18
“Plaquoteurs!” Father would have shouted at all this fuss, had he been alive. Bunglers! In the family turmoil that had followed his death, four full years of Mother and heading into the fifth, I had grown older, and not in years alone. I was weaker, and my decline was a shock to me. I had always imagined—don’t most people?—that my life would be a long upward climb, growing in prosperity, with improving views and the clarity of sky, passing the crags, braced and vitalized by the sharp air, a series of steady achievements, more comfort, more money. Soul mate by my side.
I had never envisioned my life as a rugged descent, bumping down the glacier of neglect, this wearisome solitude, finding myself hard up, hunched over a poorly lit desk in a chilly room, writing a self-pitying sentence such as this.
My book tanked. I blamed Floyd. I blamed the whole indifferent family, who, if they took any notice at all, were secretly, smugly pleased. I had proof that they resented me. I had known years of fame and prosperity in my thirties and forties and into my fifties—what a biographer would have called my middle years. Now that I was sixty I was given a terrifying perspective of all that elapsed time, like a view from a bleak summit, the truth that it is all downhill from here. I had been doing all right until this failure, which reminded me of all my other failures. Floyd’s eight-page review of my book—his assessment of my despicable life—crushed me.
So what do you think about your brother’s piece?
I had an answer.
Live long enough and, from the thin air in the heights of age, you see everything. You eventually understand that you reach a point in life when there is no more for you, nothing but diminishing repetition, the dying echo of things past. The upward climb, so difficult at the time, now seems horribly brief, the satisfactions few, the intensity blunted by all the rest of the bother. I was shocked to realize that I’d had my time. What I was living now was something like a second childhood. Fortifying this impression was the looming figure of Mother, still alive, still fierce, still enigmatic, still dominant, still hard to please, and not really on anyone’s side.
So, with the failure of that book, my middle years, the active part of my life, was over. Awful to contemplate with Mother looking on. I knew now there was nothing more for me. I had seen the worst, and now that events were repeating—the repetition seemed like mockery—I was frightened, for I was being told that there was nothing new for me. It was someone else’s turn—for prizes, for fame, for pleasure and rewards, the windfall. I understood, as the young seldom do, that I could not make it happen again. The hardest thing for me was to disguise my disappointment as I knocked on the door of sixty-one. Impotence is one way of describing it, but it was worse than that, for I was impotent in every respect, except the one the word was supposed to describe.
I had known years of productive work and some achievement, a better score than many people. Public years, years of travel and challenge, of unexpected rewards, years that could be happily chronicled and accounted for, years of “I’ve got some good news for you!” Years of using time and knowing love, and also knowing failure, but failure of a kind that strengthened and improved me as a man and a writer. I was a familiar face, and because my intimate thoughts were published in my own voice, I was well known. I had few secrets in those years. I lived my life, and lived my crises, in full view of the spectators who were my readers. I turned my crises into fiction and endured them that way, ultimately learning to value them.
Those years on the record, interviewers would ask blunt questions about my marriage or divorce, my children, my money, what I’d had for breakfast, and what I was writing. Even a lazy biographer on a fellowship, with grad students doing the grunt work, could do justice to those years—could probably describe them as well as I. My successes were public, my failures were in full view, exaggerated by all that sunlight. It sometimes seemed in those years that I belonged to the public, to my readers, to the people eager for the minor scandals associated with me—the two wives, the two children, the houses, the travel, the squandered fortune, the color and buzz of my writing life. I had lived through a time when a writer was a magic figure, a person of influence and power, watched closely and admired and envied.
Perhaps the way I lived, sharing my life with the world, was the reason it all came to an end. I was popular for thirty years, and then I was out of favor, I was hidden, I became what’s-his-name. Maybe I was dead. Yet I was alive and alert, wondering in my new obscurity what would come next, and all I saw was Mother.
