Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  This was the cottage that, one day, Mother gave to Franny and Rose. Further proof that they had gotten the house was that these close, intimately involved sisters began to quarrel with each other. They went on criticizing Mother, and they appealed to the rest of us to take sides.

  So Mother had succeeded in creating a family feud that put her in the middle, a guarantee that she would be paramount. Others joined the fray, for the issue was not between Franny and Rose but their husbands—whom we never saw—each one disputing the other’s right to use the house. Months of this, another sideshow, which we regarded the way sweaty ragged people in jungle clearings watch a cockfight and cheer the feathered shrieks and the frantic pecking, the blood, the struggle, as Mother looked on, with the sort of indefinable half-smile that I had seen in only one other place, floating across the lips of the monumental heads of gods and kings at Angkor Wat, representing defiance one moment, sadness the next, then sadism, contempt, pity, power—everything but pleasure.

  25

  Struggles

  In our struggles and our ill-humored teasing we were unlike any other family I knew. Contention thumped in our blood—no peace, no victory; ours was a war of minor skirmishes, a rising tide of rancor. Yet Mother was the first to deplore, or solemnly pity, the families that broke apart, the messy divorces, the whimpering runaways, the estranged children, the families that didn’t go to church, or the ones that sat in different pews, the split-ups, the broken homes.

  “Say a little prayer for them,” Mother would say. Or: “Imagine a mother leaving her children like that.” “God help them,” she’d remark of the family with an adulterous father or a delinquent child. “You’re so lucky,” she said to us. “Count your blessings.”

  Locked in battle, we were kept together. We were enmeshed in perpetual contention. What seemed a truce at the hectic dinner table, among the few of us who were still on speaking terms, was false and forced, the pretense purely for Mother’s sake, to prove she was benign. She beamed at the thought of presiding over this meal attended by some of her children, but never all of them at once. They might be Fred and Gilbert, or Hubby and me, or the girls—but probably not the girls these days, because they were trying to conceal the fact that they had been given a whole house. Floyd kept to himself, though everyone but me saw him.

  I raged against him, against the family, and now and then I would shout and slam down the phone with such force I felt blinded by my anger. And the day after one of these tantrums I would feel the nausea and self-disgust, from my bad night and my fury, which, like a hangover, but worse, left me raw.

  Floyd’s vicious profile of me, which interviewers still used to challenge me, was a reminder that I had to be careful what I wrote and said—or shouted at the others. Floyd had made a fool of himself in having published his abuse, yet his gibes about “his illegitimate son” still stung. That lost boy was my shameful secret. I had abandoned him, and I was so appalled by what I had done, I had not disclosed his existence to my ex-wives or my children. They found out the secret in the worst way, but a way that was characteristic of my family’s whispers. Fred, who of course knew, had told his wife, and she had told her three children, to belittle me. Two of Fred’s kids were the same age as Julian and Harry, and one day, Jake, the bigger of the two, had said, “You got a brother somewhere. Your dad gave him away when he was little. The whole thing’s a secret.”

  My boys came to me indignant, angry that they had been insulted by a wicked lie. They were eight and ten. And they listened, breathing hard in a sorrowful silence, while I told them the truth. And after they knew, they looked—not older but sadder, bent over and burdened. They never lost the sense that I had deceived them by keeping the secret from them until their ten-year-old cousin had revealed it. They struggled to contain their disappointment, and yet they knew they had been betrayed, that I had another family somewhere, a shadow wife, an older ghost-child, a cluttered wayward past. And here I was, a taskmaster, expecting them to be perfect.

  Was it any wonder I never confided in Mother, or in any of them, ever again?

  “It wasn’t me,” Fred said. “Erma did it. I don’t know why.”

