Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  As recipients, they were not calmed. They were, if anything, more competitive. Had Mother intended this? The sisters especially hated Hubby and saw him as undeserving.

  Floyd said, “Remember the shit fit Franny threw when Ma gave Hubby the Acre?”

  It was true. She had been tearful, appealing to us for support.

  “She wanted it for herself.”

  Hubby did not mention the gift of land or the various sums of money Mother had sent his way—the check register told it all—yet he swore and yelled about his sisters’ greed, their gall, and when he was challenged, claimed that the land he’d been given had been worthless, unbuildable, until he’d put in an expensive septic system.

  Fred, the eldest, and Gilbert, the youngest, were allies. Floyd hated them both. “Vacillators! They ratted us out!”

  After some months, Mother noticed the hostility, and she asked to be visited more often. The alliances altered, at her direction, Floyd reported to me. In Floyd’s eyes the greatest crime of Fred and Gilbert was that they now spoke to Franny and Rose, and joined Mother and them for Sunday lunch, the potluck meals that included potato salad, salami, Swedish meatballs, coleslaw, and Mother’s nutty hermits.

  “They actually eat this stuff,” Floyd said. “It’s not a meal, it’s more like a hazing ritual. A tribal initiation. Consuming the unnamable. And for what? For more money.”

  Could this be so?

  We waited for another Friday, another bird-carving class. We drove to Mother’s and cautiously approached the house, parking two streets away, as we had before, thinking of ourselves, in our juvenile way, as commandos. The back door was unlocked, though the front door was bolted.

  Floyd said, “Look, Ma still saves jelly jars.”

  We hurried to her desk and flipped open the spiral-bound check register.

  “What did I tell you?”

  Franny—Happy Anniversary $500. Rose car insurance—$700. Benno—good report card—$50. Franny Air Fare to visit Max $1,200. Fred ​— tuition $1,500. Hubby—for window boxes $200.

  “This thing is hemorrhaging money,” Floyd said, pounding the binder shut. “And nothing for me. What about me? I’m smart and I want respect.”

  He was clowning, stamping his feet, flinging himself from room to room. He finally alighted on the cabinet of knickknacks.

  “I want this!” He flung open the cabinet door and took out a porcelain Hummel figure. “Goose girl, you’re mine.” And then he put it back. “This is rat shit. By the way, are you aware that these tchotchkes are the brainchild of a materialistic German nun?”

  I was seated on Mother’s throne, watching him fuss.

  “The real problem in this house is that there’s nothing left to steal. That must happen in a lot of families.” He went to the bookshelf and poked at the spines of some books. “Worthless. But what about these albums?”

  A stack of fat albums were crammed onto one shelf. We pulled them out, looked over the old photos, and found snapshots from the 1920s—Mother’s family, Father’s family. Then the 1930s—their marriage. And the 1940s—our baby pictures, photos of us growing up. Various houses we’d occupied. Mother’s father, looking like a tycoon, a heavy watch chain draped on his vest front, a cigar in his chubby hand.

  “Family history,” Floyd said. “This is gold. These are priceless.”

  “Should we take them?”

  “Why not?”

  We made a pile of the albums with the rarest photos and left the rest. Floyd returned to Mother’s desk, lifted the glass on it, slipped out the smiling photo of Franny, wrote Fatso on the back, and then replaced it.

  “Someday Franny will be dusting and she’ll find that.”

  We ate an apple and half a ham sandwich from the refrigerator.

  Floyd said, “Remember that guy who raped and murdered a woman in her trailer? She had been eating a hamburger. After he strangled her, he finished her hamburger.”

  He was chewing, holding the sandwich in one hand and the family albums under his arm.

  “They fried him. It wasn’t just the murder. That was bad. It was the hamburger. That was somehow worse.” He made a face, then wiped his mouth. “Why does Ma use so much mayo?”

  We crept out of Mother’s house and, looking left and right, sneaked through the backyards to my Jeep.

