Mother Land

  “I don’t think he would have wanted that,” Rose said. “He hated restaurants. He always said they were a waste of money.”

  “You had your chance and you blew it,” Franny said. “You walked out of the restaurant the other night. So did Floyd. So did JP. So what’s the point?”

  “It’s up to Ma,” Fred said.

  We looked at her; for an instant she didn’t look strong anymore. She made a theatrical gesture, touching her gloved hand to her forehead, and said, “I’ve got a splitting headache.”

  Franny and Rose rushed to assist her. Gilbert carried her purse. Fred fussed.

  The rest of us went our separate ways. In the car, Floyd said, “Fred’s such an asshole. ‘It’s up to Ma.’”

  I called Mother that night, but she did not answer the phone, Franny did.

  “She’s tired,” Franny said. “Rose and I are staying here a few more days to look after her. She’s had an awful shock. Her nerves are shot.”

  Shawk . . . shawt, the accent of Mother Land. But it seemed to me that she’d had no shock at all, just a great reward, of health and strength, a renewed vigor and confidence. She had been proud at the wake, queenly at the cemetery, surrounded by her big family. Her look of power, the triumph of the survivor, had filled me with apprehension.

  I called her the next day and she said she was feeling better, with Franny and Rose staying with her. Their presence seemed odd, for both of them had jobs teaching school, which they were obviously neglecting.

  Some days later, when she was alone, she called me back: “I’m sending you a little something. There was money left over from Dad’s funeral expenses.”

  Mother paid a neighbor to clean out Dad’s shed, where the tools had been. The garage, too. All of Dad’s accumulated possessions were junked. The paint cans, the jars of nails, the rope, the coils of wire, the rusty screwdrivers, the ball of string, the stack of folded brown grocery bags. The yellowed newspaper clippings went. They had been nailed to the wall, and some of them were very old: one said WAR IS OVER, another said PEACE AT LAST, the Boston papers from 1945. Some were newspaper pictures of us. Floyd shooting a basket in a high school gym. Fred bundled up in a hockey uniform, his stick poised, pretending to slap a puck. Me holding a trophy from the science fair. Hubby in a group of serious-faced Boy Scouts en route to a jamboree. Clipped-out mentions of events, such as band concerts and ball games. Others were snapshots. Of Franny and her terrified prom date. Of Franny when she was a nun, draped in her penguin outfit. Of Rose, a pretty child in a white dress, hands folded: first communion. Of Gilbert smiling across the bridge of his violin. Several were attempts at family photos, but they were amateurish and awkward—there were too many of us, the camera was cheap, we looked like a discontented mob.

  Father’s woodstove was ripped out of the living room. He had kept it burning until the night he was taken to the hospital. No one wanted the old stove. When it was moved, ashes spilled out, and the gray dust powdering the floor was a grotesque reminder of him.

  “He never did clean it out thoroughly,” Mother said.

  I went back to the cemetery about a month later. Father’s grave looked new and colorless. I planted some geraniums in front of it and a small pointed juniper on either side. I told Mother this.

  She smiled in pity, as she always did when I made a blunder. She said, “He’s not there, you know.”

  She sent me a check for five hundred dollars. I did not want it, and yet I did not know what to do with it, for the dark secret of receiving money from Mother so confused me I kept it to myself.

  Franny and Rose were busier than ever. On their way to Mother’s, they stopped off to see me sometimes, bringing me candy and donuts, the sorts of things they imagined everyone ate.

  “We see her every Sunday,” Franny said one day. Rose just smiled. They settled into the cushions of my furniture. I was fascinated by the way these chairs announced the danger of weight in the twang of their springs. “We know how busy you are. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.”

  Soon after that, each of them bought a new car.

  “Mumma likes visits,” Rose said. “You know how she is.”

  I said I did, but did I? Nothing was simple in Mother Land.

  4

  Loyalty Oaths

  To the world—and our world was our small town, our neighborhood, our church, the schools we went to—we were an exemplary family. “Your folks are the salt of the earth,” Father Furty said to me in a scolding way, lashing me by praising them. “Pillars of the community,” he said another day. He meant that I was negligible and that my parents were loyal to him and God-fearing. His esteem for them was shared generally in our world. Ours was a bigger family than most, and the more admirable for its size. We were noted for our struggles, our uprightness, our decency, our respectability. Not prissy, not snobbish—we could be relied upon. We were good people. We were . . . yes, this is tedious in its litany of virtues, but bear with me.

