by Paul Theroux
I had known a modest sort of fame, and now it was gone except for an ambiguous afterglow, as when I was cashing a check and my name was recognized by a bewildered stranger who was not quite sure why he knew it.
“Didn’t you write something once?”
It was a clerk in a hardware store in Osterville, putting his blunt fingertip on my printed name on the check.
I was entering that gray and uneventful desert-like region of late middle age. I thought of stretches of sand dunes, like the ones in Truro—low and infertile, no clear path, not much vegetation, little comfort, only emptiness beyond them. All this is hidden from the young, the barren region where all striving seems futile and any enthusiasm or serious effort appears foolish. Nothing happens except unfortunate accidents, and ill luck is a condition of this stage of life. But I was no cynic; I was almost serene. Strangers did not see me, or if they did, their gaze did not linger.
But when I thought of Mother, or visited her and was in the presence of her fury or cunning or the energy of her evasion, I knew I was wrong about myself. I looked at her and thought: I’m not old at all. I am her much younger child, her third son, still a swimmer and a cyclist, a capable drinker, a sometime cook, and if Mother’s age is any indication of longevity, I have another thirty-something years left. Thirty more years of this!
The notion of all that time, like a jail sentence, cast a spell on me and made me brood. What to do with those years? It made me deeply melancholy to think that I was headed for a life like Mother’s: alone in her home with her telephone, stirring up her children, and receiving visitors, dropping hints to excite their envy or whispering in their ears to remind them of their duties.
Mother had lost weight, an amount that made an older person seem satisfied and settled, somewhat immobilized, and good-humored. Mother was now pared down to her essence: skeletal, pale, with the sort of loose yellowish skin you find on the carcasses of warm plucked poultry. She wore a shawl she had knitted herself, or a sweater, even in summer, and always her nurse’s shoes that Hubby got her wholesale from the hospital supplier.
“Hear what Floyd said about Ma?” Hubby asked one day, calling me out of the blue.
“I never talk to him.” I hated hearing his name. “How would I know?”
“The usual way.”
It was true: the grapevine was alive with whispers, even from people we hadn’t seen in years.
“He says she looks like Bertrand Russell.”
In spite of myself, I laughed.
“You think that’s funny?” Hubby was indignant.
“No,” I said, though it was perfect: the skull on the scrawny neck, the white tufts of hair, the androgyny. Bertrand Russell looked like a lot of grandmothers.
“Floyd’s a clown. What are you doing?”
“A little work.”
I was doing nothing. I did not have the heart to begin another book. I wrote pieces instead, magazine hackwork that got me out of the house and paid my rent—a thousand words on Cape Cod cycle paths, fifteen hundred on Martha’s Vineyard in the off-season, the text for a photo essay on lighthouses, a reminiscence of a traveler I had known, vignettes on scrimshaw, on lobstering, on sailing, on bass fishing, the Cape Cod clichés repeated for a new readership, filling space in magazines aiming to make money for pages of advertising.
Measured against Mother, I was a young man. In her presence I felt like a boy. I stopped brooding about being old. I had changed my mind and decided to live. I visited her to renew my sense of my youthfulness.
Perhaps the reminder of my relative youth helped keep me on the Cape, living ten minutes from Mother. When I tried to work it out, I became self-conscious and confused and thought: Never mind. Doesn’t matter. It’s only for the time being.
And besides, in the weirdly tribal way I have already described, this was my world—my family, my culture. I spoke the special language of this tiny band of people whose lives were part of my own, and though I protested, their habits and beliefs were mine, even the diet, even the secrets.
In time—this was the unspoken taboo—Mother would die, and then I would be old. Her death would make me old.
Mother had stopped talking about her passing, had stopped talking about her will. She had solicited everyone’s opinion about it, how her estate should be apportioned. There wasn’t much, I was sure, but Mother was still vigorously alive, still needing our attention, and so each of us served some purpose for her. My life of ambition, my career as a serious writer, was over. My life of striving was over. I was no longer an aspirant. Knowing this calmed me and kept me in one place.
