Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  Before Mother handed over the cottage, Franny and Rose had begun to visit her in the same car. This was too cozy, providing too many opportunities to whisper and compare. Mother wanted them in separate cars.

  What seemed like Mother’s dark policy, something worked out by a plotting queen, was an instinctive response made up of her natural deviousness. She proved to me that tyrants were not shaped by dogma or scholarship or carefully laid plans, but by circumstantial and nervous improvisation at crises and the impulses of their weak and anxious hearts.

  “What would you have done?” Mother asked me.

  I said, “I would have sold the cottage and divided the money seven ways and, by being scrupulously fair, would have made seven children happy.”

  She began to laugh in a mocking way, and I expected her to jeer at me, saying, “Stop making sense,” but she stopped laughing and said, “I hate it when my children don’t get along.”

  I said, “I guess Franny will be forced to give her share to Rose.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  Mother was wide-eyed, her big bland blameless face disbelieving what seemed obvious to me. But of course she knew, she was prepared for it, had perhaps hoped for it from the start.

  And that was what happened. It had already taken place some days before, and Mother still said she knew nothing about it. Pretending she was in the dark was Mother’s way of angling for more.

  Franny said to me, “Let Rose and Walter have the cottage. They’re welcome to it.”

  This sounded generous, but it was just a way of concealing what really happened. Soon afterward, Mother put Franny’s name on the deed to her own house, the family house, site of her throne and her knitting and her shelf of hand-carved birds. She claimed she’d done it out of pity for Franny, but all of us knew that her intention was to foment conflict.

  This seemed to be how it always worked in the family. A gift by Mother to any of us produced one ungrateful child and six malcontents.

  26

  Reminders

  In late middle age, living at the ragged edges of all this family strife, I was continually reminded why I had left home as a youth. I was reminded of much else besides. Father’s death had drawn me back, and in the shadow of his passing, and Mother’s ascendancy, my career had faltered. I had lingered too long, and in that hesitation I was caught, even as I knew it was a mistake to stay.

  Travel had always been my salvation, though perhaps I was less a traveler than a refugee. I set off in the same spirit that another person might have felt burrowing into the bedclothes and hugging himself into a ball. I needed the physical relief of going into the wider world, to lose myself, in every respect to vanish without a trace.

  Leaving home, as I saw it, was also a hostile act. I am outta here, I thought. On every trip I took, no matter how attractive the destination, my fundamental motivation was to turn my back on home, travel as refutation. Everywhere I went I found strangers kinder and more civilized than my family.

  I was still traveling from my rented house on the Cape, still seeking relief from the family. I had just returned from Uganda, where I had been gathering material for the sort of magazine article I was asked for these days. But I had been on other trips, some for months, choosing a lengthy but specific itinerary. The previous year, during the handing out of Mother’s properties, I’d traveled the shores of the Mediterranean, and on my return, I’d written a book about it, and repaid most of my debts.

  In the week before I’d left for Uganda, Gilbert had visited. He had called me from the airport: Would I pick him up? I did so gladly, because as the youngest, and unmarried, he was the most rational sibling. I relished the hour-and-a-half drive from Boston, going slowly in the rain, hearing about his recent post as a political officer in Yemen—his trips to Mocha, to Rimbaud’s house in Aden, the rhino horn handles of tribal daggers being hawked in the bazaar, the disaffected fanatics of the cities, the sententious mullahs, the culture of khat chewers and stewed coffee husks.

  He was still talking as we arrived at Mother’s. She was waiting at the door, looking out, and from the end of the driveway I could see her eager eyes, enlarged by her glasses.

  “Gil-bert,” she cried, singing his two-note name, embracing him, wrapping her skinny arms around him, clutching his neck, leading him inside. “Are you hungry? I made some fish chowder, your favorite. What about some juice. How about a nice piece of fruit.”

  I was still standing on the walkway in the rain.

  “I’ll be going,” I said.

  “Bye.” I could not tell which one had spoken.

  A few days later, Fred visited. He had something to tell me, he said. It seemed that Floyd had wanted to see Gilbert, so Fred had not invited me to the family reunion at his house, and his message to me was, “It wasn’t much. I didn’t think you’d want to come.”

  Franny stopped by to complain about this party to which I had not been invited. “I’m eating some mashed potatoes,” she said, the historical present being her usual tense for such stories, “and Floyd makes a face at me and screams, ‘That’s death on a fork!’ Fred’s kids are uncontrollable. Somehow they managed to leave footprints on the walls. I feel so sorry for them. They have no boundaries. Hubby’s getting awful heavy. But I’m glad Rose is happy with her house. It’s kind of funny. She keeps saying how Dad wanted her to have it, but what about Walter, who never does anything for Ma and who now has a house? Good—they can choke on it. I don’t think Ma had a very good time at the party. I could see that she wanted to be alone with Gilbert.”

  “So I guess I didn’t miss much,” I said, waiting for her reaction.

  “You were lucky you didn’t go,” Franny said. “I don’t even want to think about Ma’s birthday.”

