Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Where is your sense of fun?”

  “This family never changes,” Julian said.

  “Yes, it does,” I said. “It gets worse.”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t there. You and Uncle Floyd in the same room,” Julian said. He shuddered. “Dr. Mongoose and Mr. Cobra.”

  I said, “He was fine—in good form. We fooled around.”

  They exchanged glances. I didn’t blame them. It was impossible to think of Floyd and me without imagining loud abuse, or else embarrassed silence.

  Knowing that I had their attention, I said, “We could stop by his house after lunch. It’s on the way.”

  “No, no,” Harry said.

  “I want to. I have something to tell him.” I wanted most of all to prove to them that I was an adult, that I’d finally overcome the childishness of the years of feuding.

  My sons were worried, they were anxious, but they were fascinated. Uncle Floyd was to them an almost mythical figure, famous for his rages, celebrated for his learning, a well-known poet, a cantankerous Harvard prof, widely published, a man in a black cape who had known Samuel Beckett, and in a sense had been anointed by him, as Joyce had anointed Beckett, extending a literary tradition. Floyd was part of this lineage.

  Driving down Route 6A from the sushi bar, I slowed the car at Willow Street. Julian said, “I don’t want to do this.” But I knew that what I intended was another form of station identification.

  As I drew up to Floyd’s driveway, Floyd was snipping with hedge clippers at a squatting, vaguely human-shaped bush. He wore a Panama hat, a white linen suit, and espadrilles.

  “I have such a weakness for topiary,” he said.

  “Is it a monkey?” Harry asked.

  “Not even close,” Floyd said, still snipping. “The Ape of Thoth. Notice its prognathic visage. Question—which second-rate diabolist called his mistress the Ape of Thoth?”

  “You want Aleister Crowley,” I said.

  “As every schoolboy knows,” Floyd said. “Consecrated the Scarlet Woman by Crowley, and thus she was the initiatrix of his becoming Ipsissimus. Bride of Chaos, as she was known to him. But what was she known as to the world at large? You want simple, screwy Leah Hirsig, she of the turdish tastes in a world of cack, and I might add, not only American but one of nine children, so I think we can safely say she was one of us.”

  “Nice to see you, Uncle Floyd,” Julian said.

  Floyd put down his hedge clippers and adjusted his Panama hat at a more foppish angle. He squinted at my sons and said, “Now tell me about England, which is ever so ducky, and that muffin-faced queen who is head of the church, God help her.”

  “She can cure scrofula by just touching a person,” Harry said. “The English monarch has magical powers.”

  “I’ll rub-a-dub,” Floyd said. “What a credulous, class-ridden kingdom. But of course I miss Fitzrovia and ‘the taking of a toast and tea.’ Whom am I quoting?”

  “Henry James?” Julian said.

  “Toilets, which is an anagram of T. S. Eliot,” Floyd said. “What have you brought me? Nothing. What have you brought your aged grandmother? Nothing.”

  We were now following him across the grass where, under a tree, a table was scattered with scribbled-on paper, a human skull serving as a paperweight.

  “This is a masterpiece,” Floyd said, tapping the paper, “and this is of course an ancestor skull, used by the Asmat people of New Guinea as a headrest or a pillow. Note the patina and the shell inlay and the overmodeling. Did you want something? Am I wearing something of yours? Do I owe you money?”

  “Mum sent her regards,” Julian said.

  “A good woman. Her sensibly shod feet squarely on the ground,” Floyd said. “Your father took her very much for granted and paid dearly for it, if I’m not mistaken.” He was glancing at the paper he’d written on. “Oh, most assuredly this is a capolavoro.”

  The boys were laughing. They had relaxed, recognizing the old Floyd, teasing and good-tempered and overacting. They were reassured, and so was I. It had been more than ten years since I’d been here at his house. Instead of commenting on that directly, he welcomed us with a burst of family abuse, which was his oblique form of welcome.

  “The birthday party was a fiasco,” he said. “Why was Hubby sulking? Was he having a fit of the vapors? Franny’s husband looks like a penguin. Walter is pan-headed, Jonty’s daughter is a monkey, but then, what five-year-old isn’t the very image of a bonobo chimp? And, entre nous, did you know that bonobos are ardent masturbators? The food was terrible. Places like that should provide a vomitorium. Did you see Fred? I want to give the eulogy at his funeral. I’ll stand over his casket and say, ‘I never really knew this man.’”

