Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  We met again the following week, on the day of Mother’s carving class, her only morning out of the house. Floyd was somewhat subdued. He did not satirize my Jeep (I had thought of some rejoinders). He said he’d spent the week in Cambridge, teaching his seminar on Milton.

  Floyd had the odd smoky voice of someone who’s seen something. He had a tendency to “see” things. “I saw that,” he would say, remarking on his prescience.

  “This Jewish guy’s doing a graduate degree in literature,” Floyd said. “He thinks it’ll help him in his psychiatric work—he’s a shrink in Newton. He wants to be the next Harry Stack Sullivan. As you probably don’t know, Sullivan used classical literature to illustrate certain psychological traits and tendencies.”

  “Unlike Freud, of course, who never wrote about Oedipus or Dostoyevsky and who generally avoided pathologies in literature.”

  “Noted,” Floyd said. “And now, will you shut your arse while I make my point? This guy Silverstone—observe the ingenious nomenclature—was in my office discussing some passages in Paradise Lost, and he says, ‘I have real difficulty treating Jewish patients, because they don’t forgive. They refuse to let go.’ Just to keep him going—because, I mean, where’s the headline?—I said, ‘How do you know?’ ‘Take me, for example,’ he says. ‘I hate my mother.’ This seized my attention, needless to say. I grilled him a little. He said that he and his brother wanted warm coats in the winter—he grew up in Brooklyn. His mother refused to buy them warm coats. Her excuse? ‘You’d just lose them, or leave them somewhere.’”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Take this left,” Floyd said. “Pequod Lane. Do you think that anyone on this benighted fucking street has any idea of the literary origin of this name? Anyway, in the evening this domineering harpy heated them a bowl of noodle soup from a can. Or thawed out a kosher hot dog. Later, when her husband came home—their father—she cooked up a London broil or a fricassee of fish cheeks. You get the picture. Little Silverstone complains that this is unfair, and his mother says, ‘I’d do it for you, but you wouldn’t appreciate it.’”

  “I like that,” I said.

  “He says to me, ‘She was the most selfish person I’ve ever known in my life.’ This is a doctor speaking, and I think we’re aware that sick people are not only a pain in the arse but unbelievably narcissistic.”

  “So maybe Ma is not so bad after all? Some kids have it worse?”

  “We shall see,” he said, holding up the screwdriver.

  We continued on our way to Mother’s. I slowed down at the junction of her street. No cars were parked near her house. The coast was clear, Floyd said, leaning forward, looking hard.

  “Park near the house. If anyone comes in, our story is that we’re visiting her. See? I brought her a present.”

  He showed me a bag of apples.

  I parked. We got out, went to the back of the house, and stepped onto the porch, Floyd walking ahead. He twisted the doorknob.

  “Unlocked,” he said, waving the screwdriver. “We shall enter by the postern rather than jimmying the portcullis.”

  We went through the house—the whole place with its peculiar odors of Mother: toast and coffee, talcum, several struggling house plants, including a wilted narcissus, a scorched smell as of baked-on grease, the itch of unvacuumed carpets, book dust, a tang of urine.

  “There is nothing worth stealing in this house,” he said.

  “Except this,” I said, and slipped a porcelain duck into my pocket, something I had been looking at my whole life, a present from the uncle whom Floyd hated.

  “You crazy bastard,” Floyd said in an admiring way. He sniffed the air. “Some old ladies’ houses, you know immediately they’re incontinent.”

  “Spare me that thought.”

  Floyd was in the study, rifling her desk, pulling out folders.

  “Fred was here. Fred saw these. Ah,” Floyd said, “here’s the check register.”

  He heaved open a black spiral binder and began flipping pages.

  “Good God, look at this,” he said. “Five thousand for Franny, three thousand for Rose, fifty bucks for her son-in-law. This is—look, there’s more.”

  He was pushing pages aside, moving quickly through the accounts. Then he looked up and clawed his hair. “This is unreal. It’s a shakedown.”

  I looked at the check register and saw in Mother’s neat handwriting the lists of payments—small sums for food and electricity, large sums for Franny and Rose, many of them recent.