  She gave me a Tupperware tray of Swedish meatballs, a box of peppermint patties, a jar of Marshmallow Fluff, two brownies, and a half-gallon of Coke. Treats for her she thought would be a treat for me.

  After such events as the party to which I was not invited, I traveled happily. Distant travel was my way of asserting that I had no family, that I recognized no obligations, that I wanted to be out of touch. Travel can serve as the unambiguous gesture of giving the finger to people you’ve left at home—it was in my case. Homesickness was an ailment I never suffered. Travel for me, as I had written, was flight and pursuit in equal parts. When I was away from them, I forgot them and their malice. In a new place, among strangers, I was who I wanted to be: a solitary soul on the move.

  I told myself that in travel I was looking for material, in search of new experiences. In retrospect, I realized that I was looking for innocence—a simpler world, perhaps the contented childhood I’d been denied through overcrowding. And I often succeeded in this. I was nearly always helped on my way, lucky in the people I met. I put up with nuisances, and sometimes endured hardships, but I never came to any serious harm.

  Large friendly families still existed in these remote places: extended families in Africa, in rural India, in South America, and on Pacific islands. The one-child family of China was just weird: two harassed parents and a brat in a vertiginous tenement room. But I never saw—in the rain forest, the jungle, the savanna, the obscure river systems of the bush, or the deserts of the outback—any group of people as tangled, as rancorous, as my own family. I marveled at the serenity of these coherent clans. This discovery encouraged my wider travel and the realization that I would have been a traveler even if I had never been a writer: going for the fresh air, the freedom of the open road, to remind myself that my family was not the world.

  I wrote about these trips. The books must speak for themselves. I can make no claim except to say that they stand as an accurate record of what happened to me every day—all the things I said and did, everything I saw and heard—for the duration of the journey. Five or six months’ experience, sometimes a year or more, between covers. This was the reason my trip did not in the least resemble anyone else’s trip, a cause for annoyance among some critics
.

  Fiction was something else for me, a conviction, a passion, and it worried me a little when I looked closely at what I created, for though I was depicting aspects of my life or my fantasies in my novels and stories, I was not providing any context. Rather than write about big families, I took the ambiguity of distant places as my subject. I wrote about restless and discontented men much like myself, but these men were nearly always solitary. And here I was, a member of a savage tribe that practiced endo-cannibalism, feeding on ourselves. I wanted to write about my family, but I didn’t dare to, couldn’t bear to, didn’t know how.

  Moving back home, into a family atmosphere of death and greed and failure, had clarified my position by reacquainting me with rancor, but it also created problems. This homecoming was an extreme mode of travel, my first experience, as a traveler, of severe hardship, corrosive solitude, danger, risk, frustration, and harassment—worse than anything I had ever known on the road. My life of travel, long and difficult though it had been, had not prepared me for any of it, but all of it was a reminder of my earlier life, my childhood, the torn and flapping narrative of my family.

  So, again, I fled. It was always a joy to flee Mother Land. The relief of it made even the worst places bearable. In the average hellhole I smiled, reflecting: It could be worse, I could be home! I was a patient and grateful alien. I chose itineraries that offered the most vivid encounters, and I watched closely, confronting these new surroundings, noting my reactions and impressions, thinking: I am recording what this place is like in this particular moment—I alone am seeing it now in this strange and seismic way, and because I am an unsparing witness, perhaps what I write will have value in times to come, as part of a historical record. But at the very least I have provided myself with some diversion and have succeeded in being away from home. I have been happy.

  Yet always I had to return home. Home might be grim, a struggle, the everlastingness of Mother, but I had nowhere else to go.

  On that return from Uganda, in the stack of accumulated mail—unpaid bills, threats to cut off the electricity, stern reminders from the landlord about trivialities, the odd poignant letter from a reader, junk mail and circulars—in that unsorted pile was a letter I had been dreading almost my whole life.

  The letters we fear most are the ones we hold in our hands unopened, the flap glued shut; letters that we can recite by heart before we’ve taken a knife to the envelope; the ones we’ve been blindly mumbling the words of for years, verbatim, with the prescient anxiety of anticipation.

  This was one. I saw Mona in the name on the return address. I did not know the surname, but I knew it was she, and that she had unwelcome news, because for years I had rehearsed this moment in my head. True fear is not unexpected; it is the occurrence of something painful one has imagined in every particular. And then it happens, and it is just as awful as one had guessed. What other reason would Mona have had for writing me? After that terrible year that I called the best year of my life, for the way it had prepared me, steeling me for the horrors to come, Mona and I had hardly spoken—the obvious subject was too awful for talk. It was the stuff of nightmares. We weren’t friends, we were unhappy memories. I had not received a letter from her for almost forty years. And so, with a trembling hand, I used the knife on it.

  Guess what?

  But I had already guessed. The letter fluttered in my hand.

  I found our son! It was the most amazing thing—I can barely write I’m so excited—

  My heart sank. I had foreseen all those words, and what was coming next, painful reminders of what I already knew.