Alive, alert, Mother kept me young. No matter how feeble or forgetful or ill she was, her very existence made me a boy. We were Mother and son, Madonna and child, the contrast in us the visible proof of my youth. When this sank in I took a greater interest in seeing her. Like a peasant on a hillside in a foreign land, regarding his queen-empress in her distant castle, I had learned to live with her tyranny and see some advantages in it. And like that peasant, I was beneath her notice most of the time. It had ceased to matter whether she was on my side or not, sowing confusion, stirring up trouble, telling lies about me, whispering, mocking. All I cared about was her endurance, the everlastingness of her, her value as a symbol, a totem, the head of our family. I hoped she would live forever. I wanted her to be eternal. I did not want to contemplate her death, for as long as she lived I would never die. More than that, I would remain a boy.
That bracing thought (it seemed logical despite being untrue) was another reason to live ten minutes from Mother.
Mother seemed her usual sly and evasive self, perhaps more pronounced now because she was skinnier, her profile in sharper relief, when I brought her a present. She often said, tapping a box of chocolates with her bony hands, “Franny likes these. She and Rose are coming down tomorrow.” And, with a dig at them, “I don’t know why they bother. I can manage perfectly well on my own.” An expression of disgusted pity flickered on her face, making her seem like a coquette with a sour stomach. “But if it makes them feel better”—and she sighed.
That was Mother all over, belittling someone for doing the very thing she wanted them to do.
I imagined, though, that Franny and Rose were visiting Mother for the same reason I was—venerating the old woman as a pagan idol, glorying in her life, propitiating her vanity, flattering themselves that they were young, rejuvenated by being in the same room with an eighty-eight-year-old mother.
I liked hearing Mother boast, “I went for a walk today,” or “I’ve been weeding the garden,” or “I’ve been to the beach.”
When I called and the phone rang a few times more than I expected, her house seeming emptier, growing hollower with each ring, I feared she might be lying face-down, dying, clawing the carpet. My heart gave a little jump when the ringing was cut off and she said hello in her usual way, a two-tone “Hull-oh?”
She always spoke in an uncertain tone, as though intruded upon in a dark room. Her note of dumb wonder and inquiry was the result of her not knowing who was at the other end, and she did not have a true voice until she knew who it was. She had a different voice for each of us, a different quality of greeting, all of them true, all of them false.
“It’s me.”
“Gilbert?” she said brightly, going giddy.
“No, it’s me.” Now, of course, I was teasing.
“Hubby?” she said in a discouraged way.
“He’s at the hospital.”
“Freddy?” she said with hope in her voice.
“JP,” I said, putting her out of her misery.
“Oh?” Her incurious sigh was one of disappointment, but I didn’t mind. I was glad she was alive.
As soon as I established that fact, I wanted to put the phone down. But I stayed on the line and listened to her aches, her recent purchases (“peaches are sixty-nine cents a pound”), birthday updates (“Bingo has a birthday this month”), the weather report (though I lived nearby and the same
rain fell on me), and reminiscences—how a teacher had praised her handwriting in 1927, and what her father had always said. She quoted this man constantly, his struggles, his dreams, his sensitivity, how much he had loved her. She did not seem to realize that as a child I had known this sententious old patriarch who demanded to examine my school report card. Often Mother quoted Angela, with whom she regularly communed, channeling the dead child’s wisdom. “I can feel her looking down on me from above,” as though she was in an earthly pew, and her father and Angela stood in a golden gallery, clutching the ornate rail, puffy Tiepolo clouds floating by, while they nodded in approval.
Often in a phone call she made belittling compliments, backhanders of a kind that Mother had turned into a fine art. “I see Hubby has a nice new car. I don’t know where he gets the money,” “Gilbert just got a promotion. That means he’ll be traveling more, poor kid. I worry about his health,” and “Franny and Rose swept out the garage. I guess they think their old mother is too weak or too lazy to do it,” and “I haven’t heard from you lately. You must be so busy with your fiancée.”
