38

Hot Dinners

Driving down the empty road toward Mother’s—she had called, with an ambiguous summons, saying, “Of course, if you’d rather not come . . .”—I was marveling at the nakedness of the Cape in February. My tires hissed, licking at the grit and slime of winter. Tree branches were so crooked when they were stripped bare, the trees themselves so witch-like. Freezing weather made me feel aged and fragile; the winter creature, confined, shrunken by the cold.

Summer on the Cape, by contrast, was a green world of sunlit privacies, the density of speckled and shadowy woods, the leafy trees giving the impression of largeness and health, protecting the house, hiding the neighbors. The Cape foliage was its real beauty, more beautiful even than its sloping dunes and beaches of smooth stones. The Cape trees looked indestructible: seedlings with their fans of shapely oak leaves sprang up between the hydrangeas and needed to be yanked like weeds. Infant pitch pines and cedars bristled at the margin of the lawn and were sometimes mowed. Never mind that the soil was bad. Dig down six inches and there was sour sand, but the native trees were suited to it; they seemed big and powerful, and so were the local roses, small floppy blossoms on a tangle of brambles.

On winter days like this the real size of the trees was obvious. Without leaves, the oaks and locusts and pepperidge trees were spindly, round-shouldered, starved, hollow-eyed, and knobby. The pitch pines were revealed as frail—the sea winds killed them with salt, they shedded half their needles. Only the cedars and junipers stood straight, but were not thick enough to hide the neighbors. The roses were over, the geraniums had blackened in the first frost, and, in this soil, none of the trees grew tall.

I had known the Cape summers as a small boy. I had gloried in those sunny months, loving the whine of insects, the hot tang of tar bubbles on the sun-softened roads, the marsh hawks hovering. As an older man, working through the seasons, I saw the truth of the Cape: it was lovely only in the summer. Locals hated tourists, so they longed for cold months, but the cold months were bleak and there were often nine of them. The fall colors were too brief to be an event—the russet and gold leaves were beaten down by the rain; and the winter was stark, the Cape a corpse in the sickly light, gray grass, black trees, gangrenous leaf mold, and too many houses. Far fewer people to support the stores and the restaurants, giving the towns a look of abandonment. The roads were always wet and peculiarly dirty in winter, the roadsides thick with ropes and twists of accumulated sand and grit. Blown leaves were bunched against stone walls and rusty fences and pasted onto the broken roads, for in winter the frost heaved the roads apart, and the scrape of snow plows deepened the potholes. The rain was brown, falling from the brown sky, or else it shot hard out of the northeast, thrashing, whips of it against the shingles. I like it when it’s bleak, some Capies dishonestly boasted. They meant: We have no other place to go. We are dying here.

The Cape in winter made me feel morbid. I resented the conceit of Mother’s ancient vanity. I hated old age.

No matter how resourceful an adult I could be in the world at large—the solitary traveler in the African bush—when I was on the Cape I was a boy, a son, something of a burden, an annoying brother. This also meant that, on the Cape, I found it hard to relate to my own children, who were not boys at all but men—Charlie in Boston, Julian and Harry in London. I heard from them all the time; their lives were busy, busier than mine. But I seldom saw them. The pull of Mother, the gravity of accumulated distress, was strong.

My Africa book was published. This account of my overland trip from Cairo to Cape Town—trains, trucks, buses, boats, bush taxies, and on foot—got the usual reviews, some praise for being truthful and felicitous, some abuse for being critical. Mother’s example had convinced me that most praise sounded like belittlement. I dedicated the book to her. And on this cold day I was visiting her with a copy of the book lying gift-wrapped on the passenger seat.

“I want you to look at something,” Mother said as a way of greeting me, seizing my wrist and guiding me across the front lawn, which was stubbly this late winter afternoon, the grass decaying in the dampness, the soil as soft as cake. Mother had a remarkable grip. I could feel her finger bones pinching me hard like salad tongs, that same cold tug, that same snap.

I saw nothing. I said so. Mother said, “Because you’re not looking!”

Mother always spoke as if someone else was listening—many people, in fact.

The thing she wanted me to see was a birdbath, a cement saucer propped on a fluted cement stand, a crust of frost-rimmed ice in its declivity.

“Nice,” I said. From where I stood it looked like a crude toadstool, lifeless in the early dusk.

“Look closer.”

Lettering carved around the rim, or rather cast in the cement (you bought these things at Wally’s Garden Center in South Yarmouth), read, To the Dearest Mother on Earth. A bird had shat on it, making the crucial word read Direst.

“It’s lovely, Ma.”

“Rose’s idea,” she said. “What’s that?”

She was looking at the wrapped parcel under my arm.

“A book.”

“Oh?”

“One of mine.”

