Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “Franny was screaming about you,” Hubby told me the next day. “You should have heard her. You and Floyd let her down. She’s already ordered the tuxedoes. Where is she getting the money is what I want to know.”

  “She never mentioned tuxedoes.”

  “She’ll never forgive you for this.”

  It was true. She never did. Years later, she still mentioned my absence at Jonty’s wedding as a slap in her face. She had the family’s long merciless memory.

  Hubby went to the wedding and was ridiculed for looking silly in his ill-fitting tuxedo. (It was Floyd’s.) He was an usher. Gilbert was the other usher—he was not ridiculed. Fred went too, but he was mocked for bringing one of his small children, who cried so loudly that Fred had to leave the church just as the bride and groom were exchanging vows. Rose went and said, “It was hard to keep a straight face. I kept thinking of Jonty kicking out the windshield of the Dodge Dart.”

  Mother presided in the front pew, looking enigmatic. She wore her favorite lavender dress and her aquamarine necklace, white gloves and a white hat. She was demure, she accepted praise, and Father Furty’s sermon mentioned Mother, her standing in the community, her years of teaching, her large and successful family, how big happy families were the repository of God’s grace.

  And when it was over (so Gilbert reported; he found her hilarious in her spite), Mother said under her breath, “This is a farce. He’s a horrible little monster. I pity his wife,” and smiling, “I give this marriage a year.”

  9

  Self-Denial

  What had surprised me most about the wedding was Franny’s written request: I’m hoping you might recite something from a book and that Floyd will write a poem.

  It was rare for any of us to ask a favor, especially something we cared about, because doing so would expose us. The request gave you away, betrayed your need, and a need was a weakness that could be exploited and held against you. Better not to ask.

  We had refused and stayed away from the wedding, couldn’t be bothered, and Floyd said, “I’m going to read a poem to those philistines?”

  Had it been a simpler request we might have relented. A family characteristic was never to give what was asked, but rather to give half or less, or to complain to everyone else about how much we had been imposed upon. And the little that had been granted was never acknowledged, for an acknowledgment was a conspicuous display of gratitude, and all thanks implied the weakness of indebtedness.

  Yes, all this showed extreme pettiness, but pettiness animated the family and made it work. Pettiness—these trivialities—made us a mob, and we reacted because of slights or hurts or imaginings, Mother most of all. When one of us exposed a weakness to Mother, we belonged to her. She pretended not to notice at first; then, appearing to sympathize, she pumped us for enough details to turn into gossip, and she used her knowledge of this weakness to control us. At last, she owned us.

  With this in mind, early in my life I developed one of my most enduring personality traits, a reluctance to seek help or favors. I learned never to ask anything of Mother. Dad was easygoing enough and helpful at times; Mother was impossible. She did not know how to give, or rather, her way of giving was instead a genius for withholding, in ways that were not obvious yet complex, as though she was the goddess with eighteen arms, each one twisted in a peculiar gesture—one giving, one taking, one hesitating, one bobbling, one fondling, one holding a weapon or a piece of fruit, and so forth. Durga needs that many arms to deal with hostile cosmic forces, and in her incarnation as a wrathful deity, Mother had adopted a similar strategy. On a sentimental and superstitious level, the way I recited prayers, I told myself that I loved her. I even prayed for her. I gave her presents—she was propitiated with presents. On a practical level she was the enemy, but an ignorant and destructive enemy, selfish and sinister, greedy for power, attentive only when she felt her power diminished.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she’d ask.

  “Nothing. I’m all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She did not want to help me; she only wanted to know whether I was in need of help. She was not evil; in fact, Mother’s example convinced me that evil as unexplainable darkness might not exist. Beyond good and evil, she was weak and vain, and these qualities were more real, more human, more widespread than what people denounced as wickedness. To me a devil was just a joke, but a woman with the face of a mother and an appetite for power was dangerous. Mother did not know any better, she did not have a thought-out program, she wasn’t on a campaign to ruin us; some ancient instinct that Floyd identified as tribal was at work in her.

