Mother Land

  “How difficult. A pill.”

  “But for a reason.” She regarded me with a diagnostic half-smile. “Men have no idea.”

  Beyond the periphery of my tribal existence, life went on. Work saved me; work was my sanity. Though I seldom heard from my sons, I took this as a sign that they were fulfilled, preoccupied with their own work, and in any case did not need me to be interested. I called to inquire: How were they? Did they have love in their lives? What was new?

  “I’d rather not say,” Julian told me in his guarded way. From whom had he gotten this caution? Not from me. “I don’t want to jinx it.”

  I took this as a promising response. I did not press him or ask for more. A month or so later he called to say that he had good news: he was engaged and wanted to be married soon. Would I come to the wedding in England? And Harry called to say that he, too, had fallen in love and could now tell me he was living with a wonderful woman. Might I be inclined to visit?

  I flew to London, feeling like a tourist in a city where I’d lived for seventeen years. I was a stranger once more. A whole cycle had passed, and I was stepping into a new phase: different names in the newspapers, different people in publishing, new books, new critics, new products on the billboards of the tidier and more prosperous city, with its much younger pedestrians and more youthful police.

  In a rented car I drove to Shropshire, to the hotel where Julian had reserved me a room. And on the hotel stairs, just moments after I arrived, I met my ex-wife Diana, Julian’s mother, an older, fragile version of the woman I’d married almost forty years before.

  “Isn’t it exciting?”

  She hugged me and gave me a kiss. I was so unused to such uncomplicated affection I almost resisted, but then I returned it and was happy to be held like this.

  “And this is my partner, Piers,” she said. “Piers, meet Jay.”

  “Partner” made me smile. The man had been hovering just behind her, a balding fellow in a tight suit with a meaningful handshake and an assertive manner, as though to reinforce the fact that he had usurped me and was in charge now.

  “Pleasure,” he said, and tucked the thumb of his free hand into his waistcoat pocket.

  Julian welcomed me, introduced me to Marion, his fiancée. He was happy, so was she, the smile making her radiant. She was a beauty, with the face of a wise child, thick curly hair, and dark eyes—part Welsh, Julian had told me.

  “Dad, this is Sophie,” Harry said, and a slender woman in a fluttering dress stepped forward to shake my hand. Her hand, so pale and pretty, was rough to the touch, a roughness that was in surprising contrast to her feline face, her piercing eyes, her look of robust health.

  “Sophie’s a landscape architect,” Harry said, and then I understood the hands and her lovely color.

  Harry showed me the way to the village church, for the wedding rehearsal. There, I met Marion’s parents and those of Julian’s friends who were part of the ceremony. Later, we gathered for dinner, and I sat listening to the loud talk and laughter, besotted with the sweetness of it all.

  “Why are you smiling, Dad?” Harry asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m happy. This is what a family should be.”

  The wedding itself was a small, intense, and joyful affair, just family and friends in the old stone village church. Diana’s “partner” was the official photographer.

  Posing with her beforehand, I said, “I like this arrangement. That Piers is the photographer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he won’t be in any of the pictures.”

  “Now isn’t that just typical of you,” she said, smiling sternly.

  “This conversation is going downhill, Dad. Please,” Harry said.

  Julian put me into the service. I read from Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road.” Someone sang with guitar accompaniment. The small boys who assisted looked nervous and normal. Afterward, at the wedding dinner, Harry gave a speech—needling, praising, funny. He invited others to speak. Diana rose and recounted a memory of Julian’s boyhood. Julian’s old school friend Gavin told a complimentary story, a memory of Julian conjugating an irregular Latin verb. How poised they all were. They gave me strength. Marion spoke, mentioning cautions she’d been given about living with a restless creative person, for Julian was a writer, a filmmaker, a traveler.

  When it was my turn, I stood and took in the blurred spinning room and all the hot faces. I felt slow and unsteady. I addressed the centerpiece of flowers, saying how happy I was, but saying so I sounded tearful, and my weepy voice quieted the room. I saw Marion’s anxious eyes. I spoke to her.

