by Paul Theroux
“I have all Ma’s recipes,” Franny said.
“Sure you do,” Hubby said. The flecks of chowder in the corners of his mouth made him seem more menacing.
The sarcasm about Mother’s food thickened the air with frank hostility. We disapproved of the way we were behaving; we were childish and insincere. None of us wanted to be there, so we were spoiling it, and as we did the main course was served. Broiled scallops, mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and an ear of corn for each person lay in its own trough-shaped dish.
“I can’t eat,” Mother said. She looked limp, her face slack and corpse-like.
“Are you upset, Ma?” Franny said.
Jonty said “Just take a bite for Daddy” to his daughter, poking at her face with a spoonful of potato.
“Bay scallops,” Marvin said, pronouncing it the off-Cape way, instead of rhyming it with wallop, and we all stared at him.
“You always wonder, which bay?” Floyd said. “But I happen to know. It is of course a species and not any specific bay.” He whipped around and said to Jonty, “I feel certain you could have told me that.”
Behind us, Walter kept scraping his feet around the table, taking pictures, his camera making a sucking sound. He was one of those people who is determined to impress you by exaggerating the motion and noise of his job.
“Your anthropologists will tell you that communal eating is a grand gesture of harmony,” Floyd said. “We are partaking, therefore we are in accord, and all our ill will is behind us, our—dare I say?—motiveless malignity.”
Mother’s eyes were shut, her expression meditative, slightly sunken, as though in a coffin. No one had responded to Floyd. We went on eating. None of us wanted to be there, and as this feeling penetrated us, the conversation became milder, brittle with forced politeness. The more correct we were, the more obviously hostile.
“May I have a piece of bread?”
“You may have a piece of bread.”
That sort of thing went on for a while, and then the table was cleared, the cake brought in and placed before Mother. The waitresses seemed harassed and incompetent, teenage girls with untidy hair. “Enjoy,” one of them said.
“An expression I deplore for its being a grammatical goofball,” Floyd said. And to Jonty, “A solecism, as you might put it.”
Mother smiled at the slumping soggy cake, topped with eight lurid pineapple slices, most of them with a cherry in the middle, two with candles, and on the sloping front side, MOTHER spelled out in shaky piping, with scrolls and roses around it.
“Make a wish, Ma,” Franny said. “Pineapple upside-down cake. Your favorite.”
But Mother had begun to look past us. “Hello?” she said, as though answering the telephone.
I followed Mother’s line of sight and saw at the door of the room, just entering, Charlie and Julie, and little Patrick asleep in Julie’s arms. The moment they entered, the temperature in the room went down, the silence and the stillness shadowing forth a chill.
I stood up and said, “Let me introduce everyone.” When I turned back to the table I saw puzzled, unwelcoming faces—savages, staring at outsiders who had invaded their feast. “This is Charlie, his wife Julie. And Patrick.”
“Dead to the world,” Charlie said. “Long ride!”
No one spoke. Mother straightened in her chair and looked resentful, for the attention had been taken from her. Hubby and the others shifted in their seats. As though sensing the bewilderment, and taking advantage of the uncertainty, Jonty’s daughter Jilly began to bawl. Little Patrick’s eyes fluttered at the squawk, seeming to recognize the child’s complaint, like a common language.
“Let me get you a chair,” I said.
“How about this one?” Charlie seized a chair back.
Someone snorted. “No, no,” I said. “That’s Angela’s.”
“She in the john?” Charlie said.
“She’s in heaven,” Mother said.
I found some folding chairs stacked in the corner. Charlie helped me set them up, a second row behind me. No one else moved, or spoke.
“Blow out your candles, Mumma,” Rose said.
The candles had melted and dripped and charred the flesh of the pineapples on the upside-down cake, but still the orange flames swayed.
“Here goes,” Mother said.
“Her ninetieth,” Marvin explained to Charlie, who had drawn his chair nearer the table so that he could see better. Julie held their sleepy child. Their presence was a derangement that delighted me.
