Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  Mocking the daughters was a dodge. I knew that now. It was Mother’s way of disguising the fact that she was still regularly writing checks to them, for small and big amounts. Mother’s reasoning—transparent to me—was: If I’m rude about them, no one will suspect that I’m giving them money for attending to me. I knew that Franny and Rose’s position was secure as Mother’s favorite visitors.

  But here was a further subtlety: I really did not know whether Mother was actually concealing her gifts or whether she was only pretending to conceal them. She was so shrewd that either could have been the case. She had me fooled—Floyd, too. He had kept current with her handouts, but in his romantic bliss with Didi, whoever she might be, he’d stopped caring about the outflow of money.

  Sunday belonged to Franny and Rose. None of us wanted to bump into them, so we stayed away. Hubby visited on Saturday. Gilbert stayed for a few days at a time when he was back in the States. Fred made a point of taking Mother out to eat, the sort of dinner date that Mother loved. These outings were less for the dinners than for the doggy bags that Mother appealed for. Floyd visited now and then—a few times a month. I dropped in on the days I visited Father’s grave—Oak Grove was not far from Mother’s house. I say “Mother’s house,” but of course the house had been deeded to Franny and Marvin.

  I was reminded that the house was Franny’s on the occasions when Mother pointed out that she had ordered new carpets, a new stove, a skylight in the living room, a new brick walkway—all the improvements that Franny egged her on to make, so that she could enjoy them when Mother herself was in Oak Grove.

  I, who had prided myself on my clear-sightedness, was confused. It was never completely clear to me if Mother was manipulating those of us she was giving money to, or were these people manipulating her? I looked for a villain. But it was Mother’s genius that she could seem both tyrant and victim, oppressor and oppressed.

  This was the confusion, the tang of blood in the air, that made us vipers. In the past we had been covert, resorting to casual abuse and whispering, happy that what we said would be reported back, as in the times when I’d heard, “Fred thinks you’re pompous,” “Franny said you’re so cheap all you eat are Japanese noodles,” “Hubby says you put him to work every time you see him—he’s sick of being your handyman,” “Floyd says you’re competitive,” “Rose says you’re angry,” that sort of thing (these were aimed at me), all of it secondhand and specious, and deniable.

  “I never said that,” Franny would protest to me. “You’re the most generous one in the family”—compounding her lies.

  But we changed. We were older. We had nothing to gain by pretending to be polite. We turned from a whispering hypocritical family into an openly abusive one.

  “Why am I not entering this house?” Floyd called through the door, seeing that Fred was seated in a chair next to Mother. “Because I deprecate you. I have no fondness at all for you. Because you are a sententious bore.”

  “What was that?” Mother said. Her hearing was at last failing.

  Hubby went out of his way to remind Rose’s kids that their dog had been run over by a FedEx truck.

  “Where’s Wags?” he asked, and their eyes filled with tears. “Oh, that’s right. Wags is roadkill.”

  This was at the Stop and Shop. Rose turned on him and cried, “You asshole!”

  We became those people you sometimes see embarrassing themselves in public places: the sudden yell, the clash of supermarket carts, the red faces on the sidewalk, the slammed door. Our public displays were more common these days because it was only in public that we met—at the movies, at the beach, at the dump, or at Father’s grave.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked Franny at Oak Grove, and I ridiculed her for her pathetic pot of wilted, sour-smelling marigolds.

  Rose saw me crossing the main street of Osterville as she was driving by. She speeded past me, saying, “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “Up yours,” I said when I saw who it was.

  “Watch it, fella,” an old man said, frowning at me.

  “She almost ran me down,” I said to him. “I’ve got the right of way.”

  But how could that nice old man have known that the two foulmouthed people were not an impatient motorist and a jaywalker, but a brother and sister. And a bigger shock was that I had not recognized her at first. The person I saw was a gray-haired old lady, her head sunk into her shoulders, screaming at me, showing her discolored teeth. Rose!

