Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “My health is perfect. I take no medicine. Of course I have the usual aches and pains.” She paused and, reflecting on this, gave one of her shallow coughs.

  “I’m thinking about the future.”

  “I have what I need. Don’t worry about me. I worry about those poor people in Africa. I send them a little something now and then.”

  “The unexpected—that’s the concern.”

  “I have made provisions,” Mother said.

  What did this mean? I guessed that Franny and Rose’s infantilizing of Mother was complete: having taken most of her fortune, they had left her with the impression that they would see her through any medical emergency. Maybe this meant they would invite her into their homes when she was no longer able to care for herself.

  To get off the phone gracefully, I said, “You know, I never gave you my last book. I’m going to bring you a copy.”

  “Don’t bother. It would just be wasted on me,” Mother said. “I can only read large-print books these days, and I don’t think any of your books is in large print. They only do it for the big bestsellers.”

  I reported Mother’s saying “I have made provisions” to Floyd, who said, “What will they do if she’s gibbering and incontinent like this old guy I know in Chatham? He needs round-the-clock nursing. He needs diapers. He’s on a feeding tube.”

  “Ma doesn’t want to think of that.”

  “She’ll be put in a hospital. We’ll get the bill.”

  “I guess it’ll be shared.”

  He screamed, not a word but a howl of defiance: “The fatties spent all the money she gave them!”

  I spoke to Gilbert. He said, “Obviously we should do something, but we shouldn’t upset her.”

  I spoke to Hubby. He said, “I ain’t paying.”

  I spoke to Fred. “There are three ways of looking at this,” he said in his lawyerly way. But what his convoluted reply really meant was: Please don’t bring this up. And in a smiling voice, he said, “Jay, what you don’t seem to accept is that Ma can do whatever she wants with her money.”

  “Even divide us.”

  “That’s a little harsh.”

  “We hate each other, Fred. How many of us are on speaking terms?”

  “I spoke to Gilbert just yesterday. I spoke to Ma today.”

  “As usual, you’re just fencing with me.”

  “Look, don’t you see that the person who matters most is Ma? We’re lucky she’s still alive—we still have her. She’s healthy. We have no right to upset her.”

  He went in this vein. This was Mother speaking, as usual.

  That was another characteristic of tyrants. They created other, smaller tyrants, operatives and surrogates who spoke for them, who perpetrated the lies, and who kept them powerful.

  Behind all this confusion I sensed Mother’s defiance. She now suspected that some of her children were questioning her judgment. Floyd’s letter had stung her. I was vilified for speaking about it. She had told Franny and Rose that she loved them. She had told everyone that I was upsetting her.

  The tyrant’s nightmare was to have all his agents of unrest in one room. Mother feared having us all together, facing her. She needed us apart, because she treated each of us differently, and it helped her that we were at odds with one another. United, we might oppose her; separate, quarreling, uncertain, and unequal, we needed her. This had been the case for years. But she was more secretive and fickle now than in the past—colder, harder to fathom, and contradictory.

  I could tell that Mother was angry. She believed that Floyd and I were questioning her. She hated that; even the simplest question was a challenge.

  “The facts are on our side,” Floyd said. “We’ve got to do something.”

  “What are we actually trying to accomplish?” I asked. “You don’t want money. I don’t either.”

  “Strange as it might seem, given her hostility to us, we have to protect her.”

  “From what?”

  “From predators. From her handing out the last of her money.”

  He proposed sending photocopies, bound booklets of the hundred or so pages of the check register, to every member of the family.

  “In the spirit of transparency, of openness.” But Floyd was laughing—he was like Mother too. He saw turmoil in such a move.

  “What about sending a sample page?” I said. “That will shut them up.”

  “We have to do more than that. I’m sick of hearing all the denials.”

  We compromised. We photocopied the choicest pages, on which the largest payments were listed—payments to Franny and Rose, mostly the four- and five-figure sums. The pages were a selective history of a woman buying favors from some of her children, while excluding others altogether, seven distinct versions of mothering, a chronicle of favoritism.

