Mother Land

  This big event was just a talent show to him, and his white-haired father, who worked on the MTA buses, was just an old guy singing. Yet in our house Mr. Bones had taken charge and intimidated us all.

  He had a different complaint about each of us. These objections were clearer when he was in blackface and a wig than when he was just Mr. Bones in name. He was now a man in a mask, someone to fear, saying things he normally avoided, singing strange songs. In his minstrel show costume he could be as reckless as he wanted.

  It was true that Fred told fibs and didn’t want to go to college, true that Floyd owed him money and hated trumpet lessons. And it was easy to see that Mother’s nagging caused him to tease her and change the subject. His jokes were more than jokes; they were ways of telling us the truth. The yellow mustard in big quart jars was cheap and tasteless; “mouse turd” was a good name for it. The stale raisins that Mother bought cheap in the dented-package aisle were like dead flies. But it was so odd hearing these things from his gleaming black face, his white-outlined mouth, his woolly wig askew, and rapping his tambourine after he spoke.

  “Dad,” we said, pleading.

  “Dad done gone. ‘That was prior to his decease, Mr. Bones.’ I says, ‘He had no niece.’”

  Shika-shika-shika went the tambourine.

  He was not just smiling but defiantly happy, powerfully happy, talking to us, teasing us in ways I’d never heard before. He had once been remote, with a kindly smile that made him hard to approach. Now he was up close and laughing at us and he wouldn’t go away.

  He was someone new, convincingly a real man, as though he’d been turned inside out, the true Dad showing. Swanking in the role of a comical slave, he’d become a frightening master to us, and because he was so strange we had no way of responding to his tyrannical teasing.

  Something else I discovered, because I kept going to the store to lurk and spy on him, was that instead of sitting silently alone in the shoe department he’d been hired to run, he now had company: Mel Hankey, John Flaherty, Morrie Daigle, and two men I’d never seen before. All of them with their heads together, sitting in the customers’ chairs, whispering, as if they were cooking something up. So odd to see this in a store where everyone else was working or shopping or being loudly busy.

  That was his secret, mine too. The whole affair looked more serious than just black faces and songs and jokes. These men were like conspirators, and the sight of them impressed me, because Dad was in charge, I could see it in his posture, sitting upright like a musician holding an instrument; but the instrument was his hand. As though wearing white gloves, he was giving directions, issuing energetic commands. Mr. Bones was their leader.

  We had taken him to be a man with no friends outside the family, no interests outside the house and the church. But here he was, Mr. Bones with his pals, Tambo, Lightning, Mr. Interlocutor, and the rest whose names I didn’t know.

  But that same night, as if to dispute all this, he came home after dinner in blackface and his floppy coat and wig, and said, “Listen to Mr. Bones.”

  Fred was fiddling with the radio, Mother was at the sink with Floyd, and I was looking at a comic book.

  “I says, listen to Mr. Bones!”

  He spoke so loud we jumped, and as we did he banged and clicked his tambourine. He was like a drunk you couldn’t talk back to, yet he hadn’t had a drink.

  I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody,

  I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time!

  And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime,

  I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!

  He searched us, shaking his head, and moaned, “Nobody, no time!”

  Was it a song? Was it a poem? Was it a speech? It was too furious to be entertainment. We sat horrified by the sight of Dad in blackface, rapping his tambourine on his knee and his elbow and then bonking himself on the head with it.

  Even though his recitation was painful to hear, he had our full attention. We had to listen; we couldn’t look away. That proved he was the opposite of the poor soul he was describing. He was stronger than we were, and I recognized the “nobody” he spoke of. It wasn’t Mr. Bones, it was Dad.

  After that, he went over to Fred and said, “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

  “College,” Fred said, blinking fiercely.

  “Know the difference between a college professor and a railway conductor?”

  “No.”

  “No what?”

  “No, Mr. Bones.”

  “One trains minds and the other minds trains. Which one do you want to be?”

