Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  That was convenient, because I had begun to be interrupted in a random way by family drop-ins, almost weekly visits by Franny and Rose, usually on Sundays, always on their way home after seeing Mother.

  These visits, which I took to be partly hostile—hostility was always a component in their gift giving—I thought of as station identification: Here we are—remember us? Gilbert didn’t drop by, but he phoned, often from an airport when his flight was delayed. He was off to London. Or he was being called unexpectedly to Venezuela. Was there anything I wanted? And he called again, just back, with a Liberty print blouse or the pound of coffee I had requested (though I didn’t mention Missy). And Hubby dropped in as well, to ask if I needed help fixing anything. Yes, a leaky faucet; a slider off its rails; a circuit breaker to be replaced; a heavy sofa to be shifted. I had never known Hubby so cheerful, so conversational, such a good listener, so solicitous.

  “So, what were you saying?”

  “Nothing. You were telling me about your wedding anniversary.”

  It was the day of the pesky circuit breaker. Salt air had corroded the points, so Hubby had said. He tended to lose the thread of conversation whenever he was engaged in a task. When he held a special tool, the right-sized pliers, and was gripping something in his working hands, his mind wandered and he went deaf.

  “Right.” He yanked out the circuit breaker like a dentist on a molar and held it up in the beak of the pliers, examining it dentist-fashion, the contacts that had gone green.

  “Marrying Moneen was one of the smartest things I’ve ever done. That, and insulating my basement from this sea air, which is something you did not do. Look at the verdigris,” and he tossed the circuit breaker into his toolbox.

  “You seem to forget I don’t own this house,” I said, reminding myself of my penury and, even in middle age, how lightly tethered I was to the Cape.

  “Maybe you should think about moving.”

  Fred came over with his three kids and his two dogs, and all of them, children and dogs, ranged like fox hounds, chasing one another, dodging around the trees and the yard as though on the scent.

  “I love this place,” Fred said. “It’s so great to have a perimeter fence.”

  “It’s a rental.”

  “You should buy it. Get into the housing spiral again. Make the owner an offer—cash. It’s a great place for kids. Terrific ambience. Those trees.”

  With his feet up on the porch rail, listening to the shouting children, the barking dogs—the loud sounds of raucous contentment—he told me how lucky I had been in my life: two wonderful children, a number of books in print, lots of foreign travel. People asked him all the time, he said, whether he was related to me.

  “You paid big dues,” Fred said, clapping me on the shoulder. “That girlfriend of yours, Sharon Something, the screamer? Who was going to drown herself in your swimming pool?”

  I snorted, remembering. “Those were the days.”

  Wincing with incomprehension, Fred mouthed, “What?”

  “When I had a swimming pool.”

  Fred sighed. “I’ve wasted my life,” he said, and in his reckless candor he made it sound like a boast. “You’ve had the guts to take chances. I wish I’d had your optimism.”

  “It was desperation. I never saw myself as having made any choices in my life. I only saw one thing to do, one way, no alternative. And quite often—a lot of the time—it was the wrong thing.”

  “You don’t ever see your strengths,” Fred said. “Maybe that’s your virtue. Floyd’s irrational, Hubby’s a complainer, Gilbert’s a mystery—why is he in Kuwait this week? Franny and Rose are a pair of hamburgers. But on any given day, you know exactly what you’re doing.”

  Praise always made me suspicious. It put me on guard as an obvious technique—“indirection” was Floyd’s word for it. I was watching Fred closely, looking for Mother’s influence.

  People sort of brace themselves when they lie. Mother had a peculiar posture and wide-eyed gaze when she fibbed. She angled her body and moved her head in a certain way. She had a liar’s hand gestures, a liar’s finger movements, the way she might press her cheek or touch her eye or tap her foot, emphatic, percussive, as if demanding that you believe her.

  Fred had none of these traits. He stared at me, not blinking, giving me the plain truth—or was it?

  “I should have followed my instincts and become a painter,” he said. “I had some talent—you remember. Edward Hopper—I could have gone that route. Lighthouses, dunes, porches like this. You took the leap, and the thing is”—he took me by the shoulders—“you still have a lot to offer.”

