53

The Unknown

Crises had always brought out the worst in us: Fred’s stroke, Marvin’s death, Floyd’s gallbladder, Hubby’s diabetes, any mention of hemorrhoids—jokes, gibes, wisecracks, whispers.

Were we softening? In the weeks after Mother’s near-death experience, we clamored to visit her, taking turns, never meeting, often delivering food or flowers, a potted narcissus or the chocolate she loved, anything to keep her alive, to rekindle her interest in living. We feared losing her; we realized how close we’d come to her slipping away forever. Our greatest fear was contemplating life without her. Just as acute was the awful thought that we, her children, would have to deal with one another. Who were we without Mother as referee? We didn’t know. We were reluctant to find out, and so we clung to Mother.

She knew this and, as usual, seemed way ahead of us. Extreme as her self-starvation was—shrinking to a wisp, apparently conscious that she was at death’s door—it occurred to me that it was calculated. Mortifying her flesh in a devout fast, the famished Saint Thérèse (one of Mother’s favorites), whose self-denial sent her into ecstasies, prayed before a ripe peach. In the following weeks, Mother received us individually, keeping the needle of Hubby’s IV drip in her arm long after it was needed, as though impressing us with the wound it left, a sort of stigmata.

“They might have to put a gusset in my body,” she said, “for me to be fed with a tube.”

“Who told you that?”

“Hubby. It’s a normal procedure in intensive care.”

“Ma, you’re not in intensive care.”

“I almost was.”

She said this with a stern smile of reproach.

Hubby said, “I never told her she needed a gusset. I said ‘grommet.’ She asked me for the worst-case scenario. I hooked her to an IV. I got her rehydrated. And for this I get flak!”

To replace the cleaning woman who had been glad to go, we hired a Thai woman, Poon—mild, hardworking, two children. Mother took to her and treated her like a pet. Poon discovered Mother’s fondness for jelly donuts, hot chocolate, and lobster bisque. For any favor of this kind, Mother gave Poon a dollar. The arrangement seemed perfect.

Poon had worked as a cleaner in a nursing home on the lower Cape, Arcadia, in Chatham. The experience had given her a hatred of such places.

“No send Mummy to a home,” she said. “The people so roney. They say to me, ‘Pease he’p me.’ They faw down. They cry, ‘I want to go home.’”

“Of course Poon’s going to say that,” Fred said. “She’s protecting her job. She wants to keep this gig with Ma.”

“Ma likes her.”

“We need a backup plan. Arcadia could be part of it.”

 

Fred sent one of his lawyerly memos to the rest of us with the subject heading “Options.” In it he outlined the various courses of action: keep Poon as a helper, find a professional caregiver, put Mother in a place such as Arcadia, and more. It was a severe edict, set out in his usual long-winded way, with a section about doing nothing followed by a subsection suggesting action; a section acknowledging that Mother was unwilling to move to an old folks’ home was followed by paragraphs describing how, by subterfuge, she might be persuaded. A “What if she falls?” section, undercut by a “What if she outlasts us?” section. A whole page was devoted to possible schedules for visits by us, by nurses, by dietitians, by the local police for their “Reassurance Program”—a once-a-day call from a concerned cop, to ask, “You okay?”

Mother was not okay, but would not admit it. A place like Arcadia was the answer—preliminary visits by her might ease her into agreeing to a room with a view—but Fred’s memo, the dancing around Mother’s stubbornness, indicated the futility of its options, because Mother, wasting away, with as yet no intention of moving, would continue to be an unsolvable problem.

Pages of this, and at the end Fred asked for our thoughts, but before anyone replied, he fired off a second memo, briefer than the first, explaining at length that he had several interactions with Arcadia’s director. The place was clean, well run, not far away, and had a medical wing for residents who were ill, demented, or incapacitated. He urged us to see it for ourselves.

“They have,” he wrote, “a weekly ‘Chowder Day’ for prospective clients.”

Put off by the name, busy with my book, I avoided Chowder Day—free soup—and the get-acquainted tour of Arcadia. Let the others decide, I thought. I’d go on visiting Mother as often as I could at her house, where she seemed content with Poon, healthier than before, knitting and reading again, doing the daily crossword, and no longer hooked up to a drip.