  “When Julian goes away, don’t think he’s feeling liberated and free,” I said. “He is suffering. Travel is dreadfully lonely. Keep him in your heart, because that’s where you are—in his heart. Being on his own doesn’t mean a lack of love. Love is what he needs to travel. Love is necessary to his privacy. He needs love to work, to think, to be productive and happy.”

  A mass of tin trays clattering to a tiled floor in the adjacent kitchen made me pause, but the noise also had the effect of hushing the silent table even more.

  “Don’t feel that, in his travel, Julian has run off. Or that you need to run yourself, to find another friend to spend time with—someone else to love.” Here I paused, and then I pleaded, tears on my face. “Wait for him. In traveling he is waiting for you. He doesn’t love you less because he’s away. You are his family. When he’s away from you his love is, if anything, deeper, with a longing to see you again. He needs you to wait, for you to hold him in your heart.”

  The table of festive wedding guests was very somber now. I raised a glass to the bridal couple and, to everyone’s relief, I sat down.

  I had embarrassed myself. It didn’t do to cry in England. “American men cry,” Diana’s mother had said to me once, in derision. “And they wear hats in the house.” Afterward, Julian said, “You said what was on your mind. That’s not bad. I’m glad you felt relaxed enough to say it.”

  Not relaxed, perhaps drunk. But the moment passed, happiness returned with chatter and the clinking of glasses. Finally, as the meal dissolved into smaller groups, Julian and Marion made their exit.

  Diana came over to me and said, “Are you angry with me?”

  “No,” I said, and wondered if I were. But it was too late to be angry. All my anger had been buried by time. Smiling to reassure her, I remembered her pretty face at our own wedding, our innocence, before everything happened, everything unexpected and strange. Yet here we were.

  “This is a joyous occasion,” she said. “It’s like a scene in a Shakespeare play, one of the late ones, where the younger generation redeems the older one. And there’s peace—music and merrymaking, even wedding bells. Am I thinking of The Winter’s Tale?”

  “No weddings at the end of that,” I said, “but I know what you mean.”

  “No, no. After Hermione appears, Leontes says to Paulina, ‘Thou shouldst a husband take by my consent,’ and he tells Camillo to take her by the hand. They get married,” Diana said, giving me an Oxford wink. “Anyway, we made a mess of things, but they’re doing it right. We have a lot to learn from them.”

  I said, “I apologize for making that remark about your friend Piers. About taking the pictures. Not being in any of them.”

  “Thank you. On his behalf, I accept your apology. I meant to ask, how is your mother? Why are you making that face?”

  “Because I had forgotten all about her.”

  “But tell me, how is she?”

  “I don’t want to think about her on this happy day.”

  “Then why not tell me what’s happened to you in this wide gap of time since first we were dissevered?”

  I stood gaping at her like a dog that’s just heard music.

  “Last line of The Winter’s Tale,” she said. “‘Hastily lead away.’”

  I did not want that day to end. But I woke the following morning to find that everyone had dispersed, and I was a
lone again, and had to go home.

  Mother had left a message on my answering machine, not inquiring about the wedding but asking where I was. I had not called her for the week I’d been in Britain. As soon as I was settled, I returned her call and told her about the festivities.

  “Do English people take pictures at weddings?” she said.

  I visited her, bringing my small camera, with the photos I’d taken. Diana had said that Piers would be sending a disk with all his pictures. I sat with Mother on the sofa and clicked through the sequence of ceremonial snapshots, of Julian and Marion, of the cake-cutting, and some group shots of everyone who’d attended.

  Mother said, “The cake is nice.”

  She meant, The cake is small and unappetizing.

  I said, “In England they don’t go in for big, tall layer cakes. It’s more a kind of rectangular fruitcake that’s traditional. Some people take home pieces in little boxes.”

  But Mother had stopped listening. “What kind of church is that?”

  She meant, It looks Protestant.

