Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  So she had succeeded—there was brilliance in her behavior. She was revealed as mysterious, unfriendly, aloof, disloyal, even to Hubby, who had gotten the land, because of course she had betrayed him. “Ma promised she wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said, quacking.

  In one stroke she had demonstrated her irrationality, her fickleness, and because of this, her power. Because we could not fathom her motive, we were bewildered and weakened, and so she had more power.

  Land and power and money were the issues, and yet when I visited Mother after that, and she said, “I’ve got something special for you,” I smiled hopefully.

  She kicked and scuffed into the kitchen and fumbled with a tin tray, took up a knife, and began stabbing at something in the tray. Mother with a knife in her hand looked dangerous.

  “Hermits,” she said. “I baked them especially for you.”

  In my mind, I set a paper plate of crumbling, knifed-apart hermits next to an acre of land with an ocean view.

  Perhaps she guessed I was comparing them, because she said, “I put a whole cup of raisins in them.”

  Franny stopped by my house a week or so later. When she sat, the sofa spoke, sounds of stressed wood and metal from within it that I’d never heard before. A brown bag rested on the hammock formed by Franny’s two flung-apart knees. She untwisted the top of the bag and began to cry.

  “Banana bread,” she sobbed. “Ma gave it to me!”

  Fred, she said, had gotten a carved loon, Rose a pair of knitted mittens, Gilbert a jar of crab-apple jelly, and Floyd, if he got anything at all, did not get much more than this.

  “I got some hermits,” I said.

  Everything Mother made looked like cat food, including the mittens she knitted, so her gifts were all a form of mockery. We had to be grateful, to say how it was just what we wanted, to tuck the thing under one arm and head home, with the thought that Hubby had received eighty thousand dollars’ worth of ocean-view acreage that was appreciating at twelve percent a year.

  “I forgive her,” Franny said. She screwed up one eye in pity. “She’s like a little girl.” Then she looked squarely at me. “But we should do something.”

  I said, “What about Floyd. Have you seen him?”

  She made a face of shocked indignation.

  “I never see him,” she said, and when I went on staring, she added, “I think Rose sees him now and then. Bingo and Benno adore him. Apparently he put them in his will.”

  Whenever I saw them, Franny and Rose complained about Hubby, how he had hoodwinked Mother. And Hubby complained about the land. “It was an unbuildable lot. I had to get a special permit. It failed the perc test. I have to put in a septic system that’ll cost me an arm and a leg.” He suggested that he had been swindled. The land was just a headache, and here he was the victim of a whisper campaign.

  I said, “The others are whispering because you got the land for a dollar.”

  “I told you the price was fair. I didn’t lie.”

  “A dollar, Hubby.”

  “Ma said that no one else was interested in it.”

  “For a dollar?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “I’ll give you two dollars for it and you can double your investment.”

  “You think it’s funny.”

  No, I didn’t. I was confused and angry and envious, like everyone else in the family, except Mother, who, far from being hoodwinked, had made her point.

  Fred called me to complain. He said, “If Ma had asked me, I would have advised her to sell the land and divide the proceeds seven ways. I can’t understand why she didn’t ask me.”

  “Obviously, because she didn’t want to.”

  “It’s her land,” Gilbert said. “She can do whatever she wants with it.”

  Gilbert’s consistently defending Mother convinced the others that he had been secretly rewarded by her. But that struck me as too straightforward. Something so simple and logical could not have been true. With Mother, only the most complex and irrational transactions were real.

  Soon I had proof of this. Franny and Rose went from blaming Hubby to blaming Mother, and Mother herself—when I visited, to be given more crumbly hermits—began mocking Franny and Rose again, all this delivered in the most cordial way.