  “College professor, Mr. Bones.”

  But Mr. Bones had turned to Floyd. “What are you going to do for Mr. Bones?”

  “Trumpet lessons, Mr. Bones.”

  “You always were good at blowing your own trumpet. Ha!” Then he had me by the chin and was lifting it, as Dad had never done. “Who was that lady you saw me with last night?”

  With his white-gloved hand gripping my chin I couldn’t speak.

  “That was no lady. That was my wife!”

  Mother muttered as he shook his tambourine.

  “You’ll need some Karo syrup for that throat,” Mother said, and handed him a bottle and a spoon.

  He took a swig straight from the bottle, then said to Fred, “Here, want to keep this bottle up your end?”

  I didn’t know it was a joke until he lowered his shoulders and swung his arms and shook his tambourine.

  I dreaded the minstrel show, which was just a week away, and when the day came I said, “I don’t want to go. I’ve got a wicked bad stomachache.”

  “Everyone’s going,” Mother said, trembling with a kind of nervous insistence that I recognized: if I defied her, she might start screaming.

  On a wet Saturday night in May we went together to the high school auditorium in our old car, Mother driving. I could tell she was upset from the way she drove, riding the brake, stamping on the clutch, pushing the gear shift too hard. Dad had gone separately. “Tambo’s stopping by for me.”

  I hurried into the auditorium and slid down in my seat so that no one would see me. When the music began to play and the curtain went up, I covered my face and peered through my fingers.

  Dad—Mr. Bones—was sitting in a chair onstage, and the others, too, sat on chairs in a semicircle. Mr. Bones looked confident and happy; he was dressed like a clown, but he looked powerful. He was wearing his floppy suit, his shiny vest, his big bow tie, his white gloves, his tilted wig, and his face was black. All of them were in blackface except Morrie Daigle, in the center, wearing a white suit and a white top hat.

  “Mr. Bones, wasn’t that music just beautiful? Didn’t it touch you?”

  I pressed my fingers to my ears and closed my eyes and groaned so that I wouldn’t hear the rest. I wanted to disappear. I was so slumped in my seat that my head wasn’t showing, and even though I kept my hands to my ears I heard familiar phrases, “physician of good standing” and “that was prior to his decease.”

  The songs I knew by heart penetrated me as I sat there trying to deafen myself. Mr. Bones sang “Mandy.” “Rosie” and “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby” were sung by others. Someone else sang “Nobody.”

  “You should see my brother, he walks like this,” I heard, and knew it was Mr. Bones. I heard “barefaced liar.” I heard “Toulouse and Toulon.”

  There was much more, skits and songs. People laughing, people clapping, the loud music, the shouts, the tambourines, the familiar phrases. This was silly and embarrassing, yet the same jokes and songs had intimidated us at home. And Mr. Bones had been different at home too, not this ridiculous man clowning, far off on the stage, but someone else I didn’t want to think of as Dad, teasing us and making fools of us and getting us to agree with him and make decisions. That was who he was—Dad as Mr. Bones.

  When the house lights were still dimmed and the people onstage were taking bows, I said, “I have to go to the bathroom,”
and ran out and hid in our car.

  Back home afterward, no one said anything about the show. Dad was in his regular clothes, with the faint greasy streaks of black on his neck and behind his ears. He was excited, breathless, but he didn’t speak. The strange episode and uproar were over. Later, I got anxious when he hummed “Mandy” or “Rosie” while he was shaving, but he didn’t make any jokes, didn’t tease or taunt anymore. Looking at him through the side window of the store, I saw him standing near the cash register, smiling at the front door as if to welcome a customer.

  The following year there was talk of a minstrel show, but nothing happened. We had a TV set then, and the news was of trouble in Little Rock, Arkansas, integrating the schools, black children protected by National Guardsmen, white crowds shouting abuse at the frightened black students who were being liberated. The bald-headed president made a speech on TV. Dad watched with us, saying nothing, maybe thinking how Mr. Bones had been liberated too, or banished. The news was not what he had expected, the expression on his face was vacant, stunned with sorrow, but before long Dad was smiling.