  My mind raced ahead of the letter. I looked up and saw it all, not in consecutive words but a jumping montage of fearsome images. The boy had been raised in a small house, not the big ramshackle houses I had lived in, but a mean narrow place where he knew he did not belong, a house that was always both confining him and pressing him to the door. He was bursting with anger. He blamed me for rejecting him; he hated me; he wanted something from me that I could never give him—his childhood back. For years he had lived with this fury, helpless because he was a stranger and I was unknown to him. We were lost to each other, and a good thing, too: we would never know the extent of each other’s misery. The danger was that he might one day discover that I existed, and where I lived. Until then, there was no one on whom he could honestly vent his rage. I was to blame; but where was I?

  All this I saw in torn, scrambled dismemberment—faces, hands, blowing clothes, vague shapes. Yet he was real and pink—he was flesh, he had a name. In my self-lacerating imagery he was busy, manic, as vengeful people usually seem; his adoptive parents were pale-faced, small, unlike him; perhaps he had siblings like stick figures, in that flimsy house like a cardboard box you could kick apart.

  But that was what I imagined; it was not what the letter said. It was what I saw, with the paranoia of a haunted man. I sat down and summoned the strength to read the letter.

  27

  The Letter

  It was notepaper, a thickness of it, folded in half and crammed into the envelope. I smoothed the many small sheets. I could see Mona’s face, her lips, her fingers, in her impatient handwriting; the loops and shapes of her words, all the reminders of how she looked in the way her ballpoint pen pressed into the paper, deforming it like Braille, the sloping script I associated with the mournfulness and desperation of forty years before. So much was revealed in the ink. People these days seldom went to the trouble of writing a letter on light squares of pinched-over notepaper, but it helped me remember, and all the scribbles scared me.

  The peculiar slant of her writing was like the anxious tone of voice that I easily recalled, and her untidiness showed in the hurried and jumbled way it was formed. Everything was revealed in her handwriting—her fear, her pleas, her knotted clothes at the foot of her unmade bed, the blond wisps of hair beside her face. Yes, still blond—she had not aged in this familiar penmanship. I had to remind myself that she was older than me.

  Nothing seemed to be going right in my life. My daughter was getting married. I somehow needed to know for sure if our son could be found. I was prepared to fail but I figured why not give it a shot? So I did. I did a little homework. I found that both sides have to approve—the birth parent and the child. I would not be able to find him if he wasn’t willing. Luckily he had put his name forward. He had signed the Search Form because his sister (also adopted) wanted to find her birth parents and he was kind of encouraging her. There was a lot of paperwork but believe me it was worth it. As soon as I started my search his name came right up and we were put in touch.

  I called him up and we talked for over an hour. We’ve talked a few times since then. He’s a great kid! He’s married with a little boy (2). I think the birth of his son was one of the reasons for his getting interested in who his birth parents were, plus his sister’s plan. He’s real smart. He reads. He’s got a successful business. He’s happily married—and he had a wonderful upbringing, way beyond anything we could have done for him. I’m hoping to meet him soon. I knew you’d be excited and I wanted you to have this incredible news.

  At first glance, an amazing letter. On further examination, it was full of gaps and hurried simplifications and a kind of breathlessness that left me with questions. There was only her name at the bottom—Mona—no explanation of her married name or her circumstances. She had a daughter? The return address in New Hampshire sounded rural, flinty, strewn with pine needles. I saw a long, rutted driveway and smoke rising from the chimney of a wood-frame house on a back road, tire tracks through a meadow, the house dwarfed by trees, a lawn that needed mowing. Through the window (dusty ivy trailing from a pot) I saw the trestle table where she’d written the letter, a pile of bills, an address book, a telephone, some pencils, a yellow-eyed lamp.

  I wanted to weep. This letter was my first experience of the words “birth parents.” Of all the stones to turn over, this one was the biggest, the mossiest, hiding the most sorrow. Finding our son
was one thing, but what came next? And consider what I didn’t know: Where was he? What were his circumstances? What was his mood? What did he know of me?

  He hated me, I was sure of that. And, by the way, what had Mona told him of me? Nothing of this was in the letter. Detail was lacking. Where did he live? What was his business? The writer in me was irked by this hasty letter. The father in me was apprehensive.

  Using her married name and the town on the envelope, I called information, got Mona’s number, and called it.

  The voice I heard, answering, seemed to be backing away in suspicion.

  “Mona?”

  “Yes”—though the word was uncertain.

  “It’s Jay.”

  She said, “This isn’t a good time.”

  Her prompt, adenoidal voice had an intimidated tone. I guessed that someone was listening.

  “It’s nice to hear your voice after all these years,” I said, to test her.

  “Me too,” she said, failing the test. The correct reply would have been, Nice to hear your voice too. A disapproving man was scowling at her in the drafty New Hampshire kitchen, which smelled of stew and brown bread and kerosene.

  “I guess you know why I’m calling.”

  She said, “I’m sorry, I really can’t talk,” and hung up before I could leave her with another thought.

  So I was stuck holding the leaves of notepaper, knowing something but not knowing enough, left with questions. I reread the letter and thought of more questions.