Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

One family argument for putting Mother in a nursing home was that a fog of senility might be clouding her brain. Hubby found a list of standard questions in the files of the geriatric ward at the hospital and urged me to test Mother’s clarity. When I visited, Mother was canted forward in her chair, absorbed in the crossword puzzle.

  “Ma, what day of the week is it?”

  “Monday,” she said promptly, not looking up.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Do you think they’d print the wrong day in the newspaper?” she said, tapping her finger on the page.

  “What year is it?”

  Now she raised her head and straightened her glasses to see me better. “Nineteen forty-nine,” she said with solemnity she held whirring in her nose.

  “Who is the president?”

  “Harry Truman, who else?”

  “Are you sure it’s nineteen forty-nine?”

  “It is always nineteen forty-nine in my heart. The year I was pregnant with Angela. I was young and hopeful. Not like now.”

  “By ‘now’ do you mean a different year?”

  “Of course.” She rapped her pen against the crossword puzzle in annoyance. “Are you trying to confuse me?”

  “One more question. You have $100 and you go to the store to buy a dozen apples for $3 and a tricycle for $20.”

  She stared at me, tilting her head, with a crooked smile, and flattened the newspaper on her lap.

  “How much did you spend? How much do you have left?”

  I had leaned toward her to dramatize my sympathy. She laughed in my face, her first real mirth in ages. “Show me a store where I can get apples for three dollars and a bike for twenty and I’m doing my Christmas shopping there.”

  I sat back and watched her resume the puzzle.

  “Hawaiian goose,” she said, reading a clue. “Nene. Everyone knows that.”

  Mother’s fear of the unknown—of darkness, of strangers, of foreign travel, of odd food, of the uncertainty that lay outside the family—all this had its counterpart in the mud villages where I’d lived in the Malawi bush, in the hearts of the people I’d met in Borneo and upper Burma, and elsewhere: among the frizzy-haired Trobrianders, the Big Nambas on the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, the Asaro Mudmen of Goroka, and the tobacco-chewing peckerwoods of the Ozarks, for whom the unknown was a fearful void and a darkness, like stepping into a deep hole.

  We’re savages, Floyd continually said of us, swearing that every trait of the family had its origin in peasant misery and folk superstition, our ancestors’ brutishness. We were near to the soil and the blood feuds of our barbarian relatives.

  He proved this assertion with details from our daily lives, describing how any of us could easily fit into a painting of peasant life by a Dutch realist who specialized in wooden clogs and codpieces. We were potato eaters, we were dumb bumpkins dazzled by natural phenomena, we were clumsy, unlettered, natural-born menials, indecisive, doomed to peonage and passivity. “Think of the feral child raised by a wolfhound,” Floyd said. “He’s doggy and drooly but somehow manages to get into Harvard, where he excels. But on graduation day his attention is seized by a passing car, and he dies chasing it.”

  It seemed to me that Mother’s fear was justified. Never mind Floyd’s flights of fancy and his mockery. Humankind is united in its fear of the unknown.

  This fear had made her the matriarch of Mother Land, kept her home, motivated her to gather her children around her, created (you might say) the stable conditions for what passed for a common culture in the family—our characteristic sayings, our soapy food, our improvisational rules and reactions. No guests, no friends, ever felt at home in Mother Land: as soon as they entered they were bewildered, as though having stumbled into barbarism. They did not understand us, nor did they sense any familiarity with anything they saw or heard. I remember the look of astonished fear on the face of my friend John Brodie being served a bowl of Mother’s pea soup, so thick a mouse could have trotted across it. He stuck his spoon into it and lifted a dollop but did not taste it; he did not recognize it as food. I was embarrassed: he had glimpsed one of our secrets. Yet Brodie and these other strangers, too, probably feared the unknown themselves and might not have been different from us in that respect. As for Mother, she would have needed a tribal purgation to overcome the fear.