  We complained, we objected, Floyd howled, but we were happy. The pleasure this gave us was almost indescribable. Why did it outweigh most of the pleasures I had known in my life?

  Burgling Mother’s house was childish fun at its most intense, savored in adulthood. The joy in being young, scattering in the neighborhood or the nearby woods, was in breaking the rules and being unobserved, somehow upsetting the natural order—shattering windows, stealing trifles, scribbling swear words on a wall, slashing someone’s tires, snapping off a car antenna and using a length of it to make a zip gun. Part of the thrill of this mischief was that while we were invisible, the misdeed was noticed—we were making someone angry. We were always so near the scene of the crime that no one suspected us.

  Our satisfaction now was in the secrecy, in the teamwork—we were a little gang—in the risk and the foolery and the reward of finding out (in our case) where we stood in the family. That it was petty crime—break-in and larceny—made it all the more pleasurable.

  The excitement of driving with Floyd to Mother’s to sneak in made me giddy. It was the happiest of outings. Floyd was in high spirits, joking as I drove, doing imitations of Mother (“Has anyone seen my albums?”) and Franny (“Want some meatballs, Ma? They’ll cost you ten grand.”) and Rose (waiting for a handout).

  “At this moment, as we are casing the joint,” Floyd had said, pushing his way through Mother’s hydrangeas, “someone is playing golf, believing he is having fun. But really, you can’t beat this for a good time.”

  “I agree, burgling is better than golf.”

  “I asked her for a loan a few years ago. She said she didn’t have any money,” Floyd said. “And look.”

  The week he had been turned down for a loan, Mother had given Rose a check, itemized under Window treatments.

  We should have been dismayed, yet we were happy. Among the papers we found was one in Mother’s handwriting specifying that, upon her death, the entire contents of the house would be conveyed to Franny. This was obviously one of Franny’s ruses, since she had already been given the house.

  “Ma, can I have the grandfather clock?” Floyd said in Franny’s oinking voice. “Ma, what about the sofa and the desk? And could I ever have the carpet?”

  I said, “Do you really want that stuff?”

  “No, but why should she have it?”

  Irrationality was another of our joys, the pleasurable perversity of pure spite, being a meaningless nuisance. Because in all of this—the intrusion, our anger, the teasing, the indignation—we were children; we were boys again.

  And I laughed hard at the end of that day when Floyd handed me the stolen albums, looked at his watch, and said, “I’ve got to hit the road. I have to be at Harvard at seven for my seminar on Wallace Stevens’s Opus Posthumous.”

  Floyd wrote a letter to Franny and Rose, condemning them. It was an indictment, berating them in his characteristic way. Your shameless opportunism, your naked greed, everything you lit upon you snatched and then you hurried away on your busy hocks and trotters.

  He made Mother the victim. Your poor unassuming mother, whose pocket you pick.

  The other children were also implicated: While your spineless brothers looked indifferently upon this heinous act of betrayal . . .

  Famous for his denouncing letters, Floyd taught another course at Harvard called The Epistolary Tradition in Literature, from Richardson to Bellow. This family letter was two pages of accusation, closely printed, and like the letters he’d sent in the past to each of us, it was fierce and so abusive it was unanswerable in its invective.

  His letter was unusual in that it portrayed Mother as the victim of their plotting. Moth
er was feeble, helpless, infantilized. I did not remark on this, but it seemed strange, since I had always seen Mother as the manipulator, and the check register seemed to bear this out. Yet for Floyd, Franny and Rose were the chief villains.

  In the letter, Mother was not Queen Lear, as Floyd had sometimes called her. She was instead an elderly and unsuspecting woman who had been bamboozled by her daughters.

  Declaiming the letter to me on my porch in Centerville, Floyd strode up and down, slapping the pages, stabbing the air with his finger. I thought, as I had many times, how he would have made a marvelous actor, although much of this was melodrama, if not parody.

