Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  Franny loomed over her, her drooping dress like a dustcloth draped over a chair. And she was breathing hard, working her jaw in wordless honks. A similarity in posture, a way of leaning, a way of holding their arms, the family feet. But there was a difference. Mother’s old malevolence and grandeur were gone. She was diminished to half her original size, hardly recognizable as the mother I had known and feared. And just like a fragile discount doll, she was modeled after the other woman. Franny was so much bigger, as if, along with everything else, the daughter had drawn off all her mother’s wind and bulk, taken over Mother’s size and strength, and stood there in the driveway like a wheezy version of the woman who’d made her. I believed strongly in inherited characteristics now. Franny was like Mother used to be.

  Yet even dwarfed and desiccated—bird bones and sparse white hair on a pink scalp, in the threadbare sack of a dress—Mother looked as indestructible as she had been my whole life. And now she seemed saurian, the way oldsters sometimes do, blinking in my rearview mirror, closer than she appeared.

  Next to this pale, petrified old woman, Franny was unsteady and lopsided, tottering in tortured shoes. Soon they were out of sight, and I was on my way home. But it was hard to rid my mind of them.

  Mother was healthier than ever, but in a passive and prune-like way. She often remarked with satisfaction that she had to go for walks alone—“Franny doesn’t feel up to it”; that she wanted to learn Spanish at night school, and to register for Advanced Woodcarving, where they fashioned larger birds—raptors and pelicans—and used power tools and an array of expensive knives. Mother still attended the weekly history class and, at least once a month, someone’s funeral.

  Mother went to the funerals as a living reproach, a flesh-and-blood I-told-you-so specter in a black hat and black veil, hanging like a fruit bat, a frowning power figure commanding fear and veneration. The funerals, like many other outings that Mother made, were public appearances for a reason: Mother left the house to solicit praise, to inspire awe, to shame people with her great age and healthy habits.

  Franny still drove over on Sundays, as always, big and wheezy from Mother’s bounty. Rose showed up on Saturdays.

  “They want to find out if I’m dead,” Mother said spitefully. But that spite did not have the corrosive effect it had on other people: it kept Mother alive.

  The rotisserie chicken, the ham sandwich, the meatballs, the takeout trays that Franny bought on the way as meals, she’d microwave. Then they’d eat, Franny silently lamenting that she could not take up residence in the house, that she’d have to find someone to cut the grass, rake the leaves, and shovel the walk. That’s what Mother told me, and others probably heard more colorful versions.

  “I don’t know why she always brings me food,” Mother said. “I have Meals on Wheels from Hubby.”

  Fred, too, once so vital—the multitasking lawyer with twenty arms—was useless. The stroke had broken him in half. He was spiritless, even more lopsided than Franny, with one loose arm and a drawn-down mouth. He couldn’t drive his own car, and on the rare days when he came to my house, dragging one foot, one arm swinging as though made of cloth—his wife was like his keeper—he said, “I’ve wasted my life. I should have been a painter. I could have done it. I had talent. But what good is it now? You made the right choice. I could have had yours or Floyd’s life.”

  “He’s a hypocrite,” Floyd said. “He’s done exactly what he’s wanted his whole life. It’s insulting to be told that.”

  That was a flash of the old Floyd. As a married man he’d become circumspect and kept to himself. He never mentioned his wife. He was preoccupied, a bit sensitive, still writing, more interested in the future than he’d ever been. He was embarked on one of his miscellanies, a volume he called Anomalies. It was, he said, his big book.

  “Give me an example.”

  “George H. W. Bush said, ‘Read my lips: No new taxes.’ But look closely. He has no lips.”

  Hubby told me he was thinking of taking early retirement from the hospital. He had high blood pressure, acid reflux, and flat feet. Even with her shuffle, Mother walked faster when she was with him. “I’m burned out,” Hubby said. Like the rest of us, he saw himself as being at the end of his working life. “I’ve been offered a buyout. Maybe I’ll be a consultant.”

  Rose was content now that Bingo and Benno were in college, and she too talked of retirement. Rose had nothing to do except regret their absence and rage at Franny, who, it was now clear, had most of Mother’s money.

