Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  I let two days pass. I had recently returned from a long African trip and had a travel piece to write. In this time I reflected on what had happened, the almost unthinkable emergence of our lost, handed-over son, whose name I did not know, about whom I knew nothing but his age, which had to be forty-one. This was maddening. In her impulsive way, Mona had told me just enough to worry me, not enough to give me any hope or peace, and yet she was excited.

  What I imagined was a big angry man shaking his finger at me, demanding—what? Compensation for having been abandoned?

  In my misery and apprehension I remembered the anxious year long ago when I’d had to hide Mona and our error from our families; the shame I’d felt; and after we’d endured months of seclusion, the spell in Puerto Rico, my job at the restaurant, the sense of being despised and poor and in the wrong, what I still felt had been the defining year of my life, how arriving home that September day, Mother had said, “I hope you’re proud of yourself.” And after a sullen pause, her fists on the kitchen table like two tormenting weapons, “You should be ashamed,” and “How could you do this to us?”

  I could not tell her then, or later, that I had been proud, that I’d seen Mona through it all. I’d only been ashamed that we’d been found out, after we’d succeeded in solving the problem, when there was only blame left to apportion. And years later I could see Floyd sitting in the kitchen on that hot day with Mother, making a face at me that said, Oh, boy, you’re in for it.

  I had called Mona that first time on a Saturday afternoon. She had not been alone. I guessed afterward that her working husband was home. I let Sunday and Monday pass—and I remembered everything. I called again on Tuesday. This time her voice was guarded, but when I greeted her she brightened.

  I said, “Are you alone?”

  “Yes. Jay, I’m so glad you called back.”

  “I almost didn’t.”

  “It’s a little complicated here at the moment,” she said, and that might have meant anything.

  Just then there was a knock at my front door. I looked out and saw the big bearish form of Hubby, in green scrubs, waving his arms, indicating that the door was locked and gesturing for me to open it, though it was plain for him to see that I was on the telephone. He made a clownish face, poking his scummy tongue at me.

  “Mona, someone’s at the door. I’ll have to call you later.”

  “Please, don’t,” she said. “Give me your number. I’ll call you from school.”

  So we were still hiding, sneaking, concealing, whispering, after almost forty years, living in the narrow corners and shadows of other people’s lives. She was hiding from—whom? Probably her husband. I was hiding from Hubby, and everyone else, with this news. I gave her my number and hung up and answered the door.

  “What are you doing, dipshit?” Hubby asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  “No one,” I said.

  “Sure.” He was annoyed at my evasion. He had the wounded gruffness of someone who suspects he’s being whispered about, who knows he will never find out what people are saying. This perpetual suspicion in Hubby made him more of a whisperer. “Like there was no one on the phone.”

  In Hubby’s mind—I knew this, because I knew my family—I was probably on the phone with Fred or Gilbert, and I was disparaging Hubby for his size, or his wearing scrubs under his wool jacket, or his bamboozling Mother out of the Acre. These were the topics that loomed in his mind. It would never have occurred to him that I was talking to the mother of my long-ago abandoned son, about the boy’s reappearance. This was family history so old and so shameful it was buried, along with the worst failures we had endured—the liquidation of Dad’s company, Dad’s year of unemployment, the Christmas we got no presents, our divorces.

  “No one important.”

  I hated his forcing me to say this, and my resentment rekindled the memory of no one helping me or Mona, of the sorry episode being a succession of intrusions, crowned with blame.

  “So what’s new?”

  “Nothing.”

  He was fishing. He wanted to chat. Something was afoot or else he would not have been so circumspect. He glanced at the phone, perhaps hoping it would ring, so that he would catch me in a lie.

  Using his thumb and forefinger, he plucked a burdock ball from the wool of his sleeve. He held it up, squinted at it, then neatly dropped it onto the side table beside the phone, where it lay like a withered shuttlecock.

  “Don’t say I never gave you nothing.”

