Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  In that period without income, he needed work, but he was not so much looking for a job as for a benefactor. He had been raised in a culture where work was scarce and a job was a favor. If he had a passion, it was to maintain his dignity, to go on looking respectable, for the sake of family pride. He scowled and went silent and obstinate when Mother suggested that a janitor’s job was available at the church. Father was appalled—his natural piety made him innately anticlerical. And we were shocked at the prospect of seeing Dad in overalls, pushing a broom down the aisle, not so much because he would be suffering the indignity of it, but because we would be embarrassed at the sight of him.

  He was soon saved from this ignominy. This man who knew everything about tanneries and leather and stitching got a job in a men’s clothing store in the town square, selling shoes. Though he was a clerk, he had self-respect and a pardonable vanity—after all, he had fallen far—and went on dressing like a leather baron, in pinstripes, and using the word “haberdashery.” I became so accustomed to his manner of speaking that I did not realize until afterward how his euphemisms arose from embarrassed concealment.

  He never said he was tired; he was “bushed.” And when he was bushed he said, “I’m going to hit the hay.” When he saw injustice he said, “That burns me up.” For emphasis he said, “to beat the band” and “for fair.” His car was “the old bus,” and when he sold it at a profit, “You could’ve knocked me down with a feather.” He did not have children, he had “kiddos.” He was euphemistic in French, too, which he spoke with idiomatic fluency. When he got exasperated with one of his sons and was on the point of hitting him, he called him “mo’ psi’ bonhomme” (mon petit bonhomme, my fine young gentleman). He said “clem” the Quebecois way, for “crème,” always “clem à la glass” for ice cream, and when we made a fuss or a mess he cried out with a word that exists in French Canada but not in France: “Plaquoteurs!” Bunglers!

  When his business failed and people tried to cheer him up, he shrugged and said, with a Quebecois twang, “Les gens heureux n’ont pas d’histoire.”

  His fall made me ashamed and frightened, and even as a child of nine—it was 1950—I pitied him for having to endure the banter and bad jokes of his colleagues, four or five ridiculous clerks, with their spurious expertise in the area of shirts and ties: “You can’t beat a Hathaway shirt . . . That would look smart with a cravat . . . What you want is a weskit . . . French cuffs are a sign of class . . . That topcoat is too dressy.” Father distinguished between a blucher and a brogue, spoke of wingtips and chukka boots, of foot anatomy, of the instep and the ball of the foot, and he might recommend a shoe saying, “Good arch support—it’s got a steel shank. It’s a ten eddie.” He said that left and right feet were always slightly different sizes: “You’re right-handed,” he’d say, because a right-handed person’s left foot was larger than his right. Though his job was menial, he brought to it insight and learning; he was as familiar with the human foot as a podiatrist. “What you need on that foot is some powder that’s astringent.”

  “He’s not an employee, he’s an aesthete there,” Floyd said.

  Mother made him miserable with her moods. She sometimes reminded him that he was a poor provider, and he so resented her power, he took out his anger on us. He was helpless, another of Mother’s desperate victims.

  He was Mother’s enforcer. He was a failure at business, yet as contented a clerk as Bob Cratchit. Mother knew the secret of his weakness, his pride in his natty formality of dress, his desire to please her, and so she exploited his insecurity. She moaned about us, whispered in his ear. She had the ability to rouse Father’s wrath—he was irrational and violent when he was angry, and because of his passionate love for us, he became furious, nearly demented in his confusion, and hit us harder.

  He knew how to console Mother, that the greatest consolation to her was for him to punish us, for it released all of her anger and demonstrated his obedience to her. Beating us was his act of loyalty. Father loved her. He had been loved himself; he knew how to love, to be merciful, forgiving, to show gratitude. He was able to calm his excitable woman—perhaps the only man, apart from her own father; he was able to make her feel secure. He knew her better than any of us.

  And he was nothing like her. He was even-tempered, unselfish, he hated gossip, he told the truth, and he was fair-minded. By his example Mother often moderated her own behavior; though Mother still whispered and lied, Father kept her in check. From an early age, I could see that although Mother was by nature tyrannical, and that she dominated Father, and all of us, she feared the strength of his passivity. Her apparent power over him unnerved her. Really, she did not know what she wanted. In his submissive, beaten-down, uncomplaining way, Father was enigmatic. Mother never knew what was in his mind, so he was always the stronger one.