  Gilbert, the brightest, the kindest, the most forgiving, the most elusive, was in Afghanistan, on assignment at the embassy in Kabul. Whenever I asked him about the war, he deflected the question by complaining about the quality of Afghan carpets. “Lurid chemical dyes. Inferior knots.” And he might add, “The Panjshir Valley has been pacified, and the good news is that agriculture has returned to many provinces. The bad news is that their cash crop is opium poppies.”

  Angela was now fifty-five, and though she had been dead for nearly that whole time, she was seen as triumphant by Mother, who said, “She’s had the best life of any of us.”

  And I was trying to make sense of it all. How had it happened that after all these years, this big, gray-haired bunch were still children? Yet we were aging, each of us frail in our own way, without the possibility of any successes ahead of us, only the repetition of small failures that would lead us to the grave.

  In each of our minds was the question of what to do with Mother. We were old ourselves and at the end of our working lives, Fred lame, Floyd on the verge of retirement, Gilbert talking about leaving the foreign service to write a book, Franny and Rose about to abandon teaching. My writing was no more than a few fidgety and speculative hours now—note-taking, but the notes were pessimistic, like those of a traveler who’d gone too far and was stuck and saw there was no turning back, like Captain Robert Falcon Scott starving in his tent, writing messages to a world he hoped would not forget him.

  As for the family, we had entered that scrubby twilit landscape where the wide road stuttered into a path, and that path into a slender track, going nowhere, squeezing toward the end of ambition. The young didn’t know this, could hardly guess at it. But there was a point on the living road where there were no signposts, no way-markers, no ambition, and not many other people. All happy surprises were in the past. No more miracles, nothing to be expected, no hope even, only those rocky heights and the barren hills, and oblivion behind them in unreadable shadow, pushing on, every turnoff looking treacherous, the whole way forward tending toward darkness.

  That’s life, we said, meaning, That’s death.

  We resembled Mother in the way we easily forgot things, and were repetitious and set in our ways. What a relief it would have been—or a diversion, anyway—to take control, as Mother had done, and enjoy some importance, however brief; a degree of power or respect. But no, we were incapable of that.

  We had Mother’s life without any of Mother’s satisfactions. Our lives were growing thinner and emptying out. We were traveling in that harsh hinterland of aging, on that narrowing path where no one willingly accompanies you. Old love is an illusion. My affair with Dr. Alex had ended, amicably, as mature affairs between sensible adults tended to—we were too independent to find a way of living together, and too advanced in years. And perhaps she suspected how much in thrall I was to Mother and my family. We were largely ignored, unremarkable, all aspiration gone, and in our helplessness were still subservient, still attending to Mother. As her aged children, we were her limping servants, her graying subjects; we did not dare dislike her, but we had never disliked each other more.

  “I’d like to shoot Franny in the thighs,” Floyd said to me.

  Hubby said, “We have lots of wackos just like Floyd at the hospital. We sedate them.”

  “Have you ever noticed that Hubby’s head is shaped like a jezail bullet,” Floyd said. “And he’s got webbed feet. Why is that?”

  We were re
tired or semiretired, with plenty of time for this. There was no common ground, we had no shared interests, nothing to talk about, except the subject that wouldn’t go away—Mother.

  We were all fairly fat and shaggy, but we looked different and our personalities were distinct. We were so unlike each other it was as though we belonged to separate families—or not family members at all, but rather orphans of the storm.

  “How’s your brother?” strangers might say of Fred or Floyd. “Is she related to you?” they’d remark of Franny or Rose. Or “What do you talk about when you’re together?” It seemed an enigma that we could be so different, and the result, of course, was that we found it impossible to talk reasonably to one another. As a traveler, I knew that strangers could be unpredictable. But strangers in the same family are dangerous.

  As Franny had discovered—I’d seen it on her face, the look she had at the table when all the food was gone, while she sat with a fork in her fist—there was no money left. Mother’s gifts these days were her knitted throw rugs and her carved birds. “This is a loon . . . This is a nuthatch,” Floyd mocked. “And these are vultures, so gorged on their thievishness they’re too fat to fly.”

