Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  “This is Angela,” Mother said one day. The young woman was making the bed and couldn’t drop it and go. “Angela, this is my son Jay.”

  I said, “Really?” And to the woman, “Are you Angela?”

  She looked at me shyly. “Yes. Thank you. I finish now.”

  So there was such a person.

  “Buenos días, señorita.”

  She glowed with the greeting, smiling in relief.

  “Gracias por ayudar a mi madre,” I said. “Usted es realmente un ángel de la misericordia.”

  “Su madre es un ángel. Mi querida.”

  “Dónde está su madre ahora?”

  “A su casa, en México, en mi pueblo.”

  “What are you saying?” Mother said, sounding peevish. “I don’t understand.”

  “I tell him my mother in Mexico,” Angela said.

  Mother laughed. “I’m your mother.”

  “Yes,” Angela said, tucking in the sheets, plumping Mother’s pillows. “You my mother now.”

  Angela was small, smooth-faced, with dark, Asiatic eyes above her high cheekbones, full lips, beautiful teeth, and thick black hair drawn tight with a red headband. Even in her loose green uniform I could see she had a good figure, but a slight one, and in all her movements there was willingness and grace. I loved her slender legs and small feet, her subtle, simian way of pawing from one side of the bed to the other when she was straightening the sheets.

  “Okay—madam,” she said to Mother. “You need anything, please call.”

  “I need a kiss, Angela,” Mother said.

  “Of course,” and she bent toward Mother, hugged her, kissed her head, an act of such extraordinary affection, almost unprecedented in our family, I watched with rapt attention.

  Don’t go, I thought.

  “You coming to the clambake?” she asked me.

  “Tal vez,” I said. Perhaps.

  “It make you mother so happy,” she said, and with a little bow she was gone.

  Nothing for years, and then, like that, a flicker of desire, a reminder that you’re a man, and the further reminder that with desire and a glow of hope there is always struggle and sadness, the complication of someone else.

  “She’s good as gold,” Mother said. “I hope you didn’t bring me anything. I don’t need anything.”

  We talked for perhaps five minutes. These days, Mother had no memory of time passing. I said, “I think I should go.”

  I had seen Angela pushing a food cart past Mother’s door.

  “Be good,” Mother said.

  Angela was waiting by the elevator, another smile. “I like you mother so much.”

  “I worry about her,” I said. “Can I have your cell phone number? That way, you can tell me how she is when I’m not able to be here, and then I won’t worry.”

  Peering down at her face, I saw the length of her eyelashes, silken, upswept, a smear of lipstick on her cheek, a freshness in her face, her small fingers manipulating the buttons on the phone. It was not just desire; it was the obvious thought that she was a better person than me, nor was she that young—mid-thirties, maybe more, not a youthful raver but a sensible woman.

  “She talk about the clambake. She like the ostras. You say ostras?”

  “Oysters,” I said, loving the wetness of her lips and tongue.

  I returned the next day, less to see Mother than to get a glimpse of Angela again. Mother’s door was closed—usually it was open. I hesitated, then opened it slowly, saying hello.

  “Wait, please.” Angela was at Mother’s bedside with a basin and a sponge. “Oh, Señor Jay”—she pronounced it Shay—and seemed relieved.

  Mother had not moved; her deafness spared her the shock of my intrusion. She was propped up on the bed, Angela holding her skinny arm and dabbing at it with the sponge.

  I had never seen Mother naked. She was not naked now, but she was nakeder than normal. The ritual of her bath in bed, and Angela with the sponge, revealed more of Mother’s body than I’d ever seen, more than I wanted to see. I closed the door behind me but stayed in the doorway, so as not to interrupt Angela in this intimate task. The small dark beauty worked the sponge gently across Mother’s arm, and in a tender reflex of concern lifted a stray wisp of hair, twirling it away from Mother’s cheek.

  “Who’s that?” Mother asked, now aware of me.

  “You leetle boy,” Angela said.

  I was staring at Angela’s boyish buttocks, the way they tightened in the green scrubs when she leaned toward Mother, how they shifted, slipping against each other, like melons in a sling, when Angela moved from foot to foot.