  No one asked him about his menial job, or mentioned the defective house, ever again.

  6

  Mother Land

  The memory of Mr. Bones was so strong that even without mentioning it, Dad was powerful and not to be disobeyed. But when he died, and the minstrel figure no longer haunted us, and Mother became herself, I was astonished at the change in her. I saw the family in a new way—revealed, in an enlarged perspective. I am looking for an image. Balance had been lost; we were out of alignment. Now the whole family began to wobble. Do I mean entropy? We behaved differently because Dad was gone, and Mother was more demanding than ever. Getting rid of all of Father’s accumulated tools was one sign. She threw out all his clothes, gave them to thrift shops and charities. She purged the house of his memory except for a few photographs. She took over the house, claimed every room. And not just the house—she dominated us, made demands and, just after Father’s funeral, tested our loyalty to her, fixing each of us with a raptor’s beaky stare, saying, “Here is what I want you to do for me ​—”

  Being a closely observed citizen of Mother Land had always unsettled me. From an early age, I believed my life belonged only to me, and I avoided sharing it with my family. I needed to believe this, because so many family members were prepared to interfere with me, mock my writing, or claim that they knew better than I did.

  Mother would find a book I owned—it might be a Steinbeck novel with a racy cover, such as The Wayward Bus; or a Mickey Spillane paperback, I, The Jury; or Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist ​— and say, “Why are you reading this? Haven’t you got anything better to do?” She meant that I should be at the Stop and Shop earning money, keeping out of trouble. Reading was idleness, and just the sight of me sitting in a corner with a book in my face enraged her. Reading was an indulgence, writing was unthinkable; no wonder they became my passion.

  Mother’s motto was “Keep yourself busy.” This meant pursuing part-time jobs and handing her half my paycheck every week.

  She did not know me. This boy she bossed around was a stranger to her, who obeyed her because obedience was simpler and sneakier than rebellion. Perhaps I had learned this from Dad: follow orders, show no defiance, do not resist, and in this way no one will ever know who you are or what is in your heart. From my obedience they would invent a personality for me, one that suited them, and my soul would belong to me alone. Maybe Mother suspected this strategy in me. Maybe it made her insecure and cranky when she realized it. Whatever, I became adept at concealment.

  As a child, I had thought, One day I will flee and go far away. And I did. As soon as I graduated from college I went to Africa and stayed there. I married there—no one from my family was present. I had children. I traveled more. I divorced and married again. I wrote forty books. With Father’s death I returned home to Cape Cod. Mother was still there, smaller but fiercer than ever.

  My struggle to assert my belief in myself helped make me a writer, against the odds—the bewilderment of Dad, the opposition of Mother, the envy and mockery of my siblings. Floyd’s experience of becoming a poet was no different from mine, though he had the respectability of tenure at Harvard to shield him from philistinism. I wrote in seclusion, loving my remoteness, finding strength in my secrecy.

  My life was of my own making. I regarded it as odious that any of my family, or anyone in the wider world, would presume to tell my story. Only I had the right and the qualifications; all the acts that applied to me were known only to me. Mother I knew was at the center of my story. And I knew that once I embarked on it, I would write it with such completeness that no one would be able to deny it or supplement it. There would be nothing more to say.

  In any memoir, prudery or reticence (not that I have sedulously practiced either one in my writing) only encourages commentators and speculators to fill in the blanks, and candor tends to provoke the author’s family into objecting that they are not shown in a more favorable light. I knew that Mother had her supporters—how could this not be the case, since from the beginning she had actively tried to recruit them to her side. She had favorites, and her favorites plumped for her canonization, and God knows what they thought of me. But I felt that if my story was exhaustive and honest it would render every other version of my life worthless. In the end, it is the David Copperfield version of his upbringing that displaces the speculations of any Dickens biographer: Copperfield rightly has the last word.