I didn’t take the bait. I said, “I’m never too busy to call you. We spoke yesterday.”
“I don’t think so.” She did not say it as if she was unsure but as if I was telling a lie.
“You mentioned that you walked down to the beach.”
“That wasn’t yesterday.”
She had me on the witness stand, poking holes in my testimony while I stammered to be believed.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“It matters if it’s not true,” she said, refusing to concede.
“I guess I didn’t call you yesterday,” I said, knowing that I could not win.
“Ah,” she said, at last triumphant, and then, in her flat, news-giving voice, “Floyd was over here today.”
The name was like a lash. Strangers hearing my name often brightened as they mentioned his attack on me and my book, and some could quote the more savagely memorable parts of it to me. Sometimes sentences that Floyd had written purely to annoy me turned up in judgments on me in essays about my work: “obsessed with his bowels,” “fact fetishist,” “phony English accent,” “solipsistic in his monstrous pomposity,” “family finds him ridiculous.”
“Hello?” Mother said, as though from the bottom of a silent well.
“I’m still here.”
“I thought we were cut off. I was talking about Floyd.”
“Ma, he won’t speak to me.”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“I haven’t heard from Floyd for two years. He seems to hate me.”
“No one hates you. Don’t commit the sin of pride. Do you really think you’re important enough for anyone to hate?”
No sooner had she said this than various faces swam before me with hatred in their eyes, Melissa Gearhart among them, and more haters massing behind them like a bank of storm clouds.
“Floyd wrote that horrible review. You saw it.”
Mother became haughty with flamboyant piety, protesting her innocence. “I haven’t seen a solitary thing.”
“Never mind.”
That mention of Floyd, as in “Floyd was over here today,” was intended to make me squirm, to feel small, to remind me that I was a victim with a ruthless enemy. Her malice was clearer to me and came over the phone more distinctly than if I had been in her presence, since she affected a fluttering saintliness, a sort of resolute suffering, an intense sanctimony, especially when she was being malicious.
She was gossiping. They all were. Hubby often stopped by my house, always with a grievance, sometimes with a hospital story. Defeat had turned me into a good listener. Besides, Hubby lived in the real world of life and death, of order, of regular hours, clocking in, clocking out, collecting his check every week. He had colleagues, he had bosses, he had employees and assistants. He had patients. Responsibility was shared; so were jokes. He had paid vacations and holidays off. I knew nothing about any of this in my improvisational life of disorder, and I often envied him, not for his work but for the sociability of his day, the friendships, his being in the world of illness, which was also the world of healing.
Hubby had been a medic in Vietnam, and after his discharge he made a smooth entry into nursing. Wide-bodied, with powerful shoulders, a thick neck, and big pink hands, he seemed to enjoy growling, “I’m a nurse,” for the way the announcement made people’s faces twitch with disbelief.
“We had a woman in the ER today,” Hubby said to me one night around this time—starting a story was a form of hello in our family. “Early this morning. I was having my coffee. She’d OD’d on Vicodin. I ran her name through the records and got the headline that this was the third time she’d tried to kill herself. We hooked her up, pumped her out, and all this time she’s barfing and complaining. I says to her, ‘Hey, lady. Instead of wasting our time, why don’t you do it right? I’d be happy to tell you how to off yourself so that you stay offed.’”
“How did she take that?”
“She hauled off and slapped me in the face. ‘Fuck you!’” Hubby laughed at the memory of it. “I was in shock. I wanted to hit her back. The other nurse yells, ‘Clean up your act, lady.’ Then she lashed out at him. More f-bombs, and puke all over her lips.”
I envied Hubby his drama. That’s what I was missing—real life. I guessed that Hubby seldom felt, as I did, superfluous.
