Mother Land Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraphs

  PART ONE

  Mother of the Year

  “This Is for the Best”

  Do You Believe in Rock and Roll?

  Loyalty Oaths

  Mr. Bones

  Mother Land

  Home Life

  Wedding Balls

  Self-Denial

  The Best Year of My Life

  Secrets

  Disclosure

  Visits

  Whispers

  Outsider

  Crazy Bastard

  Good Sport

  Second Childhood

  The Side Effects of Melancholy

  PART TWO

  Holidays

  Traitors

  Ten Minutes from Mother

  The Acre

  The Cottage

  Struggles

  Reminders

  The Letter

  Charlie

  Birthday Cards

  Upside-Down Cake

  My Nature Is to Sting

  Station Identification

  Cat Burglary

  Rewards

  PART THREE

  The Algebra of Love

  Checks and Balances

  Defiance

  Hot Dinners

  A Nest of Vipers

  Mottle Sin

  “What Are You Doing Here?”

  Bad News

  Best Man

  Winners

  Aliens

  My Muse

  PART FOUR

  Pastoral

  Angor Animi

  The Survivor

  The Kindly Ones

  Mother’s Century

  Memento Mori

  The Unknown

  Arcadia

  Clambake

  Angela

  Bulletins

  Strangers

  Read More from Paul Theroux

  About the Author

  Connect with HMH

  Copyright © 2017 by Paul Theroux

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  www.hmhco.com

  Library of Congress-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-0-618-83932-2 (hardcover)

  Cover design by Mark R. Robinson

  Cover photograph © Getty Images

  eISBN 978-1-328-66410-5

  v1.0417

  Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please, please, please. Don’t—don’t do this. Don’t do this.

  Lay down your life with your child.

  —Jim Jones, Jonestown “Death Speech,” November 28, 1978

  Great hatred, little room,

  Maimed us at the start.

  I carry from my mother’s womb

  A fanatic heart.

  —William Butler Yeats

  PART ONE

  1

  Mother of the Year

  Weather is memory. Even the wind matters. The slant of rain can serve as a nudge, so can a quality of light. You don’t need a calendar to remind you of personal crises. You smell them, you feel them on your skin, you taste them. If you go on living in the same place year after year the weather begins to take on meanings, it is weighted with omens, and the temperature, the sunlight, the trees and leaves, evoke emotions on every anniversary. The whole venerating world turns on this principle of weather-sniffing familiarity: all such pieties have their origin in a season, on a particular day.

  That lovely morning in May we were summoned from our homes and told Father was ill. Mother—frugal even in emergencies—seldom called long-distance, so the implication of this expensive phone call was that Father was dying, that we were being gathered together for a deathwatch, but a peculiar ritual all our own.

  You come from a family as from a distant land. Ours was an outlier with its own customs and cruelties. No one knew us, nor did we invite any interest, which is why I told myself that when the moment was right I would put my family—Mother Land in every sense—on the map.

  There were eight of us children, and one of us was dead. Our parents were severe, from hard work and their fear of the destitution they had seen in the Great Depression. They seemed ancient to us, but as long as they were in our lives, no matter how doddering, we remained their much younger and unformed children—still children, still behaving like children, when Mother was a living fossil. In old age we embarked on our true, awful childhood—infantile fogies ruled by their triumphant mother.

  The fact that two of us were writers was a nuisance to the others, and often an embarrassment, since writing had little value in the family’s estimation. Being a writer seemed to this rabble a conceited form of laziness. I was blamed for what I wrote. I doubt that my writing will figure much in this family story, except incidentally when it becomes a problem for the rest of them. My concern here is the life I lived, while I was still a flight risk, before I left home, when I was about eighteen, and the continuation of it after I returned to confront death and failure and confusion, forty years later—the beginning and the end; not the books of my life, but the bookends.

  When I was very young my mother, all smiles, used to tell me the story of a man who was shortly to be hanged. As a last request he said, “I want to talk to my mother.” She was taken to the foot of the gallows, where her son stood handcuffed. “Come closer, Mother,” he said, and when she inclined her head he made as if to speak confidentially to her and bit into her ear. As she screamed in pain, the condemned man spat out a piece of her ear and said, “You are the reason I’m here, about to die!”

  Telling the story, my mother always folded her hands in her lap and nodded in satisfaction. Was she telling me that I was luckier than that man, and that she was not that kind of mother? Or did she think I was too confident and unruly. I didn’t know why, though the story terrified me, because I often felt like that condemned man, someone who had to be punished, a child among unruly children, a potential ear biter.

  Even sixty years later, that was how we behaved toward one another, too, childishly, with pettiness and envy. The taunting was endless, and years after, all these big stumbling teasers, bulking and bullying, late-middle-aged potbellied kids, balding, limping, belching with ailments and complaints, went on mocking each other, wagging their fat fingers. When we were older there was much more to mock.

