Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “But you got the Acre from Ma, so what are you complaining about?”

  “I’m not asking you to mow my lawn,” Hubby said. And he sulked.

  Floyd made the same point. Why were we cleaning Franny’s house?

  Fred said, “We’re doing it for Mum. Do you want her to live in squalor?”

  The condition of Mother’s house improved, Mother began eating again, and I found that having something practical to do on my weekly visit—dusting books, tidying the desk, waxing the end tables—made my appearance purposeful. And Mother was grateful for the attention.

  She called from the next room, “Everything all right?”

  “Coming along,” I said, squirting the window, wiping the dirt off. “I wish my work was going better, though.”

  “Oh?”

  “Trying to write a novel,” I said, and saying it aloud, yelling it to the other room, made it sound absurd. “My landlord just raised my rent, so I have to take little assignments to pay bills. ‘My favorite piece of luggage.’ ‘A book that influenced me.’ ‘A memorable meal.’ Always about five hundred words.” I was scrubbing the window, looking out at the road, watching a squirrel seated upright on the curb, looking baffled, its tail flicking in what seemed indecision. A wet day, no acorns apparent. I was that squirrel.

  “Would you ever ​—” Mother cleared her throat and began again, “Would you ever write about me?”

  “In what respect—kind of a memoir?” I eliminated the last smudge from the window and went to the door of the study. Mother was in her chair, leaning forward.

  “Exclusively about you? Like I Remember Mama? You used to love that show.”

  Mother said, “Maybe about everything I did for you. All the sacrifices I made.”

  It was a gray day in late spring, exhalations of vapor from the damp earth, buds on the trees but no leaves, a season of hesitation, the daffodils and tulips past their best but nothing else in bloom except a few whips of forsythia and a blush of azaleas, the sky heavy, a dampness in the road, the lawn still soggy from the late mud season, the grass uncut and shaggy—whose job was that? The ninety-nine-year-old woman and her sixty-five-year-old son alone in the old house. Her request made me sad. I wanted to weep when I reflected on what she was asking: this severe woman who claimed I had never done anything right was requesting a hagiography.

  “Like I said, I’m struggling to write something.”

  “Oh?”

  “I just wish my Social Security payments would kick in. I won’t get anything for another year. I wish I were done with this book.”

  Mother said, “My father always said that you had to work hard to do anything well.”

  I stared at her, a squirt bottle of Windex in one hand, a damp rag in the other.

  “Nothing is easy in this world,” she added.

  “I’ve generally found that to be the case,” I said, trying to control myself.

  “If your book isn’t done, whose fault is that? It means you have to get up earlier and apply yourself. Roll up your sleeves and get down to business. Burn the midnight oil.”

  I felt the strong urge to slap her, jerking her face sideways with the force of the blow, all the while howling at her. But it was a vagrant thought. The stronger sense I had was: she’s better, she’s back on form, I don’t pity her, I’m not worried. She’s stronger and meaner than me.

  A week went by. I returned to tidy and dust the study. Mother was more watchful than usual, and I noticed that she had put on a few pounds. The house smelled of lemon wax and Hubby’s industrial disinfectant and the sharpness, like varnish, of rotisserie chicken.

  Sorting the papers on Mother’s desk, I uncovered a thick book, stamped Journal, and—making sure that I was not being observed—opened it. It was a diary of sorts, in the form of a logbook, the kind a ship’s captain might keep, noting the compass heading and weather conditions and occurrences in one-liners. Mother, too, recorded the weather. Sunny one day, Showers another, and Breezy. She kept track of visits. Franny brought food, and Fred chocolates, and Gilbert called from London. The pages were arranged in weeks. I looked at the previous Wednesday for a mention of my cleaning. Jay showed up, her entry began. His usual complaints. My hard life, no money. Poor me, poor me.

  I did not take this as a slight, or as mockery, but rather as further affirmation that Mother was her old self again.

