Places Where I've Lived: Mount Pleasant 9 (The Four-Gated City 3)

When Mark ends his communist phase Martha's mother visits from Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe).  Their relationship has never been good and for Martha seeing her mother again is nothing short of traumatic.  Martha is currently seeing a psychiatrist as she is interested in knowing whether or not she has a mental illness.  Her mother arrives and finds herself shocked about what her daughter whom she hasn't seen in four years has become.  She is a woman from a previous age and completely disapproves of the loose morals of her daughter and young people in general.  She cannot understand that Martha has become part of an unconventional household.  Everything she has known and valued about the family here is turned on its head.  Mark and his wife Lynda co-exist but not as husband and wife.  Lynda lives in the basement with her friend Dorothy, also mentally ill and their whole circle of friends who are ill, involved in the occult or both.  Martha is the default mother to Mark's son and nephew.  When her mother asked her who was raising the two boys her daughter lamely answered "They are being raised."  The house is full of communists, or ex-communists, like her daughter.  She accidentally walks in on Martha and Mark just after they've made love.  The room is dark and there is a glow of cigarettes, their silhouettes and nothing else.  She has a private meltdown in her room, lying on her bed alternately singing a hymn and grumbling what a whore her daughter is and that she would also have free room and board if she made her living with her legs in the air.

Mrs. Quest, Martha's mother, is a racist white supremist like many of the white old guard in southern Africa.  She has been living with her son and daughter-in-law on a remote farm in Southern Rhodesia.  Her need to control everyone drives them both nuts so they have a small cottage built for her where she has to live attended by a pubescent black African boy.  The boy adopts her as his grandmother, and despite her deeply ingrained prejudice she comes to deeply love him while living in a state of complete denial that their relationship is other than servant and master.

Martha's psychiatrist tells her that she has to tell her mother to leave, since she really wants her to.  She resists, more from fear and lack of spine than guilt.  She brings Mrs. Quest to see him.  She refuses at first, becomes psychosomatically ill and confines herself to her bed.  Martha just manages to coax her to come with her.  The old woman moves slowly and painfully, needs help on the stairs and has to walk hobbling on two canes.  They arrive in the psychiatrist's office and Mrs. Quest proceeds to spend the entire hour vituperating her daughter, telling the good psychiatrist in as many ways as she can what an absolute failure Martha is as a daughter, a woman, and a human being.  She leaves the psychiatrist a picture of robust health, forgets her canes and nearly runs like a schoolgirl on a soccer field to the waiting cab.