“Have you heard what they want to do with me?” she said one day.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

She leaned forward and, with her teeth clenched for the emphasis of a dramatic hiss, said, “They want to stick me in a home.”

“That place, Arcadia?”

“You know about it!”

“Fred mentioned it. I haven’t seen it.”

“But I have. Chowder Day.” Mother made a face. But she was so small it was undefinable.

“Were they nice to you?”

“Of course they were. They want my money—although, God knows, I have very little,” she added quickly. “They want me to sign up and move in.” She called out “Poon!” and then coughed from the effort.

The Thai woman appeared at the bedroom door. “Yah?”

“Arcadia. Good or not good?”

“Not good,” the woman said.

Mother said, “See?” And then, “All they did was smile.”

Mother’s suspicion of anyone who was overly pleasant verged on paranoia. Snakes might smile, but snakes were cruel too. Most people were snakes, which was why it was wise to stay in the security of your own home.

“They want me to leave all this!”

“All this” didn’t look like much. The furniture was worn, the carpets were threadbare, the clutter on the coffee table dated from when Dad was alive. Mother refused to improve the house because she no longer owned it, and Franny did nothing because she didn’t live there. The filled bookshelves may have given the illusion of scholarship and seriousness, but many were our old school textbooks or library discards, with stained covers and brittle pages mildewed by the Cape’s humidity—sunned, as book dealers said; foxed, hinges loose, jackets torn, spines cocked. Nor had they ever been removed from the shelves and dusted, so, sitting in the red armchair near the shelves, I always found myself gagging, my skin prickling with the peculiarly irritating dust that accumulates on unread and browning books.

The kitchen was small, and it had its own family smell of Mother and stale bread—the same odor, really—the counters sticky to the touch. Mother in her frugality washed her own dishes in a plastic basin in the sink, though Poon might have been doing it these days. In the center of the kitchen table, in one of Dad’s souvenir saucers (The Old North Church, One if by land, two if by sea), were the salt and pepper shakers, a jar of mustard, a bottle of ketchup, a jar of jam all bearded and crusted with residue, a small quiver of toothpicks, a button, and some paperclips.

And cushions, comforters, shawls, tissues: Mother’s nest, penetrated by Mother’s odor – the odor that met you like cobwebs draping your face as soon as you opened the front door.

“Don’t let them do it to me, Jay,” Mother said. “I’m happy here. Don’t make me leave.”

One family argument for putting Mother in a nursing home was that a fog of senility might be clouding her brain. Hubby found a list of standard questions in the files of the geriatric ward at the hospital and urged me to test Mother’s clarity. When I visited, Mother was canted forward in her chair, absorbed in the crossword puzzle.

“Ma, what day of the week is it?”

“Monday,” she said promptly, not looking up.

“You’re sure?”

“Do you think they’d print the wrong day in the newspaper?” she said, tapping her finger on the page.

“What year is it?”

Now she raised her head and straightened her glasses to see me better. “Nineteen forty-nine,” she said with solemnity she held whirring in her nose.

“Who is the president?”

“Harry Truman, who else?”

“Are you sure it’s nineteen forty-nine?”

“It is always nineteen forty-nine in my heart. The year I was pregnant with Angela. I was young and hopeful. Not like now.”

“By ‘now’ do you mean a different year?”

“Of course.” She rapped her pen against the crossword puzzle in annoyance. “Are you trying to confuse me?”

“One more question. You have $100 and you go to the store to buy a dozen apples for $3 and a tricycle for $20.”

She stared at me, tilting her head, with a crooked smile, and flattened the newspaper on her lap.

“How much did you spend? How much do you have left?”

I had leaned toward her to dramatize my sympathy. She laughed in my face, her first real mirth in ages. “Show me a store where I can get apples for three dollars and a bike for twenty and I’m doing my Christmas shopping there.”

I sat back and watched her resume the puzzle.

“Hawaiian goose,” she said, reading a clue. “Nene. Everyone knows that.”