  The backhanded expression was like a family greeting, always said of off-loaded trivia.

  “Got anything to drink?”

  “Just water. I’ve been away.” He stared at me with the merest suggestion of a smile. I said, “In Turkana Land, Lodwar to be specific. I haven’t had time to do any shopping.”

  I was fascinated by how he put me on the defensive, and at the same time resented it.

  “Okay, water.”

  “In the kitchen.”

  I followed him in.

  “What would you like to know about Lodwar, or the Turkana?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Hear about Weathervane Lane? Rose’s got the cottage all to herself. She and Walter fixed it up. Berber carpet. Any idea what that stuff costs? It’s got to be a couple of hundred a square foot.” He put his hands on his hips. “So where are the glasses?”

  I took a tumbler from the cupboard and handed it to him.

  “Which one is the cold water?” he asked, balking at the three faucets, as though I was trapping him.

  Irritated, I turned one on. He filled his glass, but didn’t drink. He made a ceremony of holding the glass in front of him and walking back to the living room. His tramping around reminded me of how much I hated this rented house. Hubby’s size-eleven crepe-soled hospital shoes made the floor shudder and house feel small and temporary.

  “There’s nowhere to sit!”

  I had sat down. There were books and papers on two of the other chairs.

  “You can put those books on the floor.”

  He sighed and made a business of placing the glass on a bookshelf, then clearing the books from the chair. This was Hubby’s way of telling me that I was inconveniencing him, which put me on the defensive again. It was, most of all, Mother’s manner of making you wrong. Whenever a sibling was with me, Mother was also in the room.

  He winced as he sat down—Mother’s wince—and squirmed in his seat, thrashing a little, and said, “Ever heard of cushions?”

  Now I just stared, to remind him that he had gone too far.

  “What’s that supposed to be?”

  Mona’s letter lay on the table next to the phone and the dried burdock pod.

  “Nothing.”

  “Looks like a note. Do people still write notes?”

  “Ma does.”

  “That’s not Ma’s handwriting. Ma has beautiful handwriting, as you know. That’s a hasty scrawl.”

  He was watchful in the way suspicious and needy people are watchful, something animal, too, in his noticing, so alert, so skilled at crowding me. Yet, like an overfed pet, he was merely instinctive, not witty. His reactions rose from greed, hunger, habit, anxiety.

  “So what do you think?”

  “About what?”

  My mind was on Mona’s letter, our resurrected child.

  “Rose and the cottage.”

  “She can have it,” I said. “Franny’s probably apeshit.”

  “Not what I heard.”

  “What did you hear?”

  He sipped the water and peered at me over the rim of the glass.

  “Ma took care of her.”

  “Put her name on the house. So I heard.”

  “Gave her the friggin’ house, more like it.”

  “So what?”

  “So what about us?”

  As we both knew, he had been given an acre of prime land by Mother, for a dollar.

  “Are you complaining, Hubby?”

  “No, and you know why? Becau
se Ma can’t give Marvin anything to cure his ulcers. We get ulcer people in the ER some nights, wailing. Bleeding ulcers. That’s what Floyd needs.” He gave me a sly, moist grin and said, “I was at Floyd’s the other day. I walk into his yard. He’s on the porch. He starts yelling at me, ‘Apologize or leave! Apologize or leave!’”

  “Apologize for what?”

  “Beats the hell out of me. He’s a whack job.”

  “I have not spoken to Floyd for almost four years.”

  “He’s nuts—he’s worse than Franny and Rose. Are you mad about something?”

  “No. Why do you ask?”

  “You look pissed off.”

  Another family rejoinder: the angry ones among us accused the others of anger. Mother, when she was harassed, would say crossly, “Stop sulking or I’ll give you something to sulk about.”

  “Just busy.”

  “What, that phone call?”

  He knew he had interrupted me, knew that I’d hung up quickly, guessed that it was important, perhaps linked to the sheets of notepaper by the phone. He wasn’t Sherlock, but he was cunning.

