Mother Land

  At the front of the altar rail Mother genuflected before the tabernacle, in conspicuous piety, and then directed us into the first pew. We sidled in and sat compactly. Was it obvious that we hated to be together, that we were sitting separately, that only Floyd and I were conversing, the rest of them sitting stony-faced?

  “Has it occurred to you that Ma might be the poorest one of us?” Floyd said in a whisper. “Think of all the money and property she’s given away. She doesn’t even own the house she’s living in.”

  I lowered my head and said, “She might have another bank account or investments we don’t know about.”

  “Look at them,” Floyd said. “Queen Lear with Regan and Goneril.”

  The three of them were kneeling, Mother between the two daughters, all of them praying with folded hands, their bums against the pew. Mother blessed herself, made the sign of the cross. The daughters did the same. And they sat.

  Then they stood—we all did. The priest had entered, followed by two gray-haired women, one very thin, the other one potbellied, both purse-lipped and ostentatiously pious, like busybodies.

  “What happened to altar boys?” I asked Floyd.

  “When’s the last time you were in church?”

  The day of Father’s funeral was the correct answer, a decade ago, and before that I could not remember. The whole service seemed strange to me now, the altar positioned like a dining table, the priest standing behind it, facing the churchgoers, flanked by the two biddies. It was all unfamiliar, not like any other mass I had ever attended.

  The priest was a big, pink-faced man with a crown of white hair, handling the items on the altar with chubby fingers, pushing at the pages of the thick missal lying in its cradle, then clasping his hands and praying loudly—more ostentatious piety. The two women jostled on either side of him, seeming to compete for attention, while the priest carried himself back and forth, his big belly draped in brocaded vestments, gold tassels, his surplice trimmed in fine lace.

  “Nullifidian,” Floyd said under his breath. “Father Corkery, heretic and blasphemer. I miss Father Furty.”

  We stood, we knelt, we sat, we muttered responses. A man with a guitar strummed and sang “The Impossible Dream” while some people hummed. Then one of the women jingled a set of bells, and the priest, looking like a chef in drag, fussed with the chalice as if he was seasoning a soufflé.

  Adjusting his lace cuffs, tugging his sleeves, Father Corkery ascended the pulpit. He was a glowing, well-fed priest, plump under his swelling vestments. Now that he was lit by the blaze from above him, I could study him. It was obvious that he was vain about his thick white hair. His pink face set it off, his eyes were pale blue, his head seemed oversized and babyish because of his short neck, lost in the frills of his collar, and when he gripped the edge of the pulpit I could see the sparkle of his rings on those thick fingers.

  As Father Corkery frowned and inhaled and began, Floyd said, “He is the reason the Mormons call the Catholic Church the Great Whore of Babylon.”

  I heard Boston Irish in his voice as Father Corkery intoned the formulas of the mass. His hee-yah for here, his hee-yands for hands, his onna-ments for ornaments, and his nasal squeak marked him as a Southie native. He announced as his subject “Mottle Sin.”

  “In the reading today”—and clipping the r, the word came out veeding—“Paul mentions fy-ah. He means hell fy-ah, as a penalty for mottle sin.” He tapped the open Bible. “So it says right hee-yah . . .”

  I was not following his argument. I was listening to the peculiarities of his speech, imagining how to write them phonetically, and reflecting on how people spoke blithely of the Boston accent. But there was no such thing. There were fifty ways of speaking, and his was the lower-middle-class Irish accent of South Boston—“the lace-curtain Irish,” Father called them, as opposed to “the shanty Irish.” Someone from Southie could probably identify the priest’s precise neighborhood. Such men became the priests, the policemen, the politicians, roughly equivalent roles in the status-minded city.

  He was speaking about the sanctity of life, how “all living creetchahs belawng to Gawd.” As this was Father’s memorial mass, I listened for any mention of him.

  “Here it comes,” Floyd murmured.

  “Yet there are people who give this idea shawt shriff,” Father Corkery said. “Who are bent on destroying life. Believe me, that takes its toll.”

