11

Secrets

Forty years passed, my writing years, my years on the move, away from Mother Land. That pivotal episode of fatherhood tempered me, prepared me for the worst, and made me a man. Nothing so hard was ever to test me again.

Those four decades were the years of my active life, as a traveler, borne by the currents of the world, a wanderer in distant cities, a resident in dusty republics and happy islands, a husband, a father of two more boys, twice divorced. And, after a slow start, a successful writer with faithful readers, though none of them members of my family.

After all this—the struggle in words to describe the struggle in my life that became my obsessive subject, my life depicted in the tangles and thickets of my prose—I had thought that was it, that my life was over, time to . . . not fade, but to grow more compact, with the economy of a small trembling animal that wrinkles its wet nose and hugs itself into a ball, warming its limbs, to await the end, having left behind wives, children, property, books, a mountain of paper, savings, and, at last, hope abandoned. So when I was summoned to the Cape for Father’s death watch, I went without hesitation. I had nowhere else to go.

Going home to live was a sure sign of personal loss. Failures ended up back where they started. I had always felt this to be true. “He lives with his mother”—you couldn’t be worse off than that. But I told myself that it was temporary. I wasn’t desperate, I wasn’t living in Mother’s house, just in the general vicinity, in Mother Land. I would be fine. So it seemed at the time.

Soon after I got back, Father’s health declined, we were called to the hospital to witness him die, Mother became queen, and we were all children again, returned to our long-ago roles and rivalries. I was at first startled. I had forgotten how dangerous we were, how angry, how vicious we could be.

“He’s a nonce, he’s a numpty,” Floyd said of Fred, and when Gilbert’s name came up, “He’s an exile.”

“Ma says Floyd’s poems are porno,” Hubby said. And of Franny, “She’s a moose.”

“Ma finds Floyd upsetting,” Franny said. “It’s his attitude. ‘Gimme, gimme.’ He has bad energy and he yells at traffic. She hates driving anywhere with him.”

“All she does is worry about her two spoiled brats,” Rose said of Franny and her kids, Jonty and Max.

“I dread Angela’s birthday,” Fred said. “Ma’s mourning gets darker every year.”

“Hubby eats too much,” Franny said. “It’s always the wrong food. I know he’s good with his hands, but have you seen the size of him? Floyd calls him a parade float.”

“I’ve memorized most of Floyd’s poems,” Gilbert said, and without a flicker of irony, “One of their characteristics is that they’re very easy to memorize.”

What did they say of me?

As a child I had been watchful, secretive, suspicious of all interest in me, such questions as “What are you doing?” and “Where have you been?” I usually answered with lies. The terror I felt when Mother said, “I’ve got a bone to pick with you!” made me defiantly untruthful. But I seldom told Mother the truth, or revealed anything personal to her. She would betray me; she would use the disclosure against me; she would entrap me. And Mother must have known that I habitually lied to her. She always looked sideways at me in annoyance, wondering what I really felt, and perhaps fearful of finding out, for it had to be obvious to her that I was a lonely fantasizing child, yearning for a life elsewhere.

My childhood dilemma was easy to explain, if anyone cared to hear it, though no one did. I was not adrift, I was stuck. Being fifteen years old was like living on the lower floor of a house where, on the floor above, a man was speaking to a woman in a different room, who couldn’t hear him but was talking back to him, though he couldn’t hear her. To a shout, which might be tedious or revealing or shocking, life-altering or wise, each yelled, “What?” Other people, too, were calling to one another in the rooms above me, each deaf to the other.

I could hear every word. But they didn’t know I was listening, or even that I existed. That was not my dilemma. My dilemma was: What do I do with all the things I am hearing?

It was my first intimation, not that I would be a writer in any important way, but that writing what I heard, or imagined, might help ease my mind.

