Mother Land

by Paul Theroux

  All over the Cape, in this last week of winter, an overnight thaw had melted much of the dirty, pushed-aside snowpack, thinned and shriveled the scaly plates of surface ice, giving onto gummy black soil in places and making everything messier—wet streets and dripping trees—early signs of mud season, exposing the ugliness of sodden earth, soon to be hacked open for a grave.

  In this disorder and uncertainty, the rituals of the wake and the funeral, like the insistent protocols in the burial rites of a savage tribe, kept us in line. We were too old, too confused, and too exhausted to think straight. We needed help in this progress of burying Mother.

  Because of the weather, the cold, the wind, the spatters of rain, we wore hats.

  The onrush like a tidal flow of strangers or people I barely recognized, and the accumulation of my straggling family—Julian and Harry from London, without wives or children but accompanying their mother, my first wife Diana, and her partner Piers, the photographer; my second wife, Heather, and her new husband; and Melissa Gearhart (“Missy,” she said, greeting me, as though I might not recognize her, and I almost didn’t), recently divorced, the bullet I had dodged, with Madison now married and with a long-haired child of her own, either a boy or a girl, named Sky; and Mona from long ago with our son Charlie. So much for my irregular past, all of them come to pay respects and venerate Mother, and all of them, young and old, grayer, heavier, somber, like strangers.

  My past had woken and risen to gather as in one of those maddening, teasing, overpopulated dreams—this, too, every feature of it, was dream-like, in the sense of being irrational, improbable, cruel, slow-moving, yet set to its own obscure rhythm, unstoppable, nor could I shake it off.

  No one said much. What was there to say? “So sorry.” “It was painless.” “She had a good life.” “I’ll miss her.” “How you doing?”

  The awkward sentiments of people who’d hardly known her, or not known her at all, the unconsoling clichés of strangers, who interrupted us in our grieving, as if having been summoned by Mother to make us even more miserable.

  “Your mom was the complete package,” someone said to me. A cousin? An in-law? Someone’s older child? A beefy balding person, in any case, who gave me a clumsy hug.

  His remark made me look at Mother—so small and skinny in her oblong box, doll-like, and so changed since I’d last seen her, wearing makeup. She was another stranger here.

  We stood near the open casket at close quarters in the receiving line—Fred, Floyd, Hubby, Gilbert, Franny, Rose, and me, greeting relatives whose names I hardly knew, accepting the sighs of sympathy and the chorus of clucking.

  In a far corner of the room at this funeral home, Angela stood, her hands clasped, too shy to sit, her face glowing with tenderness, her eyes fixed on the casket, the wisp of Mother lying lengthwise, her bony fingers intertwined on her pink blouse.

  In the past, birthdays and weddings we’d regarded as occasions for settling old scores, for teasing remarks and cruel exit lines. Take that! But a funeral was different, hushed voices, solemn expressions, no sudden movements; it was a ritual of suppression, of whispers and subdued emotions.

  Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren—a tangle of them. Who were they? Whom did they belong to? What were their names? More strangers, the vassals and outliers of the far-off country known as Mother Land.

  “How are you doing, Dad?” Julian asked, hugging me. He was much taller than me, and the hug was a comfort.

  “As usual, thinking about David Copperfield.”

  “I love him,” Jonty said. He’d been standing near, and now I stared at him in pity. “I took Loris and Jilly to see him in Vegas.”

  Jonty, once an imp, was middle-aged and leathery. He said he jogged. Benno and Bingo looked dowdy. Fred’s kids conferred among themselves. His son Jake had become immensely wealthy, having transitioned from computer programming to creating iPhone apps that variously detected gluten, peanuts, monosodium glutamate, or high-fructose corn syrup in restaurant meals. “You point your phone at the food,” he said, and still holding his phone, Jake swiped at it, showing photos of his yacht in the Maldives.

  “Remember when you ate the Styrofoam cup?” Hubby said, craning his neck at the photos.