Mother’s fear of the unknown—of darkness, of strangers, of foreign travel, of odd food, of the uncertainty that lay outside the family—all this had its counterpart in the mud villages where I’d lived in the Malawi bush, in the hearts of the people I’d met in Borneo and upper Burma, and elsewhere: among the frizzy-haired Trobrianders, the Big Nambas on the island of Malekula in Vanuatu, the Asaro Mudmen of Goroka, and the tobacco-chewing peckerwoods of the Ozarks, for whom the unknown was a fearful void and a darkness, like stepping into a deep hole.

We’re savages, Floyd continually said of us, swearing that every trait of the family had its origin in peasant misery and folk superstition, our ancestors’ brutishness. We were near to the soil and the blood feuds of our barbarian relatives.

He proved this assertion with details from our daily lives, describing how any of us could easily fit into a painting of peasant life by a Dutch realist who specialized in wooden clogs and codpieces. We were potato eaters, we were dumb bumpkins dazzled by natural phenomena, we were clumsy, unlettered, natural-born menials, indecisive, doomed to peonage and passivity. “Think of the feral child raised by a wolfhound,” Floyd said. “He’s doggy and drooly but somehow manages to get into Harvard, where he excels. But on graduation day his attention is seized by a passing car, and he dies chasing it.”

It seemed to me that Mother’s fear was justified. Never mind Floyd’s flights of fancy and his mockery. Humankind is united in its fear of the unknown.

This fear had made her the matriarch of Mother Land, kept her home, motivated her to gather her children around her, created (you might say) the stable conditions for what passed for a common culture in the family—our characteristic sayings, our soapy food, our improvisational rules and reactions. No guests, no friends, ever felt at home in Mother Land: as soon as they entered they were bewildered, as though having stumbled into barbarism. They did not understand us, nor did they sense any familiarity with anything they saw or heard. I remember the look of astonished fear on the face of my friend John Brodie being served a bowl of Mother’s pea soup, so thick a mouse could have trotted across it. He stuck his spoon into it and lifted a dollop but did not taste it; he did not recognize it as food. I was embarrassed: he had glimpsed one of our secrets. Yet Brodie and these other strangers, too, probably feared the unknown themselves and might not have been different from us in that respect. As for Mother, she would have needed a tribal purgation to overcome the fear.

I did not share this dread. To me, the unknown held helpful possi-bilities and offered hope. I believed this from an early age when I read the books I loved most, of African travel and polar exploration—Clyde Beatty, Admiral Byrd, Allan Quatermain, Frank Buck (Bring ’Em Back Alive)—up the Amazon, down the Nile, across the Sahara, climbers of Everest, bushwhackers in the outback. I did not know the word at the time, but what I was seeking, and what I imagined the unknown might grant me, was transformation. From my earliest years I wanted to go away. I equated travel with salvation. Darkness was not to be feared: it offered a second chance.

What had made Mother a shut-in had made me a traveler.

Don’t let them do it to me, rang in my head. Don’t let them send me away.

The plea of the Choctaw in Mississippi just before the Trail of Tears, the lament of the Jew in the shtetl hearing the train whistle and the clatter of jackboots, the whisper of a dissident in Stalin’s Russia, dreading a possible fate in the frozen prison settlement in Siberian Magadan.

So I became Mother’s protector. I visited her more often. Relations with my brothers and sisters were chilly, but we were happier not seeing each other, and I was too absorbed in my novel to have any time for them. Being midway through a novel was like treading along a high wire, a balancing act that would end in a fall if I was disturbed. I phoned Mother, I dropped in with food, and I noticed—from crumbs, from scraps, from left-behind hats and gloves—that the others did the same.

But more and more, Mother neglected to pick up the phone. And when, out of concern, I went over to make sure she was not dead, I found she was gone, the house locked. I smiled to think she locked a house she’d given away, from which everything valuable except the grandfather clock had been either handed out or stolen. But, anyway, where was she?

And then, one Tuesday, unable to raise her by phone, I remembered that the same had been true the previous Tuesday.

“I couldn’t find you yesterday,” I said the next day.

“I was out.”

“Anywhere special?”

“With Fred.”

“As long as you’re being looked after—that’s the main thing,” I said, taking her hand, clutching the bird claw. “I won’t let them send you away.”

