She was looking at the wrapped parcel under my arm.
“A book.”
“Oh?”
“One of mine.”
“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.
“About Africa.”
“Those poor people,” she said. “I give them a little something every Christmas.”
“It’s for you. Look.” I unwrapped it and turned to the dedication page. To my Mother, on her 92nd birthday.
Tucking it under her arm, she said, “I’d like to give it to Rose. She’s so generous. Isn’t that the most beautiful birdbath you’ve ever seen? She knows how much I love birds.”
In that moment, with hardly any effort, she managed to insult me, anger Rose—who would be getting the book secondhand—and maintain control over us. What annoyed me even more was that I resented giving Mother a copy of the book in the first place.
“I always knew you were going to be a writer,” Mother said, leading the way into the house. “You used to lie on the living room floor with a pencil and a piece of paper.”
I sat and Mother began to talk about how proud she was of the family. She was triumphant. We were at war with each other. The coils of complexity, the old whispers and jealousies, the sedition and sniping, the combustible memories in the family, and the ancient sadism—all of it made it impossible for me to tell when the war had started. At birth, probably: we had never known peace.
There wasn’t much love, but somehow Mother had taught us that love and money were equal, that money was a measure of love. She was brilliant in her partiality, keeping every amount she gave unequal, She had a competitive and resentful person’s instinct for measuring, for teaching us the subtleties of shortfall, the scourge of scarcity. Father had been a moderating influence—his gentle persuasion made Mother aware of her unfairness. “Measure, measure,” was one of his taunts. Later, I learned how, with a compulsive measurer, you always fail.
This was running through my head as we sat in Mother’s house on this cold day, Mother talking about Rose’s gift of the birdbath and Franny’s attentiveness to her.
“Would you do me a favor? I would be so grateful,” Mother said, still in the voice that suggested she believed she was being overheard by many people.
“Gladly.”
“There’s a towel on the clothesline,” Mother said. “Would you ever go out and get it for me? It should be dry by now. I hung it out to dry this morning. The ground was so slippery! I thought I might fall and break my hip. But I had no choice. The towel was soaking wet.”
This seemed an extravagant explanation for a wet towel. I guessed there was a story behind it, or else I would not have heard all this prologue. Mother never spoke of effort without following it up with blame.
I got the towel. It was still damp and gray on this damp gray day. Mother, too frugal for a clothes dryer, was perhaps the last person on the Cape to use wooden clothespins.
“That’s Floyd’s,” she said.
“Floyd’s towel?”
“The one he used.” She cocked her head. “He was here yesterday.”
She spoke in a weary way, as though characterizing Floyd’s visit as an ordeal.
“Really—he was here?”
“At the crack of dawn,” Mother said. “I was still in my bathrobe, making coffee.” By her tone I could see that she was the victim of an early-morning siege, Floyd hammering on her door. She made a martyred face. “He brought me a pizza,” she said, “that he made himself. ‘You can eat it for dinner with a bottle of wine’”—her mimicry of Floyd’s glottal stop on “bottle”—baw-oo—was accurate.
She went on telling me what was to be a story that typified the triumphant phase of her motherhood.
But even so, I was surprised, because I knew the story that lay behind it. Another Christmas had come and gone, another set of separations. Six weeks before, around New Year’s, Floyd had complained to me of Mother’s generosity toward Franny and Rose over the holidays: large checks—Floyd was still monitoring the outflow. He had received a pillow, I had gotten a jar of grape jelly (“Made by Trappist Monks”). We had all chipped in at Fred’s suggestion and bought Mother a rocker. This angered Floyd.
“Great, we just bought Franny and Marvin a new chair.”
He reminded me of the letter among Mother’s papers specifying that all the furniture in the house belonged to the inheritor—Franny.
Floyd was particularly aggrieved because the winter’s low temperatures had frozen his water pipes. His oil burner was broken. Apart from a kerosene stove that gave off noxious fumes, Floyd had no heat or water.
“I’m living like a rodent! I’m nibbling cheese! My nose is running. And Franny has a new rocker. She owns Ma’s house!”
Floyd did not communicate with Mother for six weeks. Normally he called her, as I did, once or twice a week to ask whether she needed anything—and of course, as we all did, to find out if she was still alive.
On one of my calls, Mother said, “Is Floyd mad at me?”
“I don’t know.”
It was a family trait to avoid being anyone’s advocate, because it seemed to demonstrate an alliance.
“Are you sure he’s not mad at me? I haven’t heard a word from him for some time.”
Mother was still sharp enough at ninety-two to evaluate the separate attentions of her children. Her alertness was in keeping with her need to control: no one was safe from her gaze, and even the despised children were scrutinized—perhaps given more scrutiny.
I said, “Why don’t you call him? See what’s on his mind.”
She seemed doubtful, a long silence on the phone, a familiar sigh, vibrato from the roof of her mouth.
I said, “I mean, you’re his mother.”
This remark came back to me the next day, Hubby in a bantering call telling me that Mother had mocked my saying (and she improved it a little), After all, you are his mother, aren’t you?—turning it into an accusation.