  Our childishness was so obvious that Floyd once said, “Who was that dreamy French philosopher who talked about the permanence of childhood: A motionless but enduring childhood, disguised as history. Nobody in this family has the slightest idea of his name! Is it Pecos Bill? Time is the arch-satirist! It was Gaston Bachelard.”

  Each of us children had the same father—he was solid, though he was often ill. He had the nervous anxiety of a compulsive saver. Frugality was his obsession. He would take a stick of gum and tear it in half, because chewing a whole stick was a needless luxury. He saved string, saved rusty nails and screws in a jar, saved planks of wood, saved everything. To the end of his life he retained a great fondness for the town dump, for the treasures it held. Going to the dump was an outing, and it made him smile as he set off, as though headed to Filene’s Basement, certain to return with a bargain. He always took a barrel of trash, but he returned with half as much in possibly reusable items he’d found, scavenging on the heaps of smoking refuse surrounded by contending seagulls. The dump was also one of his meeting places—he had friends there; the other was church. A boyhood of poverty left him with something like a lingering illness he carried with him through h
is life and made him grateful to be alive.

  Mother was unreadable and enigmatic, at times unintelligible, like a wrathful deity. Insecure in her power, she had an impatient and demanding cruelty that seemed to come from another century, another culture, and it was never satisfied. It made her a willful killjoy. Mother’s contradictions, her moods, her injustice, her disloyalty, and her unshakable favoritism made her different to every one of us; we each dealt with our own version of her, we each had a different mother, or translated her, as I am doing now, into our own particular idiom. Fred might read this book and say, “Who is this woman?” Franny or Rose might object. Hubby might growl, “You ree-tard.” Gilbert did not know the woman who raised me. But Floyd, the family’s other writer, had more than an inkling, and when we talked he might raise a fist and say, “The Furies! The betrayals! The cannibalism! It’s the House of Atreus!”

  Mother’s stories and confidences varied according to which child she was talking to. I should have guessed this early on, because her habit was to see us one at a time. She encouraged us to visit her separately and hinted that she loved to be surprised with presents. But the phone call was her preferred medium of communication; it allowed for secretiveness and manipulation; she liked the surprise of a ring, the waywardness of conversation, the power of hanging up. In seven phone calls—needy people are chronic phoners—she would tell a different version of her day.

  It might be Fred, the eldest, the only child she deferred to and respected. He was a lawyer, with a lawyer’s circumspection and the ability to hold two opposing notions in his head, neither of which he believed. She poured out her heart to him and he responded, “This is what you should do, Ma,” and then the opposing view, “Or you could do this.” Later he would act as her counselor, her defender, her explainer.

  Or it might be Floyd, second oldest, whom she despised and feared, saying, “He never was right.” He was a university professor and an acclaimed poet. Floyd used to say, “Art is the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.”

  Or the sisters, Franny or Rose, both of them bulky and breathless, like those anonymous startled eyewitnesses on TV who gasp, “I’ve lived here my whole life and I’ve never seen anything like it!” Both of them, teachers of small children, addressed everyone as if addressing a child.

  Or Hubby, the brooding one, of whom Mother said, “He’s so good with his hands.” He was an ER nurse with a fund of gruesome stories.

  Or Gilbert, her favorite, a diplomat, cheerfully oblique. “He’s so busy, poor kid, but I’m proud of him.” Mother never said no to him.

  Or me, known from birth as JP. Mother was wary with me, blinking in uncertainty when I visited her and always eager for me to leave. She had wanted me to be a doctor; she had never liked my being a writer. When someone praised a book of mine she said, “Oh?”—as if someone had woken her by prodding her with a stick.

  Mother spoke to Angela, too, through the power of prayer; Angela was the dead one. This infant girl had died at birth, her life snuffed out when she was hours old, yet she had a name (“She was like an angel”); she had a personality and certain lovable quirks and was part of the family. Angela was often mentioned as the perfect one, whom we should emulate.

  “I’m sure you’re aware that Paul Verlaine’s mother kept her two stillborn children pickled in a glass jar on a parlor shelf,” Floyd said. “Mother at least spared us that spectacle”—here he looked over his half-moon glasses—“of conspicuous foeti for the family to mourn.”

  But Angela was more obvious and present, much more available for advice and consolation—and guidance—because of her being a specter. Such ghostly ancestral presences often dominate the daily life of folk cultures and savage tribes, the dead and the living in agreement, the motif of “the grateful dead” you read about in Lévi-Strauss.

  When Mother needed an ironclad excuse or a divine intervention, it came from Angela, who warned her of disloyal whispers or dangerous portents. Angela not only had a name and a personality, she also had a history. She was mourned every January 8, when Mother was paralyzed with grief and needed to be visited or phoned, in order to pour out her sorrow and the story of her difficult pregnancy during the war. Dead Angela was also necessary in helping to plump out the family, like the dead souls in the Gogol novel, making our big family even bigger, and somewhat fictional.