  “We have been cozened!” he cried. “We are the poor dupes of a pea-and-thimble trick. And who is left? A bewildered crone, gibbering in her chair, her shoulders shaking under her thin shawl, whimpering, ‘Why me? Why me?’”

  He finished, clearly pleased with himself, folding the pages and tucking them into the breast pocket of his seersucker jacket.

  “Are you sending a copy to Ma?”

  “Everyone gets one,” he said. “That way, there is no misunderstanding.”

  “What do you think she’ll say?”

  “Ma? She’ll see we’re on her side. That she’s been conned. That’s what this is all about. We’re the only ones who see the truth. Ma is the victim.”

  36

  Checks and Balances

  I did not see Mother in the way Floyd did, and perhaps this was another of her triumphs. With her timely gifts, Mother had reconfigured the family to suit her needs. Some of us were trusted, and rewarded for being trustworthy; others were less reliable. Floyd and I were beyond the pale. I objected to this until I saw Mother’s crystalline logic—she was right not to trust me.

  Floyd’s orotund document was both a warning and an accusation. He tended toward the lapidary, but among “inasmuch” and “vouchsafe” and “money-grubbing harridans and moralizing mountebanks in muumuus,” the message was clear: We are watching you.

  Mother was now ninety-one. Nearly all her old friends had died. She was making new ones. They loved her wisdom and her twinkle, they admired her health and strength. “I do the best I can,” she said, and lowered her eyes—Mother’s pose of modesty was effective. She knew she was healthier than any of the others in her carving class, the doddering octogenarians, the seventy-odds with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was thin as a stick but with the same fierce face I had known all my life, the hawk nose, the flinty eyes, the sharp tongue. Her hearing was perfect: “No need to shout” became one of her catchphrases. Marvin had high blood pressure, now worsened by his having retired from his job as a mall cop. Mother said, “It’s his own goddamned fault.” Fred’s wife Erma had fallen and bruised her arm. Mother said, “When I was carrying Gilbert I slipped on the ice and chipped my elbow. They expected me to miscarry. Did I complain?” Loris was pregnant again. “She’s as big as a house,” Mother said, hooting, “God forgive me.”

  She seemed more malicious than ever, more willful, and would not be corrected. Talking to her, I forgot her age. She was quicker-witted than me, two moves ahead of me usually, all her faculties intact. Her accounts were complex but revealing—one could understand the state of her mind from the movements of her money, the handouts big and small, and the melancholy fact that now she had a lot less money in the bank and no property left to dispose of. Apart from that money, she had left herself with few assets. Each item in the house had someone’s name on it, and the house itself was Franny’s. She was eating off crockery that was legally Rose’s, wearing jewelry that she’d willed to Fred.

  But Mother’s gifts were only part of my concern. The bigger question was how would she go on living, supporting herself, if her health failed? She wouldn’t be able to live on her own much longer. Soon she’d be the resident of an old folks’ home. Assisted living was expensive, and at some point she’d need twenty-four-hour nursing, money for rent, for medicine, for care. A hundred grand was not enough to cover this. The next time I visited her, I brought the subject up.

  With a rocking motion of her body that signaled her impatience, Mother said, “I’m insured.”

  “Do you have long-term-care insurance?”

  “I’m covered. I was a teacher, you know. I have a good policy.”

  “They don’t cover old folks’ homes.”

  “I’m not in an old folks’ home, in case you didn’t notice.”

  “You might need money sometime,” I said.

  This anxiety also lay behind Floyd’s letter. It was why he had said to me, “Ma will end up thanking us for this.”

  “I have money,” Mother said.

  “You might need more.”

  “I have enough.”

  Because I knew so much, I had to tread carefully. I did not want to reveal the extent of my knowledge, for fear she would ask how I’d come by it. I said, “But if you give any away, you might find yourself short.”

  Mother sat back and smiled at my stupidity. “Give it away?” And she laughed, an unconvincing whickering. “To whom?”

  “Say, to your children.”

