by Paul Theroux
I studied her lined face. I could see her skull. Now, almost one hundred and three, she sat, glowing softly, saying nothing. Why had I needed Angela to tell me the simple truth? She’d had a hard life, she had suffered. Why had it been necessary for someone to tell me that?
What was the worst part of growing old? I pondered this in Mother’s room, a place that more and more resembled a chapel, and Mother a graven image in it, an example of what it meant to be ancient. The knowledge that at some point you must see that you can’t do it all again, with babies and risk and hope. No lover to rescue you, no more lives to live, only the one you’re living, which is growing smaller and simpler, more and more like Mother, motionless in a chair, in a still room, the only sound a ticking clock, waiting for the end.
57
Bulletins
On every visit I made these days Mother would pinch my hand for emphasis and say, with relief and pride, “This is Angela,” forgetting that she’d already told me. Whether Mother thought this was her long-ago dead daughter returned to ease her into the afterlife, or simply stating that Angela was a capable caregiver at Arcadia, I did not know.
Then I would see them together, Mother in her chair, Angela beside her, and I was struck—as I had never been, seeing Franny or Rose or any of us with Mother—by the quality of attention, the tender sympathy, Angela giving, Mother accepting, the ideal in piety of Mother and daughter, the roles reversed in Mother’s old age. Angela fed her, dabbed her lips, sang to her, tidied her hair, adjusted her shawl, and often bathed her. No wonder Mother was so content, and might well have believed that the much-mourned Angela had reappeared to comfort her. No point trying to argue her out of this, if indeed she believed it; she was too deaf, too slow, too old to reason with. There must have been days when she felt she’d been reunited in heaven with her beloved daughter.
I had a sense of the pleasure Mother felt with Angela, because I felt it too. She was becoming a friend. I was no longer alone. I had someone to tell my stories to, someone to share a meal with, someone new. We went out for pizza, for a drink, for meals in the winter-empty restaurants of the Cape.
“Tell me about your village.”
“I told you everything.”
“I want more—the priest, the alcalde, your neighbors, the weather.”
“You were in Chiapas. You know very well what is the weather.”
But because she was homesick for her pueblo in the mountains, Villaflores, she went into detail. I heard about the scandals, the local heroes, the boy who became a football star, the woman who made the best tamales, the part of the river where the small boys swam, the day the Federales burned the marijuana fields and everyone was high from the drifting smoke, and the priest, Father Ruiz, who had a secret girlfriend and two children. Of villagers who had crossed the border to the United States with the help of coyotes and the cartels, how they were working on farms in California. Angela’s trips by bus to the coast, to La Angostura and San Cristóbal.
Telling me these stories, Angela became sad and sentimental, would fall silent, and then, “When I has enough money I will go home.”
“And get married and have children,” I said, testing her.
She laughed, saying, “That is for someone else.”
I posed no threat to her virtue. I knew how to be a friend. I listened, encouraged her, praised her. She helped me with the subjunctive: Si hablara español mejor, no tendría que ir a clase, If I spoke Spanish better, I wouldn’t have to go to class. Llámame cuando quieras, Call me whenever. Si yo fuera rico, If I were a rich man . . .
She said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”
I wanted what any man might want: one night to hear a soft knock on my door, to find Angela outside on the steps, her hair drawn into a brush on the back of her head, her eyes lustrous, a slightly drunken smile on her face, her skin so smooth, in a black cape and red shoes on her small feet—unexpected, nine at night, perhaps—smiling, and as she reached for me her cape falling open, revealing her in lacy underclothes, a short nightgown or lingerie, maybe holding a bottle of wine. Male fantasy, the better for remaining a fantasy.
Angela was not beautiful. I wanted to tell her: I hate great acting, great beauties make me laugh, great meals are ridiculous. Angela had health, she had strength, she was graceful, so she had power. She was loyal and kind and capable, and she was the right size. She was someone you’d trust with your life, or your mother’s life.
