Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  The years I had spent trying to keep my dreams intact while living with my intrusive family—those years were formative, painful, humiliating, the source of all my secrecy and my creative energy. Not romantic, not even colorful, full of hurts and embarrassments and put-downs, and Mother’s cries of “It’s your own goddamned fault!” and “Who do you think you are?” But those hurts drove me in my middle years, the work I am known for. What I had dreaded most had come to pass: I was back home, with Mother.

  I had come from nowhere, I was going nowhere. But wait: the middle years were not half so human, so truthful in their raggedness, as where I was now. My middle years were in my books. I had published that part of my life, and I had found myself at another bookend.

  Now in obscurity, back home, I saw that I had failed as I had feared, and that I was ending my life as I had started it, among my jeering brothers and sisters, with Mother enthroned at the center of her own land.

  I hated what I now understood to be my life. I had been kidding myself, as many men do, about remarrying. I had misled Missy and her dim daughter. I would never have another wife, another child. And who knew whether I’d have another book?

  “Are you one of these writers who gets up early and does all his work before breakfast?” a friend of mine had asked the great Chicago novelist Nelson Algren a few years before his death—a man who knew a lot about the bitter end.

  “No,” Algren said. “I’m one of those writers who doesn’t write at all anymore.”

  It had been a torment to be young with Mother telling me I might never have a career; it was just as bad to be in late middle age with Mother to remind me that my career was over. Downhill, all over except the paltry remainder of my life, and Mother never looked stronger. She seemed to exist and thrive purely to show me that I had decades of disappointment ahead of me.

  I visited her. She wanted presents. She needed me to tell her how well she looked. She wanted compliments.

  “Guess what tomorrow is?” she asked, and looked coy. “My wedding anniversary. It would have been our sixty-sixth.”

  What about my two wedding anniversaries that no one remembered, not even me?

  “Look what Franny brought me. Cashmere.”

  A shawl. She draped it across her shoulders and posed.

  “This is from Fred.”

  A chunk of porous yellow stone, set in a cube of Lucite and labeled Piece of the Great Wall of China, with two flags, America’s and China’s. Certified Authentic.

  “Gilbert and Rose clubbed together to get me this.”

  A footstool, leather-cushioned, with a margin of brass tacks and sturdy legs.

  “And these are from Floyd.”

  More books, smelling—as old books always do—of mice droppings and sticky mold and damp decay. I had come to hate the sight of books.

  “I never see him.”

  “Oh?”

  The way she cocked her head, like a bystander at a train wreck, told me she was taking no responsibility, nor would she be giving me any information. Mother was always posturing, always playing at something, and now she was playing dumb.

  “Because of what he wrote. He gave my book a stinker of a review. My own brother!”

  “Oh?”

  “Floyd reviewed my book!”

  “Why are you shouting?”

  “‘The whole family laughs at him’—that’s what he said.”

  “I don’t know anything about it.” She folded her hands and shrank a little inside her new cashmere shawl.

  “Yes, you do. It was in the magazine.”

  Mother blew open her nostrils in a sneer. She said, “Are you still brooding about that?”

  “People keep asking me about it.”

  “Oh?”

  Her tone was pitying, belittling me. But she was right. I ought to have let it go. Yet I hated her tone of It’s your own goddamned fault.

  “Maybe you did something to offend him,” she said.

  I said, “No writer’s brother has ever done this, Ma. Hemingway, Henry James, all the rest of them. Like I told you. Their brothers never did this. It’s a first. I mean, this would actually be amazingly interesting if it wasn’t me, Ma.”

  Mother had stopped listening. I could tell from the slant of her head and the look in her eyes that she was thinking about something else. Her expression indicated that she was waiting for me to stop, a look of irritated and impatient boredom. Are you still blabbing? When I finished—I did so abruptly, just faltering and shrugging and going silent—Mother smiled at me.

  “I walked all the way down to the public beach this morning.”

