Mother Land

  But no, I was also living my life, the productive part that had nothing to do with my family: books, boats, travel, and being a father to my own children, including Charlie. If I was more than usually attentive to Mother, it was because I thought that at any minute she would die. In any given visit I might be seeing her for the last time. But she would have laughed if I’d said that to her. Though she never explicitly conveyed the impression to me, always assuming that I’d be back soon, and even speaking with that valedictory sigh of her bags being packed (“I’m ready to go”), she seemed to insist that she would be here long after everyone else had gone.

  At intervals I fled Mother Land. I needed to insert myself in the world of reasonable people and vitalizing work. To get away from the family I had traveled in Africa for ten months, from north to south.

  I made this travel into a book. When the book appeared, I was seen as a contrarian because of my skeptical view of the aid business and the charities, the virtue industry—not altruistic at all, but self-serving, and many of them doing harm. A contrarian is useful in the spectacle of media head-butting. The book sold well, and I was asked to write another—more travel. This removed me again from the furious buzz of the family. I saw my boys in London and discovered the pleasure of being their houseguest, their dinner companion, a fourth at Scrabble or whist.

  In a library, a bookstore, a restaurant, or a distant land—Zambia or South Africa, or even the London of my first marriage—I was reminded of why I left home. I was happy in those places. I had no past. People spoke with affection about parents or children, they talked politics, they discussed books or plays or music.

  I had forgotten how clearheaded I could be, how there were other people in the world besides my narcissistic mother and predatory siblings. Now and then I came across a problematical family. An African would complain that he had to marry his brother’s wife, because his brother had died, and his brother had no cattle. Or a familiar tale of daughters-turned-handmaidens who picked their mothers’ pockets—quite a common pattern. But no matter where on earth I roamed I never came across any mother resembling Mother in her ferocity, her vulnerability, her megalomania, or in her calculated partiality, her deliberate injustices. “Ma’s disloyalty makes her unique, outside the pages of the Oresteia,” Floyd often said, and it seemed true.

  I had a relationship for a time with a woman I loved, though I knew it was doomed. She was still of childbearing years, and I told her frankly that my days of fathering more children were over. But just as important, I could not imagine bringing a woman so innocent into my family. And so we parted, and she found a father for the child she wanted, and I never heard from her again. She had become a mother.

  Long ago, I had discovered that in travel I became another person, someone I knew well and liked best—the person I really was. Among strangers, under another sky, in a distant land, I was myself: travel brought me to adulthood, the joy of traveling alone. In these years of family oppression, I fled and wrote about the remote Oriente province of Ecuador, I paddled a kayak down the Zambezi, I cycled through Scotland, I researched Ayurvedic India, I planned a second long journey for a book. And all this time in lecture halls and in bookstores I met my readers.

  On one of those trips I found myself talking to a lawyer. This was in Ohio. He told me he was from a large family. “Eight children, actually,” he said, almost in apology, feeling that he’d have to justify the number of kids, defend them, give them some color. I knew the feeling. It was saying you were from another country, another culture, one that needed a little explaining, because it was Mother Land. Usually on these trips my family was far away and forgotten, but this man interested me.

  “How many of you are on speaking terms?” I asked.

  “I see one of my younger brothers,” he said. “The rest of them . . .” His voice trailed off, though I could have finished his sentence.

  “I know,” I said, and told him a little about my family.

  “It’s terrible when there’s money involved,” he said. “We had quite a lot of that conflict.”

  I told him about Mother, but holding back, just hinting at her contradictions, her manipulations, the milder examples of her treachery.

  “That’s very Mediterranean,” he said. “My mother was just the same. Impossible.”

  “My mother still writes checks.”

  “She what?” He threw his head back and howled.

  I wanted to tell him more, because he was a stranger, because he came from a similar family, because he recognized Mother and didn’t judge her, or me. But there wasn’t time to get into it.

