51

Mother’s Century

Mother’s birthday, the month and the day, was a command: March fourth. “Think of it,” Mother often said, and here she would square her skinny shoulders, level her long, indicating nose, and stare straight ahead. “March forth!”

We had always obeyed, marching out of step, but now with her hundredth approaching we had made no plans. What to do was only part of the problem. Christmas had just passed, and because Mother had contrived for most of her life to divide us, so as to be the focus of attention, we spent the holiday separately with her, taking turns, like patients visiting a doctor, keeping appointments, not speaking to each other, merely seeking approval, punching in, signing out. The procession of gift-givers and well-wishers put Mother in a good mood, but soured us. The division haunted us, most of us were not on speaking terms, and those who were, such as Floyd and me, were overlooking a great deal of our own combative history. Floyd was well aware that recently, to amuse Hubby, I’d told him that I suspected Floyd to be the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, based on his threats, his prose style, his angry letters to celebrities and politicians, his wild hair, his hermit-like existence, his ingenuity, and his rage. Hubby, who was the leakiest one of us all, told everyone, and of course my cheap shot got back to Floyd, likely in an even more twisted and abusive form.

Given that we seldom communicated, it was hard to agree on what to do about Mother’s caregiver. And the hundredth birthday party seemed beyond anyone’s ability to organize. At the end of December, Christmas safely out of the way, I ran into Fred at the town transfer station—the dump had closed, and this new facility did not encourage dawdling or chitchat or dumpster diving, nor was there a swap shop to trawl for treasures. Fred was carrying an armload of grease-stained pizza boxes to the paper-recycling receptacle.

“What about Mum’s birthday?” I said, startling him. “Maybe the Happy Clam again?”

He did not break his stride. He returned to his car for the glass and plastic recyclables, saying, as he passed me, “Anything can happen. There’s a lot of time between now and then.” He kept walking. He dumped his barrel of glass and plastic. Passing me again, he said, “I don’t buy her green bananas anymore,” and then, “or long books.”

And using his good arm and his good leg, he drove off. Mother’s birthday was a little over two months away. “Anything can happen” meant she might die, relieving us of the burden of having to plan a party. Ours had never been a family of planners, but it was obvious that unless someone took action, Mother would not be celebrating her century.

There followed a typical family pattern of passivity and evasion, of a sort we’d rehearsed as children: one cookie left on the plate—who would be brazen enough to pick it up? In a big family the last cookie is never taken, never eaten. It remains on the plate as a challenge, a taunt, a problem, and there it goes stale, making everyone angry.

In the end, Gilbert—the kindest, the hardest to read, the motto on his escutcheon Mother never says no—made a reservation at the Oyster Bed from his bolthole in Baghdad, using the Internet, and relayed the information to us. Lunch on the fourth, the whole restaurant had been booked. “Mum’s looking forward to it.”

“Eighteen oysters for her and heartburn for the rest of us,” I said to Julian and Harry the day before, when they arrived, flying into Boston from London.

“Park it, please, Dad,” Julian said. “She’s your mother, she’s a hundred years old, she’s an idol. If she were in Britain, she’d be getting a telegram from the queen, congratulating her.”

“And she gives us hope,” Harry said. “It means you’ll live a long time. We’ll have you for years.”

They were tall—taller than me; they had their mother’s coloring, my first wife’s English pallor; and they were healthy—Julian from daily tai chi, Harry a dedicated cyclist. They were both in their forties, Julian with traces of gray in his hair, middle-aged from an actuarial perspective, responsible and sober, with houses and wives and children—my grandchildren, whom I seldom saw. My children were adults and I was the cranky child.

But they shamed me out of it, taking me again to Yarmouth Port for sushi and inquiring about my work. It was rare that anyone discussed writing with me, the one activity I cared about, that kept me sane and hopeful, my mission in life, my only intensity.

“‘We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have,’” I said. “‘Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.’”

“You sound like Uncle Floyd.”

“Harry’s right, but I know it’s Henry James,” Julian said. “People ask me all the time if I’m related to you. They wonder what you’re publishing next.”