Everyone at the table had gone silent, not knowing how to handle the abrupt entrance of these strangers. And because I had introduced them, the hostility was directed at me. The family was naturally suspicious, but the unexpected arrival of these three smiling people at Mother’s birthday party made them seem intruders. They had stumbled upon our secret ritual and might have overheard us in our mumblings and chants. To a disorderly and angry family, all outsiders were enemies, even the spouses. I was somehow responsible, so I was glared at more than Charlie.
“Take a group picture, Walter,” I said.
“What about Angela?” Charlie said, gesturing to the empty chair.
Mother shut her eyes and suffered a little, as Franny and Rose gave Charlie dark looks. But he must have misheard when Mother had said that Angela was in heaven, perhaps thinking that she was in another room.
After the cake had been cut and apportioned, Walter obliged with a family portrait. Floyd stood at the rear of the group, and just before Walter snapped, Floyd said, “The House of Atreus!”
“Jay is something of a fop, but we forgive him his pretensions,” Floyd said to Charlie. “He’s the objective correlative by which we assess our plausibility. Let’s face it”—were still posing, Walter still snapping—“he has made some questionable choices. But in his mind, he is the sane one. We are unfathomable grotesques.”
“Give it a rest,” Fred said. “Ma has a headache.”
But family teasing was the test of friendship, and Floyd was being friendly. I took his fooling as a peacemaking gesture. Needling was a form of dialogue.
“Floyd’s choices have been irreproachable,” I said, and Floyd laughed.
“It’s nice of you to have us,” Charlie said, glancing at Mother, who stared at him, “especially on this big day.”
“Ya welcome,” Rose said out of the corner of her mouth.
As though dismissing Charlie and Julie, Fred said, “Want seconds on the cake?”
Coffee was served by the harassed waitresses, but by then the family members had gotten to their feet, yawning, making grunts of farewell, mutters of apology, shufflings of departure. With the arrival of Charlie, the birthday had come apart, and only a residue, a faint echo of the meal, remained. The family had been intruded upon, but the hostility had leaked away, leaving—what? Confusion, collapse, for ill will had held us together and now there was simply indifference.
“Stick around,” I said to the table. “We can talk.”
But no one lingered, no one gave Charlie a second glance.
“Charlie owns a software company in Boston,” I said. “Ma, Charlie was looking forward to meeting you.”
But Mother was being helped out of the room by Gilbert, and Fred turned to me, pointed his finger at his head, and made a face, meaning “headache.”
When we were alone in the room, Charlie said, “Sorry, did we break up the party?”
“No, of course not,” I said. He had, more suddenly than I had expected, but as I spoke he gave me a hug, and little Patrick said, “Who’s that man?”
31
My Nature Is to Sting
Everyone in the big, porous, leaky family complained about Mother’s birthday party afterward, whispering heavily into the phone, including Mother—guest of honor, recipient of presents—who’d had a good time. But Mother had a motive.
“I can’t believe that Jonty had the nerve to bring that daughter of his,” Mother said to me when I visited her with more chocolates. “
Who ever gave her permission to do that? And where was Loris?”
I was surprised by Mother’s fierceness, excessive even for her. She stood and stamped her tiny feet when she was angry, cords were drawn tight in her neck, she grew hoarse in her indignation and choked slightly—hlook! hlook!—bone-in-the-throat gasping that always got my attention, though I despaired of the naggy emphasis of her amateur acting.
“Jonty should have known better. I specifically said, no children.”
Her child hating was not a pose, the weary exasperation of a sentimental mother who spoke of them as rug rats and burdens. Mother genuinely disliked them, but I did not realize this until I had children myself. She had already raised eight of them, including the ghost of Angela—why more? Children bored her, they irritated her, they were always in the way; most of all they took attention away from her. When there was a child in the same room with her, she knew that at least two people were not listening—the child and the child’s parent—and perhaps many more.