  “This can’t be a conversation,” he said, sizing up the situation and my state of mind. He was, after all, a lawyer. “There’s too much for idle talk.”

  “Maybe it’s a book.”

  “It’s a book,” he said. “And you may think you’re having a hard time now. But your mother is still alive. You’re still her children. You can’t imagine what life will be like without her.”

  That was the event I could not contemplate, because it filled me with confusion. A normal reaction would have been, How awful, and yet I sometimes dreamed of it as a release. He seemed to guess at my thoughts.

  “When your mother dies you won’t feel like a child anymore. Your siblings won’t be children. You’ll be bewildered. You’ll have to put the whole family back together. But you won’t have her. You’ll suddenly be orphans. Your mother can’t be replaced.”

  Maybe he saw me smiling. To cover myself I said, “And then what?”

  “You’ll look for allies within the family. Or maybe there’ll be no one. Families go to pieces. Mine did.”

  “I have children. That’s my family.”

  Before an assignment in Scotland, I stopped in London. I invited my two boys to dinner at Rules restaurant in Maiden Lane. I associated the restaurant with happiness, with celebrations, times when I was feeling flush. Over steak and grouse pie and a bottle of Merlot, we talked of their projects—Julian was writing a book, Harry was making a documentary. And what was I doing?

  “Going biking through the Highlands,” I said. “Starting at Inverness.”

  “I remember doing that when we were at school,” Julian said. “Fun.”

  I was abashed hearing this: reduced to that, a big man on a bike, pedaling up and down the Scottish hills, looking for something to write about.

  Harry said, “You see more from a bike, actually,” making a case for me.

  “It wasn’t my idea. A magazine wanted it. They get advertising from the Scottish Tourist Board. That’s how these things work.”

  “You should write another novel,” Julian said.

  “I haven’t got the heart,” I said. “It takes courage. Anyway, all the good stories I know are true.”

  “Pretty soon it’ll be time for your autobiography. You always said you’d write one like Rousseau’s Confessions, putting everything in—the whole truth.”

  Harry said, “The only autobiography you can trust is the one that reveals something that’s disgraceful. Orwell said that.”

  “I agree. But I’ve changed my mind. No autobiography.”

  “Why, Dad?” Harry said, seeming genuinely disappointed. “You’ve had such an adventurous life. You’ve seen so much. The sixties—you were there! You were the fifth Beatle.”

  “I think I’ll keep it to myself. I’m not sure I want my life to be reviewed.”

  Julian said, “So you don’t have any ideas?”

  “I might do something with my family—find a way of fictionalizing them somehow. I’ve never written about them.”

  “That’s a book I’d read,” Harry said.

  “But I don’t have the time. I’m trying to finish another travel book. And I’m too close to my family at the moment.” I thought about the events of the past year and smiled. “It’s funny, I never thought I’d be friends with Floyd, or conspiring with him in petty burglaries.”

  The boys looked up from their meal, r
ather hesitant, still holding on to their knives and forks, in the way of people thinking they might have just heard some bad news—but not too sure, hoping they hadn’t, squinting a little at the possibility of further disclosures.

  “Burglaries?” Julian asked at the unexpected word. “What kind?”

  “Break-ins.”

  “That’s serious.”

  “No,” I said, and laughed. “It was just Grandma’s house. Last year. And most of the time there was no break-in at all. We just walked in.”

  “You did it more than once?”

  “A couple of times. Uncle Floyd went back a few more times,” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  They had lowered their faces at me, looking shocked, embarrassed—none of the smiles I had expected, no encouragement. I felt I had told them a great joke and they were outside it, disapproving, as though the joke was in bad taste.

  “We didn’t take anything,” I said. “We just creepy-crawled her house when she was at her weekly woodcarving class.”

  “What was the point of breaking in?” Harry asked.

