Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  To Franny and Rose, Mother was a feeble old thing who was lost without their dutiful attention. To Mother, Franny and Rose were figures of fun—needlessly nannying, forever in the way—whom she tolerated, doing them the favor of accepting their fussing. Mother implied that she humored them; they winked and wanted the rest of us to know they were humoring her. To each, the other was a bore and a burden.

  In her oddly fluttering pretense of confusion, Mother claimed to know very little. So we said, “Oh, didn’t you know that?” and each of us gave her our version of a story, usually one that reflected badly on the subject of the gossip.

  Hubby (“impatient”), in his haste to put up his storm windows, smashed his thumb and needed four stitches. Franny (“careless”), not looking, backed her car into a fire hydrant. Floyd (“gullible”) lost his new girlfriend to a complete stranger, who had vanished with Floyd’s credit cards. Fred’s neighbors had called the police (“wouldn’t you know?”) for his big slavering dogs. Rose (“spendthrift”) was overcharged for an oil change.

  Hearing such stories, Mother widened her eyes and said, “Oh?” and asked for more.

  But she knew more than we did. She feasted on it, she retailed it, and was so animated by gossip, alert and bright-eyed and calculating, that she became a slightly different person, and could not disguise her excitement.

  “Notice how she looks younger when she’s just heard some bad news?” Floyd said. “It’s uncanny, like a swamp thing tasting blood.”

  I had no idea what she said about me. I should have guessed, because apart from Gilbert, she did not have a kind word for anyone. If I had only reflected a little on how the others were treated, I would have known how viciously I, too, had been mocked. The fatal delusion in many families is that you are special, treated differently from all the others. If only we had considered the fact that what we said about all the others was being said about us. None of us, not even Gilbert, escaped the family fate of being the butt of a joke.

  Yet I made a point of never arguing. I never contradicted, never raised my voice, and never complained. This restraint was not fortitude on my part; it was cunning evasion. Any of us who argued or complained revealed what was in his heart. I needed my secrets—I had so little else, and even then I knew that to keep a secret was necessary to self-preservation, for my secrets were the only power I had.

  And where would complaining have gotten me? Mention to Mother that you needed a tooth pulled, and she would respond with one of her dental horrors, such as the molar extraction of 1925 during which part of the tooth broke off and the roots had to be drilled and dug out of her bleeding gums. Hurt your arm? So did Mother, in the winter of 1937, when she was pregnant with Fred and slipped on the ice and developed an abscess in her elbow. Lost your wallet with cash and driver’s license and credit cards, did you? What’s the problem? Mother lost Angela in 1946, and a baby was far more precious. A wallet and money could be replaced, but you could never replace a dead child. The reply to any misery you had to endure was that Mother had had it much worse—count your blessings.

  As for being overweight or pimply or covered with a poison ivy rash or sick—whose fault was that? The weakest, most shameful thing you could do was cry or moan in pain.

  Mother smiled and said, “The louder you cry, the more it proves that you’re not really sick. People in severe pain don’t cry at all. Doctors will tell you that. Sick people just lie there. They don’t make a sound.”

  So, moaning showed you were actually much better, perhaps in the pink. Whatever trouble you had would be flung back in your face.

  You lost something?

  “It didn’t just walk away!”

  You spent all your money?

  “A fool and his money are soon parted.”

  You gave Fred your sweater and you want it back?

  “Maybe you should have thought about that before you gave it away.”

  You feel sick to your stomach?

  “You should have been more careful about what you put in your mouth.”

  You were sad because you scored badly on a math test?

  “You should have studied harder.”

  Mother took pleasure in blaming us for our failings, tormenting us because we were weak. She gloried in it; our imperfections exalted her.

  She was never happier than when she straightened on her throne and said, “It’s your own goddamned fault.”

  8

  Wedding Balls

  Mother loved presiding over dismissals. She was bucked up by them, got throatier and more confident, turning her back and saying, “Who does she think she is?” We all suffered in various degrees, but the person who excited all of Mother’s contempt was Franny’s son Jonty. Above all she hated his name, which was a contraction (he had lisped it himself as a two-year-old) of John T.

