This story appeared in the July 7 & 14, 2025, New Yorker. Here’s a link:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wEHdaiA8fGX2lnRYg1ue7K_D_JVxM2ty/view

My father worked nights as the desk attendant at a cheap hotel downtown. It was a thankless job behind bulletproof glass, which was all he had to shield him from demented drunks and screeching prostitutes, from seven in the evening until four in the morning, poor man.

These are the opening lines. Nothing they convey is true. But we, and the narrator, won’t learn this until late in the story.

Each of the major characters — father, mother, son — is living a kind of lie. Presenting a false self. The word “pretend” appears eight times.

The son pretends to be religious for his father, acts innocent and easily shocked, perhaps thinking that’s how a son should be. But he and the father never really connect. They’re both playing roles.  

Title: Early on, the narrator says of his father, “All he wanted to do was to make me laugh.” The father tells his son a couple of corny jokes. As the story continues, we see the young narrator acting like a comedian. Ultimately, they both are comedians. Like father, like son.

The blind mother, the son tells us, addresses his father with affectionate terms like “Sweetie,” “Honey,” and “Daddy,” but he hears nothing of affection when she speaks of him outside his presence. “She had no future, so she played the old-fashioned, agreeable wife.” She addresses the narrator impersonally as “son,” as does his father. We never learn the boy’s name; he never hears it spoken in his house. Worrisome, conveying a lack of closeness or affection.

Near the end, we’ll see that the father, unbeknownst previously to the son (or us), is a real comedian. On stage, truth replaces corny humor. He tells the audience he can’t stand his wife, lets them know something his son doesn’t: that he’s not his real father. Something he also says is that his son loves his mother.

Later, when the son fails to come home at his expected time (because he’s followed his father to the bar where he learns that his father works as a comic MC instead of a hotel desk clerk), she gets drunk and rails against the pigeons who use the space outside her window for mating. The son’s take: “The very idea of courtship, seduction – it embarrassed her. I don’t think she believed in love, nor do I think she ever felt it, even accidentally.” Yet he’s missing how his mother might have loved a man (not his father) with whom she bore him (the son). Perhaps the mother has shut down her capacity to love in response to feeling burned. The son is a reminder of something she’d like to forget?

Son: says it was his job to keep his mother company, feed her, and put her to bed. Later, though, we see that after he’s put her to bed, he lies beside her while she sleeps, only leaving when he hears his father return from his night job. Hmm. His lingering in bed after his job would seem to be over suggests his love for her.

“Whores” appears nine times (plus one “prostitute”). Whores provide a semblance of love. A love substitute. Perhaps what the son and his parents both give and receive. But perhaps also how the father views his wife based on her past infidelity. (It’s possible she bore her son before meeting her future husband, but the constant use of the word “whore” suggests otherwise.) A view the son picks up and transfers to all women?

The son acts meanly toward his mother because she expresses no love for him. After pouring her bath, he uses her time relaxing in the tub to torment her by practicing his clarinet, which he purposely plays badly, a skill he has honed (rather than learning to play it well). He manages “to produce a self-pitying, pleading noise like an animal lying on the side of the road, begging to be put out of its misery.” Perhaps the image expresses what he feels like but cannot say. We get a sense that his bad behavior is a cry for attention. Oddly, he spends hours shining a pen light into her eyes, looking for . . . what? If nothing else, the amount of time and detail the son provides on describing his mother shows a kind of obsession that hints at the father’s claim that he loves her.

We see parallels between the narrator’s cruelty toward his mother and the way he treats the other women in the story that he likes. He claims that the nuns who teach at his school hate the students. One, Sister Brigida, throws erasers at their feet. Still, he says he likes her. He especially likes a second nun, Sister Veronika, but he expresses his feelings by demonstrating their opposite, embarrassing her in class with inappropriately crude language, something he enjoys. Similarly we learn that he has a crush on the girl who cleans their apartment. In a quirky, flirtatious scene, in joking with her he calls her a whore. His interactions with these female characters mirror his behavior toward his mother. He likes them but treats them badly.

The last lines in the story are opposite of the first lines, true instead of false. The son’s mournful cry that he would have worshipped his mother if she’d been “willing to share.” He doesn’t use the word “love;” he’s still coming to terms with her lack of it for him.

Late thought: Is it accurate to say the son loves his mother? Or are his actions best explained by the normal desire and expectation of an offspring for a mother’s love?