  I knew why. Revealed secrets and teasing, mimicry and gibes, gifts to some but not to others, a bizarre system of rewards and punishments, the low level of quarreling that was a dueling drone that never let up. You always knew that as soon as you left the room you were gloatingly mocked for what you had just said, or what you were wearing, or for your children’s failings, or your spouse’s idle remark. And if you had given Mother a present, the present was jeered at, because it was never enough, and Mother herself might initiate the jeering by rolling her eyes or using her ambiguous smile while weighing the thing in her skinny hands.

  Yet it all appeared normal to me. This battling seemed somehow truer, more real, than the submissive happiness of the other families I knew. I never quite accepted their contentment: they had to be hiding something. I was certain of this as an adult, but even as a child I did not believe and did not trust the platitudes of the happy family. There was no such thing.

  Most families (I thought) were probably as hateful as ours, but the difference was that we admitted it and they didn’t. I was glad I knew the depth of disloyalty in our family, the capacity we had to mock one another, how this knowledge liberated me and strengthened me in my cynicism. Otherwise, I would have felt defenseless. But as I write this, I realize I am deluding myself, because despite knowing how disloyal we were, I was continually surprised by the greater and greater betrayals. Even the deepest cynicism does not prepare you for the worst that a family can do to you.

  I visited Mother for news.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “You don’t want to know.”

  Her putting it in this tantalizing way convinced me that I did want to know.

  “Franny and Rose, at each other’s throats.”

  Mother was almost jubilant. Her gift of the cottage had created envy, anger, and resentment among us, and serious conflict between Franny and Rose. The gift was a kind of thunderbolt, splitting us up, scattering us. Mother was at the center of it, at peace, surveying the dissension, its only true beneficiary.

  “I’ve written them a letter,” Mother said. “It’s very brief, just two words. ‘Make peace.’”

  Any fool knew that two families, and especially Franny’s and Rose’s, would never be able to share one house. You could not contemplate such a letter, such an order, without seeing that it would only make these daughters angrier.

  She reached to the table beside her throne and passed me the letter, the two words in block capitals in the center, and under them, Love, Mother.

  At a loss for something to say about such an insincere and provocative message, I said, “You have lovely handwriting, Ma.”

  “I was first in my penmanship class at Lowell Normal,” Mother said. “Mr. Stoner singled me out. He asked me to stand up. He praised my cursive. Palmer method. And he mentioned how I had joined the college in the second semester. I had missed months of work, but I caught up by working my fingers to the bone.”

  The penmanship story I had heard before, but her late arrival was news.

  “How come you missed the first semester? Were you sick?”

  “Oh, no. I was working.”

  “Working where?”

  “Gilchrist’s.”

  “When was this?”

  “After I graduated from high school.”

  Gilchrist’s was a department store on Main Street in Medford, where Mother had been raised and had gone to high school. I tried not to show my shock.

  “What sort of work at Gilchrist’s?”

  “Ladies’ department. Foundation garments,” Mother said. “Corsets. Girdles. Bras.”

  “Selling them?”

  “That was my counter, yes.”

  I said, “But you had just graduated from high school. You were a good student. Why didn’t you go to college?”

  “I did, but not then.” />
  “How did it happen that you went to college?”

  Even asking the question, I saw Mother amid a big pile of pink satin bloomers.

  “I was going home one October day and saw one of my friends. She was just leaving the train station. She was at the college, she said. She commuted to Lowell. I hadn’t seen her since graduation. She told me a little bit about it. ‘You should apply,’ she said. So I did. But I couldn’t start until the second semester.”

  “Your friend told you, I get it. But what I don’t understand is why your family didn’t encourage you to go to college.”

  Mother became a small bewildered girl, looking lost, compressing her lips and slightly bowing her head, so that her neck looked skinny and frail, wisps of hair trailing onto it, her hands clasped.

  “I don’t know.”

  “They sent you out to work?”

  “They didn’t send me. I really didn’t know what to do. A job is a good thing.”

  “But this friend of yours encouraged you to go to college.”

  “Agnes Doherty,” Mother said.

  “Why didn’t you ask your family about going to college?”

