by Paul Theroux
That night over dinner—they had bought lobsters and corn—Julian said, “We have to leave first thing tomorrow.”
“I’ll be sorry to see you go.” I wondered if they heard the flat note of insincerity behind this.
Strangers had never been welcome in the family. As honest, mature, well-adjusted young men, they were strangers here. The family was all around me: in my house, in this room, at the table, in my head.
Next morning they were up early, busy in the kitchen, impatient to go, while I lay awake upstairs, waiting for the preparation noises to subside. And my fatigue was another side effect of melancholy.
They were eating breakfast, all dressed, their bags at the doorway, when I came down, yawning, still in my bathrobe, barefoot, clawing at my tangled hair.
Harry said, “We were just talking about money. I hadn’t realized the exchange rate was so favorable. We changed more pounds than we needed.”
“We’ve got all this extra wonga,” Julian said.
His gentle eyes were filled with concern. Harry looked at him, perhaps wondering what would come next. Julian held a thickness of dollars, folded over like a sandwich.
I said, “Now you have to come back and help me spend it.”
Too polite to press the matter, they made their excuses and left me feeling like a lost boy.
PART TWO
20
Holidays
After that, every time I gathered fallen leaves to burn, held the rake handle at a scraping angle, keeping my head down, feeling a numbing lumbar tug as I dragged the rake, never trapping as many leaves as I wished to, I remembered the visit of my two innocent adult sons.
The sick feeling and my prickling eyes made me snatch harder with denying swipes of the rake. I saw the abashed faces of my children: the horror they pretended was faint surprise, the disbelief they masked as amusement, the shock they contrived to turn into a look of mild concern. They had pitied me. They thought I hadn’t noticed—and I hadn’t, at first. My shame sank in slowly. I felt it soaking me. It was still sinking in weeks later, at Thanksgiving, another holiday I was spending alone.
What was it about dead crushed leaves and yard work that made me remember? The menial routine humbled me, and in this mood I was reflective, resentful, solitary; no one to help me. I was no good at this work. This drudgery—all drudgery—made me feel small.
Of course I seemed childish! I was home again, a failure among my envious siblings. I got no pleasure settling scores, but I needed the truth of who I really was, who I had been. Who I Was had been a title I had planned to use for my autobiography. The rest of my life, the middle years of being a husband, a father, and a hardworking writer, seemed no more than a glimmering interlude between the confusion of my earliest years and the castaway I was now. Next to this the fictions I had imagined were meaningless and concocted, simply yarn-spinnings, and yet the family drama was so extravagant and manipulated there was something fictive in it, which drew me in deeper.
Some weeks after the raking, I was shoveling snow, or pushing at it with a snow scoop. The snow-shoveling posture induced in me the same thoughts, the same justifications, dragged the same mood over me. Thanksgiving was a week away, and looming behind it, Christmas.
My children, those two boys, were the only adults I saw for ages. They were scandalized by what they saw of me. I wanted them to understand, yet I could not explain adequately what I felt and why I was still living here, near Mother and all my childish, contending siblings. Even though it had been an awkward few days, I had loved being with my boys.
They were out of sympathy with me, or else I would have kept them informed of what my life was like. Out of habit I sometimes tried.
“She talked constantly about how her father was a saint.”
“Don’t tell me.”
“She wants me to bring her presents.”
“Please, Dad. I don’t care.”
“She goes on talking about her will.”
“What about it?”
“She asks how her money should be divided.”
“A lot of old people do that.”
“Not like she’s doing.”
Mother mentioned the will all the time. Before Father’s death the subject had never come up. In the years since then it was a frequent topic of conversation. The first time she mentioned it to me I had been surprised.
“You should do whatever you want to with your money,” I said, surprised that she had enough money to make this worth discussing.
“But I want your advice, Jay,” she said. “What do you think is the best way to divide it?”
“Since you put it like that, there’s only one way—seven equal shares.”
This seemed to startle her, as if the obvious answer had not occurred to her, as if dividing her money equally was some great novelty.
“I’ll have to think about that.” She adjusted her glasses and stared at me, seeming to perform some complex mathematical calculation in her mind.
I smiled and said, “Those who don’t need their share can put it back in the pot.”
“But there’s property,” she said. “That makes it complicated.”
“Property could be sold, and the money divided seven ways.”
“And why do you say seven ways?”
For a moment, a flash of her eyes in the big lenses, she seemed insane.
“Because there are seven of us.”
“What about Angela?”
“Where would we put her share?” And I whispered, “Ma, she’s dead.”
“Something nice for her grave,” Mother said of her dead child, speaking like a superstitious aboriginal in a jungle clearing. “I’m sure she’d like something nice for herself.”
“Divide the money eight ways, then,” I said. “But equally.”
“I’ll have to think about that.”
Again, this seemed to her a bizarre notion.
I did not tell my children about this conversation, or the others that followed it, or the events that occurred, always on low frequencies, as gossip. This was a narrative that kept building, something new every day, always something surprising, which made me think, Only in this family. And money was the theme.