  She wanted a compliment, Lordy, you are one in a million—I don’t know how you do it, but feeling hostile, I instead said, “You should be careful. You could fall. Do you remember to take your cane? A lot of people your age stumble and break a hip.”

  She smiled, but I could tell from her pinched nose that she was affronted.

  “I’ve always been a good walker. Miles—I’ve walked miles. I never complain.”

  “I only mentioned a hip because a replacement is so expensive. You don’t want to get into a cash crunch.”

  It was all mutual rebuke. I had gone there hurting, looking for a listener, and now I hurt more. Mother offered no consolation. And her obstinacy made me obstinate: I refused to praise her walking.

  Gilbert called me the next day. He seemed in a hurry, but he was agitated too; he hated confrontation, and one was looming. I knew this was not a friendly call.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Riyadh?”

  “Next week,” he said. “Listen, I just got off the phone with Franny. She was talking to Ma this morning. Ma was really upset about what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “Let’s not get into that, okay? What you don’t seem to realize is that walking to the beach is one of Ma’s recreations. She said you were determined to scare her—wait ​—” I had tried to interrupt. “Don’t discourage her, and for God’s sake stop trying to scare her. She won’t fall down. She’s pretty spry. She was so upset she couldn’t sleep.”

  Hubby called and said, “I saw Ma. She was talking about you. She even mentioned your book,” and in Mother’s voice he added, “‘More porno!’”

  Fred called later. He said, “I guess you know why I’m calling. Ma’s a wreck. Why do you try to worry her? Give her a break. She’s old.”

  Mother did not seem old to me. She seemed ageless and fierce, more powerful than ever, surrounded by courtiers and ladies-in-waiting and flatterers and protectors, demanding obedience from her subjects, of whom I was one of the lowliest. She seemed to grow stronger as I grew weaker, and now I felt ant-like again, a humiliated child, reprimanded by Mother’s surrogates. I was fairly miserable. Mother was very happy. She preserved her happiness by blaming me for my misery. And she was probably right to blame me. My book had failed. Whose fault is that?

  19

  The Side Effects of Melancholy

  When my children called, as they did every month or so, another example of station identification, I tried to reassure them that I was doing fine. I had released them into the world. I wanted to avoid doing to them what Mother had done to me. I left them to themselves. I made no demands on them. I thought about them every day, yearning to see them, but I seldom did.

  “I’m okay,” I would repeat, yet I knew that my voice had that strangled intensity as when one is trying too hard to be convincing. They said they would visit. Though I didn’t press them, they kept promising. As youngsters they had adored me. Older, they had kept their distance, so that my shadow would not fall across them, so that they could make their own lives. My early success had disturbed them; they had feared being overwhelmed by me, absorbed into my life, losing their own creative ambitions by becoming part of the family business.

  Now they were embarked on their own careers, the elder, Julian, a screenwriter, the younger, Harry, a maker of TV documentaries, neither of them married. Perhaps wha
t they had seen of marriage in their youth had made them wary of any surrender to romance. They both lived in London. Being so far gave them an excuse to stay away, but I knew that their real reason was their fear of becoming entangled in my affairs—and who could blame them?

  Yet I adored their visits. Probably that was something else that put them off, my smothering attention, my eager inquiries into their lives. They needed distance, to be themselves. I did not fault them for wanting to keep apart from my success, and I strenuously urged them to steer clear of my failure. Now I was in between, in a sort of creative twilight. The season matched my mood. It was early fall. My book had failed: I pegged its decline to the week that Floyd’s grotesque piece appeared. In his attack on the book and me, Floyd had cast himself in the role of spokesman for the family.

  I abandoned any hope for my book, a reminder of an early intimation of mine, that although I wished to make a mark as a writer, it would never happen. As a hopeful high school scribbler, with a paperback of On the Road, nursing a dream of becoming a writer, I was embarrassed to tell anyone. Secretly I believed myself to be one of Kerouac’s Subterraneans, yet the notion of being a writer was too extravagant. I was not worthy of it; I was talentless—Mother’s message of You’re not good enough. It was how I had felt then. It was how I felt now.