  “I know a guy in Dayton, Ohio,” Floyd said. “I’ll make up the envelopes and send them to him to mail.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “No one will have the slightest idea of who sent them.”

  This was cleverness of a sort that Mother might have approved.

  “But they’ll know it’s one of us,” I said. “We can send the letters from Boston. They won’t know which one.”

  We did this, and the effect was immediate. Franny hurried to Mother’s with a scrapbook of Mother’s thank-you notes. Leafing through them, Franny wept, saying, “Am I a thief? Did I steal from you, Ma?”

  Rose did the same, on a different day.

  Mother told these stories to each of us when we called, not to mock her daughters but to defend them. She defended the presents to Fred, to Hubby, to Gilbert—how dare we question those?

  Fred called me. He told me that we had made a big mistake in sending the copies. I said I had no idea who’d done it, but that I’d found them interesting.

  “And how is Ma?” I asked.

  I had assumed that revealing the payments would be a cautionary move, that Mother would see the injustice of it, that she might be contrite.

  “She’s on the warpath,” he said.

  The next time I visited her, she was. She’d been reading a book, but she put it down beside her chair to give me her full attention. In our last conversation, when I’d mentioned bringing her one of my books, she told me not to bother; she could read only large-print books. Given that she had recently refused my offer, I was curious to know what the book was, but as it was on the far side of her big chair, I could not see the cover. Anyway, she had other matters on her mind.

  She did not mention the fact that one of her children had broken into her house and made copies of her check register. This seemed to be a predictable crime, one that was to be expected in a tyranny. Since she was underhanded herself, she was not shocked.

  She had seen the photocopies. Franny had shown her in an attempt to vindicate herself. But the manner of Mother’s being questioned was unimportant. What angered her was that she was questioned at all.

  “Do you know anything about this?” she asked me, fixing me with a rocking motion that was meant to corner me.

  I said that I had seen the accounts. Some mysterious person had mailed them to me. She continued to stare at me. I said, “It was news to me. I didn’t know that you handed out half a million bucks.”

  Her fingers clutched the ends of the chair arms. She tightened her grip and pulled herself forward. “Whose money is it?”

  Her gargle of rage made me wince. I said, “Yours, of course.”

  “Do I ask you what you do with your money?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “Whose fault is that?”

  “It’s my own goddamned fault,” I said, in Mother’s voice.

  “If I want to help someone with a little gift, that’s my business,” she said.

  “Is a house a little gift?” I said. “Is thirty grand a little gift?”

  “That’s for me to judge,” Mother said.

  “Do you remember, some time ago, you asked me how your
will should be construed? ‘How shall I divide it?’ you asked. I said that it should be apportioned equally.”

  Logic infuriated her. But instead of raging at me, she smiled at my simplicity of mind. She said, “People are not equal. Some of them are nicer and more loving than others. Some of them have needs. Some of them love me.”

  Only when she used the word “love” did she display any anger, and she showed it by setting her jaw at me.

  I said, “Some of us might be wondering why you chose to give most of your money and property away to just a few of your children.”

  She sat straight in her chair, and although she was small and thin, she bristled in such a way as to suggest ferocity. “Who are you to question me? I can do whatever I want with my money. Now look what you’ve done.” She clutched her head and massaged it. “You’ve given me a splitting headache.”

  As a courtesy, I lifted the book from the floor beside her chair and placed it on her lap. It was very heavy, and not a large-print book. Eleanor: The Years Alone, by Joseph P. Lash, about Mrs. Roosevelt.

  Within hours, in her usual sequence of phone calls she told the others that I had attacked her.

  “You’re a fool,” Fred said to me. “I was afraid of this.”

  “What’s there to be afraid of?”

  “She still has money,” he said. “And she’s mad. And she knows who her friends are.”

  “By the way,” I said, “did you know that Franny calls her every night at bedtime to say good night?”

