Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “You’re limping,” she said.

  She remained watchful as I corrected my step, turning to align my aching foot, trying to deny it. Mother’s unsympathetic alertness was that of an unblinking lioness observing a distant antelope for signs of weakness. How had she seen? But I was prey: she saw everything. Her watchfulness was also that of a tyrant, and it struck me again that a tyrant is often a paranoiac.

  “Nothing serious.”

  “If it’s not serious, why are you doing it?” The illogical always made her smile in pity.

  “My foot’s sore.”

  “Did you break something?” She seemed hopeful, saying this.

  “Gout,” I said.

  “My father had gout, rest his soul. He suffered terribly. He took pills.”

  “I’m taking pills.”

  Mother smiled, and when she did, I knew from her look of contentment that she was thinking of herself.

  “I don’t take anything,” she said. “I was at my carving class the other day. All the rest of them were talking about their medications. Jim Gaffey is on blood thinner. Irene is on prednisone. Walter takes Vioxx. Who takes stool softeners? Someone. Zyloprim. They looked at me, because I hadn’t said anything. ‘What are you on?’ I just smiled”—saying this, she enjoyed the same smile now, smug and tight under her raptor’s nose. “Then I said, ‘I’m not on anything.’”

  She sipped some more tea. The tumbler was no longer a measuring beaker; it was just a glass again. Drinking, she became self-absorbed. Her way of swallowing and going glassy-eyed was a kind of selfishness.

  And, for effect, she repeated the answer: “I’m not awn anything.”

  I said, “The trouble is having to remember to take the pills three times a day with food. It’s so boring.”

  “I’m never bored,” Mother said.

  That morning I had felt better, over the worst, the first indication that the indomethacin was taking hold, a subsiding of the soreness in my big-toe joint. In Mother’s presence, it was sore again. I felt much worse—sicker, sorer, more demoralized and unconsoled—having visited Mother.

  “Not that it matters that I’m never bored,” she said, still swallowing. “I won’t be around much longer.”

  “Don’t be silly, Ma. You’re looking great. I brought you these blueberries.”

  She eyed them as I placed them on her side table.

  “My bags are packed.”

  She said it as though she would be leaving the blueberries behind.

  “Have you heard from anyone?” she asked.

  I said, “On my way over I took the scenic route, to get these berries at the farm stand. I saw a backhoe on the Acre.”

  “I have no idea what that is.”

  “A digger. For making a foundation.”

  “Oh?”

  Mother and Dad had bought the vacant lot they called the Acre years before, from a man so desperate for money he sold it way below the market price. Some days Mother walked the quarter mile from her house to stare at it, as if she expected fruit trees to start from the ground, and springs to bubble up, and flowers to blossom. Her gaze was just so absorbing and demanding and hopeful.

  “Are you planning to build on it?”

  “No,” she said, and the implication of her tone in this simple word was that my question was stupid and intrusive, like a bratty child’s nagging.

  And so we talked about the weather, and she wanted to know why the carton of blueberries had leaves and twigs in it. Then I left her, limping badly, my foot much sorer than when I’d arrived.

  A few days later, Franny called me. Her voice was agitated and tearful.

  “Have you heard? Hubby’s got the Acre.” She started to cry, snorting into the phone. “He’s already broken ground!”

  “The Acre? How did he get it?”

  “Three guesses.” She was still struggling to speak through her sobs. “I don’t know why I’m so upset. He doesn’t deserve it. What has he ever done?”

  “Ma must have sold it to him.”

  “He tricked her. You know how he is.” She was snuffling snot and tears, like someone being tumbled in surf. “Dad never meant the Acre to be sold!”

  But I was thinking of Mother. She hadn’t said a word of this to me, nor had she told me a single lie.

  Soon, everyone in the family knew, and everyone, even Hubby, was angry.

  I said to him, “How much did you pay for it?”

  “Everyone’s asking me the same stupid question!”

