by Paul Theroux
The source of most of the pitiless whispers was Mother. Crashing a BMW was what happened when you had money to burn. It was your own goddamned fault. If you broke your ankle skiing, it was something you’d asked for—after all, the rest of us were working while you were on the slopes. Hubby’s dog died, sending Mother into giggles of glee as she mimicked his grief. Like most pet haters, Mother was a penny pincher. What on earth are they for? “Do you think he’ll cry like that when I die? I doubt it. A dog!”
Mother was at the center of all this bad news, because she competed with these misfortunes for attention. By spinning the news, turning tragedy into farce, she could stay in control. Her attitude had been established a decade back when, after Dad died, our grieving for him implied we were being disloyal to her. More than anything, a misfortune proved our weakness, our moral faults, our inferiority; misfortune put us in our place. Mother’s was a primitive, fatalistic view of life: bad things happened to bad people.
I did not need a psychiatrist to explain to me that there were dark reasons for Mother to stew in this ill will. She was weak, her self-esteem was low, she needed attention. But that was a determination on a cerebral level—Mother as a Case, Mother as a Study in Tyranny, Mother’s power politics in the dynamics of the family. Living in the misery of Mother Land, I was seldom able to summon the rationality that would allow me to be objective about this unhappy woman. Crowded and mocked by all these conspirators, I reacted in passionate and petty ways, always competing, and often delighting like Mother in someone’s downfall. We embodied the spirit of the rabble, a mob instinct, destructive and envious in a world where no one was to be trusted or praised, where the dominant craving was the desire to get even.
“Every dog has his day,” Mother used to say, one of her favorite proverbs. She often said it while looking out the window—raindrops spattering the glass, the sky brown, the trees black, a smell of decay raised by the rain. The saying had once summarized for me a spirit of hope. But as the years passed and Mother repeated it, I saw it as a sinister promise, a piece of brutish wisdom, something like revenge, in a wilderness of baying hounds.
“I guess Rose is going to have to work a little bit harder,” Mother was saying to me. She had risen from the sofa and was rattling plastic bags and prying open the tops of Tupperware containers in the kitchen. “Maybe I can fix you something for lunch. Here’s some ravioli Rose brought me when she told me the news.”
Because this was just a few weeks after Father’s memorial mass, the bad news was welcome, a little gift to remind Mother of someone else’s misery, meant to revive her and make her feel better.
Widening her eyes, pretending innocence, Mother said, “I understand Walter’s going to be a consultant.” She ridiculed the word by pausing and uttering it in a tone of disbelief. All new words sounded like lame excuses to her. “Does that mean he’s been fired?”
Walter’s becoming a consultant meant that Rose was even more dependent on her for support. She would need to be more loyal, more grateful, more careful. A messiah loves a broken family—Jesus and Mao and Jim Jones were family-haters. Follow me, they said. Leave your family behind, they said. It was all in Matthew: I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a son’s wife against her mother-in-law; and a man will find enemies under his own roof. And so did Mother.
I left with a bag of Mother’s hermits and three “church window” cookies. With a younger brother’s glee, like a sweaty boy, panting and simple, with the wicked satisfaction of having a juicy piece of news, I hurried to Floyd’s house. I wanted to tell him I’d seen another big payment to Rose. The news was my gift to him. Mother was buying favors—that was the pretext. But in my heart the pettiness of this fuss made me feel young. The return to childhood had its annoyances but also its pleasures. Even the story of my embarrassment was entertaining.
“Guess what?”
“The second-story man,” Floyd said blandly, motioning me to a rocker on his porch.
“What do you mean?”
“The cat burglar,” he said. “Mr. Sneaky. Light-fingered Larry. Raffles, the amateur cracksman.”
I was smiling. How could he possibly know this? He read the question on my face and leaned against the porch railing with his arms folded.
“Creepy-crawling your poor old ma. She just called and told me. She said everyone is scandalized.”
A ten-minute drive from Mother’s to Floyd’s: in that time she’d apparently called the other children to denounce me for snooping in her house, suggesting I’d taken some of her valuables.
