35

The Algebra of Love

Now I knew the truth, and the truth made me snarl with bitter joy. It was a family cynicism that I shared—a sour trait—glee at seeing the worst in people, the confirmation that all of us were dogs. I complained to Floyd. I encouraged him to rant, I said that I was outraged, I shook the photocopies of Mother’s check register—a great flapping sheaf of betrayal—and I went on howling. But I was happy in a grim and deeply satisfying way, taking a morbid pleasure in having the truth in my hand.

How often in life are you certain of the unvarnished truth, have laid out before you the meticulously kept balance sheet of affection, the algebra of love? Here it was, all those columns of figures, and explanations too. Franny’s kitchen $16,000 and Rose’s septic system $11,000 and Hubby, repayment for groceries $80 and Jay birthday $10 and Gilbert birthday $500 and Franny car $6,000 and People in Africa $20 and Fred children’s tuition $1,500. Fred was a multimillionaire.

Money was love. On the basis of Mother’s financial records I had the heptagram of her love, also her indifference, her favorites, her weaknesses, her dislikes, and more. Her disposition in every sense. She had drawn up this balance sheet and in doing so had reconfigured the family, arranged the real family into a set of numbers. Franny came out on top with sums of five figures, Rose was second, Hubby and Fred next, and Gilbert had gotten a smallish amount.

Floyd and I came at the bottom, behind Angela, who was dead but who had been lavished with candles and flowers and memorial masses and contributions to charities—missions in India and Africa and South America—in her name: a hospital in Angola, her representation as a cherub in a stained-glass window in Peru, a gift of goats to a village in Ethiopia. What was beautiful was the linking of Floyd and me at the bottom of the balance sheet, for after all the years of backstabbing and recriminations and Look what he did to me! and He hit me first!, Floyd and I became allies—more than that, the best of friends, as in our earliest childhood, when he had protected me and comforted me with stories at bedtime. “Tell me about the circus,” I had pleaded with him in the suffocating darkness of our attic bedroom.

In the real family, which these accounts revealed, Father did not matter much, apart from Geraniums $2.99 and Memorial Mass $25. And Floyd and I were negligible, seemingly punished, though God knows for what. We did not figure in Mother’s accounts, and so did not occupy much space in her mind or her memory. We had gotten nothing, so we were at the margin, and in the center the rewarded ones were arrayed: Gilbert, who had received a few checks; Fred, who’d been given tuition money for his kids; Hubby, who’d gotten a large piece of land for a dollar. Franny and Rose had, between them, reaped a fortune in money and property.

The abusive phone calls that Floyd had made had put them all on notice. Mother had no idea what we knew. All the children still visited her, brought her presents of plants and fruit and trinkets. We took turns driving her to church and invited her for meals. But we did this separately. Apart from Floyd and me, our paths did not cross. There were no more family dinners, cookouts, or birthday parties, none of the old family routines. We knew too much of Mother now to see each other in the same way.

The real family consisted of lobbyists and gossips, of which Franny and Rose were the most active. We now knew they were Mother’s handmaidens and heiresses, and as in all such opportunistic relationships, it was hard to tell whether she owned them through her patronage or they possessed her by their flattery.

As recipients, they were not calmed. They were, if anything, more competitive. Had Mother intended this? The sisters especially hated Hubby and saw him as undeserving.

Floyd said, “Remember the shit fit Franny threw when Ma gave Hubby the Acre?”

It was true. She had been tearful, appealing to us for support.

“She wanted it for herself.”

Hubby did not mention the gift of land or the various sums of money Mother had sent his way—the check register told it all—yet he swore and yelled about his sisters’ greed, their gall, and when he was challenged, claimed that the land he’d been given had been worthless, unbuildable, until he’d put in an expensive septic system.

Fred, the eldest, and Gilbert, the youngest, were allies. Floyd hated them both. “Vacillators! They ratted us out!”

After some months, Mother noticed the hostility, and she asked to be visited more often. The alliances altered, at her direction, Floyd reported to me. In Floyd’s eyes the greatest crime of Fred and Gilbert was that they now spoke to Franny and Rose, and joined Mother and them for Sunday lunch, the potluck meals that included potato salad, salami, Swedish meatballs, coleslaw, and Mother’s nutty hermits.

“They actually eat this stuff,” Floyd said. “It’s not a meal, it’s more like a hazing ritual. A tribal initiation. Consuming the unnamable. And for what? For more money.”

Could this be so?

We waited for another Friday, another bird-carving class. We drove to Mother’s and cautiously approached the house, parking two streets away, as we had before, thinking of ourselves, in our juvenile way, as commandos. The back door was unlocked, though the front door was bolted.

Floyd said, “Look, Ma still saves jelly jars.”

We hurried to her desk and flipped open the spiral-bound check register.

“What did I tell you?”

Franny—Happy Anniversary $500. Rose car insurance—$700. Benno—good report card—$50. Franny Air Fare to visit Max $1,200. Fred ​— tuition $1,500. Hubby—for window boxes $200.

“This thing is hemorrhaging money,” Floyd said, pounding the binder shut. “And nothing for me. What about me? I’m smart and I want respect.”

He was clowning, stamping his feet, flinging himself from room to room. He finally alighted on the cabinet of knickknacks.

“I want this!” He flung open the cabinet door and took out a porcelain Hummel figure. “Goose girl, you’re mine.” And then he put it back. “This is rat shit. By the way, are you aware that these tchotchkes are the brainchild of a materialistic German nun?”

I was seated on Mother’s throne, watching him fuss.

“The real problem in this house is that there’s nothing left to steal. That must happen in a lot of families.” He went to the bookshelf and poked at the spines of some books. “Worthless. But what about these albums?”

