Mother Land

  Dear Jay,

  I read your book. Your publisher gave me a 25¢ discount then charged me a dollar for mailing it, in addition to the price of the book! It grieves me to tell you I did not like your book at all. I found it extremely unfunny, sordid, cheap and vulgar. Had you thought about the people who would read this creation of yours? Would you want me to hand it to Hubby or Rose and let them “enjoy” it? Could you in all honesty hand this to someone like Mr. Becker across the street and say, “This is my first novel! Hope you enjoy it!” I wonder if he would? Jay, why waste your time on trash? You will have to answer someday, even if only to your conscience, for the printed word, which will last forever. I could say much more, but I know I have inflicted enough hurt on you. I am hurt even as I write this. No one will gain from this book.

  Love, Mother

  I kept the letter those forty years as a talisman, as a goad, and as a rare example of the severe honesty of someone who seldom told the truth.

  At last, everything came to an end for me. I thought: Two wives—done. Two children—done. Houses and property acquired and lost, ditto every article of furniture, everything I had accumulated since leaving home was gone, or almost. I had kept many of my books—no one fights over books. Books are burdens; they get heavier, smellier, dustier; they swell, the pages fatten, the bindings crack, the dust jackets tear and slip away. Yet I needed something to hold on to. It seemed odd to be returning home after so many years, but I had been everywhere else and, I repeat, I had nowhere else to go.

  Father’s failing health meant that I had to hang around and be useful, and it had allowed me to reacquaint myself with my brothers and sisters. Father’s death created, if not a bond, then a family feeling, and my new nearness to Mother reminded me of why I had left all those years ago.

  In this period, just after Father’s death, when Mother was queening over us, I grew close to Floyd. Floyd was a satirist, had been so from childhood. Older than me by two years, he had always loomed large, and was both funnier and more serious than anyone else in the family, marked with the satirist’s traits: comedy, severity, cruelty. He was the most tormented, the one with natural talent. When I wrote well, I was sometimes forced to admit that I was unconsciously mimicking Floyd at his most fluent. He was too good a writer not to be a bad influence. Maybe he was another reason I had gone away and stayed: I needed to be myself.

  As a satirist, Floyd was useful, perhaps essential, to understanding the quirks of the family—mocking Fred’s earnestness, Franny’s fussing, Rose’s stubborn streak, Hubby’s clumsiness, Gilbert’s love of opera, his own irrationality; and he frankly mimicked my self-dramatizing tendencies.

  In his role as mocker, Floyd was a figure of power. Growing up, I had been shocked and exhilarated by his fearless satires of Mother: he did her voice, her equivocation, her tantrums, her shallow cough, her distinctive manner of swallowing (goose-necked, gulping, with popping eyes). I had to admit that watching him in this vein had liberated me and given voice to emotions I felt.

  Floyd had grown up angry and sad. He had felt passed over, and his childhood had been overshadowed by Fred, darkened by judgments against him. He used to say, “How long did Charles Dickens work in the blacking factory?” and would quickly answer, “Not long,” as a way of explaining how, as a child—Dickens had been twelve—even a short time could be purgatorial, unendurable, and that sometimes the merest hint of criticism left a wound that failed to heal.

  A whisper never went unheard in our family; the fact of it being a whisper made it serious and inescapable. “He wets the bed” might have been spoken as little more than a breath, but we all heard. Floyd could do nothing to stop it. Years later, he still spoke of it with bitterness and shame, first appalled at waking in the morning—he might have been nine or ten—and realizing he was lying in a puddle of his own chilled pee, the soaked sheets under him, and with a sense of woe that his error could not be lied away or hidden; then terrified in anticipation of Mother’s screech.

  “Again! You’ve done it again!

  Floyd hid his face as he wept in fear and humiliation. “My fallen-angel face, filthy with tears” is a line in one of his poems. What he remembered in the poems he wrote as a Guggenheim fellow was his bedwetting, how when he was an anxious boy Mother had howled at him, “I’m going to hang that rubber sheet around your neck if you wet your bed one more time. I’ll send you to school wearing the rubber sheet. Everyone will know what you do!” And, “I wash your pissy sheets!”

