Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  2

  “This Is for the Best”

  In seven phone calls, and a prayer to Angela, who had been dead for forty-two years, Mother said something different to each of us. “I think you should be here,” she told me—I was languishing in Polynesia. To Fred: “As the eldest, it’s up to you to take charge.” To Floyd: “Dad’s ill. I think he’d like you to be there.” To Franny, “I don’t think I can manage without you.” To Rose: “Franny will need your help.” To Hubby: “We’ll need you to do the driving.” To Gilbert: “Your father’s been so difficult lately. I’ve honestly felt like hitting him.”

  The sterility of the hospital was like a preparation for his going—the cold place seemed like an antechamber to a tomb, his room as bleak as a sarcophagus. There was nothing in this unornamented place that I could associate with Dad, who was untidy, and like many frugal people not a minimalist but a pack rat. Dad was a hoarder and piler of junk, a collector of oddments, a rifler of dumpsters. His garage had the stacked shelves you see in a Chinese shop, and the same dense, toppling asymmetry. How happy he was to live near the sea, for he was also a beachcomber. “That’ll come in handy someday.”

  He lay like wreckage under the complex apparatus monitoring his heart and lungs. Mother had remained in the corridor, signaling for each of us to slip in and greet Father. We had not been together this way for years, and toward evening we grouped around his bed to pray for him, looking like superstitious jungle dwellers muttering to the gods, the first intimation I had in many years that Floyd was right: we were at heart nothing but savages.

  Father struggled to speak, then gasped on his ventilator, “What a lovely reunion.”

  We had barely recovered from the shock of seeing him so physically reduced when Mother ordered us all into the hospital corridor. Standing there, swelling with authority, she took charge and said, “We think it’s best to take him off his ventilator. He’s so uncomfortable.”

  Taking him off the ventilator meant: let him die. I started to object, but she interrupted.

  “The doctor says he doesn’t have long. I think it’s best.”

  I said, “But he’ll die without it!”

  “We should respect her wishes,” someone said, so softly I could not tell who it was.

  Mother was glassy-eyed and seemed determined, not herself but a cast-iron version, so nerved for the occasion and standing so straight she seemed energized, even a bit crazed, as though defying any of us to oppose her. She was eighty-three years old, though she was so strong, so sure of herself, you would have taken her for a lot younger. I did not know her. She was a stranger, a substitute—fierce, deaf to advice. She was not the tremulous old woman who had suffered through Father’s illness; she was someone else entirely, a woman I scarcely recognized.

  My throat narrowed in fear. “Where there’s life there’s hope,” I said lamely, and thought, “Uncomfortable” is better than dead.

  “Don’t you see this is for the best?” she said, in a peevish tone that implied I was being unreasonable. It was the tone she used when she said, “The TV is on the fritz again. Junk it.”

  Her implication was that I was being weak and obstructive. He ought to be allowed to die, she was saying, in a merciful way; while I was urging her to let him live, something she regarded as cruel and insensitive. And I was misinformed.

  “What’s the point of letting him suffer?”

  She meant that by suggesting ways to let him live, I was inflicting suffering on him.

  “Why don’t we all go out for a meal?” Gilbert said in an easy, peacemaking voice. “Soft-shell crabs are in season.”

  Franny and Rose stood on either side of Mother, less like daughters than like ladies-in-waiting, seeming to prop her up. Yet they were bent over, grieving in rumpled sweat-stained clothes.

  “I think I’ll stay with Dad,” I said.

  “We should keep together,” Mother said.

  “We could all stay with Dad.”

  She said, “Let’s just leave him in peace,” again in a tone that implied I was being uncooperative and cruel.

  “Let’s do what Mumma says,” Franny said.

  “It’s not asking too much,” Rose added.

  Mother just smiled her challenging smile.

  Fred said to Mother, “You should do what you think is right.”