  “The nerve of him,” Mother would say, tightening her jaw.

  Franny was a fool for catering to her ungrateful children, two boys, Jonty and Max.

  “Remember when Jonty kicked the windshield out of the Dodge Dart by bracing himself on the front seat?”

  Mother had a peculiar posture when she was indignant. She stiffened, straightening her back like a judge at his bench, her hands like an eagle’s claws gripping the arms of her leather chair. As she spoke she started forward, spitting, her eyes huge behind her glasses.

  “Can you imagine the gall,” she would go on.

  Someone outside the family might have concluded that Jonty was an adversary Mother’s own age rather than her teenage grandson. Someone in the family would know that Jonty was Mother’s rival and therefore someone to destroy.

  “The little prince has to have a brand-new tuxedo for the prom. Oh, no, he can’t rent one from Mr. Tux. He has to have a brand-spanking-new one.”

  So that was the issue—the tuxedo, the exorbitant cost, the unworthy wearer who from his earliest years would pose, twinkling and wagging his head, and say, “Do you like Jonty’s new pants?”

  The sarcasm of her tirades against the “little prince” matched my image of Mother as a furious old queen.

  She would excoriate any bright extravagance bestowed on Jonty—new shoes, a watch, fashionable sneakers, gym equipment, a new Walkman. Mother hated the attention that Jonty got from Franny, and she said how sweet-natured and generous Franny was, how awful the son, how iniquitous that this greedy sneak was taking advantage of Franny.

  While Mother might have sometimes felt a lingering sentiment for her children, even the most wayward of us, she had an unqualified resentment for her grandchildren, except those who showed abject submission. Rose’s twins, Bingo and Benno, learned that “I brought you a beautiful present, Grammy” was the only way to this woman’s heart.

  Her zestful hatred for Jonty was undisguised. As with most of Mother’s prejudices, it was the cruel grain of truth in them that seized your attention, and when Mother cried, “Do you see what I mean?” you would grudgingly concede some fundamental justification, and reply, “You’re right, Ma.” If she mocked Hubby for being a klutz, or Floyd for being volatile, it was because they had verifiable spells of this behavior. Mother was not creative enough to invent, but she was so possessed by a paranoiac’s resourcefulness, her exaggerations went beyond satire into surrealism.

  She had a predator’s eye and nose for a person’s weakness and was remorseless in exploiting it. We were shocked at Mother’s sudden denunciations, and not just the vividness of them but the basis in fact, followed by the serious question: Who’s next?

  Mother’s contempt spoke to what we had thought was secret in our heart. She knew that on some level we agreed with her. Jonty was a perfect victim. With the best will in the world it was hard to take to Jonty. Even Rose, who was the closest to Franny, said, “Jonty is a pill. He can be a sneak, too.”

  Jonty was casually disliked, ridiculed for his greed, his oafishness, his timidity, his fear of insects (he would scream when he saw one) and of strange dogs (he cowered and called for his mother), a
nd sometimes when he was especially frantic he gasped and worked himself into a choking fit, seeming to swoon. Whomever he was quarreling with—and it was usually his father, Marvin, the security guard at the mall, who was timid himself, even at 240 pounds, with his can of Mace and shiny truncheon and walkie-talkie hooked to his belt—would become alarmed, hovering and calling out, “Are you all right, Jonty? Take a deep breath.” But seeming to suffocate, gagging on his misery, Jonty was victorious in the quarrel, arousing sympathy.

  “Asthma,” Franny said, pleading for sympathy. “Just like Dad.”

  Family illnesses were convenient excuses, never needing to be explained but only mentioned, like Mother’s headaches or any of us with a cold or a sprained ankle. And no one really believed them. Mother’s defiant cynicism determined that anyone claiming to be sick had to be faking or somehow at fault.