“Oh.” She sounded disappointed.

“About Africa.”

“Those poor people,” she said. “I give them a little something every Christmas.”

“It’s for you. Look.” I unwrapped it and turned to the dedication page. To my Mother, on her 92nd birthday.

Tucking it under her arm, she said, “I’d like to give it to Rose. She’s so generous. Isn’t that the most beautiful birdbath you’ve ever seen? She knows how much I love birds.”

In that moment, with hardly any effort, she managed to insult me, anger Rose—who would be getting the book secondhand—and maintain control over us. What annoyed me even more was that I resented giving Mother a copy of the book in the first place.

“I always knew you were going to be a writer,” Mother said, leading the way into the house. “You used to lie on the living room floor with a pencil and a piece of paper.”

I sat and Mother began to talk about how proud she was of the family. She was triumphant. We were at war with each other. The coils of complexity, the old whispers and jealousies, the sedition and sniping, the combustible memories in the family, and the ancient sadism—all of it made it impossible for me to tell when the war had started. At birth, probably: we had never known peace.

There wasn’t much love, but somehow Mother had taught us that love and money were equal, that money was a measure of love. She was brilliant in her partiality, keeping every amount she gave unequal, She had a competitive and resentful person’s instinct for measuring, for teaching us the subtleties of shortfall, the scourge of scarcity. Father had been a moderating influence—his gentle persuasion made Mother aware of her unfairness. “Measure, measure,” was one of his taunts. Later, I learned how, with a compulsive measurer, you always fail.

This was running through my head as we sat in Mother’s house on this cold day, Mother talking about Rose’s gift of the birdbath and Franny’s attentiveness to her.

“Would you do me a favor? I would be so grateful,” Mother said, still in the voice that suggested she believed she was being overheard by many people.

“Gladly.”

“There’s a towel on the clothesline,” Mother said. “Would you ever go out and get it for me? It should be dry by now. I hung it out to dry this morning. The ground was so slippery! I thought I might fall and break my hip. But I had no choice. The towel was soaking wet.”

This seemed an extravagant explanation for a wet towel. I guessed there was a story behind it, or else I would not have heard all this prologue. Mother never spoke of effort without following it up with blame.

I got the towel. It was still damp and gray on this damp gray day. Mother, too frugal for a clothes dryer, was perhaps the last person on the Cape to use wooden clothespins.

“That’s Floyd’s,” she said.

“Floyd’s towel?”

“The one he used.” She cocked her head. “He was here yesterday.”

She spoke in a weary way, as though characterizing Floyd’s visit as an ordeal.

“Really—he was here?”

“At the crack of dawn,” Mother said. “I was still in my bathrobe, making coffee.” By her tone I could see that she was the victim of an early-morning siege, Floyd hammering on her door. She made a martyred face. “He brought me a pizza,” she said, “that he made himself. ‘You can eat it for dinner with a bottle of wine’”—her mimicry of Floyd’s glottal stop on “bottle”—baw-oo—was accurate.

She went on telling me what was to be a story that typified the triumphant phase of her motherhood.

But even so, I was surprised, because I knew the story that lay behind it. Another Christmas had come and gone, another set of separations. Six weeks before, around New Year’s, Floyd had complained to me of Mother’s generosity toward Franny and Rose over the holidays: large checks—Floyd was still monitoring the outflow. He had received a pillow, I had gotten a jar of grape jelly (“Made by Trappist Monks”). We had all chipped in at Fred’s suggestion and bought Mother a rocker. This angered Floyd.

“Great, we just bought Franny and Marvin a new chair.”

He reminded me of the letter among Mother’s papers specifying that all the furniture in the house belonged to the inheritor—Franny.

Floyd was particularly aggrieved because the winter’s low temperatures had frozen his water pipes. His oil burner was broken. Apart from a kerosene stove that gave off noxious fumes, Floyd had no heat or water.

“I’m living like a rodent! I’m nibbling cheese! My nose is running. And Franny has a new rocker. She owns Ma’s house!”

Floyd did not communicate with Mother for six weeks. Normally he called her, as I did, once or twice a week to ask whether she needed anything—and of course, as we all did, to find out if she was still alive.

On one of my calls, Mother said, “Is Floyd mad at me?”

“I don’t know.”

It was a family trait to avoid being anyone’s advocate, because it seemed to demonstrate an alliance.

“Are you sure he’s not mad at me? I haven’t heard a word from him for some time.”

Mother was still sharp enough at ninety-two to evaluate the separate attentions of her children. Her alertness was in keeping with her need to control: no one was safe from her gaze, and even the despised children were scrutinized—perhaps given more scrutiny.

I said, “Why don’t you call him? See what’s on his mind.”

She seemed doubtful, a long silence on the phone, a familiar sigh, vibrato from the roof of her mouth.