  “To find her check register. See whom she’d been giving money to. I broke in one day and took them all to Kinko’s and photocopied them. A hundred pages! We nicked a few things for the hell of it.” They looked even gloomier. “What’s wrong? We’re in there padding around like cat burglars, whispering. It was a great feeling, intruding on my mother’s privacy for a change, looking at her lies and deceptions. She’s given a ton of money away, mostly to Franny and Rose. I’ve got all the proof, the little rationalizations, in her own handwriting. We know everything now.”

  I saw myself and Floyd squeezing through the back door, unscrewing the hasp, lifting off the chain, and tiptoeing into the still house. A childhood caper, and a childish thrill, certainly, but what was more intense and satisfying than a childish thrill? The aromas of Mother’s awful food and yellow soap and dusty curtains; Floyd talking about fingerprints, slipping on gloves, hoisting a flower as he passed a vase, walking in a self-conscious, spidery way, all the while suppressing giggles—the excitement and absurdity of it, Floyd finally saying, “Look what she’s making us do. It’s all her fault!”

  Julian looked irritable. He shook his head. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

  “You actually sneaked into her house?” Harry said.

  “We had to,” I said. “We wanted to find out where the money was going.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “She might need it in the future. She’s being scammed. We’re looking out for her interests.”

  “That’s not the reason,” Julian said. “You’re doing it because it’s fun.”

  “Of course.” But they were adamant in their disapproval. “You don’t understand.”

  “I don’t want to understand,” Harry said.

  It was impossible to explain to them why this was so important to me, why at the age of sixty I had taken the greatest pleasure in breaking into my mother’s house, why I had considered it a victory—how close I’d felt to Floyd, how happy I’d been on those days of the break-ins.

  “It’s so childish,” Julian said.

  “Yes,” I said. “That’s why it’s such a pleasure. And I found out the truth of my mother’s feelings, looking at where the checks had gone.”

  “What’s the truth, then?”

  “That she doesn’t like me. I have the proof.”

  “Why do you need it?”

  “Maybe it absolves me for disliking her.”

  They didn’t want to know any more. It was a mistake to have told them so much, but I found the whole subject irresistible.

  “We love you, Dad,” Harry said. “Can we leave it at that?”

  After my Scottish trip and the writing of the piece, I went back to the Cape and descended into childhood again. Floyd had left a message on my answering machine. Call me. I’ve got news.

  He had gone to Mother’s while I was away and found money missing from all the accounts, had even found a new account, a money market fund that could be used for checking. He had found envelopes with jewelry tucked inside, one with Franny’s name on it, the other Rose’s.

  “The ultimate break-in,” Floyd said when I saw him. “We boost something valuable, maybe some jewelry.”

  It was as though he was now so used to coming and going in the house that he felt he could claim anything, because he’d seen what others had done.

  We went back, this time wearing coats with big pockets, looking to carry away something of value. The house was locked. The door had a second chain on it, another bolt.

  “She must suspect something,” Floyd said.

  But we were undeterred. We got in through an upper window, using the ladder from Dad’s shed. Then, creeping from room to room, we went through her desk, her chest of drawers, her jewelry box. And we found nothing. The envelopes were gone. The check register and the other financial records were in new hiding places.

  “Bitches!” Floyd said. “They’ve taken it all. There’s nothing left to steal.”

  38

  Hot Dinners

  Driving down the empty road toward Mother’s—she had called, with an ambiguous summons, saying, “Of course, if you’d rather not come . . .”—I was marveling at the nakedness of the Cape in February. My tires hissed, licking at the grit and slime of winter. Tree branches were so crooked when they were stripped bare, the trees themselves so witch-like. Freezing weather made me feel aged and fragile; the winter creature, confined, shrunken by the cold.

