by Paul Theroux
“You’ll be joining us at some point in the not-too-distant future, I imagine,” Mrs. Nickerson said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I have other plans.”
“It’s like a hotel,” Mrs. Wragby said.
“No offense, but I’m not that fond of hotels,” I said.
In the silence that followed, Mother said with a certain pride, “I was born here on the Cape.”
“It must have been so different then.”
“The train went to Truro,” Mother said. “When World War One ended they rang the bell at my school.”
Now the women stared. Mrs. Wragby said, “That would make you —?”
“One hundred and one,” Mother said, and shivered with pleasure, then looked for a reaction.
“Mae Kibby is a hundred and one,” Mrs. Nickerson said.
“I think Grace Almond is a hundred and two.”
Mother moved her mouth slowly, in silence, chewing her disappointment, looking determined.
Back at her apartment, I said, “You’ve adjusted so well and so quickly. Good for you.”
“Angela has been a great help,” Mother said in a confiding voice.
Of course, the long-dead child a greater source of comfort than the seven surviving children. I said, “That’s great,” but no more. Why amplify her delusion with further questions?
Leaving that day, I bumped into Floyd at the front door. Like me, he was making his first visit, accompanied by Gloria.
“Et in Arcadia Ego,” he said as a greeting. “Source?”
“I think you’re looking for Waugh. Brideshead.”
“The obvious middlebrow reply. What I had in mind was the ambiguous painting by Nicolas Poussin in which the enigmatic ego might—who knows?—refer to death speaking.”
Gloria said, “Guercino did one as well. Baroque.”
“Clever girl,” Floyd said. “Jay is overwhelmed, punching above his weight with that reference to Waugh.”
I said, “Mum thinks that Angela is here. That’s why she likes it.”
“Leave her to her delusions. They can be life-enhancing for some of us.”
“Not me, thanks very much.”
“You have Jell-O in the corners of your mouth. Two demerits.”
And with Gloria on his arm he pushed past me.
But once past the spiked swinging gate of Arcadia the season seemed to turn. The ingenious gardeners had planted evergreens—holly trees, yews, blue spruce—and laid a formal driveway to the front door that was a boulevard, lined by a colonnade of tall, wide-hipped arborvitae, the whole green garden looking hopeful and edible. Rhododendrons are never without buds; a whole wall of them lined the walkway and ivy had jumped to the façade of Arcadia’s main building. The grass was ankle-deep and dark green—well fertilized, neatly cut, no sign of grubs. The box hedge and the feathery junipers were thick, every shrub dense with sprays of needles. So the whole effect, even on a cold day in late fall, was of lushness and abundance, a great verdant salad swelling against the red brick walls, a garden all the more welcoming for looking like a healthy meal, no suggestion of death or decline.
This vitality was an illusion on the withered autumnal Cape, a trick of landscaping, but it worked. Healthy evergreens and fat bushes were an encouragement. When I visited, I felt Mother was in good hands. She seemed strengthened by the greenery too, and the attention she was getting. She sat straighter, she was more active, she had a dignity and self-possession I’d rarely seen in her before. Away from the mouse-nibbled carpets and dusty shelves and the glum, sticky kitchen of her old house, she looked haughty in Arcadia, regaining the dusty glow of immortality I’d noticed when she turned one hundred, the goddess aura, like a gold mist behind her head.
The third time I visited, a woman blocked my way.
“Can I help you?” she said, placing her pear shape and sloping stomach between the entrance and me, as though I was a tramp, sneaking in to get warm.
“No thanks,” I said. “I know where I’m going.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“An appointment? To see my mother?”
“You’ll need to sign in,” she said. “The receptionist’s on break.”
“And you are—who?”
“I’m the life enrichment director. There’s an event in progress. You’ll have to wait.”
In the lounge, which smelled of human decrepitude, I read a copy of Modern Maturity, listened to the tick of a clock and the muffled sounds of the event, which (I saw from a poster propped on an easel) was a slide-show lecture on the shore birds of Cape Cod.
