by Paul Theroux
“Ma’s so needy. I tried to avoid coming this weekend. Marvin’s coaching Little League, but Ma insisted. She said she wanted me to do her hair. Then she wanted me to help her clean out the drawers of her end tables. She’s still trying to get rid of Dad’s stuff. Do you need any ties? How about socks? And she’s got a huge collection of coat hangers. I said to her, ‘Ma, no one wants coat hangers,’ but does she listen?”
Franny went on in this vein, whinnying, working her shoulders, her elbows resting on her knees. But I knew her well enough to guess that all this talk meant she had something else on her mind. She had Mother’s trick of wearing down a listener with her talk, and when you were panting for her to finish, she would come to the point, always a demand.
Finally, she said, “Ma needs a chair.”
“Hasn’t she got a chair?”
“I mean, a real comfortable one that she can enjoy. Leather, with cushions, good lumbar support for her arthritis. Real workmanship. She’s got some issues with her spine.”
“You mean we should get her one?”
“I was hoping you’d say that. Right, everyone chipping in. We’ll split it seven ways. Marvin knows a guy.”
Marvin, her security guard husband, with a truncheon, a can of Mace, and a walkie-talkie on his belt, and a donut in each hand. He was also the mainstay of the local Little League, although neither of his boys had ever played in it. He liked standing at home plate and howling “Safe!” and “Out!” and “Stee-rike!” Floyd referred to him as a bunk muffin.
“There’s a furniture place at the mall where he works. He can get a good deal.”
The price was high. Franny said, “It’s made in England.” It wasn’t, but never mind. What struck me about the big leather chair was how different it was from the other chairs in Mother’s house. Mother sat in it from the moment it arrived—sat and knitted and talked on the phone, sat and received her children. I say “received” because the leather chair was so much like Mother’s throne. And one day when she patted it and said, “Franny got it for me,” I didn’t bother to correct her. She would have held it against me as another defiant lie. Mother hated to be contradicted, especially when she was sitting on her throne, the monarch of Mother Land.
7
Home Life
After that—and it was years—I rarely saw Mother away from her chair, with its wrinkly leather and its creamy color and its buttons, its swollen arms and upholstered shoulders and brass foot claws, the chair (so it seemed to me) a bit like Mother herself in her younger and just-as-fierce days. She sat, she knitted, she listened, she stirred and dished, and though she was unforthcoming and canny, even at her most evasive she had perfected an I-have-nothing-to-hide face and solemnly truthful tone that became indistinguishable to me from a lying one.
I began to think that history had to be full of queens who were idle or sulky until, at the death of the king, they ascended to the throne and became queenly, as a dowager regent, gripping the scepter in skinny fingers, enigmatic, single-minded, exalted, impossible—having given no indication beforehand of what power would do to them. Robed and crowned, the tiara fitted on the frizz of hair and the yellow skull, and towering on the throne, they were absolute and unknowable in their arrogant authority.
Mother was like that. I marveled at her transformation. She claimed to be old and achy, yet she could also twinkle with affection in her goggling mock innocence and call attention to a bargain she’d landed, or a loon she had carved, or a scarf she’d knitted. But in spite of all of these trifles, she was no less a queen.
One of the conventions of the family—and, who knows, it may have been a convention of a medieval court—was our needing to observe a habit of disloyalty. We were required to satirize each other, but slyly. Any mention of another family member, with a few exceptions, always involved a backhanded remark; it was all belittling, all whispers, all betrayal. To defend anyone was unacceptable, worse than impolite, because it meant putting the mocker in the wrong. And we were most loyal to Mother when we were being disloyal to each other. Though we begged each other or angled for secrets, no confidences were respected. If anyone was incautious enough to disclose a secret, adding the warning “But don’t tell anyone,” then everyone was told, one person at a time. Of course, this also became a form of discourse: pretending to have a secret, you muttered the very thing you knew would excite the hearer, so it would be repeated, broadcast to your appalled rivals. Without a doubt, this stratagem of ours had to be another conspiratorial feature of a dark castle.
