39

A Nest of Vipers

After years of steady work, a daily routine, writing all morning, a walk after lunch, more work in the late afternoon until wine o’clock, at six or seven, I had begun to slow down. And, in my solitude, I began to observe the family with a fascinated gaze. I saw what I had missed before. The battles had wearied me, yet had not repelled me. I had become absorbed in the bickering; the fighting in the family was like a sulfurous form of vitality. I even turned it into work, making notes as I had done as a young man in central Africa, in a district of warring clans or a peculiarly feud-prone village. I saw that what I had taken to be quarrelsome siblings and a vain and manipulative mother was much more poisonous, disruptive, and dangerous—a nest of vipers. The dreary family now seemed extraordinary in its cruelty and selfishness. This revelation liberated me and made me patient in my fascination.

My new habit of doing nothing, or very little, seemed natural, a period of rest after labor. I wrote less, I read more. I noticed that the memoirs I was rereading, Greene’s A Sort of Life, Conrad’s A Personal Record, and Kipling’s Something of Myself, were all published by writers in their sixties. Waugh wrote A Little Learning in his late fifties. These evasive books convinced me that I would never do this myself. I had been pondering this subject ever since the lunch at Rules in London when Julian had said, “Pretty soon it’ll be time for your autobiography.” I would never write an autobiography, with all the misleading facts, half-truths, and evasions of an irregular life. A memoir with big gaps seemed worse than an exhaustive self-examination.

I imagined the book’s appearance. My life would be reviewed by envious hacks, bitter academics, and ambitious young writers. I knew—I had been all of these people in my career. The summation of my life: “Some good parts, lots of boring parts, wasted time—on the whole, a mediocre life. Not recommended.”

It must occur as a grim foreboding to many writers that when the autobiography is written, it is handed to a reviewer to be graded on readability as well as veracity and fundamental worth. With this notion of my life being given a C-minus, I began to understand the omissions in autobiography and the many writers who refused to write one.

Besides, I had at times bared my soul. What is more autobiographical than the sort of travel book, a dozen tomes, that I had been writing for the past forty years? In every sense that candor goes with the territory. And the setting down of personal detail can be a devastating emotional experience. The assumption that the autobiography signals the end of a writing career also made me pause. Here it is, with a drum roll, the final volume before the writer is overshadowed by silence and death, a sort of farewell and an unmistakable signal that one is “written out.”

And what is there to write? In the second volume of his autobiography, V. S. Pritchett speaks of how “the professional writer who spends his time becoming other people and places, real or imaginary, finds he has written his life away and has become almost nothing.” Pritchett goes on, “The true autobiography of this egotist is exposed in all its intimate foliage in his work.”

The more I reflected on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big, talkative family I grew up in, and early on I developed the fiction writer’s useful habit of taking liberties—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction.

I thought of a line in Anthony Powell’s novel Books Do Furnish a Room, where the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins, reflecting on a slew of memoirs he is reviewing, writes, “Every individual’s story has its enthralling aspect, though the essential pivot was usually omitted or obscured by most autobiographers.”

My essential pivot, was it Mother?

 

This decision not to write an account of my life made me happy. It was a reprieve from a chore I’d dreaded, and it gave me more leisure to think about my family—a different sort of chronicle, nothing about writing but rather a reflection on power, a study of malice.

I was watchful. I seemed to slip into idleness, as though I had sustained a bad injury—cracked my spine, maybe—and in the process of healing grew fat and, most of my passion spent, never regained the desire for effort. “I don’t have the fire in my belly anymore,” older men used to say to me, to explain why they’d retired from their work. They were usually bureaucrats, foreign service officers, competitive men, and when they said it I always involuntarily glanced down and saw a broad complacent paunch.

That was my condition now, living in Mother Land, my family of greater interest to me than any people I had traveled among in a life of roaming the world of hungry people struggling to survive. The family now seemed to me just like those strugglers and scavengers, except that they wore shoes. And in the meantime, in my leisure, I found other things to like. I learned, as one does in idleness, to avoid occasions when people were laboring, toiling for a fair day’s pay. I needed to be around other idle people, stragglers like myself. I did not have to look farther than my family.

I found a horrid enjoyment in the bickering, took a bystander’s glee in the fighting of the siblings—the ones who’d gotten a bit of Mother’s money battling the ones who’d gotten a lot of it. “It’s so depressing,” Floyd said. “Didi doesn’t understand it at all.” Didi was his new woman, just a name so far; I hadn’t seen her. But the struggle seemed to me like a process of life, like the oldest story in the world, the queen setting her subjects at odds, animating them with unequal handouts to test them and to guarantee her dominance. It was at once like the origin of war and the key to power, for the more the subjects fought among themselves, the less the queen was threatened.

Had Mother guessed how violent a process she had kicked into motion? I don’t think so. Mother was vain but she wasn’t evil, and on a fundamental level she needed us. She would not have wanted us to destroy each other. She would have been shocked if she had known how fierce we fought—the insults, the gibes—how close we came to wrecking one another’s lives, and how miserable it made us all.