  “Franny was out of breath from just a little mincing walk from her car to the front door. And I had to reglue the chair leg after she sat on it. But I didn’t mind her wolfing down four hermits. I was flattered! I do wish Rose would tell me what’s on her mind. I ought to consult Angela, who is always a ray of sunshine, bless her soul. Franny and Rose say they want to help me, but heaven knows I’m perfectly capable of helping myself. Frankly, I think the only reason they come over here is because they like a little fresh air, and the ride does them a world of good. I mean, what must it be like to be married to men who just watch TV? Dad was never that way. I think it shows in the children—lazy people have lazy kids. Not that I’m calling anyone lazy. I know they mean well . . .”

  Droning on like this, she ran them all down, and after I had listened for an hour or more she had made me an accomplice, if not a co-conspirator, so I could not object. Objecting to such disdain was, paradoxically enough, considered the height of bad manners.

  But this talk was a dodge in any case, for a day or two later, Hubby came over to my house crowing that at roughly the time Mother was disparaging Franny and Rose, and blessing Angela’s soul, she had signed an entire house over to the two daughters, the cottage on Weathervane Lane. This lovely little place had always been Mother’s rental property, a source of income and pride.

  “Are you sure she gave it to them?”

  Hubby said, “Do bears shit in the woods?”

  This was another occasion when I wanted to call my own children and cry, Look what she’s doing to me!

  So Franny and Rose’s obsession with Hubby’s land, their mockery of Mother, and Mother’s mockery of them had one clear source: they had been given a house. Why did I not see this? I ought to have known much earlier that Hubby’s badmouthing Mother meant that he had gotten something substantial from her, and the onset of Franny and Rose’s bitchery and envy was a sly, ungrateful way of dealing with their having been given a cottage.

  A gift was always an occasion for indirection, and the best form of indirection was complaint. In our family, the most effective way of hiding generosity was not merely pretending nothing had been given, but asserting that the giver was a skinflint.

  Rose said, “Dad always wanted me to have it.”

  So it was not a present at all, but a piece of property to which she had long been entitled.

  “We’re planning to fix it up and rent it,” Franny said.

  Rose simply stared at this suggestion, though she said, “It needs an awful lot of work.”

  “It’s a mess,” Franny said.

  The cottage was in poor shape, so it could not be considered a generous gift. Like Hubby’s ocean-view acre that needed a septic system and permits, it was a burden.

  “It’s incredible,” Fred said. “It’s not that they’re getting something they earned. They’re taking this away from the rest of us. I thought this cottage belonged to all of us.”

  “Ma was really upset,” Gilbert told me. He was speaking from Yemen, but he kept in close touch with Mother. “Floyd went over there and said, ‘Hah! You’ve really done it now. Franny and Rose’s husbands are going to be sleeping in those beds and farting on the sofa. You made it possible for them to sit on the porch and drink beer. I hope you’re proud of yourself. Two lazy slobs in the house, and they don’t even like you!’ Can you believe this?”

  I said yes, I could now believe it. For although Mother winced under Floyd’s sarcasm, she had carefully created this situation. We were bewildered and angry again—a whole house had been handed over without any explanation or justification. Hubby said that he had been stuck with a piece of land; Franny and Rose said that the cottage was a wreck; Floyd and Fred were howling with
rage. Gilbert was annoyed by the fuss. No one was satisfied, except Mother, who was delighted.

  Mother said, “What’s everyone so upset about?” Yet she knew exactly what the problem was. “I’m glad I have Angela on my side at least.”

  The dead were always available to offer consolation that the living denied her. Mother wore a martyred look, but of course by means of her tactical gifts, she had become even more enigmatic and powerful. Mother at her most dominant was unreadable. The truly powerful are always unpredictable. You could not second-guess her or calculate what she would do next, and nothing was more of a sign of danger than the smile that floated on her lips these days.