Keeping secrets didn’t make us strong; only disclosing them was an empowerment. Telling secrets was the way we conversed, but we had to be careful. The object was to tease, to fascinate, to befriend a sibling with an apparent confidence. If the entire secret was divulged wholesale, we lost all our power. The trick was to reveal it bit by bit while seeming to tell it all, to keep something back, never to come completely clean.
It was no good claiming to know a secret; we needed to demonstrate our knowledge. We believed that the manipulation of secrets was the ultimate exercise in power. In our self-deception, we did not understand Dad’s lesson, that the silent person is always the least knowable, the most masked, and the strongest.
We did nothing but talk, encouraged by Mother. Some of the talk was of course a cover, a distraction, just hollow boasting or the spinning of our wheels, but most of it was gossip. It was vicious, aggressive, beyond satire in its heartlessness—and Mother loved it.
Mother feasted on failure, had always done so; and now, with Dad gone, so did we. As children we had been merely unkind or obtuse, and now we were competitive and cruel—amazingly, in an attempt to please the old woman who was quietly knitting in her big leather chair, who pretended to be ignorant and slow, feeble and arthritic.
“Hubby needs a colonoscopy,” she said to me, pretending to distract me with a bird carving she’d done. “I thought it was an old person’s thing, but no, apparently if you don’t take good care of yourself you need it pretty bad. Know what this is? A puffin.”
Another day she said with a smile, “I guess Marvin needs a root canal. I’ve never needed one of those. I have every single one of my teeth.”
“It seems Fred had quite a time getting back home the other day, poor kid,” Mother said, clicking her knitting needles. “Those dogs, for one thing. One was pretty sick, but I imagine he’ll survive.” Fred was mauled by his German shepherd. “He’s been asking for that.”
She disliked most animals, but now and then a dog might provide entertainment. She smiled at me one morning and said, “I’ve just had an earful from Franny. Her precious Max was bitten by Fred’s big dog. I’m sure she’s making a fuss about nothing. ‘Stitches in his hand, Ma!’ I told her I know all about stitches, I’ve had a few in my time, and she said—get this—‘But this means Max will never be able to be a hand model.’ God forgive me, I had to laugh. Him, a hand model!”
In Mother’s Boston accent the word had two syllables, hee-and, which made it greater mockery.
Unless they were biting her grandchildren or being a nuisance to someone she disdained, she hated animals. She could not see the point of pets. They represented nuisance and needless expense, they were dirty, just hairballs on dirty paws, little better than vermin—cats, dogs, canaries. Fred had a pair of hounds that in Mother’s eyes were an example of Fred’s weakness and disobedience. Had he listened to Mother, he would never have kept them, but instead the result was two slavering mutts that had to be transported in the back of the Volvo, wreaking havoc.
These animals chewed the seats, shat on the floor mats, chased other dogs at the service areas on the turnpike, and, unless tethered, often ran away, later to be found and cited for not being licensed, no collar, no proper ID, and the consequence was, “God forgive me, I have to laugh—a fifty-dollar fine!” All this time, Fred’s kids sat, cranky in the car while the dogs ran riot. Mother reported that one of Fred’s children—Jake—had eaten a Styrofoam cup. It was somet
imes hard to tell whether she was criticizing Fred or quietly rejoicing in the disorder of it all, finding pleasure in the tyranny of the dogs. The eating of the cup became the whole of Jake’s history, like original sin, overwhelming all his achievements as an adult.
“Floyd was here,” Mother said to me one day, knitting a woolen square for an afghan. She had skinny hands with knuckles like acorns and yellow nails, and her knitting looked ghoulish and efficient, the clicking of the needles like the cracking of her finger bones.
She had implored me to visit, saying that she was alone all the time. No one dropped in anymore.
“He had a long face,” she said.
“I thought he had a girlfriend and that all was well. From New Jersey? Very pretty? Works for a pharmaceutical company—something like that?”
Mother smiled and worked her tongue through her thin lips as if enjoying the taste of Floyd’s troubles.
“Apparently she sent him back his ring,” and she smiled, “in a Jiffy bag,” and smiled again, and said, “I shouldn’t laugh,” and laughed, “it’s not funny,” and laughed again. “This is—what?—his sixth or seventh true love.” She lowered her face into the yarn, clicked the needles, and said, “Maybe he can write another poem about it.”