  We laughed at Jonty in secret, and in secret he laughed back at us. We were on our worst behavior when we were with him, yet we felt justified because not only did we regard him as rude, whiny, vain, and sneaky; Mother thought so too.

  “Guess what? The little prince doesn’t eat hot dogs,” Mother said. “I put some out for him. ‘They have horse lips in them. And pigs’ ears. And scraps from cows’ tails.’” Then Mother peered closer and said, “A lot of hungry people in the world would be damned glad to get those hot dogs. And he turned up his nose at them.”

  “Turned up his nose” made us think only of Jonty’s nose, which was so broad all you saw were slanted staring nostrils, each one the width of a fingertip. “That lisp,” we said, but it wasn’t a lisp, it was a way of speaking that had no name. Jonty had such a lazy tongue that instead of being uttered as endearing lisps, words like “chicken” or “church” snagged and rolled his tongue and involved his whole mouth in a slushy chuckle. “Jordache jeans” or “jagged edge” came out in a rush of chewed lips and spittle. Just saying his own name gave him monkey cheeks.

  “The little prince wants to go into radio,” Mother said.

  “Perfect!” Floyd said. “It is a demonstrable fact that some of the most successful people on the radio have speech defects. They lisp, they chuck their teeth, they wa-wa, they yim-yam, they spit, they’re whopper-jawed!”

  Another day she said, “The little prince has a girlfriend. Apparently he sees her almost every day. But does he see his poor old grandmother? Oh, no, he’s much too busy for that.”

  It surprised me that Mother cared, but her contradictions helped keep us on our toes. She said Jonty was selfish not for visiting, but if Jonty had visited, Mother would have sneered at him for pretending to care, for patronizing her, for saying “Do you like Jonty’s new pants?” as he had been saying, egged on by Franny, since he’d been able to talk. “They’re Daks slacks.”

  “We give thanks to the Lord for this twenty-five-pound turkey,” Floyd prayed at Thanksgiving, saying grace. “Which, oddly enough, is the same size as Jonty’s ass.”

  The cruel pleasure of ganging up on one weak person was something I had known in my childhood—trading mockery, sharing contempt, freezing out the person, confusing them, jeering at them, but never quite excluding them, because we needed them near us in order to persecute them. The weird stimulation of this bullying was all the more intense for being verbal, never physical, passing the time in poisonous monologues, and strangely enjoyable because it made us feel superior and strong. If someone said that it was mean-spirited, we would have laughed and said, “That’s the point!” Sometimes when we were swapping vicious stories about Jonty, I saw Mother hunch her shoulders and cover her face with her hands, weeping tears of joy.

  “You won’t believe this,” Mother said one day, speaking with the flourish, the whoop that she saved for her choicest gossip. “The little prince is getting married.”

  She needed me to join in her gloating; she could not mock someone alone. She wanted an accomplice, someone to justify her contempt and to magnify it. Having an ally proved her right and made her blameless.

  I seem to be suggesting that Mother corrupted us, but that’s only how it looks to me from this distance. At the time I joined her willingly, and for me this cruelty was an occasion of satisfying hilarity, even of closeness and warmth, with Mother by my side. It seemed the greatest pleasure in the world to pick on someone, especially a member of our own family. As children, when wrestling in the house or throwing ourselves against each other, we called it a pig pile.

  Jonty’s announcing that he was getting married we saw as a way of his singling himself out as a victim. We heard that and thought, Pig pile! Mother’s thinking was that Jonty took advantage of Franny, and that Mother was deprived of Franny’s attention because of this demanding child. Mother was a rival, with all of a rival’s sneers.

  The theme of our gossip was Jonty’s unworthiness, his pretentiousness. Franny would be forced to pay for this whole thing, because Jonty was lazy and wore too much hair gel, and where was this fancy job as a radio announcer for someone who sprayed you with spittle when saying “chicken chow mein”?