“What do I want?” I said. “I want you to do what you’ve been doing—helping my mother.”
She was not only resourceful, she was calm, and that had the effect of soothing Mother. I often found Angela kneeling before Mother, massaging her feet, gently working her hands over the sharp bones and stringy sinews, the arthritic joints swollen to lumps.
“For the circulation,” Angela said.
“This is Angela,” Mother said, stroking Angela’s hair.
“Feel them—they are so cold, so stiff. The pressure point in the feet help the whole body.” And she would pinch a toe, saying, “This is her shoulder. Go ahead, feel them. So cold.”
“I believe you.” I could not bear to touch Mother’s bony feet.
After a few minutes, Angela would excuse herself. “You stay with Mother. I come back.”
On her return to the room, she’d look closely at me, as if to determine what I’d said or done, because she had suggested that I was too abrupt or did not linger. Angela tried to sense the degree of warmth I’d created in the room.
One of those days she found me in the corridor, heading home. She looked around to see whether anyone was listening and then said in a low voice, “Do you tell Mother you love her?”
“Of course. Claro.”
Angela stared at me. Did she know I was lying? I said to myself that I’d tell mother I loved her as soon as I could, and it seemed less of a lie.
“Because that is medicine. Love is medicine.”
The strange aspect to this was that I was determined to tell Mother I loved her, less to please Mother than to impress Angela and win her approval. I suspected that underlying Angela’s question was her belief that if a man could not tell his mother he loved her, and mean it, how could he enjoy a loving relationship with a woman such as Angela herself? There was a point where amateur psychology overlapped with folk wisdom, two related fields of simplicity and obvious superstition. But I craved Angela’s good opinion of me, and hoped obscurely for more than that.
The possibility that this friendship and affection might grow into love made me happy. Why does love matter? Because it offers hope, and most of all because it promises a future. There is a tomorrow in loving. Lovers take risks, they make plans, they believe that years from now they will still be in love, and the intensity of love concentrates the mind and gives it health.
Mature love looks beyond sexual desire—someone my age had known that, its pleasures and deceptions. Someone who’d grown up poor like Angela was especially practical in that matter, since her whole life was dedicated to survival—sex was incidental and risky, desire was a distraction. I had now arrived at the insight and wisdom she’d known for years, that love involved trust, that she needed to be secure, with the assurance that I would protect her and her family. In that respect my being much older was an asset. I had achieved the status of a protector. That was why she needed to see me being more loving with Mother. If I proved that I was protective toward this ancient and fragile woman, Angela would look upon me with greater favor, because in her watchfulness, what she wanted more than fine clothes or a car or jewelry was the survival of her family—a lesson we siblings had not learned from Mother. Angela was not selfish in her instinct to preserve and prevail; she was obeying an animal instinct that made her decisive, and resistant to temptation. I now understood her as triumphant in her animal spirit.
And I had been slumbering. Another aspect to love was its vitality. With Missy Gearhart, my failure as a fiancé, love—or what passed for it—took the form of
work. “You have to work on that,” she’d say. “We need to work it out.” “You need to work on your attitude.” It was all work, the job of living, the obligation to health (“I’m working on my glutes,” she also said, lying on the floor and kicking). With Angela my effort was joyous, so I looked forward to pleasing her. It was all an awakening.
Mother, too, had been more alive in these winter weeks. “Take me for a ride”—she meant in her wheelchair, around the public rooms of Arcadia. She did not talk about death or dying. She made plans. “There’s a concert next week.” It was February. “Presidents’ Day there’s a dinner.”
For Mother there was now a tomorrow, a next week, a next year, a next birthday. It was the confidence of being cared for by Angela, of being loved, though I had yet to say those words to Mother.