Yet, seeming to act on what I’d said, she called Floyd. She invited him over. And, overcoming all his Christmas fury, Floyd had visited. I now knew that he’d brought her a pizza he’d made. He had also—the towel was proof—taken a shower there, because his pipes had frozen.
Mother got what she’d asked for, a visit from her son. And afterward she sat jeering at him, laughing at his pizza, lamenting his early arrival.
“And he left me a little present—his wet towel to launder.”
He’d given her what she wanted more than anything, a grievance.
Two more cold Cape Cod months drizzled by. Easter came. Floyd was in Pennsylvania—a new girlfriend and also an escape from the holiday. Few of us still went to church. It seemed that Franny and Rose had other plans. Only Hubby and I were on the Cape. I kept my head down. Hubby was not Mother’s favorite, but he wanted to make some improvements to his house on the Acre, and he had a plan to soften Mother up for a loan. He called it a loan, but when the lender is ninety-two years old, all loans can be comfortably regarded as gifts.
Realizing that she would be spending Easter on her own, Mother encouraged Hubby to visit. If she couldn’t have one of her favorites, she would settle for him. And before he made the visit final, Hubby said he needed a little money: “Just a loan. I’ll pay you back.” Eager for his company and his bringing food, relieved that she wouldn’t be alone, Mother agreed in principle to the loan.
“I’ll bring scallops,” Hubby said.
Mother said, “I love scallops,” yet as soon as she hung up, Fred called unexpectedly to say that he’d just arrived excitedly from China. He was on the Cape. Could he host her for Easter dinner?
“Hubby insisted he wanted to come over,” Mother said to Fred. “You know how he is. He doesn’t seem to realize that I can look after myself.”
Hubby’s visit was now a burden, and particularly annoying because it meant she’d have to turn down Fred’s invitation to dinner.
Hubby and Moneen made their Easter visit to Mother. They sat with her to
watch the Easter service on TV. They brought flowers. Moneen sautéed the scallops and served them on angel hair pasta. Hubby presented Mother with a chocolate cake. Then he scraped his chair back and clutched his face and told her his tale of woe. Mother sent him away with a check.
“But remember, it’s a loan,” Hubby said. “I’m paying you back.”
So powerful was Mother’s conceit that she was indestructible, she said, “I can give you a few years, Hubbard, but no more than that.”
That night she called Franny and Rose, she called Fred and Gilbert, she prayed to Angela, she even called me. In a towering rage she denounced Hubby to everyone. He and Moneen had shown up late, with a pound of scallops (“I know for a fact that they were on sale”) and “a store-bought cake.” He’d then demanded money. “How could I refuse?” She’d given him a check, and instead of thanking her he’d made a big show of saying he’d pay her back. What a bore it had all been. And on Easter, the holiest day of the year.
“They took home the leftovers,” she said. “They left me dishes to wash.”
To please Mother, we joined her in disparaging Hubby and pitied her for the unsatisfactory dinner, the wasted day, the ingratitude.
We entertained her after that, early dinners at nearby restaurants, but because each of us children were on bad terms with each other, we took her out separately.
“Franny and Rose would have loved to be here,” Mother said to me at her favorite restaurant, the Happy Clam—my night to host her for dinner. She knew they would not have come for anything, but it was another way of putting me in the wrong and justifying her role as a benign dictator.
“They hate me,” I said.
“No one hates you,” she said.
“It’s true. But I’m all right with it.”
Mother was chewing as she said, “It’s so sad when people can’t learn to get along.”
The dinners continued. Mother was the only one of us who was truly happy. Because of this, she concealed her happiness, so that we would not be complacent. In her oblique, not to say perverse, pathology, she became even more secretive. She said the opposite of what she felt, or else was noncommittal. She was soon famous for her silences.
“Read my mind,” she seemed to say, and she smiled whenever we attempted this impossible feat. We were always wrong. No matter how hard we tried, we could not get her to admit she was happy. She refused to be satisfied, because admitting this would also be to admit that we had succeeded. She saw her mother role as that of someone who had to insist that we had failed her. Only that way could she triumph. Every dinner was a celebration of our failure. Angela was perfect, but Angela was dead, only useful as a spiritual guide. Angela could not pay the bill at the Happy Clam.
I apologized to her at one of these dinners, just to see what she would say.
“You’ll just have to try harder,” she said.
I came to understand that each of us was alone. Each of us pretended to have Mother, but it was not so. Nor did we have anyone else. Mother had us all. Mother had everything.
39
A Nest of Vipers
After years of steady work, a daily routine, writing all morning, a walk after lunch, more work in the late afternoon until wine o’clock, at six or seven, I had begun to slow down. And, in my solitude, I began to observe the family with a fascinated gaze. I saw what I had missed before. The battles had wearied me, yet had not repelled me. I had become absorbed in the bickering; the fighting in the family was like a sulfurous form of vitality. I even turned it into work, making notes as I had done as a young man in central Africa, in a district of warring clans or a peculiarly feud-prone village. I saw that what I had taken to be quarrelsome siblings and a vain and manipulative mother was much more poisonous, disruptive, and dangerous—a nest of vipers. The dreary family now seemed extraordinary in its cruelty and selfishness. This revelation liberated me and made me patient in my fascination.
