by Paul Theroux
“Put your chopsticks down,” Harry said, “and let’s join hands.”
We held hands, our arms extended across the table.
Harry said, “Grandma is a hundred years old. The statute of limitations on family rancor has run out. Repeat after me. ‘All is forgiven. No more rancor. Right thought, right action.’”
“Are you a Buddhist now?”
“Repeat it, please.”
“All is forgiven. No more rancor,” I said. “Right thought, right action.”
They held on to me, tugging slightly, longer than I expected, long enough for the words to sink in, for me to be ashamed of my casual abuse and lingering resentment.
“Now, for God’s sake let’s talk about something else,” Julian said. “One more story about Grandma and I’m getting the next plane home.”
What they had said was true: she was an idol, small and shriveled and yellowish, but looking indestructible, with bright eyes, a solemn expression, and a dusty glow. She sat between Fred and Gilbert, her favorites. Freud was right about that: a mother’s favorite child was usually a conqueror, triumphant in life. An empty chair next to Gilbert—Angela’s, in her memory. Franny and Rose at adjacent tables, with glum Walter, and children. Jonty’s two, the great-grandchildren, ran among the tables, yapping like puppies. There was Jonty’s brother Max, whom I had not seen since he was a playing card in the ballet Alice in Wonderland, a skulking wife in tow. Four generations at the Oyster Bed, decorated today with a hundred roses and a hundred cupcakes, sent by Mother’s well-wishers, the Ohlendorfs.
I sat down with Julian and Harry, and Charlie joined us, saying to Julian, “Hey, bro,” and they fist-bumped, and I reminded myself that Charlie was nearing fifty.
With Harry’s mantra of compassion in mind, I was less happy than detached. I looked at everyone closely and saw, not siblings or cousins and near relations, but characters, faintly fictional, as though they were strenuously auditioning for a part in something I might write.
That was how my brothers and sisters seemed to me—fixed and fictional, vaguely menacing, as comic characters often are, unpredictable, and because of that unreliable, always posing a threat, conveying through the subtlest gestures and nuances of speech and bad jokes that they were antagonists. Their claims of reassurance were never a consolation. I took them as an excess of insincerity. The most menacing sentence an isolated person could hear from someone nearby was I’m not going to hurt you. You think: That had not occurred to me, but now I’m worried.
Now, with this detachment, seeing them as characters, I watched them at the birthday party like puppets in a play—Gilbert on Mother’s right, Fred on her left, and the rest of us at greater distances. I sat in a far-off booth jammed between Julian and the wall, Charlie and Harry opposite.
“Grandma looks happy,” Julian said.
“Yes,” and I thought, Not merely happy but triumphant.
My children were right—she’d outlived the whole family, she’d outlasted all her friends, and if she’d had enemies, she’d buried them too. Of her generation, only she was left standing. All the others were gone, and so she remained, like a silent emissary from the distant past.
Of the others, what could one say? Her rivalrous children didn’t count, but a new generation was obvious in the room—the grandchildren, the cousins, all of them much bigger and bulkier than I remembered, Bingo with a fiancé, Benno with a beard. Jonty announced that he had a public relations company; Fred’s son Jake, who had once seemed troubled and hopeless, was a successful computer programmer and had a newborn son, whom he displayed like a ham, and the child looked scalded, as infants do. I thought of them as they’d been: the juggler, the harmonica player, the screechy brat, the boy who’d left footprints on the wall of my dining room, the one who’d eaten a Styrofoam cup. But they were grown now, they had jobs, some were married, and though still wary of their weird uncles and aunts, they seemed content.
A new generation to displace the one above them. All of us were Mother’s subjects, but some had suffered more than others. For these younger ones in the birthday room, knowing little of the fanatic heart of the family, there was a measure of hope. They hadn’t suffered at all—to them, Mother was a noble soul who could always be relied upon, the embodiment of sympathy and generosity, baker of church-window cookies, knitter of scarves and afghans, carver of birds, head of the family, defender of the faith. Empress of Mother Land.