  “Grandma said she enjoyed herself,” Julian said.

  “Because it’s the House of Atreus. It feeds on chaos,” Floyd said. “Sit down. Have a drink.”

  “We’re fine,” I said.

  “That’s it, take charge,” Floyd said. “Do you want orange squash? Ribena? Lucozade? Stone’s ginger wine? A lemon shandy? Where do the English get these drinks, out of a kiddie’s book? They love nursery food, the English, especially the upper classes. ‘I want bikkies, I want pudding!’”

  The boys knew better than to challenge him. Julian said, “You’re right. They’re pathetic.”

  “Did I say that? Never mind. Have some lemonade. It’s a man’s drink.” Still speaking, he walked to his house and returned a few minutes later with a jug of lemonade and four glasses.

  “You want that skull, but you can’t have it,” he said, patting the cranium. “Which poet saw the skull beneath the skin?” he asked, and in the hesitation said, “The answer is Webster, but the judgment is Toilets, a wicked anti-Semite and I believe no stranger to sodomy. His wife was a martyr to dysmenorrhea, poor thing. She turned to Bertrand Russell for consolation, which sent her barmy. Drink up.”

  I said, “Fred dropped in the other day.”

  “The human doormat,” Floyd said. “Mister M’Choakumchild. What is it with lawyers? They have no souls.”

  “He had just come from Ma’s,” I said. “Somehow he got a look at her accounts. She’s been giving money to Franny and Rose. Big money.”

  “Looking in Ma’s accounts for clues,” Floyd said to Julian and Harry. He flapped his fingers at me as though casting a spell, and made a face. “Step forth, Auguste Dupin.”

  “Sixteen thousand, ten thousand, new kitchen, new car.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Floyd said.

  But he was surprised. He rattled the ice in his glass and looked into the distance, across his lawn to his limestone gazebo.

  “I asked her for a loan a few years ago,” he said in a new, reflective voice, his own. “She said, ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees.’ Funnily enough, I knew that.” He turned to me. “Why did Fred tell you about the money?”

  “To wind me up, obviously,” I said. “He says he doesn’t care. That means he does care. The thing is, all he wrote down were the big figures. Apparently, she’s given quite a lot away.”

  “Queen Lear,” Floyd said. “Two adoring daughters. ‘We love you, Mumma!’ I wonder how much she gave them altogether?”

  “We can find out. Look at the accounts. But I’m not sure how.”

  Though he said nothing at first, I could see from his face that Floyd was becoming even more animated. He was mentally hurrying to Mother’s house, casing the joint, slipping on a pair of gloves, and tiptoeing around it in his espadrilles.

  “Cat-burgle it,” he said. “Creepy-crawl it. Find out the truth. This is treachery.” He raised one eyebrow and fixed me with his gaze. “More lemonade, Watson?”

  33

  Cat Burglary

  There we were, Floyd and I, in my old Jeep Renegade, once stylish, then a banger, later vintage, now a classic, setting off to burgle Mother’s house. Floyd said, “I hate cars like this. What is it that you lack in your life that makes you need something of this sort?”

  “I
t’s sturdy.”

  “For all those cross-country drives! For all those treks in the Mato Grosso!”

  As he spoke, he was trying to adjust the seat, biting air in frustration, jerking his body back and forth, snatching at the lever on the side, as though humping down a hill of wet snow on an old sled.

  “It’s a gas hog. How often do you put it in four-wheel drive, eh, Indy?”

  “When I drive across your lumpy ass.”

  “The trend toward survivalism in consumer goods. Titanium sunglasses. Indestructible mountain bikes. Big fat knobby tires. Hunting knives. Cargo pants. I wrote a poem about it. Effeminate executives are wearing waterproof divers’ watches that can still tick at two hundred meters under the sea. Hummers—you could invade Somalia with them, but yuppies use them to pick up sushi.”

  “This isn’t a Hummer.”

  “Same thing. It’s overkill.”