  All of this was in my mind, for after the wedding I mentioned the extravagant expense of it to Mother—what I had heard of the elaborate arrangements through the family whispers.

  “How could Franny afford this big bash?”

  Mother did not reply. She gave me one of her knowing, ask-me-another-question looks, a smugness, a certain slyness, a cunning display of both denying and possessing a secret, implying a deep wish to prolong the pettiness of questioning the expense.

  “So, um, where did she get it?” I asked again, because Mother had made it clear that she harbored secrets.

  “All I know is, they don’t have an awful lot,” Mother said. “Marvin doesn’t make much at the mall, but he’s a scrapper, you know, and Franny’s been a brick. I know she thinks the world of you. She’s so proud of you all.”

  Most of this was platitude: you had to praise someone before damning them, followed by the usual cant that we were a big happy family.

  I said, with a directness I seldom used on Mother, “Did you give them any money for the wedding?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I was just wondering.”

  She giggled and said, “I helped them out a little bit.”

  This floored me. Mother, who had done nothing but mock Franny for indulging Jonty, and jeer at Jonty for being selfish and lazy, who had ridiculed the whole notion of a grand wedding and a high mass, who had, loudly at times, threatened to stay away from the whole affair (“I could sit at home and watch All My Children”; she seldom missed that soap opera)—Mother had actually given Franny money for Jonty’s wedding.

  “Helped them out a little bit” could mean two things in Mother-speak: a pittance she was boasting about, or a large amount she was concealing. She wouldn’t tell me how much, though she implied, by deflecting the question, wincing slightly, that it was quite a lot. At the time, I thought, What a generous and forgiving soul to contribute to her grandson’s wedding.

  Unexpected news always seems to create a series of aftershocks, which we experience in successive gulps of elaboration. When “I helped them out a little bit” sank in, I realized that this news was also an indication that Mother, who claimed to be poor, had money. “I’d love to help you,” she would say, “but where would I get the money? I have nothing.” But she did have some. I wondered how much but didn’t ask for details. Her story had always been that she had so little she still bought day-old bread and dented cans at the supermarket, using coupons. Money was not something you spent; it was a life force, something you saved.

  One of Mother’s essential traits was frugality, withholding praise, money, even simple attention. She would look away when I mentioned something exceptional I had done—wrote a story, won a merit badge. “What was that you said? Oh, really?” And she had a special way of refusing to help, trumpeting nostrils and the jeer, “You’re not man enough to do that?” or “What you need is good old-fashioned elbow grease,” or “God helps those who help themselves.”

  Saying so, she took a step backward, as if to dismiss me or give herself a better view of my failure.

  Had she turned her back on me I could have managed, but she lingered to watch me falter. Her attitude did not make me strong; it made me insecure and resentful. Her lack of support argued a lack of interest. In time, this distance did its work, with the result—curious and sad to my y
oung mind—that she ceased to know me.

  Asking for money was out of the question and could be risky, for I knew that she would not just refuse the money—for a bike, a tent, a Boy Scout uniform, or a jackknife—she would take pleasure in belittling such useless things. Why did I think I needed a bike? I could walk just as easily. And where would I put a bike? There was no room in the garage. And if I had a bike, what would I do when I needed a new chain or a tire or a tube? A bike was just the beginning of more expenses. “Bikes cost money!” And spending money in this way was pure vanity. Take a bus.

  A Saturday matinee cost ten cents. At the age of nine I did not have ten cents, and Mother refused to give it to me.

  “But it’s not the money,” she said—although I knew it was. “You want to sit in a movie theater on a glorious day like this?” She scoffed at the self-indulgent waste of such time. “You should stay outside in God’s sunshine.”

  God made the day for a purpose, for work and profit, and so good weather was a blessing, a cause for rejoicing. It was sinful to refuse to rejoice in it and be thankful.