  To help provide regular meals, rather than depend on food drops, Hubby renewed Mother’s visits of Meals on Wheels. As with everything we did, no matter how small, this became his boast, as the cleaning of Mother’s study was my boast and the kitchen was crowed over by the daughters. “See what I did?” And we knew that there is no more irritating person than the one who loudly calls attention to a minor task he or she has done. But of course we boasted of these trivialities for that very reason, because it was annoying.

  Mother thanked Hubby for taking the trouble (so he reported), and she told the rest of us in turn that the food was terrible. “I leave it for the seagulls,” she said—the big scavenging birds roosted on her back fence. “I keep the little carton of milk for myself.” She laughed at the notion that Hubby believed he was helping with the food.

  “If you call it food!”

  But the soup and the rolls and the stew that we brought began to accumulate in her refrigerator. Mother sipped and nibbled at it but did not finish anything. The trips to the Oyster Bed tailed off—we were too busy, or else away, or found it a chore. We wondered whether Mother might be declining again.

  “She needs a caregiver,” Fred said.

  Because of her age and her apparently slender means, Mother qualified for a twice-a-week visit from a home aide, deputized by the town’s Senior Care Initiative, to make a simple meal and do basic cleaning.

  The woman, Maureen, was middle-aged and slow, and lasted one day, not even to the end of that day. Mother couldn’t bear her.

  “I think she smokes. A few flicks with the duster and she’s done. I don’t call that cleaning. After an hour she tells me she’s tired. I said, ‘If you’re tired, go home. But don’t come back.’”

  Mother mocked her as she mocked Meals on Wheels, and the woman begged to be released.

  “Angela didn’t like her either,” Mother said.

  That was another feature of Mother’s mood: her more frequent allusions to Angela as an eyewitness.

  Floyd, still recovering from his gallbladder surgery, sent Gloria to bring food for Mother. But it ended badly, as I discovered from a letter that Floyd sent me the following day:

  Dear Jay,

  “Floyd’s wife Gloria is here, going through my checkbook,” Mother told Rose this morning at 10 a.m. when she telephoned. Gloria had just brought Mom vegetable soup and homemade blueberry pie when Mother, fretting, quickly dragged her into her study to show her a doctor’s bill ($35) for which she claimed she had been double-billed.

  Crying out that she had already paid the bill, Mother pulled out all her checks, checkbook, you name it. Always helpful, completely innocent, worried for Mother, hoping to help her out and get to the bottom of it, Gloria called the doctor’s office twice, the bank twice, and found out that the bill had been paid but not yet received, was perhaps lost. Immediately, the phone rang. Rose had meanwhile notified Fred, no doubt claiming that Gloria was stealing Mother’s money, and within minutes Fred telephoned the house and began to upbraid Gloria for “looking at my mother’s finances.” He harangued her, badgered her, and shouted at her that he had paid that bill.

  “Do not look into my mother’s checkbook! That is private!”

  What this old grizzled fool, devious himself, fails to understand is that Gloria is the most honest human being on the planet, cannot even conceive of stealing, feels awkward about taking a food sample offered to her by a lady in a supermarket! Gloria began to cry, telephoned me, and I told Mother, when she put her on, immediately to call Fred and Rose. Gloria tried Rose, could not reach her, but she called Fred back and straightened him o
ut.

  I am very angry. Gloria is inconsolable, angry, hurt, and justifiably convinced we are all brutes. I want this hellacious story told, not only because it is true, but because it is just the kind of thing—secrecy, suspicion, gossip, cruelty, calumny, the Furies!, the Kindly Ones!—we live by in this awful family. The Oresteia replayed as farce!

  —Floyd

  I called him for more details, but he was too furious to listen. He began to yell, “Look at the food her children are giving her! No nutrition, just bottles of Ensure. It’s sludge! The refrigerator’s full of garbage. Swill! Chanklings! Dog food! They give her chew toys to eat!”

  Hearing me snigger—it was the word “chanklings”—he banged the phone down.