And yet that was what happened. What made this antagonism so bad was that, as older adults, we behaved more like children than ever before. We seemed intent on devouring each other, the endo-cannibalism that existed in the most self-destructive rituals of remote peoples. We had the time for it. Our careers were over, or we were part-timers. Not much else to do but fight; not ambitious but still greedy, still angry.

Mother was more alive, more active than I could remember, more acute and demanding, on the phone all day and half the night, wanting to be visited, eager for presents, the center of our world.

Mother’s health was good, so she mocked other people’s illnesses—Marvin’s hypochondria, Jonty’s whining, Franny’s worrying. Of Walter’s back problems Mother said, “I’ve never had anything wrong with my back.” Of Rose’s reduced hours at school, Mother said, “She only works two days a week,” always comparing others to herself and to her life of toil.

Mocking the daughters was a dodge. I knew that now. It was Mother’s way of disguising the fact that she was still regularly writing checks to them, for small and big amounts. Mother’s reasoning—transparent to me—was: If I’m rude about them, no one will suspect that I’m giving them money for attending to me. I knew that Franny and Rose’s position was secure as Mother’s favorite visitors.

But here was a further subtlety: I really did not know whether Mother was actually concealing her gifts or whether she was only pretending to conceal them. She was so shrewd that either could have been the case. She had me fooled—Floyd, too. He had kept current with her handouts, but in his romantic bliss with Didi, whoever she might be, he’d stopped caring about the outflow of money.

Sunday belonged to Franny and Rose. None of us wanted to bump into them, so we stayed away. Hubby visited on Saturday. Gilbert stayed for a few days at a time when he was back in the States. Fred made a point of taking Mother out to eat, the sort of dinner date that Mother loved. These outings were less for the dinners than for the doggy bags that Mother appealed for. Floyd visited now and then—a few times a month. I dropped in on the days I visited Father’s grave—Oak Grove was not far from Mother’s house. I say “Mother’s house,” but of course the house had been deeded to Franny and Marvin.

I was reminded that the house was Franny’s on the occasions when Mother pointed out that she had ordered new carpets, a new stove, a skylight in the living room, a new brick walkway—all the improvements that Franny egged her on to make, so that she could enjoy them when Mother herself was in Oak Grove.

I, who had prided myself on my clear-sightedness, was confused. It was never completely clear to me if Mother was manipulating those of us she was giving money to, or were these people manipulating her? I looked for a villain. But it was Mother’s genius that she could seem both tyrant and victim, oppressor and oppressed.

This was the confusion, the tang of blood in the air, that made us vipers. In the past we had been covert, resorting to casual abuse and whispering, happy that what we said would be reported back, as in the times when I’d heard, “Fred thinks you’re pompous,” “Franny said you’re so cheap all you eat are Japanese noodles,” “Hubby says you put him to work every time you see him—he’s sick of being your handyman,” “Floyd says you’re competitive,” “Rose says you’re angry,” that sort of thing (these were aimed at me), all of it secondhand and specious, and deniable.

“I never said that,” Franny would protest to me. “You’re the most generous one in the family”—compounding her lies.

But we changed. We were older. We had nothing to gain by pretending to be polite. We turned from a whispering hypocritical family into an openly abusive one.

“Why am I not entering this house?” Floyd called through the door, seeing that Fred was seated in a chair next to Mother. “Because I deprecate you. I have no fondness at all for you. Because you are a sententious bore.”

“What was that?” Mother said. Her hearing was at last failing.

Hubby went out of his way to remind Rose’s kids that their dog had been run over by a FedEx truck.

“Where’s Wags?” he asked, and their eyes filled with tears. “Oh, that’s right. Wags is roadkill.”

This was at the Stop and Shop. Rose turned on him and cried, “You asshole!”

We became those people you sometimes see embarrassing themselves in public places: the sudden yell, the clash of supermarket carts, the red faces on the sidewalk, the slammed door. Our public displays were more common these days because it was only in public that we met—at the movies, at the beach, at the dump, or at Father’s grave.

“What are you doing here?” I asked Franny at Oak Grove, and I ridiculed her for her pathetic pot of wilted, sour-smelling marigolds.

Rose saw me crossing the main street of Osterville as she was driving by. She speeded past me, saying, “What the fuck is your problem?”

“Up yours,” I said when I saw who it was.

“Watch it, fella,” an old man said, frowning at me.

“She almost ran me down,” I said to him. “I’ve got the right of way.”

But how could that nice old man have known that the two foulmouthed people were not an impatient motorist and a jaywalker, but a brother and sister. And a bigger shock was that I had not recognized her at first. The person I saw was a gray-haired old lady, her head sunk into her shoulders, screaming at me, showing her discolored teeth. Rose!

Franny wrote me a message on the back of a greeting card with the salutation, Thinking of You. The big loopy letters of her first-grade teacher’s handwriting said, I pray for you because your soul is black. If you died right now in your state of Mortal Sin you’d go to Hell.

Both sisters hounded Hubby and, as takers often do, complained of his greed.