  “I haven’t given anyone a penny,” she said, and when she delivered this line—the blanket denial that was never true—she fixed her gaze on me, arranging herself in her mendacious posture.

  As though to a lying child I said lightly, “You might have given them something.”

  “Nothing,” she said, reminding me how defiant she got when caught in a lie. That, too, like a child.

  “Maybe a little?”

  “Did you hear me? I said nothing.”

  I had nowhere to go with this, and yet, leaning forward on her throne, stamping out the words on the carpet with her tiny foot, she was not through with me.

  “Are you calling me a liar?”

  “I would never do that.”

  “You’re trying to upset me again.”

  Staring at me, she made it plain that my time was up. After I left, she called Franny and Rose and Fred. She said that I’d accused her of lying, a cruel accusation for a child to make to his mother. The three of them called me and berated me for my wickedness.

  Mother denied everything. She would not take responsibility for anything she’d said or done. Still, I was so stung by being told I was wicked that I called her up.

  “I didn’t accuse you of lying,” I said.

  “I never said you did.”

  “Fred told me.”

  “Oh, Fred. What has that got to do with me?”

  Putting me in the wrong, Fred had said, “It’s her money.” He was right. I had no business questioning her. I told this to Floyd.

  “Fred let it happen. He’s like Ariel Sharon letting the Christian falangists into Shatila to kill those Palestinian prisoners!”

  This shout made me wary. Floyd was enraged by the accounts, and for a few moments he was inarticulate in his anger, wetting his lips, trying to swallow, nodding to get his bearings.

  “Fred’s not the executor,” I said. “Don’t you see, Ma is Ariel Sharon.”

  “Two points,” he said, trying to calm himself. “The first is that the daughters have her money. The second is that when she needs assisted living in a so-called facility we’ll have to pay for it. This is monstrous.”

  What I did not tell him about Mother’s denial was that in facing me and defying me, in the way she set her jaw and stamped her foot, she became a petulant child, insolent and unforgiving, as she told me obvious lies.

  “She’s like a little girl,” Franny had said to me many times. She knew Mother well, and that little girl in Mother was susceptible to Franny’s mothering and Rose’s flattery. Mother wanted praise, needed attention, craved to be noticed and marveled at, and like a tantrum-prone two-year-old, she wanted independence. I was not good at this sort of manipulation, and Floyd was even worse than me.

  I began to understand all tyrants in the world as willful, twisted children. The evil king was a little boy on a throne, the wicked queen was a little girl, t
he dictator was a peculiar brat, obsessive and single-minded as all brats are—vindictive, too. The history of tyranny was the history of a damaged childhood—the child with power, of idiotic excesses and spite, which accounted for the irrationality and the violence. Political outrages and purges began as tantrums and ended as edicts. The vanity and greed of a tyrant was essentially infantile, but enacted on a grand scale.

  The telephone was Mother’s natural weapon. Each of us was encouraged to call her once a day. Franny and Rose called her two or three times a day. That amounted to almost a hundred phone calls a week. None of the calls were sincere, none of them truthful, yet all were necessary to reassure Mother that she was still our mother and in sole charge of the family—and that we loved her, though the word “love” in this context was meaningless.

  “Franny said she got a hateful letter,” Mother said to me during one of these calls.

  “It might have been the letter that Floyd sent,” I said.

  Shrewd woman that she was, Mother did not admit that she’d received one too.

  “Why would he ever do a thing like that?”

  I said, “I think he had the idea that you were giving Franny and Rose money.”

  “I have never given them a penny.”

  “And that they were taking advantage of you.”

  “Franny and Rose are two of my dearest children, loving and kind. Franny calls me every night at bedtime, to say good night.”

  I hadn’t known that it was important to Mother to be bidden good night. Calling Mother at bedtime was something I had never thought of doing, because she had never done so with me. Bedtime had always been a screech of “Turn off that goddamn light!” Franny knew better.

  “I cherish them. I wish I could say the same for some of my other children.”

  “Some of your other children are concerned that you might need your money. Maybe for health care.”