  A daily visitor was what Mother needed, a hot meal in the evening, the laundry done, the bed made. And so a Brazilian woman was found to be Mother’s caregiver. Fred located her—the Cape was full of Brazilians, many of them illegal immigrants, but this one came highly recommended. She looked after an elderly woman in the same neighborhood, and a visit to Mother could be part of her schedule.

  Her name was Selma. She looked Italian, dark unruly hair, hook-nosed, duck-butted, a grandmother, she said, from Cuiabá.

  “What a coincidence,” Floyd said. “The very town from which Lévi-Strauss set out to discover the secret history of the Nambikwara people. I long to engage Selma on this subject, and on structural anthropology, the opposition of Le Cru et le Cui, and what could pass for the portrait of this family, his seminal work, La Pensée Sauvage. Like you, when I mention Lévi-Strauss, she’ll think I’m referring to the maker of blue jeans.”

  Selma had a friend, João—Mother called him Joe—who volunteered to cut the grass if Mother paid him twenty-five dollars an hour. Mother agreed, and—perhaps as she intended—this opened a whole new discussion: Was Joe cutting Mother’s grass or Franny’s grass?

  Screams from Floyd, howls from Hubby, sarcasm from me, tears from Rose. Franny ended up paying, but claimed she was being overcharged.

  “I think Selma steals,” Mother said.

  Mother shuffled to her china cabinet. She tapped the glass front and said, “The souvenir plate Dad and I got from Niagara Falls. Some Hummels. A teacup from Japan. And some pieces are missing from my jewel box, those black pearls you brought me from the Pacific.”

  All the items she mentioned had been taken by Floyd and me, years before.

  “Maybe you mislaid them,” I offered.

  “They were in the china cabinet. The pearls were in the box. I didn’t touch them.”

  To ease her mind, and mine, I brought back the hideous Hummel figures I’d taken, and the black pearls, and put them where I’d found them. A week later, I looked again in the china cabinet and the jewel box and saw they were gone. When I remarked on this to Mother, she said that the only person who had been in the house since she’d seen me last was Selma. So Selma had to go.

  “I am glad you say that,” Selma said. “I want to leave. You mother never happy with me. You mother never happy with no one. She talk on the telephone and complain all the day. Now give me my money and I go.”

  “Give me back the things you’ve stolen and I’ll pay you.”

  “You call me feef? You tink I hob her?”

  She was fierce, and indignant in her ferocity, and denied she’d taken anything. But I knew she had. And when she finally went away, without much protest, I realized that she must have been illegal and feared arrest and deportation. We had the locks changed and new keys cut and returned to our former routine, each child responsible for a room.

  This was not the answer to “What shall we do about Mother?” It was not practical. But it was unsatisfactory in another respect. Being in Mother’s house, cleaning the rooms, listening to her reminisce about Angela, or correct us, or complain, was a painful reminder of the life we thought we’d left behind long ago, inhabiting the same space, always at odds, saying “Look what I did” when we were children, as though at this late stage in our lives we were getting younger and younger, or at least more infantile.

  51

  Mother’s Century

  Mother’s birthday, the month and the day, was a command: March fourth. “Think of it,” Mother often said, and here she would square her skinny shoulders, level her long, indicating nose, and stare straight ahead. “March forth!”

  We had always obeyed, marching out of step, but now with her hundredth approaching we had made no plans. What to do was only part of the problem. Christmas had just passed, and because Mother had contrived for most of her life to divide us, so as to be the focus of attention, we spent the holiday separately with her, taking turns, like patients visiting a doctor, keeping appointments, not speaking to each other, merely seeking approval, punching in, signing out. The procession of gift-givers and well-wishers put Mother in a good mood, but soured us. The division haunted us, most of us were not on speaking terms, and those who were, such as Floyd and me, were overlooking a great deal of our own combative history. Floyd was well aware that recently, to amuse Hubby, I’d told him that I suspected Floyd to be the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, based on his threats, his prose style, his angry letters to celebrities and politicians, his wild hair, his hermit-like existence, his ingenuity, and his rage. Hubby, who was the leakiest one of us all, told everyone, and of course my cheap shot got back to Floyd, likely in an even more twisted and abusive form.