  Even as she hectored me, I suspected that Mother did not believe this. At bottom she was not spiritual at all. Saving money was both an art and a science; it was a way of life. This was reason enough to keep us from the movies, from any spending at all. But along with it was Mother’s need for control.

  It was fatal to ask why.

  “Because I said so!”

  Disobedience was severely punished, but the odd thing about our obedience was that, once we had submitted, we foundered and so did she: Mother did not know what to do with us. We were, like lifers in a reformatory, to be controlled for the sake of control. We needed to learn the virtues: get up early, work hard, obey your teacher, impress your boss, don’t get out of line, and never complain. Kids who sold newspapers Mother respected more than kids who buried themselves in books or who excelled in a sport.

  Mother’s ideals terrified me. One was the pale boy in a threadbare coat and a bad haircut standing before a stack of newspapers at a street corner, clanking change in the pocket of his filthy apron. Another was the girl scuffing along a snowy street with her aged mother on one arm and a shopping bag on the other. The teenager in white overalls pushing a trolley of dirty dishes in a café and busing tables. The grinning boy with slicked-down hair in an old suit going door-to-door selling ointment or greeting cards he’d received as catalog mail orders under the promise Earn $$$ in Your Spare Time! These were the people Mother admired, the paragons she held up to us. The joyless, overworked, unimaginative youths, seeming so dull and luckless and unambitious to me, were embodiments of virtue to Mother, who believed that time spent with a book was time wasted, that there was something unrewarding, even effete, in study. Where was the elbow grease in scholarship? Roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty!

  Once, foolishly, on a Saturday afternoon, I let slip the fact that I was going to a matinee with a girl I longed to be alone with. I was perhaps twelve or thirteen. The movie was one I wanted to see, and the day was rainy. How was it that I was so unwise as to mention this to Mother? Perhaps I was so happy with this plan that I had let my guard down.

  Mother stared at me, smiling in pity, casting her shadow over me. I had begun to gnaw my fingers.

  “Why?” she asked.

  I had no answer. I didn’t go, and when I broke it to the girl, saying, “My mother won’t let me,” the girl laughed at me for being a simpleton.

  The next year I pleased Mother by getting a job at the Stop and Shop. At first I was too young to stock shelves but just the right age to round up shopping carts in the parking lot. This was how I spent every Saturday for the next four years, ascending the supermarket ladder from the parking lot, to bagging groceries at the checkout stand, to stocking shelves at night, and at last to the after-hours weekend cleanup, the sweeping and mopping. As I was telling a harassed woman, “Ritz crackers? Aisle five,” or “Velveeta? Dairy case,” my school friends were at the football game or the library. I was neither a jock nor a scholar. My coworkers were the feebs, the failures, the wiseguys, the sturdy louts who saw such jobs as their whole future.

  Work hard, be humble, be anonymous, be grateful, be self-effacing and save. Mother never said why. Mortify your flesh—that’s what saints did, such as Tarcisius, the boy martyr who allowed himself to be stomped to death by a mob rather than let them desecrate the host. It was not clear to me how Tarcisius’s example in Rome applied to me in Mother Land, but I took the message to be martyrdom and self-denial.

  Mother set us in competition with each other. Fred worked for Father, Floyd for a stationer, I was at the supermarket. Hubby and Gilbert were too small to compete, and already Franny and Rose were Mother’s handmaidens, learning housework. Being the eldest, Fred worked longer hours and earned the most money. The idea was that, in time, Fred would learn the business and eventually take over—as a shoe clerk. No one asked if this was what Fred wanted.

  Floyd’s part-time job at the stationer’s was odd. The owner of the business was afraid of the rats that had nested in the basement and the stockroom and penetrated the rest of the building, so he kept Floyd with him at all times, to scare the rats. Floyd’s fundamental task was to stamp his feet and drive them into hiding. Floyd was poorly paid, he threatened to quit, but Mother said to him, “What will you do then?” for she could not imagine his existing without a job. Being a full-time high school student, doing homework, using the library, playing basketball—which he excelled at—and relaxing with his friends was an absurdity, out of the question.