Everything that had come before those years of public life was yearning—fantasy, pain and preparation, Mother’s scorn, stocking supermarket shelves. Everything that followed those years was diminution, as I sank. Everything I did occurred with a dying fall. I began to understand the older people I had known earlier in my life, the men and women I had smiled at and not taken seriously, because they had not taken me seriously. Their mood of disappointment, their skepticism, their bitter humor, their refrain of “You’ll see, I was like you once.” I remembered how they had mocked my hope, jeered at my ambition. “What will you write about? Who’ll publish it? Do you have anything to say? Who will care?”—the challenges that Mother had made that rang in my mind all those years.
At a certain stage of life you realize that most of what you’d hoped for will never come to you. Not gonna happen! I consoled myself with the thought that I’d been luckier than most. I’d had decades of pleasure, of dreams fulfilled. It was just that I wanted more. I had not guessed that it would all end, was not prepared for it, and the ending made those earlier years seem unreal, as though they’d happened to someone else, not anyone who resembled me, for I had nothing to show for my effort. All gone! I was back where I’d started, literally so, with Mother, Fred and Floyd, Franny and Rose, Hubby and Gilbert, and the ghost of Angela. Back in Mother Land.
I had never written about that—my family, my early years of hope and ambition and yearning. No big families appeared in any of my books; the mothers I described were blurry but benign. What I wrote about, what people mostly write about, the busy years, the noisy years in the limelight, when they are on good terms with the world, are far less important than the hidden years, of doubt and struggle, because they are so messy and shameful. Although they are severely plotted, like my “best year,” they seem at the time to have no order to them. As a child, as an aspiring writer, I felt like an ant: I believed I had an ant’s chance of success. I saw very little; no one could see me. I was beneath notice, insignificant.
How I survived in the family, struggling to hold my own, keeping my secrets and my dreams intact—and what happened next—were what mattered to me most. I developed such a solemn habit of concealment I was not able to write about the circumstances that made me who I was. And I knew what I was concealing was too sad to think about.
The years I had spent trying to keep my dreams intact while living with my intrusive family—those years were formative, painful, humiliating, the source of all my secrecy and my creative energy. Not romantic, not even colorful, full of hurts and embarrassments and put-downs, and Mother’s cries of “It’s your own goddamned fault!” and “Who do you think you are?” But those hurts drove me in my middle years, the work I am known for. What I had dreaded most had come to pass: I was back home, with Mother.
I had come from nowhere, I was going nowhere. But wait: the middle years were not half so human, so truthful in their raggedness, as where I was now. My middle years were in my books. I had published that part of my life, and I had found myself at another bookend.
Now in obscurity, back home, I saw that I had failed as I had feared, and that I was ending my life as I had started it, among my jeering brothers and sisters, with Mother enthroned at the center of her own land.
I hated what I now understood to be my life. I had been kidding myself, as many men do, about remarrying. I had misled Missy and her dim daughter. I would never have another wife, another child. And who knew whether I’d have another book?
“Are you one of these writers who gets up early and does all his work before breakfast?” a friend of mine had asked the great Chicago novelist Nelson Algren a few years before his death—a man who knew a lot about the bitter end.
“No,” Algren said. “I’m one of those writers who doesn’t write at all anymore.”
It had been a torment to be young with Mother telling me I might never have a career; it was just as bad to be in late middle age with Mother to remind me that my career was over. Downhill, all over except the paltry remainder of my life, and Mother never looked stronger. She seemed to exist and thrive purely to show me that I had decades of disappointment ahead of me.
I visited her. She wanted presents. She needed me to tell her how well she looked. She wanted compliments.
“Guess what tomorrow is?” she asked, and looked coy. “My wedding anniversary. It would have been our sixty-sixth.”
What about my two wedding anniversaries that no one remembered, not even me?
“Look what Franny brought me. Cashmere.”
A shawl. She draped it across her shoulders and posed.
“This is from Fred.”