“A novel set in Mexico,” I said, and telling them about the book, based on my brief stay with the family on the Río Jataté in Chiapas, I began to believe in the story, and saw it whole, and became happy and hopeful again. I had turned this friendly family into hostage takers, transferring the confinement I felt with Mother and my own family into the narrative: the man in the narrative held captive by a manipulative family in Mexico.

“That sounds great,” Harry said. “The man comes with good intentions and they keep him prisoner. A kind of parable. Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man.”

“Who said that?”

“Lots of people. I came across it in Freud. Civilization and Its Discontents.”

“You know, Freud’s mother lived almost as long as mine. Yet he never wrote much about mothers or motherhood.”

Julian said, “How can you have an Oedipus complex without a mother?”

“Freud claimed he didn’t have a clue about women,” I said. “He claimed that if you want to know about women, you need to examine your own experiences of life, or read poetry. He was exasperated by women. He said he couldn’t answer the question ‘What does a woman want?’ He knew my mother!”

“Put your chopsticks down,” Harry said, “and let’s join hands.”

We held hands, our arms extended across the table.

Harry said, “Grandma is a hundred years old. The statute of limitations on family rancor has run out. Repeat after me. ‘All is forgiven. No more rancor. Right thought, right action.’”

“Are you a Buddhist now?”

“Repeat it, please.”

“All is forgiven. No more rancor,” I said. “Right thought, right action.”

They held on to me, tugging slightly, longer than I expected, long enough for the words to sink in, for me to be ashamed of my casual abuse and lingering resentment.

“Now, for God’s sake let’s talk about something else,” Julian said. “One more story about Grandma and I’m getting the next plane home.”

 

What they had said was true: she was an idol, small and shriveled and yellowish, but looking indestructible, with bright eyes, a solemn expression, and a dusty glow. She sat between Fred and Gilbert, her favorites. Freud was right about that: a mother’s favorite child was usually a conqueror, triumphant in life. An empty chair next to Gilbert—Angela’s, in her memory. Franny and Rose at adjacent tables, with glum Walter, and children. Jonty’s two, the great-grandchildren, ran among the tables, yapping like puppies. There was Jonty’s brother Max, whom I had not seen since he was a playing card in the ballet Alice in Wonderland, a skulking wife in tow. Four generations at the Oyster Bed, decorated today with a hundred roses and a hundred cupcakes, sent by Mother’s well-wishers, the Ohlendorfs.

I sat down with Julian and Harry, and Charlie joined us, saying to Julian, “Hey, bro,” and they fist-bumped, and I reminded myself that Charlie was nearing fifty.

With Harry’s mantra of compassion in mind, I was less happy than detached. I looked at everyone closely and saw, not siblings or cousins and near relations, but characters, faintly fictional, as though they were strenuously auditioning for a part in something I might write.

That was how my brothers and sisters seemed to me—fixed and fictional, vaguely menacing, as comic characters often are, unpredictable, and because of that unreliable, always posing a threat, conveying through the subtlest gestures and nuances of speech and bad jokes that they were antagonists. Their claims of reassurance were never a consolation. I took them as an excess of insincerity. The most menacing sentence an isolated person could hear from someone nearby was I’m not going to hurt you. You think: That had not occurred to me, but now I’m worried.

Now, with this detachment, seeing them as characters, I watched them at the birthday party like puppets in a play—Gilbert on Mother’s right, Fred on her left, and the rest of us at greater distances. I sat in a far-off booth jammed between Julian and the wall, Charlie and Harry opposite.

“Grandma looks happy,” Julian said.

“Yes,” and I thought, Not merely happy but triumphant.

My children were right—she’d outlived the whole family, she’d outlasted all her friends, and if she’d had enemies, she’d buried them too. Of her generation, only she was left standing. All the others were gone, and so she remained, like a silent emissary from the distant past.

Of the others, what could one say? Her rivalrous children didn’t count, but a new generation was obvious in the room—the grandchildren, the cousins, all of them much bigger and bulkier than I remembered, Bingo with a fiancé, Benno with a beard. Jonty announced that he had a public relations company; Fred’s son Jake, who had once seemed troubled and hopeless, was a successful computer programmer and had a newborn son, whom he displayed like a ham, and the child looked scalded, as infants do. I thought of them as they’d been: the juggler, the harmonica player, the screechy brat, the boy who’d left footprints on the wall of my dining room, the one who’d eaten a Styrofoam cup. But they were grown now, they had jobs, some were married, and though still wary of their weird uncles and aunts, they seemed content.

