Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “What did I say?”

  “You accused her of being an inattentive mother,” he said, as I listened, astonished at the woman’s mendacity. “And you know how hard she tries.”

  In this outpouring of good feeling for Mother as her birthday approached, I was the only holdout, it seemed. I loved her less than anyone. I perhaps did not love her at all. I saw her as cruel and selfish—and how was it possible that I was the only one of her children who felt this way? In this sprawling family I was the single skeptic. I wondered why, yet I did not doubt my feelings. I suspected the motives of the others, the ones whom Mother corrupted with her gifts and compromised with her gossip. I had no allies.

  Or perhaps I had one.

  It was one of the perversities of the family to see an occasion such as this, a birthday, a wedding, any celebration, as a chance to settle old scores. Because it was superficially benign and included everyone, a family gathering was an opportunity to inflict pain, to get even with the maximum number of people at one time. A family meal, everyone with his guard down, I remembered as raised voices, vicious words, unforgiving whispers, kicks under the table, sudden departures, floods of tears, and slammed doors.

  “I’m not angry!” someone would scream.

  In the endless, inward, contained war, the family like a bag of ferrets, a birthday or a wedding was a separate pitched battle. I dreaded the skirmish to come.

  Fred invited me to his house in Barnstable for a drink. This sort of hospitality I saw as hostile.

  He poured me a small glass of clear viscous liquor and said, “This is Chinese gin. Baijiu. I hand-carried it back from Shanghai. Go on, chug it.”

  “Razor blades,” I said.

  “Best quality—Maotai,” he said, clinking his glass. “Ganbei!” and he drank. “Listen, I want you to come to the party.”

  This gratuitous prologue meant one thing, and we both knew it: he didn’t want me to come to the party. An italicized but loomed.

  “But Ma said you were traveling, that you had some kind of assignment. So, I’m just saying—and look, I really want you to be there—that you don’t have to be there. We understand.”

  He looked fussed, he took another drink, he hated holding this conversation. He wanted me to say that I had other plans so he would be off the hook.

  I said, “I want to be there.”

  He tried to conceal his look of disappointment with another drink, wincing as the liquor went down.

  “It’s just a lunch at the Happy Clam. Not really a party. An hour at most. No one’ll be missed. My kids have soccer. If you had plans, you could take Ma out another day. She’d love that.”

  “Fred, you sound like you don’t want me to go.”

  “Did I say that?” He sighed. He made a business of pouring another drink and slowly screwing the cap on the bottle so that he could turn his back on me. “I said I want you to come to the party.”

  “I don’t have other plans. Turning ninety is a big deal for Ma. I’m going.”

  Fred smiled at me, a version of the pitying smile that Mother had perfected—and talking to Fred, I often had the feeling I was talking to Mother.

  “Floyd’s going to be there,” he said with moistened lips.

  “So?”

  “I’m just saying. Floyd’s signed on.”

  Floyd’s name was a weapon in the family, and for years this weapon had been used against me, waved in my face, flourished, glinting in the sun like a hammered blade.

  “Ma said she wanted everyone there.”

  “Right, right,” and now Fred looked alarmed. “That’s why Floyd’s going.”

  “And that’s why I’m going.”

  Now Fred began to smile, and I knew worse was to come. “He can be difficult.” He went on smiling. “He’s crazy, you know.”

  “You can handle him,” I said, smiling back.

  But his smile was meant to threaten me. Fred said, “He can be violent. What if he freaks?”

  I realized that I enjoyed confounding Fred, seeing him squirm, and now I knew that he feared trouble—Floyd ranting at me, my hollering back at him, Mother covering her eyes (“You’re killing me!”), the girls sobbing, “Mumma! Mumma!” Unfinished meals, untasted drinks, bruised shins, hurt feelings, slammed doors.

  “I’m going,” I said.

  Fred’s face shone with insincerity, a feeble expression of fear as he clucked and wrung his hands. “Like I said, I want you to be there. And Ma wants everyone to be there. It’s a big day.”