  “Fred wrote down a few numbers on an envelope and he thinks he’s cracked the case,” Floyd said. “He’s a fucking lawyer!”

  “We should make copies of them,” I said.

  “There’s a Kinko’s in Dennis Port. We have time to photocopy them and still put them back.”

  “How much should we copy?”

  “All—everything since Dad died. Every page.”

  He weighed the check register, then handed it to me.

  “You do it—hurry up. I’ll wait here.”

  “What if Ma comes back early?”

  He smiled. “I’ve got my present. The apples. Now go.”

  The Kinko’s store was not far, and the photocopier was available. The trouble was that I had to do each page separately, flopping the binder this way and that because the register was spiral-bound. Altogether, about eighty pages of closely spaced check descriptions. Mother was meticulous: number of check, payee, purpose, and amount. Tens of thousands to the daughters, very little to anyone else—a few dollars on a birthday or anniversary, a bill payment, here and there a pittance to a charity. Certain entries stood out, the ones that Fred had flagged: Rose—new septic system, $11,000, or Franny—toward new car—$8,000.

  It took me almost an hour to make the copies and sort them. Then I shoved them into my bag with the check register and headed back to Mother’s. The return journey was slower. I was caught in Hyannis-bound traffic and realized, inching along, that it was eleven-thirty. Mother was due home at noon. I fumed, got sweaty, growled at the creeping line of cars ahead of me. And, at last, when I turned into Mother’s street, I thought I had just made it.

  I was wrong. Floyd and Mother were in the front yard, Floyd seeming to query her, Mother pointing to her flower bed.

  “There you are,” Mother said. “What a nice surprise. And look what Floyd brought me.”

  She showed me a bitten apple. “I like a nice piece of fruit.”

  Floyd said, “Jay, do me a favor. I left my keys in the house. Will you get them for me?”

  Mother said, “The house is locked.”

  “No,” Floyd said. “You must have left it unlocked. That’s why I was out here—guarding it.”

  I went inside, restored the check register to the desk drawer where Floyd had found it. I saw Floyd’s keys on the coffee table. He had worked out this chess move.

  “Thanks,” Floyd said when I tossed him the keys.

  Mother said, “Don’t go. I’ve got some Swedish meatballs that Franny brought me yesterday. I can heat them up for you.”

  “We’re fine,” Floyd said. “We have to go.”

  “I’m glad you two are on friendly terms again,” Mother said.

  But she sounded disappointed. Floyd and I together, apparently friends, were a liability. We would compare notes, we might conspire. She gave us a wan smile and said, “There’s so many things you can do together.”

  “We’ll think of a few,” Floyd said.

  “Life’s so short,” Mother said.

  In the car, Floyd said, “Ninety years old and she’s saying life’s so short? What does she mean? And look”—he was riffling pages—“Franny was there yesterday, bringing her meatballs. That was the fifteenth. Here it is, July fifteenth. Check four-oh-six. ‘Franny—toward her vacation, fifteen hundred dollars.’ This is appalling. It is thievish—the sisters, the glib and oily art of them!”

  He continued to go through the copies of the check register as we crossed the Cape, an
d he went on raging.

  “Who the fuck is this woman?” he said, slapping the pages. “Who is she?”

  34

  Rewards

  With Floyd’s question ringing in my ears as I examined Mother’s accounts, I saw who she really was. It was all much worse than I had guessed, worse than Fred had suggested, worse than Floyd’s rants and screams. In her own code, the check number, the payee, the date, the stated reason—even at her most secretive, Mother remained literal-minded—and the amount, I saw in actual numbers the reality of Mother’s affection.

  The numbers were also a glimpse into her inner life. Seeing these dollar amounts, I knew her and I was saddened—disappointed, angry, puzzled. That buried sense of rejection that bulged at the bottom of my consciousness—now I had a reason for feeling it.