“Ripping off your mother!” Floyd laughed. “She caught you red-handed. You’ve lost your touch, buddy-boy.”
“You could have come along.”
“To purloin Ma’s property?” he said. “Excuse me, I have more important things to do than mugging an old lady.”
I was grinning, rocking on my heels like a teenager. What was more enjoyable than spending a sunny day in the supreme violation of breaking into your mother’s house and robbing her—sifting through her records, weighing her artifacts and mementos, and lolling on her throne-like chair with your muddy feet on her coffee table. It was never too late to be a juvenile delinquent.
“It was fun,” I said.
“Some of us are adults,” he said, affecting haughtiness. “Did you get anything good?”
“As you once acerbically pointed out, there’s nothing left in the house to steal.”
42
Bad News
Probably in all families—certainly in the doomed clans of Mother Land—there comes a point when no more good news is possible. It is all ill tidings. People get older, they fail, they get fired, they go broke, they stop aspiring, they cheat. Time passing means that things get worse (one of Mother’s notions, which we all came to believe): people fall ill, they weaken, they stink, they die.
So a family crumbles, but in stages, falling like a stand of trees in a forest with its roots in thin soil, like the pitch pines on the Cape rooted in loose sand. The trees don’t go all at once. They fall one by one, from rot, from infestation by bore beetles, from wind, from the undermining of the rising sea, from being too tall or the wrong shape. They snap, they topple, they sometimes knock each other down, and finally they’re all gone. You might discern seedlings, delicate as houseplants, sprouting in the mess of needles and decayed splinters, but it will be decades before they will climb to a stand, and it is a certainty that they will fall too, for even as they rise, they are weakening.
No one gets healthier, no one grows stronger. Our mortality pursues us, our vices overtake us—smoking and drinking and telling lies. Time itself pulls us apart. The family crumbles slowly. It crumbles in installments, but it crumbles.
Hubby was diagnosed with high blood pressure and was put on sick leave. Mother hooted at the irony of a hospital worker, toiling among the healers and pills, becoming ill. “He eats too much,” she said. “He eats the wrong food.” It had to be his own fault.
“One in twenty people who check into a hospital catch a hospital-related illness,” Hubby said. “Hospitals are unhealthy places—everyone knows that.”
“Did you catch high blood pressure?” I asked.
“Very funny,” Hubby said. “Ma says it’s a blessing in disguise. I need to slow down and put my house in order. It’s kind of a wake-up call. I think she’s right.”
As though competing in these illness stakes, and craving attention, Marvin developed a tummy ache he claimed was a bleeding ulcer.
“Stress,” Mother said, cackling at the word—for her one of the new bogus ones—and laughing at the contradiction, for how was it possible to have been stressed in such a simple job as mall cop, circling the benches between Mrs. Fields cookies and Dunkin’ Donuts? Mother reminded us that she was ninety-four years old, was taking no medicine at all, walked up and down her street every afternoon, and was healthy—“No complaints.”
She called me one evening to report that Fred had
had a stroke. She sounded certain of the fact, yet somewhat bewildered about the reasons for it. “Apparently, he’d been traveling. China. He got home and was reading the paper. Erma heard him say, ‘I feel funny.’ One whole side of his body was seizing up and he went all feverish. He was rushed to Emergency. They’re doing tests.”
Her story was precise. By the time she called me, she had probably called five or six others, so she sounded practiced. But what did it all mean? You could not be ill without somehow asking for it—sickness in the family indicated a moral fault. What had Fred done to deserve it?
Lately Fred had been a nag, blaming Floyd and me for stirring up trouble by demanding to know which of the children were getting payouts from Mother, and how much, and why.
“Can’t you just let the matter rest?” he’d said in an email, repeating, “Ma can do whatever she wants with her money.”
Really? Here was a woman in her mid-nineties who might very well need the money to pay for round-the-clock nursing or assisted living. She would not be living alone and reading books and making phone calls and going for walks much longer.