  “Maybe we should make another foray through the back door,” I said.

  “There’s nothing left to steal,” he said. “There hasn’t been anything for years.”

  “Just for fun.”

  “You always did have a perverse notion of fun. Why is that? Are you insane? Stop gabbling. The treasure has been plundered.”

  We were at his house, on his porch, the sounds of Gloria inside rattling pans in the kitchen. She brought us coffee. She was the woman Floyd had waited for his whole life. Now, nearing seventy, he had found Mrs. Right, who adored him. She lingered, because he was still talking.

  “And to think that Ma’s fortune at Dad’s death still had its maidenhead, ‘never sacked, turned, nor wrought . . . ,’” he said. “‘The mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples.’ Source?” He took Gloria’s hand. “Look at him squirm.”

  I said, “It sounds familiar. John Donne?”

  “Raleigh. You didn’t know that?” And Gloria kissed him. He said, “I am cursed with total recall, my darling.”

  On one of my visits to Mother around this time, she said to me, “Do you think I belong in a home?”

  I gave her the answer she wanted.

  She said, “Some people think I do.”

  She mentioned it as a power play, being forced into exile; and again, saying this, she sounded more than ever like a despot losing her grip, fighting a rearguard action against potential usurpers.

  “Some people want to ship me out of here.”

  “Which people?”

  “I’d rather not say.” In her great age, Mother’s head had grown smaller, yet her nose was still beak-like and inquisitive. “But you’d be surprised.”

  That meant Franny and Rose. “Horrible,” I said, spotting an opportunity to appear sympathetic and ingratiate myself. “You’re independent. You’ve got friends and interests. You can cook for yourself.”

  “I got myself to the dentist the other day without anyone’s help.”

  “Sure you did.” Did she? “Why would you want to go to an old folks’ home?”

  “I’d die in one of those places.”

  “Right. Whoever made that suggestion would be sending you to your death.”

  “I’d have no privacy at all,” she said.

  “It would be like a prison,” I said.

  Staring, Mother became reflective, her fingertips tracing the waxen contours of her face.

  “I know I haven’t been perfect,” she finally said.

  “You’ve done fine, Ma.”

  “I’m sure I’ve made a lot of mistakes.”

  I peered closely at her, and as though speaking to an oversensitive child, I said, “Don’t think about it, Ma.”

  This was the wrong answer. Mother’s face tightened, her mouth became grim. “So you think I have?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I did.” But I hadn’t, and now it was too late.

  “There may come a time for me to go into a home,” Mother said. She turned away from me, her jaw set against the possibility of ever leaving her chair.

  “Not soon,” I said.

  “When I’m old,” she said.

  She was ninety-six, twig-like, but so hardened she seemed to exist in a state of ossification, the bony essence of what she had been.

  Rose called me that night. “You asshole. Ma said she didn’t get a wink of sleep after you upset her. Okay, maybe she did make a few bad decisions, but why do you insist on telling her about all the mistakes she’s made?”

  It was not really a question. It was an accusation. Without another word, Rose banged the phone down.

  After I’d left, in a maneuver I’d lived through a hundred times, Mother had called around and maligned me. Mother did not think of herself as old. We were the ones who were aging, not she. Her mention of the dentist: I kept thinking about it, how even at her age she had most of her teeth and went on getting them fixed, tinkering with them, having them scaled and filled. She saw a podiatrist for her bunions, the internist for her shallow cough. After ninety-six years she was keeping her time-battered body in repair. She still had usable teeth! Her feet and legs still worked! Even that reaction to my visit, that old reflex of malice that kept her whispering against me, inventing stories, making trouble (“Jay upset me!”), even that still animated her.

  Fred stopped by after calling me from his car. He happened to be passing. Might he drop in? Nothing was casual with Fred. I knew that he was headed my way and wanted to talk, and that I would not be able to dissuade him.