  “We’re family,” people say with a confident smile, and I think, God help you.

  The phrase “big happy family” does not invoke a congenial crowd to me; it suggests weird corporate disorder, treachery, greed, and cruelty, the nearest thing in civilization to a cluster of cannibals. I am generalizing here, using the words “savage tribes” and “cannibals” for emphasis and melodrama, and I know unfairly. Reading those words you are immediately put in mind of comic, half-naked, bone-in-the-nose jungle dwellers, bow-and-arrow people, beating drums and dangerous only to themselves in their recreational violence, and of course hollering and jumping on big feet and showing their teeth. Such people don’t exist in the real world. I once lived in the equatorial regions where these belittled stereotypes are said to live, and I found the folk there to be anything but savage; they were subtle, chivalrous, openhearted, dignified, and generous. It was in suburban America where I encountered savagery in its nakedest form and discovered all the mythical characteristics associated with cannibals to be the simple observable facts of my own big flesh-and-blood family.

  My father was the henpecked chief, my mother his consort. Dissatisfied and frustrated, we were a collection of relentless rivals, struggling for dominance, getting away with murder, with our own language and our peculiar pieties, grievances, and anniversaries, all of them incomprehensible except to the family members themselves. Also, though we were moody, merciless, and full of envy, we were always pretending to be the opposite. The solid seamless hypocrisy of religion was an asset: big families are nearly always attached to a fanatic and unforgiving faith. Ours was. You don’t think happy or sad, you think of the fury of survival and of damnation and blame.

  Such families hardly exist anymore in the Western world of tiny houses, limited space, and rising costs. The birthrate in Europe is recorded in negative numbers, hinting at shrinking populations and families. This is why the story of any large family is worth telling, because such families have been forgotten, yet the members of these complex and crazed clans have helped shape the world we know now, probably for the worse.

  We were seen as a big happy family, and we smiled, for while we believed there was no such thing, happy was how we advertised ourselves, because we had so much to hide. Cynicism is another big-family attribute. Some of our desperation must have arisen from the fact that we knew our family was too big to survive, too clumsy to flourish, monstrous to behold, the grotesque phenomenon of another century, a furious and isolated tribe at war with itself, ruled over by an unpindownable presence—chairperson of the board, fickle queen, empress of Mother Land.

  For most of my life I was encouraged to believe my mother was a saint—a little tedious and repetitive, but virtuous and loyal. Of course, she fostered this fiction, she worked at shaping it. And I was also influenced by her public image, for she was something of a local celebrity, a former schoolteacher respected by her students, active in church affairs, shrewd about money, insightful in matters of the heart, a pious busybody beloved by everyone. To the world at large my mother was a resourceful and hardworking woman who had raised seven children (and nurtured the memory of the eighth) and put them through college, the matriarch of a big happy family. She identified with wise and long-suffering mother figures in the news, especially the annual Mother of the Year, whom she never saw as a role model but always as a rival. She also compared herself with the wise old women depicted in the comics—Mary Worth was one—and the sensible gray-bunned soul in the early TV series I Remember Mama. She also prayed hard to the Virgin Mary, and her piety contained the presumption that she and the Mother of God had much in common, except the quality of th
eir offspring. She would have found an easy kinship with Mother Hawa—Eve, of Islam—the mother of humanity.

  I marvel at my naïve belief in her self-sacrificing persona, for when I was growing up Mother was my oppressor, and I longed to escape her injustice. Dad was mild, but she goaded him to hit us with his usual means of punishment, his razor strop. He feared her too, and so he obeyed and became her enforcer.

  “Get over here,” he’d say. “You are no more than a fart in a mitten.”

  We could not protest. Mother always had the last word, and it was usually untrue, based on the maxim, Why tell the truth when it is to your advantage to lie? In her perversity, whatever she wanted you to believe that day was the truth. She would do anything to get your attention—be angry, upset, abusive, or gentle in a foxy way. Sick, too: she could make herself noticeably ill so that we would listen to her. She might also offer us presents, but they were the sorts of crudely whittled tokens that simple folk exchanged in the jungle.

  This woman was quite old before I could admit to myself who she really was. At the age when she would become an object of gratitude and generosity, she seemed no more than a demented monarch. People used to say to me: Your education, your reading, your travel, your long days at a desk. No, not at all; my doing battle with mother’s malign influence made me a flight risk.

  When someone mentions a mother who dotes on her children, who works her fingers to the bone (Mother’s self-regarding catchphrase), who often invites her children to visit her or who visits them with presents—a kindly seeming woman full of solemn, stern advice—I think, What on earth does the sententious old woman want? She can only be wicked and manipulative to be so persistent, and whoever trusts her has got to be a fool. She will use you. She will eat you alive and shit you over a cliff.

  Yet nothing was obvious to me about my family, the hidden tribe in Mother Land, until Father died.