  “I didn’t want to cause trouble,” she said. “And they didn’t know any better.”

  All the stories I had heard before this were about her nurturing family, her saintly father, her loyal mother, her well-educated brothers. This was the first I had heard that she, the only daughter, had been sent into the world to find her own way, to sell women’s underwear at Gilchrist’s. It hinted at turbulence in her family, and neglect or indifference. She had been rescued from the girdle department by a pitying school friend. In that accidental way she had received an education and gotten a teaching job worthy of her intelligence. I had not known this. It saddened me to think of Mother, after her high school graduation, toiling in a department store.

  “I caught up on every bit of the work. Mr. Stoner praised me. He asked me to stand up.”

  This was a struggle parable too. Mother turned the story of her family’s indifference into a story of overcoming the odds, studying late at night, hitting the books, improving her penmanship—a moral tale of hard work rewarded.

  How little I knew of Mother’s past. But that was her habit of concealment, because she wanted us to believe in her virtue, the articles of her faith, the holiness of her family, all the fictional details that gave her authority and strengthened her. In every sense, Mother was self-made. That seemed to me a characteristic of tyrants, and being her own creation was enigmatic, if not unknowable.

  Pedestrian facts of the private lives of tyrants diminish them, or so they think. The striving is epic and a little vague. They need to be glorified, they require an element of mystery. Like Mother they come from nowhere and are subjected to a series of ordeals. There is always an official version of the struggle. I had heard of Mother’s early poverty, her helping her father in his work, being laughed at by other students for her old-fashioned clothes. She never went on dates. She excelled in school, saved money, adored her parents. But the details of her late application to college contradicted the official version.

  Mother’s early life had been random. Her family had obviously taken little notice of her. She graduated from high school in May and had begun to work as a salesgirl. Months later, in October, she was still laying out girdles and tapping the cash register. The notion of going to college did not occur to her until one of her friends bumped into her and, seeing the absurdity of this intelligent woman wasting her life in a department store, suggested she go to college. Mother’s family had been passive the whole time.

  “What did your parents say when you told them you were going to college?”

  “They were very proud of me. They knew the importance of a good education.”

  A lie, of course—the received version. But what lingered in my mind was Mother’s acceptance, and her own passivity. Her brothers had gone to college, but she had not believed she was good enough for a college education until her friend told her.

  I was fascinated by how casual Mother’s education had come about, for later she defined herself as an educator, the mother as teacher. But it had all happened as a result of a chance meeting.

  Usually when I visited Mother I felt worse afterward—smaller, weaker, unworthy, defeated, resentful, trifled with, and sometimes I wished I were dead. Not today. With this glimpse of the past I felt sorry for Mother. And so I decided to stay a little longer.

  “What were you going to tell me about Franny and Rose?”

  “I guess the fur is flying,” Mother said. She pursed her lips and swallowed in pleasure, as though she’d downed a gulp of something delicious.

  “Is it the cottage?”

  Mother smiled and swallowed again. She said, “All I wanted was for them to be happy.”

  She explained that the fuss had begun with her handing over the key. Who would get the one key? There was an argument about having duplicate keys cut. “But why does Walter need one if you have one?” Franny had said. “Walter is my husband,” Rose replied. That seemed ominous in the way superfluous statements often did.

  Walter was a plodding and unforthcoming person, pleasant enough, but with the trembling lip and cold stare of a godly man resisting the pull of evil. His jutting jaw and bony chin and empty, deep-set eyes gave him the beaten look of someone searching for a fellow sufferer.

  And soon Franny found a fellow teacher to rent the cottage for the whole month of July at the high-season rate. Rose had equivocated, and when Franny chased her for a reply—this was in late April, when summer plans had to be made—Walter called Franny.

  “We decided not to go with renting. Renters will just trash the place.”

  “These are very dear friends of mine. They’d respect the cottage,” Franny said, and getting no response, she added, “Plus, I promised them.”