  As he whistled for his kids and rounded up his dogs, I thought: Why is he telling me this?

  And each Sunday, when Franny and Rose dropped in, Franny tramped up my walkway, a shopping bag in each hand, Rose and Rose’s twins in tow—all carrying presents, like tribute, sometimes cheap hostile gifts, other times the sort of presents I imagined they wanted themselves.

  “Remember these? Bull’s-eyes. Tootsie Rolls. Jelly beans!”

  Franny brought me candy and sweets. “Penny candy!” Pounds of chocolate, Almond Roca, bonbons wrapped in tissue and foil like baubles, peanut butter treats, tubs of caramel-coated popcorn. “Moose Munch.”

  “Do you like it?”

  Franny had a kindergarten teacher’s habit—a technique, perhaps—of treating everyone like an infant. She helped me eat, unwrapping Tootsie Rolls for me as she talked. And though Rose seldom brought a gift, she helped herself to the Tootsie Rolls and talked too.

  “Aren’t my twins getting big?”

  They were big, but they were silent, and always mentioned in the third person, as though they weren’t there.

  Franny and Rose traveled like peasant wives, always with their younger children, always carrying food, never with their husbands. The men kept themselves apart, exercising their silent power as authority figures. Franny’s Marvin and Rose’s Walter were enigmatic men who seemed to insist that you had to guess what was in their minds. I knew it was baseball and computers and beer, though they suggested by their absence and silence that it was bigger things. I understood the burdened wives, the aloof husbands: it was the family pattern of folk societies in rural Uganda, which I had known well, the sort of thing I had seen on the Congo border, in distant Bundibugyo.

  Even when they were in their teens, Rose’s twins accompanied her to Grammy’s, and to my house on their way home. They sat saying nothing unless they were needled, their heads sunk into their tiny shoulders, knees together, mouths shut, eyes glazed.

  “They have a really great relationship with Ma,” Rose said. “Benno, show Uncle Jay your report card.”

  “It’th in the car.” Lisping made Benno seem much younger than fourteen. Or perhaps I was measuring him against Madison Gearhart, who would have loomed over him as she shouted him down. Madison would also have loomed over his twin sister, Bingo, also small for her age—boyish, skinny, shy, but good to Grammy. Bing and Ben.

  “Ma couldn’t believe it. All A’s. Bing, play something for Uncle Jay on your harmonica.”

  Bingo yawned in terror and seemed to gather herself into compactness as she shortened and shrank into the chair.

  “Aren’t they adorable?” Franny said.

  I smiled, thinking: I have two children of my own—when are you going to inquire about them? Out of pride, I said nothing. Had I mentioned my kids, Franny and Rose would have patronized me.

  Rose said, “But Ma started to talk about her own report card—back in 1921! ‘I had wonderful handwriting. And I could play the piano.’ Ma’s so competitive.”

  “She doesn’t miss Dad at all,” Franny said. “It’s amazing. Maybe it’s because we’ve been so supportive. She’s like a little girl.”

  Laughing gently at Mother, as they were doing today, was another feature of these visits, for they had always just come from a large Sunday lunch at her house and needed to ventilate their feelings.

  Fran
ny tended to nod when she told me something she wanted me to agree with, or wagged her head at something sad. She was nodding now.

  “Jonty and Loris have been trying to have a baby,” she said. Her scatty mind led her to non sequiturs. Her neediness meant that the non sequitur was always something related to her. I tried not to smile at “trying to have a baby.” “They’ve been trying for about three months.”

  And then I really did smile at the notion of two people naked in a bed, kicking and grunting in the procreative position, “trying.” But I said, “I think that’s wonderful,” with too much seriousness, mawkish solemnity, because I wanted to cover my smile.

  Franny stared at me, as though comparing the brightness of my smile with the force of my protest, assessing the degree of contradiction. Was I mocking her? She seemed to think so. We were all highly sensitive to belittlement. Our family history was a series of slights and gibes. I was sure that Franny knew I was smiling at “trying to have a baby,” but she was not subtle-minded enough to see that it was the phrase that I found funny, not the notion.