For the duration of Mother’s hundredth an unspoken truce was observed—no wisecracks, no casual abuse, no tasteless jokes—and this made for a dullness that seemed interminable. Oh, for a bitchy remark or a low blow. I also thought, So this was the prevailing atmosphere of families who got along, a mood of tedium and forbearance and Christian charity. How awful. But I kept my vow from the night before: all is forgiven, no more rancor. The vow did not inspire any sweetness, only an alien sense of sanctimony, of slight fraudulence, and a leaden quality of patience. No matter who you are or what you say, I will retain this moronic half-smile and this heavy-lidded gaze.
An insistent tapping on a water glass silenced the room. Gilbert had risen, and as he shuffled some papers, Fred shushed Hubby, who had been giggling over a story.
“Thank you all for being here,” Gilbert said. “With your permission —”
“Denied,” Floyd called out.
“—I’d like to remind you of what this woman has witnessed so far in her life. When Mother was born, William Howard Taft was president. At three hundred and forty pounds, Taft was the very definition of love handles. She has seen sixteen presidents come and go since then. Fenway Park was being built that same year, and the Titanic sank soon after, the Lusitania a few years later. Orville Wright flew a plane for nine minutes, a world record, the year of her birth. Consider that feat and then consider that this woman witnessed the moon landing and rockets to Mars.”
“It’s one small step for a man,” Hubby intoned.
“Two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The murder of Rasputin in Petrograd, and fifty years later Martin Luther King in Memphis.”
“Is there a connection?” someone said loudly.
But Gilbert persevered, through Fatty Arbuckle, Prohibition, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Crash of ’29, Pearl Harbor, Elvis, the Beatles, and the Internet.
“Mother’s century can be called the greatest, most meaningful in history.”
“The Renaissance was a blip compared to it,” Floyd said.
“It was a century of modernization and great change,” Gilbert said, batting away the interjections with his free hand. “But some things did not change—Mother’s humanity, her kindness, her generosity, her love for her family. Ladies and gentlemen, let us raise a toast—to Mother.”
“To Mother!” came the cry.
The celebrants crowded forward to congratulate Mother, to gush, to grope for her hands, to be remembered, to ask for her blessing.
The contrast between Mother and these people was remarkable. She did not resemble anyone else in the room. We were hairy, pale, misshapen. In a strange sense most of us looked older than Mother as we shuffled among the tables, bumping shoulders, stepping on each other’s toes; we were fleshy and overgrown. Mother was smaller than ever, bird-boned, bright-eyed, narrow-shouldered, physically unlike the others, in many respects healthier, with the old glow of the little yellow goddess, all of us murmuring our thanks and saying goodbye as if we were doomed and departing but Mother wasn’t going anywhere.
We were broken, Mother was whole—that was apparent. At least half the people in the room were strangers to me, either relatives I’d never seen or heard about, or else distant acquaintances.
“Your mother is a marvel,” one of them said, a middle-aged woman whose name rang no bells.
That was the chorus: Mother is amazing! Lordy, how does she do it? What a lovely family! And with my new detachment I began to think so too. It wasn’t a question of forgiving tran
sgressions or forgetting slights and hurts. These were irrelevant now. Mother had done her work; she had formed us, and therefore did not need to exert any power over us. She had what she wanted. Mother, who had no profound capacity for happiness, who was consistent in her ritual of telling us how we’d fallen short, seemed happier that day than I had ever seen her. Her satisfaction showed in her silence. She sat wordlessly acknowledging the praise of the partygoers, accepting their presents, quite formal, looking superior to everyone—indeed, most of those who approached her for her blessing looked fumbling and inadequate, needing her attention but not quite sure how to seize it. Mother perhaps suspected this uneasiness, and it gave her greater strength—power over them, over us.
She grew ever more regal at her table, now and then whispering to Gilbert or Fred. I knew from my time spent in Africa how the most powerful chiefs never spoke, never addressed a crowd, hardly uttered a sound—such talk was beneath them. All announcements were left to the porte-parole, the chief’s spokesman at his elbow, word carrier and confidant, who would incline his head and listen, then speak for the chief in a voice of authority. The Chinese empress dowager Ci Xi did the same, whispering to a mandarin or a noble eunuch, who would convey the command, screeching to the Qing court.
