Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  Men like Floyd who entertained general theories about women always seemed to be justifying a dislike of them. Subscribing to such theories is usually fatal to a relationship. “Women leak” was one, and “Women constantly look at the clock, yet they always know the time” was another. “If a woman stands listening to you without moving, it’s a sign she has sex on her mind,” and “They are always looking for a man to help them live their lives.” He had written a poem on the theme, “Women Extend the Cheek—Men Kiss It.” But his generalizations about women made me think that he feared them.

  As he had grown older, the successive women had become younger and the relationships shorter. That was the pattern. How would this one be any different? From past experience, I guessed that at some point he would show up howling, “Perfidious bitch!” and claim that he’d been abandoned. But not this time.

  He invited me for a meal. The table was set with plates and chopsticks, little dishes of soy sauce and wasabi paste; bigger platters of sushi, sashimi, tempura, and dumplings; bowls of miso soup.

  “I have been thoroughly Nipponized,” Floyd said. “In here, honey.”

  She entered from behind a pile of books stacked in a column taller than she was, treading in small, pawing steps. She was beaming, head cocked somewhat submissively, hands together.

  “Gloria Fujii, but we call her Didi,” Floyd said. “East meets West.”

  She took my hands in hers and smiled, nodding with gratitude. Her father had been Japanese, her mother Italian, and the result was a sort of exotic Mexican, with a strong hint of Asia. An aquiline nose, hooded eyes, thick black hair—pretty, in her mid-thirties. Floyd was sixty-six.

  “Floyd’s told me all about you.”

  She pronounced his name Freud, which made me smile, because Floyd was such a hater of psychoanalysis and its jargon. Floyd seemed not to notice. He was pouring out little glasses of sake.

  “Let’s say I warned her about your waywardness.” He lifted one of the glasses. “Take a glass. I am making an announcement. I will be brief. In a word, Didi and I are getting married. To each other.”

  He downed the sake and made a face, deliberately comic, blowing out his cheeks, and looked at Gloria. She was smiling adoringly at him, her lips glistening with the sake she’d just drunk.

  “A tad more, don’t mind if I do.” Floyd poured and drank again. He said, “We’ve selected you to be best man. Don’t look so puzzled.”

  “I’m delighted.” The sake had burned my throat, but it didn’t matter—Floyd was still talking.

  The date was six weeks away. The ceremony would be held in the local Catholic church, a chapel by the roadside on the Cranberry Highway near his house.

  “Secrecy is the watchword.”

  Apart from Mother and me, no one else in the family would be invited, though it was essential that they should know about it, because what was the point of excluding people unless they were sharply reminded of their exclusion? They had to know that they were not wanted.

  It could be said that in this period of Mother’s dominance, we looked for ways ostentatiously to exclude each other from our lives. No pleasure was complete unless we made sure the others felt unwelcome. It was difficult to have a good time unless we were certain that our siblings were having a bad time. Their misery became part of our pleasure, perhaps the best part.

  “Ma’s coming?” I asked.

  “Ma’s coming.”

  “We want her to be there,” Gloria said. “She is so old and so wise. Amazing woman. She doesn’t take any medicine.”

  Floyd frowned at this with a fiancé’s indulgence. He said, “But Ma doesn’t know it yet.”

  The idea was that Mother would be invited for brunch on the day, around seven. Before she was picked up—this was one of my jobs—she would be told it was Floyd’s wedding. She’d have two hours to get ready. In that time, she’d make her family calls. Everyone would be told and they would know they weren’t invited.

  Laughing and joking over the meal, seeing Floyd and Gloria conversing in Japanese—I assumed they were endearments—I felt that at last something positive was happening in the family.

  “The rest of them will be sulking at home!” Floyd said. The very thought of this lifted his spirits.

  Floyd and Gloria made all the preparations. It would be a small affair: a few of his friends, Mother and me, Gloria’s mother—her father was dead—and some of her friends; fifteen of us in all. The reception afterward would be on Floyd’s lawn, a buffet. They would honeymoon in Maine.