  I knew I could not prevent anyone from taking exception to what I wrote about the family, or from publishing their own portraits of Mother. But I also knew that my being frank in my disclosures would enfeeble all those attempts to tell my story. After I finished there would be no more secrets, nothing left to say. The truth of my fiction would put everyone else out of business.

  Just after Father’s death, our loyalty was tested by Mother. There was first the necessity to show up and to call regularly. Mother had put herself at the center of things. She insisted on knowing what we were doing. She demanded a say in our affairs. With me, it was a question of marriage.

  “I want you to find someone,” Mother had said on the phone. “Do it for me.”

  I had been trained from childhood to submit—at least to pay lip service to a suggestion. Of course, I said, I would find a woman to love me, but even saying this, I was smiling bitterly into the receiver.

  Dad was not mentioned. His memory was displaced by Mother’s ailments, at first trivial, and then, as an answered prayer, she acquired a real complaint. She had craved a condition. For a period of time in this funereal atmosphere Mother was diagnosed with a sort of arthritis. Like the hypochondriac she was, Mother could talk for hours about her symptoms and her medicine. “It’s called polymyalgia,” she said, and told of the pain and the swelling. “I’m on prednisone,” she said, and listed not the relief she got but the side effects she read in the accompanying leaflet: nausea, swollen feet, vomit that resembled coffee grounds, mood swings, puffy face, sleeplessness, sweating, blurred vision, bone pain, cramps, water retention. Medicine was never a curative but only another burden.

  “Have you found anyone?” she asked me after she’d finished describing her ailments.

  “Still looking,” I said.

  “Time is flying,” she said.

  What the others were asked to do for her I didn’t know—didn’t ask—but the renewed bustle of activity around Mother was obvious to me. Some of us were required to visit, Franny and Rose especially. Others were encouraged to phone her often. All of us were enjoined to send her presents—tokens, souvenirs, kitsch, and more serious gifts of jewelry, or ornaments, lamps, vases, small items of furniture.

  “Ma likes presents.”

  Franny and Rose talked about Mother as though she was a small willful girl it was their mission to placate, like one of their difficult students or someone they were eternally babysitting. They rolled their eyes and smiled when they mentio
ned Mother’s demands, yet they showed up at her house every Sunday. They brought Mother food and trinkets; they called her several times a day and talked for hours.

  I was glad they were attentive. I felt spared from having to do it myself, for the fact was that Mother had become a bore on the subject of her arthritis, repetitive in her stories, and perverse in her eagerness for bad news. And the medicine’s side effects were taking hold. Talking to her made me impatient and slightly ashamed of myself for enduring the pettiness she stirred in me. She loved news of people’s failures or lapses. She feasted on misfortune. She would cluck at hearing of Hubby’s piles, Floyd’s faltering romances, or the death of Fred’s dog; yet she loved this stuff and asked for more.

  In her subtle way, not in words but in shrugs and whinnying noises, Mother made it apparent that I still had not proven my loyalty. It was apparent to her that I missed Dad. I mentioned Mr. Bones, I visited his grave, I tended to its flowers and shrubs. Either through whispers or her shrewd watchfulness of my dreamy inattention when I was with her, Mother suspected me of disloyalty and squinted at me in my reverie: Where are you?

  Mother’s stern questions from childhood on—Where are you going? What are you doing? What are you thinking? Why are you frowning? Who do you think you are?—had turned me into a sneak and a liar, made me evasive and untruthful. You never forgive people who force you to lie. So in this frame of mind, wishing to conceal my anger, I was receptive to any suggestion that would calm her and convince her—if not of my love for her than of the fact that I was not her enemy.

  Soon after I returned to the Cape, or rather the province of Mother Land, Franny stopped by my rented house one day. She wheezed as though her body was something separate from her, that burdened her, and so tired her that she gasped when she spoke, mouth-breathing, always complaining, usually about Mother.