A new generation to displace the one above them. All of us were Mother’s subjects, but some had suffered more than others. For these younger ones in the birthday room, knowing little of the fanatic heart of the family, there was a measure of hope. They hadn’t suffered at all—to them, Mother was a noble soul who could always be relied upon, the embodiment of sympathy and generosity, baker of church-window cookies, knitter of scarves and afghans, carver of birds, head of the family, defender of the faith. Empress of Mother Land.

For the duration of Mother’s hundredth an unspoken truce was observed—no wisecracks, no casual abuse, no tasteless jokes—and this made for a dullness that seemed interminable. Oh, for a bitchy remark or a low blow. I also thought, So this was the prevailing atmosphere of families who got along, a mood of tedium and forbearance and Christian charity. How awful. But I kept my vow from the night before: all is forgiven, no more rancor. The vow did not inspire any sweetness, only an alien sense of sanctimony, of slight fraudulence, and a leaden quality of patience. No matter who you are or what you say, I will retain this moronic half-smile and this heavy-lidded gaze.

An insistent tapping on a water glass silenced the room. Gilbert had risen, and as he shuffled some papers, Fred shushed Hubby, who had been giggling over a story.

“Thank you all for being here,” Gilbert said. “With your permission ​—”

“Denied,” Floyd called out.

“—I’d like to remind you of what this woman has witnessed so far in her life. When Mother was born, William Howard Taft was president. At three hundred and forty pounds, Taft was the very definition of love handles. She has seen sixteen presidents come and go since then. Fenway Park was being built that same year, and the Titanic sank soon after, the Lusitania a few years later. Orville Wright flew a plane for nine minutes, a world record, the year of her birth. Consider that feat and then consider that this woman witnessed the moon landing and rockets to Mars.”

“It’s one small step for a man,” Hubby intoned.

“Two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The murder of Rasputin in Petrograd, and fifty years later Martin Luther King in Memphis.”

“Is there a connection?” someone said loudly.

But Gilbert persevered, through Fatty Arbuckle, Prohibition, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, the Crash of ’29, Pearl Harbor, Elvis, the Beatles, and the Internet.

“Mother’s century can be called the greatest, most meaningful in history.”

“The Renaissance was a blip compared to it,” Floyd said.

“It was a century of modernization and great change,” Gilbert said, batting away the interjections with his free hand. “But some things did not change—Mother’s humanity, her kindness, her generosity, her love for her family. Ladies and gentlemen, let us raise a toast—to Mother.”

“To Mother!” came the cry.

The celebrants crowded forward to congratulate Mother, to gush, to grope for her hands, to be remembered, to ask for her blessing.

The contrast between Mother and these people was remarkable. She did not resemble anyone else in the room. We were hairy, pale, misshapen. In a strange sense most of us looked older than Mother as we shuffled among the tables, bumping shoulders, stepping on each other’s toes; we were fleshy and overgrown. Mother was smaller than ever, bird-boned, bright-eyed, narrow-shouldered, physically unlike the others, in many respects healthier, with the old glow of the little yellow goddess, all of us murmuring our thanks and saying goodbye as if we were doomed and departing but Mother wasn’t going anywhere.

We were broken, Mother was whole—that was apparent. At least half the people in the room were strangers to me, either relatives I’d never seen or heard about, or else distant acquaintances.

“Your mother is a marvel,” one of them said, a middle-aged woman whose name rang no bells.

That was the chorus: Mother is amazing! Lordy, how does she do it? What a lovely family! And with my new detachment I began to think so too. It wasn’t a question of forgiving transgressions or forgetting slights and hurts. These were irrelevant now. Mother had done her work; she had formed us, and therefore did not need to exert any power over us. She had what she wanted. Mother, who had no profound capacity for happiness, who was consistent in her ritual of telling us how we’d fallen short, seemed happier that day than I had ever seen her. Her satisfaction showed in her silence. She sat wordlessly acknowledging the praise of the partygoers, accepting their presents, quite formal, looking superior to everyone—indeed, most of those who approached her for her blessing looked fumbling and inadequate, needing her attention but not quite sure how to seize it. Mother perhaps suspected this uneasiness, and it gave her greater strength—power over them, over us.

