36

Checks and Balances

I did not see Mother in the way Floyd did, and perhaps this was another of her triumphs. With her timely gifts, Mother had reconfigured the family to suit her needs. Some of us were trusted, and rewarded for being trustworthy; others were less reliable. Floyd and I were beyond the pale. I objected to this until I saw Mother’s crystalline logic—she was right not to trust me.

Floyd’s orotund document was both a warning and an accusation. He tended toward the lapidary, but among “inasmuch” and “vouchsafe” and “money-grubbing harridans and moralizing mountebanks in muumuus,” the message was clear: We are watching you.

Mother was now ninety-one. Nearly all her old friends had died. She was making new ones. They loved her wisdom and her twinkle, they admired her health and strength. “I do the best I can,” she said, and lowered her eyes—Mother’s pose of modesty was effective. She knew she was healthier than any of the others in her carving class, the doddering octogenarians, the seventy-odds with early-onset Alzheimer’s. She was thin as a stick but with the same fierce face I had known all my life, the hawk nose, the flinty eyes, the sharp tongue. Her hearing was perfect: “No need to shout” became one of her catchphrases. Marvin had high blood pressure, now worsened by his having retired from his job as a mall cop. Mother said, “It’s his own goddamned fault.” Fred’s wife Erma had fallen and bruised her arm. Mother said, “When I was carrying Gilbert I slipped on the ice and chipped my elbow. They expected me to miscarry. Did I complain?” Loris was pregnant again. “She’s as big as a house,” Mother said, hooting, “God forgive me.”

She seemed more malicious than ever, more willful, and would not be corrected. Talking to her, I forgot her age. She was quicker-witted than me, two moves ahead of me usually, all her faculties intact. Her accounts were complex but revealing—one could understand the state of her mind from the movements of her money, the handouts big and small, and the melancholy fact that now she had a lot less money in the bank and no property left to dispose of. Apart from that money, she had left herself with few assets. Each item in the house had someone’s name on it, and the house itself was Franny’s. She was eating off crockery that was legally Rose’s, wearing jewelry that she’d willed to Fred.

But Mother’s gifts were only part of my concern. The bigger question was how would she go on living, supporting herself, if her health failed? She wouldn’t be able to live on her own much longer. Soon she’d be the resident of an old folks’ home. Assisted living was expensive, and at some point she’d need twenty-four-hour nursing, money for rent, for medicine, for care. A hundred grand was not enough to cover this. The next time I visited her, I brought the subject up.

With a rocking motion of her body that signaled her impatience, Mother said, “I’m insured.”

“Do you have long-term-care insurance?”

“I’m covered. I was a teacher, you know. I have a good policy.”

“They don’t cover old folks’ homes.”

“I’m not in an old folks’ home, in case you didn’t notice.”

“You might need money sometime,” I said.

This anxiety also lay behind Floyd’s letter. It was why he had said to me, “Ma will end up thanking us for this.”

“I have money,” Mother said.

“You might need more.”

“I have enough.”

Because I knew so much, I had to tread carefully. I did not want to reveal the extent of my knowledge, for fear she would ask how I’d come by it. I said, “But if you give any away, you might find yourself short.”

Mother sat back and smiled at my stupidity. “Give it away?” And she laughed, an unconvincing whickering. “To whom?”

“Say, to your children.”

“I haven’t given anyone a penny,” she said, and when she delivered this line—the blanket denial that was never true—she fixed her gaze on me, arranging herself in her mendacious posture.

As though to a lying child I said lightly, “You might have given them something.”

“Nothing,” she said, reminding me how defiant she got when caught in a lie. That, too, like a child.

“Maybe a little?”

“Did you hear me? I said nothing.”

I had nowhere to go with this, and yet, leaning forward on her throne, stamping out the words on the carpet with her tiny foot, she was not through with me.

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“I would never do that.”

“You’re trying to upset me again.”

Staring at me, she made it plain that my time was up. After I left, she called Franny and Rose and Fred. She said that I’d accused her of lying, a cruel accusation for a child to make to his mother. The three of them called me and berated me for my wickedness.

Mother denied everything. She would not take responsibility for anything she’d said or done. Still, I was so stung by being told I was wicked that I called her up.

“I didn’t accuse you of lying,” I said.

“I never said you did.”

“Fred told me.”

“Oh, Fred. What has that got to do with me?”

Putting me in the wrong, Fred had said, “It’s her money.” He was right. I had no business questioning her. I told this to Floyd.

“Fred let it happen. He’s like Ariel Sharon letting the Christian falangists into Shatila to kill those Palestinian prisoners!”

This shout made me wary. Floyd was enraged by the accounts, and for a few moments he was inarticulate in his anger, wetting his lips, trying to swallow, nodding to get his bearings.

“Fred’s not the executor,” I said. “Don’t you see, Ma is Ariel Sharon.”

“Two points,” he said, trying to calm himself. “The first is that the daughters have her money. The second is that when she needs assisted living in a so-called facility we’ll have to pay for it. This is monstrous.”

