Mothers and Sons : A Novel

How well do you know your mother? How well does your mother know you? In his acclaimed debut novel, The Baker, Paul Hond presented an ambitious and deeply compassionate portrait of race and redemption in urban America. Now, in his long-awaited second novel, Hond offers a wise and moving variation on one of literature's essential themesthe complicated and often unarticulated relationship between mothers and sons. At twenty-seven, Moss Messinger, a sometime restaurant critic with a dwindling bank account, had hoped he might be over his childhood. Moss grew up with his distant single mother, a musician, in their rent-controlled two-bedroom Manhattan apartment. Nina lived in a haze of music and men that Moss was never able to pierce. Having a baby at seventeen had completely changed Nina's lifeand she'd tried to change it back ever since. When her son was a teenager, she left on a jazz-fueled tour of Europe, and Moss was never able to forgive her. Through the years, there had been a kind of hostility between them, though the tenderness that passes between mothers and sons lay beneath it. Now their emotional distance is matched by the geographical distanceNina is in L.A., Moss is in New Yorkand exacerbated by Nina's new husband, whom Moss has never met. Yet when Moss breaks up with his longtime girlfriend and sinks into depression, Nina flies back east to be by his sidenot altogether unselfishly, as it also allows her a respite from a troubled marriage. But the reunion triggers a series of shocking events that force mother and son to confront and understand each other in new and unusual ways. Psychologically rich and acutely observed, Mothers and Sons is an intricate portrait of a complex and fascinating familial relationship, one that is both sensitively rendered and urbanely wry. Drawing on a literary tradition ranging from D. H. Lawrence to Philip Roth, Paul Hond writes with dexterity and insight about fractured lives, the long shadow of resentments, and the rebirth of love and family.

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Chapter 1

For the fifth straight morning, Moss Messinger was awakened by noise: deep, infernal grunts, toad rhythms, a throbbing, a frenzy, an orgy, an infestation. The monsters! They were killing him. Moss removed his earplugs, which were made of a specially engineered foam, guaranteed to block out snoring, car alarms. Yet useless. The noise bored right through them, to the root of Moss’s brain. His sleep was ruined. He heaved himself up in his bed, pulled open the curtain and saw on the window ledge two plump gray pigeons, the head of one tucked under the other’s wing. They appeared to be asleep. Moss tapped the pane, but the lovers didn’t move; instead came the flapping and screeching of other birds, exploding from their sanctuaries in the narrow air shaft and falling upward through the canyon of blackened bricks toward daylight.

In Moss’s life in that apartment, there had been many annoyances—busted boilers, banging pipes, leaks, bad smells—but never this, never pigeons. Had someone dropped bread out a window? Moss suspected one of the old Ukrainian widows that you often saw in the park, standing in a roiling sea of strutting, pecking, filthy birds, tossing crusts from under her tattered shawl. A few of them lived in Moss’s building and in the tenement next door, on the other side of the air shaft: they sat in their windows like faded portraits. Every so often, one would die, and before the body was cold the contractors would be hammering away, renovating the place so that Moss’s cheeseparing landlady, Mrs. Bulina, could rent the unit for five times the money she’d been getting before. Moss knew that his own apartment was similarly undervalued. He also knew that Mrs. Bulina knew this.

Moreover he was aware that a few unscrupulous building owners had taken to harassing long-standing tenants in an effort to drive them out, and sometimes not just harass: the murder of a tenant at the hands of his landlord on Norfolk Street had been big news in the wake of recent battles in the state legislature in which laws protecting tenants like Moss from sudden and dramatic increases in rent had mercifully been upheld. Sometimes he felt that his landlady viewed him mostly in terms of money lost, and why wouldn’t she? The logic was inescapable. Now Moss wondered, not too seriously, if Mrs. Bulina might herself have dropped some bread, as part of a plot to drive him out. Moss, it was true, had a tendency to create elaborate dramas around himself, but it was hard to overestimate Mrs. Bulina, who, seen carrying her small heft tidily up and down the stairs in floral-print dresses and white sneakers to deliver rent notices, had been a notorious slumlord in her day.

Even now, she refused to make improvements to the building, and when Moss’s upstairs neighbor, a dandified Pole with a Hitler mustache above a moist quivering lip, had gone on rent strike over Mrs. Bulina’s continued failure to install an intercom system, so that guests and couriers and deliverymen could be admitted at the push of a button instead of your having to go down to open the door, Moss had kept a low profile, declining to add his name to a petition that the neighbor had circulated. Moss was all for an intercom, but did not want to antagonize his landlady, and besides, he rarely ordered in. Still, he was unnerved by the example made of his neighbor, who was eventually removed from the premises by three cops and a psychiatrist.