  Dad was hardworking, the owner of his failing business. He was a proud, fair man, devoted to his wife and children, from a large family himself, with a lineage that was both distinguished in its heritage (French Canadian and Native American) and obscure in its achievements. Yet the centuries of vagueness added to the mystique of the family name, which was originally Justice when they had lived in New France but became Justus when they percolated south to the United States. “My great-uncle Pierre spelled it J-U-S-T-I-S-S,” Dad said. He loved explaining his name and, especially, saying the original in the French way, everting his lips like a fish, leaning forward, and slushily saying, “Zhoo-stees.”

  Dad’s family had lived in North America for three centuries. They did not have an immigrant story, the romantic myth of a long sea voyage, a tale of hope and rewarded toil and transformation, that so many American families love to retell, to explain themselves. Only the name change was a clue to when Dad’s family had arrived, though all birth records had been lost. On his mother’s side they’d been aboriginals, squatting in the woods for thousands of years. Dad in his dumpster-diving had inherited their instinct for being hunter-gatherers.

  “Grandma used to play with the Indians,” Dad said, a way of hinting that she was an Indian. “She once saw Buffalo Bill!”

  One of Dad’s ancestors, Antoine Justice, helped found the city of Detroit, under Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac. But here I am myself romancing. The plain truth is that this ancestor, with our uncorrupted surname, was a deckhand in the French navy, recruited as a mariner because he had worked as a ferryman in his river town of Verdun-sur-Garonne, in the Pyrenees near Toulouse. He was not a native speaker of French but a provincial, speaking Gascon. During his first winter in Canada, in 1693, instead of moaning “Le temps est très froid” or “Il fait froid,” this much more effusive son of Gascony would utter something like, “Dieu vivent! Fa pla fred a pr’aici.” And, feeling far from home, would mutter, “Soi pla lan d’enta ieu,” rather than “Je suis bien loin de chez moi.”

  Most of Antoine Justice’s fellow soldiers would have been native French speakers from Normandy, so Antoine the Gascon would have been babbling to himself, on his own, establishing a family tradition, the first in a long line of odd men out. Meanwhile, he was bullying the natives and ultimately went native himself in the wilds of Canada, becoming a fur trapper and settling down to farm after he was discharged from the navy. The family inhabited their Quebec village for three hundred years. They were older than the oaks, older than the marsh grass that gave their tiny village its Iroquois name, Yamaska, place of the reeds.

  Dad’s family, like Dad himself, exemplified endurance and indifference. They had survival skills, but passivity had been bred into their bones. They had the aboriginal’s hatred of change, fear of novelty, and suspicion of strangers. In their muddy boots they remained peasants, hearing about the French Revolution from afar, unaffected by it. When the harvests were poor they traveled from Canada to the United States and back, oblivious of the internatio
nal frontier that the family had predated. They did not have a country, they had a family and a plot of land. Passports were unknown to them. They didn’t read, they didn’t vote. Slow, oblique, kindly, they had the virtues of vegetable growers and chicken raisers, never boasting, proud of having gone nowhere, still holding on, still mellow, still modest, with the farmers’ habitual mockery of wealth, materialism, worldliness, and pretension. They did not hate the English, who had ended up defeating and colonizing them; they simply believed the English to be another species, incomprehensible, not quite human, comic in their ambition, and, when roused, the enemy. In Father’s family, chickens and cows were currency; they recognized no laws but their own; they were entirely themselves, not wishing for transformation or any change. They couldn’t spell. At some point, talking to a clerk in a registry office, speaking the name they couldn’t write, Justice became Justus.

  Mother’s family was the opposite. They were turn-of-the-century arrivals from Italy, new Americans, with the immigrant tenacity of weevils: desperate, thin-skinned, active, sniping, hustling, competitive, clinging to the ladder and measuring each rung with money, cynical, crowding to prove themselves, wanting more and never having enough. They were natural jostlers and climbers and too ambitious to risk being truthful. They could easily have become a pack of criminals.