After I left home the first time, struck with the trauma of my best year, I found it simple to invent a life for myself. I was a student, so schoolwork prevented me from going home often, and the need to work meant I had to travel and save. The scholar-traveler was the person I described in letters home, though this earnest and prudent young man did not in the least resemble me. These were the waning years of letter writing, of three or four inked sheets of notepaper folded in half and stuffed in an envelope, or two double-spaced typed pages beginning, Dear Family.

The late 1980s and email ended that with forgettable, untraceable, disposable, disputable cyber-messages and telegraphic memos, more like garbled conversations shouted into the wind than the stacks of letters I sent home, amounting almost to an epistolary novel. My letters were so substantial I could conceal myself in them and create a new man. I hid in my inventions, and my ardent fictionalizing in these letters home helped make me a novelist: sharpened my imagination, gave me a plausible fluency in whoppers.

The memory of my intrusive family made me choose to live off the map. I have said I was a teacher in Africa. This was partly true. “Teacher” was a heroic euphemism, for my residence in Africa seemed a laborious sacrifice, if not a martyrdom. I was learning the local language, I lived in the bush, I got my news from the shortwave radio, the mail was always late. In my letters, Africa was work. I suppressed in them the details of my real life, which, besides students and grading homework, involved writing and village beauties and beer drinking and long rides on bad roads—the riotous excesses and mythomania of an expatriate in the African bush, indulged and forgiven by a system that usually failed and expected little except poor results and phenomenal delays.

I was lazier than anyone I knew in Africa, and I laughed with shame when expatriates claimed Africans were idle. I was so appalled at how I did my job that I knew I must succeed as a writer, because I would fail at teaching or anything else. And when I published poems and stories, I felt vindicated and reassured, yet I still knew that I had cheated the Uganda Ministry of Education, my employer. I had written my stories on government time, and when this became obvious, I used the excuse of student riots in Kampala to leave for Southeast Asia, to cheat the Singapore Ministry of Education. By then I was married. My children, born in musty, smelly equatorial hospitals, where lizards flicked their tongues on white stucco windowsills, grew up pink and cranky with heat rash.

Why would any woman put up with a tiny, non-air-conditioned house abutting an open storm drain on a back street of Singapore and a selfish, single-minded husband upstairs writing stories at a desk under the croaking fan? Well, she wouldn’t. My wife left me. I married again. The second time was impulsive and it lasted less than two years—no children. I lost more of what I owned, yet I had usable skills. As a teacher I could work anywhere, but teaching interfered with my writing day. I abandoned teaching, settled in England, and continued to write.

And it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, another travel book. But it was not an unsorted stack of vagrant scribbles; it was in words a sort of edifice. What I was doing was giving form to a continuous account of my existence, my disappointments and obsessions, my reading, my secrets, writing every day. All these books and pieces could be laid end to end as a long linking account of who I was, bringing order to my living and publishing it, in thousands of pages of print, bound on three shelves of a bookcase, which represented my attempt to make sense of my life.

But I had never written about my family. I couldn’t bear to, even obliquely. In those millions of words there is no description of a big rivalrous family. Until I returned home for Dad’s death, I had not realized that the greatest subject for me was not couched in the pretensions of poetry or the imaginative vagaries of a novel or the exploration of a landscape, but would be a truthful account of my family, my long experience as a traveler in Mother Land.

All the time I’d been away, I must have seemed to Mother sober and studious. She had no idea what I was doing, but when I published my first book, a novel, she wrote me a stern letter telling me how much she disliked it. The powder-blue, tissue-thin aerogram (No Enclosures Permitted), with its narrow border of red and navy-blue chevrons and an eleven-cent John F. Kennedy stamp, was dated May 6, 1967.

 

Dear Jay,

I read your book. Your publisher gave me a 25¢ discount then charged me a dollar for mailing it, in addition to the price of the book! It grieves me to tell you I did not like your book at all. I found it extremely unfunny, sordid, cheap and vulgar. Had you thought about the people who would read this creation of yours? Would you want me to hand it to Hubby or Rose and let them “enjoy” it? Could you in all honesty hand this to someone like Mr. Becker across the street and say, “This is my first novel! Hope you enjoy it!” I wonder if he would? Jay, why waste your time on trash? You will have to answer someday, even if only to your conscience, for the printed word, which will last forever. I could say much more, but I know I have inflicted enough hurt on you. I am hurt even as I write this. No one will gain from this book.