  “I want a car like yours,” I said. “A twenty-year-old Mercedes with peeling paint and a Harvard sticker on the back window saying Veritas.”

  “You wish you had one so wicked bad, instead of this piece of dated yuppie frivolity.”

  “But yours is a toilet.”

  Floyd bucked in his seat with hilarity and cackled, “I love that expression.”

  It was as if no time had passed. The day was sunny, Father was still alive, we were in high school. We were cruising around, shouting at each other, yelling at traffic. Floyd had a habit of waving at pretty girls—in cars, on the sidewalk—encouraging them to wave back. The world was big and strange, therefore we mocked it and re-created it as our own fiction. We had no money, but we had secrets, we had hopes, we were outlaws, we gloried in self-dramatization.

  “There’s pecker tracks on the rear seat,” Floyd said.

  Seeing a yellow light ahead, I stomped on the gas pedal and ran the red.

  “Fuck a duck,” Floyd said.

  We were alone. My two sons had returned to London, shaking their heads over the family. And Floyd was affectionately jeering at me, as he’d done long ago. He did not allude to the fact that we had been at odds for the past eight years. He had not said a word on the subject, that he had disparaged me in a set of extravagant lies and rubbished my book in his bilious review. The matter did not arise. I guessed his teasing to be a way of moving on.

  As two happy boys in the car, speeding down the Cape, the prospect of this act of villainy filled us with joy, like teenagers swaggering toward a petty crime. I remembered the old thrill of smashing streetlights and running to hide, siphoning gas from cars, making zip guns, and jamming potatoes into exhaust pipes.

  “I brought a screwdriver and a crowbar.”

  “And a jimmy!” Floyd said. “He’s getting into the mind of a criminal. He’s a walking time bomb. He’s Raskolnikov, ambiguous guilt all over his face. See, he really wants someone to catch him stealing from his mother.”

  “And you’re on an emotional roller coaster.”

  Nothing made Floyd happier than a cliché. “You’ve got issues,” he said. “And Fred is a sentimentalist. He’s Edward Ashburnham in The Good Soldier, looking for his Flory Hurlbird. ‘Shuttlecocks!’ He looks at Ma’s accounts and scribbles down a few figures on the back of an envelope. Would you hire this guy—never mind as a lawyer. Would you hire him to replace the refill in your ballpoint pen? He’s not serious. He’s pettifogging with us, and so he has left us no option. Ha!”

  “We are going to the scene of the crime.”

  “And if it turns out that Ma has been giving Franny and Rose money, I’m going to write them a note. Just a few words on a postcard. ‘Someone should shoot you.’” He jerked his body impatiently in the seat again. “She might have locked the whole place.”

  “Look at this.” I held up the screwdriver.

  “Listen, Arthur Flegenheimer, aka Dutch Schultz,” Floyd said. “Do me the courtesy of not boasting in advance. It would pain me ever so much to see you chopfallen.”

  “Fred wouldn’t have mentioned it if there hadn’t been any truth in it.”

  “Franny and Rose, the Wobbling Weird Sisters. How could Ma favor them like that?” Floyd said. “What about me? I can handle things. I’m smart”—his imitation of Fredo in The Godfather.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Ma is such a fox,” he said. He sat back, remembering. “It’s just before graduation, 1957. I have won the American Legion Award. We are asked to appear for a group photo taken by Dwight Davis—he of the gimpy leg—all the prizewinners, all the scholarship students. But I am not in the photograph. Where am I? Look in the basement of Murray’s Stationery on Riverside Ave. and you will find me stacking reams of paper, because Ma wants me to work. Because money doesn’t grow on trees.” He straightened and shouted, “I will break down her door and ransack her files!”

  His voice cracked like a teenager’s. This was fun, like old times. The only pleasures I knew in this family were the rebellious deceptions of my boyhood, which today Floyd and I were reliving—outsmarting Mother, betraying Franny and Rose, mocking Fred, ranting against the injustices of the family: “It’s a study in jealousy and begrudgery!”