  I did not share this dread. To me, the unknown held helpful possi-bilities and offered hope. I believed this from an early age when I read the books I loved most, of African travel and polar exploration—Clyde Beatty, Admiral Byrd, Allan Quatermain, Frank Buck (Bring ’Em Back Alive)—up the Amazon, down the Nile, across the Sahara, climbers of Everest, bushwhackers in the outback. I did not know the word at the time, but what I was seeking, and what I imagined the unknown might grant me, was transformation. From my earliest years I wanted to go away. I equated travel with salvation. Darkness was not to be feared: it offered a second chance.

  What had made Mother a shut-in had made me a traveler.

  Don’t let them do it to me, rang in my head. Don’t let them send me away.

  The plea of the Choctaw in Mississippi just before the Trail of Tears, the lament of the Jew in the shtetl hearing the train whistle and the clatter of jackboots, the whisper of a dissident in Stalin’s Russia, dreading a possible fate in the frozen prison settlement in Siberian Magadan.

  So I became Mother’s protector. I visited her more often. Relations with my brothers and sisters were chilly, but we were happier not seeing each other, and I was too absorbed in my novel to have any time for them. Being midway through a novel was like treading along a high wire, a balancing act that would end in a fall if I was disturbed. I phoned Mother, I dropped in with food, and I noticed—from crumbs, from scraps, from left-behind hats and gloves—that the others did the same.

  But more and more, Mother neglected to pick up the phone. And when, out of concern, I went over to make sure she was not dead, I found she was gone, the house locked. I smiled to think she locked a house she’d given away, from which everything valuable except the grandfather clock had been either handed out or stolen. But, anyway, where was she?

  And then, one Tuesday, unable to raise her by phone, I remembered that the same had been true the previous Tuesday.

  “I couldn’t find you yesterday,” I said the next day.

  “I was out.”

  “Anywhere special?”

  “With Fred.”

  “As long as you’re being looked after—that’s the main thing,” I said, taking her hand, clutching the bird claw. “I won’t let them send you away.”

  “I often consult Angela,” Mother said. “Have you brought me a present?”

  And that was that. The following Tuesday I called, got no answer, and went to the house. Maybe she was ill? Maybe out? Maybe dead? Maybe she’d gone somewhere with Fred, and if so, where?

  Waiting on Mother’s front steps on this damp late afternoon, the clouds thickening in the mottled sky, idly grinding sand against the brick walkway with my foot soles, my forearms resting on my knees, I felt like a latchkey child, killing time, humming tunelessly, wondering where his mother might be—a sad, anxious, neglected child on a gray day. How long will he have to wait? What will become of him? Where is his mother? Shouldn’t we do something about him?

  I was not a sixty-something author who’d left his desk and the scattered pages of his manuscript. I was a little boy crouched by his mother’s front door. I enjoyed wallowing in the self-pity for a while, feeling small and forlorn. And then I heard a car.

  It was a new Prius, one I didn’t recognize. Gliding up behind my old Jeep, it looked like a boast.

  “Candy-ass.” Floyd, in a leather bomber jacket and a Red Sox cap, climbed from the car, still talking.

  I regretted having lingered. I didn’t want to see anyone, and certainly not my siblings. I hated looking idle. But if I bolted now, Floyd would jeer even more.

  “Where’s your mother?” he said.

  “No idea. I called her
but she didn’t answer, so I got worried and came over.”

  “‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’”

  “You took the words out of my mouth.”

  “I see you failed to bring her a present.” Saying this, he plucked a box of chocolates out of his jacket and wagged it at me as a taunt. He could see I was empty-handed.

  “Will those bonbons make up for all you’ve stolen from her?”

  “Hah! Look who’s talking—Autolycus, the snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” He kicked a wet clump of dead leaves.

  “Let’s talk about the weather.”

  “The weather?” he said, putting his face close to mine.

  “Why not? It’s a gray day, a lowering sky.”

  “I hate it when people tell me what sort of a day it is.”

  “What would you say?”

  “I would say”—and he straightened and sniffed the air—“obnubilate.”