I said, “I mean, you’re his mother.”

This remark came back to me the next day, Hubby in a bantering call telling me that Mother had mocked my saying (and she improved it a little), After all, you are his mother, aren’t you?—turning it into an accusation.

Yet, seeming to act on what I’d said, she called Floyd. She invited him over. And, overcoming all his Christmas fury, Floyd had visited. I now knew that he’d brought her a pizza he’d made. He had also—the towel was proof—taken a shower there, because his pipes had frozen.

Mother got what she’d asked for, a visit from her son. And afterward she sat jeering at him, laughing at his pizza, lamenting his early arrival.

“And he left me a little present—his wet towel to launder.”

He’d given her what she wanted more than anything, a grievance.

 

Two more cold Cape Cod months drizzled by. Easter came. Floyd was in Pennsylvania—a new girlfriend and also an escape from the holiday. Few of us still went to church. It seemed that Franny and Rose had other plans. Only Hubby and I were on the Cape. I kept my head down. Hubby was not Mother’s favorite, but he wanted to make some improvements to his house on the Acre, and he had a plan to soften Mother up for a loan. He called it a loan, but when the lender is ninety-two years old, all loans can be comfortably regarded as gifts.

Realizing that she would be spending Easter on her own, Mother encouraged Hubby to visit. If she couldn’t have one of her favorites, she would settle for him. And before he made the visit final, Hubby said he needed a little money: “Just a loan. I’ll pay you back.” Eager for his company and his bringing food, relieved that she wouldn’t be alone, Mother agreed in principle to the loan.

“I’ll bring scallops,” Hubby said.

Mother said, “I love scallops,” yet as soon as she hung up, Fred called unexpectedly to say that he’d just arrived excitedly from China. He was on the Cape. Could he host her for Easter dinner?

“Hubby insisted he wanted to come over,” Mother said to Fred. “You know how he is. He doesn’t seem to realize that I can look after myself.”

Hubby’s visit was now a burden, and particularly annoying because it meant she’d have to turn down Fred’s invitation to dinner.

Hubby and Moneen made their Easter visit to Mother. They sat with her to watch the Easter service on TV. They brought flowers. Moneen sautéed the scallops and served them on angel hair pasta. Hubby presented Mother with a chocolate cake. Then he scraped his chair back and clutched his face and told her his tale of woe. Mother sent him away with a check.

“But remember, it’s a loan,” Hubby said. “I’m paying you back.”

So powerful was Mother’s conceit that she was indestructible, she said, “I can give you a few years, Hubbard, but no more than that.”

That night she called Franny and Rose, she called Fred and Gilbert, she prayed to Angela, she even called me. In a towering rage she denounced Hubby to everyone. He and Moneen had shown up late, with a pound of scallops (“I know for a fact that they were on sale”) and “a store-bought cake.” He’d then demanded money. “How could I refuse?” She’d given him a check, and instead of thanking her he’d made a big show of saying he’d pay her back. What a bore it had all been. And on Easter, the holiest day of the year.

“They took home the leftovers,” she said. “They left me dishes to wash.”

To please Mother, we joined her in disparaging Hubby and pitied her for the unsatisfactory dinner, the wasted day, the ingratitude.

We entertained her after that, early dinners at nearby restaurants, but because each of us children were on bad terms with each other, we took her out separately.

“Franny and Rose would have loved to be here,” Mother said to me at her favorite restaurant, the Happy Clam—my night to host her for dinner. She knew they would not have come for anything, but it was another way of putting me in the wrong and justifying her role as a benign dictator.

“They hate me,” I said.

“No one hates you,” she said.

“It’s true. But I’m all right with it.”

Mother was chewing as she said, “It’s so sad when people can’t learn to get along.”

The dinners continued. Mother was the only one of us who was truly happy. Because of this, she concealed her happiness, so that we would not be complacent. In her oblique, not to say perverse, pathology, she became even more secretive. She said the opposite of what she felt, or else was noncommittal. She was soon famous for her silences.

“Read my mind,” she seemed to say, and she smiled whenever we attempted this impossible feat. We were always wrong. No matter how hard we tried, we could not get her to admit she was happy. She refused to be satisfied, because admitting this would also be to admit that we had succeeded. She saw her mother role as that of someone who had to insist that we had failed her. Only that way could she triumph. Every dinner was a celebration of our failure. Angela was perfect, but Angela was dead, only useful as a spiritual guide. Angela could not pay the bill at the Happy Clam.

I apologized to her at one of these dinners, just to see what she would say.

“You’ll just have to try harder,” she said.

I came to understand that each of us was alone. Each of us pretended to have Mother, but it was not so. Nor did we have anyone else. Mother had us all. Mother had everything.