Mother Land

  They had begged to be his friend, had brought him propitiatory gifts, sent him invitations. They no longer had to look over their shoulder, and could open a letter from him without trembling, for that was how he communicated his withering opinions, always in closely typed letters. But their presents had not done the trick. He was on their side because he saw me as a betrayer. Your wife!

  I hadn’t told him of my fondness for Missy—indeed, had never mentioned her name, knowing how he would mock it, especially the mockable “Gearhart.” And now I couldn’t tell him it was over. Everything he “knew” was in the area of gossip, speculation, and creative half-truths, the family way of making news.

  Because Floyd was now a frequent guest at Fred’s, at Franny’s, at Rose’s—less so at Hubby’s and Gilbert’s—I was a liability. I could not be invited or I would drive him away. They could not entertain both of us without losing him, so they chose him. He was the more satirical, the funnier, the angrier, the more eminent, the greater danger.

  How had this transition been so smooth, the result so successful? Mother had been the key: from that first party to which I had not been invited, Mother had been conspicuously present. She had not mentioned me; no one had. Mother had welcomed Floyd as if he was a warrior just emerged from the wilderness, into the family clearing in the jungle. In her role as matriarch, she gave Floyd her blessing, and since she dominated the parties, she was in the position of sanctioning the guest list. I heard as a mutter from Franny that Jonty had been deleted. “Ma goes, ‘Maybe it would be for the best.’” Franny believed it was a sacrifice for Floyd, but in fact it was for Mother’s own sake.

  I did not complain. Any complaint in this family was self-revelation. I did inquire about the parties, though: “Just wondering.” Obliqueness and irony were lost on Mother, and yet, canny enough to suspect that I was hurt, she was defensive.

  “Be a good sport,” she said.

  Mother could count on me to be mild, and she welcomed it as a weakness. I was easy, Floyd was difficult, so he was chosen. These days Mother was the guest of honor, with Floyd at her right hand, tamed and attentive. Because he was usually cantankerous, because he was now loyal to her, his presence made Mother more powerful.

  Desperate to know more, I called them all to find out where I stood. Gilbert was vague; he was preparing for a trip to Syria. Hubby was busy at the hospital, but he admitted that he had been to several of Fred’s barbecues and also at Franny’s potluck supper. He complained of the greasy food and the warm beer and the burned burgers as a way of reminding me that I hadn’t missed much. “Floyd was making jokes about Franny’s three-bean salad and repeating the words ‘puncheon’ and ‘luncheon.’” When I called Franny, for her party was news to me, she complained about Floyd—“Floyd’s always been high-maintenance”—so that I wouldn’t feel bad about being left out.

  “It wasn’t much of a party,” she said. “Who told you?”

  “Hubby.”

  “Hubby had about sixty hamburgers, a whole pile of french fries, and a ton of pie,” Franny said. “Fred’s dogs were in the pool. Little Benno walked straight into my screen door and needed stitches. Bingo got poison ivy.”

  All this was meant to make me feel I had been lucky not to be there.

  And why had I wanted to? Because I had been rejected by Missy. Because I had finished my novel and wanted to tell someone. Because I was low, living near Mother, and didn’t know how to flee.

  I called Missy. She interrupted me as soon as she heard my voice. She said, “Do you realize what you’ve just done?”

  “No, what?”

  “You dialed my number,” she said. “Don’t ever do it again.”

  “I bought some lobsters. I thought I might bring them over. I love you.”

  “I don’t eat lobsters. See? You claim to love me and you don’t even know that simple fact about me.”

  I hung on to the phone so long, stunned by this rejection, that the recorded voice came on saying, If you want to make a call, please hang up and try again, over and over.

  When I got the proofs of my book, I was occupied. But in all solitude, even the most benign, there are parts of the day, the early evening especially, when a sort of sadness descends, a shadowy stillness that is a reminder one could be elsewhere, an emptiness: something is missing. The shadow asks: What are you doing?