  He said this word as thole, using his emphatic tongue. That was true to his part of Boston, for in his next sentence he used the expression “square deal”—squa-yah theel—and how there were people who “vipped living children from the wombs of their mothers, Gawd love them, and then flushed them down the terlet. And dint cay-yah! Went to a function! Fixed themselves something to eat. Took and made themselves a drink. Had a bee-yah. Had a time!”

  “See what he’s doing? What he’s not talking about?” Floyd said. “No buggery. It’s what magicians call indirection.”

  Though Father Corkery was railing against abortion, speaking of the abortionists as murderers, the clinics as slaughterhouses and Nazi death camps “like Os-wich” (making it sound like a town on the Cape near Hah-wich), and that things had to change, I continued to be fascinated by his accent. Why did no one ever put this sort of local speech into a book?

  The heckling sermon went on, but I was thinking how local accents in America were being lost and absorbed into the more homogenized speech of TV and radio. That was a shame, because there was something in a local accent that helped you to verify the truth of what someone was saying. I could tell from the way Father Corkery spoke that he was posturing. He was talking about “doctors drinking a bottle of tonic”—bawtell of tawnic—“on their piazzas without a cay-ah in the world, and yet they’re in a state of mottle sin.”

  We could do something about it, he said. There was an election coming this fall.

  “If you’re fed up to hee-yah, go over they-ah to that polling booth and take your ballot and mahk it. Vote for the candidate who promises to overturn the mottle sin of abortion. Tell your friends and nay-biz. Tell them Father Cokkery wants to know. Demand to know where the candidates stee-yand on the issue.”

  “Ayatollah,” Floyd said.

  Mother’s head was bent in prayer.

  “Notice how much time he’s spending on the pervert priests,” Floyd murmured again.

  What I had noticed was that Father Corkery had been raising his voice throughout the sermon, along with a contrary wail, a sort of chanting, coming from outside the church but piercing the stained-glass windows with its shrillness.

  And when at last Father Corkery said, “Let us join ourselves in pray-yah,” I heard the rhythmic shouts again, not clear but loud and discordant with emotion.

  In this prayer that followed the sermon, Father Corkery mentioned the souls that had departed from this church, and lifted his eyes as if they had been launched through the roof of St. Joe’s. Among the three or four deceased, he spoke Father’s name, mispronouncing it as Joo-stiss.

  Making the sign of the cross, Floyd murmured, “In the name of the former and of the latter and of their holocaust. All men.”

  With muffled voices that became shouts, the doors of the church burst open and red-faced people appeared in the aisle, crying “Hypocrites!” in cracked nervous voices.

  They were protesting the cover-up of the pedophile priests, but we shrank—everyone did—taking the word personally.

  The mass fell apart at this point—it was almost over anyway. The priest busied himself, clutched at his skirts, said some hurried prayers, and fled. The churchgoers got up and pressed toward the door, driving out the protesters, who without their signs mingled with everyone else and were indistinguishable. Because we were in the long pew at the front of the church, we stood and shuffled and were the last to leave.

  We gathered again in the parking lot. Charlie said he had to go back to work.

  “I think it would be appropriate to visit Dad’s grave,” Moth
er said.

  “I’ll be there,” Charlie said. “Work can wait.”

  We drove separately to Oak Grove and met again in a group before Father’s rough-textured stone—two names on it, Father’s with his dates, and Mother’s with a birth date.

  In her primary school teacher’s voice, Mother said, “I’d like you all to form a circle.”

  We stepped forward, frowning, hating to be together.

  “Shall we join hands?” Mother asked.

  “No way,” Hubby said.

  “Is it necessary?” Rose asked.

  “I think it might be a nice idea,” Mother said.

  No one looked up. Fred said, “I agree.” He was Mother’s enforcer now, as Father had sometimes been. I reached to the left and right, and my hands were caught, I did not want to know by whom. Dry scaly fingers and soft palms, almost reptilian, damp in the May warmth, held mine in an unwilling grip, as Mother intoned, “Let us pray.”

  41

  “What Are You Doing Here?”

