eyed under the streetlamps, with one or two middle-aged girls on each arm, singing ballistic snatches from “The Little Shirt My Mother Made for Me” or “Sweeney Todd the Barber,” his behaviour, after all the drink, considered by the general neighbourhood not so much objectionable as courtly, though it periodically cost him those not always enviable few minutes just later when, unable to exorcise himself of the disconsolate and unbearable immediate, he fell prey to the singularly virulent malocchio drilling him in silence from across the darkened bedroom. But sovereignty was re-established as apologies were made, insisted upon, sworn, repeated, sworn again, and more than one potentially fistic evening passed away forever in a loud duet of snores, one
set markedly louder, almost triumphant, poignantly female. What the deuce, he had often said, say la vee. He had given Mrs. Proby a fairly full life: judicious, non-adjectival, sometimes cranky, but almost always full. He was in plastics; then he retired comfortably, took the little woman and Weenie to Woodford Wells where they bought a modest little house, trimmed a hedge or two, and tried as best they could to make the rough places plain. Then, three years ago, after a nice meal of fresh crab cakes, Cornish pasties, and a bottle or two of brown ale, Mr. Proby took a jaunt into Epping Forest and dropped dead—ironically, during the loveliest hour of the English year: seven o’clock on Midsummer Eve. The sudden shock of it all caused in Mrs. Proby a diarrheal disease called sprue, an agnail on her right toe as large as a doorknob, and, she claimed, twinges in the area of Rosenmüller’s Organ. In any case, Mrs. Proby waked him, buried him in a spot near the Bunhill Fields, packed her things (a lonely collection of Royal Doulton, her woolwork slippers, a zipper Bible, a morocco-bound account of the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46, a boa she had kept from the celebration of her wooden wedding, etc.), and moved to a little street near South Kensington, where she had grown up as a girl, because she could not stand to be too far from the nicer part of London, the very quarter in which—oh, it seemed years ago, she often pointed out—Bernard (Mr. Proby) courted her, with a full crop of bushy coal-black hair, pointed shoes, and the banjo eyes she’d grown to love. In those days, England had a voice in the world, people could understand the lyrics of songs, and there were no Chinese. Changes, however, had come about and had created in her a compulsion for the laudator temporis acti reminiscence, which excluded, perforce, the total existence of both a certain Chinaman and any capacity in him that might try to prove otherwise. Mrs. Proby became hermetic not per accidens but by predilection.

  A tight national budget coupled with the small personal account Mr. Proby left her kept Mrs. Proby’s eye on the shilling. And except for a chance Saturday at Portobello Road (for thermal underwear, wholesale tins of quinine toothpowder, or general white elephant), a dash to a museum exhibit, or a quick afternoon at the pictures, she restricted herself to the quiet deliberation and firmitude of soul found in the English matron: a recipe available to few but the sore-footed and antique wise. Mrs. Proby bought her flat right out, dusted, put sachet lavender in the drawers, scrubbed, put up new flowered wallpaper, hoovered the rugs, religiously scrubbed lye into her porcelain, and draped the windows in percale. Until she met Mrs. Cullinane she spent most of her time munching from a can of Fortt’s Original Bath Olivers or sucking winegums, slouched lugubriously by the wireless, following episode after episode of “The Archers,” listening on the BBC to Sidney Torch’s dated musical extravaganzae—and of course she was, as she was always ready to add, “all for the telly,” in front of which she often sat making penwipes of flannel in the shape of carnations for the old soldiers on Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea. Her teas were grim; even Weenie was no help there.