“And only the immediate family,” she added.
Then I knew what this was about. In this outburst of criticism Mother was of course reprimanding me for inviting Charlie, Julie, and little Patrick to the family event. This was how she stirred: criticism was always oblique. By blaming Jonty for precisely the same liberty that I had taken, I was being told that I was myself at fault. After almost forty years, Charlie was still unwelcome, and his child—my grandson, Mother’s other great-grandchild—was no more than an irritant.
At one point in the cake cutting I had wanted to say, “Can I have everyone’s attention?”—and I was going to proclaim him. I resisted, but loved the fantasy of apostrophizing, and even now, listening to Mother complain, I had the urge to say, “That was my son!”
Mother said, “Who did Jonty think was paying for that party?”
“I forgot to ask—aren’t we sharing it?”
“I paid for it with my own money,” Mother said, screeching like a child shaking an empty piggy bank.
I watched her for a while and then said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have brought my friends.”
The noncommittal way Mother rolled the bones in her shoulders told me more than she said. The bones said, Why are you putting me through this by saying that? Mother said, “They seemed very nice. I didn’t mind their being there. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to talk with them.” One of her bony shoulders snapped back and seemed to say, Don’t care!
“No one said much to them.”
Seizing this with a jeering laugh, Mother said, “We’re busy, Jay. Everyone is. You can’t just show up and expect people to be at your beck and call.”
“But they had a good time. They liked meeting the family.”
Mother smiled unpleasantly. “The little one came back for another piece of cake.”
She had noticed everything. She saw them as gate-crashers, leeching and gobbling.
A day or so later, Franny confirmed my suspicions of what Mother had said—and by suspicions I mean what I had translated of her words, the family-speak that was always inverted, when “I didn’t mind their being there” meant that she did mind.
“Ma was kinda put out by your friends,” Franny said.
“They didn’t eat much.”
“They had an awful lot of cake. Seconds.”
“So what?”
“It’s kinda the principle of the thing.”
Bemoaning a three-year-old for eating a small wet piece of upside-down cake was so preposterous I could not think of a reply. I hoped my silence would shame Franny. But she persisted.
“And Hubby had seconds of chowder. And three big slices of cake.”
“Is that a problem?”
“I’m just saying. I’m kinda worried about his health. He has issues. And he’s always been heavy.”
Another family irony was that the target of one person’s criticism was the critic of his accuser, and the blame was usually identical. Franny said that Hubby was fat and greedy, then covered it with this insincerity about his health; and Hubby returned the compliment. We seemed to know by instinct who was watching us, and why.
“Franny really stuffed herself,” Hubby said to me the next day. “And she’s a blimp.”
When, a few days later, Rose found fault with Fred—“wicked bossy bastard, playing God with the menu”—I knew that Fred would have a reply, and he did: “Her husband sticking his camera in my face. And she’s getting so manipulative.”
My phone kept ringing, and always it was a sibling carping about another sibling.
“At least Ma had a good time,” I said.
“She was upset by all the little children,” Fred said.
Two children, one of them my guest. No one dared criticize me to my face, which meant that behind my back they were buzzing, all of them angry with me. And I knew why. Charlie dropping in with his wife and child, the strangers presuming on a family gathering, violated a family rule, probably an ancient taboo in the world of savages: no outsider must be allowed to observe us in our private rituals. The taboo had been transgressed. But this postscript of whispers was also an example of the family love of moaning as a way of testing affinities and finding allies.
“I know Ma’s angry with me,” I said to Franny, who spoke to Mother four times a day on the phone.
“She was kinda miffed.”
In the lingua franca of Mother Land, “kinda miffed” meant furious.
“What did she say?”
Franny would certainly tell me, because it was her blameless way of putting me in my place.
“She said you had kind of a nerve bringing those friends of yours.”