What I did not tell him about Mother’s denial was that in facing me and defying me, in the way she set her jaw and stamped her foot, she became a petulant child, insolent and unforgiving, as she told me obvious lies.

“She’s like a little girl,” Franny had said to me many times. She knew Mother well, and that little girl in Mother was susceptible to Franny’s mothering and Rose’s flattery. Mother wanted praise, needed attention, craved to be noticed and marveled at, and like a tantrum-prone two-year-old, she wanted independence. I was not good at this sort of manipulation, and Floyd was even worse than me.

I began to understand all tyrants in the world as willful, twisted children. The evil king was a little boy on a throne, the wicked queen was a little girl, the dictator was a peculiar brat, obsessive and single-minded as all brats are—vindictive, too. The history of tyranny was the history of a damaged childhood—the child with power, of idiotic excesses and spite, which accounted for the irrationality and the violence. Political outrages and purges began as tantrums and ended as edicts. The vanity and greed of a tyrant was essentially infantile, but enacted on a grand scale.

The telephone was Mother’s natural weapon. Each of us was encouraged to call her once a day. Franny and Rose called her two or three times a day. That amounted to almost a hundred phone calls a week. None of the calls were sincere, none of them truthful, yet all were necessary to reassure Mother that she was still our mother and in sole charge of the family—and that we loved her, though the word “love” in this context was meaningless.

“Franny said she got a hateful letter,” Mother said to me during one of these calls.

“It might have been the letter that Floyd sent,” I said.

Shrewd woman that she was, Mother did not admit that she’d received one too.

“Why would he ever do a thing like that?”

I said, “I think he had the idea that you were giving Franny and Rose money.”

“I have never given them a penny.”

“And that they were taking advantage of you.”

“Franny and Rose are two of my dearest children, loving and kind. Franny calls me every night at bedtime, to say good night.”

I hadn’t known that it was important to Mother to be bidden good night. Calling Mother at bedtime was something I had never thought of doing, because she had never done so with me. Bedtime had always been a screech of “Turn off that goddamn light!” Franny knew better.

“I cherish them. I wish I could say the same for some of my other children.”

“Some of your other children are concerned that you might need your money. Maybe for health care.”

“My health is perfect. I take no medicine. Of course I have the usual aches and pains.” She paused and, reflecting on this, gave one of her shallow coughs.

“I’m thinking about the future.”

“I have what I need. Don’t worry about me. I worry about those poor people in Africa. I send them a little something now and then.”

“The unexpected—that’s the concern.”

“I have made provisions,” Mother said.

What did this mean? I guessed that Franny and Rose’s infantilizing of Mother was complete: having taken most of her fortune, they had left her with the impression that they would see her through any medical emergency. Maybe this meant they would invite her into their homes when she was no longer able to care for herself.

To get off the phone gracefully, I said, “You know, I never gave you my last book. I’m going to bring you a copy.”

“Don’t bother. It would just be wasted on me,” Mother said. “I can only read large-print books these days, and I don’t think any of your books is in large print. They only do it for the big bestsellers.”

I reported Mother’s saying “I have made provisions” to Floyd, who said, “What will they do if she’s gibbering and incontinent like this old guy I know in Chatham? He needs round-the-clock nursing. He needs diapers. He’s on a feeding tube.”

“Ma doesn’t want to think of that.”

“She’ll be put in a hospital. We’ll get the bill.”

“I guess it’ll be shared.”

He screamed, not a word but a howl of defiance: “The fatties spent all the money she gave them!”

I spoke to Gilbert. He said, “Obviously we should do something, but we shouldn’t upset her.”

I spoke to Hubby. He said, “I ain’t paying.”

I spoke to Fred. “There are three ways of looking at this,” he said in his lawyerly way. But what his convoluted reply really meant was: Please don’t bring this up. And in a smiling voice, he said, “Jay, what you don’t seem to accept is that Ma can do whatever she wants with her money.”

“Even divide us.”

“That’s a little harsh.”

“We hate each other, Fred. How many of us are on speaking terms?”

“I spoke to Gilbert just yesterday. I spoke to Ma today.”

“As usual, you’re just fencing with me.”

“Look, don’t you see that the person who matters most is Ma? We’re lucky she’s still alive—we still have her. She’s healthy. We have no right to upset her.”

He went in this vein. This was Mother speaking, as usual.

That was another characteristic of tyrants. They created other, smaller tyrants, operatives and surrogates who spoke for them, who perpetrated the lies, and who kept them powerful.

Behind all this confusion I sensed Mother’s defiance. She now suspected that some of her children were questioning her judgment. Floyd’s letter had stung her. I was vilified for speaking about it. She had told Franny and Rose that she loved them. She had told everyone that I was upsetting her.

The tyrant’s nightmare was to have all his agents of unrest in one room. Mother feared having us all together, facing her. She needed us apart, because she treated each of us differently, and it helped her that we were at odds with one another. United, we might oppose her; separate, quarreling, uncertain, and unequal, we needed her. This had been the case for years. But she was more secretive and fickle now than in the past—colder, harder to fathom, and contradictory.