  “Montaigne was wrong about death,” Floyd said. “He claimed that people who died when they were old were not whole. ‘God shows mercy to those from whom he takes away life a little at a time’—an advantage of growing old. You’re killing off half a person, or a quarter, he says. No! Ma was all there. She was working out a clue to a crossword at the very end. Is it tactless to ask what the word was? I feel a poem coming on.”

  For relief, I went over to Angela and hugged her. I was comforted by having her to hold, fitting her body to mine, the vitality in her arms, flesh and blood, the reassurance of her strength. I was more upright next to her.

  “She loved you,” I said, “like a daughter.”

  Angela was too moved to speak. She believed in the afterlife: Mother was in a Mexican heaven, with flowers and frilly dresses and mariachi men in floppy sombreros plunking guitars. For Angela, Mother wasn’t dead but had simply moved on to her reward, the next level, an eternal fiesta.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said.

  She clutched my hand, warming it, allowing blood to throb through it. And then she let go—a man nearby was staring at me.

  “You probably don’t remember me,” I said. I’d been saying it all day. “I’m Jay.”

  He was a pink-faced man with a white mustache and white hair, yellowing in parts. He said, “We’re from the neighborhood.”

  “Mother was so sorry to leave the neighborhood. Which house did you live in?”

  “No, this neighborhood,” he said, in the cranky way of someone being corrected, and he jerked his thumb out the window.

  “You knew my mother?”

  “No, we . . .” He faltered in annoyance and looked away.

  The woman beside him spoke up. “We normally go for a drive down-Cape on Saturdays. But the streets are unsafe with the black ice.”

  “So you decided instead to come to my mother’s wake?”

  The woman chewed at me in a hostile way and sighed as a sort of objection, while the mustached man took a plastic inhaler out of his pocket and sucked on it like a stoner with a bong. The other couple stood in wet feet on the carpet, clenching and unclenching their fingers.

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” the man with the inhaler finally said.

  Before I could speak, Rose—who’d sidled over to listen—said, “I think it’s time for you people to go.” She spoke with such ferocity, all four strangers left. Then Rose turned her back on me.

  “They’re closing the coffin,” Fred called out.

  We took turns kneeling before Mother’s body.

  I was last. I formed the three words in my head, then whispered them to Mother’s floury face and looked for a reaction. Mother seemed to be smiling—her smile of triumph, one I knew well.

  The funeral mass was another helpful ritual, everyone with a role to play, the same people from the wake and more, the vast unrecognizable extended family. I had always thought of my family as a small angry knot of quarrelers, but this was a crowd with certain features in common, round-shouldered shufflers, close-set eyes, dangling arms, the related citizens of Mother Land.

  It had been so long since I’d entered a church I simply followed along, grateful for the ritual. I found no comfort in the prayers, but they helped pass the time—the mutterings, the hand gestures, the blessings, the swinging thurifer, the swirling smoke of the incense. Then from the pews, the sobs and honks of grief, like idiot laughter.

  All a waste, I thought, my life in Mother Land, among my fractious family, every one of them in this church venerating Mother’s polished sepulcher, containing not just Mother’s remains but (as I imagined in my feverish grief) a whole epoch, the ragged fury of jostling bodies and grasping hands and crow-like voices. I couldn’t pray it away. I seemed to
be sorrowing for Mother, but I was sorrowing for myself. I saw with shame that I’d endured it, or rather, it had poured through me, as Floyd had once described the human body—my meat and plumbing.

  But I was still here, more alive for being old. Julian and Harry on either side of me, and nearby, Charlie, on his knees, his head down, praying to the woman who had denounced his birth as shameful. He had entered my life as a mistake, and now was a blessing. We were alive, we were quick, we kept moving, and I contemplated his accidental origin, my hard year, my best year, my expulsion from the family—his, too.

  Exile had saved me. Only in my old age and in Mother’s ancient lastingness had I understood her as my muse. To tell that story I’d need to build on the bigger story, of my family. I had gone away to make my life, I had returned at Dad’s death, and I had stayed for Mother’s long decline. And there she lay, in the big box parked in the center aisle.