In this strange manner, Mother, who had no sense of history and knew nothing of chiefs or kings, managed to contrive, through willpower and egotism, the pretenses of an empress.
Her intense gaze and her calculated silences impressed me, because I had become so used to her remarks, sometimes shrewd, sometimes cruel, always stinging. Her talk had once made my head hurt, and now she didn’t talk at all. From that day onward, Mother, whose reputation for jawing—a word from her early youth—was well established, became known for saying nothing. And I soon realized that silence could be devastating—eloquent, unsettling, capable of inflicting long-lasting harm.
Mother, reflective and serene, triumphant, seemingly at peace, the center of attention at her hundredth, flanked by Gilbert and Fred and a hundred roses and a hundred cupcakes at a table piled with presents—feared, loved, forgiven, blameless, majestic—cue the organ recital, you think—but wait.
Something in the way the conflicted elements resolved themselves into the appearance of order seemed to nag and invite disharmony. The grandchildren were in a corner of the room, out of earshot. The feeling of rebellion was much greater than the wish of a child to poke a finger onto a surface marked with the sign Wet Paint. That was just a lark. This was more akin to rapping on the bars of a cage where the lions were asleep, snoring on their forepaws.
What was it? The birthday serenity, unbearable bliss, unfamiliar harmony, provoked its opposite, a kind of malice, none of it directed toward Mother—she was sacred now, above criticism, revered for her great age—but aimed at each other, the siblings at war.
“Look at Franny,” Hubby said. “She sold your books on the Internet, the ones you signed for her.” And when he saw that I was insufficiently riled, he added, “I don’t think she got much for them.”
“I understand you made some unwelcome suggestions to Hubby,” Floyd said to me, and with his arm around Gloria, went on, “That, um, I might be the Unabomber. That is patently untrue, since the miscreant has been caught, while you seem a living example of why travelers have bad marriages.”
Gloria looked at me with confusion—she was still new to this sniping—as Floyd turned to Rose, saying, “I notice Bingo has a dusky boyfriend. Do you find that every seventh of December he has an insatiable urge to bomb Pearl Bailey?”
In reply, Rose said to Gloria, “Does Floyd still wet the bed? Seems to me you’d be the first to know.”
“Don’t tell Jay anything,” Franny said. “He’ll just put it into a book.”
“It’ll be safe there,” Rose said. “No one ever reads his frigging books.” Before I could think of a rejoinder, she said, “Why are you so angry?”
Overhearing us, Fred said, “For Pete’s sake, will you give it a rest?”
“Who put you in charge?” Hubby said.
Floyd had called Benno over and was saying to him, “Put your fingers in the corners of your mouth like this and say, ‘I’m a banker.’”
Benno, who was afraid of Floyd’s temper, did as he was told, grunting the words “I’m a wanker.”
“Grow up,” Gilbert said, and obviously worried that this ill humor would worsen, he lifted Mother to her feet and guided her to the door, as her well-wishers cheered her.
“Ass hat,” Hubby said to Floyd.
“Monorhine,” Floyd said. “Rump swab.”
“You’re all unbearable,” Rose said.
“This is a nightmare,” Franny said, but she was wearing a crooked smile.
“I think you’ll find,” Floyd said, “that the word is ‘homeostasis.’ Back to our old ways, our need for transgression and conflict, and loving every minute of it. Hey, like the ancient Greek. Goes to a tailor to get his pants mended. Tailor says, ‘Euripides?’ Guy says, ‘Eumenides.’”
52
Memento Mori
The birthday celebration over, the hundred cupcakes apportioned and dispersed, the hundred roses withered, we returned to our lives, satisfied that we were still at odds, reassured by the conflict, stung and eager to sting back. Elevated by the ritual of her hundredth, Mother was in a state of grace, while we remained sinners, unforgiving toward each other.