  But, lacking influence and fearing the law, needing to obey convention, they were forced to believe and finally enact their own clichés, making their platitudes into deeds. They became education-minded, the newly bourgeois father nagging his kids to succeed—one as a civil engineer, another an entrepreneur, two girls as teachers, another a nurse, and the youngest fulfilling his spiritual role in the Catholic family and becoming a priest, Father Louie. Mother deferred to him, because of his vows, and she praised the memory of her father: “He was a saint.” Before her marriage, Mother had been a teacher. She returned to teaching after Gilbert was of school age; he was in her first-grade class, her star pupil.

  We were churchgoers. All the priests knew us and approved. “The family that prays together, stays together,” Father Furty intoned from the pulpit. The good opinion of priests was like God smiling upon us, since the priests were God’s envoys on earth, his agents and deputies. They had the power to absolve us of sin, they could recommend our souls to God, their intercession could save us from hell, they could get us into heaven.

  Dad was in the church choir, and his sons were altar boys and acolytes. Franny and Rose spoke of becoming nuns. We were industrious and uncomplaining. I worked at the Stop and Shop bagging groceries, stocking shelves with cans. Fred worked for Dad, who hinted that Fred would take over the business. Floyd worked at a store that sold office supplies. Hubby had a paper route, and later, because he was the last child, even Gilbert took part-time jobs. The girls babysat the neighbors’ kids. We were the model of harmony and industry, an ideal family.

  Much of the credit for this went to Mother. She was seen as modest and thrifty, a nurturing, intelligent, practical, unflappable, and attentive homemaker. The Mother of the Year Award was not a joke. Though Mother never said so, she implied that not only could she qualify, she was much too busy being a mother to pursue it, and so deserved to win.

  But wait. All of this, of course, was essentially false, either half-truths or outright lies.

  What the world knew of us was untrue. We shut the door of our big, respectable-looking house and withdrew to the dilapidated interior of wobbly tables and uncomfortable chairs and dim lights, backing into it like rats protecting their nest, baring our yellow teeth, not just keeping the world out but actively engaged in the hopeless self-deception of keeping up appearances.

  Our family secrets were much too horrible to reveal. Take Father Louie. To the wider world he was a figure of piety, but we knew him as a scold, a know-it-all, a foulmouthed teller of dirty stories, a braggart, and a tyrant. He was cruel, he was probably insane. We dreaded his visits. He drank bitter-tasting Moxie soda and chain-smoked Fatima cigarettes and pinched us hard, twisting his fingers in our flesh, and told us we were lazy and spiteful. He picked on Floyd, scolding him in front of all of us: “You still wet the bed. You’re killing your mother! You’ll never get married—you’ll pee on your wife!” Floyd said he wanted to beat Uncle Louie to a pulp.

  We hated our after-school jobs. Fred was ashamed of Dad’s piddling shoe business. Floyd detested his boss at the stationery store and was forced to work there even on the day he won an achievement award at school, missing the ceremony. Because I worked nights at the Stop and Shop, I never engaged in after-school activities and seldom finished my homework. I usually stayed on when the store closed to help with restocking—a full carton against my chest as I jammed cans onto the shelves. I was fast; I knew how to use a labeler for multiple cans, pounding the prices in purple ink. I could slice open a crate of toilet paper with a box cutter without slashing any of the contents, round up thirty shopping carts at a go, and arrange heads of iceberg lettuce into symmetrical piles, but I could not hit a ball with a bat, nor could I catch a football.

  We were not lazy, but we were spiteful. We were backbiters, sneaks, constantly quarreling. We were also ashamed of ourselves. And Mother’s screeching tantrums were embarrassing. She seemed bewildered by the fact that there were so many people in the house, crowding her and wasting her time. “Kids wreck a marriage,” Dad said—one of his saws, but he said it for Mother’s sake; he seemed to enjoy us. The fact that Mother had given us birth was both her boast and her complaint.

  Was her father—Grampa—a saint? I knew him as a mustached pontificator, seated at a sewing machine, biting thread off a spool and knotting it with his teeth, like an otter eviscerating a herring. He would lecture me on manners, all the while hacking at pinstriped cloth with a narrow slice of marking soap. Because he was a master tailor, he made his own suits, and dressed like a dandy, with a vest and a watch chain, always flourishing a big cigar.