  Instead of saying more, she nodded and took a piece of wrapped candy and plucked at the waxed paper, her impatient fingers clawing at the tight folds and twists, pinching it off and squeezing it into a ball as she masticated the candy at the side of her jaw. She looked at me with a big, bug-eyed face. I could see from the way she chewed that she had something on her mind.

  “What a beautiful wedding they had,” Rose said. “Benno was the ring bearer, weren’t you, Ben?”

  They were taking a dangerous tack, I felt. I had refused to attend the wedding, had made a lame excuse, and Franny had denounced me to the rest of the family.

  “But it was wicked expensive,” she said, smacking her lips on the chocolate and ungumming her tongue. “The tux alone cost a fortune. Then there was the rehearsal dinner, the reception, the limo, the photographer, the floral decorations, the centerpieces. The gratuities. Father Furty looks at me, like, ‘And where’s my tip?’ We gave him a hundred bucks. I thought priests took a vow of poverty.”

  It was hard to tell whether Franny was boasting or complaining. It sounded like both, the groaning boast, the smug complaint. “This car’s such a gas guzzler,” Gilbert said of his stylish SUV, and “You wouldn’t believe what it costs to heat this house,” Fred said of his mansion in Osterville, and of course, “I’ve wasted my life”—as a highly paid lawyer. You sympathized until it dawned on you that they wanted to appear superior for having something you didn’t.

  Yet Franny’s nodding in front of me about the wedding made me remember how I had avoided it, how I had gone to a bar with Floyd and spent the entire time mocking Jonty, recalling his bratty behavior, the farce of a big wedding and a high mass. According to Mother, Franny had said, “I’ll never forgive them.” And Mother had smiled and added, “I think Franny was a little miffed.”

  Certainly Franny had not forgiven me, for we were a family that never forgave anything. And we usually exaggerated a lapse, so the smallest hurt became unpardonable.

  Yet here she was, nodding, smiling, reminiscing about Jonty—the proud mother recalling her son’s glorious wedding without any undertone of resentment for her uncooperative brothers.

  “He looked like a movie star in his tux. Ma said, ‘He looks like my brother Louie.’”

  Franny had a way of whispering, as if to emphasize that she had singled me out for this secret.

  “Jonty’s a man. He’s a husband. Someday he’ll be a father. He’ll have a family. Ma couldn’t believe it. Ma teared up.”

  I had rarely seen Mother cry except when she was defied or did not get her way. An ineluctable or effulgent vision of Jonty’s potential fatherhood was unlikely to bring tears to Mother’s eyes, but would only make her envious and angry. She cried as a child would cry, out of frustration or pure spite.

  In my own unforgiving way, I remembered Mother’s satire, and how she had let slip with a calculated smile that she had helped pay for the wedding, to help Franny, who had never acknowledged the fact.

  “What we found out—the hard way,” Franny said, sounding clownish in her pedantry, “you have to plan ahead.”

  All this talk of Jonty’s wedding annoyed me, but when I remembered that they had brought me chocolate and fruit and a tin of cookies, I was ashamed of myself and fell silent.

  “Get your harmonica, Bing,” Rose said.

  As Bingo dug her toe into the carpet and mewed like a cat, Franny said, “She played for Ma. ‘The hills are alive with the sound of music.’”

  “Ma identified with Maria von Trapp,” I said, remembering how Mother had once wanted to go to the Trapp family chalet in Vermont and introduce herself to this other matriarch, to see if the Austrian measured up.

  “You should see her on the harmonica—it’s amazing,” Franny said. She had not heard me. She seldom listened, another family trait of steamrolling with a story. “And Benno juggled, didn’t you, Ben? Ma was amazed.”

  I easily pictured the kids performing, Franny and Rose calling out, “Ga-head, juggle for Grammy.” “Play Grammy a tune! Ga-head! Ga-head!”

  And I knew that if another of us got Mother at the right moment, she would cackle like a witch and say how horrible it had been. But what could I say? I couldn’t stop them. And the poor little thing wanted to juggle for me.