  “It’s me—Jay,” I called out.

  “I leave you now. I come back later,” Angela said.

  Mother protested, first a squawk, then clinging to Angela, clutching her now, digging her claws into Angela’s arm, saying, “No, stay. He can come back.”

  I signaled that it was okay—a little wave—and withdrew. Mother knew she was in good hands. In my Jeep, driving away, I remembered how, in one of my favorite stories, Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” it is the earthy peasant boy Gerasim who gives Ivan solace and spiritual sweetness in the pain of his death throes, not any member of Ivan’s family, the fractious Golovins.

  The formality of Arcadia meant that we visited in relays, signing in, signing out. Mother didn’t need us; we didn’t need each other. Yet we went on visiting, superstitiously pretending it was not a goodbye.

  Mother was not sick. Even now, she took no medicine. One day she surprised me by saying, “I have a dental appointment. Fred’s taking me.” One-hundred-and-two-year-old molars in for a tune-up. She still had most of her teeth.

  She was smaller still, glassy-eyed, shrunken, desiccated, with a twitchy way of reacting, but fully alert, a book open on her table, a half-completed crossword in her lap.

  “The print’s so small I can hardly read it.”

  “Maybe you need new glasses?”

  “No—it’s them. They use less ink these days, so it’s gray instead of black,” Mother said. “Think they’re so smart, saving money on ink!”

  Some of the other people in Arcadia tried to attract attention with their ailments—limping, sighing, moaning, complaining how the weather swelled their joints. Mother was conspicuous for her health, boasting of her sound sleep and her energy.

  “I’m looking forward to the clambake,” she told me.

  The jowly woman at the front desk, whose glasses were always propped on top of her head, told me I’d have to register for the clambake and pay in advance. I did so, wondering who else in the family would show up, and speculating on what I’d say to them if they did.

  I heard a brass band on the day of the clambake, audible in the lobby as I entered and signed in. A jazz combo— four older men in checkered vests, derby hats, bow ties—was playing “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

  And around a table, my brothers and sisters, all of them, I saw with a sinking heart.

  “Look who’s here.”

  “It’s doo-doo head.”

  “Jaybird.”

  “Where’s Ma?” I asked.

  “On her way,” Fred said.

  Fred, Floyd, Hubby, Gilbert, Franny, and Rose—the heptad, no spouses—the men gray-haired or bald, the women careworn and misshapen, all of them with their thick forearms braced on the table, as though impatient.

  Floyd said, “You’re just in time for the pop quiz.”

  “Sit down, take a load off,” Gilbert said.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in Wadi Halfa?” I said.

  “Wadi El Natrun,” Gilbert said promptly. “Natrun for the salt.”

  “Pipe down,” Floyd said. “What was the name of the man who delivered coal to our house for the furnace?”

  Just then, Mother appeared in her wheelchair, pushed by Angela, who steered her to the head of the table, then stood behind her, steadying the chair, in attendance.

  “The music’s too loud,” Hubby said.


  “Yes, you seem disinhibited as a result,” Floyd said. “Ma, we’re having a quiz.”

  A tactful move. In a contentious group, better to create a harmless game, because conversation is dangerous, and games, even wicked ones, were from childhood our mode of interaction.

  “His name was Audie Jackson,” Mother said to the first question. “He carried the coal in bags on his back and dumped them into the iron chute that led to the coal cellar. He brought us ice in the summer.”

  “What was Dad’s name in the minstrel show, and what song did he sing?”

  “He called himself Mr. Bones,” Mother said. “He sang ‘Mandy, is there a minister handy.’ I played the piano. All his practice gave him a sore throat.”

  “I wasn’t alive then,” Gilbert said.

  “I was,” Hubby said. “But I don’t remember it.”

  “What was the one thing I yearned for all through childhood but never got?” Floyd said. “Cowboy boots. What was Dad’s business?”

  Mother said, “Shoes.”

  “Dad had the front page of two Boston newspapers nailed to the wall of his workshop,” Floyd said. “What did the headlines say?”