  “Sorry,” Walter said.

  The toneless way he said it frightened Franny. She wanted to reply—as she said to Mother—“Don’t I have a say in this?” But she said, “Okay,” and tried to think how she might break the news to her friends.

  Mother said to me, “I’m keeping out of it,” but she could barely hide her pleasure.

  We decided not to go with renting!

  Franny was humiliated and cast down. Any hope that the cottage would be an earner was dashed, and not by Rose—whom Franny now saw in a new light, wondering, Who is she?—but by Walter, a son-in-law whom Mother disliked. Walter never showed up. He didn’t send presents or birthday cards. He could have offered to fix the screens or mow the lawn, but never did. The oddest aspect of Walter, perhaps his triumph, was that he seemed in his selfishness and his silence more passive aggressive than any of us.

  “We could have rented it the whole summer,” Franny wailed to Mother.

  “I don’t want to get involved,” Mother told Fred, who said Walter was being unreasonable—and what sort of joint-ownership agreement did they have? Gilbert assured Mother that there was worse to come. Hubby satirized them for the crisis they had created. Floyd berated Mother for handing over the cottage in the first place. According to Fred, Floyd had screamed, “It’s our legacy.”

  Gilbert was right. A greater struggle started.

  For a month they took turns using the cottage, Rose and her family for a week or so, then Franny and her family. At the end of the month, Franny called Rose to say that Jonty and his wife Loris wanted to use it for a few weeks.

  Rose said, “I’ll have to ask Walter if that’s okay.”

  Franny was made to wait for three days while the request was discussed. In the end the answer was no, Jonty’s family visit would not be convenient. The cottage interior was being painted.

  Franny said to Rose, “I don’t understand why it’s being painted. It’s just a rental.”

  Rose said, “You can’t put a new carpet in a house until it’s been painted or you risk getting drips and stains on the new carpet.”

  “What new carpet?”
r />   “Walter wants a berber for the lounge.”

  “Is this berber one of the renters?”

  To Franny, Mother said, “It’s a sensible idea to take good care of the place. Think of it as an asset.”

  Rose had complained to Mother about Franny’s not wanting to renovate the cottage. But “lounge”? It had never had a lounge before.

  Franny said to Mother, “I just got a bill for the new carpet and the paint job. More than twelve hundred dollars! We could have made more than that by renting it. I don’t even like the carpet. What’s a berber? Marvin’s a wreck.”

  No one in the family was interested in Franny’s tale of woe. The cottage had been given to her for nothing, after all.

  “Walter wanted a new icebox,” Mother said. She retained these old turns of speech—icebox for fridge, piazza for porch, tonic for soda, scrod for fish, dinner for lunch. “An Amana. Nothing but the best for him. He didn’t discuss it first. Just went out and bought it.”

  And Walter sent Franny her share of the bill. He did the same with a new microwave and a toaster—bought expensive ones and sent Franny the bills. And a new vacuum cleaner for the new carpet.

  “What did Rose say?” I asked Mother.

  “That Franny doesn’t appreciate all the work that Walter’s doing to upgrade the cottage.”

  As a tactic to make Franny submit, it was ingenious. I could see from far off what Rose and Walter had planned. They wanted the cottage for themselves, that was obvious—Rose repeated, “Dad always wanted me to have the cottage”—but how to dislodge Franny and Marvin as joint owners? The answer was to make ownership so expensive and burdensome that Franny would beg to have her name removed from the deed.

  New plumbing, new lights, a paved driveway, and what Rose called “plantings.” Franny was upset, but what could she do?

  Mother told me all this in a sorrowful tone, but I knew by that very tone that she was delighted. She regarded it as a victory that she had, by a calculated act of generosity, managed to divide her daughters and set their husbands against one another. Had there been harmony, Mother would have felt threatened. Had they been close and conciliatory, Mother would have imagined them whispering against her, staying away, perhaps conspiring. Disunity among Mother’s children strengthened her grip.