Perhaps I had expected that all along. Perhaps it was worse than mere presumption on my part. I suspected that my motive for inviting my long-lost son to a family gathering—a family that had taken no interest in him—was a distinct form of aggression. I had challenged them, knowing they would object, knowing that I would be hurt. Charlie had become an expression of my defiance. And what they didn’t know, in seeing him as an intruder, was that he was a member of the family.
All he said afterward was, “Thanks for having us. What an amazing family, even if it’s a little scary. But I’m so happy to have a grandmother.”
In all this rancor, a voice that was generous.
The biggest surprise to me at Mother’s ninetieth birthday party was Floyd—that he showed up was something of a miracle, but that was not all. His bearishness and pedantry were immutable aspects of his personality. What I had not expected were the energy and inventiveness of his incessant teasing.
Teasing in the family, as I have said, was always meaningful, but it needed to be deconstructed. It could be mocking, it could be casually cruel, it could be an expression of boredom—something like turning a hose on a puppy—and at its most sadistic it could be a way of amusing bystanders by ridiculing the weakest person in the room. It could be affectionate, a form of sparring, taking a shot at someone and allowing him to hit back. That was Floyd’s manner in the function room at the Happy Clam. His teasing had been friendly, with an acerbic geniality. Mostly, he had been performing, throwing elbows at the others and digs at me. I had teased him back. Though you had to have grown up in the family to appreciate the nuances of it, his teasing had been a compliment, the nearest thing there was in this family to a hug.
I could tell from his teasing that Floyd wished to forget the past. He was elaborate in covering his embarrassment. And he was so subtle in it that I was sure that no one at the table had seen this. Amazing that this secret, this tentative proposal of a détente, had been enacted in front of the whole family, and yet only he and I understood his true intent. He wanted to be my friend.
The details of his printed attack on me still angered me, and so I had avoided him. And it puzzled me that no one had taken my side in the affair. All along, people had said to me, “How could he say those terrible things about you?”
I had said, “He’s a piece of work, actually. Someone sa
id it looks like Cain and Abel. I said, ‘No. It’s like Tom and Jerry.’”
I always thought of Floyd in terms of the Sufi story about the helpful tortoise and the stranded scorpion. After the tortoise carries the scorpion across the river, the scorpion stings him. The tortoise says, “My nature is to be helpful. I have helped you, and now you sting me.” The scorpion replies, “But my nature is to sting. Why do you seek to transform your nature into a virtue and mine into a villainy?”
Floyd’s nature was to sting. What I could not tell anyone was how his attack had served to expose the family’s hostility toward me.
At the birthday lunch I saw him as the older brother I had once loved. He was funny and ironic, evasive, cranky, unexpected, forever chattering and mimicking, except when he was sulking.
He was a reader. No one else in the family read books. He respected me for my reading, and he saw the rest of the family as either ignorant or intellectually lazy.
People who read widely and with fervor learn a language and inhabit a world that is different from the world of the nonreader. I don’t mean illiterates, many of whom I knew in Africa, who develop special skills of observation. Nonreaders are merely idle and arrogant and obtuse. And by “readers” I don’t mean the chasers of the latest books but rather wanderers in the whole realm of literature, all its thickets and caverns, the seldom-trodden pathways among the wayward geniuses. The famous names, of course—Shakespeare, Dickens (the Shakespeare of the novel), Flaubert, Joyce, Twain, and Melville. Even nonreaders know those names, and if they never open a book, they know “To be or not to be” and “Please, sir, I want some more,” and that Captain Ahab had a peg leg and that the whale was white. But they have never heard the names Baron Corvo, Mervyn Peake, Trollope, Turgenev, George Gissing, Zora Neale Hurston, or Ford Madox Ford. Floyd was an authority on his Cape neighbor Edward Gorey—and a friend of his, too. He had translated Celine’s Mort à Crédit into English, and Collier’s His Monkey Wife into French. He knew Edward Dahlberg’s Bottom Dogs almost by heart; he had read the whole of Samuel Beckett, and all of Yeats and Faulkner.