  “‘War Is Over,’” Mother said. “‘Peace at Last.’ The Globe and the Traveler.”

  “Mum wins the quiz,” Floyd said, as Mother beamed, turning to look at Angela.

  In the few minutes of Floyd’s quiz the table was harmonious, or at least calm and attentive, but with Floyd announcing Mother as the winner, a restlessness overtook it—the table itself rocked a little, and Rose grunted.

  “Quit kicking me,” Rose said to Hubby. “Are you doing that on purpose?”

  “If I was doing it on purpose you’d be crippled.”

  “I’m wicked hungry,” Franny said.

  “Yeah, you look like you’re wasting away,” Floyd said.

  “It’s a buffet,” Gilbert said. “Kind of a walking thing.”

  Fred said, “For Mum’s sake, let’s be civil.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Floyd said and, pointing to me, “Jay carried from his mother’s womb a fanatic heart.”

  The band still played, absurdly, old songs that resonated more for being out of tune: “On Moonlight Bay,” “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “If You Knew Susie.”

  “Someone please get me some oysters,” Mother said.

  Fred stood up, so did Gilbert and Rose, a scramble, competing to get the oysters, and then Hubby pushed past them.

  “He’s such an asshole,” Rose said.

  All this while I was glancing at Angela, who held the handles of Mother’s wheelchair, standing with a patient smile on her Mayan face. She took no notice of the table, Mother’s children, all of us old, most retired, and Mother herself, ancient, indestructible, now tipping raw oysters into her mouth.

  “I don’t know why I bothered to come,” Rose said.

  “Maybe it was the irresistible prospect of the buffet,” Floyd said.

  With a hiss, Rose mouthed an obscenity.

  “That’s a sibilant fricative,” Floyd said. “But of course you knew that.”

  “We’re doing it for Mumma,” Franny said.

  “I want some buddah for my lobstah,” Hubby said, waving a lobster tail he’d speared on his fork. “Buddah, buddah.”

  Hubby had shaved his head since the last time I’d seen him, and with this cue ball and his plastic lobster bib he looked like a fat baby with a rattle in his fist.

  “This music blows,” Gilbert said, buttering an ear of corn with swiping motions of his knife.

  “Arcadia reminds me of a cruise ship,” I said. “The staterooms, the meals, the activities and events. No one goes ashore for any length of time. The ship never arrives.”

  “A sinking ship,” Floyd said. “Das Narrenschiff. Allegorical. My beloved Gloria could explicate the Bosch triptych of the same name.”

  “And you on the poop deck,” Hubby said.

  “Watch your mouth,” Franny said.

  “From the Latin puppis, as you know,” Floyd said. “Meaning ‘stern.’” And he raised his glass to Hubby. “Silence was his stern reply.”

  “Up yours,” Hubby said, tracing his fingers lightly over his baldness, as shaven men often do.

  “We should be ashamed,” Fred said in a low voice, so that Mother couldn’t hear—and his whisper caused us to glance at Mother, who had turned to smile at Angela behind her. “Behaving like children.”

  “Which we are,” Floyd said. “Which we will ever be.”

  This remark, too, provoked us to look at Mother again, perhaps out of self-consciousness. But Mother did not react. Except when she was using her frantic twisted fingers to grip an oyster shell and slip its innards into her upraised mouth, Mother sat like an apparition. She was spectral.

  The clambake itself was a clatter of plastic plates and croaking voices, a shuffling scrum to the buffet, and the loud music, a shouting from table to table of old coots. Floyd said it was like being in a well-lighted catacomb of people who’d been mummified in their summer clothes. Hubby told him to shut up. “You think that’s the tamale of the lobster,” Floyd said, a clot of green paste on his thumb. “But it’s snot.” And we glanced at Mother again, expecting a reprimand.

  But there was nothing, not a flutter, from this delicate and doll-like figure, shrunken to the size of a household god in a corner shrine, and with the same smoky aura. Mother was so insubstantial she was more like a thought, a fugitive idea, a wisp of motherhood, as though woven from cobwebs. That aura was a small flame reduced to a pale glow that was to be venerated, and she was all the more powerful for making no sound.