  We met the day before the wedding for the rehearsal, Floyd self-conscious and clowning. The morning of the wedding he called me.

  “She knows. I just told her. You’re picking her up at nine.”

  Mother was sitting on her throne when I arrived.

  “I never thought this day would ever come,” Mother said. She blinked and goggled at me, holding her mouth open in what seemed a calculated look of astonishment. “Do you know that Floyd is getting married today?”

  “That’s where we’re going,” I said.

  I could never tell whether she was pretending to be confused, in order to elicit more information, or that she was really and truly bewildered.

  “To the church,” I said.

  “You know about it?”

  “Ma, I’m driving you. That’s why I’m here. I’m the best man.”

  Even Mother saw the irony in this, my old family enemy asking me to prop him up and be part of the ceremony.

  “No one else knows,” Mother said in a tone of wonderment, which struck me as possibly genuine. “No one else was invited.”

  So she had made her calls already. Floyd had succeeded in tormenting them.

  I helped her into my old Jeep, not easy because the seat was high, and her shoe was unsteady on the metal step. She seemed so shrunken and brittle, so frail when she was out of the house, off her throne, just a basket of bones, her arm like a chicken wing, her hand like a claw. Yet she had carefully dressed up in her favorite color, pale purple, a lavender dress, a lilac-colored hat with a small veil. She wore a string of South Sea black pearls I had bought for her in Tahiti, and seeing them on her neck, I gave a thought to stealing them from her before she gave them away. I clicked her seat belt in. She sat compactly, very watchful and a little nervous in her passenger seat, like a small girl in a stranger’s car.

  “Floyd,” she said. She was still marveling. “Getting married again.”

  “It’s a happy day.”

  “At his age.”

  “Big news.”

  “No one tells me anything.” She was more relaxed now, and with confidence she became resentful. By the time we got to the church parking lot she was scowling. “Hardly any cars,” she said.

  I counted four cars, and though there were not many people the church was festive inside, the front three pews occupied by wedding guests, about a dozen. Mother took her seat in the front pew and made the sign of the cross, like a semaphore, as she knelt to pray.

  Floyd was standing at the side of the altar in a morning suit, striped trousers and tails, a white carnation in his lapel. I walked over and stood with him as the organ sounded. We watched Gloria being led down the aisle by her uncle, a severe man taking studied steps, as though in formal reluctance. He was Japanese and unreadable.

  The priest looked harassed, his vestments untidy, and his sandals contrasted oddly with Floyd’s elegant shoes. During the ceremony I glanced at Mother. In the exchange of vows her eyes brimmed with tears. I was touched by her emotion, softened by her reaction, and began to regret every grudge I’d held against her. I had judged her too harshly; I did not really know this woman; I had never known her.

  And then in a rumble of organ notes the bride and groom smiled and were saluted by the priest. They headed down the aisle, man and wife.

  The reception at Floyd’s house was a joyful lunch party with the dozen friends and family. I discovered through them that Gloria was a painter. Her friends were pain
ters and art students, easygoing, sociable in the way of art students, finding much to praise in Floyd’s house of books and prints and artifacts.

  “He’s got a collection of human skulls,” I heard one of the students say. “They’ve got scrimshaw on them. Some are Tibetan bowls. It’s far-out.”

  Floyd must have heard them. He brought out a skull—shells in its eyes, feather ornaments hanging from its jaw.

  “My last duchess,” he said.

  Mother had found a throne on Floyd’s porch and was soon in her element, smiling through the comments from the wedding guests who praised her great age and her good health.

  Mother told her medicine story, which began “What are you awn?” and ended “I am not awn anything.”

  “What a lovely day this is,” she said. “I’m so lucky to be here to enjoy it. I’ll be ninety-five in a few months.”