  Later, Floyd said, “Grampa looked like Alexander Woollcott,” and raising his little finger, “Woollcott, the twinkie, dash of lavender, who said to Anita Loos on one memorable occasion, ‘All my life, my greatest wish has been to be a mother.’”

  Grampa was henpecked by his wife—moaning and moonfaced Granma, famous for her frugality, the dandelions she dug, the dented cans and day-old bread loaves she bought. She was also famous for her disapproval of her daughter’s marriage to Father, whom she regarded as an innocent fool, and she made no secret that she believed his family, the Justuses, were barbarians.

  Mother resented our presence; the very fact of having children seemed to her an intrusion. She complained of our noise, hated doing the laundry, and could not cook with any competence. She did not have the patience for cooking. More than that, she did not have the love. You need to love the people who eat your food; loving your diners, you are inspired and generous in your kitchen.

  Mother seemed to relish her incompetence and challenge us with it. She made pea soup that was too lumpy to swallow; it was burned and scabbed on the bottom of the pot; those globs of ham fat floating on top were for flavor, she said. She made oatmeal that was too lumpy to swallow; it was burned and scabbed on the bottom and was usually served cold. I could not taste Mother’s oatmeal without wanting to vomit. When she made spaghetti the pasta congealed into a sodden cable of twisted worms because Mother was too hurried to stir it. It, too, was lumpy, burned on the bottom, yellow oil slick on top from the greasy hamburger that made it Bolognese. She made kidney stew. This was for Father, whose own mother had made it. All of us dreaded kidney stew night: stringy innards reeking of cow piss, mixed with crumbly potatoes, undercooked onions, and canned peas. “You set a wonderful table, Mother,” Father said.

  Her money-saving, institutional, one-dish cookery was always served from a big black pot, which we ate out of fear of offending her. One night Mother took the lid off the black pot and served a sinister stew. I could not touch it. She demanded that I eat it all. Perhaps I suspected that she deli
berately gave us these awful meals because she disliked us, and I refused to be a party to this hostility.

  I said, “I don’t like it.”

  Father said, “Eat it. There’s plenty of things I don’t like, and I eat them.”

  Mother glared at him: we were both damned. She never forgave him for this indiscretion.

  “You can’t go to school unless you finish your oatmeal,” Mother would say, and I sat there as the oatmeal stiffened. Mother was stubborn, and she loomed over me until I choked down a few mouthfuls, the taste of it bringing tears to my eyes. Several of those times I was late for school, and I gave as my excuse, with more insight than I knew, “My mother’s sick.”

  And peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on Wonder bread, marshmallows in big crinkly bags, something called Cheez Whiz on crackers, and Karo syrup spooned onto toast. All of these we prepared and ate on our own, and we told ourselves that we enjoyed them.

  Our guilty secret was that Father had gone broke. His company went into liquidation, but he was not told until the day it happened. The declaration of bankruptcy is always a whisper. In financial failure secrecy is everything: the people who matter find out the worst when it’s too late. American Oak was a leather company supplying cowhides to shoe manufacturers. Father had grown up in the stink of tanning hides, one of the smelliest businesses on earth. “Nothing like leather,” he boasted. He was a connoisseur of shoe leather—pebble grain, top grain, cordovan, hand stitching, tooling, the tongue, the welt, the shank, the vamp. “That’s where the steer rubbed against a barbed-wire fence,” he told me once, showing me a scar on a thick hide. But now the company was done for, and the shoe factories of New England would soon become a thing of the past, as dead as the cotton mills, as hollow-eyed and decrepit as their decaying towns.

  Father did not rise again. He was in his mid-forties, still relatively young, yet the world of ambition and achievement and fresh starts was a mystery to him. Money and profitable employment were ever-receding enigmas, partly wreathed in mystery, the rest in criminality. Dad was an innocent, and though he could be boisterous, talkative, and a resourceful storyteller with us, he was essentially a shy man. He had moments of theatricality, almost actorish behavior, often funny, sometimes bewilderingly submissive and melodramatic, as when, to placate Mother in one of her fits of anger at us, he would lift one hand for silence and say, “‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!’”