To her poetry was laughable, in the same category as pets and expensive clothes and sports events and Christian Science and going to the movies. Where was the profit? And yet Mother had boasted and snipped out the news item in the Globe when Floyd had won a Guggenheim.
“What about Hubby?”
She smiled again. “He keeps busy. Like Dad. Puttering around. He fixed my kitchen cabinets. The only thing is, the doors don’t shut properly now. I think he put the hinges on wrong.” She poked and stabbed with her needles, gathering and knotting the yarn. “Still, I gave him a little something.”
Hubby was a figure of fun. Because he was dependable and a trauma nurse and could fix things that baffled everyone else, he needed to be satirized. Instead of being Mister Fixit, he was portrayed as the opposite, as a klutz, all thumbs, memorable only for what he had broken, not what he had fixed.
“Hubby took me over to his house so I could admire his new sink. He says to me, ‘Look, Ma.’ I didn’t know what to look at. I am standing in his bathroom and you know how big he is—just crowding me against the shower stall. ‘Look.’ And finally, ‘New faucet.’ I didn’t dare tell him it looked exactly like the old faucet except that this one cost seventy-five dollars. Imagine! And he was so proud of it. I said, ‘It’s dripping.’ He hadn’t even noticed.” She had begun her hard merciless laugh, and still laughing, half covering her mouth, she screeched, “God forgive me!”
I was staring.
She said, “He still doesn’t eat right.”
This remark had a history. Long after adolescence, Hubby still had a bad complexion, his nose inflamed, corrugations of infected boils on his forehead. So his face was larger than other children’s, and fiercer-seeming. How he must have suffered, for there are faces that can make even the young and innocent seem dangerous.
Mother said, “If only he ate more sensibly. He never would listen. It’s all the chocolate.”
Yet as a schoolboy Hubby had a pimply face, and it was Mother who fed him and went on blaming him, complaining of his gluttony.
He was miserable. He grew fat and more miserable. He was miserable because he was fat, and his misery made him eat more and grow fatter.
“His stomach is distended,” Mother said. After fifty years Hubby’s stomach was still a topic of conversation. “You know when you eat too much your stomach gets stretched”—she dropped her knitting needles and clawed the air apart with her hands—“and you have to keep filling it.”
As she was talking about his belly, Hubby—as he grumbled later to me—was at the hardware store buying galvanized brackets for her window boxes and a plunger to unstop her toilet and some neat’s-foot oil for her throne.
Hubby’s misery was not only the result of his acne and his girth. There was a family reason. When Gilbert learned the violin, Hubby was encouraged, as an afterthought, to play an instrument, and how about the cello? Mother said that her brother, the sadistic priest Uncle Louie, had played the cello and had liked it, and Hubby would like it too. Hubby objected, and when he was angry he quacked and flailed and made himself villainous.
“I want to learn the guitar!”
“Phonies play the guitar,” Mother said. She believed that the guitar hardly qualified as a musical instrument. It was a foolish object that uneducated men slung around their neck when they sang, now and then strumming it, pretending to make music.
“The cello or nothing,” Dad said, goaded by Mother.
And so, against his will, Hubby took cello lessons from a heavy-drinking music teacher two streets away, who called him “Bubby” and sometimes fell asleep in his chair, snoring loudly as Hubby played. Hubby cursed because he was no good and because he was forced to play for us all, scraping away at the only song he knew—all this because, as Mother said, Hubby had low self-esteem.
The song was “My Grandfather’s Clock.” The way he played it sounded, as Floyd said in a stage whisper, like a kid with a cold playing a kazoo. Hubby hunched over his cello and wheezed, dragging his bow across the strings, not sounding like a kazoo at all but like someone ripping old rags. Hubby scowled, daring us to laugh, holding his bow in his fist like a weapon.
Mother sang:
Ninety years without slumbering
Tick, tock, tick, tock,
His life seconds numbering,
Tick, tock, tick, tock,
It stopped short—never to go again—
When the old man died.