  She told her brother Louie, the priest, who rushed to our house in his purple Studebaker and demanded that Floyd come downstairs to go for a walk. “Get down here, sonny.”

  When they were alone, Uncle Louie put down his glass of Moxie and ordered Floyd to stand at attention. He took Floyd’s chin, lifted it, and said, “If you keep this up you’ll never get married. Know why? Because you’ll pee on your wife. Is that what you want?”

  And of course Floyd wet the bed more than ever. He was angry, anxious, confused. In such misery, he probably did have a secret wish to piss on everyone.

  “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Mother said, advancing on Floyd, who was backing away on skinny legs, his wet flannel pajamas stuck to his thighs, his hair spiky from sleep. “I really am going to do it. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I’m going to hang that rubber sheet around your neck and you’re going to wear it to school.”

  Mother had stripped the sheets from his bed and thrown them on the floor. The rubber sheet was black and slippery. It had a peculiar inhuman smell, a sharpness of rubber, a sour stink that, no matter how often it was washed, would linger in its fabric. It was smaller than a normal sheet and so heavy it rumbled when it was shaken.

  I had a clear image of what wearing it would be like, because Audie Jackson, the coal man who delivered ice in the summer, holding a crystal block of it with a pair of tongs, wore just such a sheet like a filthy cape on his back. That was how Floyd would look, draped in the black rubber sheet, a humiliated beggar boy dressed like the limping ice man.

  Even in adulthood, the rubber sheet was Floyd’s defining image, like Fred’s slavering dogs, Gilbert’s melodious violin and shelves of Proust in French, Hubby’s tuneless cello and his ball-peen hammer, Franny’s tub of three-bean salad, Rose’s Mixmaster (“Ma loves fudge”), Angela’s halo, and the pup tent I bought for ten dollars, so that I could make camp in the backyard and sleep there on warm nights, pretending I was in the Africa of wild animals and jungles that I read about in Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive and Fenworth Moore’s Wrecked on Cannibal Island; or, Jerry Ford’s Adventures Among Savages.

  Floyd was miserable. He could not seem to go a night without wetting the bed, and it got so bad that there was a permanent resentment against him for making more work for Mother. Whenever Floyd did something wrong—and it might be as trivial as spilling milk on the counter or muddying his knees or failing to mop the floor after he’d promised to—he was reminded of his bedwetting.

  Egged on by Mother, Father would say, “Look what you’ve done, and after all that, this is what your mother gets for it—more of your pissy sheets!”

  At the age of eleven, Floyd saw a psychiatrist, Dr. Younger, on Harrison Avenue in Boston.

  I asked Floyd, “What does he do?”

  “Just talks and stuff.”

  “What about?”

  “Asks me to draw pictures and stuff.”

  I imagined that the doctor was being kind to him, encouraging his artwork, to make him feel better. I was envious, because a stranger’s sympathy would have made me happy.

  But the visits made no difference, for Mother was still so enraged that she printed Floyd’s name on the rubber sheet. And she went on provoking Dad to scold Floyd, which he did, but now in a whisper: “You’re killing your mother.”

  Floyd was well into his teenage years before he was entirely cured of his bedwetting. Leaving home had a great deal to do with the improvement, as leaving home would help me. Yet h
e always spoke of his misery with a fresh sense of hurt, as if it were yesterday.

  Like me, he had stayed away. When he earned his doctorate, when he won the poetry prize, the Guggenheim, the Fulbright, he was alone. He never invited Mother or Dad—nor, indeed, any of us.

  Like me, his marriage ended. Like me, in late middle age he found himself living in Mother Land, where we were more familiar with the weather and the seasons and the routines. Like me, he had told himself that it was temporary, and yet the years were passing and we remained ten minutes from Mother.

  We resumed our friendship, Floyd and I, in a bristling, wary way, like a pair of mismatched hedgehogs. We were both passionate readers and mediocre golfers, and both single again. He was still the family satirist. “Who’s this?” he would say, and screw up his face and launch into an imitation of Fred or Hubby, Franny or Rose, Hubby or Gilbert, and me, too, in a defiant way. But I was flattered, because teasing me to my face was a gesture of affection.

