Mothers and Sons : A Novel

How well do you know your mother? How well does your mother know you? At twenty-seven, Moss Messinger, a sometime restaurant critic with dwindling funds, had hoped he might be over his childhood. Moss grew up in a rent-stabilized two-bedroom Manhattan apartment with his distant single mother, Nina, a musician who lived in a haze of bars and men that Moss was never able to pierce. Having a baby at a young age 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 eventually moved to Los Angeles, and Moss was never able to forgive her. 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.

PAUL HOND is the author of The Baker. He lives in New York City.

From the Hardcover edition.

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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,

Excerpted from Mothers and Sons: A Novel by Paul Hond
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