A stack of fat albums were crammed onto one shelf. We pulled them out, looked over the old photos, and found snapshots from the 1920s—Mother’s family, Father’s family. Then the 1930s—their marriage. And the 1940s—our baby pictures, photos of us growing up. Various houses we’d occupied. Mother’s father, looking like a tycoon, a heavy watch chain draped on his vest front, a cigar in his chubby hand.

“Family history,” Floyd said. “This is gold. These are priceless.”

“Should we take them?”

“Why not?”

We made a pile of the albums with the rarest photos and left the rest. Floyd returned to Mother’s desk, lifted the glass on it, slipped out the smiling photo of Franny, wrote Fatso on the back, and then replaced it.

“Someday Franny will be dusting and she’ll find that.”

We ate an apple and half a ham sandwich from the refrigerator.

Floyd said, “Remember that guy who raped and murdered a woman in her trailer? She had been eating a hamburger. After he strangled her, he finished her hamburger.”

He was chewing, holding the sandwich in one hand and the family albums under his arm.

“They fried him. It wasn’t just the murder. That was bad. It was the hamburger. That was somehow worse.” He made a face, then wiped his mouth. “Why does Ma use so much mayo?”

We crept out of Mother’s house and, looking left and right, sneaked through the backyards to my Jeep.

We complained, we objected, Floyd howled, but we were happy. The pleasure this gave us was almost indescribable. Why did it outweigh most of the pleasures I had known in my life?

Burgling Mother’s house was childish fun at its most intense, savored in adulthood. The joy in being young, scattering in the neighborhood or the nearby woods, was in breaking the rules and being unobserved, somehow upsetting the natural order—shattering windows, stealing trifles, scribbling swear words on a wall, slashing someone’s tires, snapping off a car antenna and using a length of it to make a zip gun. Part of the thrill of this mischief was that while we were invisible, the misdeed was noticed—we were making someone angry. We were always so near the scene of the crime that no one suspected us.

Our satisfaction now was in the secrecy, in the teamwork—we were a little gang—in the risk and the foolery and the reward of finding out (in our case) where we stood in the family. That it was petty crime—break-in and larceny—made it all the more pleasurable.

The excitement of driving with Floyd to Mother’s to sneak in made me giddy. It was the happiest of outings. Floyd was in high spirits, joking as I drove, doing imitations of Mother (“Has anyone seen my albums?”) and Franny (“Want some meatballs, Ma? They’ll cost you ten grand.”) and Rose (waiting for a handout).

“At this moment, as we are casing the joint,” Floyd had said, pushing his way through Mother’s hydrangeas, “someone is playing golf, believing he is having fun. But really, you can’t beat this for a good time.”

“I agree, burgling is better than golf.”

“I asked her for a loan a few years ago. She said she didn’t have any money,” Floyd said. “And look.”

The week he had been turned down for a loan, Mother had given Rose a check, itemized under Window treatments.

We should have been dismayed, yet we were happy. Among the papers we found was one in Mother’s handwriting specifying that, upon her death, the entire contents of the house would be conveyed to Franny. This was obviously one of Franny’s ruses, since she had already been given the house.

“Ma, can I have the grandfather clock?” Floyd said in Franny’s oinking voice. “Ma, what about the sofa and the desk? And could I ever have the carpet?”

I said, “Do you really want that stuff?”

“No, but why should she have it?”

Irrationality was another of our joys, the pleasurable perversity of pure spite, being a meaningless nuisance. Because in all of this—the intrusion, our anger, the teasing, the indignation—we were children; we were boys again.

And I laughed hard at the end of that day when Floyd handed me the stolen albums, looked at his watch, and said, “I’ve got to hit the road. I have to be at Harvard at seven for my seminar on Wallace Stevens’s Opus Posthumous.”

Floyd wrote a letter to Franny and Rose, condemning them. It was an indictment, berating them in his characteristic way. Your shameless opportunism, your naked greed, everything you lit upon you snatched and then you hurried away on your busy hocks and trotters.

He made Mother the victim. Your poor unassuming mother, whose pocket you pick.

The other children were also implicated: While your spineless brothers looked indifferently upon this heinous act of betrayal . . .

Famous for his denouncing letters, Floyd taught another course at Harvard called The Epistolary Tradition in Literature, from Richardson to Bellow. This family letter was two pages of accusation, closely printed, and like the letters he’d sent in the past to each of us, it was fierce and so abusive it was unanswerable in its invective.

His letter was unusual in that it portrayed Mother as the victim of their plotting. Mother was feeble, helpless, infantilized. I did not remark on this, but it seemed strange, since I had always seen Mother as the manipulator, and the check register seemed to bear this out. Yet for Floyd, Franny and Rose were the chief villains.

In the letter, Mother was not Queen Lear, as Floyd had sometimes called her. She was instead an elderly and unsuspecting woman who had been bamboozled by her daughters.

Declaiming the letter to me on my porch in Centerville, Floyd strode up and down, slapping the pages, stabbing the air with his finger. I thought, as I had many times, how he would have made a marvelous actor, although much of this was melodrama, if not parody.

“We have been cozened!” he cried. “We are the poor dupes of a pea-and-thimble trick. And who is left? A bewildered crone, gibbering in her chair, her shoulders shaking under her thin shawl, whimpering, ‘Why me? Why me?’”

He finished, clearly pleased with himself, folding the pages and tucking them into the breast pocket of his seersucker jacket.

“Are you sending a copy to Ma?”

“Everyone gets one,” he said. “That way, there is no misunderstanding.”

“What do you think she’ll say?”

“Ma? She’ll see we’re on her side. That she’s been conned. That’s what this is all about. We’re the only ones who see the truth. Ma is the victim.”