We talked about generosity, even harped on it. But no one was generous. That talk was a trick, to get us to give. In the absence of generosity we had to learn how to take, to be artful thieves, to be plausible, to appear to be respectable in our snatching, yet to know how to scavenge and survive.
Money was the measure of generosity. But Mother never gave us any, for to do that would reveal to us that she had some, and her mantra was that she had none. Money did not exist in our family as a fact, only as an abstraction, something whispered about, so hard won it was almost unattainable. I might see a few dollars in a wallet or some coins in a purse, but never more than that. The wad of money, the thick roll of bills, the chunk of change, were fantastic absurdities. And because it was unseen, magic was attached to money, but black magic, a kind of curse. We did not think we deserved to have money, and if by chance we got some, we could not spend it, because spending was wasteful. Money in your pocket tripped you up. You were better off without it.
Money was a thing of darkness, always put away. Money was something that was saved—stacked up, hoarded, stashed for a rainy day, but always small amounts scraped into a pile, like Father’s winding knotted lengths of string into a ball. But why? We didn’t ask.
Money was whispered about because it was tainted. Other people had it—we did not; we would never have it. We had no idea where money came from. We did not know anyone who had it. The ways in which other people got money were a mystery to us. No one had money in Mother Land.
Money did not grow on trees. Money was the root of all evil. Money was filthy lucre. A fool and his money were soon parted. Most people had more money than brains. They spent money like a drunken sailor. They knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.
We were so in awe of the rich that we were
forbidden to use the word. Instead of “They’re rich” we had to say, “They’re comfortably off.” Rich families were like members of another species, but a dangerous one that needed to be propitiated with our being submissive. We saw them as a conquering tribe; the world belonged to them. They were comfortable, the rest of you were getting by, we were pinched and hard up. We were moneyless, and so powerless.
At first, when Mother claimed to have no money, we took her at her word and pitied her a little. We got part-time jobs and gave her half our weekly pay. “This will go toward the electric bill,” Mother would say. “This will help pay for your food.” That was her way of saying it would never be enough. We went on paying her off in a cycle of endless peonage and debt slavery.
Later, from vague hints and chance remarks, we suspected that Mother had some money, somewhere. Perhaps her bleak insistence that she was poor was the giveaway. “I’m wearing a dead woman’s dress,” she sometimes said, to emphasize her poverty—a morbid hand-me-down, with the coffin stink or the sickroom pong still on it. That shocked us. If one of us asked for something and she paid for it, she made such a fuss and we felt so bad we never asked again. She had no checkbook; she never used credit. She paid in cash, though she always concealed these transactions from us to maintain the fiction that she had no money. Paying for something, handing over money, was probably the most solemn and covert of her secret ceremonies.
Dad had nothing to do with money. He gave all his pay to Mother at the end of the week. It wasn’t much, as Mother often said, to Dad’s shame, her bony thumb upon him. He never mentioned money.
She was hard on the grandchildren for wasting money—particularly Jonty, Franny’s eldest, with his history of tantrums. Not just the windshield he punted out of the Dart, but his various school fees. Franny’s other son took ballet lessons. “Max is a playing card,” Franny said, “in Alice in Wonderland.” Mother considered these lessons a foolish expense, and she, too, found humor in “Max is a playing card.” Mother said, “I wonder which card?”
Since gossip was oxygen for Mother, she asked me in the canniest way what I had heard, pretending not to know anything so as to compare my version of a story with the one she had already been told, always hungry for the smallest detail of frailty or frittering away money. Her eyes glittered with pleasure at a choice tidbit, and hearing something truly disgraceful, she could not prevent herself from laughing out loud, showing her yellow teeth to their wolfish roots.
My reward for visiting her was that she confided these disgraces. And sometimes they were betrayals that took my breath away. She jeered at her children for their pretensions, and at their spouses for incompetence or greed. Her harshest remarks were aimed at members of her family, Angela excepted. Spending money was the worst stupidity and roused her greatest scorn.
Autumn had tightened around me, the early darkness enclosed me. I tried to work but felt too small, too defeated, to rise above my sadness and write well, or at all. As in that earlier time, of my first childhood, my days were full of indecision and interruption and false starts.
Unemployed, lacking the will to work, I searched for solace in my past and signed up to go to my fortieth high school reunion. I had last been to the twentieth, which had reassured me by reminding me that I had friends who’d been closer to me than family: John Brodie and other boys I’d known since grade school; old girlfriends; my high school buddy George Davis, my first black friend.
The reunion was held in a hotel ballroom in Falmouth, and to my delight George was in the portico, finishing a cigarette as I approached.
“Fortifying myself,” he said in a hoarse whisper, holding his breath, pinching the cigarette in his fingers. And then I saw it was a joint, what he would have called a roach in high school. After he swallowed the smoke he hugged me and said, “Great to see you.”
“I almost didn’t come.”