A memo from Fred in the form of an emailed bulletin threatened to end it all. He had a habit in his retirement of treating us as junior partners. This behavior was a hint of how he’d managed his law firm, and over the years, as the senior child in the family, there had been so many memos. Once they had come as printed letters, folded into an envelope, or single sheets he’d circulated at family meals. This was an email. I thought that with Mother in Arcadia we’d seen the last of these long-winded memos.
“It has come to my attention,” this one began, and then I saw it was headed ANGELA and consisted of five numbered paragraphs and various subsections, alphabetized, with brackets and addenda. I scanned it quickly, growing agitated.
“Fred’s the most devious one in the family,” Floyd used to say, “so naturally he’s the one most prone to suspicion. He believes all people are as tricky as he is.”
The memo continued, “Angela spends a great deal of time with Mum. She has become conspicuous in this—in Mum’s room, wheeling her outside, and has been observed looking in Mum’s drawers, where her valuables are kept.”
I had wondered whether this issue might be raised when Franny and Rose claimed that Mother was colder toward them, more distant, that Angela’s caregiving was interpreted as manipulative.
“There is an unfortunate tradition,” Fred went on, “of caregivers insinuating themselves in the lives of their clients and exerting subtle pressure wherein they end up as substantial beneficiaries, often sole beneficiaries.”
He portrayed Angela as a wily, desperate, intrusive, greedy functionary (“Even the authorities at Arcadia have become concerned”) who had wheedled her way into Mother’s affections and was taking advantage of her.
“The status of her visa or green card needs to be looked into,” he wrote, then spoke of another—perhaps the worst—of Angela’s transgressions: “There are occasions, as I can testify, when Mother fully believes that Angela is her natural daughter.”
There was more, and then an ominous conclusion: “I have asked Arcadia to take appropriate action.”
I called Angela. It was late afternoon—she’d be on the food cart, taking meals from room to room. No answer.
In my attempt to reply to Fred, I was so frantic that I kept hitting the wrong keys, and so I got into my Jeep and drove the five miles to Fred’s house in Yarmouth. A snowfall that morning, turning to sleet and now a sudden freeze, kept me going slowly, my fury building in my impatience.
Fred was in his driveway, bent over a wide-bladed snow shovel, using his good arm to chip ice from the wheel tracks. In his wool hat and overlarge coat and rubber boots, breathing hard, he reminded me of Dad. But then I, too, probably looked like Dad, who in his retirement became a sort of janitor, enjoying menial chores—sanding, painting, shingling, fixing leaks. Fred heard the Jeep, he glanced up, he turned away, and most annoying of all, with lowered head he went on jabbing his shovel against the layers of ice.
“I just got your email.”
“Just got it?” He was facing away from me. “I sent it two days ago.”
“I don’t check my email every day,” I said. “Look, you’re making a mistake. Angela is good for Mum.”
“I’ve already taken care of it.” Still with his back turned to me, chipping the ice with his clumsy shovel.
“I thought this was a matter for discussion.” I wanted to punch his head or snatch his silly hat.
“It was. But you didn’t respond.” He chunked and hacked at the ice, and that he was clumsy in it made him seem more offensive in his rudeness. “Franny and Rose happen to agree with me.”
“Agree with what? Jesus, would you mind stopping for a minute and just look at me?”
He turned slowly to face me—unshaven, angry, with hateful eyes. “I know why you’re here,” he said. “You think you haven’t been seen with your friend Angela?”
“What are you talking about?”
“At the pizza place. Elsewhere.”
“What sneak told you that?”
“So it’s true, ha.”
“We spend most of the time talking about Ma.”
He affected a derisive laugh. “Ma—whom you obviously haven’t seen for two days. Because if you had, you’d know that she has a new nurse. Not Angela, who, as I said, was manipulating Mum.”
“She was feeding her, bathing her, massaging her feet.”
“And what was in it for her?” Fred had a way of lifting one eyebrow in a querying way that he probably thought clever, but it made him seem like a stage villain. “More to the point, what was in it for you?”
“You think I was in some sort of conspiracy with Angela to defraud Ma?”