  “So what’s the answer?”

  In a growly voice he said, “The price was right.”

  I was surprised by how indignant the rest of them were. It was as if the Acre had been taken from them. I reasoned that the land was Mother’s to dispose of as she wished. Odd, though, that she would sell it to Hubby, whom she so often mocked behind his back.

  “He’s got more than me,” we used to say at the dinner table. “She’s got a bigger piece.” Or: “He’s having seconds.” Years of that. And Hubby’s ending up owning the Acre was just another version of it.

  Mother was excited by the angry interplay, vitalized by the controversy. Her fascination was vivid and palpable and seemed to strengthen her. She seemed years younger in her indignation.

  “The nerve of them, asking me about the Acre,” she said to me.

  “I suppose it’s natural curiosity,” I said, to see what she would reply.

  “It’s unnatural. I’ll do as I goddamn please!”

  She only pretended to be angry. She loved the helpless fury of our ignorant questioning, so that she could be defiant. She wanted the arrangement with Hubby to be noticed, whatever arrangement it was—the more shadowy and covert-seeming the better, because it was all a provocation to us. She wanted to say, Do I ask you what you do with your money and property? She was delighted that we were confounded with unanswered questions. She exploited our confusion.

  The attention she got so energized her that she stopped saying “My bags are packed.” The flurry of curiosity, the backbiting and envy, restored her will to live.

  And our objections showed her how weak we were, how easily manipulated.

  I was also thinking, Hubby—of all people! Because he made an effort to help and was never thanked, he was the fault-finder, the complainer, the begrudger, at least in the eyes of the others, who disparaged his effort. He offered medical advice, drug samples, and bandages, and I saw him as the handyman, the essential person in a big, breakable household, Nurse Fixit. He was jeered at, but when someone had an ache or a swelling, had a drain to unclog or a gutter to clear or a mower to mend, had something to be bandaged or glued, Hubby had the answer.

  He was expert in his own profession, as a practical nurse, usually in triage at the ER in Hyannis, but no one spoke of him as a medical man. He was the family menial, expert in niggling repairs.

  One of the family’s cruelest characteristics was its cynicism in giving no credit to those who helped. By minimizing someone’s generosity, you owed nothing. The greater the favor you did, the more you were mocked for your folly in offering it, or worse, you were ignored. I would be asked for a loan. It might be ten thousand dollars. I would agree—too readily—and so the amount would be doubled, and soon the figure might be twenty-six thousand. The borrower had just suffered a crisis and was facing financial ruin. I was enjoying literary success—the good years. I found it more poignant than flattering that a sibling should come to me, hat in hand, begging for a loan, and so I would say yes.

  An ominous quality of frenzied joy, a giddy relief, takes hold of people who have gotten what they wanted from you. This joy raises the suspicion that they will never repay you. They are a bit too happy, too relieved, all at once carefree, the burden lifted. Infused with an almost indefinable and irrational hysteria.

  “I’ll pay you back,” said with such insistence, made me suspicious. Why wouldn’t I be paid back?

  “I insist on paying interest. A bank would make me do it. It’s only fair.”<
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  In some cases a document would be drawn up and the borrower would smile at our parallel signatures. Alarmed by this ritual, I’d repeat that at some point I’d have to be repaid.

  Years went by, my fortunes flagged, I was going through a divorce, and now our positions were reversed, the borrower now flush with success. I needed the money.

  “What money?”

  I’d mention the amount and I’d be stared at, as though I might be off my head, not just delusional but something of a nuisance. I’d repeat the amount in a tremulous voice.

  “Are you sure?”

  Smiling at my confusion, looking like Mother, the borrower regarded my request as absurd, a shakedown of my own. I was the trickster now. So it often happens with a loan: the loaner becomes the villain, the recipient of the loan the victim.

  All memory of the loan had been wiped clean, and the borrower’s casual geniality made me anxious.