  For all his faults, Floyd was capable of spontaneous comic turns. I did not love him, I did not even like him, and yet I admired his nimble brain. He was still able to amuse me—certainly the only one in the family who could do it, and one of the few people I knew, tailoring his wit to order, for me alone, either a gesture or a single word.

  There is no reply to “obnubilate.” Floyd knew that, smacking his lips, savoring his victory.

  Just then, a car—this I recognized as Fred’s, a Chevy Blazer, his license plate SUE EM—and Mother in the front seat, looking like a small girl. Floyd and I watched as Fred hurried to the passenger side and helped her out. He guided the small, pale, shuffling woman up the brick walkway.

  Mother looked furtive and oppressed, the effect of being in the presence of her three eldest children. She was our mother, but she was a different mother to each of us, and this gathering provoked confusion of the kind experienced by someone with multiple identities surprised by three witnesses. It was as though she’d been caught in a lie.

  “What a nice surprise,” Mother said, and I was convinced of her dismay.

  “I was worried about you,” I said.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said.

  She lifted her shoes and kicked with them, a clockwork way of walking that involved toppling forward and jerking upright just in time.

  “Cute hat,” Fred said to Floyd.

  “The only known cure for baldness,” Floyd said. “Such a simple expedient would surely benefit you.”

  Mother said, “Be nice.”

  The hundred-year-old woman, her three aged boys, her shadowy house, the dark day of tumbling furry clouds, the twisted pitch pines—all the elements of a folktale, including the sinister command Be nice.

  This wolfish woman saying that to her three snarling cubs made me laugh out loud. Mother took this to be friendly mirth and smiled, extending her bird claw. I helped her up her front stairs.

  “Where have you been?”

  “For a ride,” Mother said coyly, and poked at the keyhole with her latchkey. Then, with a half-turn toward us, she made a face.

  There was a century of family history in that face. An essay could have been written about the subtlety of its meanings, like the ambiguous smile floating on the lips of a Khmer goddess at Angkor Wat. It was mockery, it was interrogation, it was doubt, it was defiance.

  “Chowder Day,” Fred said.

  54

  Arcadia

  Mother’s way of keeping a secret was to tell it to one person at a time; disclosing a confidence sequentially was to her the utmost in tact. That’s what we believed. Mother talked, she often gossiped, we thought she was the soul of indiscretion. Distracted by her whispers and disclosures, we did not imagine that there was anything she kept to herself. But there was much we didn’t know, that she didn’t tell, that no one would ever fathom.

  For weeks she had been visiting Arcadia covertly, always on Chowder Day—free food, a grateful welcome, the staff beseeching her to move in. She usually went there with Fred, who practiced Mother’s habit of selective disclosure.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you’ve been spending so much time with Mum at Arcadia?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  A lawyer’s reply, because in the world of lawyers you volunteer nothing. You say, “I wasn’t home.” You avoided saying, “I wasn’t home because I was getting free chowder at Arcadia in Chatham.” Fred himself had taught me that.

  Though Mother had said nothing to anyone else about these visits—we had the impression she was isolated and slowly starving herself to death—it seemed she enjoyed the outings well enough to repeat them week after week. Her fears of the unknown were allayed by her eagerness for complimentary meals, as the Ohlendorfs had found by taking Mother to the Brazilian restaurant and setting the “gauchos” in motion.

  “They wanted to hear all about my father,” she said of Arcadia. “They couldn’t believe my memory, that I was able to recite all my teachers’ names. They were so sorry to hear about Angela. I did the crossword after lunch. They watched me with their mouths open.”

  Mother had discovered what many of us find by leaving the house: the joys of meeting new people, to whom you can relate your fund of stories—fascinating tales when told the first time. You think you’ve cast a spell. But in such a courtship, the strong person, the dominant one, the charmer, is not the teller but the listener.

  “They loved my shawl. I said, ‘Oh, that old thing. I knitted it myself.’ ‘You still remember cable stitch?’ they said. They were bowled over.”