  “I’ve just gotten back from Kenya.”

  “Tarzan of the Apes,” Hubby said. “Guess whose birthday is coming up?”

  “Ma,” I said.

  “Her ninetieth,” Hubby said. “That’s a big one. We have to do something.”

  “I’ve been dreading it.”

  “It’ll be great—everyone in the same room, the whole happy family.”

  “Fred will arrange something. Gilbert will help.”

  “Will you go?”

  “I guess.”

  He looked away. “It’ll be a friggin’ zoo. Think about it.”

  But all I could think of was Mona’s letter and the interrupted phone calls.

  28

  Charlie

  In her slack, rag-like voice, like a slow child confounded by a cold-eyed stranger—even over the phone she seemed to twist her head at me and squint—Mona said, “I can’t talk long. I’m at work. I’m expecting someone. Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  Home in the world of my fiction was unusual—no one was ever home. Home in the world of my travel was a far-off destination, a place I had fled. Yet here I was in Mother Land, where I’d been born, among the sand dunes and scrub cherry trees and pin oaks and pitch pines, the lumped-up terminal moraine of the Cape, where I’d started out, where I’d returned.

  “Oh,” Mona said, because of all the places you could be, home needed the least explanation.

  I had the impression of Mona as someone like Mother: “difficult,” a wisp of a woman, ectoplasmic, with a steel core, ungraspable, complaining of frailty, the receiver jammed against her thin skull. If I raised my voice she’d fall silent, she’d be spooked, she’d flutter away, just a pair of furiously fanning wings, trailing the glitter of dust and scales, before vanishing out the window. Now dark trees loomed over her where she stood in New Hampshire, the earth there dense with pine needles.

  Her small sidling voice reminded me of her pale body and staring breasts and how in that year of the child we had seldom laughed. Our time together, all those anxious months, had been enforced by her pregnancy. I had been captured and held prisoner with her as she’d grown bigger, slower, sadder. But of course we’d been each other’s prisoner, and on the run, and she had suffered far more than I.

  “Jay?”

  Because I’d been lost in this memory, I said, “I’m here.”

  I imagined her in a schoolroom—that sort of echo, cold walls, no carpet or curtains. Or a shared office. I’m making a personal call. I won’t be long.

  “I thought you’d hung up.” That was the old Mona, imagining the worst.

  “Are you a teacher? What do you teach?”

  “This isn’t about me. This is about our son.”

  She sounded upset. “Mona, what’s the matter?”

  “My husband.” She hesitated. I heard her teeth in her breath. “He’s not comfortable with me talking to you.”

  I kept myself from yelling in frustration, a monkey howl that would ream the telephone wire. But Mona was fragile, bewildered, glancing sideways, brushing her hair away from her eyes with the back of her slender fingers.

  “He’s kind of intimidated by your being a famous writer. What did you just say?”

  “I was laughing,” I said, but I had started to howl. “I’m broke,” and the hideous finality of the word, its nakedness, made me angry. “My last book tanked. I live alone in a rented house. My wife—second wife—left me eight years ago. My kids feel sorry for me, but they hardly talk to me. I’ve just come back from a remote part of Kenya. I’m trying to save up some money to finance a book about Africa. I microwaved some canned chili for lunch. I’m not famous.”

  As I talked, hearing myself, it seemed like a success story, of survival against the odds.

  “Most people think I’m dead or that I’ve stopped writing.”

  “Quit complaining,” Mona said in a hot whisper, almost hissing at me. I instantly knew this desperate tearful voice, the Please don’t leave me of almost forty years ago, beseeching me, but now she seemed to be saying, Get out of my life.

  “I’m not complaining,” I said, and calmed myself with three deep breaths, remembering why she had called me. Her helpless fear aroused my pity. “You must be so glad to have found the boy.”

  “Overjoyed,” she said sadly, her anger subsiding. “I can’t tell you how happy I am. He’s so smart. He was captain of the cross-country team. He owns a big company. He skis. He runs marathons.”