  5

  Mr. Bones

  After his death, whenever I got sentimental and took on a reminiscing tone and talked about how Dad used to read to me and encourage me, I realized that I was lying. Maybe it was a way of being kind to his memory, like “You look marvelous!,” another thing he used to say. “Pretty as a picture”—seldom true. “Looks good enough to eat,” he declared over Mother’s gristly meatloaf. But then, generosity can often seem to verge on the satirical.

  My father, apparently a simple cheery soul, seemed impossible to know. His smiles made him impenetrable. There he stood at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him. A satisfied man, he had the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associated with an old-fashioned servant. “Glad to oblige!”

  A smile is the hardest expression to fathom—you don’t inquire, you don’t even wonder. He must have known that. I never thought: Who is he? What does he want? He said he was happy. He would not have said otherwise, but though I believed him, there were things I didn’t know. He lost his job when American Oak folded. Never mind, he found another one. Did he like it? “I’m tickled to death!”

  He was so thoroughly nice it did not occur to us that we did not know him. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He never went out at night except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after first becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidants—he wasn’t the confiding type. He wasn’t a joiner. He was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a voice, a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. A hush. Dramatic departure, and then silence again.

  This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder, tension, and conflict in our household. It was crooked in the angular splinters of the woodwork, pulsing in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and without any voice, a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, and it was all masked by politeness or sometimes by hostile displays of affection. The quiet-seeming household is often more turbulent or intimidating than the household of the bully or the drunkard.

  One of the unspoken conflicts in the house was the house itself, a constant reproach in the cabinets that failed to catch, in every creak of the floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the stains on the ceiling like mocking faces, every draft that blew under the doors. All these awkward reminders. Mother’s version of the story—the one that she wouldn’t let him live down—was that having decided we had to move (at the time, four kids in a tiny house, with a fifth on the way), my father would go and find a bigger one. Mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked us to make our own decisions, so that if we failed she could say, “Whose fault is that?” Deniability was a defense she mastered long before such a word was coined.

  By directing Dad to look for a new house, she became the one to be propitiated: a scolding silence if it was a good choice, loud blame if it was a bad one. Dad was like hired help, the house hunter. “And it better be a good one.”

  Unused to spending large amounts of money, risking this big decision, Dad became more affable, more genial, than I’d ever seen him.
It was sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table betting everything on the turn of a card.

  He saw three or four houses. They were unsuitable. He liked all of them. Mother was vexed. This was dinner table talk: we were discouraged from speaking during mealtime, so we listened. “What’s good about it?” Mother would say. “It’ll be hard to heat,” or “It’s not on a bus line,” or “That’s a bad neighborhood.”

  One winter night Mother was in tears. Dad had seen another house he liked and was told the price. He was in the nervous, affable mood. He did not bargain or say “My wife will have to see it,” or “We’ll think it over.”

  He said, “We’ll take it!”—with a sudden flourish of money that startled the seller of the house, who was a cranky old woman in a soiled apron.

  That was my mother’s version, in the oral tradition of the family history, the only version that was ever allowed. In a matter of an hour or so my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it in the dark. Because it was January and he worked until five-thirty, he would have driven there after work, tramped through the snow, looked it over, and by seven or so it was a deal.

  The reason for my mother’s tears was that, anticipating his finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him, and the papers he signed that very night (the old woman had them handy in the pocket of her apron) specified a deposit of that amount, nonreturnable.

  “Our whole life’s savings!” my mother cried, thumping the table. “How could you?”

  Obviously, he’d liked the house and didn’t want to risk losing it. He wasn’t a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life’s savings—wasted!”

  Dad suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table and elsewhere. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved—a huge disruption in a family unused to events involving a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it memorable were my mother’s tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father, sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed Italian orphan, looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poverina,” poor little thing. Not the house, but Mother.

  The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side facing the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and all somehow unfinished: the kitchen not quite right, the thin wood cabinets darkly varnished, the doors sagging or poorly fitting or missing, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There’s room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.

  “Life’s savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much of one. My father was a mere shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.

  He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All’s well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hinges, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures of discontent.

  Dad said, “Say, I’ll see to that.”