“I told them all about the flycatcher,” Mother said afterward. “I showed them the one I carved. They said, ‘Did you do this all yourself?’”
She seemed uncommonly chipper. I said, “Do they have these afternoon events very often?”
We were now in the elevator. Even so, Mother whispered, her hand to her face, a bird claw against her cheek.
“They hold them to take our minds off things.” She made a knowing face, widening her eyes and nodding slowly.
“What things?”
With a pained expression, Mother said, “Mae Kibby passed away yesterday, God rest her soul. It’s a blow. We all feel it.”
But at once she lost her look of anguish and became serene, stood straighter, blinked at the pinger signaling that we’d come to her floor, and faced the doors grinding open.
“That makes you the oldest resident,” I said.
“Not yet. Grace Almond is a hundred and two,” she said. She turned and squinted at me. “But she’s not at all well.”
Within a month Grace Almond had passed away. Another event (barbershop quartet) was held to cheer up the residents, and Mother took her place as the oldest person at Arcadia, a position she held with pride, enjoying the attention, affecting quiet humility and restraint that was overwhelmed by her vanity.
On my next visit, the fourth in four weeks, I was entering the elevator when I was summoned back by a woman leaning out of the sliding glass partition at the reception counter. Pinching her glasses to get a better look at me, she seemed vigilant and rather stern.
“Are you making a delivery?”
That’s how I looked on this December day in my old coat and fedora and muddy shoes, like a deliveryman.
“Yes, I am,” and showed her the bunch of flowers I’d brought Mother.
“We were expecting some paper products.”
“I’m visiting someone.”
“You need to sign in.” She tapped the open visitors’ book.
“Really?”
“Everyone who sets foot on the campus needs to sign in. It’s the rule.”
The campus? And the protocol, the suggestion that seeing Mother was in the nature of an appointment—Name, Destination, Make of Car, Plate Number, Time In, Time Out. At Mother’s house we’d dropped in at all hours, seldom knocking, kicking the sand off our shoes at the threshold. Hi, Ma!
“What suite?” the woman said, seeing I’d left that column blank.
“Two-two-eight.”
“Is she expecting you?”
“She’s my mother.” And when the woman continued to stare, I added, “She’s always expecting me.”
I remarked on the signing-in ritual to Mother, who said, “You can’t be too careful.”
“How are you?”
“No complaints.”
Mother looked more brittle and bird-boned than ever, yet she glowed with certainty and, even bird-boned, looked unbreakable. Was it an effect of the passing of the other centenarians, Mae Kibby and Grace Almond, that Mother was now the oldest resident, at almost one hundred and two? The eldest, as a tribe would assess her, and therefore the wisest, the most privileged, the mkazi wamkulu, as we said long ago in Nyasaland, the Senior Woman. It seemed tactless to ask.
“Health and Wellness,” I said, reading from the day’s schedule of events.
“I never go to those things.”
Still reading,
I said, “Stress Management, and Coping and Relaxation Strategies.”
“I’ve never been stressed. The Wall Street crash was hard for some, but I had a job, unlike other people—Harvard graduates selling apples on the street. I was a schoolteacher.” She thought a moment. “Pearl Harbor. The Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston. The year I slipped on the ice and got an abscess on my elbow. I cope all right. I go to sleep as soon as my head hits the pillow.”
“Maybe sometimes, some relaxation strategies?”
“Maybe when I’m older.”
“So what do you do all day?”
“This,” Mother said, and indicated the folded-over Cape Cod Times and the crossword puzzle she had mostly filled in, “and my knitting. And my reading. Once a week I do memoir writing.”
“That’s wonderful, Ma.”
“Look to your laurels.”
“What are you writing about?”
“All the things I’ve seen.”
I stayed awhile, sitting on a straight-backed chair, facing her, as though I was being interviewed. Yet even physically close to me, Mother seemed distant, secure in this new setting, looked after by the efficient and good-natured staff. She was proof that Arcadia was a life enhancer, a life extender. The staff valued her as the eldest, someone special, and put her in a mood that bordered on the majestic, but neutralized, in exile from Mother Land.