  “St. Mary’s,” I said. “Eleventh century. Imagine—it’s a thousand years old.”

  Mother said, “Who are those people?”

  “Those are the people who came to the wedding.”

  “Is that all of them?”

  She meant, Just a few people.

  “Is that an umbrella?” Mother said, putting her yellow nail on the camera panel. How had she seen that tightly rolled brolly?

  She meant, And it rained.

  “There was a sprinkle just as we left the church.”

  I knew what she would report to the family about Julian’s wedding: tiny cake, Protestant church, handful of people, a rainy day. I didn’t mind that she saw it through the darkness of her fault-finding. It had been a happy day. I was undeserving. I had done nothing to make it happy—I’d made no arrangements. They had done it all, yet I felt like a winner.

  “Is that all the pictures you have?” Mother said.

  I took this to mean, A whole wedding but just six snapshots—how sad.

  “I’d love to have some.”

  She picked up my tiny digital camera. Mother had a way of handling something that made it seem negligible. She squinted at it, then gave it to me. She seemed dismissive and abrupt. She stood up and busied herself tidying the coffee table—yarn, knitting basket, books, a carved bird, yesterday’s newspaper, a holy missal, a postcard of Sharm el-Sheik, some papers.

  “You must be tired,” she said.

  “Not at all. I’m fine. I slept well last night. I just have to return my rental car.”

  “You look a little drawn.” She was still twitching the papers on the table. “A little peaky.”

  “Peaky?”

  What was she saying? I tried to translate this Mother-speak but failed to make sense of it. Did “tired” mean I had wasted my time in flying to Britain for the wedding? Or did it mean it was pointless for me to have visited with just a few wedding pictures? Normally, at this point in a visit to Mother she would offer me a nice piece of fruit, or a nice piece of candy, or a nice drink of juice. But she wasn’t offering me anything.

  Before I could protest any more I heard the sound of a car, and I understood. Mother had been hinting for me to leave. I was tired and ill-looking; I belonged at home, right now. She had been expecting someone, obviously the person who had driven up in front. I heard the ratchet and crunch of an emergency brake.

  “My goodness,” Mother said, trying to sound surprised. But she had been expecting this all along. “I wonder who that can be?”

  Mother seemed disapproving as she looked out the front window.

  “I wonder what she wants?”

  I joined her and saw a woman laboring on the brick pathway. She was tipped sideways with a bag and walked heavily, humping and bumping in a big unbuttoned coat that drooped and shook with each step. Something about the shaking of the coat enlarged what it covered, the impression of the woman being even bigger. Her cheeks were tugged down by each footfall. She seemed like someone at the end of a long journey or an unfair foot race, gasping to finish.

  The coat was new, and so was the car and the broad red handbag, yet the woman herself was careworn, with streaky gray hair frizzed out at the sides of an absurd beret, and her face was gray too. Her thick ankles swelled over her brown shoes. Some people’s shoes can look so punished.

  Franny. I had not seen her since the long-ago memorial mass. She was unsteady, she seemed weary, she was grayer. In her nervous agitation that I was watching this arrival with her, Mother was nimble, touching her chair, jerking the curtain, tapping her fingers on her face.

  “I’d better go,” I said.

  “At least say hello.”

  She had badly wanted me to go before Franny arrived. Mother hated the awkwardness of two or more of her ill-assorted children in her presence. Now, in her quandary, Mother was not sure who she was supposed to be at this moment, caught between two of her hostile children. She quivered, shape-shifting, yet her expression was so uncertain it made her seem almost ectoplasmic.

  “Ma, whose car is that?” Franny said, heaving herself through the door and dropping her bag, a thud on the floorboards beneath the carpet.

  Franny stepped back and shook a little when she caught sight of me, like someone recoiling from a loud noise. I was no less shocked. I recognized the voice—whose cah?—but the body seemed to belong to someone I didn’t know. Perhaps she felt the same about me.

  I said, “Hi.”

  At the word, the light dimmed in her eyes and she repeated with no interest, “Hi.”