  Franny wrote me a message on the back of a greeting card with the salutation, Thinking of You. The big loopy letters of her first-grade teacher’s handwriting said, I pray for you because your soul is black. If you died right now in your state of Mortal Sin you’d go to Hell.

  Both sisters hounded Hubby and, as takers often do, complained of his greed.

  Fred had a cookout for some clients. He invited Mother. In what seemed a new ploy, to encumber him, Mother said, “Is Rose welcome? She was going to visit me today.”

  So Fred invited Rose, and midway through the meal Rose accused Fred of being bossy and abusive. She was an ill-tempered person whose way of expressing it was to put her furious face into someone else’s and say, “You’re really angry.”

  This was calculated to enrage whomever she said it to, and getting this reaction she’d say, “See? Listen to yourself.”

  The cookout at Fred’s ended with Rose sitting in her car, in tears, her terrified children beside her—and they were much older now, Bingo in college, Benno a senior in high school. When Fred tried to console her, she screamed, “There’s something wrong with you!”

  Mother was sitting beside Fred’s pool, out of earshot, sipping water and saying to one of Fred’s guests, “I don’t take any medication at all. ‘What are you awn?’ people ask me. I’m not awn anything.”

  We tormented each other’s children and made a point of mentioning their lapses—shoplifting, vandalism, failures at school. Jake would never live down the fact that he had once eaten a Styrofoam cup, and the defining episode in Jonty’s life was his kicking out the windshield of the Dodge Dart. Floyd said to me in passing, “Do your kids still have those phony British accents?” and he sent Fred a postcard, a view of Woods Hole, with the message, Your children hate you.

  And yet, when I dropped in on Mother, she’d say, “Have you seen Rose?” or “Franny was asking about you,” or “Hubby made some new window boxes for me,” as though this was a big happy family, the harmonious fiction that Mother always maintained as fact.

  I was at her house one afternoon. The phone rang. Mother answered it, said “Yes,” then hung up.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Franny. She always calls at this time.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She asked me if I had company.”

  She moved us around like chess pieces, and we allowed ourselves to be moved. We did the same, moved each other around.

  Floyd said to me, “Fred once took me to Mexico. He used his frequent flyer miles, though he led me to believe he was paying. At the end of the trip I thanked him and said I’d love to repay him. Without missing a beat he asked me for my Harper’s Ferry flintlock. Fool that I am, I gave it to him. He’s a pea-and-thimble man! I was blindsided.”

  Hubby remembered slights from years back, as when he was a twelve-year-old playing “My Grandfather’s Clock” on his cello and hitting the wrong notes, and we watched and listened, trying to contain our laughter, with shaking shoulders.

  Franny and Rose claimed that someone in the family (“And we know who he is”) had vandalized their houses—tipped over garden statuary, stolen flowers, swiped important letters from the mail cans.

  After that, Floyd, who trolled for rare books on the Internet, sent me a printout listing ten books by me that Rose and Walter had sold to a book dealer in New York. They were described as “highly collectible association copies.” All were first editions, all inscribed To Rose and Walter, with love, Jay—tokens of Chri
stmas, birthdays, family gatherings. They were priced in the thousands. When someone is selling a book you’ve inscribed to them, a message is being sent. It may seem a small matter, just a book after all, but it cuts deep—the book more valuable because of the fond or loving inscription, the recipient a sister and brother-in-law, the reminder of the circumstances. The books were not memories of happy days, only part of the pretense of them, and the inscription was proof of the pretense, for the fact was that I was no more sincere in giving the book than they were in receiving it. Now it was an expensive artifact, surviving from an earlier time, representing a false emotion.

  “Treachery,” Floyd said, and because he mentioned it to Mother, the next time I saw her she told me, with characteristic guile, how much Rose loved me and my work.

  “But she sold my books, the ones I gave to her and Walter.”

  “I would never do a thing like that,” Mother said.