After Hubby raked his bow across the strings for the last time, with a final ripsawing motion and a splintering vibrato, we applauded, we laughed. It was terrible. Hubby had made a jackass of himself, and he knew it. He threw down his bow, kicked his cello, and quacked at us.
A week later, while Gilbert played his violin, Hubby was nagged to play his cello. Hubby refused at first, but Mother demanded it. “These music lessons cost good money.” Gilbert played well, Hubby played badly, we all laughed, and when Hubby got angry and quacked again, he was scolded.
“That wasn’t bad playing,” Dad said.
“You have to learn to take it,” Mother said, meaning that it had been bad.
What I learned from Mother was that no one learns to take it.
We had not learned. We came, we went, we were the same children we had always been. Here was Hubby putting up the window box brackets at the age of fifty-three and still smarting from the mocking laughter he had heard at the age of ten when he had failed to coax a melody from his cello.
Hubby had his revenge. He became a creative belittler and fault-finder, mastering it, triumphing in it, a close second to Mother, not an easy victory in this belittling and fault-finding family.
Was there a nick in the lip, or a hairline crack, in one of your new set of drinking glasses? Hubby would find it and point it out to you. Was there a typo in the five-hundred-page book you had just published? Hubby could give you the page and the line. Entering your newly painted house, he would squint upward and indicate where the workmen had left a dime-sized smudge on the underside of an upper windowsill. And that same day, walking down your driveway, he would lunge and dig his fingers into the gravel, find a rusty nail, and hand it to you, reminding you about the harm it could inflict on a tire. A bald tire, a dab of mayonnaise on your cheek, a twist of raccoon scat on your deck, a blush of rust on a hubcap, the faintest lip print on a tumbler—Hubby saw it, and nothing else existed except this flaw. The maddening thing was that what he indicated as needing attention was often something that had been on your mind for months, a wound awaiting a dose of Hubby’s salt.
We were a flailing family, and our subversion usually took the form of pettiness. Floyd was awarded a Guggenheim for his poetry. The presentation ceremony was held in New York City. He did not invite Mothe
r or Father.
He said, “I guess I forgot.”
But he had not forgotten. “Genius has no off switch,” he used to say.
I had no idea where I fitted in. If anyone had asked me, I would have said that Mother liked me for my good humor and hard work, my willingness to help, my independence, my alertness. My good manners were a form of evasion, but they were manners nonetheless. Mother said, “I love all my children equally,” but “equally” was not true, and “love” sounded ritualistic to me—all mothers had to declare it, for they couldn’t very well say they didn’t love their children. So the statement meant nothing to me. I never felt when she said it that I was in the presence of love. It was a wordy formula, like loving God. But God was invisible, ungraspable, and so the words were meaningless to me. Any mention of love was like a secret, seldom-used password you had to say in order to get your way. Telling me that she loved me, Mother persuaded me to clean the bathroom or cut the grass. From this I learned that if I told a girl I loved her, I could slip my hand up her blouse and fondle her breast. Though sensing it was a manipulative formula, I could not bring myself to tell Mother I loved her.
But, “We love you, Mumma,” Franny and Rose said. They looked after her, sighing at the burden of it, rolling their eyes, moaning about Mother’s frugality, how she didn’t have much money left.
“She’s slowing down an awful lot,” Franny said. “I goes, ‘This bottle of tonic is flat.’ She goes, ‘I just bought it.’ The cap was off. It was about a month old. She’s so forgetful. She leaves the stove on. Things boil over. It’s a wonder she hasn’t burned the house down.”
“She’s so careful about her money,” Rose said. “It’s a good thing we visit her. If we didn’t, she’d probably starve herself to death. As it is, she doesn’t have much time left.”
“Slowing down,” “frugal,” “forgetful,” “doesn’t have much time”: I was to hear these words for the next twenty years. Mother was not slowing down at all; her memory was almost perfect, except when she pretended to forget or to be deliberately vague, in order to test us, to get more information, or to seem blameless for one of her peculiar cruelties. Cured of her arthritis, ridding herself of the medicine’s side effects, she took no more pills and grew stronger.