  On any single page of the ledger I could see how Mother, for whom money was emotion, expressed her love, her inclination, her dislike; every shade of feeling was registered in dollars and cents. And here was a revelation: in these terms I was not the least loved—that position was Floyd’s. I came somewhere near the bottom. Franny was first. A rough total of her take so far was in the many thousands, and add the house to it—the house that Mother still lived in—and the total was nearer half a million. Rose came second, with thousands in cash, plus the cottage, for a total of about three hundred large. Fred’s and Hubby’s gifts took the payout to almost a million dollars. No wonder Floyd had sat beside me in the car thumping the pages, screaming and quoting King Lear. I’d gotten under a thousand, Floyd slightly less.

  He called Franny and howled.

  Franny said, “I haven’t taken a penny from Ma.”

  He called Rose, who said, “After all I’ve done for you,” and hung up.

  Raging, he wrote to Fred, one of his lapidary letters, like a papal bull, denouncing him for allowing this to happen. He believed that Fred was Mother’s executor, that he ought to have protected Mother’s money.

  “They took that money from me!”

  But Fred had been in the dark. Mother was at her most secretive when it came to money; not trusting anyone to be her executor, she remained in full control of her banking, keeping her checkbook in her claw, using it to win allies.

  The payments had begun soon after Father’s funeral, at the time when I’d noticed Mother’s odd alteration of mood, Maoist in an expansive and megalomaniacal way, even more domineering and needy, telling me to get married, retailing gossip, whispering against us, one against the other, isolating those of us who sounded disloyal, which meant in her mind not sufficiently flattering.

  That period had also coincided with Franny and Rose’s regular visits to Mother, weekly drop-ins, usually on Sundays, and now we knew why. They had come with tales of woe, to leave some food, to moan about their fate; slurpingly, to tell Mother how much they loved her, and to collect a check. They had been regular in their collection, ingenious in their reasons (teeth, house repairs, children’s tuition, groceries), and always covert. While Mother was giving me a plate of hermits, or Fred a loon she had carved, Franny was pocketing a check for six thousand dollars, scribbled, Toward new kitchen.

  We children were not impecunious people. We were reasonably well-off, most of us house owners. I was the only renter, but I had hopes. The heaviest recipients of Mother’s gifts were double-income families.

  Floyd called me. “It’s all in King Lear. They go to Ma’s and say, ‘ “I love you more than words can wield the matter; dearer than eyesight, space, and liberty”—and help yourself to a Swedish meatball.’”

  “But on the other hand,” I said, “‘Better to go down dignified with boughten friendship at your side than none at all.’”

  “‘Provide, Provide,’” Floyd said. “The cynical poem of a damaged man who was also an old fart.”

  I called Fred. I said that I’d seen the accounts, though I didn’t say how, or that I’d photocopied them.

  “She’s given away much more than you said.”

  “That’s her right,” Fred said. “She can do what she wants.”

  “Tens of thousands.”

  “It’s her money, Jay.”

  “I haven’t seen any.”

  “Do you need money?”

  “Does anyone really need it?” I said, my shrill voice going childish. “No one does. Fred, this is just greed and opportunism.”

  “We should rejoice that Ma is still alive. She’s over ninety. She’s healthy. She’s been through a lot. She’s our mother.”

  He said more, and as he did, he slipped into Mother’s mode, her imagery, her logic, her tone of voice.

  When he was done, I said, “I see what you mean.”

  But I didn’t. Floyd was right: Fred was on Mother’s side, with Gilbert. They implied that it was unfair to criticize Mother for writing checks, even if she was doing so with a shaky hand and a forgetful mind. So Franny and Rose were in the clear, and as the check register showed, they were still collecting.

  I lost all of what remained of my loyalty to her, my sympathy evaporated. I had known she was canny; I did not realize how treacherous she was. Not maternal at all but rather an unusual and deceitful old woman, who obviously did not like me very much, who was afraid of Floyd, who was ingenious in her many deceptions.

  I had known she was a habitual liar, but I had thought she was impartial in her lies. I hadn’t guessed that she was truthful with her daughters, to whom she confided, whom she trusted and enriched. She was more complicated than I’d thought. It had never crossed my mind that she could be generous. Yet she was abundantly philanthropic to her girls, even kind to them, giving them her time. All this meant that she was not the tricky soul I had taken her to be, with lapses into kindness, but tortured and elliptical, even more of a scheming old queen.