  “Teddy Roosevelt was president when you were born,” someone said.

  “Of course I was just a toddler then,” Mother said. “My father was a very strong Roosevelt supporter. Not Franklin but Teddy. My father was a saint, rest his soul.”

  In the meantime, Floyd and Gloria had changed clothes. They appeared on the lawn, holding hands.

  “And now Didi and I are going to Maine,” Floyd said. “Don’t feel you have to leave. Finish the food, and there’s more wine in the refrigerator. The last person please shut off the lights and lock the door.”

  Then they were gone. Seeing them drive off, I knew I had lost an ally. Floyd had another life now, a real life with someone outside the family. He had no need of us, no need of Mother anymore. It was like watching a prisoner plucked from captivity by the timely intervention of a heroine. I felt sheepish and superfluous driving Mother home.

  “What did you think?” I asked her.

  “I got lots of compliments.”

  That night, Hubby called me, quacking, talking over me. “What a sideshow. Who’s the unlucky girl? I’m not surprised the church was empty. I give that marriage two months. Floyd’s a maniac.”

  Over the next two days, I got more calls, and heard Mother’s version of the wedding, the one she told her other children.

  She had not known (so these versions went) that Floyd was getting married until she’d arrived at the church and saw the flowers and Floyd wearing an old-fashioned tuxedo. She had said to me, “Why are we here?” No one was in the church—no one had been invited.

  There might have been some people, but she didn’t see them. Imagine, no wedding guests. She had sat there not knowing what to do. She’d been embarrassed to look. Floyd seemed so old and ridiculous in his tuxedo. His bride was young. Mother could not remember her name; she looked strange, foreign, maybe Chinese. Her dress didn’t fit very well.

  And (Mother went on) she had no idea what was happening. No one had told her anything. The food at the reception was also very odd: uncooked scrod and noodles and tiny vegetables and brown soup. Some of the people were trying to use chopsticks. She felt a bit sorry for Floyd and his new wife. She was thinking of giving them a little something.

  I heard this from Hubby, from Fred, from Gilbert, all of whom confirmed that Franny and Rose had been told the same tale. I knew that I would hear variations of the wedding from everyone, including strangers and friends of the family, for years; what a farce it had been, how small and unsatisfactory. No one would believe me when I tried to tell them what had actually happened, because Mother’s story was so different from mine.

  With Floyd’s marriage came the prospect that I would lose my only ally. He had grown up and gone away, and here I was still, in short pants.

  44

  Winners

  It may seem as if I had no other life, no other sphere of interest, no pleasures or distractions. Yet I had all of these. As a writer, I had always lived a double life: the obsessive mythomaniac at his desk was one, the passive and dreamy civilian the other. A wiser writer than I had once spoken of how in the inner history of any writer’s mind there is a break at a crucial point, the moment when the writer rejects the people who surround him and discovers the necessity of talking to himself, and not to them. The “them” in this case was my family.

  I was a writer still, and when luck came my way in the form of a windfall—I had sold the movie rights to one of my novels—I was more noticed as a writer. Movies aren’t escapist entertainment; on the contrary, the hyperreality of the money and glamour compels us to take life more seriously. I published another novel and a collection of stories; I wrote for magazines. And I had some friendship in my life, with a hope it would sweeten into romance.

  A woman as busy as I was, as preoccupied with her work and her aged parents, relieved some of my weekends when she was not on call. She was a doctor. I saw her for intellectual companionship, for friendship, to share meals, for sex. She had the unsentimental practicality bordering on selfishness of her profession. Was there time? Okay, let’s do it. I think I can fit you in.