“Had a guy in last week. ‘I’ve got a wicked pain in my stomach.’ He said it in a girlish way. X-ray showed a foreign object. We removed a six-inch vibrator that had somehow disappeared up his ass. I mean, he could have said something to us about it beforehand, maybe? All he said was ‘That thing does not belong to me. I have no idea where it came from.’”
This was his usual warm-up. After a few more stories like this, I was sure Hubby would return to our obsessive subject, the other members of the family. Lately, his grievances had been sharper than mine.
He squeezed his face between his thick hands, distorting it, in what seemed a gesture of friendliness, but also indicating that he was changing the subject.
“Ma’s acting weird these days.”
“There’s a headline.”
“No, really. ‘Do this, do that.’ Very demanding.”
I almost said, Franny and Rose said the same thing, because just a week before, on a Sunday, they had dropped in to complain about Mother. They moaned and flapped for a full hour about her tyranny.
Hubby narrowed his eyes at me: What did I know? But I just shrugged. It was always a mistake in this family to offer information. If someone did, the listener—Hubby was deft at this—pretended not to hear or interrupted at times, talking over it in his outraged voice. But every detail of the indiscretion was noted and remembered, to be repeated later, with embellishments.
I offered him nothing in return, so he yawned, complained about the chores Mother gave him, and said he had to go.
Franny and Rose had in the past often sighed over Mother’s meddling and neediness (“like a little girl”), her infantile glee at receiving presents. But never before, as they did these days, had they sounded bitter or oppressed.
Franny had said, “I can’t take much more of this,” which was extreme for her, since she was vain about her ability to endure suffering.
Rose blamed Fred. “He said he was coming to visit Ma. He never keeps his word. He sent her a fruit basket out of guilt.”
“Ma’s not comfortable with Hubby,” Franny said.
They knew better than to mention Floyd to me. Hubby had said that he was doing all the maintenance on Mother’s house—cleaned the gutters, replaced fallen shingles, resprung the screen doors, put new clamps on the hoses. Mother, he’d said, was unreasonable, never satisfied, as cheap as they come.
I visited Mother that week. She said she could not remember whether Hubby had visited.
“Didn’t he do some chores around the house?”
“A few little things,” Moth
er said dismissively. “I could have done them myself. I should have—it would have been quicker.”
“How are you feeling?”
“Oh, fine,” she said, sounding wounded and unconvincing.
“Isn’t there anything I can do to help?”
“You’re busy,” Mother said, putting me in the wrong, wincing in self-pity. Then, goggling at me through her big lenses, she added with feeling, “My bags are packed.”
The expression was new with her. Where had she learned it? Only from someone her age, perhaps someone in the waiting room at the doctor’s office, or one of the aged whittlers at her bird-carving class. I would not have known what it meant if Franny had not warned me. It was Mother’s way of saying, I am ready to die.
Hubby had heard her say that too. So had Floyd, Hubby said.
“What did Floyd say?”
“He quoted Winston Churchill. What a pisser he is.”
“What was the quote?”
“Something about, ‘If I got a telegram saying that Stalin was dead, I would ask myself, What does he mean by that?’”
23
The Acre
One hot summer day of high blue sky, the light breeze off the ocean fragrant with wild roses and beach plums and the tang of the sea, the noon heat cooking and concentrating the aromas, I drove over to bring Mother a carton of blueberries. She was sitting under her maple tree at the back of the house, sipping iced tea. As I approached her, she angled her shoulders and knees at me, and still sipping her tea, holding the tumbler like a measuring device, assessing me as I drew nearer to her. Even outside, Mother looked imperious. Whatever she sat on was a throne, including this old chair. Exposed to her penetrating gaze and inquisitive smile, I felt clumsy, and faltered. To compensate I walked with exaggerated care, hen-like, an altar boy observed by a congregation. The dull tap and fidget of ice in Mother’s tumbler told me that she was still eyeing me.