Moss now noticed the droppings on the windowsill: green and white spatterings covered with wormy ash-colored coils. You could get respiratory diseases from breathing that stuff, Moss had read. Maybe he’d already contracted something. Hadn’t he been coughing lately? Wheezing? Of course, the main problem was the noise. Whenever the pigeons got agitated and burst from a ledge, a high-pitched pulsing sound rattled in their fat throats, like the trill of a car’s starter on a freezing day.

Moss got out of bed and went to the toilet with a book of poems by Keats, a gift from Danielle on his last birthday. Moss had resisted these poems because Keats had died at twenty-six, and Moss, at twenty-seven, felt threatened by the genius of men younger than himself. If he and Keats had been friends, which of them would get the girls? That was the real question in life, and the fact remained that Moss had yet to have a single one of his plays produced. Danielle once mentioned that Keats had died a virgin, and that was of some consolation. Danielle always knew what to say.

Moss saw that she had marked a poem for him—“Ode to a Nightingale.” That was eerie, a further encroachment of birds. Moss read the poem skeptically, feeling certain that Keats, for all his problems, had never been ravaged by pigeons. And while an Old World songbird was a different thing from what was roosting in Moss’s air shaft, Moss made no distinction. Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird! Moss’s great-grandfather had raised pigeons for food on the roof of a tenement on Avenue C, and so maybe there was some justice at work. More to the point, Moss himself had eaten pigeon for the first time just ten days before. This was at Beaujoli, a slick new eatery that had opened up a few blocks away in what was once a Salvation Army outlet where Moss used to get his shirts. Moss’s dining companion, Boris, had ordered the pigeons au Sancerre. A culinary-school dropout, Boris suspected it was not a Sancerre that had been used but a California sauvignon blanc, which he claimed was a common substitute in that dish. The kitchen confirmed this upon inquiry. Moss thought that the discrepancy ought to have been explained beforehand by the waiter, a waifish blue-eyed hustler who reeled off sumptuous descriptions as long as your arm but couldn’t remember to bring a glass of water. Moss would mention all of this in his review. In addition, Boris thought that the bouquet garni overwhelmed the other flavors. Moss saw his point. Moss himself had ordered the loin of hare, cooked in wine and butter and blood. Boris tasted it and thought the sauce too bloody. Moss made a note.

Moss’s opinions about Beaujoli—which were largely Boris’s—had appeared a week later in Eat New York, and that night—three nights ago—he had come home to find a frightening message on his answering machine: a low, breathy voice, obviously disguised, saying, “Sweet little [unintelligible], why did you die?” Moss listened to it over and over, nibbling on his thumb. Sweet little what? Red Fee? Reffie? Referee? Suddenly, Moss knew: it was Nik Cattai, owner of Beaujoli. Referee. Cattai, a foreigner, might have meant this in the sense of “judge,” as a synonym for “critic”; and his “why did you die?” seemed almost a parody of a threat delivered in sinister broken English. Moss had met Cattai briefly at the restaurant’s opening-night party a month or so before, and was impressed by his charm, a product of vampire good looks, a streetwise solicitousness and several million dollars.

There were rumors that he’d made his fortune as a youth in Croatia, funneling weapons to the Irish Republican Army. Moss didn’t ask. All he knew was that Cattai had invested a huge amount of money in what he hoped would become the next sensation on the downtown restaurant scene. Eat New York, though subheaded “What’s Yummy and What’s Crummy,” was concerned less with serious food criticism than with Who Was Eating Where, and promoted the celebrity of chefs and owners, combining interviews and sexy photos with industry gossip and recipes of the stars. Nik Cattai was determined to become a star in his own right, and Beaujoli, with its antique ceiling fans and tile mosaics, to say nothing of chef Billy Pipp, was to be his key; and with a view toward a major cover story, he’d been terribly gracious to Moss (who, like some reviewers, forswore his anonymity in exchange for special treatment), taking him through the kitchen, introducing him around and generally making him feel that he was being asked to do a favor.

Moss had mentioned this too in his critique.

Now, from the bathroom, he heard the pigeons shrieking as they flew from ledge to ledge.

Of all the times to be single, Moss thought, recalling Danielle’s quiet top-floor studio on Bank Street, which had afforded him so many peaceful sleep-filled hours. He had ended that relationship weeks ago, long before the pigeons. He could not have seen them coming. Not that having a noiseless living space had been Danielle’s chief attribute—far from it. Aside from her beauty—older people compared her to Grace Kelly—she was probably the most selfless and giving person Moss had ever known. There was nothing she would not have done for him. Well, there had been one thing. She wouldn’t leave him. He’d given her every chance—told her he couldn’t be “trusted,” that he wasn’t “ready,” that he feared “intimacy”—anything to get around the painful truth, which was that he had turned off to her sexually. He hardly understood it, but there it was. And because he could not abide the effect his flagging interest might have on Danielle’s self-esteem, he took the blame: I’m confused, he would say, I’m afraid of getting too close, I don’t want to lose myself, and on and on. Danielle had no choice but to believe him—the alternative was too horrible. Occasionally she tried to seduce him. He feigned sleep, illness. Frustrated, she suggested—tolerantly—that he might be gay. “It’s okay if you are,” she told him with compassion. “I just want to know.” Moss denied it, but not categorically. Meanwhile he lusted after every pretty girl he saw. For months he lived like this, celibate in the prime of life, all because he could not bring himself to betray a woman who loved him so much that she was willing to wait years for him to realize what a precious thing he had.