  People do not do us all the harm they are capable of, an obscure Frenchman once said. He did not know the abuses in Mother Land. Still, seeing the whole bad-tempered bunch mumbling insincere prayers at Father’s grave made me feel so rebellious, the next chance I had, I broke into Mother’s house—blindly, idly, on an insolent impulse.

  But the break-in did not go as planned. I had told myself that I wanted to sneak another look at the revealing check register, and a defiant thought urged me to steal something of value that might easily fit into my pocket—a ring, a keepsake, one of Mother’s rarer, uglier porcelain Hummels from the china cabinet. I did not want a souvenir or a trophy but a sort of token hostage, even better if it happened to be one of the lumpy baubles Mother had earmarked as heirlooms for Franny and Rose.

  I knocked, to give myself an excuse in case she might be home, though it was her morning for bird carving at the senior center. Hearing no reply—she had to be at the class—I crept to the back door and shoved it open as far as the security chain would allow, about three inches. I was insulted that she had locked it, indignant that she was so untrusting as to think someone might try to break in.

  Annoyed by the brass chain, which was evidence of her suspicion, I jammed my shoulder against it and reached through the crack to unscrew the plate that secured the chain fastener. My nimble fingers, my tiny screwdriver—Floyd had marveled at my diabolical dexterity the first time I had accomplished this. I stepped inside and screwed the plate back in place, then entered the kitchen, flipping open cupboard doors and glancing at the objects on the shelves, thinking, Anything I want . . .

  Passing a mirror, I got a glimpse at my face, dog-like and grim, and kept walking. A few glittering items on a saucer or a shelf had me raising my hand, but I became angry with myself for being distracted by them—a cheap thimble, a worthless salt shaker, an old bobbin, some Canadian coins. Past a narcissus blooming on a plant stand was a clock, loudly ticking, displaying the wrong time.

  I made for Mother’s desk and the check register, quickly scanning it for payments. I made a note of the larger amounts, then opened the china cabinet. The Hummels included a fat friar, a goose girl, an urchin, a chorister, a Madonna—pieces of hideous kitsch, yet I knew they had some value. I picked up some of them, checking for their authenticity—the bee inside the V on the base—and I saw a crystal Swarovski owl I had bought Mother at a duty-free shop many years before. Why not take that? It was mine anyway. Or what about those two Russian icons that Fred had brought from Moscow? The smaller of the two was resting against a mirror, and in the mirror I saw Mother on the sofa, her head to one side, her slack mouth half-open.

  My first thought was that Mother was dead. She had been sitting, probably reading, with a book at her feet, as if it had slipped from her knees. But she was canted sideways, her shoulders tipped, her slumped head resting on the back of the sofa, her hands in her lap, her face gray. She lay askew in the collapsed posture of someone who’d been assaulted.

  Behind her, a big, slow horsefly bumped the windowpane. Mother’s angle was not the repose of sleep but the collapsed-looking awkwardness of death, in extreme discomfort. I heard the fly, but I did not hear Mother breathing, though I knew that old people sleep with their mouths open. She was motionless, fragile, as if made of ashes, crumple-faced, with bluish fingers, twisted on the sofa.

  I was still holding the small crystal owl that had caught my eye. Mother was dead, so it didn’t matter. I was relieved that she couldn’t blame me—no, this cruel satisfaction was unworthy of me. I was so ashamed of the thought, I put the owl back into the china cabinet and latched the glass door. I accepted Mother’s death, thinking, I didn’t do it! and What now?

  “Hello?”

  The click of the door latch had awakened Mother. She twitched. She did not open her eyes, but she drew her mouth shut, blew out her thin lips and breathed, then sank back into stifled sleep, her mouth falling open again, her greenish tongue floating behind her teeth.

  Seeing her this way, back from the dead, exposed to any intruder—I could have been that stranger, standing six feet away, about to plunder her house—I wanted to protect her. I had never seen her so vulnerable, like a pale child discovered alone in an empty house.

  She had seemed stronger, stiffer, when I’d taken her to be dead. Now, knowing she was sleeping, she seemed more breakable than any of the porcelain objects in front of me.