  Working her arms like flippers, as though to propel herself, she shuffled forward and kissed Mother.

  “Ma, you okay?”

  Two old ladies, one big, one tiny, clutching each other like grieving widows.

  “I’m fine,” Mother said. She coughed, two shallow dust-hacks, as she usually did when saying I’m fine.

  I stood, leaning, eyeing the door, awaiting my chance to leave.

  “How’s Rose?” I asked.

  “I wouldn’t know.” Franny was wearing white ankle socks.

  Mother winced and became tense again. Obviously I had raised an unwelcome subject. Maybe the daughters were in the midst of one of their tiffs.

  “What about Fred?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Mother sighed. This was everything she feared, her feuding children meeting before her, compromising her feelings.

  Seeing my camera on the coffee table, a wedding picture still displayed on its panel, I stepped toward it. I did not want Mother to show the pictures to Franny or anyone else—did not really want them to know about the wedding. Like Floyd, I hoped to exclude them. We were a family frantic to protect our secrets; we needed our secrets for strength. And most of all I wanted to keep this bitter family away from my happiness.

  I snatched the camera and palmed it, pressing my thumb on the power button to blacken the screen.

  “Gotta go return my rental car.”

  Franny was staring at me with narrowed eyes, as though I was an intrusive stranger who’d wandered into her house. She had screwed up one side of her face with the expression of someone staring into sunlight. She looked like a big soft monument, and Mother beaky and white, like a plucked bird.

  A certain noxious smell rises from people who hate you. I had a whiff of it now that stung my nostrils.

  Outside, before I got to the driveway, Franny was squinting at the gutters, the eaves, the roof, with a scrutinizing grin of anger. The house was hers. She was not visiting her aged mother, she was paying a call at her own house—like an agitated landlord, appalled at the sight of her sitting tenant who was still alive and inhabiting the property, her clutter all spread out—thinking, Why aren’t you dead?

  Franny was a winner, yet Mother’s shrewdness had obligated and encumbered her. Yes, she could have the house, but Mother came with it, and all Mother’s needs. This early bequest had come
as a burden. Mother had been right not to trust me, and right in holding back with some of the others. In Franny she saw the perfect caregiver, hypocritical and hungry, and Mother had trapped her in her greed.

  Mother had endured, had prevailed. In that time, Franny had grown old. She had expected Mother to have died years ago. All this time, Franny had been waiting, and now she was ever more burdened by the weekly visits. She seemed feebler than Mother. She might never get to enjoy the property and money she’d pocketed. She had spent more than half her life as Mother’s handmaiden, realizing only now, late in the game, that in making her seem special, Mother had conned her.

  Franny, in being a winner, was defeated. She wore that defeat on her lined face.

  Fred, too, was ailing, his heart ticking more erratically than Mother’s. Hubby was on beta-blockers. Rose was angry—a kind of stewing rage of gasping and choking that was like a sickness. Gilbert was away—I guessed in Sharm el-Sheikh, judging from the postcard on the table. Floyd, with Didi, was elsewhere.

  The other great irony of Franny’s having to suffer the burden of the house, while Mother refused to die and allow her to live there, was that Rose had misread the gifts. Rose hated Franny for her seeming victory. They had quarreled over the inheritance and the presents. At last, Mother had broken them, split them apart and soured the friendship, isolated them, so that now she had two caregivers competing for her attention.

  45

  Aliens

  Across the receding image in my rearview mirror was a lettered stripe, cautioning, Objects in mirror are closer than they appear, and the image was of Mother and Franny standing side by side, like a big girl and her doll, the larger kind of doll that you might win at a country fair after successfully knocking over six objects from a shelf. Mother was skeletal and upright and beaky, as though her very bones had shrunk inside her, the features of her skull distinct in the tissuey skin of her tiny head. Her neck was stringy, her skinny hands clenched at her sides. Her clothes were loose and faded, reminding me that most old people don’t buy new clothes. These duds will see me out.