  30

  Upside-Down Cake

  A birthday can be a kind of funeral. But I saw it as an opportunity, and made my arrangements, and looked forward to the event. The private function room at the Happy Clam was funereal, with the bouquets and the long faces—Rose with her back turned, Gilbert and Fred conferring, Franny fussing over her son Jonty, Jonty nagging his daughter Jilly. No one wanted to sit next to me. We all stood gaping, glassy-eyed, as though we were about to bury someone.

  I had arrived early, resolving to see it through. The spouses were rattled—Marvin ill at ease out of his security guard uniform, Fred’s wife Erma sighing and snatching at her hair, Walter monkeying with a camera as a way of snubbing everyone else. Jilly was the center of attention, the adults shouting at her as she ran back and forth.

  “Run to Granma! Run to Granma!” Jonty called out. “Jilly, listen to me!”

  Mother winced at the approaching child. Mother had a way of recoiling as she was being attacked. She smiled slightly as Jilly tripped and fell and began bawling. Mother squinted at the sobbing girl. Jonty swept up Jilly.

  “I had a child named Angela,” Mother said. “She died. She’s in heaven.”

  “Granma is, I believe, the name of the Cuban press agency,” someone said very loudly. It was Floyd, in a black fedora, leaning on his tightly rolled umbrella. “I always found that terribly ironic. It was named after the yacht that brought the guerrillas to fight in the Cuban Revolution in 1956.”

  “But why was it called Granma?” Rose asked.

  “Funnily enough, because the man who owned it, a gringo, had named it after his granma. But you knew that, of course.”

  “Jilly, tell me where it hurts, honey,” Jonty pleaded with the howling child.

  “Who was it who said, ‘If you’re strong enough to scream, it can’t hurt very much’?” Floyd asked, winking at Mother and stepping past me to give her a kiss. “Was it you, Mother?”

  This was the Floyd I remembered from happier days, the man who burned up the air in the room and left people gasping in the vacuum.

  “We’re waiting for Hubby—oh, there he is,” Fred said as Hubby and Moneen appeared at the door.

  “Puffing like a grampus,” Floyd said. He tilted his wide-brimmed hat and made a face. “That is, a cetacean of the northern seas. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

  Hubby scowled—the first cut of the day—and ignored Floyd. Moneen hurried to the other spouses, the second tier of relations, in the cheap seats.

  The triumph at such a family gathering lay in concealing your real feelings. But already this was unraveling. Hubby was stung, Rose hunched her shoulders and refused to greet me, Mother was still wincing at Jilly. Everyone but Jonty and Loris had left their small children at home. Franny handed Floyd a shopping bag. “Your favorites,” she said. Floyd picked through the bag, sorting fruit and packages of candy, and he held up a pink metal drum of Almond Roca.

  “The trouble with them is I can’t open them fast enough,” Franny said.

  “One would never have known that,” Floyd said, “to look at you.” He found something else, a cellophane bag. “Mixed nuts. That is so appropriate to this day of days.”

  “Maybe we could sit down,” Fred said, raising his arms. “Everyone’s here.”

  Floyd began shaking nuts into his hand. “Why is it,” he said as he rattled the nuts like dice in his fist and shot them into his mouth, “that people always do this when they’re eating nuts?”

&n
bsp; “I’m not sitting next to him,” Hubby said, and moved his place card down the table, away from Floyd’s.

  Floyd saw this and said, “Nice shirt, Hubby. I’ve always said those are going to come back in style someday.”

  “Butthole,” Hubby said.

  “Gilbert’s just come back from, I think, Kuwait,” Fred said as Gilbert greeted everyone. “And won’t be going back, inshallah.”

  “The placement,” Floyd said, a French accent on the word, plassmon, fluttering his fingers at the place cards. “It’s worthy of the court of Versailles. ‘I know my place.’ ‘Who’s in, who’s out?’ ‘I won’t sit next to you.’”

  “But there’s an extra place,” Marvin said.

  Mother stared at him. He stammered and clutched his belt, as no doubt he did at the mall, one hand on his billy club, one on his Mace can.

  “Mah-vin,” Franny said. Still an outsider, not one of us, after all these years, Marvin did not realize his mistake even when it was pointed out to him: this seemingly extra place was of course for Angela, who had been with us, guiding Mother, for fifty years after dying at birth.