  I went out, I drove, I visited bars. I was a more conspicuous stranger in a bar, because everyone else knew each other; I was intruding. Bar patrons were a sort of family, but a rare happy one. I had no business being among them.

  And didn’t I have my own family? I brought Mother a shawl. “It’s nice,” she said, and I knew from her faint praise that she would probably give it away, one of her many recycled gifts.

  “How are you, Ma?”

  “I just got my electric bill. It was astronomical. And I never leave lights burning.”

  One of her favorite themes, the high cost of living.

  “I remember when a dollar was a lot of money.”

  “Even I remember that,” I said.

  I offered to help her financially, but halfheartedly, partly because she had not been grateful enough about the shawl, but also because I had so little money myself. But maybe my book would succeed.

  “Oh, I’ll manage,” Mother said in a martyred voice.

  To change the subject, I remarked on all the books stacked on her coffee table.

  “I love a good book,” Mother said. “I like to improve my mind. I never waste a minute.”

  “I finished my novel,” I said. “It’s coming out pretty soon.”

  “Oh?”

  She said it tipping her head to the side, as though eager to hear more. But I resisted. I didn’t want her to spread the word about me or my new book. I knew the news would be received with mockery. And my secrets were all I had of my own.

  “Are these any good?” I asked, fingering the books.

  “Floyd brings them to me. He knows I’m a reader.” She pushed at the books. I saw a biography of Amelia Earhart, and a novel, and a picture book, Italians Who Made America.

  “He hates me.”

  “No one hates you.”

  “Everyone does.”

  “That’s very unfair,” she said, and to clarify it, “of you.”

  “When Floyd’s invited to a family dinner, I’m always excluded,” I said. Mother didn’t react. “He won’t speak to me.”

  “Maybe there’s a reason for that.”

  This meant it was my own fault.

  “I have no idea what the reason could be,” I said. “He wrote me some vicious letters.”

  “That’s between the two of you,” Mother said.

  “Maybe you could say something to him.”

  Mother winced and pressed her temples. “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

  Mother had what she wanted. She needed to be in regular touch with Floyd. I mattered less, because my loyalty was never in question and I was a good sport. But Floyd was volatile, Floyd was a mocker, Floyd was dangerous—he was a power figure who could sway the others with his satire. That unsettled Mother. To have him calling and visiting, supplying books, showing up at parties and paying his respects to her—that was important. He brought her food sometimes too, as Franny and Rose did: a pound of scallops, a pair of lobsters, a tin of cookies, a basket of berries, a tray of cheeses with his scribbled note: I love an assertive cheese.

  What Floyd did with the rest of his time was of no concern to Mother. That he whispered about me and mimicked me was my problem. Mother would have been disturbed if she’d gotten wind of the fact that he mocked her, but there were no whispers of this. Floyd inspired fear in the potential gossip.

  Mother was happy. Floyd was showing up, bringing presents, being a grateful son. In my distraction I was a wayward son, not a habitual gift giver or regular visitor. I was sullen, selfish, distrusting, neglectful, and—in Mother’s blaming eyes—a blamer. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” I had heard my
whole life. We were not allowed to be sad, to mourn, to be doubtful or introspective, and so we had to find other ways to express our dejection.

  Mother was not interested in my problems, or anyone’s problems, except as gossip, because such drama took the emphasis off her own. She wouldn’t listen. It had been a mistake for me to say “He hates me.” She had no natural sympathy. No one could be more wounded than she was herself. Her belief that no one was as sick as they said they were must have had its origin in her own unconscious knowledge that she was a hypochondriac, her sense that she never told the truth about her health.

  Mother’s egotism and indifference could be maddening, but it saved her from ever fretting about us. She was never more queenly or aloof than when a crisis arose among her children. Then, her only advice was Be a good sport, which meant Shut your mouth.

  Mother’s chief concern was loyalty to her. It pleased her a little that we were divided among ourselves. Not that she wanted to know the messy details—she didn’t—but she was comforted by the reassurance that we were more easily dominated if we were divided and somewhat in disarray and requiring her counsel.