  Summer on the Cape, by contrast, was a green world of sunlit privacies, the density of speckled and shadowy woods, the leafy trees giving the impression of largeness and health, protecting the house, hiding the neighbors. The Cape foliage was its real beauty, more beautiful even than its sloping dunes and beaches of smooth stones. The Cape trees looked indestructible: seedlings with their fans of shapely oak leaves sprang up between the hydrangeas and needed to be yanked like weeds. Infant pitch pines and cedars bristled at the margin of the lawn and were sometimes mowed. Never mind that the soil was bad. Dig down six inches and there was sour sand, but the native trees were suited to it; they seemed big and powerful, and so were the local roses, small floppy blossoms on a tangle of brambles.

  On winter days like this the real size of the trees was obvious. Without leaves, the oaks and locusts and pepperidge trees were spindly, round-shouldered, starved, hollow-eyed, and knobby. The pitch pines were revealed as frail—the sea winds killed them with salt, they shedded half their needles. Only the cedars and junipers stood straight, but were not thick enough to hide the neighbors. The roses were over, the geraniums had blackened in the first frost, and, in this soil, none of the trees grew tall.

  I had known the Cape summers as a small boy. I had gloried in those sunny months, loving the whine of insects, the hot tang of tar bubbles on the sun-softened roads, the marsh hawks hovering. As an older man, working through the seasons, I saw the truth of the Cape: it was lovely only in the summer. Locals hated tourists, so they longed for cold months, but the cold months were bleak and there were often nine of them. The fall colors were too brief to be an event—the russet and gold leaves were beaten down by the rain; and the winter was stark, the Cape a corpse in the sickly light, gray grass, black trees, gangrenous leaf mold, and too many houses. Far fewer people to support the stores and the restaurants, giving the towns a look of abandonment. The roads were always wet and peculiarly dirty in winter, the roadsides thick with ropes and twists of accumulated sand and grit. Blown leaves were bunched against stone walls and rusty fences and pasted onto the broken roads, for in winter the frost heaved the roads apart, and the scrape of snow plows deepened the potholes. The rain was brown, falling from the brown sky, or else it shot hard out of the northeast, thrashing, whips of it against the shingles. I like it when it’s bleak, some Capies dishonestly boasted. They meant: We have no other place to go. We are dying here.

  The Cape in winter made me feel morbid. I resented t
he conceit of Mother’s ancient vanity. I hated old age.

  No matter how resourceful an adult I could be in the world at large—the solitary traveler in the African bush—when I was on the Cape I was a boy, a son, something of a burden, an annoying brother. This also meant that, on the Cape, I found it hard to relate to my own children, who were not boys at all but men—Charlie in Boston, Julian and Harry in London. I heard from them all the time; their lives were busy, busier than mine. But I seldom saw them. The pull of Mother, the gravity of accumulated distress, was strong.

  My Africa book was published. This account of my overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town—trains, trucks, buses, boats, bush taxies, and on foot—got the usual reviews, some praise for being truthful and felicitous, some abuse for being critical. Mother’s example had convinced me that most praise sounded like belittlement. I dedicated the book to her. And on this cold day I was visiting her with a copy of the book lying gift-wrapped on the passenger seat.

  “I want you to look at something,” Mother said as a way of greeting me, seizing my wrist and guiding me across the front lawn, which was stubbly this late winter afternoon, the grass decaying in the dampness, the soil as soft as cake. Mother had a remarkable grip. I could feel her finger bones pinching me hard like salad tongs, that same cold tug, that same snap.

  I saw nothing. I said so. Mother said, “Because you’re not looking!”

  Mother always spoke as if someone else was listening—many people, in fact.

  The thing she wanted me to see was a birdbath, a cement saucer propped on a fluted cement stand, a crust of frost-rimmed ice in its declivity.

  “Nice,” I said. From where I stood it looked like a crude toadstool, lifeless in the early dusk.

  “Look closer.”

  Lettering carved around the rim, or rather cast in the cement (you bought these things at Wally’s Garden Center in South Yarmouth), read, To the Dearest Mother on Earth. A bird had shat on it, making the crucial word read Direst.

  “It’s lovely, Ma.”

  “Rose’s idea,” she said. “What’s that?”