“It upsets her to know that her judgment is being questioned,” Fred went on—same email. “She’s frail, she’s forgetful. She gets confused. You should show some compassion.”
I replied saying that someone who was frail and confused at ninety-four should not be handing out checks willy-nilly. There was a contradiction here: either she was feeble and needed guidance, or she was hearty and could do what she wanted. But Fred was no help. This was another example of his lawyer’s ability to hold two opposite views in his head at the same time, and argue them convincingly without believing in either of them.
Now he was in Cape Cod Hospital’s intensive care unit, attached to plastic tubes, one of his hands (so Mother said) “like a dead paw.”
Mother was angry. She could not rationalize the illness of a favored son, her eldest. She blamed his work, his travel, his diet, his wife, his children, his dogs.
“It’s just not fair,” she said to me. I took this to mean that she felt he’d abandoned her: his sickness was a form of disloyalty. Bad things happened to bad people, and also, if he’d really loved Mother, he would not have had the stroke.
Floyd said, “The big explainer! The big moralizer! Look at him now, drooling into his pillow, snatching at the air, crying ‘More light!’ Where is his indirection now? Stroke! I like that. He has been struck down.”
Hubby said, “I heard he’s having trouble swallowing, and they might have to put a grommet in his abdominal wall and do a gastrostomy—hook him up to a feeding tube.”
His tone was horrified satisfaction, gloating at the prospect of the eldest brother kept alive and immobile by a set of pipes feeding him goop. As a nurse, Hubby became important as an interpreter of the science behind the feeding tube.
“I visited Fred today,” Mother said. “He was a wreck.”
She was not moved to pity by the sight of her son lying in intensive care; she felt superior and stronger. She was prepared to release him, for, in a way, he was being sacrificed. He had been Mother’s ally and counselor, and so the stroke was perhaps the result of his effort at being tenaciously loyal. Enduring the stroke was something he’d done for Mother.
“He was lying there,” she said. “He just looked at me with those glassy eyes. He couldn’t speak, but I knew what he wanted to say. ‘Thank you, Mother. Thank you.’ He was letting go.”
We all visited Fred, for the novelty of seeing this once-powerful deputy of Mother’s in his sickbed. We went separately, in the family fashion, and insincerely paid our respects. Fred was rigid, looked broken and beat up. He was wordless apart from a few protesting groans. I listened with satisfaction to the bubbling in his tubes, which resembled the sound of the aerator in a fish tank.
His doctor visited while I was seated, watching. I asked the doctor the obvious question.
“These things are to be expected at his age,” the doctor said.
“He’s only seventy-something,” I said.
“He’s getting on.”
Mother visited Fred often and always returned home revitalized—more phone calls, more baked hermits, more walks up and down the street. His sickness made Mother healthier, boastfully so.
“Hubby explained what an angioplasty is,” she said to me, “but what is a stent? Hubby just confuses me.”
I explained the little I knew of the procedure.
“They did that to Fred yesterday,” she said and, sounding rueful, added, “It seems to be working.”
Eventually, Fred recovered much of his strength, though one arm remained slack. He learned to walk, but he tended to shuffle. He was soon disparaging me again, and ridiculing Hubby for his explanations and for conferring with Mother. He’d had a near-death experience, always revealing, for it is only at such times that you find out what people really think of you. He’d discovered that we were joking about his condition in whispers—no sympathy at all.
“We almost had another saint in the family,” Floyd said.
I told him what the doctor had said about Fred’s age, a little over seventy and susceptible. “He’s getting on.” It was a reminder—we seldom had them—of how old Mother was, and not just old but, it seemed, everlasting.
43
Best Man
I was nagged by a memory of something that had happened earlier at Floyd’s. It was the day of my break-in at Mother’s when I had discovered her corpse twisted on her sofa, and then she had awakened from the dead. (“What are you doing here?”) I had hurried to Floyd’s, but Mother had already called him to report that she had caught me in her house, that I was a burglar.
Two things interested me about the visit to Floyd’s, though they did not come to mind until much later. They were powerful afterthoughts.