I could tell that Mother was angry. She believed that Floyd and I were questioning her. She hated that; even the simplest question was a challenge.

“The facts are on our side,” Floyd said. “We’ve got to do something.”

“What are we actually trying to accomplish?” I asked. “You don’t want money. I don’t either.”

“Strange as it might seem, given her hostility to us, we have to protect her.”

“From what?”

“From predators. From her handing out the last of her money.”

He proposed sending photocopies, bound booklets of the hundred or so pages of the check register, to every member of the family.

“In the spirit of transparency, of openness.” But Floyd was laughing—he was like Mother too. He saw turmoil in such a move.

“What about sending a sample page?” I said. “That will shut them up.”

“We have to do more than that. I’m sick of hearing all the denials.”

We compromised. We photocopied the choicest pages, on which the largest payments were listed—payments to Franny and Rose, mostly the four- and five-figure sums. The pages were a selective history of a woman buying favors from some of her children, while excluding others altogether, seven distinct versions of mothering, a chronicle of favoritism.

“I know a guy in Dayton, Ohio,” Floyd said. “I’ll make up the envelopes and send them to him to mail.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“No one will have the slightest idea of who sent them.”

This was cleverness of a sort that Mother might have approved.

“But they’ll know it’s one of us,” I said. “We can send the letters from Boston. They won’t know which one.”

We did this, and the effect was immediate. Franny hurried to Mother’s with a scrapbook of Mother’s thank-you notes. Leafing through them, Franny wept, saying, “Am I a thief? Did I steal from you, Ma?”

Rose did the same, on a different day.

Mother told these stories to each of us when we called, not to mock her daughters but to defend them. She defended the presents to Fred, to Hubby, to Gilbert—how dare we question those?

Fred called me. He told me that we had made a big mistake in sending the copies. I said I had no idea who’d done it, but that I’d found them interesting.

“And how is Ma?” I asked.

I had assumed that revealing the payments would be a cautionary move, that Mother would see the injustice of it, that she might be contrite.

“She’s on the warpath,” he said.

 

The next time I visited her, she was. She’d been reading a book, but she put it down beside her chair to give me her full attention. In our last conversation, when I’d mentioned bringing her one of my books, she told me not to bother; she could read only large-print books. Given that she had recently refused my offer, I was curious to know what the book was, but as it was on the far side of her big chair, I could not see the cover. Anyway, she had other matters on her mind.

She did not mention the fact that one of her children had broken into her house and made copies of her check register. This seemed to be a predictable crime, one that was to be expected in a tyranny. Since she was underhanded herself, she was not shocked.

She had seen the photocopies. Franny had shown her in an attempt to vindicate herself. But the manner of Mother’s being questioned was unimportant. What angered her was that she was questioned at all.

“Do you know anything about this?” she asked me, fixing me with a rocking motion that was meant to corner me.

I said that I had seen the accounts. Some mysterious person had mailed them to me. She continued to stare at me. I said, “It was news to me. I didn’t know that you handed out half a million bucks.”

Her fingers clutched the ends of the chair arms. She tightened her grip and pulled herself forward. “Whose money is it?”

Her gargle of rage made me wince. I said, “Yours, of course.”

“Do I ask you what you do with your money?”

“I don’t have any.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“It’s my own goddamned fault,” I said, in Mother’s voice.

“If I want to help someone with a little gift, that’s my business,” she said.

“Is a house a little gift?” I said. “Is thirty grand a little gift?”

“That’s for me to judge,” Mother said.

“Do you remember, some time ago, you asked me how your will should be construed? ‘How shall I divide it?’ you asked. I said that it should be apportioned equally.”

Logic infuriated her. But instead of raging at me, she smiled at my simplicity of mind. She said, “People are not equal. Some of them are nicer and more loving than others. Some of them have needs. Some of them love me.”

Only when she used the word “love” did she display any anger, and she showed it by setting her jaw at me.

I said, “Some of us might be wondering why you chose to give most of your money and property away to just a few of your children.”

She sat straight in her chair, and although she was small and thin, she bristled in such a way as to suggest ferocity. “Who are you to question me? I can do whatever I want with my money. Now look what you’ve done.” She clutched her head and massaged it. “You’ve given me a splitting headache.”

As a courtesy, I lifted the book from the floor beside her chair and placed it on her lap. It was very heavy, and not a large-print book. Eleanor: The Years Alone, by Joseph P. Lash, about Mrs. Roosevelt.

Within hours, in her usual sequence of phone calls she told the others that I had attacked her.

“You’re a fool,” Fred said to me. “I was afraid of this.”

“What’s there to be afraid of?”

“She still has money,” he said. “And she’s mad. And she knows who her friends are.”

“By the way,” I said, “did you know that Franny calls her every night at bedtime to say good night?”

“No. God bless her.”