My new habit of doing nothing, or very little, seemed natural, a period of rest after labor. I wrote less, I read more. I noticed that the memoirs I was rereading, Greene’s A Sort of Life, Conrad’s A Personal Record, and Kipling’s Something of Myself, were all published by writers in their sixties. Waugh wrote A Little Learning in his late fifties. These evasive books convinced me that I would never do this myself. I had been pondering this subject ever since the lunch at Rules in London when Julian had said, “Pretty soon it’ll be time for your autobiography.” I would never write an autobiography, with all the misleading facts, half-truths, and evasions of an irregular life. A memoir with big gaps seemed worse than an exhaustive self-examination.
I imagined the book’s appearance. My life would be reviewed by envious hacks, bitter academics, and ambitious young writers. I knew—I had been all of these people in my career. The summation of my life: “Some good parts, lots of boring parts, wasted time—on the whole, a mediocre life. Not recommended.”
It must occur as a grim foreboding to many writers that when the autobiography is written, it is handed to a reviewer to be graded on readability as well as veracity and fundamental worth. With this notion of my life being given a C-minus, I began to understand the omissions in autobiography and the many writers who refused to write one.
Besides, I had at times bared my soul. What is more autobiographical than the sort of travel book, a dozen tomes, that I had been writing for the past forty years? In every sense that candor goes with the territory. And the setting down of personal detail can be a devastating emotional experience. The assumption that the autobiography signals the end of a writing career also made me pause. Here it is, with a drum roll, the final volume before the writer is overshadowed by silence and death, a sort of farewell and an unmistakable signal that one is “written out.”
And what is there to write? In the second volume of his autobiography, V. S. Pritchett speaks of how “the professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing.” Pritchett goes on, “The true autobiography of this egotist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.”
The more I reflected on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big, talkative family I grew up in, and early on I developed the fiction writer’s useful habit of taking liberties—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction.
I thought of a line in Anthony Powell’s novel Books Do Furnish a Room, where the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, reflecting on a slew of memoirs he is reviewing, writes, “Every individual’s story has its enthralling aspect, though the essential pivot was usually omitted or obscured by most autobiographers.”
My essential pivot, was it Mother?
This decision not to write an account of my life made me happy. It was a reprieve from a chore I’d dreaded, and it gave me more leisure to think about my family—a different sort of chronicle, nothing about writing but rather a reflection on power, a study of malice.
I was watchful. I seemed to slip into idleness, as though I had sustained a bad injury—cracked my spine, maybe—and in the process of healing grew fat and, most of my passion spent, never regained the desire for effort. “I don’t have the fire in my belly anymore,” older men used to say to me, to explain why they’d retired from their work. They were usually bureaucrats, foreign service officers, competitive men, and when they said it I always involuntarily glanced down and saw a broad complacent paunch.
That was my condition now, living in Mother Land, my family of greater interest to me than any people I had traveled among in a life of roaming the world of hungry people struggling to survive. The family now seemed to me just like those strugglers and
scavengers, except that they wore shoes. And in the meantime, in my leisure, I found other things to like. I learned, as one does in idleness, to avoid occasions when people were laboring, toiling for a fair day’s pay. I needed to be around other idle people, stragglers like myself. I did not have to look farther than my family.
I found a horrid enjoyment in the bickering, took a bystander’s glee in the fighting of the siblings—the ones who’d gotten a bit of Mother’s money battling the ones who’d gotten a lot of it. “It’s so depressing,” Floyd said. “Didi doesn’t understand it at all.” Didi was his new woman, just a name so far; I hadn’t seen her. But the struggle seemed to me like a process of life, like the oldest story in the world, the queen setting her subjects at odds, animating them with unequal handouts to test them and to guarantee her dominance. It was at once like the origin of war and the key to power, for the more the subjects fought among themselves, the less the queen was threatened.
Had Mother guessed how violent a process she had kicked into motion? I don’t think so. Mother was vain but she wasn’t evil, and on a fundamental level she needed us. She would not have wanted us to destroy each other. She would have been shocked if she had known how fierce we fought—the insults, the gibes—how close we came to wrecking one another’s lives, and how miserable it made us all.
And yet that was what happened. What made this antagonism so bad was that, as older adults, we behaved more like children than ever before. We seemed intent on devouring each other, the endo-cannibalism that existed in the most self-destructive rituals of remote peoples. We had the time for it. Our careers were over, or we were part-timers. Not much else to do but fight; not ambitious but still greedy, still angry.
Mother was more alive, more active than I could remember, more acute and demanding, on the phone all day and half the night, wanting to be visited, eager for presents, the center of our world.
Mother’s health was good, so she mocked other people’s illnesses—Marvin’s hypochondria, Jonty’s whining, Franny’s worrying. Of Walter’s back problems Mother said, “I’ve never had anything wrong with my back.” Of Rose’s reduced hours at school, Mother said, “She only works two days a week,” always comparing others to herself and to her life of toil.