  I knew this was unfair—wrong—but as Mother said, with Dad backing her up, “As long as you live in this house, you follow our rules,” and so I did.

  Because I was overworked and mediocre and miserable, I found school dreary, and any memory of it was inevitably an embarrassment. I was, simply, not a scholar, not a participant. I endured it, without any distinction.

  On graduation, I enrolled in a university and left home, paying my own way, using my supermarket savings. “You’re on your own,” Mother said with her customary shrug. But I liked it: at last, away from Mother, I felt less careworn, less troubled; I felt energized, more optimistic. I began to get a notion of who I was and what I wanted, and when I had a difficult year—it came suddenly, soon after I left home—it served as such a useful gauge for all the rest of them, I regarded it as my best year.

  10

  The Best Year of My Life

  This, the best year of my life, began in the worst way, more proof of the sadism of fate, convincing me that, somewhere, someone was enjoying my pain—a merciless plotter, perhaps one of Mother’s wickeder allies, if not Mother herself. I got the appalling news while the whole family watched me, all of them chewing and gabbling at the kitchen table, near where the phone hung on the wall. This was a few days before Christmas, so everyone was at home, the entire cast assembled at the front of the stage for this—not tragedy, tragedy seldom visits the young—this cruel farce. I was eighteen.

  “It’s for you,” Mother said, handing me the receiver.

  My whole life was to change. I was about to step into a hole and spend a year in the dark. Typical, I thought, for my life as I lived it then—in bewilderment, frowning at the futility, and resenting the squandered time as it unrolled and flapped around me, slapping my head and making me lose the thread of whatever I was trying to do—seemed ragged and plotless: random, rancorous, out of my control, meandering from disorder to chaos, in the general direction of oblivion.

  In retrospect, from the vantage point of late middle age—the helpful heights and clear air that are part of aging’s greatest consolations—I see (as I wander through memories of Mother Land) that my life was closely plotted and consequential, with the structural elaboration and subtle motifs of a Victorian novel, interwoven with grace notes, subplots, and byways, coincidences that stretched credulity, and surprises so unexpected and yet inevitable. This life of mine—perhaps all lives—suff
ered from an excess of design: nothing random, nothing wasted, no longueurs, everything hinged and tight. Everything mattered, and the hole I’d stepped into was a magical thoroughfare that carried me to the future.

  Though, as I say, at the time it all appeared to be an aimless monochrome, regret and shame and wrong turnings and wasted effort. And worse, humiliation and one specific disgrace.

  Whatever befell me, my mother’s shrill isolating cry was always “It’s your own goddamned fault!” That blame rang in my head for years. But decades later, when other troubles came my way, I was able to say, “I’ve seen worse,” and really mean it. Much worse than being thirty, with a wife and two small children and no money, and recently fired from my teaching job in Singapore and having to save myself, and struggling to find a house to live in. Worse than being fucked up and far from home in India, lost in China, and hard up and buried alive in London. Worse than being cuckolded. Worse than hearing “I’m leaving you” in a stifling and pissy phone booth on a crackling receiver stinking of cigarettes, “and I’ve found someone else,” and the miserable litigation of (so it seemed) the death sentence of divorce, and the half-life of splitting up and losing that house I had struggled to find earlier in this paragraph. Worse than decades of “You’re not going to like what I’m about to tell you.” Worse than the loss of my father, for an old man’s dying is a natural process, even if it had been hastened by a nagging wife and a quarreling family. That singular disgrace was worse than anything I was ever to know. It was entirely a young man’s stupidity, as Mother was to remind me again and again: all my own goddamned fault.

  That year, my first year of college, I was away most of the time, but back home for vacations, still one of the family, working to pay my way, with obligations burdening me—school bills, travel bills, food and room bills.