He looked at me with a pretense of incredulity, twitching—more acting—and delivered an actor’s cliché. “I honestly don’t know what to think.”
“Ma depended on Angela,” I said, my voice hoarse with anger.
He nodded. “It’s called elder abuse.”
I only now registered that I had been out of the picture. I had not seen Angela for three days—in my buoyant, confident mood I’d been writing my book. The last matter Angela and I had discussed where Mother was concerned was the big question: Had I told Mother I loved her? I’d said yes, meaning that I’d fully intended to, and I’d been intrigued to find out how Mother would react to an unexpected—and unprecedented—declaration of love.
So the removal of Angela as Mother’s nurse and caregiver, the banning her from Mother’s room, the implication that she was up to no good and that I was a conspirator in the plot—all of this was old news.
Fred had turned his back. I walked around him and, facing him, said, “Why didn’t you mention this about Angela before. At the clambake, say?”
“You didn’t ask.”
“I didn’t ask because Ma was happy!” I said as he swiveled, chipping a low shelf of ice with his shovel. I stepped in front of him. “And healthy.”
“She’s lost some speed on her fastball.”
“What does Gilbert think?”
“He’s in Fallujah.”
“What about Floyd?”
“He’s insane.”
“Hubby liked Angela,” I said, protesting.
“Until he saw you holding her hand at Punchy’s Pizza in Marstons Mills.”
Darkness had fallen while we stood bickering in the snow and broken ice of Fred’s driveway, and the darkness brought a black frost. The puddles of minutes ago now were topped with a thin ice crust; the wet snow had stiffened and crunched underfoot. I wanted to snatch the shovel from Fred and batter him senseless.
“God, I hate this family.”
“Step aside, I’m trying to work.”
“I’m going to Arcadia. I’ll set them straight. You can’t take sole charge like this. Ma was depending on her.”
“For money.”
“Angela is keeping her alive, you fuckwit.”
His back was turned again. “They won’t let you in. It’s too late. They don’t let visitors in after seven.”
“I’ll go tomorrow. You can’t stop me.”
“I’ll call them,” he said with a hiss of threat in his voice. “I’ll do it now. I won’t let you upset Mum. Her birthd
ay is next week. She’s counting on it.”
“Call them. Do what you like. There’s something I have to tell her—nothing to do with you. I’m going tomorrow.”
Though his back was still turned, I heard his mocking “Huh,” and at the same time I looked up and saw Erma at the window, backlit by a lamp, her hair glowing.
Trying for a dramatic exit, hurrying to my Jeep, I slipped on the ice, and then I had trouble starting the engine, pounding the gas pedal with my foot and flooding the carburetor. When I got the car started, my wheels spun in the snow as I backed up, skidding, and finally I slewed on the slick road, bumping a snowbank.
And there was no tomorrow, only another bulletin from Fred. I read it when I awoke at nine. My fury with Fred had exhausted me, so I’d slept late.
I have just spoken to Arcadia. Mother passed away peacefully this morning. She was found at 7:20 in her favorite chair, the Cape Cod Times open on her lap to the crossword page, the sun coming through the window.
And then two more paragraphs about funeral arrangements, flowers, and setting out the details for the choices of coffin.
58
Strangers
So, Mother’s wake, Mother’s funeral. We’d pondered them for decades but never spoke the words aloud. We were spared any anxiety, because they were rituals, with all of a ritual’s inevitability. The satisfaction of such a ceremony—a cannibal feast, a high mass, a baptism, a burial—is that it has been rehearsed over the years and keeps you from having to think. Showing up is all that is necessary. Spontaneity is not required—indeed, it is discouraged, as a derangement of the sequence of consoling ceremonial moves. We were putting Mother to rest, and in all the emotion and the potential for disorder—howls, tears, the frenzy of loss—we needed to be contained by a ritual’s predictable formulas and its steady tempo, going through the motions.