I tried to see Mother as the people at Arcadia saw her. They were somewhat at a disadvantage, having missed her first hundred years—the years that had tested her, the years of struggle and rivalry, of secrecy, of turbulent children, of her widowhood and queenship, her battling plotters and choosing sides, of whispers, the years of court intrigues, a century of rehearsal for this.
She’d been whittled small and quieted, and in the glare of sunlight from the window next to her desk she was sometimes almost translucent—spare, reduced, skeletal, her head hardly a head, more a skull with tufts of hair on its tightened scalp. Her fingers were narrow bones and slow to grasp, but they were sure, in the block letters she habitually formed. Only her handwriting—bold, clear—was unchanged; everything else about her was new.
All these old selves burned away! That history was over, and Mother the battler was overtaken by this sweet aged woman. I had inwardly raged at how she had treated me long ago, but this was a mild and saintly being who meant it when she said, “No complaints,” strangely grateful yet self-possessed enough not to cling when I said I had to go.
She’d always hovered at the periphery of my life, as part of my routine, a thought bubble over her head: What are you going to do with me?
That was no longer the case. She had removed herself to Arcadia. The question of how Mother was paying for it had yet to arise. Fred had told Hubby, in confidence, that Mother had plenty of money socked away in money market accounts and mutual funds—and Hubby told everyone. Mother was still writing checks. She didn’t need us any longer except for the occasional visit as a diversion. But we needed her more than ever, because we, her children, were fearful of each other, afraid of what would become of us.
At Arcadia we were subjected to the scrutiny of the jowly woman at the reception desk, who one day took pleasure in telling me, “Your mother says she’s not to be disturbed.”
“I’ll just be a minute.”
“She says that she’s busy with Angela.”
Even the staff, groveling to please their senior resident, were conniving with Mother in her delusion.
Mother’s mentions of Angela became more frequent.
“Angela just left.”
“Angela is so good to me.”
“What would I do without my angel?”
Leave her to her delusions, Floyd had said. They can be life-enhancing for some of us.
And soon she turned one hundred and two, and became like a saint with a serene face, like the plaster Madonnas that were carried in festivals in Boston through adoring crowds. In my youth we mocked the Italians in the North End who howled and blessed themselves and pinned dollar bills and gold bangles and necklaces to the images of the Madonna delle Grazie or Saint Rocco or Saint Joe that were paraded through the streets until these big painted dolls were cloaked in money and tinkling jewelry. All the while the brass band played, and the Italians wept and prayed. Now it had come to that: Mother was the idol, we were the venerators.
We took turns pushing her from her apartment to the elevator, down one floor to the lobby, and out the French doors into the garden, and all that way like a royal progress Mother was greeted by everyone she passed, their faces brightening when they saw her, because now, as the oldest person in the place, her survival and continued good health gave them hope.
Despite her poor eyesight and deafness, exiled in a contracted world of sight and sound, she was aware of their fascination, and she lifted her skinny hand like a regent in a sedan chair, acknowledging the salutations of her loyal subjects, giving her an air both pompous and aloof that enlarged her presence.
Yet she was still shrinking, very tiny now. Her small size gave her a greater glow, and that, too, added to her look of divinity, as if she’d been successfully transformed into a life-size image of herself, carved out of old ivory.
On other days, in poor light, she looked mummified, like an upright feature of a catacomb. Or, beaky and bony, like a prehistoric bird, a giant moa, a vast, flesh-colored sparrow.
Now and then, she asked for a meal at the Oyster Bed, and she was wheeled through the restaurant like a patron saint. She could still manage a dozen oysters, sometimes more. But except for that, and the wheelchair rides at Arcadia, there were no events for her. She preferred to sit at the table in her room, poking at papers. And we visited, always in a spirit of veneration, the more so because she seldom moved, was always upright in her customary chair, not the fierce empress on the throne that had disparaged me and made mischief and divided her children, but a solemn skeletal relic, awaiting her anxious visitors, often with a crooked smile that seemed to gloat, Still here, still here, as though to imply, I will outlast you.