A chunk of porous yellow stone, set in a cube of Lucite and labeled Piece of the Great Wall of China, with two flags, America’s and China’s. Certified Authentic.
“Gilbert and Rose clubbed together to get me this.”
A footstool, leather-cushioned, with a margin of brass tacks and sturdy legs.
“And these are from Floyd.”
More books, smelling—as old books always do—of mice droppings and sticky mold and damp decay. I had come to hate the sight of books.
“I never see him.”
“Oh?”
The way she cocked her head, like a bystander at a train wreck, told me she was taking no responsibility, nor would she be giving me any information. Mother was always posturing, always playing at something, and now she was playing dumb.
“Because of what he wrote. He gave my book a stinker of a review. My own brother!”
“Oh?”
“Floyd reviewed my book!”
“Why are you shouting?”
“‘The whole family laughs at him’—that’s what he said.”
“I don’t know anything about it.” She folded her hands and shrank a little inside her new cashmere shawl.
“Yes, you do. It was in the magazine.”
Mother blew open her nostrils in a sneer. She said, “Are you still brooding about that?”
“People keep asking me about it.”
“Oh?”
Her tone was pitying, belittling me. But she was right. I ought to have let it go. Yet I hated her tone of It’s your own goddamned fault.
“Maybe you did something to offend him,” she said.
I said, “No writer’s brother has ever done this, Ma. Hemingway, Henry James, all the rest of them. Like I told you. Their brothers never did this. It’s a first. I mean, this would actually be amazingly interesting if it wasn’t me, Ma.”
Mother had stopped listening. I could tell from the slant of her head and the look in her eyes that she was thinking about something else. Her expression indicated that she was waiting for me to stop, a look of irritated and impatient boredom. Are you still blabbing? When I finished—I did so abruptly, just faltering and shrugging and going silent—Mother smiled at me.
“I walked all the way down to the public beach this morning.”
She wanted a compliment, Lordy, you are one in a million—I don’t know how you do it, but feeling hostile, I instead said, “You should be careful. You could fall. Do you remember to take your cane? A lot of people your age stumble and break a hip.”
She smiled, but I could tell from her pinched nose that she was affronted.
“I’ve always been a good walker. Miles—I’ve walked miles. I never complain.”
“I only mentioned a hip because a replacement is so expensive. You don’t want to get into a cash crunch.”
It was all mutual rebuke. I had gone there hurting, looking for a listener, and now I hurt more. Mother offered no consolation. And her obstinacy made me obstinate: I refused to praise her walking.
Gilbert called me the next day. He seemed in a hurry, but he was agitated too; he hated confrontation, and one was looming. I knew this was not a friendly call.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in Riyadh?”
“Next week,” he said. “Listen, I just got off the phone with Franny. She was talking to Ma this morning. Ma was really upset about what you said.”
“What did I say?”
“Let’s not get into that, okay? What you don’t seem to realize is that walking to the beach is one of Ma’s recreations. She said you were determined to scare her—wait —” I had tried to interrupt. “Don’t discourage her, and for God’s sake stop trying to scare her. She won’t fall down. She’s pretty spry. She was so upset she couldn’t sleep.”
Hubby called and said, “I saw Ma. She was talking about you. She even mentioned your book,” and in Mother’s voice he added, “‘More porno!’”
Fred called later. He said, “I guess you know why I’m calling. Ma’s a wreck. Why do you try to worry her? Give her a break. She’s old.”
Mother did not seem old to me. She seemed ageless and fierce, more powerful than ever, surrounded by courtiers and ladies-in-waiting and flatterers and protectors, demanding obedience from her subjects, of whom I was one of the lowliest. She seemed to grow stronger as I grew weaker, and now I felt ant-like again, a humiliated child, reprimanded by Mother’s surrogates. I was fairly miserable. Mother was very happy. She preserved her happiness by blaming me for my misery. And she was probably right to blame me. My book had failed. Whose fault is that?