  He was regularly visited by Franny and Rose. They brought him tribute, to disarm and obligate him—fruit, candy, T-shirts, cakes and cookies they had baked. Always on their return journey after seeing Mother, they stopped off to see him and tell him in detail how Mother was failing. “She’s real feeble, she’s forgetful. She leaves things on the stove with the burner on.” They rolled their eyes and moaned about what a trial Mother was, how frail, how hard up, so confused.

  Less often, they stopped at my place, saying the same things.

  “She’s really slowing down a lot,” Franny said to me. She was slumped, one shoulder higher than the other, and her dress glowing heavily with sweat, sitting with her knees apart as she gasped for breath. “Plus, she repeats herself all the time.”

  “What’s this about Ma being hard up?”

  Franny narrowed her eyes and said, “Some weeks she’s real short.”

  Saying it shawt, the Cape Cod way, made Mother’s financial state sound dire.

  Instead of mentioning what Mother had said about helping her with Jonty’s wedding expenses, I merely remarked on how generous it was that she and Rose stopped in and made sure the old woman was okay.

  “I know how busy you are,” Franny said, though in fact this was not my point—I saw Mother fairly often, at Mother’s bidding. Franny screwed up one side of her face. “You know, Jay, Ma really doesn’t have a lot of money.”

  This seemed as odd a remark as “Some weeks she’s real shawt,” since Mother had always been a saver, thrifty, not to say fanatically frugal: day-old bread, dented cans, most of the clothes she gave as presents labeled Second and Irreg.

  Floyd laughed at Franny for her lugubrious stories, at Rose for her nervous anger, at Mother for her sanctimony, at Fred (“he’s a castrato”), at Hubby (“the village explainer”), at Gilbert (“our virtuoso on the strings”). And of course everyone else, the children, the grandchildren, their friends, their pets, “the human zoo!”

  Mother was shrinking, Floyd said. “She’s turning into a Q-tip.” It seemed true—she was growing paler, with thin wispy hair, like cobwebs twirled on a twig, her sallow scalp showing through. Her skin was tissuey, her eyes watery, with yellow, claw-like nails on ashen hands that were almost reptilian, as though in her old age she was devolving. Yet given her physical decline, she still seemed strong, and most of the time put me in mind of a Chinese empress.

  “She’s all about indirection,” Floyd said. “She doesn’t hear you when you have something on your mind. And when you ask her how she is, she never replies at once. Instead, she looks a little croaky and coughs”—Floyd gave two dry barks, the practiced cough of a hypochondriac. Then he groaned in Mother’s voice, “Oh, I’m all right. I’ll be fine. Croop-croop!”

  But for all his mockery, he indulged her, brought her books, gave her rides to the supermarket on senior citizen discount day and to the Big Scoop for an ice cream. He marveled that she was bright and busy, always knitting or reading or monologuing on the phone. “She still goes for walks!” She usually went alone, shuffling in her crepe-soled nurse’s shoes, sometimes walking as far as the beach, where, her white hair blown by the wind, her big cloak lifted in an updraft, her face tightened by the cold, Floyd said, “She looks like Queen Lear!”

  “Your father hated walking, but I love to be outdoors—it does you so much good,” she said, implying that Dad was a drag until he died, and that he probably shortened his life by sitting indoors with a glass of Wild Turkey in one hand and doing the crossword.

  “Look, Ma,” Floyd would say on one of his Sunday visits, “here come your favorites.”

  Out the window, Franny and Rose were advancing from their cars to the front door, filling the path, smiling in anticipation.

  Mother rolled her eyes to signal, Oh, Lord, those two, back again!

  Seeing her alone, I often thought how kindly she could be, how she would hold my hand and ask me to sit down beside her and speak to me with a sympathy that, in spite of my skepticism, touched my heart.

  “I want you to find someone nice. I want you to be happy. That would please me so much.”

  What Mother did not know—what no one knew—was that I had found someone. I was happy. But as always, I didn’t know how much of this affair to tell Mother, or whether I should say anything at all.