  Mother was fingering a small wooden carving as she told me this, a gray and yellow bird with a longish tail and some white markings.

  “Next time I’ll be sure to bring this along. When I tell them I carved it myself they’ll be astonished.” She held it for me to examine. “A phoebe, also called a flycatcher. I read up on them. They’re seasonal here. They migrate from faraway south to lay their eggs and hatch their young on the Cape. Go on, hold it. I sanded and painted it myself. When the little birds can fly, they all move on.”

  I held the beaky bird. It stared at me with the glowing pellets of its eyes.

  “I should move on,” Mother said.

  “You mean to Arcadia?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, startled—she knew she’d given away too much.

  “Won’t you miss your house?”

  “This is Franny’s house.”

  “What about your friends?”

  “All my friends are dead.” She became thoughtful, her face puzzled and pinched in reflection, that same expression she wore when she smelled something she could not name. Then, in solemn bewilderment, she remembered. “A man at Arcadia said he’d read a book by you.”

  “Which one?”

  “He was in a wheelchair. He coughed a lot.”

  “Which book, I mean?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Anyway, that’s nice.”

  She wasn’t so sure. She said, “He asked me if I was your mother.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  She stared at me. She said, “I can’t remember.”

  Mother’s Chowder Day visits continued through the summer, but with fall and the first sign of leaves turning, a nip in the air at evening, the foretaste of cold days and early darkness, Mother moved into Arcadia.

  In the stark simplicity of her small apartment—bedroom, sitting room, bathroom, kitchenette—Mother acquired a dignity that she had lost in the gloom and ambiguous odors of her house. She was released from everything she’d given away, the place she no longer owned. She brought some clothes, her knitting in a basket, family photographs, a picture she’d painted—sand dune, sailboat in the distance, gull in the blue sky—some religious paraphernalia, not much else. Oh, yes, a loud clock. She’d whittled her possessions down to what she’d brought with her, but the defining piece of furniture was her throne-like chair of old—well worn but impressively so, the leather distressed and rubbed to softness, the brass tack-heads with a reddish patina, the wood
darkened with age. Shuffling to the chair, Mother was elderly and uncertain; seated in it, she was an intimidating figure, someone to whom you told the truth.

  Seeing her in her small suite for the first time, I expected to find her disoriented and homesick. Take me home, Jay. But she was calmer than I’d seen her in years, in her big wing chair with a newspaper open to the puzzle page—the crossword, the Jumble, the quiz—and on the table before her the loud clock reminding her that her time was running out. There was a contemplative narcissus blossom in a flute-like vase, a jar of peanut butter, and a calendar where Mother wrote in her careful block letters the names of her visitors, Arcadia events (CONCERT, MOVIE), meals she’d had, the weather she could see from her window, her usual sort of sea captain’s logbook.

  “It’s like a hotel.”

  But Mother had seen few hotels. Arcadia was more like a ship—a cruise ship on a peaceful sea where all the crew wore white uniforms and white shoes. The staterooms gave onto a long corridor, the galley below; a gong was rung to signal mealtimes; the whole of it seeming to plow through rain and wind and sunshine, though that was the illusion of the weather moving past it. Mealtime was like mealtime on a cruise ship, the diners obeying the gong and taking up their places at familiar tables, greeted by waiters who knew their tastes. Then the talk of “There’s a movie in the lounge tonight,” “There’s a party this weekend,” and when the van pulled up in the morning to take the few energetic ones into Chatham for shopping, it was like they were going ashore.

  I discovered this because I joined Mother for dinner on my first visit. She approved of the food: fruit cup, Salisbury steak with mashed potatoes and green beans, Jell-O for dessert.

  Two women sat with us—neither as old as Mother, probably mid-eighties—and introduced themselves as Mrs. Nickerson and Mrs. Wragby.

  “This is my son Jay.”

  “What work did you used to do, Jay?”

  “I used to be a writer.”

  They accepted this without further question. They told their stories: both from Boston originally, moved to the Cape when their husbands retired, then their husbands died, now Arcadia.