  “Sorry, Ma,” someone muttered.

  Mother moved her lips—wordless—perhaps she was chewing. But being so dry and withered and odorless, she was an unreadable petrifaction.

  We her children were raw meat, big and gray, fat shoulders and crazy hair, or no hair, thick, fleshy, porcine, ursine, sweaty from the effort of cramming lobster claws and corncobs and dripping littleneck clams into our mouths, our lips flecked with wet bits of chewed and bitten clambake.

  “I’m tired,” Mother said with a blank stare, to no one in particular.

  Was she aware of our gluttony and dissension and foolery? If so, she didn’t indicate it. She was very deaf, her eyesight was poor, her voice a whisper, but these traits made her statuesque and idol-like. She drew her shawl tighter and said, “Angela?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Angela said, and wheeled her away.

  “Ma ate eighteen oysters,” Hubby said.

  “I’m never going to do this again,” Gilbert said, untying his bib.

  “I think we’re unanimous on that point,” Floyd said. “But what about her next birthday?”

  “It’s six months off,” I said.

  “I have to go to a funeral that day,” Hubby said. He lifted the front of his shirt, wiped his sweaty face, and mopped his head.

  “That’s funny,” Rose said.

  “No, it’s not,” Franny said.

  Floyd unfolded his stained napkin and shook it open, intoning, “The Shroud of Turin, fully authenticated. You came to mock—you will stay to pray.”

  Rose was about to curse when Fred, looking beyond us, raised his hand in a cautioning way, his face reddening.

  A young man and woman had approached our table. The man wore a blue blazer and white slacks, his sunglasses propped on his head, expensive loafers, no socks—stylish. The woman, in a wide-brimmed straw hat and a floral print dress, was fresh-faced and smiling in a submissive and grateful way, probably from nervousness.

  “Sorry to interrupt. Hey, we’ve been checking you out and it looks like you’re having an awesome time,” the man said. “I’m Chase, this is Laura.” He nodded with exaggerated approval, surveying our impudent faces, our splashed clothes, the wreckage of our meal—shells and bones and the garbage of our leavings.

  “What can we do for you?” Fred said.

  “We’re with my parents, just here for
the day, getting acquainted. They’re looking for a senior option. Great clambake, nice place. Ate my head off . . .”

  “But we were wondering,” the woman said.

  “Yeah,” the man said with this cue. “How do you guys like living here at Arcadia?”

  56

  Angela

  What stayed in my mind: Mother, the skeletal idol, like a starved Madonna, and Angela, the Mexican beauty, upright behind her, steadying her wheelchair—Angela especially.

  Using the clambake and my concern for Mother as a pretext, I called Angela on her cell phone and asked for news. Had Mother found it tiring, and did she have enough to eat, and by the way, there was a restaurant in Hyannis, Cholo’s Cantina, and was she, Angela, interested in going out for a drink or a meal?

  The hum on the line was like the whirr of her suspicion, processing my questions.

  Then, “What you want, Shay?”

  I want relief from being immobilized by Mother. I need a lift after the humiliation of the clambake, especially being mistaken for a resident of an old folks’ home. A night out, a bit of human warmth, a break from my routine of writing, propped on my left hand, scribbling slowly with my right, amid the crumbs of my kitchen table. A smile, a word, anything, please.

  “Just to see you,” I said as casually as I could. The hum came again, the whirr of suspicion, prompting me. “Maybe talk about my mother.”

  “You mother very nice.”

  “She likes you so much.”

  Still, Angela hesitated, but I pressed harder—Mother, Mother—and she relented, saying okay without much encouragement.

  “I’ll pick you up.”

  Angela’s house was the sort of small, brown-shingled box that was numerous on the back roads of the Cape, where the seasonal workers, the menials, and the poorer vacationers stayed—pine needles thick on the roof and clogging the gutters, the tin downspout askew, the paving stone walkway overgrown, the split-rail fence that fronted the road in need of repair, the stunted shrubs and scrawny trees and dead hydrangeas proof that it was a place built on sand. All this was obvious, and I saw it with sympathy, because it was a house much like my own.