  “We’ve always been a musical family,” I said.

  “Except for Hubby’s cello!” Franny laughed. “‘My Grandfather’s Clock.’ That was harsh.”

  “Hubby is such a dickhead,” Rose said. I wanted to tell her that she was sitting on the sofa that Hubby had helped me move.

  “Fred was pretty good on the trombone,” Franny said.

  “He blew,” Rose said.

  I said, “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do on a trombone?”

  But, ranting, Rose didn’t hear. “And Floyd. Ma used to say how embarrassed she was when he tried to play the trumpet. He tried, and went red in the face, and nothing came out.”

  “You always had a nice voice, Jay. You should have kept up with your singing. You could have gone somewhere.”

  They left soon after. A typical visit: boasting, complaining, mocking, flattering, backbiting, leaving a bag of candy and some bruised fruit. It was a family suspicion that all gift giving was a form of cynical disposal, that presents were always things that the giver did not want.

  They came again the following week—more candy. They moaned about Mother’s neediness.

  “She didn’t want us to leave. I think she misses Dad.” Franny nodded. “We all need a mate.”

  “She looks frail,” Rose said.

  When I next visited Mother she looked robust, fierce, alert as a fox.

  “I keep busy. I have my knitting. I keep up with the news. That poor little kid that got stuck in that well in—was it Texas?” Mother said. “I go for walks. I’m reading a biography of Madame Curie. She was Polish. She discovered radium. It glows in the dark. She died from it. Cancer. Kind of ironic. If she hadn’t discovered it, she’d have lived a good long time. I watch my diet. You look well. Your friend must be taking good care of you.”

  14

  Whispers

  Floyd’s visits were sudden and swooping, as though he’d plummeted from the sky, talking fast as he landed, sweeping me up in his talk. But they were the abrupt appearances of a friend—no guile, no stratagems, and he came quickly to the point; he was usually in a flap, needing something, the family impatience blunting his request. Did I have a 26-millimeter socket wrench with a ratchet handle? Would I loan him a copy of Religio Medici? What was Saul Bellow’s phone number? Was Loris pregnant? Had I noticed the obvious anomaly that Willie Nelson, in order to look macho, wore his hair braided into pigtails?

  Floyd did not flatter me—far from it, he insulted me, but I took that as a form of comradeship and was bucked up. He teased me to my face, but in the family this sort of teasing was friendly, even flattering, sometimes stinging, yet it was strange
ly companionable in its cruel honesty and defiant frankness. You’re getting fat. That shirt is hideous. Your car’s a toilet. Flattery and gift giving were hard to read and harder to deconstruct, but teasing was a form of discourse based on equality. Teasing an inferior was simply cruel and in our family amounted to recreational sadism. But teasing an equal was a form of sparring; it took nerve, and in the end—if it was calibrated so as not to destroy the friendship altogether—made the friendship stronger. In our family, teasing someone to their face was unambiguously friendly.

  “I hate people who do this!” Floyd said, seeing an engraved invitation propped on my mantelpiece. He snatched it down and pretended to spit on it. “What is it, some phony English habit, showing off your social life?” He clawed his thinning hair, read the card, “‘A recital will be presented’—pompous!,” and handed it to me. “Don’t put it up there!”

  It was the invitation to Madison’s dance recital. Missy had sent her daughter to dance classes—tap dancing, but the rebellious child had opted for break dancing, which turned out to be part of a hip-hop curriculum that was offered.

  Floyd said, “You’re not actually going to this fucking rigadoon.”

  “A friend of mine’s daughter is performing.”

  “The only possible friend you’d try to please that way is a woman you’re trying to nail,” Floyd said, growing excited as he sketched out, more or less correctly, my situation. “And that means a single mother, living with her troubled kid in a rental somewhere on the Cape, who sees you—of all preposterous people, you—as her next husband and father figure.”

  I slipped the invitation between the pages of a book, thinking that if Floyd couldn’t see it, he was less likely to be further inflamed in his taunting.

  “Wrong,” I said. “All wrong. But even if you were close to being right, what’s the matter with my being a father figure? I have two children of my own.”