  We were intimate friends. And since she had another life at the hospital—no one was busier: she was at the mercy of her pager—she welcomed our irregular meetings. We lived for those days and nights, infrequent though they were. I loved her scientific mind, her efficiency, her unspiritual sense, her confidence and skepticism—her factuality—her casual familiarity with death and dying. We made no plans for the future, we asked very little of each other; we had little to give. She had lank blond hair, she never wore makeup, her skin was pale and warm. She had an older woman’s generosity in bed. She was not a conventional beauty, but her intelligence and humor made her desirable to me. And she was tough, unbreakable, always smiling, as if to say, Try me. She was a fully rational adult of a kind that did not exist in my family. Her name was Alex.

  I did not mention my family to her or anyone. I did not write about Mother or anyone resembling her. My fictional characters were usually parentless, and for a reason. Where would I begin? In my writer’s mind I was an orphan, a changeling, someone rejected to make my own life. Far from being self-pitying, I boasted of my sense of abandonment; and it was better that way, for this conceit, my struggle, had been the making of me as a writer.

  And as a further provocation I had that nagging but effective goad, Mother, rubbishing my work and somehow setting others against me. How much worse my life would have been if she had been breathing down my neck, praising my writing, pushing me in my ambition, dragging me to publishers, puffing me up—one of those pushy stage mothers who live through their talented children. Was it that Mother wanted to go on being superior to me—perhaps to all of us? I didn’t know. I only knew that I was inferior and inadequate. She laughed at me behind my back. She mocked my writing to my siblings. She was wholly philistine in saying, “He never got his hands dirty,” and “He calls that work!,” and in her look of disgust (so it was reported) when she said, “Jay writes porno.” In her mid-nineties, she was fiercer than ever.

  I was astonished that she was still alive. Her endurance compelled my admiration. But she was not merely everlasting—there were plenty of zombies on the Cape, more dead than alive, driving slowly or clomping along, clutching the handlebars of aluminum walkers. Mother was healthy, healthier than her two panting daughters, burdened by bags of groceries. Mother was sturdier than her stroke-victim son, or portly Floyd, who was plagued by indigestion. She was nimbler than Hubby, whose green scrubs grew tighter by the month. She was quicker-witted than me. When I mentioned any of this to her, she began to boast, for she was vain about her daily shuffle-walk to the corner, her command of woodcarving, and within the past year she had started to attend a weekly class on Cape Cod history at the community college.

  Mother attended the class as a living legend, an eyewitness to the entire twentieth century. Franny or Rose drove her and basked in the reflected glory of her appearance. Her role was not to study history but to display her knowledge of it, as interrupter and commentator. She became famous for her interruptions, piping up in the middle of a lecture and correcting t
he teacher on a date or a name or a pronunciation. She was a living native fossil.

  Funerals were her other pastime, more frequent now. She called me or Floyd, or whoever happened to be around, and asked to be driven to a wake or a funeral mass for one of her recently deceased friends or acquaintances—always someone much younger than she, as she invariably pointed out in the midst of her grieving.

  “She was on medication,” Mother would say on the way to the service.

  Even when she was kneeling and praying, her posture seemed to gloat: I won. You lost.

  In Mother’s mind, medication was the commonest cause of death. Medicine made you ill. Pills were poison. Hospitals were infectious. Doctors were dangerous—they were bullying and invasive and much too young. Doctors violated you.

  My friend Alex at Cape Cod Hospital would have been amused. I liked her unshockable doctor’s manner, though without a medico’s smugness. She was an ob-gyn and often talked about mothering. She delivered babies at all hours. She was observant, and when she generalized she sometimes had the smiling detachment of a veterinarian talking about cows.

  “When a woman becomes a mother, she changes,” Alex said. We were at Baxter’s in Hyannis, eating fish and chips, waiting for her pager to go off—she had a patient in labor in the hospital up the street. “I see these submissive women get pregnant and become strong. They turn into confident mothers, much tougher and self-reliant. Something kicks in. It seems like a law of nature.”

  “And what if she has a lot of children?” As I said, I had not mentioned my family to Dr. Alex.

  “You can’t imagine how her character would change,” she said. “How stubborn she’d become, how empowered, how different from what she was before. How tough.”