  “I didn’t say you would. But Rose did.”

  “I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

  “They’re in a catalogue. Floyd showed me.”

  “You know how Floyd is.”

  “I saw the books listed. My name was there.”

  Mother went vague. She adjusted her glasses, rocked her body a little. She said, “I don’t know anything about it.”

  “That’s why I’m telling you,” I said.

  “Why are you shouting?”

  “I’m annoyed because they sold my books for a lot of money.”

  It was a mistake to solicit sympathy: Mother had none. But the word “money” got Mother’s attention.

  “How much?” she asked.

  “Thousands.”

  That made her laugh. She knew I was exaggerating, if not lying. No book was worth that, none had ever been sold for that amount. For all her knowingness, she was, like many queens, isolated and innocent of much of the world, especially the world of modern first editions.

  “I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding,” she said. “They’re coming over tomorrow. Do you want to join us for a little bite?”

  Mother claimed to be forgetful. She really did seem forgetful. Or was she purposely leaving the gas on and the faucet running? She was so completely credible in her vagueness that I was almost sure it was an act. I say “almost.” I had no idea what was lurking in her mind.

  “I won’t be there,” I said.

  “Rose will be so disappointed.”

  This left me gaping at her. I said, “She sold my books. She calls me names. She hates me.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Mother said. “The first lesson I taught my children was that they must love each other. That’s the most important lesson of all. ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’ Jesus said. If there’s no love in a family, why, where would we be?”

  40

  Mottle Sin

  That was when I learned that weather is memory. That even the wind matters. That you don’t need a calendar to remind you of anniversaries. You smell them, you feel them on your skin, you taste them. If you go on living in the same place year after year the weather begins to take on meanings; it is weighted with omens, and the temperature, the light, the trees and leaves, evoke emotions. The whole venerating world turns on this principle of weather-sniffing familiarity: all such pieties have their origin in a season, on a particular day. It had been a warm fragrant morning in May when Father was buried.

  So there was something primitive in the way we stood in the parking lot of St. Joe’s Catholic Church on Station Avenue—all of us, heavier, older, none of us making eye contact. It was the month, it was the day, it was the morning, it was the very weather of ten years before, when we had gathered for Father’s funeral: the same heat, the same light, the same smells of damp earth and fresh leaves. May thirtieth—the pungency of new warmth on the rain-sodden turf of spring, the rising sourness of sun-cooked and crumbled dirt, the whiff of pine duff and the sting of leaf mold ripening into mulch, the suggestion of wet roots and swelling bulbs pricking through the wet earth, the earliest flowers—daffodils, jonquils, azaleas, the big rosy buds of rhododendrons, heavy yellow forsythia, the sweetness of white viburnum.

  Even Mother felt it. “My favorite flower.” And she added to test us, “Do you remember my favorite?” Before anyone could supply the right answer, she said, “Magnolia.”

  We all agreed in a reluctant murmur, a chorus of muffled moos. The grudging tone of this owed much to the fact that while each of us wanted to be at the church, for Father’s sake, to honor his memory, we did not want to be together.

  “I’d like all of us to be there,” Mother said when she told us individually of her plan. “As a family.”

  At the lowest, most savage mood of this family, the nastiest and most corrosive I had known—“You asshole,” “You shithead,” “You fat greedy fuck,” all that—Mother announced that she had paid for a memorial high mass to be said for Father and that we were expected to be there on our knees.

  “It’s for the repose of his soul,” Mother said, using the church’s formula.

  Floyd remarked on the medieval practice of buying a church service, paying for prayers.

  “Selling indulgences,” he said. “Paying money to get redemption—it’s what Luther objected to. ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ And here it is again, coin to gain advancement. Look!”

  He turned me around to face the sidewalk where two people were carrying signs, jerking them up and down to call attention to the messages. One sign said, Reclaim Our Church, the other, Punish the Pedophile Priests. Near them on the lawn some other people were kneeling, saying the rosary.