  Fred and Gilbert sat on either side of Mother, Franny and Rose next to the brothers, then Hubby, Jonty (Jilly on his lap), and the spouses, Marvin, Moneen, Erma, Loris, and the others—Walter snapping pictures. Floyd took his seat, and I sat next to him on the only remaining chair.

  Floyd started to tug at my shirt. “This is—what?—shirred silk? Chiffon? I like its epicene in-soo-shuntz. Its drape. Its hand.” He twisted it and dropped it. “I hope you’re clad in clean linen. I can’t abide any other. Mother, to you!” he said, snatching my water glass and raising it to Mother. “I love a fruity vintage. I need an assertive cheese.”

  Mother beamed over the motley crowd at the table. Seven years on from Father’s funeral, we looked bigger but droopier, the same people but wearing odder, older masks, all of us like large, misshapen children.

  “How wonderful to have all my family here,” Mother said. “I’m so lucky.”

  “We’re the lucky ones, Mumma,” Franny said.

  “Ma, we’ve been looking forward to this,” Rose said.

  Hubby said, “Will someone pass the bread?”

  Floyd juggled a bread stick and said, “Are you saying you’d like one of these up your end?”

  Breathing hard in impatience, Hubby scowled. He said, “So, do we get menus?”

  “Menu is, of course, the grandson of Brahma, and his law must be observed,” Floyd said. “I think you knew that. One apposite law regarding temperance is ‘He must eat without distraction of mind.’”

  “No menus. Fred chose the meal,” Mother said. “It’s simpler. We thought you’d prefer it that way.”

  Mother said she was happy, and for once she seemed to be telling the truth. But her happiness was possible only because the rest of us were miserable. Looking around the room, I saw how shamefaced we seemed. We had betrayed each other too many times to sit comfortably around the same table together. We were there because we were failures—still lived in Mother Land, ten minutes from Mother, had lost money and families, needed Mother, and that other distortion, that only when we were together did we see how different we were, how unlike a real family.

  None of us had really wanted to show up. We disliked each other so much that the notion of peacemaking implied in sharing a meal only made us angrier. The very fact that we were there proved that we were failures. We needed to be separate to function properly; we had to be secretive to survive. But Mother had prevailed. She had insisted on our being there, and had implied—as she often did—that if we cooperated, there would be a reward for us in her will. She held out the prospect of her death always, yet she was the only happy person at the table, the only one who, small and sinewy, looked healthy. So Mother had her wish and was fulfilled in all the important ways—having her birthday party, getting presents, and in this large get-together dividing us by creating more confusion.

  “May I request a beverage?” Floyd said.

  “Take your hat off,” Fred said.

  “If you say the magic word,” Floyd said, squinting at him, removing his hat and spinning it on his finger. “‘O for a beaker full of the warm South!’” He was leaning toward Jonty. “‘The blushful Hippocrene, with beaded bubbles winking at the brim.’ Source?”

  Jonty turned away. Hubby set his face at Floyd. Franny and Rose shrugged.

  “You want Johnny Keats,” Floyd said, and raised a finger, reciting, “‘The dunces flutterblasting, with food-splashed faces.’ A citation, if you please.”

  Hubby said “Diet Coke” to the waiter.

  “I think you’ll find that it was I who penned those words,” Floyd said, swinging himself sideways toward Hubby and crossing his legs. “Why is it that your so-called diet drinks are the preference of the chubbies and the chunkies, as if some arcane magic attached ​—”

  “Shut up,” Hubby said.

  The drinks were handed out, we toasted Mother again, and the first course was served, clam chowder and soda crackers.

  “Careful, hon,” Franny said to Marvin, “don’t season it,” and explained to the table, “He’s got acid reflux wicked bad. He’s on Zantac.”

  “For the PPI,” Marvin said with the pedantry of a chronic sufferer. “Proton pump inhibitors.”

  “I seem to recall it was stool softeners,” Floyd said, “a bewitching pair of words. Like panty shields.”

  When Marvin looked up, his chin thrust out like a claw hammer, Rose said, “It’s not funny. I’ve got OIC, opioid-induced constipation, Ma.”

  Mother smiled like a cat and licked the rim of milky chowder from the bristles above her lips.