  Rolling down Route 28 toward Mother’s house, Floyd was saying, “Ma’s perfidious brother Louie, that sanctimonious bastard, used to take me aside and say, ‘You’re killing your mother. By wetting your bed. Do you realize how that hurts your mother? When are you going to stop? When you get married you’re going to pee on your wife.’ And he was a priest, so we couldn’t answer back. He’s straight out of Boccaccio. He’s as bad as the pervert priests buggering altar boys in Dorchester. I was ten years old! No, no, take a right here ​—”

  I turned off the main road, followed the side street for half a mile, then, at Floyd’s insistent pointing, I took a back road to Mother’s.

  “It’s her day for carving class at the senior center. I know these things,” Floyd said. “But you can never tell—she might not have gone. Or she might have come back early. She might have finished her great crested grebe. Oh, shit.”

  We had reached the intersection of Mother’s street. Her house was the fourth one down, and we could see that a large SUV was parked in her driveway.

  “Who’s that?”

  “It’s Fred’s car.”

  “Oh, Jesus, wouldn’t you know.”

  Floyd sighed as he peered out the window.

  “Maybe he’s visiting.”

  “Of course he’s visiting. Ma decided to cancel her carving class so that she could spend some quality time with Fred.” He laughed a little at this: the day we decide to burgle Mother, Fred is there to spoil our plan. The nerve of him.

  “I’ll go in,” I said.

  “I don’t want him to see me,” Floyd said. “I’ll wait here. No, I’ll walk around the block. I’ll meet you at the end of the street.”

  He got out of the car, cursing. I drove up the street to Mother’s and parked near Fred’s big Land Cruiser.

  “Hello,” I called through the screen door.

  “In here.” A woman’s voice—Erma, Fred’s wife. “Hi, Jay. Are you looking for your mother?”

  “Yes. Where is she?”

  “At carving class. She let me in. I’m just waiting for a phone call from Fred.”

  “Where is he?”

  “On his way to Hong Kong.”

  “And he’s calling you here?”

  “Our phone’s not working. Maybe it’s the batteries.”

  She stared at me. You would have thought she was smiling, but it was a smile-like expression of bewilderment. She was foxed by anything mechanical. She unplugged all the appliances when she went away, in the belief that, left hooked up, one of them would start a fire.

  “Did you unplug the phone?”

  This question made her wary. She didn’t answer. She behaved as though I was criticizing her, and I suppose I was.

  “What time is Fred going to call?”

  “Eleven.”

  “It’s half past.”

 
“I’m wondering if I should wait.”

  I wanted her to say “I’m going.” I wanted the phone to ring. But she sat, a huge, baffled obstruction, frustrating our plan.

  “I’ll tell your mom you were here. She’ll be back around one.”

  “I forgot about the carving class.”

  “Every Friday,” Erma said.

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “I’ll tell Fred you were asking for him.”

  “Do that.”

  I found Floyd standing under a maple tree, looking like an escaped felon. He said, “Does the word ‘dentifrice’ bother you as much as it bothers me?”

  He had been vexed with this problem under the tree, probably grinding his teeth. I told him what I had found at Mother’s, and Erma’s explanation.

  “Waiting for a phone call?” he said. “The woman is a ree-tard. What a waste of time this is. All this driving and waiting, and that foolish bitch parks her ass on Ma’s sofa. She has nothing to do. I have a poem to finish. I’ve got grass to cut. I’m correcting page proofs. I’d like to go back there and toss her out of the house.”

  He was furious again, blaming Erma for thwarting our plans.

  “This is the most wasted day of my life!”

  But the attempted burglary (perhaps like all burglaries) was a bonding experience. Floyd and I were reconciled. And after that everyone avoided us. They were afraid of Floyd, and of course they knew—or guessed—that Floyd would tell me all the disparaging things they told him behind my back, in the days when they were close to Floyd and avoided me.

  So, the worst of all things that can befall a big polarized family occurred in ours—the two bitterest enemies became friends, or at least allies. The children’s factions were forced into new alliances: they were exposed, they were fearful, they hardly trusted one another, and they knew that their old allies, and in a sense their protectors, the two former enemies, were comparing notes on them.

  But I could not let my guard down with Floyd. He was funny and intelligent and could be charming, but he could also be lethal. Say the wrong word and he could turn in seconds from a charmer to a demon. I was always cautioned in my behavior with him by the story of the tortoise and the scorpion. My nature is to sting . . .