  “It’s kinda bad taste,” Franny said to no one in particular. “That’s what I think.”

  “Would you say that if a priest had sodomized Jonty when he was twelve?” Hubby said. “ ’Cause that’s what they were doing, nailing twelve-year-old boys on camping trips.”

  Fred rolled his eyes and put his arm around Mother.

  The scandal had been reported in the Cape Cod Times—disturbed, wild-haired men coming forward to claim they had been fondled and raped by homosexual priests in Boston twenty and thirty years ago. The lawsuits and accusations had divided the church; the Boston cardinal had protected the priests—indeed, had sent them to new parishes, where they abused more boys. Some priests had recently been sent to prison, others were soon to stand trial. The lawsuits demanded millions—so much money that the diocese had begun to close churches, anticipating the huge payout.

  “Shanley’s in Provincetown,” Floyd said. “In our very midst.”

  The recently arrested Father Shanley was one of the accused pedophile priests, out on bail, awaiting trial, living in the gay enclave on the lower Cape. While still a priest, he had been a charter member of the North American Man/Boy Love Association.

  “Maybe he’s saying mass today,” Hubby said.

  “He’s been defrocked,” I said.

  “After defrocking all those little boys.”

  “I think he was frocking them,” Hubby said.

  “Keep it down,” Rose said.

  “You’re disgusting,” Franny said.

  “That’s right, criticize me. Don’t say anything about the pervert priests.”

  Our shrillness exaggerated our frailty and our age. Arguing, growing wheezy with anger, we seemed older and crueler, and our ill temper suggested weakness.

  And we did look old. I had been shocked by the sight of the crone in the car in Osterville, screaming out the window at me—Rose. But Franny was a crone too, Fred was an old coot, Floyd was almost wholly bald, and Hubby had a tonsure. Gilbert had a paunch. I was balding and fatter. No one was more undignified than a foulmouthed oldster.

  Only Mother was unchanged. She was a stick figure but seemed indestructible. At ninety-three, she looked no older than she had ten years before at the funeral. She was standing with her arms folded, her big Sunday handbag hanging from one arm, at the center of our family group. We were still shuffling like penguins in the parking
lot.

  “I think we should go in,” she said. “I’ve reserved a special pew for us up front. Who’s that?”

  It was Charlie, hurrying toward us from his car.

  “Charlie,” I said.

  Mother said, “Who’s Charlie?”

  “My son—one of them.”

  “Oh, that’s right, I remember,” Mother said.

  “Hope I’m not late,” Charlie said.

  “I can feel Angela here,” Mother said. “Her presence. She’s speaking to me. She’s grieving for Dad. Would anyone like to say anything to her? I can pass on the message.”

  Mother, assuming the role of sibyl and go-between, was speaking loudly, attracting the attention of other people who’d already taken their seats. It struck me that Mother intended to make a spectacle of our entrance into the church, our procession down the main aisle, Mother and her seven children, like Snow White and the dwarfs.

  “She says she’s happy that we’re all together, in harmony,” Mother said, looking left and right. “As a family.”

  Fred walked on one side of her, turtle-headed, looking ill. Franny and Rose jostled on the other side. Hubby was behind them, walking alone, next came Gilbert and me, and finally Floyd. Charlie and the grandchildren and the spouses were far to the rear. Perhaps the people in the church saw us as the exemplary family Mother wished them to see—the many offspring supporting their aged, widowed mother in her mourning. Perhaps they did not see what I felt profoundly, that we were old and mean, ugly children with their aged mother, committing sacrilege by pretending to pray.

  Father would have been uncomfortable with the charade, the paid-for mass, the expensive flowers, the procession, the pomp, the show of fake solidarity, the appeal to Angela. He would have crept through a side door, sat in the back, and expressed himself with full-throated singing, his favorite hymns, or kneeling with closed eyes, in prayer.