  “Machiavelli for beginners,” Floyd used to say. But I would think: Machiavelli, yes; beginners, no. Mother’s was an advanced course in power.

  The crisis began with my receiving in the mail a literary magazine, one of those sober academic quarterlies that list the table of contents on the cover—not one I subscribed to. Opening the plain envelope, I assumed I was on a mailing list, and I was on the point of tossing it away when I saw that Floyd had a piece in it. His short story had a characteristic title, purplish and arcane, “Envenoming Junior.”

  Durian Staines [so the story began], who had always envied and then came fully to hate his brother, Jack, becoming even crustier and more hostile after many years, was trying to intimidate his older son, Blore, now thirty-four, to write something poisonous about his uncle, and as a sop to the project promised to give him in return his old Jaguar XK120 if he would do so. ‘But, as I say, it has to be fiction,’ soberly warned his father, making an estimative grimace, which he followed with a wink. ‘Anything else of course would subject you to libel.’ The son, who had always lived in the shadow of this enthusiastic and unending disagreeableness that had kept his famously intolerant father angry for decades, was now finally hearing hard terms that seemed, seemed—he lived with doubt, suffered from anxiety—to make it all worthwhile.

  But the Staineses were skeptics, indirection was their method, duplicity their style, and suggestions were taken not as instigations but orders. His father had been badgering his son for years to write this novel.

  They sat sipping green drinks on a canopied veranda in the lush area of Hidden Hills, Los Angeles, short father and tall son, looking across a row of blasting water-sprinklers to the ferret kennels that the rude, often curmudgeonly director had bought with the grosses from his most recent film release—a surprisingly successful one, since generally his documentaries did very small box office . . .

  “Green drinks” and “ferret kennels” were nice touches. Yet I read it with my mouth open, hardly believing he could write something so ridiculous, and frankly so purple. In his extreme anger, Floyd never wished to risk being subtle. Durian Staines was me, in a conspiracy with my older son Blore; and the victim, Jack, was undeniably Floyd. Not only was Jack a writer, “Jack also wrote like an angel, with bold original prose that cracked like sheet lightning across the page, and, while Durian got more attention and was much more widely known and recognized, Jack, to those in the know, those who had taste, had by far the more original mind.”

  Ambiguity was absent from this work, and so was Floyd’s wild humor; it was all fury and recrimination in lurid pastiche. I was an envious hack conniving with my son to besmirch—his word—the reputation of a gifted brother. I had plagiarized an unpublished poem of my brother’s and gone a step further in enlisting the help of my scribbling son to finish the job. The brainwashed boy “envenomed” by me had published a story ridiculing this worthy man, the maligned brother. Jack, the Floyd character, was a solitary genius, Durian Staines was a talentless social climber, and Blore was a monkey.

  Oddly, the thing I had been accused of was the very thing he had done. I had not published anything about him, but his magazine story was about me.

  I spoke to Fred. He said, “Don’t pay any attention to it. Who reads this stuff?”

  He did not want to be involved, and I suspected he saw a grain of truth in the depiction of me.

  “‘Bold original prose that cracked like sheet lightning across the page’?” Gilbert shrugged. “I don’t think so.”

  “Was that supposed to be you?” Hubby asked.

  Mother smiled grimly at me when I raised the subject. She said, “What has this got to do with me?”

  Floyd’s elaborately wrought public rejection of me had the desired effect. I was troubled by it—by the amount of time it must have taken for him to write and publish it. He was not merely malicious, he was conscientious in his malice. But of course Fred was right when he’d said, “Who reads this stuff?” It was a literary magazine with a negligible following, and after a few weeks of fuming I realized that what he wrote would have no effect. The attack was so concentrated, so vicious in its single-mindedness, it was ultimately artless, just a howl of rage and a shallow echo. Its chief aim had been to make me feel bad. After my initial annoyance, I let go and, like a good sport, dismissed it.