  “We had a contract,” I’d say.

  “Nothing like that in my files.”

  Years of living abroad had made me a paper saver: an expatriate exists in documents. In time I’d find the contract, which would put the borrower in the wrong. The loan, now an established fact, was a great nuisance, not something to thank me for, but something to negotiate.

  “I just don’t have that kind of money.”

  Then I was the beggar, and after a while I’d be sent a check, with a graceless memo. It was bad manners on my part to have raised this awkward matter, and I’d be whispered about in the family as a nuisance and a time waster. A nobler person than I would never have asked for the money back. I was a cheapskate for asking to be repaid.

  Some happiness came from these experiences. After the first flush of bitterness subsided, I felt a throb of enlightened satisfaction, from the liberating sense that someone else in the family had been revealed as never to be trusted again. Such a revelation of disloyalty and ingratitude made me oddly joyous, relieving me of any further obligation to care.

  I was to feel this moral certainty whenever I was cheated, whenever I discovered someone had lied to me, when a woman was unfaithful to me, when I’d been swindled. After my first rush of indignation, I was possessed by an exalted sense of rightness, a kind of cynical bliss. Knowing that I’d been let down freed me from any responsibility to the offender. Though I took a ghastly pleasure in smiling at such cheaters, I never took them seriously again. I was spared the effort of expending another ounce of sympathy on them.

  But the family was pitiless with Hubby. He deserved nothing—certainly not the Acre. And, true to the family tradition, Hubby denied that he had gotten anything substantial from Mother.

  “The Acre was just sitting there,” he said to me on one of his drive-bys. “Just a bunch of weeds, poison ivy, sumac trees, and tangled-up grapevines. Any of you could have had it. No one did a thing for years. Ma sells it to me and everyone goes nuts. People are yelling at me.”

  He was indignant rather than grateful, and he implied that he’d had to pay quite a bit for it.

  Our speculation over the Acre made us yell at each other, and for a time, the yelling brought us together.

  “Can you believe his gall?” Fred said to me. “He’s sitting on an acre of prime land—water view—and pretends he has a God-given right to it. How about, ‘Thanks, Ma’?”

  I was reminded of one of the loans I’d made to a family member, who’d paid it back only because I’d found the contract. But I said, “Hubby’s been useful around the house.”

  “Idiot jobs. Replacing a lightbulb. That land is worth eighty K!”

  This figure was repeated. The supposition was that Hubby had paid Mother nowhere near the market price. He’d secretly acquired it, taken it from us—so to speak—and had conned Mother. No one suggested that Mother had conspired with him. In our scenarios, she was the injured party.

  Franny and Rose wailed the loudest.

  “Look at you,” Franny said to me. “You don’t have a house. You’re in a rental. You could have used that land.”

  “But I couldn’t have bought it. Franny, I don’t have any money.”

  “Your fiancée might have chipped in.”

  This was how out of touch she was—they all were. It had been years since Missy had dumped me, and I’d found no one else. But I had at last understood the wisdom that a secret is something you don’t tell.

  “Hubby is such a sneak,” Rose said. “He’s a bully, too. Ma’s afraid of him. That’s why she agreed to it. If I’d known, I would have done something about it.”

  Franny said, “He doesn’t deserve that land. He’s going to build a nice house there while the rest of us are in hovels.”

  “I hope he has trouble getting a building permit,” Rose said.

  Hubby did have trouble getting the permit. The perc test failed. He had to get an engineer to create a hillock on the land for the septic system, and then he underwent the ordeal of a public hearing. Because the hearing was held in the winter, when his neighbors on the Cape had nothing to do but attend such meetings and frustrate building permits, this one attracted attention. Franny and Rose went on that cold night, and so did Fred. It seemed the greatest opposition to the permit came from their corner of the room. It was pointed out that they were not abutters, and the permit was granted over their objections.