  Late September days of bright sunlight and cool nights filled me with the desire to work, a project for the indoor months to come. But I had nothing to do. I was glad for a chance to pretend to be busy in what remained of this mild breezy weather. I sailed single-handed in my sprit-rigged dory out of Lewis Bay and beyond the Hyannis Port jetty, telling myself that I was lucky to be able to prolong the summer while everyone else was working, not daring to admit to myself that I would rather have been writing.

  That, too, had been a feature of my childhood: solitary trips in a rowboat, lonely hikes, any excuse to get out of the house, away from Mother’s fuss and blame, the family whispers. No one must know where I am and what I am doing. I protected my privacy, fearing that I would be satirized by the others. Ganders in a flock, seeing an old goose stumble and fall, attack the bird without mercy, stabbing with their beaks, pecking its head, beating it with their wings.

  The same self-conscious solitude I had known as a secretive child enclosed me now, and so I was hyperalert when the phone rang. I put on a special voice of greeting, a false I’m all right tone when I answered the phone.

  “Dad!” It was Julian, calling from the airport. “We just arrived. Harry’s getting a car.”

  “This is a surprise.”

  Did they perhaps suspect that I was unable to offer a lift? They were brisk and capable.

  “Anything we can bring?” Julian asked.

  “Just yourselves.”

  “See you in a bit.”

  They arrived late, and coming out of the dark into the lamplit house, they seemed tall and self-assured. I guessed from their bonhomie that they were worried about me.

  “You look great, Dad. You’ve been sailing. Your nose is sunburned.”

  All good parents worry about their children, but only the most irresponsible parents require their children to worry about them. I did not want them to be anxious, yet they were. Perhaps they had reason to be.

  They hugged me, squeezing hard, making me feel frail. Meaning well, they asked me questions, believing the answers would buck me up. But there were no simple answers to “Is this a rental?” and “Where’s all your wonderful furniture?” and “How long are you going to be here?” and “How’s the book?” and “What’s up with the family?”

  They insisted on taking me to a Japanese restaurant in Yarmouth Port to eat sushi.

  “You look fit, Dad,” Harry said. “You’ve lost weight.”

  “I haven’t been eating.”

  “Dieting?”

  “Sort of.”

  One side effect of melancholy was a numbed palate.

  Julian pushed the sushi platter over to me, saying, “Go for it, Dad,” and then, when I hesitated, “What’s wrong?”

  It was the question they had wanted to ask since the moment they’d arrived. Everything I had lived through since Father’s death was etched on my face, not sorrow or grief but the more complex mask of experience, the sort of weather-beaten face you see on a mountain climber who has survived a harrowing descent and lost some of his companions and perhaps a few toes to frostbite.

  “Nothing,” I said. They stared at me. “My family.”

  “Uncle Floyd is so weird,” Harry said. “What made him write that crazy thing?”

  Floyd’s piece was as famous for its vitriol as for its being unexplainable. It had overshadowed my book in ways that might have surprised Floyd himself.

  “I think he was annoyed because I kept him out of the loop.”

  My children had no idea that I had planned to marry for a third time. I had not wanted to tell them, because I had suspected that it was a bad idea, that it might fail, that there was nothing to tell.

  “I think Floyd felt I was keeping secrets from him.”

  They were shrewd and humane boys. They asked nothing more that night. It was not until the next afternoon, helping me rake leaves, that Julian said, “What kind of secrets?”

  “Nothing important. But you know how it is in my family. They have to know everything, or else.”

  “Or else what?” Harry asked.

  “You get blackballed and excluded. No one talks to you.”

  “What about your friends?”