Love, Mother

 

I kept the letter those forty years as a talisman, as a goad, and as a rare example of the severe honesty of someone who seldom told the truth.

 

At last, everything came to an end for me. I thought: Two wives—done. Two children—done. Houses and property acquired and lost, ditto every article of furniture, everything I had accumulated since leaving home was gone, or almost. I had kept many of my books—no one fights over books. Books are burdens; they get heavier, smellier, dustier; they swell, the pages fatten, the bindings crack, the dust jackets tear and slip away. Yet I needed something to hold on to. It seemed odd to be returning home after so many years, but I had been everywhere else and, I repeat, I had nowhere else to go.

Father’s failing health meant that I had to hang around and be useful, and it had allowed me to reacquaint myself with my brothers and sisters. Father’s death created, if not a bond, then a family feeling, and my new nearness to Mother reminded me of why I had left all those years ago.

In this period, just after Father’s death, when Mother was queening over us, I grew close to Floyd. Floyd was a satirist, had been so from childhood. Older than me by two years, he had always loomed large, and was both funnier and more serious than anyone else in the family, marked with the satirist’s traits: comedy, severity, cruelty. He was the most tormented, the one with natural talent. When I wrote well, I was sometimes forced to admit that I was unconsciously mimicking Floyd at his most fluent. He was too good a writer not to be a bad influence. Maybe he was another reason I had gone away and stayed: I needed to be myself.

As a satirist, Floyd was useful, perhaps essential, to understanding the quirks of the family—mocking Fred’s earnestness, Franny’s fussing, Rose’s stubborn streak, Hubby’s clumsiness, Gilbert’s love of opera, his own irrationality; and he frankly mimicked my self-dramatizing tendencies.

In his role as mocker, Floyd was a figure of power. Growing up, I had been shocked and exhilarated by his fearless satires of Mother: he did her voice, her equivocation, her tantrums, her shallow cough, her distinctive manner of swallowing (goose-necked, gulping, with popping eyes). I had to admit that watching him in this vein had liberated me and given voice to emotions I felt.

Floyd had grown up angry and sad. He had felt passed over, and his childhood had been overshadowed by Fred, darkened by judgments against him. He used to say, “How long did Charles Dickens work in the blacking factory?” and would quickly answer, “Not long,” as a way of explaining how, as a child—Dickens had been twelve—even a short time could be purgatorial, unendurable, and that sometimes the merest hint of criticism left a wound that failed to heal.

A whisper never went unheard in our family; the fact of it being a whisper made it serious and inescapable. “He wets the bed” might have been spoken as little more than a breath, but we all heard. Floyd could do nothing to stop it. Years later, he still spoke of it with bitterness and shame, first appalled at waking in the morning—he might have been nine or ten—and realizing he was lying in a puddle of his own chilled pee, the soaked sheets under him, and with a sense of woe that his error could not be lied away or hidden; then terrified in anticipation of Mother’s screech.

“Again! You’ve done it again!

Floyd hid his face as he wept in fear and humiliation. “My fallen-angel face, filthy with tears” is a line in one of his poems. What he remembered in the poems he wrote as a Guggenheim fellow was his bedwetting, how when he was an anxious boy Mother had howled at him, “I’m going to hang that rubber sheet around your neck if you wet your bed one more time. I’ll send you to school wearing the rubber sheet. Everyone will know what you do!” And, “I wash your pissy sheets!”

She told her brother Louie, the priest, who rushed to our house in his purple Studebaker and demanded that Floyd come downstairs to go for a walk. “Get down here, sonny.”