  I was moved by the thought of her so small, so shrunken on the sofa that was like another throne, and I felt something like love for her—not the love I’d ever felt for anyone else, but the word as shorthand for a rapture of gratitude that she had not been lying there dead, that she was only sleeping. I had a second chance to redeem myself.

  Sometimes you see a child throwing a tantrum and your immediate impulse is hatred. But then you notice how skinny and helpless the child is, peculiarly grotesque in the tantrum, tear-smeared cheeks, snot on her chin, and you realize that she is not angry but afraid. Then your hatred is overtaken by sympathy. The poor thing feels trapped and terrified, feels weak, and you are strong. Why not try to help, or at least not judge the kid? That was the feeling I had for Mother, a kind of resolve, not love but pity, a shallow reflex of mercy for her frailty.

  “What are you doing here?” Mother said. “How did you get in?”

  “Through the back door,” I said, stammering, because she was fully awake.

  “It was locked,” she said with a flash of malice.

  “I thought something was wrong. I knocked. You didn’t answer. I was worried.” I gulped in my lie.

  “I was just resting my eyes,” Mother said, another lie.

  I hated myself for my lie; I hated Mother’s lie. After all the purifying wash of emotion, my sympathy became hostility again.

  “I was trying to make sure you were all right.”

  More lies, falsehood as conversation. I resented her putting me through this.

  “Carving class was canceled. I was reading. I like a good book. I don’t need TV.” She smacked her lips in this sanctimony.

  “I thought something might have happened.”

  She pulled herself upright. “What were you doing in my china cabinet?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You were going to take something.”

  Mother, the interrogator, was expert at bluffing, and was successful at this informed sort of game playing, because her instincts were uncanny, especially in assessing the basest motives. She was prescient when it came to criminality, but this was another way of saying that she believed no one was reliable, no one loyal, everyone a potential intruder and felon; no one could be trusted. Anyone who offered her a helping hand she suspected was intending to pick her pocket. She woke from a nap and, startled by her own child in her house, saw a thief.

  “I wouldn’t take anything from you, Ma.”

  “Oh, no, not you,” she said, her cynicism making her jolly. She was wide awake now. She clearly saw my lie, and it made her h
appy.

  “Want a drink of something?”

  “Just water.”

  She drank loudly, lapping and swallowing, sucking at the lip of the tumbler, her forehead and scalp contracting with the effort. I felt sorry for her again, hearing the gurgle-gulp in her throat. She never looked older than when she was eating or drinking.

  “Guess what?” she said, handing me the glass.

  I knew it had to be bad news: she was trying not to smile.

  “Walter didn’t get his promotion.”

  Mother seldom hid her contempt for the in-laws. She began to laugh at Rose’s husband.

  “God forgive me”—her mirth was genuine, another sign of life—“but what difference will it make?”

  The most reassuring sound in the world, the Chinese say, is the thump of your neighbor falling off his roof. This was the sort of cruel folk wisdom that appealed to our family, and especially to Mother, for the best news, the news that traveled fastest, always concerned someone’s misfortune.

  A flooded basement, a downed tree on a car, frozen pipes, a painful ailment (better still if the ailment had a ridiculous name like shingles or hives or mono)—these brought joy to us, to all but the victim. “Guess what?” Hubby might say—Mother’s voice, Mother’s question. Someone had piles. Or someone’s teenager totaled the family car. The fact that the wrecked car was expensive made the news even sweeter. My first divorce and the penury that followed had been followed by whispers of derision—Jay’s been taken down a peg. Floyd had told me this in detail, and he had a great deal to tell, because we’d been on the outs when I’d split up with Diana. The rest of the family had descended on Floyd, knowing that he would welcome news of my failure and disgrace. When this turned into my deep unhappiness and bankruptcy they all pitched in and told him what they thought of me—and of course, in this way, ingratiated themselves with him. Have we got some wicked news for you! I had, so to speak, fallen off my roof. But after Floyd and I became friends again he was able to tell me all these stories of betrayal, of the other family members laughing behind my back.