  The cottage on Weathervane Lane was a low wooden cedar-shingle structure with the proportions of a cigar box, its lid ajar and slightly raised, which gave its roof a modest slant. A bedroom in each corner allowed it to accommodate enough people to assure its value as a profitable summer rental—eight twin beds and a couple of cots, a tiny kitchen, a porch hammered to the back by Dad in one of his fits of renovation, a rusty grill blowtorched from an oil drum, a picnic table in the yard. It had, early on, been the family’s seaside retreat, and each of us had contributed something to its purchase. I had used part of my first book’s advance, almost forty years before, to help with the down payment. We all took turns keeping it in shape, painting it, shingling the roof, fixing the fences, planting hydrangeas. The cottage was surrounded by stunted pitch pines and bluish junipers and brambly Rosa rugosa—the indestructible plants of the Cape.

  In this simple cottage, with its sour stink of damp clothes and the sea—the odors trapped in the house—I had spent some of my happiest days as a young man, a husband, and a father; as a son and a brother. Harry and Julian could have said the same, for it was the scene of many of our summer vacations, the barefoot days of hot sand and picnics on the outside table.

  Its weathered boards, peeling paint, threadbare carpets, and faded curtains made it lovable. You had the sense that thousands of people had enjoyed it over the years, and they probably had, because as a rental property—self-supporting, a source of income—it had always been occupied.

  Newly married, overeager, and naïve, I had gone there with my first wife, and later with her and the children, wishing to reclaim the happiness of my summer days on the Cape and to give these foreigners, my wife and children, a sense of Cape Cod and America. I rejoiced in their experiencing the seaside warmth that I had known: the sun cooking the thickened odors of tall grass and wildflowers into the air, the dazzling light on the ocean, the breath of summer scented with white oak and pine, and the dustiness and brine of the dunes, on which the wind whipped the long tufts of sword grass so hard they scraped a circle around themselves from the swirl of their blades. The cold water of Cape Cod Bay sloshed and smoothed the stones on the beach into perfect shapes for us to skip them, or to play the stone-tossing game my father had taught me on a Cape beach, Duck on a Rock.

  After their early childhood in Africa and Singapore, my own boys found the simplest American pleasures a sunlit fantasy of bliss—not just the lapping waves, the hot days, the lounging on hammocks, and the ease of a Cape summer, but the food, too, lobsters and steamed clams, hamburgers, platters of spaghetti, pitchers of lemonade, ice cream, apple pie, treats from the corner shop—Twinkies and moon pies. The abundance of it all.

  At night the sound of crickets calmed us as we sat drinking and joking. Everyone was welcome. These were the family’s happiest days, perhaps—only Fred and I were married then. The first year Fred had rented a large house, with his wife and three children, near Weathervane Lane, and we had the cottage. Hubby was still in school, so was Gilbert. Rose was unmarried, Franny had a boyfriend. So they filled up the cottage and yakked on the phone and we all went to South Village Beach and sat in the sunshine and talked and swam. In the evening we had a cookout, a clambake, or a tureen of spaghetti and meatballs.

  Our incessant teasing disturbed my English wife. She could not understand Floyd doing imitations of Hubby when his back was turned. Hubby mocked Floyd’s girlfriend, and all of us rolled our eyes behind Fred’s back for the way he submitted to his wife’s nagging—Fred, the eldest, whom we thought of as an authority figure, being bossed by this snobbish woman, Erma, from out of state. My wife said, “It’s a bit off. Maybe someday I’ll understand.” Some evenings Mother and Dad drove over from their house, half a mile away, for a family dinner. When they left, we all laughed at things Mother had said, her catchphrases—“My father was a saint,” “I’ll bet you dollars to donuts,” “Laugh and the world laughs with you—weep, and you weep alone,” “Every dog has his day.” Or we’d remark on how Father might stare out the cottage window at the sea, a fixed smile of disapproval on his face, and say with some drama, “Nevah!”

  Happy days, and happiest that first summer after I had been away so long. On the last day, Mother came alone, I thought to thank me for hosting the extended family for a month at the cottage, or to say how pleased she was to see me on this visit after my years abroad.

  But she said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you. Next time you come—if you do come next year—could you come after Labor Day?”

  I smiled at her because I didn’t understand. “The water’s cold then,” I said. “The kids will be in school.”