For all our quarreling and confrontation, the noises off, the slammed doors and muffled sighs, the insults and sudden departures, in this family of cruel exit lines, all-out war was avoided. Violence would have ended the misery with a vanquishing, bloodstained winner, and a loser licking his wounds. We preferred the messiness of skirmishing and sniping, no death blows, only the bruising and slaps of whispers and insults. And this occupied us to such an extent these days that Mother was forgotten.
In her silence, which gave the illusion of superiority—wisdom and dignity and remoteness—Mother was above the fray, her natural element. Now her work, her mischief, was complete. She could retire from it all, watch or listen if she cared to, or more likely indulge in one of her vitalizing hobbies—knitting, reading, doing crosswords—and contemplate her next birthday.
But having achieved one hundred, her next birthday was not a certainty. It is natural to assume that someone in her late nineties will attain one hundred, but after that, any more birthdays are pure speculation, so distant as to seem unlikely. Certainly we felt that way, assuming a finality in her century; that having gasped to the finish line in this long-distance race, she would not be going much farther.
She fortified that assumption, saying with greater assurance, “My bags are packed.” And after a pause, “Are yours, Jay?”
I had no bags, I had no answer, though I sometimes felt: I can start again, meet someone, tell her my stories, encourage her ambitions, move to a better climate, perhaps have more children. Why not? I’m still a child of sorts, not old, my mother is alive. I have a mother! She was like an insurance policy guaranteeing that I would stay young, or at least youthful. Having a mother was a gift of hope. No, my bags were not packed. Mother was alive and strong—why should I think of death? Her very existence rid me of morbid thoughts.
Love, wife, child, and scribble-scribble—I could do it all again, another life, of the sort I had briefly contemplated in Mexico, encouraged by the smiling Trinidad family and willing Luma. Ending my days in a hut in a village, unobtainable and reclusive, seemed perfect. Perhaps a good career move, too, since no writer was in greater demand or the object of such intense publicity as the one who chose to vanish into obscurity. I could become famous for rejecting fame, as some shrewd writers did, attracting notice. Lives in a remote part of Mexico, had a nice ring to it. Refuses interviews would create buzz. This delusion buoyed my spirits as I worked on my book.
And so, again, we visited Mother less frequently. My once-a-week became once-a-month. Franny and Rose still dropped in most weekends, but often made excuses—th
ey had family obligations, jobs, friends, and distractions, and they were old and frail. Fred was often ill—phlebitis, his eyes, migraines that gave him cramps. Floyd was occupied with Gloria, who, in the manner of a new wife, was rearranging his house, sorting his belongings, and evaluating the loyalty of his friends. She was the subject of most of his poems these days. Hubby, who had turned down the hospital’s offer of a buyout, worked longer hours to boost savings. Gilbert was in Mazar-i-Sharif. And in my resolute and solitary way, working in the dark, doing what I could, fantasizing about my future, I was writing my novel about the man held captive in the village.
Floyd, on one of his visits to borrow a book, asked me why I was still writing.
I said, “To keep the wolf from the door.”
He said, “So you read your book to the wolf?”
Mother seemed to accept our absences. She no longer clamored for our company or accused us of not calling her. She had Meals on Wheels, the daily visit that kept her in food and verified that she was alive. A despised weekly cleaner still showed up and developed a bantering relationship with her—Mother feeling superior because the woman let drop that she took daily pills, cueing Mother’s “I’m not awn anything.” Mother seemed as independent as ever, looked after herself, had her hair done, and got the occasional pedicure. Still writing checks, she kept her financial affairs a secret. Did she have money? We didn’t know, but she now and then complained of being hard up, and that complaint is usually a sign of solvency and often great wealth.
She spoke on the phone, she could talk for hours, but even that was a form of silence, because it was repetitive—her days of stirring us were over. She no longer seemed malicious to me, and while a certain sanctimony had always served as a cover for her cruelty, I was now convinced of a definite late-life sweetness. She seemed grateful and at peace, and often complimentary.