  12

  Disclosure

  Mother knew I was happy. I could tell by the way she blinked, bringing me into focus with each blink. I was a fifty-six-year-old child, crouched on the footstool before her leather chair. She sensed my happiness the way a predator senses crippled prey, as it crouches at the edge of a wadi and discerns a lame buck dragging its hind leg at the rear of an advancing herd, marking the animal out and preparing for the pounce. My happiness must have been as obvious as a gimpy leg, or my conspicuous grin.

  I was in love. That gave me my glow, relaxed my natural suspicion, and made me vulnerable to assault—a happy person is a potential mugging victim. Another man’s mother might have been relieved and delighted, but my mother became dark and watchful. For her, all happiness concealed a secret, all smiles suggested submission. I was her prey.

  “I can tell you’re well relaxed,” Mother said. “A good night’s sleep is so important”—something you would say to a small child as you stalled and scrutinized their features for a tic of self-consciousness. What are you smiling about? she would demand angrily when we were very young, and often, Wipe that smile off your face.

  “I’ve been a night owl my whole life,” she went on. Her attention always wandered back to her own habits, her ego like a powerful magnet. “But if I get six good hours I’m as good as gold.” Then she shook her head. “What was I saying before that?”

  “That I looked rested.”

  “And that makes me so happy. To see you happy.”

  But she did not look happy, and because she was eyeing me closely, I warned myself not to say anything more. Yet on another level, in a blissful way, in my dreamy doze, I was joyous at having a woman in my life. I was at that early, overcertain stage of desire, feeling rejuvenated and hopeful. I had a future after all, I was not going to be alone, I had someone I wanted to please, someone who wanted to please me. And there was the romantic physical side, the yearning to stroke her, and the erotic cannibal side, someone for me to eat. Her name was Melissa Gearhart. She called herself Missy and had a teenage daughter named Madison. Missy worked in a bank on the Cape. She too was divorced. I loved her.

  “A mother needs to see that her children are happy,” Mother said.

  I had dropped in because Gilbert had called from Washington to say, “Ma’s lonely. No one calls her. No one visits.”

  Was this so? It seemed to me that Mother had plenty of company—the phone ringing, the usual visits and inquiries and drop-ins.

  “People promise but no one comes through,” Gilbert said. “I’d drive up myself but I’m on an assignment, leaving tonight, wheels up at eight. Ma said, ‘What if you crash? What will I do?’ She’s definitely low.”
/>
  Fred had said something similar. “It’s just Ma and that big house, all alone. I can’t make it—one of the dogs has colic and the other one a suspected hernia. Poor Ma. Most of her old friends are dead. And she’s lost her mate.”

  “She’s lost her mate” made Mother sound like a grieving zoo animal, off her feed, swishing her tail at flies. But there was a distinct note of Mother’s own complaints in these comments, just the language she would use. But I went all the same, and she said, “I’ve lost my pep.”

  She had often praised people, saying, “He has lots of pep.” Pep was better than money. Pep was positive. Someone with lots of pep would do what you asked them to do, saying, Sure thing! Glad to oblige!

  I had brought Mother a basket of fruit, which still sat at my feet, the way one might try to please a shut-in, or in Mother’s case, a way of trying to propitiate her. The basket, wrapped in heavy cellophane bunched at the top and tied with a red ribbon, was still in the supermarket bag. I was so dazed in my complacency I had not handed it over.

  “Oh, yes, I’m feeling fine,” I said, remembering her comment—or was it a question?

  She was alone and looked small, cornered, solitary—which, no doubt, was how she wished to be perceived. But this role-playing did not convince me, for behind her gaze was the narrow penetrating gleam that you see in the eyes of a night stalker.

  She said, “I was thinking how much Dad loved you,” and added, “You were his favorite.”

  The mention of Dad called up his face, and I was moved by the memory. Yes, he was generous and had indulged me, treated me as a friend, was proud of me, and made few demands. He was restful to be with because he was so openhearted. He had vanity, as we all did, but he had no guile. His inner life was a mystery that had been briefly revealed by Mr. Bones, but he did not invite anyone to look further into it. He was that rare individual, the helpful stranger who asks nothing in return.