She grew ever more regal at her table, now and then whispering to Gilbert or Fred. I knew from my time spent in Africa how the most powerful chiefs never spoke, never addressed a crowd, hardly uttered a sound—such talk was beneath them. All announcements were left to the porte-parole, the chief’s spokesman at his elbow, word carrier and confidant, who would incline his head and listen, then speak for the chief in a voice of authority. The Chinese empress dowager Ci Xi did the same, whispering to a mandarin or a noble eunuch, who would convey the command, screeching to the Qing court.

In this strange manner, Mother, who had no sense of history and knew nothing of chiefs or kings, managed to contrive, through willpower and egotism, the pretenses of an empress.

Her intense gaze and her calculated silences impressed me, because I had become so used to her remarks, sometimes shrewd, sometimes cruel, always stinging. Her talk had once made my head hurt, and now she didn’t talk at all. From that day onward, Mother, whose reputation for jawing—a word from her early youth—was well established, became known for saying nothing. And I soon realized that silence could be devastating—eloquent, unsettling, capable of inflicting long-lasting harm.

Mother, reflective and serene, triumphant, seemingly at peace, the center of attention at her hundredth, flanked by Gilbert and Fred and a hundred roses and a hundred cupcakes at a table piled with presents—feared, loved, forgiven, blameless, majestic—cue the organ recital, you think—but wait.

Something in the way the conflicted elements resolved themselves into the appearance of order seemed to nag and invite disharmony. The grandchildren were in a corner of the room, out of earshot. The feeling of rebellion was much greater than the wish of a child to poke a finger onto a surface marked with the sign Wet Paint. That was just a lark. This was more akin to rapping on the bars of a cage where the lions were asleep, snoring on their forepaws.

What was it? The birthday serenity, unbearable bliss, unfamiliar harmony, provoked its opposite, a kind of malice, none of it directed toward Mother—she was sacred now, above criticism, revered for her great age—but aimed at each other, the siblings at war.

“Look at Franny,” Hubby said. “She sold your books on the Internet, the ones you signed for her.” And when he saw that I was insufficiently riled, he added, “I don’t think she got much for them.”

“I understand you made some unwelcome suggestions to Hubby,” Floyd said to me, and with his arm around Gloria, went on, “That, um, I might be the Unabomber. That is patently untrue, since the miscreant has been caught, while you seem a living example of why travelers have bad marriages.”

Gloria looked at me with confusion—she was still new to this sniping—as Floyd turned to Rose, saying, “I notice Bingo has a dusky boyfriend. Do you find that every seventh of December he has an insatiable urge to bomb Pearl Bailey?”

In reply, Rose said to Gloria, “Does Floyd still wet the bed? Seems to me you’d be the first to know.”

“Don’t tell Jay anything,” Franny said. “He’ll just put it into a book.”

“It’ll be safe there,” Rose said. “No one ever reads his frigging books.” Before I could think of a rejoinder, she said, “Why are you so angry?”

Overhearing us, Fred said, “For Pete’s sake, will you give it a rest?”

“Who put you in charge?” Hubby said.

Floyd had called Benno over and was saying to him, “Put your fingers in the corners of your mouth like this and say, ‘I’m a banker.’”

Benno, who was afraid of Floyd’s temper, did as he was told, grunting the words “I’m a wanker.”

“Grow up,” Gilbert said, and obviously worried that this ill humor would worsen, he lifted Mother to her feet and guided her to the door, as her well-wishers cheered her.

“Ass hat,” Hubby said to Floyd.

“Monorhine,” Floyd said. “Rump swab.”

“You’re all unbearable,” Rose said.

“This is a nightmare,” Franny said, but she was wearing a crooked smile.

“I think you’ll find,” Floyd said, “that the word is ‘homeostasis.’ Back to our old ways, our need for transgression and conflict, and loving every minute of it. Hey, like the ancient Greek. Goes to a tailor to get his pants mended. Tailor says, ‘Euripides?’ Guy says, ‘Eumenides.’”