  For a while there was no construction, but when the land thawed in the early spring, the hillock began to swell on the Acre.

  “I paid good money for this,” Hubby said when he drove by to complain that the others had attended the hearing to vote down his permit.

  “Floyd’s angry with me,” Mother said. “‘You gave the Acre to Hubby!’ What right does he have to question me?”

  Her way of putting me in my place was loudly to put someone else in his place. But I had no serious complaint. I didn’t have the money; I didn’t care. And besides, Hubby took on all the unpleasant jobs I could not do. I recalled him fixing a clogged drain, reaching in and yanking out a dripping clump of Mother’s hair as sleek as a ferret from the pipe.

  Franny said, “If Dad were alive he’d never have agreed to this.”

  Dead Dad was the missing sense of fairness.

  “How could she?” Franny said over the phone, between sobs. Rose was simply furious—no tears. Gilbert took Mother’s side. “Maybe she did what made her happy.” Fred raged at Hubby for all the faults I’d found in Fred—arrogance, meanness, amnesia.

  We were talking, we were arguing, and Mother had never been happier. She would not say why she had sold the Acre, or how much it had cost. She rebuffed all questions, and yet she welcomed questions, because she enjoyed rebuffing them, creating greater confusion, more questions. From Mother’s standpoint this was perfect. We had no idea what she was thinking, while she knew exactly what was on our minds.

  This confusion persisted into the spring and summer, during which Hubby dug a foundation, put in a septic system, poured a slab, and began framing a modest house. And this might have been the end of it, as one of the many family enigmas, a quiet deal that extended Mother’s power and her greater air of mystery, leaving us with a sense of injustice. But, buffeted by the criticism and feeling wronged, Hubby began again to complain about all the jobs Mother asked him to do—the summer chores, of window boxes, gutters, shingles.

  “I have people dying at the hospital, I’m trying to finish my house, and I have to run over there and patch Ma’s screen door,” Hubby said. “I’m doing triage, I’ve got a motorcycle victim with massive head trauma, I can see his cortex is compromised, and I get a call from Ma. ‘The sink’s blocked. Could you ever come over and fix it?’”

  Dramatizing his job, Hubby often transformed himself into a neurosurgeon.

  Mother went on being evasive, defending Hubby, until she heard from Franny that Hubby had been telling the rest of us, “I’ve worked for this. I’ve earned this.”

  Unexpectedly, Mother said, “He did no such thing.”

  This assertion went aroun
d the family. We asked her to repeat it. She did so, her eyes dancing in anger. And she stopped defending Hubby. She began attacking his ingratitude. Everything he said seemed calculated to undermine Mother and prove her wrong. She had said the terms of the sale were secret. But Hubby kept blabbing.

  When the truth came out, it was hard to know who had been told first, because one day everyone knew.

  “Guess what he paid for the Acre?” Mother asked.

  Perhaps she told each of us in turn. If so, it all happened fast. On the day she told me, I had begun the conversation by saying how hard Hubby worked, springing to his defense. He was useful, he was helpful, and we owed him so much for being a handyman when he was also so busy in his job at the hospital. Mother fixed me with a hard stare and asked me the question.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “One dollar,” she said. “One measly dollar.”

  Mother’s way of saying it made it even more negligible, a dawlah. That was the smallest possible amount allowed by law for conveying the land to him.

  Then we all knew, and Hubby was cursed for taking advantage. But if this was the truth, then Mother emerged as being more unreadable than ever.

  24

  The Cottage

  Mother was strengthened, because she had kept from us her real motive in handing over a valuable piece of land; the mention of one dollar only made her more enigmatic. Hubby getting the land from this obsessively frugal woman for a buck was much more serious than his getting it for nothing. We dangled a dollar next to an acre and were angry and resentful and confused. It had to be a trick, surely. If Mother would do that, what might she do next? This extravagant and uncharacteristic deed said: Do not presume. I am capable of anything.