  “Has anyone here tried Ambien?” Gilbert said. “I’ve finally gotten a night’s sleep with them. Call it my drug of choice.”

  “Walter’s on Paxil,” Rose said. “It seems to calm him down—doesn’t it, honey?—and helps him sleep.”

  “I take like a ton of potassium,” Jonty said. “I’ve got a problem with electrolytes.”

  “I love the gallant names,” Floyd said. “Ceedrex, for my liver and lights. I eat them like candy.”

  “All I take is blood thinner,” Hubby said.

  “What about that stuff to lower your cholesterol?” Moneen said.

  “And that—Lipitor.”

  “What are you on, Ma?” Franny said, raising her voice, as we all did when addressing Mother.

  “These people who take nitroglycerin for their heart,” Floyd said. “Why don’t they explode? And by the way, in which novel does a character self-combust?”

  “Bleak House,” I said. “The rag-and-bone man Krook. ‘Inborn, inbred, engendered in the corrupted humors of the vicious body itself.’”

  “Isn’t education a wonderful thing?” Floyd said.

  “What am I awn?” Mother said, but did not speak again until all eyes shifted to her, as she sat glaring at Rose. When we had fallen silent, she said again, “What am I awn?” She spoke loudly and became indignant. Her girlish shudder was studied and stagy, shoulders twisting under her shawl. “I’m not awn anything.”

  Though we marveled at Mother for taking no medication, it seemed to me that she was calling attention to her hypochondria. Abstinence was her way of outdoing us in our maladies.

  “There is no medicine for what I have,” Mother said, her fingers stroking the skin flaps of her scrawny throat.

  “Mumma!” Franny cried, as if summoning her.

  “Old age is incurable.” Mother half closed her eyes. “My bags are packed.”

  “Please, don’t, Mumma,” Rose said, whinnying a little.

  Franny vomited up a sob as Gilbert placed a reassuring arm around Mother, who wore an expression of quiet suffering, tragic and serene.

  Marvin whispered to his son Jonty, “You gonna finish the rest of that chowda?”

  The spouses were flustered. In his confusion, Walter was walking around the long table, his head bowed over his viewfinder, s
napping pictures of us.

  “Why don’t we all take turns telling our happy memories,” Fred said. “Of Ma. Way back when.”

  Mother closed her eyes completely. She seemed to be lying in state as the meal became a proper funeral, with valedictions and reminiscences, Mother in the place of honor with her embalmed expression, looking thwarted and doll-like, as the dead do, her skinny fingers twisted in her green shawl.

  “Like when we had that creamy oatmeal,” Hubby said, “that was never lumpy. Yum-yum.”

  “My favorite was the al dente pasta,” Rose said. “With the bolo sauce.”

  “Both were thewy and farinaceous,” Floyd said, tearing at a piece of bread. “And what was that witches’ brew we had on Saturday nights, with the crunchy undercooked onion. And the fatty meat—‘That was the best part!’”

  “Bruised fruit is what I remember,” I said. “Meatloaf sandwiches that fell apart because of all the ketchup.”

  “Pea soup,” Franny said. “Kidney stew.”

  “Dad’s favorite,” Mother said. She was deaf to irony. Believing that her cooking was being praised, her eyes puddled and she began to cry. She dabbed at her eyes. “I tried so hard to please you.”

  Floyd said, “Pot roast. Baked chicken. Fork-tender.”

  “The way you put crunched-up potato chips on your fish casserole is what I used to like,” Rose said. “I do that for my Walter.”

  Mother was smiling through her tears, feeling venerated, but also looking like a dead child.

  “Ma made her own rolls,” Hubby said. “No one does that anymore. Home-baked and fluffy.”

  “I do,” Moneen said.

  “Not like Ma’s.”

  “Parker House rolls,” Mother said.

  “Your chocolate cake,” Gilbert said, giving Mother a hug.

  “And boeuf en daube,” Floyd said. “A splash of brandy and a lovely Côtes du Rhone in the pot, served with baby carrots, lightly sautéed morel mushrooms, the pancetta, the bouquet garni, the white truffles, just a hint of tarragon.”

  “Don’t be a jerk,” Fred said. He had been squirming as we’d satirized Mother’s cooking.