“I guess I know why,” he said, and laughed—a stoner’s hiccupping laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“You got a target on your back, man.” He nodded, sucked on the joint again, then tossed it. “From that thing you wrote.”
“What thing?”
“About the last reunion.”
“That was twenty years ago.”
He laughed again and took my arm. We entered the lobby and picked up our name stickers. I lingered by the table, wondering if I recognized the two gray-haired women sitting behind it.
“I’m looking for John Brodie.”
“He died,” one of the women said, “years ago.”
I put my hand out. “Jay Justus.”
The woman folded her arms and leaned away. “I know who you are.”
The ballroom was noisy, jammed with elderly men and women shouting at each other, sipping at plastic cups of wine. My first thought was that I’d come to the wrong place, until I realized that I looked just like them. Only George was still dapper and, with his shaven head gleaming like a chestnut, looked younger than anyone else.
“There’s that guy Tony that used to be with us in Trebino’s chemistry class,” he said, and indicated a stout, red-faced man in a three-piece suit who was bantering with another bulky man, tapping the man’s lapel with a thick finger.
“Tony,” I said, and stepped toward him.
He raised his arms in mock horror. “Don’t know ya!”
Seeing this, the men near him laughed and, with Tony, turned their backs on me. Someone muttered approvingly, in a joke echo, “Don’t know ya!”
I wandered away, taking refuge by a far wall, and remained there, feeling futile, looking at the crowd. They’d become louder, more confident, happier, and many were hugging. George slipped next to me and stood, sighing. He said nothing for a while; he was nodding at the room.
“They’re all drinking,” he said. “In a little while, they’ll be toasted.” He squeezed my arm. “You don’t want to be here then, man.”
I went home, heavy with sadness, slouched in my seat, not trusting myself to drive fast.
Fred called. “I just spoke to Ma. She said she’s feeling alone. Will you go visit her and cheer her up?”
“Why don’t you?”
“I’m in China. I’m seeing clients.”
I called Franny. I had resented her being so close to Floyd, so I came straight to the point.
“Fred said Ma’s lonely. You have to visit her.”
“Marvin has acid reflux. He’s day to day. It could be an ulcer. I can’t leave him like this.”
“I’ll explain that to Ma.”
“Someone will have to go. Don’t you know what day this is?”
I had no idea. Melancholy had a way of blurring time.
“It’s January fourth.”
“What are you saying?”
“Angela’s birthday in four days. This is a hard month for her.”
So it was no longer one day of grief but rather a monthlong period of mourning, a funereal season.
“I’ll go,” I said.
On my way to Mother’s I stopped off to see Hubby. He was shoveling out his basement—for headroom, he said. I told him where I was going and why.
“Ma’s fine. I saw her yesterday.”
“Fred called me today.”
Talking over me, he said, “She was telling me stories about her mother. She worked in a corset factory in Boston. When she got married, guess what they gave her as a wedding present?”
“A corset,” I said. “I’ve heard this story.”
I continued on my way to Mother’s. She was seated on the big leather throne. She said she was glad to see me. Mother being Mother, her forthrightness itself seemed a kind of evasion. Her eyes enlarged in her glasses followed me around her parlor.
“Fred said you were lonely.”
“I’m no such thing”—more certainty that made her seem unsure.
“So he said.”
“I don’t know where he got that idea.”
“He said you told him.”
“Fr
ed is in China.” This was indirection and had no bearing on the question, but was a characteristic response from Mother when she didn’t want to give a straight answer.
“I’m fine,” she said. Her eyes were huge and imperious. She smiled, or rather showed her teeth, so it was not a smile but more like an animal baring its fangs before something edible. “You know how Fred exaggerates.”
I suspected she was denying her loneliness because she didn’t want to confide in me, didn’t really want me to visit. She was disappointed that one of her favored children wasn’t there, Franny or Fred or Gilbert.
“Hubby said he was here yesterday.”
“All of him,” Mother said, widening her eyes. “The size of him. Naturally he was hungry. He did nothing but talk about how he’s fixing up his basement. I think he was hinting that he wanted some financial help. But what can I do? I don’t have much—hardly anything. Is there something wrong?”
I had been holding my jaw. I’d chipped a filling, and though I hadn’t intended to tell her, I explained what had happened.
Mother winced, then slowly shook her head and said, “I woke up one morning with a toothache. I was nine. It was like a knife going through my jaw. My mother said, ‘If you’re strong enough to cry, it can’t hurt that bad. It’s when you can’t cry that the pain is really bad.’ She gave me a clove to bite and made me go to school. A few days later the dentist drilled it, without anesthesia. We didn’t have Novocain in those days. My jaw was swollen for a week.”
Mother touched her jaw in the place where the dentist had done his work eighty years before. As she grimaced at the memory, my tooth ached more than ever.
“Angela was spared sore teeth,” Mother said. “She was spared a lot of heartaches.”
True, a newborn who’d died almost at birth had managed to elude a great deal of life’s pain.
“You know what next Monday is?” Mother asked.