When they were alone, Uncle Louie put down his glass of Moxie and ordered Floyd to stand at attention. He took Floyd’s chin, lifted it, and said, “If you keep this up you’ll never get married. Know why? Because you’ll pee on your wife. Is that what you want?”

And of course Floyd wet the bed more than ever. He was angry, anxious, confused. In such misery, he probably did have a secret wish to piss on everyone.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Mother said, advancing on Floyd, who was backing away on skinny legs, his wet flannel pajamas stuck to his thighs, his hair spiky from sleep. “I really am going to do it. You think I’m kidding, but I’m not. I’m going to hang that rubber sheet around your neck and you’re going to wear it to school.”

Mother had stripped the sheets from his bed and thrown them on the floor. The rubber sheet was black and slippery. It had a peculiar inhuman smell, a sharpness of rubber, a sour stink that, no matter how often it was washed, would linger in its fabric. It was smaller than a normal sheet and so heavy it rumbled when it was shaken.

I had a clear image of what wearing it would be like, because Audie Jackson, the coal man who delivered ice in the summer, holding a crystal block of it with a pair of tongs, wore just such a sheet like a filthy cape on his back. That was how Floyd would look, draped in the black rubber sheet, a humiliated beggar boy dressed like the limping ice man.

Even in adulthood, the rubber sheet was Floyd’s defining image, like Fred’s slavering dogs, Gilbert’s melodious violin and shelves of Proust in French, Hubby’s tuneless cello and his ball-peen hammer, Franny’s tub of three-bean salad, Rose’s Mixmaster (“Ma loves fudge”), Angela’s halo, and the pup tent I bought for ten dollars, so that I could make camp in the backyard and sleep there on warm nights, pretending I was in the Africa of wild animals and jungles that I read about in Frank Buck’s Bring ’Em Back Alive and Fenworth Moore’s Wrecked on Cannibal Island; or, Jerry Ford’s Adventures Among Savages.

Floyd was miserable. He could not seem to go a night without wetting the bed, and it got so bad that there was a permanent resentment against him for making more work for Mother. Whenever Floyd did something wrong—and it might be as trivial as spilling milk on the counter or muddying his knees or failing to mop the floor after he’d promised to—he was reminded of his bedwetting.

Egged on by Mother, Father would say, “Look what you’ve done, and after all that, this is what your mother gets for it—more of your pissy sheets!”

At the age of eleven, Floyd saw a psychiatrist, Dr. Younger, on Harrison Avenue in Boston.

I asked Floyd, “What does he do?”

“Just talks and stuff.”

“What about?”

“Asks me to draw pictures and stuff.”

I imagined that the doctor was being kind to him, encouraging his artwork, to make him feel better. I was envious, because a stranger’s sympathy would have made me happy.

But the visits made no difference, for Mother was still so enraged that she printed Floyd’s name on the rubber sheet. And she went on provoking Dad to scold Floyd, which he did, but now in a whisper: “You’re killing your mother.”

Floyd was well into his teenage years before he was entirely cured of his bedwetting. Leaving home had a great deal to do with the improvement, as leaving home would help me. Yet he always spoke of his misery with a fresh sense of hurt, as if it were yesterday.

Like me, he had stayed away. When he earned his doctorate, when he won the poetry prize, the Guggenheim, the Fulbright, he was alone. He never invited Mother or Dad—nor, indeed, any of us.

Like me, his marriage ended. Like me, in late middle age he found himself living in Mother Land, where we were more familiar with the weather and the seasons and the routines. Like me, he had told himself that it was temporary, and yet the years were passing and we remained ten minutes from Mother.

We resumed our friendship, Floyd and I, in a bristling, wary way, like a pair of mismatched hedgehogs. We were both passionate readers and mediocre golfers, and both single again. He was still the family satirist. “Who’s this?” he would say, and screw up his face and launch into an imitation of Fred or Hubby, Franny or Rose, Hubby or Gilbert, and me, too, in a defiant way. But I was flattered, because teasing me to my face was a gesture of affection.