  Learn to forget, people say. Let go. Give it a rest. Don’t brood. But that’s the worst advice for a writer. It is necessary to remember, even to brood, and writing helps you to remember, and at last to forget. Not to write about Mother, or to falsify or prettify her, was wasteful. To see her clearly, and re-create her on the page, was to give her life and make her matter. Sitting there in church, I felt the surge of survivor’s strength that had always vitalized Mother at a funeral. I was up to the task, for my life in Mother Land had been an immense journey, of the sort I’d taken many times and recounted in books, and this had all the aspects of the travel books I had loved from childhood, in the genre of Wrecked on Cannibal Island.

  Nothing was wasted, and though I’d regretted being summoned back from Mexico for Mother’s final years, perhaps that too had been essential, as a rehearsal for another departure, another life.

  Angela sat at the back, her head lowered, mourning, and at the end of the service, as we passed her, the seven of us as pallbearers, kicking beside the casket on a rubber-wheeled gurney, I glanced at her tragic eyes. Then I beckoned, and took her hand and guided her, so that Angela joined us, making a symmetrical eight pallbearers, four a side.

  The procession of cars in sunshine along the back roads and by snowy fields and bare trees; then the gravesite, more ritual, more prayers, and a shake and spatter of holy water from the gold aspergillum, while we stood, dumb in the trampled snow, the core group of siblings and Angela. Behind us, the cluster of ex-wives, former girlfriends, children, stepchildren, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, nameless and bewildered citizens, from the remotest parts of Mother Land. Up front, next to Mother’s casket, a young priest was intoning a prayer and making hand signals over an open holy book, a complete stranger, speaking to God, recommending Mother, invoking her name.

  “The ground’s too frozen to dig,” someone said softly. It might have been Hubby. “Even a backhoe. Even a jackhammer.”

  “So what’ll they do?” I asked.

  Someone mumbled, someone gargled, but I could tell—even grunts and mutters are identifiable and familial—they were uttered by my siblings. Our grunts were nothing at all like other people’s grunts, or utterances. Floyd was murmuring to a nephew, “Van Gogh said life was probably round.”

  “Maybe store the casket somewhere?”

  Someone sighed a familiar sigh.

  “Because if they don’t get the hole dug today, what happens?”

  The varnished wooden box containing Mother was propped on a pallet, surrounded by flowers, a wreath on top, the young priest still absorbed in his incantations.

  “What’s with all the questions, Jay?” someone said—it sounded like Rose.

  “Just wondering.”

  “What for?” A harsh accusing whisper. “You writing a book?”

  Hubby said in a teasing voice, “Leave this chapter out. Make it a mystery.”

  Just then a small warm hand found mine and calmed me, and I hung on.

  No one spoke again, no need to. Mother was gone, and she’d taken part of us with her.

  After decades of tribal warfare—furious, bloody, hurtful, wounding—this funeral gathering was a minor crisis, two days of low-grade anxiety. Finally, it’s over.

  Like strangers jammed together in an elevator stuck between floors, we hold our breath. At last the confining thing coughs, then starts again and trembles down the shaft, and jolts at the ground floor, the doors slipping open. Released to the fresh air of sudden freedom, we disperse in silence, eight of us, and don’t look back.

  A wide blade of afternoon sun slants through the cemetery trees, surprises the remnants of eroded snow twisted among the tombstones and turns all of it golden. A warmer wind lifting from the southwest tickles a sweetness from the earth, a foretaste of spring. Another peculiar day.

  Villaflores, Chiapas, 2015

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find more books by Paul Theroux.

  About the Author

  PAUL THEROUX is the author of many highly acclaimed books. His novels include The Lower River and The Mosquito Coast, and his renowned travel books include The Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Dark Star Safari, and Deep South. He divides his time between Cape Cod and Hawaii.

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