  Floyd said, “I don’t get this at all. This is like climbing Everest with Sherpas and traversing the edge of the crevasse, all roped together. Dad slips and he’s dangling on a rope way down there, and we don’t know whether to cut him loose or leave him or drag him down the mountain. And there’s a blizzard. And we can’t hear what he’s saying. And where is Sherpa Tenzing? I wonder if Hallmark makes a card for an occasion like this.”

  Hubby said, “That’s it, make a big drama.”

  “Oh, right, sorry, it’s not dramatic. It’s only Dad dying. I forgot, Hubby.”

  “Asshole,” Hubby said.

  “I’d like to kick you through that wall,” Floyd said.

  Franny said, “Let’s not fight.”

  “You’re all upsetting Mumma,” Rose said.

  “God knows I do my best,” Mother said, not in her usual self-pitying singsong but defiantly.

  We went to a nearby restaurant. Whipping off his glasses, Fred surveyed the menu and, as the eldest and bossiest of us, ordered the set meal for everyone. “Gilbert was right about the soft-shell crabs.” We sat like mourners, though Father was four blocks away, struggling to stay alive. I looked at the faces around the table, Mother at the head of it between Gilbert and Fred, Franny and Rose close by, all of them watching Mother with fixed smiles, loyal, submissive, and squinnying at the rest of us. Hubby and Floyd sat with their heads down, looking torn.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Franny said.

  “This is for the best,” Rose said.

  I had heard such clichés my whole life, but I think it was there that I realized how clichés always revealed deep cynicism, rank ignorance, and a clumsy hostility.

  Franny and Rose heaved themselves toward Mother and said, “Have some bread, Ma.”

  “Dad would have wanted it this way,” Mother said. “All of us together.”

  I quietly excused myself, an easy thing to do, everyone at the table assuming I was going to the men’s room. It was a trick I had used as a small boy in Sunday school, raising my hand. “Please, Father.” And the priest in the middle of a pep talk would wave me on my way, thinking I was going to the bathroom, and I would go home.

  I went back to the hospital and found Dad alone. The nurse told me that he had been taken off his ventilator and in place of the saline IV was a morphine drip. The fearful look in his eyes appalled me. He was like a terrified captive being dragged away to an unknown place against his will, which was exactly what was happening. I held his hand; it had the heated softness of someone very ill. The morphine dulled the pain, but it also weakened him and loosened his grip on life. I could feel resignation in his slack fingers.

  The gauges beside his bed showed his heart rate in a jumping light, the pattern on the screen like that of a depth sounder in a boat tracing the troughs in an irregular ocean floor. The lights and beeps, too, all seemed to me indications of his life, but also his diminishing strength.

  And there was his breathing. What had begun as slow exhalation became laborious and harsh, as though he was not propped up (which he was) but flat on his back, with a demon kneeling on his chest. His breathing seemed to give him no air at all. He fought to inhale, but the air stayed in his mouth, did not fill his lungs, and so he went on gasping, without relief, his staring eyes filled with tears. He was wordless with suffocation and fear.

  The nurse stepped in and leaned toward the monitors.

  I said, “Is he feeling any pain?”

  “I can increase the morphine,” she said, and I took this to mean yes, he was having a bad time.

  “He seems to be struggling.”

  “Agonic breathing.”


  She said it casually, yet it seemed to me an awful phrase.

  Father labored to stay alive, but I could see from the softening lines on one monitor that his strength was ebbing. Still, I held his hand. I had no sense of time passing, but at one point his breathing became shallow, and all the needles and indicators faltered and fell. Father’s jaw dropped, his mouth fell open. I clutched his hand and pressed it to my face. I kissed his stubbly cheek.

  Take me with you, I thought.

  The nurse returned soon after. She quickly summed up what had happened.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I walked back to the restaurant and found that all of them had gone. Of course, four hours had passed. I called Mother.

  She said, “Where have you been? You left the restaurant without telling anyone. You didn’t even touch your meal. Fred and the girls ate your crabs. Everyone’s here now. We’re talking about Dad, telling stories. So many wonderful memories. Gilbert was just about to call the hospital to see how things are going.”