  I was smiling in disbelief. Who was this boy? I knew no one like him. My own sons resembled me: loners, readers, puzzle solvers, studious, tending to concealment, freelancers, natural-born travelers. But I had raised them to be that way.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Charlie,” she said. “He’s named after his father.”

  “I thought I was his father.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “Funny? I’m terrified.”

  “That’s right. It’s all about you.”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Try listening. I just realized why I’m so happy. Because he’s normal.”

  “And I’m not?”

  “I don’t know you anymore. I can’t read your books. Just seeing your name on a book makes me sad.”

  “Please tell me about Charlie.”

  “Listen,” she said.

  She began to talk, and as she did, the image of Charlie formed in my mind. He came alive, one detail after another. He swelled and smiled, grew taller, acquired a sense of humor and a bank account and a swift pair of legs, had a Dartmouth degree and two adoring parents who had devoted the best years of their lives to him. As Charlie came into focus, upbeat, confident, well bred, a shrewd businessman and tenacious competitor, an athlete, a doting husband, a cultured man—reader, moviegoer, music lover—he grew less and less familiar to me, and at last I realized I did not know him at all.

  “He looks just like you,” Mona said at last. “He has your eyes and nose, even the way you stand, your odd posture.”

  “So you’ve seen him?”

  “We had lunch at his house. I invited myself—I was dying to see him. He was very sweet about it. His wife is lovely. His son is beautiful.”

  “That would be our grandson.”

  “We have no rights,” Mona said. “We gave him away.”

  She began to cry, and it sounded strange over the phone, like coughing, with long pauses between coughs. That was all I heard, a skirl of disturbed air, sudden halts, a scratchy throat, not grief.

  “I have to go,” she said in a small stifled voice.

  “I’d like to know more about Charlie. Please?”

  “He wants to meet you.”

  “What did you tell him about me?”

  “Everything I knew.”

  “He’ll want something. I don’t blame him. We gave him nothing
.”

  “No, Jay. You don’t get it. He’s well-off—rich—really rich. I saw his house.”

  “You told him I’m a writer?”

  “He knew that right away. He knew your name. His mother’s got a lot of your books.”

  “And that I’m from the Cape?”

  “Yes, all that. It’s all on your book jackets.”

  “What did you tell them about my family?” I said, already resenting her presumption, because no one outside our family knew anything about us, this tribe of hectoring misfits.

  “That it’s a big family, and—I don’t know—that it’s interesting.”

  “Mona, it’s not interesting. It’s big, yes, but it’s a monstrosity. Don’t you remember how they blamed us? That they didn’t help us? How awful it was?”

  “That doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does!”

  “Please keep your voice down.”

  Floyd’s saying “his illegitimate son” in his widely quoted magazine piece had never left my mind. No one in the big interesting family had taken exception to this objectionable phrase, not even Mother, whose own father had been an orphan, and who burst into tears when the subject of his being a bastard came up.

  “Yes, it does matter,” I said. “My family hasn’t changed a bit. They’re exactly the same, or maybe worse. I remember how my mother reacted when I got home from Puerto Rico—when you went into that home. She was horrible to me. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself.’”

  “You remember that?”

  “I remember everything.”

  “At least you have a family. I have no one. That’s why I’m so glad that Charlie’s in my life now.”

  “This assumption that everyone needs a family—I don’t get it. Mine is destructive, selfish, mean, competitive, disloyal. They gloated over my misfortunes, even Charlie. He’s their flesh and blood, but all they see is a huge mistake.”

  In a whisper of bewilderment, Mona said, “I thought your family was so close.”

  “My family is a nightmare.”

  “Then look at it this way. Maybe this is a good thing. I mean, Charlie. Maybe you’ll get involved. He’s a great guy.”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “He’s waiting to hear from you. I’ll give you his address. Now I have to go. But one more thing. Are you listening?”