Mother Land by Paul Theroux

Author:Paul Theroux
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

It was one of the perversities of the family to see an occasion such as this, a birthday, a wedding, any celebration, as a chance to settle old scores. Because it was superficially benign and included everyone, a family gathering was an opportunity to inflict pain, to get even with the maximum number of people at one time. A family meal, everyone with his guard down, I remembered as raised voices, vicious words, unforgiving whispers, kicks under the table, sudden departures, floods of tears, and slammed doors.

“I’m not angry!” someone would scream.

In the endless, inward, contained war, the family like a bag of ferrets, a birthday or a wedding was a separate pitched battle. I dreaded the skirmish to come.

Fred invited me to his house in Barnstable for a drink. This sort of hospitality I saw as hostile.

He poured me a small glass of clear viscous liquor and said, “This is Chinese gin. Baijiu. I hand-carried it back from Shanghai. Go on, chug it.”

“Razor blades,” I said.

“Best quality—Maotai,” he said, clinking his glass. “Ganbei!” and he drank. “Listen, I want you to come to the party.”

This gratuitous prologue meant one thing, and we both knew it: he didn’t want me to come to the party. An italicized but loomed.

“But Ma said you were traveling, that you had some kind of assignment. So, I’m just saying—and look, I really want you to be there—that you don’t have to be there. We understand.”

He looked fussed, he took another drink, he hated holding this conversation. He wanted me to say that I had other plans so he would be off the hook.

I said, “I want to be there.”

He tried to conceal his look of disappointment with another drink, wincing as the liquor went down.

“It’s just a lunch at the Happy Clam. Not really a party. An hour at most. No one’ll be missed. My kids have soccer. If you had plans, you could take Ma out another day. She’d love that.”

“Fred, you sound like you don’t want me to go.”

“Did I say that?” He sighed. He made a business of pouring another drink and slowly screwing the cap on the bottle so that he could turn his back on me. “I said I want you to come to the party.”

“I don’t have other plans. Turning ninety is a big deal for Ma. I’m going.”

Fred smiled at me, a version of the pitying smile that Mother had perfected—and talking to Fred, I often had the feeling I was talking to Mother.

“Floyd’s going to be there,” he said with moistened lips.

“So?”

“I’m just saying. Floyd’s signed on.”

Floyd’s name was a weapon in the family, and for years this weapon had been used against me, waved in my face, flourished, glinting in the sun like a hammered blade.

“Ma said she wanted everyone there.”

“Right, right,” and now Fred looked alarmed. “That’s why Floyd’s going.”

“And that’s why I’m going.”

Now Fred began to smile, and I knew worse was to come. “He can be difficult.” He went on smiling. “He’s crazy, you know.

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