  Given that we seldom communicated, it was hard to agree on what to do about Mother’s caregiver. And the hundredth birthday party seemed beyond anyone’s ability to organize. At the end of December, Christmas safely out of the way, I ran into Fred at the town transfer station—the dump had closed, and this new facility did not encourage dawdling or chitchat or dumpster diving, nor was there a swap shop to trawl for treasures. Fred was carrying an armload of grease-stained pizza boxes to the paper-recycling receptacle.

  “What about Mum’s birthday?” I said, startling him. “Maybe the Happy Clam again?”

  He did not break his stride. He returned to his car for the glass and plastic recyclables, saying, as he passed me, “Anything can happen. There’s a lot of time between now and then.” He kept walking. He dumped his barrel of glass and plastic. Passing me again, he said, “I don’t buy her green bananas anymore,” and then, “or long books.”

  And using his good arm and his good leg, he drove off. Mother’s birthday was a little over two months away. “Anything can happen” meant she might die, relieving us of the burden of having to plan a party. Ours had never been a family of planners, but it was obvious that unless someone took action, Mother would not be celebrating her century.

  There followed a typical family pattern of passivity and evasion, of a sort we’d rehearsed as children: one cookie left on the plate—who would be brazen enough to pick it up? In a big family the last cookie is never taken, never eaten. It remains on the plate as a challenge, a taunt, a problem, and there it goes stale, making everyone angry.

  In the end, Gilbert—the kindest, the hardest to read, the motto on his escutcheon Mother never says no—made a reservation at the Oyster Bed from his bolthole in Baghdad, using the Internet, and relayed the information to us. Lunch on the fourth, the whole restaurant had been booked. “Mum’s looking forward to it.”

  “Eighteen oysters for her and heartburn for the rest of us,” I said to Julian and Harry the day before, when they arrived, flying into Boston from London.

  “Park it, please, Dad,” Julian said. “She’s your mother, she’s a hundred years old, she’s an idol. If she were in Britain, she’d be getting a telegram from the queen, congratulating her.”

  “And she gives us hope,” Harry said. “It means you’ll live a long time. We’ll have you for years.”

  They were tall—taller than me; they had their mother’s coloring, my first wife’s English pallor; and they were healthy—Julian from daily tai chi, Harry a dedicated cyclist. They were both in their forties, Julian with traces of gray in his hair, middle-aged f
rom an actuarial perspective, responsible and sober, with houses and wives and children—my grandchildren, whom I seldom saw. My children were adults and I was the cranky child.

  But they shamed me out of it, taking me again to Yarmouth Port for sushi and inquiring about my work. It was rare that anyone discussed writing with me, the one activity I cared about, that kept me sane and hopeful, my mission in life, my only intensity.

  “‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have,’” I said. “‘Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”

  “You sound like Uncle Floyd.”

  “Harry’s right, but I know it’s Henry James,” Julian said. “People ask me all the time if I’m related to you. They wonder what you’re publishing next.”

  “A novel set in Mexico,” I said, and telling them about the book, based on my brief stay with the family on the Río Jataté in Chiapas, I began to believe in the story, and saw it whole, and became happy and hopeful again. I had turned this friendly family into hostage takers, transferring the confinement I felt with Mother and my own family into the narrative: the man in the narrative held captive by a manipulative family in Mexico.

  “That sounds great,” Harry said. “The man comes with good intentions and they keep him prisoner. A kind of parable. Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Lots of people. I came across it in Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents.”

  “You know, Freud’s mother lived almost as long as mine. Yet he never wrote much about mothers or motherhood.”

  Julian said, “How can you have an Oedipus complex without a mother?”

  “Freud claimed he didn’t have a clue about women,” I said. “He claimed that if you want to know about women, you need to examine your own experiences of life, or read poetry. He was exasperated by women. He said he couldn’t answer the question ‘What does a woman want?’ He knew my mother!”