Floyd was clean-shaven, his wild hair had been combed, he was wearing a seersucker suit. Normally he was scruffy, unshaven, wearing a Red Sox shirt, sometimes with a hat on in his house. Absorbed in his work, if he didn’t have a class to teach, he might not bathe or change his clothes for days—weeks, even. His tidiness was always a sign of happiness or at least contentment.
And I sensed he was not alone. It was not knowledge on my part, just an impression, a clutch of details, a vagrant surmise. The seersucker suit was not unusual. But with the suit he was wearing zoris—Japanese sandals. An extended residence in Japan, teaching English, researching the life of Lafcadio Hearn, and learning to compose haiku verses, had given Floyd some Japanese habits he’d never shed. Eating sushi and collecting ukiyo-e woodblock prints and netsuke were some of his loves, and a sign at his door instructed visitors to remove their shoes before entering.
On that visit, when he had said, “Creepy-crawling your poor old ma,” we had been standing on the porch by his back door, where I had casually recorded in my mind as a contrasting image, next to Floyd’s big muddy boots, a tiny pair of shoes and an almost toy-sized pair of sky-blue boots, like a child’s fanciful footwear. Afterward, remembering these diminutive shoes and boots, I concluded that their owner was in the house. That was why—though I failed to question it at the time—Floyd didn’t invite me inside, as he normally did. In hindsight, I was sure of it. Who was she?
I had not seen much of Floyd during Fred’s health crisis. This was odd, and unlike him. We were not close friends now, but we were allies, and in this family being an ally mattered more than being a brother. I enjoyed hearing Floyd’s rants about the other siblings—he could howl for hours on the subject of duplicitous greed. “Double-dipping! Fawning over Ma! Trollops!” He had briefly gloated over Fred’s stroke. He’d done a cruelly accurate imitation of hemiplegia, limping, drooling, gargling when he tried to speak, one arm swinging loosely, one side of his mouth drawn down. Floyd could be hilarious in his cruelty, but this time he was more perfunctory.
I had wanted more, because his merciless satire was cathartic. But Floyd was elsewhere—or rather, as I now realized, he was home, but
keeping to himself. And he was not alone.
Floyd had a history with women. Like me, he had been married and divorced twice, but neither wife had produced a child. His divorces figured in his poems; he saw his poetry as both a scourge and an expiation, even as a kind of voodoo that would destroy the women. He was infuriated when that did not happen, when the women became well known and somewhat in demand as minor celebrities for nothing more than being Floyd’s ex-wives. That was to be expected about women whom he’d depicted with such venomous brilliance. “I’ve been cozened!” he’d cry.
Yet women went on adoring him. He was charming, he could be funny. He had a succession of girlfriends. But with wives and girlfriends always the spell was eventually broken. Floyd blamed the woman. “She has a vocabulary of fifty words!” Women were necessities who became superfluous and ultimately obstacles.
“Sonny Barger was right. He of the Hells Angels. Women—can’t live with ’em, can’t use their bones for soup.” But the reality was that Floyd needed privacy to write, and he wrote all the time.
Privacy was a theme in the family. Perhaps it is a theme in all big families. Mother’s gruesome relief at Father’s death could be ascribed to her selfish satisfaction in having the whole house to herself. She hated houseguests; she disliked staying with any of us.
She wouldn’t share—none of us shared. Nothing was more infuriating than the rap at the bathroom door. “Hurry up!” Our need for privacy had made us solitary people—at last, after a childhood of bunk beds and hand-me-downs, we had a place of our own, so any visitor was a potential violation.
Floyd’s new woman friend living under his roof was a departure from his need for solitude. Maybe in such a turbulent family he needed an ally. But an ally was not a fiancée. You married a woman to stop her getting away, he’d recite. Now she’s there all day. He claimed that he had written those lines. Was he testing me? The women inevitably left. He claimed they’d abandoned him, but the truth was that he had driven them out with his moods, his silences, his speeches, his absences. He always wailed that he was alone, but in his heart he was relieved that they’d gone.