  How could I tell them that I had no one, that I had lost Missy, that my family had let me down, though we were somehow all still hovering around Mother, at her insistence.

  “Uncle Floyd’s piece was mentioned in some of the London papers. They quoted bits of it,” Julian said. “Very creepy.”

  “I’m glad you agree it was strange. People asked me about it, and I couldn’t explain it. I wanted someone in the family to speak up for me, but none of them would.”

  Julian was looking on me with a tenderness and concern that was also troubled by anxiety and disbelief. “What did you want them to say?”

  “Anything.” I turned away, raking more leaves into a pile.

  The scrape of rakes, clawing at pebbles and leaves, filled the silence.

  “You sound so young saying that.”

  “I went to my mother. She wouldn’t help.”

  “You sound even younger.”

  “She just dismissed me,” I said.

  “What does any of this have to do with Grandma?”

  “I think she’s behind it all,” I said. “She never liked me.”

  From the way their rakes stuttered I could tell that Julian and Harry were exchanging glances behind my back.

  “My mother tells Franny I’m upsetting her. Franny tells Fred and Gilbert. They call me and accuse me of starting trouble.”

  Harry said, “Is Fred still living around here?”

  “We all are. Because my mother’s so old. It’s like we never left.” I could not keep a catch out of my throat when I added, “They’re saying terrible things about me.”

  They glanced at each other again, I knew. I was embarrassing them, and worse, they pitied me. Even so, I felt wronged.

  “I can’t convince my mother to take me seriously.”

  Julian said, “Why, at your age, do you care what your mother thinks?”

  I had no answer to this. I was even a bit startled by the question. My befuddlement showed in the determined way I was dragging my rake.

  “I’ve got my self-respect,” I said.

  “What about Aunt Franny and Aunt Rose?”

  “They bring me fruit and candy. There’s plenty left in the house. Cookies. Franny has the idea that I love cheese balls.”

  Speaking of food, I suggested we stop the raking and eat something. They were September leaves, not many of them, nothing like the November deluge. We went into the house and made coffee. I brought out Franny’s tin of cookies, the candy, the cheese balls.<
br />
  The boys remained tactful. I could see their concern in their posture. They were attentive, obliquely collecting information, yet trying to avoid putting me on the defensive.

  “One thing you could do is call Floyd,” Julian said. “Tell him how you feel.”

  “I tried that. He won’t talk to me. He tells the others not to talk to me.” The boys were staring at me. “They have parties and refuse to invite me. Then they pretend there was no party.”

  Now both boys were sipping coffee, keeping their heads down, not making eye contact.

  “They really treat me terribly,” I said. “Although Hubby still speaks to me. My mother seems to enjoy stirring them up against me.”

  Sounds of the coffee being sipped kept me talking.

  “They can be really unkind. They’re always talking about me behind my back.”

  When there was no response, I replayed in my mind what I had just said. Still I felt wronged.

  “It’s all my mother’s fault!”

  The boys raised their eyes to me. They looked wise and sad, not sure where to begin.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

  I was a resentful child, and they—taller than me, and polite in their pity—were adults. They had work and deadlines and girlfriends; they had pleasures and income. They were self-sufficient, reasonable, and upright, regarding me from those heights and being strong, trying to buck me up and, with the best will in the world, patronizing me.

  I could see that they were surprised to find me in such humble circumstances, reduced to renting a damp bungalow, sitting among someone else’s furniture, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and yard sale accessories, and complaining about my neglectful family.

  “The reason we came,” Julian said, “ is because we both have meetings in New York. Business stuff.”

  “We can’t stay much longer,” Harry said. “Projects.”

  They made a point of never telling me what things they were working on. I understood that reticence in a child. They were glad for an excuse to leave. I was also relieved that they were not staying. Their scrutiny made me self-conscious. I knew I was not in the wrong, yet they made me feel ridiculous: they were from the outside world, they had lost touch with the family, and they had never understood how it made me so miserable.