  He looked older, much thinner, limp-armed still. It was not just that he seemed feebler than Mother. He looked as if he didn’t have long to live. After the effort of climbing the four stairs to my porch, he sat, got his breath, and said he’d made a tour of the retirement homes on the Cape. It was time to come up with a plan.

  I said, “Ma says you’re putting her into a prison.”

  “We have to think ahead.”

  “Who’s going to pay for it?”

  “I’m sure that everyone will be willing to chip in,” he said.

  Putting Mother in a home meant that Franny would get to move into the house that Mother had given her but not vacated yet. And, since Mother had handed out all her money, we’d each be assessed for the cost of Mother’s care at the assisted living facility. Those of us who had received nothing or very little from Mother would still have to assume a share of the cost.

  Instead of mentioning these petty objections, I said to Fred, “Ma will be demoralized if we bring this up.”

  “We won’t bring it up, then.”

  “So you’re not giving her a choice in the matter?”

  “As you say, it’ll hurt her if we go on talking about putting her into assisted care.”

  “Then you’re treating her like a child.”

  “I have her best interests at heart,” Fred said.

  “She told me she doesn’t want to be put into a home,” I said. “And I don’t blame her.”

  But coughing and canted over on a chair in my living room, Fred looked like the one who should have been thinking of assisted living, not Mother. He looked more like her husband than her son.

  “At least I take her out to eat. I visit her. I call her almost every day.”

  “And you’ve gotten money from her,” I said.

  “Not as much as Franny or Rose.”

  “More than Floyd,” I said. “More than me.”

  “Floyd’s done all right.”

  The discussion ended that way, as most family discussions did, running down the balance sheet.

  We were still at war, but being too tired for all-out battle, we engaged in the occasional skirmish. Our ill will did not seem so surprising to me. What bewi
ldered me were happy families. All those loud, jolly people in the backyard, standing around the charcoal grill, bantering and drinking beer and wolfing the potluck they’d brought in big platters—pasta salad, guacamole dip, tuna casserole, bubble biscuits, coleslaw. What was wrong with them? Why weren’t they fighting, or at least sulking? How could twenty or more of them be gathered together without half of them howling abuse?

  The scholarship winners, the athletes, the survivors of sickness or catastrophes, who spoke of their families as supportive—they seemed delusional, or brainwashed, or sufferers of Stockholm syndrome. “My mom was always there for me,” one might say, or “I couldn’t have done it without my family.” Runners, cyclists, winners of talent contests, teenage golf champs and tennis oafs and swimmers, all of them stood on podiums and thanked their mothers. I did not doubt their sincerity, but where had these mothers come from, and how had they got that way? I felt these children had been more manipulated than we’d been, and that all these ostentatious mom-thankers were not to be admired but pitied. They were pathetic in their gratitude, like members of a cult.

  I understood the family feud that ended in a stabbing or a drive-by shooting or a massacre, the daughter who’d swindled her mom out of her pension, the mother who sued her son for breach of promise, the barbecue that became a brawl. This waywardness no longer dismayed me but seemed like a sign of health. The saintly, salt-of-the-earth mother was more of an enigma and seemed dangerous in her apparent unselfishness. Such a softhearted being was capable of anything, especially of making you believe in her and twisting you to her will. But our mother was someone I would never trust. She was a much truer reflection of the world I knew, and now, as she headed toward the century mark, it seemed she would outlive us all.

  46

  My Muse

  In Dad’s time, we had often met at the town dump—Fred dropping off his tenants’ rubbish; Floyd looking through the books at the swap shop, where he’d once found a first edition of The Naked and the Dead, slightly foxed but with a dust jacket; Franny leaving refundable bottles at the Little League shed; Dad himself scavenging and perhaps disinterring a pair of hinges or a sheet of plywood. “Might come in handy,” or “I know just what I’m going to do with that.” Once it had been a big smoking hill of trash—stinks and seagulls rising above a swamp of poison, green with leachate. Then it was a landfill. Finally, a transfer station. But it had never ceased to be called a dump, and for Dad something like a men’s club, where he met his friends and they talked about the Red Sox or the weather—kibitzed, in Father’s word; chewed the fat.