Fred had a cookout for some clients. He invited Mother. In what seemed a new ploy, to encumber him, Mother said, “Is Rose welcome? She was going to visit me today.”

So Fred invited Rose, and midway through the meal Rose accused Fred of being bossy and abusive. She was an ill-tempered person whose way of expressing it was to put her furious face into someone else’s and say, “You’re really angry.”

This was calculated to enrage whomever she said it to, and getting this reaction she’d say, “See? Listen to yourself.”

The cookout at Fred’s ended with Rose sitting in her car, in tears, her terrified children beside her—and they were much older now, Bingo in college, Benno a senior in high school. When Fred tried to console her, she screamed, “There’s something wrong with you!”

Mother was sitting beside Fred’s pool, out of earshot, sipping water and saying to one of Fred’s guests, “I don’t take any medication at all. ‘What are you awn?’ people ask me. I’m not awn anything.”

We tormented each other’s children and made a point of mentioning their lapses—shoplifting, vandalism, failures at school. Jake would never live down the fact that he had once eaten a Styrofoam cup, and the defining episode in Jonty’s life was his kicking out the windshield of the Dodge Dart. Floyd said to me in passing, “Do your kids still have those phony British accents?” and he sent Fred a postcard, a view of Woods Hole, with the message, Your children hate you.

And yet, when I dropped in on Mother, she’d say, “Have you seen Rose?” or “Franny was asking about you,” or “Hubby made some new window boxes for me,” as though this was a big happy family, the harmonious fiction that Mother always maintained as fact.

I was at her house one afternoon. The phone rang. Mother answered it, said “Yes,” then hung up.

“Who was that?” I asked.

“Franny. She always calls at this time.”

“What did she say?”

“She asked me if I had company.”

She moved us around like chess pieces, and we allowed ourselves to be moved. We did the same, moved each other around.

Floyd said to me, “Fred once took me to Mexico. He used his frequent flyer miles, though he led me to believe he was paying. At the end of the trip I thanked him and said I’d love to repay him. Without missing a beat he asked me for my Harper’s Ferry flintlock. Fool that I am, I gave it to him. He’s a pea-and-thimble man! I was blindsided.”

Hubby remembered slights from years back, as when he was a twelve-year-old playing “My Grandfather’s Clock” on his cello and hitting the wrong notes, and we watched and listened, trying to contain our laughter, with shaking shoulders.

Franny and Rose claimed that someone in the family (“And we know who he is”) had vandalized their houses—tipped over garden statuary, stolen flowers, swiped important letters from the mail cans.

After that, Floyd, who trolled for rare books on the Internet, sent me a printout listing ten books by me that Rose and Walter had sold to a book dealer in New York. They were described as “highly collectible association copies.” All were first editions, all inscribed To Rose and Walter, with love, Jay—tokens of Christmas, birthdays, family gatherings. They were priced in the thousands. When someone is selling a book you’ve inscribed to them, a message is being sent. It may seem a small matter, just a book after all, but it cuts deep—the book more valuable because of the fond or loving inscription, the recipient a sister and brother-in-law, the reminder of the circumstances. The books were not memories of happy days, only part of the pretense of them, and the inscription was proof of the pretense, for the fact was that I was no more sincere in giving the book than they were in receiving it. Now it was an expensive artifact, surviving from an earlier time, representing a false emotion.

“Treachery,” Floyd said, and because he mentioned it to Mother, the next time I saw her she told me, with characteristic guile, how much Rose loved me and my work.

“But she sold my books, the ones I gave to her and Walter.”

“I would never do a thing like that,” Mother said.

“I didn’t say you would. But Rose did.”

“I’m sure you’re mistaken.”

“They’re in a catalogue. Floyd showed me.”

“You know how Floyd is.”

“I saw the books listed. My name was there.”

Mother went vague. She adjusted her glasses, rocked her body a little. She said, “I don’t know anything about it.”

“That’s why I’m telling you,” I said.

“Why are you shouting?”

“I’m annoyed because they sold my books for a lot of money.”

It was a mistake to solicit sympathy: Mother had none. But the word “money” got Mother’s attention.

“How much?” she asked.

“Thousands.”

That made her laugh. She knew I was exaggerating, if not lying. No book was worth that, none had ever been sold for that amount. For all her knowingness, she was, like many queens, isolated and innocent of much of the world, especially the world of modern first editions.

“I’m sure it’s all a misunderstanding,” she said. “They’re coming over tomorrow. Do you want to join us for a little bite?”

Mother claimed to be forgetful. She really did seem forgetful. Or was she purposely leaving the gas on and the faucet running? She was so completely credible in her vagueness that I was almost sure it was an act. I say “almost.” I had no idea what was lurking in her mind.

“I won’t be there,” I said.

“Rose will be so disappointed.”

This left me gaping at her. I said, “She sold my books. She calls me names. She hates me.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mother said. “The first lesson I taught my children was that they must love each other. That’s the most important lesson of all. ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’ Jesus said. If there’s no love in a family, why, where would we be?”