  In the turbulence and mutual recrimination that followed the discovery of Mother’s accounts, I tried to be calm. I asked myself why I cared about her writing checks to my sisters. Murmuring “It’s her money,” I decided that I had no grounds for objection, I had no right to expect a payout, but—never mind me—she was handing over her nest egg.

  What if she needed money for medical bills, assisted care, nursing, an old folks’ home? Who would pay for that? This played in my head, my concern for her security, but when I examined my feelings I knew that, after all, I was insulted by having been passed over. I resented Mother’s secrecy, and I hated the thought that when they had stopped by my sad little house with apples and hermits and wedges of cheese, Franny and Rose had checks for thousands in their pockets.

  PART THREE

  35

  The Algebra of Love

  Now I knew the truth, and the truth made me snarl with bitter joy. It was a family cynicism that I shared—a sour trait—glee at seeing the worst in people, the confirmation that all of us were dogs. I complained to Floyd. I encouraged him to rant, I said that I was outraged, I shook the photocopies of Mother’s check register—a great flapping sheaf of betrayal—and I went on howling. But I was happy in a grim and deeply satisfying way, taking a morbid pleasure in having the truth in my hand.

  How often in life are you certain of the unvarnished truth, have laid out before you the meticulously kept balance sheet of affection, the algebra of love? Here it was, all those columns of figures, and explanations too. Franny’s kitchen $16,000 and Rose’s septic system $11,000 and Hubby, repayment for groceries $80 and Jay birthday $10 and Gilbert birthday $500 and Franny car $6,000 and People in Africa $20 and Fred children’s tuition $1,500. Fred was a multimillionaire.

  Money was love. On the basis of Mother’s financial records I had the heptagram of her love, also her indifference, her favorites, her weaknesses, her dislikes, and more. Her disposition in every sense. She had drawn up this balance sheet and in doing so had reconfigured the family, arranged the real family into a set of numbers. Franny came out on top with sums of five figures, Rose was second, Hubby and Fred next, and Gilbert had gotten a smallish amount.

  Floyd a
nd I came at the bottom, behind Angela, who was dead but who had been lavished with candles and flowers and memorial masses and contributions to charities—missions in India and Africa and South America—in her name: a hospital in Angola, her representation as a cherub in a stained-glass window in Peru, a gift of goats to a village in Ethiopia. What was beautiful was the linking of Floyd and me at the bottom of the balance sheet, for after all the years of backstabbing and recriminations and Look what he did to me! and He hit me first!, Floyd and I became allies—more than that, the best of friends, as in our earliest childhood, when he had protected me and comforted me with stories at bedtime. “Tell me about the circus,” I had pleaded with him in the suffocating darkness of our attic bedroom.

  In the real family, which these accounts revealed, Father did not matter much, apart from Geraniums $2.99 and Memorial Mass $25. And Floyd and I were negligible, seemingly punished, though God knows for what. We did not figure in Mother’s accounts, and so did not occupy much space in her mind or her memory. We had gotten nothing, so we were at the margin, and in the center the rewarded ones were arrayed: Gilbert, who had received a few checks; Fred, who’d been given tuition money for his kids; Hubby, who’d gotten a large piece of land for a dollar. Franny and Rose had, between them, reaped a fortune in money and property.

  The abusive phone calls that Floyd had made had put them all on notice. Mother had no idea what we knew. All the children still visited her, brought her presents of plants and fruit and trinkets. We took turns driving her to church and invited her for meals. But we did this separately. Apart from Floyd and me, our paths did not cross. There were no more family dinners, cookouts, or birthday parties, none of the old family routines. We knew too much of Mother now to see each other in the same way.

  The real family consisted of lobbyists and gossips, of which Franny and Rose were the most active. We now knew they were Mother’s handmaidens and heiresses, and as in all such opportunistic relationships, it was hard to tell whether she owned them through her patronage or they possessed her by their flattery.