  Floyd, too, must have felt the story had misfired. By sending the magazine to me, he meant to hurt me, and he had; but he needed the story to be seen. He wanted me to suffer a chorus of disapproval, yet hardly anyone had heard his lone voice.

  It gave me some satisfaction to know that the magazine was beneath notice. Had it worked, had it created a flutter of ridicule, had it stung me, the matter might have ended there. But as far as he knew, it missed me, I was not scathed, and there had not been a proper response. If the object of satire is to arouse contempt and ridicule, he had failed. Perhaps his plan backfired, for he was the failure, not me.

  In the meantime, as all of this was unfolding in whispered installments and updates, my novel was published. I had begun the book before Father’s final decline, and the trauma of his death had accelerated my writing, turned it into a dense reverie of grieving. Father’s death was not in the book, but my grief was in every line. The subject was loss, a fictional rendering of the breakdown of my second marriage. Titled The Half Life, it was an account of the eerie sense of amputation I’d experienced after my painful divorce.

  The reviews were respectful, some admiring. The book was funny, not self-pitying but self-mocking. No villain appeared in it, and the tone was impartial—these aspects were singled out.

  I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I felt—in sales, in a future book contract—when Floyd reviewed the book in Boston magazine.

  This popular monthly featured a mention of Floyd’s review on the cover in a teasing headline, “New Books: Blood Feud.” The piece was unprecedented. When had an author’s brother reviewed his new book and—for this seemed the only motive—trashed it? It was without doubt the worst review of my publishing career, for it not only condemned my book; it also was a bitter attack on my life.

  I had received unfavorable reviews before, but even in the worst ones the reviewers pulled their punches, or damned me with faint praise, or registered disappointment, or said I’d written better in the past. I had never, until Floyd’s review, been dismissed as a poseur, a hack, a whore, a slob, a meretricious scribbler. “At best a beach read, a middlebrow brick just a step above Judith Krantz or Belva Plain,” he wrote. And while he mockingly and inaccurately summarized the substance of the novel, he spent most of the review (which ran to eight pages) speaking about me—things he could have learned only by talking to Mother, Fred, Gilbert, Franny, Rose, and Hubby. It was all there, my irregular life, the contents of my house, the car I drove, the food I ate, my recreations, my exercise routine
, and my engagement, down to the mention of my commitment ring.

  Only Floyd could have described my book as “a bizarre chiasmus, a Rumpelstiltskinian prank, the solitary connecting strand in the book the venal, unkempt, complicated, name-promoting, self-absorbed, literary hydra—the author himself—all at once, penitent, sneak, bounder, oaf, coward, bully, and show-off in a novelistic dead end, a pea-and-thimble trick with a gallery of shifty shits and scoundrels, as in the paradox of ‘Schrödinger’s Cat,’ where the same event simultaneously both does and does not happen. With guilt and guile and grumpiness he has rehearsed over and over again the details of his divorce.”

  There was more. “This disgraceful novel is a portrait of himself as a bum-awful writer, a brooding fuckwit with noisome habits, unclean linen, and more crotchets than crudities coming forth in his nutty, yam-in-the-mouth way to explicate by omission everything as a person he feels he is not but brutally could be, a hyperbolic creep.” And last, “It is a novel of contrition, pieced out by way of the contrivance of a writer at last taking a moment to satirize himself, not subtly . . . and to come out—even if only for the space of a story—from the cruel, carious shadows which, like a crab, he has so long chosen to inhabit.”

  So much for the novel. What of the novelist? I turned the page.

  “He is small and surly and spiteful. He has ridiculed in print everyone he has ever known, and with exaggerated vindictiveness has found half the world wanting in goodness and grace, brains and bravery, cleanliness and character. He is famously a curmudgeon in his travel books, where grumpiness becomes half the celebration of his wandering around, and when he is at rest he habitually calumniates his own first wife. Where other writers may give themselves, he seems only to lend, the way André Gide said people who smile instead of laugh hold back in order to think themselves superior.”