“I don’t know anyone my age,” Mother said, partly in wonderment, partly as a boast.
She seemed to suggest that she was the oldest woman in the world, a belief that gave her immense power and commanded respect—the witness to more than a century of human folly and achievement, as though she had personally influenced events: war, progress, death.
We were her aged children, too preoccupied with looking after her to quarrel anymore, sometimes jostling for her attention, but usually taking turns, baffled that on her way to one hundred and three she was still alive, still at the center of everything, allowing us to cling to our childhood.
A believer in the significance of milestones, superstitious, guided by omens and signs—though always thanking God for granting them to her—she was convinced that, having passed the century mark, she would continue, liberated by this big number. And so it happened: one hundred and one had been unremarkable—a small cake; one hundred and two was expected—balloons, ice cream; and each new death at Arcadia seemed to suffuse Mother with a new vitality. She was once again the survivor and seemed to draw strength from the other oldies, all of them younger than she. Someone had to live, and it seemed the lucky person was Mother.
55
Clambake
Every visit to an aged parent is in the nature of a farewell. When I got the invitation to the clambake at Arcadia, I thought: Is this a good idea? In the meantime, I looked for solace by the sea near my house. Another winter, alone again, early darkness and cold like a wet hand on my face; wind gusts against the dark ocean smacking clumps of whiteness on its greasy surface and flattening the feathers of the gulls squatting beak-first into the wind with shortened necks. Yellow bubbles in the fluffy ribs of speckled sea foam by the dumping waves.
My hands jammed into my pockets, I kicked through the tide wrack of tangled rope and slimy kelp, looking for a sign. Was there a message here for me? What are the waves saying? I searched for o
mens everywhere. Maybe I’d find a note in a bottle, a tumbled box of treasure, or a waterproof package of cocaine—street value immense—tossed from a passing drug boat.
I saw decay and death: broken clamshells, crushed crabs, shards of quahogs, bleached fish bones, bitten corncobs and lobster claws, salty withered tissue that was once oyster bellies, and masses of ugly indestructible plastic, all of it like the remnants of a long-ago clambake. The beach in winter seems to tell a story out of scattered objects: you don’t matter, you’re not missed, you’ve been marooned, no one’s looking for you—a vision of ruins, the blighted coast of Mother Land.
We were old, Mother was ageless. She might last forever, I thought. She was past one hundred and two. She might go at any moment. She might have just died.
My solitary walks were a melancholy foretaste of Mother’s passing. What to do? Whom to call? I drifted back to my old stabilizer, my only sanity—my desk, which was the kitchen table, and my writing. Mother’s hen-like face now and then appeared before me, to utter the subtext to every family failing. It’s your own goddamned fault. And what had been a squawk was now a hiss.
Often I circled back to Arcadia, less for Mother’s sake than my own. Each time I approached her apartment I wondered, Is she still here?
She always was, in her chair, crouched over a puzzle or a book, a pen pinched in her fingers—alive, alert, motionless, then seeing me and asking, “Who is it?”
“Just me.”
“Angela, is that you?”
I let it pass.
“What is your greatest regret?” I wanted to ask her, but could not bring myself to say the words. It was too intimate a question, and when in my life had I been on intimate terms with Mother? I had never known the back-and-forth of easy talk and slow disclosure, never had a conversation—spiky dialogues didn’t count. Talk with Mother had always been a battle to be heard, as it was with the rest of the family, expostulation, not listening and replying, but incessant shouts and whispers.
More and more on my visits to Arcadia I saw the same young woman attending to Mother, delivering a dinner tray—Mother preferred room service—or emptying a wastebasket, sometimes on her haunches, massaging Mother’s feet or snipping her yellow toenails, always smiling at me when I said hello, and then she would withdraw, perhaps out of tact, to allow mother and son their privacy. I would have liked to talk to the young woman for the novelty of an actual chat. Feeling thwarted, the young woman slipping away, I thought with horror, God help me, am I that lonely?