  He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you’d see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.

  Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.

  Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You’re not going to paint that house yellow!”

  So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray.

  “That’s a lot better,” the neighbor said.

  Mother pointed out that he’d dripped gray paint onto the white trim. He corrected it by repainting the trim.

  Mother said, “Now you’ve gone and dripped white paint on the shingles.”

  Dad smiled, repainting, never quite getting it right.

  Anticipating warm weather and insects, he put up screens. The screens were loose and rusted; holes had been poked in them.

  “Didn’t you look at the screens before?”

  She was talking about January, when he’d bought the house. This was mid-March.

  The stove was unreliable, the fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, which had to be replaced by a plumber, Dad’s fellow choir member Mel Hankey. He worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled, like giving off a smell.

  My father’s new job was a problem: long hours, low pay, my mother home with the small children, with a baby due in June. She was heavy and walked with a tippy, leaning-back gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved.

  “I lost a child four years ago. My darling Angela.” As though she was threatening to lose this one.

  Dad said, “It’s going to be fine.”

  “How would you know?”

  He smiled but had no reply. As a sort of penance he washed the dishes, calling out, “Who’s going to dry for me?” Because of the tension, each of us said, “I’ll do it!” and pushed around trying to be helpful, like terrified children in a drunken household. But there was no drunkard here, only a disappointed woman and her smiling husband.

  I said he had no recreations. He had one, the choir, legitimate because it was church-related. He had a strong, confident, rather tuneless voice, with a gravelly character, and even if there were thirty other people singing, I could always discern my father’s voice in the “Pange Lingua” or “O Salutaris.”

  “You’re not going out again, are you?”

  “Say, I’ve got choir practice.”

  He prays twice who sings to the Lord was printed on the hymnal. He believed that. Choir practice was more than a form of devotion, an expression of piety; it was a spiritual duty. But Dad always went alone, never taking any of us as initiates to the choir, and he always came back happy—you could tell by the tilt of his head, his movements, his breathing, the way he listened, with a different sort of smile, a relaxed posture, his walk. He seemed to weighed less.

  April came.

  “The house is full of flies.”

  “I’ll take care of that.”

  He repaired the screens with little squares of discarded screens.

  “And the paint’s peeling.”

  Instead of priming it or waiting until the summer, he’d painted over the grime and the paint hadn’t stuck.

  “The faucet drips.”

  “Say, I’ll pick up some washers on the way home from choir.”

  “This is the second time I’ve mentioned it.”

  Dad was putting on his hat, snapping the brim, looking raffish.

  “You never listen.”

  All he did was listen, but there’s a certain sort of nagging repetition that can deafen you, and another sort that turns you into a liar. We didn’t know we’d come to the end of a chapter, that we were starting a new one. And after it was over, we knew Dad much better, or rather knew a different side of him.

  The wickedest episodes of revelation can have the most innocent beginnings. This one began with a song. Dad came home carrying a large envelope with a tucked-in flap. Trying to look casual, he got his fingers inside and with a self-conscious flourish took out some pages of sheet music. The illustration on the cover showed a black man in a gleaming top hat, white gloves, mouth smilingly open in the a
ct of singing. I could see from his features that he was a white man wearing black makeup.

  “Say”—Dad was rattling the pages—“can you play this, Mother?”

  Asking a favor always made him shy. Being asked a favor made Mother ponderous and powerful. Oh, so now you want something, do you? she seemed to reply in the upward tilt of her head and triumphant smile.

  She looked with a kind of distaste at the sheet music, plucking at it with unwilling fingers, as though it was unclean—and it was rather grubby, rubbed at the edges, torn at the crease where it was folded on the left side. It showed all the signs of having been propped on many music stands. Much-used sheet music had a limp, cloth-like look.

  After a while, Mother brought herself and her big belly to the piano. She spun the stool to the right height and, balancing herself on it, reached over her pregnancy as if across a counter. Frowning at the music, she banged out some notes—I knew from her playing that she was angry. Dad leaned into his bifocals.

  Mandy,

  There’s a minister handy

  And it sure would be dandy . . .

  He gagged a little, cleared his throat, and began again, in the wrong key.

  He could not read music, though he could carry a tune if he’d heard it enough times. In this first effort he struggled to find the melody.