  “No. God bless her.”

  37

  Defiance

  Fred, the lawyer son, was a confident man. He had been a confident boy. He had learned as an infant how to be a model citizen of Mother Land. Fred was unlike the rest of us, a different child. He was the closest to Mother, and because of this proximity he saw Mother in his own way.

  As the eldest, he was regarded as singular. For his first years, the formative ones, he had been an only child, two years alone with Mother, until Floyd came along and found himself unwelcome. With that second birth a lifelong rivalry began, yet Fred never altered his belief in his own power, the one child who never felt the need to negotiate or ingratiate himself. Ingratiation was one of the most common modes of behavior of our big family—perhaps of all big families, a pretense of submission to please and placate another sibling when a favor is needed. It was the art of insincere cringing, a form of cynical satire, a sort of dance. He was anything but straightforward, and yet Fred didn’t do it. Fred was special.

  Mother had told him so. An intelligence test arranged by his proud parents when he was ten revealed his IQ as 140, beyond superior. “Borderline genius,” Mother said. We all knew Fred’s number. It was a winning score—none of us could beat it. No point in testing us. Mother confided in Fred; he was her counselor, her defender, her go-between. He saw us through Mother’s eyes. He told Hubby that he was ungrateful, told me I was difficult, said that Floyd was crazy. He thanked Franny and Rose for visiting Mother, because it spared him from having to. He was always elsewhere, busy with being a lawyer, spending months at a time in China, negotiating contracts. “Poor kid,” Mother said. “He works so hard.” I once asked him why, if there were so many lawyers in China, none of them ever defended the poor bastards who were put in jail for disagreeing with the government. Fred said, “Do you realize how prosperous China is?” A Fred answer was never an answer, only a form of indirection.

  “Franny and Rose are going down to Ma’s to get more stuff out of her,” I said.

  “It’s a long drive for them,” Fred said.

  “For money!”

  “Ma appreciates it,” he said. “What are we doing for her?”

  “I visit her, I bring her books,” I said. “Not ones I’ve written. She’s not a fan.”

  “She loves your work,” he said. “We all do.”

  “You didn’t say anything about my last book.”

  “I prefer your nonfiction to your fiction,” Fred said. I smiled at the answer, so Fred-like. “Ma’s proud of you,” he went on. “You know how much she loves to read, how we were raised on the written word.”

  I was still smiling. This was the family myth, that we had been brought up bookish: Father reading us Treasure Island, Ma reciting poems—no TV, no movies. We lived in a cultural hothouse, thrilled by adventure stories. And then as readers ourselves we had created our own intellectual lives, Fred to law school, Floyd to his PhD in literature and a career as a poet, me to the life of a novelist-traveler, like Melville, whom Father had read us, declaiming Father Mapple’s sermon in the seamen’s bethel.

  No. Not at all, apart from some snippets of Long John Silver late at night that caused us to name our attic dorm the Benbow Inn. The truth of it all was part-time jobs after school and the Saturday Evening Post, Life magazine and Reader’s Digest, Frances Parkinson Keyes and The Little World of Don Camillo. One year it was I’ll Cry Tomorrow, about actress Lillian Roth’s drinking, but what drew me to the book were the descriptions of her domineering mother, who drove her to the booze. Floyd read Thomas Merton on his monastic life, and Mother’s copy of an Ethel Mannin novel about an atheist who becomes a priest. I read books about camping, survival in the jungle, and going far away. One summer I read Generation of Vipers and delighted in the term “momism.” The next summer it was Dante’s Inferno. Then it was Peyton Place and Henry Miller. We got a TV set finally, and Dad discovered that he enjoyed Bonanza, The Jackie Gleason Show, and the quiz shows that turned out to be rigged. That was our cultural hothouse—that, and the church: hymns, sermons, outings, fasts, penances, and confessions. For we were sinners, mostly venial sins, some mortal, the ones that sent you to hell, which was why I read the Inferno, regarding it as a guidebook to the afterlife.