He was regularly visited by Franny and Rose. They brought him tribute, to disarm and obligate him—fruit, candy, T-shirts, cakes and cookies they had baked. Always on their return journey after seeing Mother, they stopped off to see him and tell him in detail how Mother was failing. “She’s real feeble, she’s forgetful. She leaves things on the stove with the burner on.” They rolled their eyes and moaned about what a trial Mother was, how frail, how hard up, so confused.

Less often, they stopped at my place, saying the same things.

“She’s really slowing down a lot,” Franny said to me. She was slumped, one shoulder higher than the other, and her dress glowing heavily with sweat, sitting with her knees apart as she gasped for breath. “Plus, she repeats herself all the time.”

“What’s this about Ma being hard up?”

Franny narrowed her eyes and said, “Some weeks she’s real short.”

Saying it shawt, the Cape Cod way, made Mother’s financial state sound dire.

Instead of mentioning what Mother had said about helping her with Jonty’s wedding expenses, I merely remarked on how generous it was that she and Rose stopped in and made sure the old woman was okay.

“I know how busy you are,” Franny said, though in fact this was not my point—I saw Mother fairly often, at Mother’s bidding. Franny screwed up one side of her face. “You know, Jay, Ma really doesn’t have a lot of money.”

This seemed as odd a remark as “Some weeks she’s real shawt,” since Mother had always been a saver, thrifty, not to say fanatically frugal: day-old bread, dented cans, most of the clothes she gave as presents labeled Second and Irreg.

Floyd laughed at Franny for her lugubrious stories, at Rose for her nervous anger, at Mother for her sanctimony, at Fred (“he’s a castrato”), at Hubby (“the village explainer”), at Gilbert (“our virtuoso on the strings”). And of course everyone else, the children, the grandchildren, their friends, their pets, “the human zoo!”

Mother was shrinking, Floyd said. “She’s turning into a Q-tip.” It seemed true—she was growing paler, with thin wispy hair, like cobwebs twirled on a twig, her sallow scalp showing through. Her skin was tissuey, her eyes watery, with yellow, claw-like nails on ashen hands that were almost reptilian, as though in her old age she was devolving. Yet given her physical decline, she still seemed strong, and most of the time put me in mind of a Chinese empress.

“She’s all about indirection,” Floyd said. “She doesn’t hear you when you have something on your mind. And when you ask her how she is, she never replies at once. Instead, she looks a little croaky and coughs”—Floyd gave two dry barks, the practiced cough of a hypochondriac. Then he groaned in Mother’s voice, “Oh, I’m all right. I’ll be fine. Croop-croop!”

But for all his mockery, he indulged her, brought her books, gave her rides to the supermarket on senior citizen discount day and to the Big Scoop for an ice cream. He marveled that she was bright and busy, always knitting or reading or monologuing on the phone. “She still goes for walks!” She usually went alone, shuffling in her crepe-soled nurse’s shoes, sometimes walking as far as the beach, where, her white hair blown by the wind, her big cloak lifted in an updraft, her face tightened by the cold, Floyd said, “She looks like Queen Lear!”

“Your father hated walking, but I love to be outdoors—it does you so much good,” she said, implying that Dad was a drag until he died, and that he probably shortened his life by sitting indoors with a glass of Wild Turkey in one hand and doing the crossword.

“Look, Ma,” Floyd would say on one of his Sunday visits, “here come your favorites.”

Out the window, Franny and Rose were advancing from their cars to the front door, filling the path, smiling in anticipation.

Mother rolled her eyes to signal, Oh, Lord, those two, back again!

Seeing her alone, I often thought how kindly she could be, how she would hold my hand and ask me to sit down beside her and speak to me with a sympathy that, in spite of my skepticism, touched my heart.

“I want you to find someone nice. I want you to be happy. That would please me so much.”

What Mother did not know—what no one knew—was that I had found someone. I was happy. But as always, I didn’t know how much of this affair to tell Mother, or whether I should say anything at all.