He realized it now. Love! He had traded love for freedom. Didn’t every pop song of the past fifty years warn expressly against that? “Let’s hang on to what we’ve got.” “Don’t turn your back on love.” Christ! It was all true. He’d never understood those songs before, and wondered if they’d been penned and sung from the same anguish he himself was feeling, or if he was merely responding, in his heightened state, to bland imitations of sentiment—as if the simplest, most timeworn phrases had a power that revealed itself to those whose experience made them receptive to it, the way believers find religious significance in ordinary events.

He flushed the toilet and stepped into the shower, sick with longing for Danielle, who had recently turned thirty and begun threatening to get a dog. “Why do I need a man or a baby?” she liked to say, pretending to have come to a more mature, more realistic point of view. It killed Moss every time. When they first met, she’d just moved to the city, bursting with plans to take acting classes and audition for As the World Turns. Moss got a bad feeling. Danielle had exactly the sort of résumé—small town, big dreams, a nurse—that made her a natural target for homeless schizophrenics with bricks, though more likely she’d be crushed by high rent, self-centered men, stiff competition and phone calls not returned. On their first date Moss learned that she’d been treated badly by her last boyfriend, a dashing young gynecologist from Bombay. “I gave him a blow job,” she said, glumly stirring her drink, “and then he broke up with me. Like right afterward.” Moss was offended by the boyfriend’s cruelty and felt that he must make it up to her somehow, even as he calculated the odds of himself receiving a blow job. He was beginning to like his chances.

“That guy was a disgusting jerk,” he said, and speculated that a man who chose to examine vaginas for a living must have pretty complicated feelings about women. This drew an appreciative laugh from Danielle. A wonderful laugh—sweet, shy, held back in the throat as though in ladylike restraint, bringing out her dimples and setting her tense nostrils fluttering. A snapshot of the soul. Moss fell in love with it. Already he sensed that she had chosen him, and his only response was to let himself be claimed. He held doors, pulled out chairs, praised her clothes, hair, eyes, nose, walked her home through dark streets and kissed her tenderly goodnight. Soon they were sleeping together. Moss would mount her from behind like an animal, turn her over and come on her face (her idea), and then take a shower. It was nothing personal, he’d tell her, the shower. He averaged three a day, even without sex. He washed his hands constantly. He avoided doorknobs, public bathrooms, people with colds. He loved condoms. Only when drunk could he really enjoy himself in bed. Bodily smells repelled him, especially his own. He wanted to be of the angels. Pure. With soap and mouthwash and antiperspirant he waged endless war with his body, striving for godliness.

One of the great things about Danielle was that she always smelled clean, even when she came home from work. Moss would sniff her neck, her hair. “You’re a flower,” he’d tell her, and she would blush and assure him that she hadn’t always smelled so good after work, a reference to her stint in Labor and Delivery, which was still her first love. Moss had never been present at a birth (not counting his own, which his mother had once described as “something I’d never want to go through again”—and she hadn’t), but he’d seen footage of one on television, and that was enough: the mother seemed to be ridding herself of some horrible bloody thing that had invaded her. Danielle saw it differently. To her, a human birth was the foremost event in nature; in her rubber gloves and blue mask she had bent herself at the volcano’s edge.

Now she worked in Intensive Care. Instead of birth, it was death she attended. She wanted to become well-rounded in the field. More than once she suggested to Moss that they have sex in the hospital morgue. She was getting in touch with things that were beyond Moss. If one of her patients died, it was her job to remove the jewelry. “It was inscribed, Moss, on the inside—‘Harry and Ruth,’ and the date. Fifty years. That ring hadn’t come off in fifty years”—conveying, Moss knew, her own desire for a lifelong bond; for she had seen what it was to die alone, without love. “How infinitely depressing,” Moss would say, whenever she described a patient who had no visitors. It made Moss think he should volunteer his time, talk with these people, hear their stories, remember them. But then the feeling would pass. In the meantime, the sick were fortunate to have someone like Danielle, who, when she had some free minutes, would massage their swollen feet.

Excerpted from Mothers and Sons: A Novel by Paul Hond
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