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  3

  Do You Believe in Rock and Roll?

  The wake at the funeral home in Osterville was a muddle, tragedy and farce combined; all the distant relations meeting after a long time and making jokes in the form of greetings, remarking on how fat or how thin or how bald we had become. We were children again whenever we met, which was seldom—we hated and mocked all our cousins, saw them as the savages we could not admit to being ourselves. And the pieties about Dad. Then tears. Then they just hung around and leafed through the albums of snapshots that cousins had brought: children’s marriages, grandchildren, vacations, pets and gardens, and pictures of prized possessions, cars and houses, the sort of ritual objects that boastful tribesmen would haul out at a clan feast. “His name is Chanler! That’s Chad! She’s Tyler! This is Blair!”

  “Remember Jake?”

  “How could I forget Jake and the cup!”

  Young Jake who, as a reckless tot, had once eaten a Styrofoam cup, ran and hid.

  Mother sat near the casket, enthroned as it were, receiving people, who paid their respects—and they too seemed like emissaries from other tribes, the big families who were our relations, several of them even bigger than ours. The look on Mother’s face I recognized from the hospital: exalted, somewhat crazed, with a serpent’s glittering stare. She sat upright, weirdly energized by the whole business.

  More rituals, the funeral mass at the church, the platitudes, the handling of the shiny coffin, the sprinkling of holy water on its lid, the processions and prayers, all of it looking eerily superstitious to me, for I kept thinking of naked, gaudily painted people in New Guinea doing similar things, preparing the corpse of an elder and calling upon the gods to protect him and to hurry his soul into the next world. All this while, Mother was the single surviving dignitary, bestowing a kiss on the polished lid of the coffin and walking past the banks of flowers with a slight and smiling hauteur.

  We drove to the cemetery in a long line of cars behind the hearse. Mother was in back seat of the lead car between Franny and Rose, Fred at the wheel, Gilbert next to him. Hubby and his family were in the following car, with Floyd and me, the flawed divorced sons, behind them.

  I asked Floyd about the meal I had missed at the restaurant, when I had snuck out to be with Father.

  “I didn’t stay,” he said. “I went for a walk. So did Hubby, but in a different direction. It was just Ma and the others, I guess. I wrote a poem about it.”

  “I think Ma was pissed off that I didn’t stay. Like it was a test of loyalty.”

  Floyd wasn’t listening. He said, “This is uncanny,” and turned the radio up. It was “American Pie.”

  “Remember Granma’s funeral?” Floyd said, and he laughed and shook his head.

  One of the footnotes to our family history was that during the funeral procession to Grandma’s burial, our cousin Allie, a goofball, had the radio on, and that same song was playing. He sang along with it, drumming on the steering wheel with his grease monkey’s fingers, following Grandma’s hearse. None of us ever remarked on it as an insult to the dead woman, only as an extemporized piece of hilarity. Drove my Chevy to the levee . . . At the cemetery, we plodded past gravestones to the hole of Father’s freshly dug grave. What seemed like a diverse community of many mourners was a procession of mostly members of our own family—spouses, ex-spouses, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren. The rest were distant relations. Hardly any were friends, for my parents were at the age when most of their friends were either dead or too ill to show up.

  Perhaps this is the place to stress that a big family, like ours in Mother Land, does not welcome friends, and has no room for strangers; it is acutely uncomfortable when either friends or strangers penetrate the privacy of the household and become witnesses and listeners, privy to outbursts and secrets. Even outsiders who are frank admirers are kept at a distance—especially them, for there is much that must be withheld from them in order to keep their admiration intact. In the same way, a savage tribe is not just suspicious of strangers but overtly hostile. We were cruel to each other, but we were much crueler toward outsiders. Mother Land had that, and more, in common with Albania at its most Maoist, when it was closed to the world. You don’t betray the tribe.