  Mother provided little prince updates. Franny hosted an engagement dinner. There was talk about a bachelor party. He solicited gifts, he had wagged his fiancée’s hand to flaunt the ring (Floyd howled, “Is she slow?” when he heard the fiancée’s name was Loris), he was measured for another tuxedo—“Why didn’t he wear the one he wore to the prom?” Mother said. The wedding would include a high mass, brother Max the best man, a little troupe of flower girls and boys, a reception at Cherry Hill Country Club.

  I’ve got something special to ask, Franny wrote me in her large childish hand. I want you and Floyd to be ushers, and I’m hoping you might recite something from a book and Floyd will write a poem.

  “What planet is she living on?” Floyd said. “She should up her meds.”

  And yet I could see that he was tempted, for the opportunity to ridicule the whole affair from a front-row seat, in a denunciation he would write and declaim in heroic couplets.

  “I can just see him in his new tux,” Floyd said, “and Loris with that snout of hers poking through her veil like an Arab peeking out of a tent, the flower girls, the overdressed munchkins, the grotesque charade of it. ‘If anyone has reason to object to the union of these two people, speak now.’ And I will rise from my seat and howl at them, ‘Poseur! He’s rotten to the core. Stop this unholy travesty!’”

  But he said he had other plans.

  Though we had met Loris, the fiancée, we hardly knew her. That did not stop us from mocking her for her size. Mother said, “She works in an office. Something to do with insurance.”

  “She’ll need it!” we said, which was just the reply Mother was looking for.

  The wedding preparations were whispered about and jeered at: expensive, unnecessary, pretentious, meaningless—“Just like Jonty to put on the dog.” And with this, everyone began to pity Franny, who was paying for most of it—Loris’s parents were Estonian immigrants. Yet when we pretended to commiserate with Franny, she deflected it and said it was a labor of love, she wouldn’t have it any other way, she was so proud. It was easy to forget in our mockery that Franny was his mother, different from Mother, and might not find any satisfaction in jeering at her own son.

  Franny was stern with me. “And by the way, you haven’t replied to the invitation.”

  She had a wobbly second chin that had an expression all its own that sometimes fiercely contradicted the sentimental one above it. As she implored me with her earnest face, her chin shook with sarcasm.

  I said, “I didn’t realize we were expected to reply.”

  “It said RSVP.”

  Referring to a line from his Mr. Bones routine, I parried, “Dad said that meant ‘Remember Send Vedding Present.’”

  Honking in sudden grief, Franny said, “I wish Dad were alive, so he could come.” Overwhelmed, she sat down on my sofa, her arms and knees rising as her body sank into the cushion. “We need names! It’s a sit-down dinner at Cherry Hill. It’s catered
. Waiters. Place settings. Linen napkins. Floral arrangements.”

  “This must be costing a small fortune.”

  “You only get married once,” Franny said, and then, as an afterthought, glanced at me slyly.

  “You’re smiling because I took the plunge twice.”

  “I was not smiling. I would never smile at something like that.”

  But another family member had an unerring ability to detect a smile, especially a gloating one, no matter how slight a pinch in the lips, no matter how small a flicker in the eye.

  “I don’t think I can make it.”

  “You have to. You’re an usher.”

  Even if the smile had not deterred me, “You have to” was all the reason I needed to refuse. I did not have to do anything, especially to please someone in this family. Franny scowled, looking severe, looking—as Floyd sometimes said—like Houdon’s bust of Voltaire.

  “You can find another usher.”

  “Floyd’s backing out too,” Franny said. I expected her to whine, to complain, to accuse me of failing her and undermining the wedding. But all she said was “Okay. If you really can’t make it. You’re right. I can find someone else.”

  Then she leaned forward, rocked from side to side, and hitched herself out of the sofa, smiling.

  “Gotta go.”

  She simply accepted it, or appeared to. But that was the family way, to pretend there was no pressure, to be casual—“Hey, whatever you want.” But behind this easygoing pretense was a humorless determination to take offense. There was never acceptance, there was always hell to pay. Franny’s silence meant she was furious, her cheery smile meant she was hurt.