“I often consult Angela,” Mother said. “Have you brought me a present?”

And that was that. The following Tuesday I called, got no answer, and went to the house. Maybe she was ill? Maybe out? Maybe dead? Maybe she’d gone somewhere with Fred, and if so, where?

Waiting on Mother’s front steps on this damp late afternoon, the clouds thickening in the mottled sky, idly grinding sand against the brick walkway with my foot soles, my forearms resting on my knees, I felt like a latchkey child, killing time, humming tunelessly, wondering where his mother might be—a sad, anxious, neglected child on a gray day. How long will he have to wait? What will become of him? Where is his mother? Shouldn’t we do something about him?

I was not a sixty-something author who’d left his desk and the scattered pages of his manuscript. I was a little boy crouched by his mother’s front door. I enjoyed wallowing in the self-pity for a while, feeling small and forlorn. And then I heard a car.

It was a new Prius, one I didn’t recognize. Gliding up behind my old Jeep, it looked like a boast.

“Candy-ass.” Floyd, in a leather bomber jacket and a Red Sox cap, climbed from the car, still talking.

I regretted having lingered. I didn’t want to see anyone, and certainly not my siblings. I hated looking idle. But if I bolted now, Floyd would jeer even more.

“Where’s your mother?” he said.

“No idea. I called her but she didn’t answer, so I got worried and came over.”

“‘Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère!’”

“You took the words out of my mouth.”

“I see you failed to bring her a present.” Saying this, he plucked a box of chocolates out of his jacket and wagged it at me as a taunt. He could see I was empty-handed.

“Will those bonbons make up for all you’ve stolen from her?”

“Hah! Look who’s talking—Autolycus, the snapper-up of unconsidered trifles.” He kicked a wet clump of dead leaves.

“Let’s talk about the weather.”

“The weather?” he said, putting his face close to mine.

“Why not? It’s a gray day, a lowering sky.”

“I hate it when people tell me what sort of a day it is.”

“What would you say?”

“I would say”—and he straightened and sniffed the air—“obnubilate.”

For all his faults, Floyd was capable of spontaneous comic turns. I did not love him, I did not even like him, and yet I admired his nimble brain. He was still able to amuse me—certainly the only one in the family who could do it, and one of the few people I knew, tailoring his wit to order, for me alone, either a gesture or a single word.

There is no reply to “obnubilate.” Floyd knew that, smacking his lips, savoring his victory.

Just then, a car—this I recognized as Fred’s, a Chevy Blazer, his license plate SUE EM—and Mother in the front seat, looking like a small girl. Floyd and I watched as Fred hurried to the passenger side and helped her out. He guided the small, pale, shuffling woman up the brick walkway.

Mother looked furtive and oppressed, the effect of being in the presence of her three eldest children. She was our mother, but she was a different mother to each of us, and this gathering provoked confusion of the kind experienced by someone with multiple identities surprised by three witnesses. It was as though she’d been caught in a lie.

“What a nice surprise,” Mother said, and I was convinced of her dismay.

“I was worried about you,” I said.

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

She lifted her shoes and kicked with them, a clockwork way of walking that involved toppling forward and jerking upright just in time.

“Cute hat,” Fred said to Floyd.

“The only known cure for baldness,” Floyd said. “Such a simple expedient would surely benefit you.”

Mother said, “Be nice.”

The hundred-year-old woman, her three aged boys, her shadowy house, the dark day of tumbling furry clouds, the twisted pitch pines—all the elements of a folktale, including the sinister command Be nice.

This wolfish woman saying that to her three snarling cubs made me laugh out loud. Mother took this to be friendly mirth and smiled, extending her bird claw. I helped her up her front stairs.

“Where have you been?”

“For a ride,” Mother said coyly, and poked at the keyhole with her latchkey. Then, with a half-turn toward us, she made a face.

There was a century of family history in that face. An essay could have been written about the subtlety of its meanings, like the ambiguous smile floating on the lips of a Khmer goddess at Angkor Wat. It was mockery, it was interrogation, it was doubt, it was defiance.

“Chowder Day,” Fred said.