  As Mother emphasized in her gossip, spouses were outsiders and all of them were mocked, always behind their backs. It could be awkward when one of them caused trouble, but it was worse for them when they tried to be generous—offered presents, cooked a meal, paid for something. “Imagine, forking out good money for this!” The present was laughable, the meal was a joke, and if they could so easily afford to pay for something, where was the sacrifice? But a dark angry spouse might inspire a measure of respect, if the person was strong, and especially so if the person was a crazy threat, because fear was all that mattered to us. At best, spouses were tolerated, but none of them inspired warmth.

  At the time of Father’s funeral, neither Floyd nor I was married, and our ex-spouses and my children were not present. I tried to imagine what my family whispered about my two wives, but I knew I would never succeed in capturing the malice; I would underestimate it, and no one would tell me to my face. In both cases, after we split up, they went far away from me and my big family. Perhaps they had always suspected that they were unwelcome, and maybe they also knew how they had been satirized.

  The priest stood in the wind, his cloak billowing as he declaimed his lines. What he said seemed more like a formula of recited verses than sincere prayers. “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes”—we had all heard them before, and now it was Father’s turn. Much of what the priest said was drowned out by the traffic beyond the cemetery wall.

  Floyd wagged his head. “Remember, Grandma used to dig dandelions here?”

  Not Grandma Justus, but Mother’s mother, a frugal Italian, from another big, disorderly family. She dug the dandelions as if they were a delicacy that ignorant people spurned, and dignified them by calling them by their Italian name, soffione; she used them in salad and soup. A cemetery was a good place to gather them, because of the wall and the gates that kept dogs out.

  Floyd was reminiscing, but he could easily have been trying to make me laugh. Getting someone to laugh at a funeral was one of the skills we had acquired as altar boys. Even Father’s funeral was not so solemn an event that we wouldn’t try to raise a laugh somehow.

  Our heads were down. We were praying, or pretending to. Floyd was humming and murmuring, This’ll be the day that I die. Yes, he was trying to get me to laugh by reminding me of “American Pie.” I glanced sideways and saw that Mother’s face wore an expression I had never seen before. Her pious posture, head bowed, shoulders rounded, was that of a mourner, yet her face startled me. The haughty look was gone, so were the glittering snake eyes. Hers was a look of relief, of weird jubilation, almost rapture, like someone who has survived an ordeal—weary yet triumphant, full of life
and strength.

  Father’s coffin was not lowered. It remained covered with a velvet cloth. Dropping it into the hole while we watched was probably considered too dramatic and depressing—indelicate, anyway.

  A last prayer by the priest, who I noticed kept mispronouncing Father’s name—did this invalidate the prayer?—and we filed back to our cars.

  Most accounts of family funerals end here—are in fact an ending. But walking away and leaving Father behind was a beginning, and it began right away, before we left the cemetery.

  Mother had been walking slowly toward the parking lot between Franny and Rose, looking small and propped up by her two daughters, whose faces, exaggeratedly solemn, shook with each step, altering their expressions.

  “Take your time, Mumma,” they were saying.

  “I got such a lot of guidance this morning talking to Angela. ‘Be strong, Ma,’ she said. You know how she is.”

  Seeing me about to join this recession from the grave, Mother turned, broke away from the girls, and looked herself again, fairly large and confident. She approached me, squeezed my hands hard.

  “I want you to get married. Find someone nice. I want you to do it for me. Will you do that?”

  She had that same deranged look in her eyes as when, in the hospital corridor, she had demanded that Father be taken off the ventilator and said, “Don’t you see this is for the best?”

  I didn’t know what to say. She had power. The death of her husband—of Father—had energized her. The king was dead, and she, as queen, was absolute monarch of the realm. She was eighty-three but in every sense a new life was beginning for her—what would become a long one, too, eventful enough to fill a book.

  “Maybe we should have a little get-together,” Hubby said.

  We were standing in the cemetery’s parking lot. Spouses and children stayed a little way off, with the wincing looks of wary people expecting to be abused.

  “Dad would have wanted it—something like a family dinner, like the other night,” Hubby said.