  “What are you thinking?” Fred said.

  But he would not have wanted to hear what I was thinking, so I said, “Ma’s still giving them money.”

  “Of course she is,” Fred said. “She’s trying to teach us a lesson. That she can do whatever she wants. We deserve that.”

  Floyd’s angry letter and the photocopies of the financial records had precipitated this. By accusing Mother of handing out money and property to her daughters, Floyd had insulted her. In her defiance, she would (Fred said) give much more to them—perhaps ridiculous amounts—to prove she could do as she pleased. A spoiled child reprimanded for poking the frosting of a cake responds to the rebuke by poking it again and insolently licking her finger. A tyrant criticized for killing innocent people reacts by ordering a fresh massacre that includes the critic. You can’t tell me what to do!

  After this talk with Fred, I drove over to Mother’s to bring her a pie. I saw two new cars in the driveway, and so I drove on, believing that people I didn’t know were visiting her.

  A day or two later, Fred called and, in a disgusted, accusatory voice, said, “She gave Franny and Rose new cars. See what you made her do?”

  His prediction had been correct. “Where does she get this money?”

  “She’s got more than you think,” Fred said.

  To test this, Hubby asked her for a loan. She said she couldn’t afford to give him any money, but that she’d knit him a pillow cover.

  I relayed all this information to Floyd. Because he would not speak to anyone else, I was his sole source of family information. “I’m going back,” he said, and slipped into Mother’s once again to examine the accounts. Not much was missing, he said. The hundred grand was intact. The only amounts missing were checks to Fred and Gilbert, a birthday present to Jonty, and a memorial mass for Angela. “But I knew she had to have a stash somewhere,” he said. “A slush fund.” That was when he found, at the back of one of the drawers, hidden the way a child would hide a candy bar, the Merrill-Lynch account, a ring binder of monthly statements.

  “How much is in that account?” I asked.

  “Telephone numbers,” Floyd said. “And there are big withdrawals every month. If you had come with me, we could have p
hotocopied the pages. But no, you had agenbite of inwit and stayed home, you wimp. This is family silver being boosted!”

  I asked Fred whether he knew of Mother’s Merrill-Lynch portfolio.

  “Sure, but I didn’t know how it was performing.”

  Apparently it was performing well, because the gifts were lavish.

  Around this time, Bingo was admitted to Smith College. Rose brought the great news, along with Bingo, to Mother and mentioned that the first year’s tuition would be forty grand.

  “Play something for Grammy,” Rose said.

  Bingo played “Climb Every Mountain” on her harmonica, and went home with a check.

  How did I know this? Because Mother told Fred how badly Bingo played the harmonica, that she—Mother—had to force herself not to laugh at the farce of it all, and how proud Rose was of the tuneless blowing. Mother mocked Bingo’s seriousness and jeered at the high cost of Smith College. And in a stage whisper she intended everyone to hear, Mother mentioned that she’d given Bingo “a little something,” which she muttered was a few thousand dollars. Take that!

  So, even in her generosity, in her role as matriarch, Mother was disloyal. This disloyalty extended even to herself, for she was by nature frugal, not to say miserly. She still clipped coupons, and had never lost the habit of buying day-old bread and bruised fruit and dented cans, or the ten-cent mystery cans that sat shining in the bargain basket, their labels torn off. She pounced on the cereal boxes with the cut-open ends, the taped-up packages of pasta, the tray of pork chops that was past its sell-by date. It was in her nature to look for a bargain, despite the risk of eating spoiled food. Handing over money was contrary to her nature, for it was her settled belief that it was wrong to give someone something for nothing.

  She was a canny and secretive woman, much of whose life as a mother was lived in solitary consultation with one child and then another; she was a full-time study. And it sometimes seemed—it must seem so in this narrative—that I did nothing else but watch the movements, the stratagems, the passive aggression of my antagonistic family.