  “Then maybe you should make other arrangements.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said, smiling more. I was sad to be leaving the Cape and hated to let go, for the long drive to Boston, then the cramped flight to our life in clammy south London.

  “You’ve been here a whole month,” Mother said. And now she was smiling back at me, one of her angry toothy smiles. “We could have rented the cottage for that time. We’ve lost a lot of money by your staying so long.”

  I stared at her, still smiling.

  “Remember I helped with the down payment for this place?”

  Mother smiled back at me, squinting in defiance. She said, “It’s high season.”

  I had not spent a summer vacation at home for years. I had a wife and two small children. Mother and Father had spent time with them on this vacation for the first time. This was my wife’s second visit to the United States. She had been reluctant; she had wanted a vacation in France—it was nearer to London, with better weather and better food, and for the English, life was sweet in France. Someone had told her about the Dordogne. She spoke French. But feeling homesick, I had badgered her. I promised good weather and lobsters and hospitality. “The cottage near the ocean,” I said. “I’m part owner of it. And my family’s looking forward to our coming.” They had, they filled the house, they were around most mealtimes. But now they were gone, we were packed, loading our rental car, hovered over by Mother, who was smiling in stern disappointment as she set out the rules for next year’s visit.

  To get her to stop, and to call her bluff, I said, “I’d be happy to pay you something.”

  Her smile slipped away. She pressed her hands together and said, “That would be only fair.”

  “Say a hundred a week? I’ll give you four hundred.”

  Now Mother looked wounded and pitying. “That’s half the usual rent.”

  Seeking sympathy, I said, “That’s all the money I have.”

  A slight puff of air from one of her nostrils, a fugitive murmur, suggested that she didn’t believe me. She was of the opinion that people always lied in matters of money, because she did. But I had told her the awful truth.

  I wrote her a check, there in the driveway, leaning on the hood of my rental car. Mother folded it and said, “I could have gotten twice this from the Marrottas.”

  Mother was younger then, and though fleshier she still had the look of a raptor, beaky, with long claws, and a way of standing when she was holding a check that made it seem as if she was protecting a kill. I wasn’t her son. I was just a renter.

  Though I was mortified and angry, in a small corner of my soul I felt the satisfaction of a saving cynicism, the knowledge that I was seein
g Mother at her meanest, drained of all sympathy. It was another family lesson I took into the world, and my satisfaction rose from the sense that I was liberated from all future responsibility. Having treated me badly, she had incurred a debt from me, and I was free to do as I liked. I believed that Mother’s meanness was self-defeating, for though she had asked for all she wanted, in her small-mindedness she had not asked for very much. She had lost me for four hundred dollars.

  “Your family!” my wife said. “Good God, you swore they wanted to see us.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “And you believed them,” she said. “The more fool you.”

  Hearing this, Harry said, “I liked the hermit crabs. The way they crept along with their little shells for houses.”

  The word “houses” made my wife remember. She said, “You told me you owned a share in that cottage.”

  No one had remembered my contribution to the down payment. That was another hurt that freed me. I vowed never to stay in the cottage again. We probably would not have been welcome in any case. The high-season rent was now up to one thousand a month.

  Good times came, successful books, large advances, in dollars I could bank in the States. When I had the money, a few years after that first visit, I bought a house about twenty miles away, on the upper Cape, and this became our summer destination. In the months that we were there it was filled with my family, Mother and Dad too, who enjoyed our hospitality and especially the fact that we weren’t in the cottage. Strangers rented it, and Mother pocketed the money. When it needed to be painted we all pitched in. We fixed the roof, we cleaned the gutters, we planted more trees, we put flowers in the window boxes, Hubby rewired it, and when we were helping in this way Mother reminded us that the cottage belonged to us all; it was part of the family legacy, to be shared. Even in the real estate boom of the ’80s, when it could have been sold for an enormous profit, Mother said, “Dad won’t part with it,” though it was clear that she was holding on to it as a rental.