A Perfectly Good Family

Meanwhile, Truman sat mutely in his chair and folded his Living Will in thirds. That he, too, did not get weepy was no testimony to lack of affection for his parents; if anything, Truman’s attachment to his forebears was of the three of us the most profound—too profound, in my view. He merely lacked imagination. Like foreign cities, the future was abstract; Mr. Practicality would not mourn an event that hadn’t occurred yet.

Mordecai, however, couldn’t keep seated. He was buoyant. “This is a bang-up idea.” He fanned the photocopy, his three pigtails wagging across his leather vest. “Christ, we wouldn’t want what happened to Grandmother to happen to you guys. She just lay there for years, it must have cost a fortune! And insurance doesn’t always cover it, you know. Exceed the liability, that’s it, you sell the house, liquidate assets, a whole life’s savings down the IV tube.”

At the mention of “sell the house”, Truman’s eyes had shot black.

“You know,” Mordecai went on, “sometimes photocopied signatures don’t hold up in court. You want to re-sign my copy? I’ll keep the form in my deposit box. Wouldn’t want it to get misplaced, right?”

Allowing one corner of his mouth a spasm of incredulity, my father scrawled on Mordecai’s copy Sturges Harcourt McCrea, disdainfully illegible; my mother penned her neat initials, EHHM, wincing.

She bent to refill our coffee cups from the thermos and offered me another biscuit; my father scowled over The Christian Century—anything to avoid glancing at their eldest son. Before Mordecai lunged ebulliently to the door, one more time he sauntered to the Britannicas and caressed them, intoning, “The new edition is nowhere near as comprehensive.”

“You got the feeling,” Truman recalled, “that Mordecai would speed his army truck across town, running lights, in order personally to whip the life support from its socket the moment either of them drifted into a light sleep.”

I conceded reluctantly, “He didn’t want them to waste his money on their hospital bills.”

“Mordecai is crass,” said Averil.

It was an ugly word. “He’s thoughtless,” I tempered. “A little avaricious, and he’s always broke.”

“He’s crass.” Quiet and verbally economical, my sister-in-law seemed to have been searching for years for the right adjective, which she would not relinquish, like a prize.

“As for the encyclopedias,” said Truman, “it’s not that I want them, I just don’t want Mordecai to get them. They’re yours, Corlis, if you like. Though I doubt you’d want to pay to box and ship them all the way to England. Nuts, you know, nobody’s unshelved one in my lifetime.”

Now I understood why I was nervous. There was something Truman hadn’t twigged yet, hardly his fault: I hadn’t told him. On the issue of the twenty black volumes, though, I wasn’t fooled. Truman was no anti-materialist. It wasn’t that he didn’t care about things, but that he cared about only one thing, in comparison to which the Britannicas were a trifle.

chapter two

I had Truman lug my bags to my old room on the second floor, one of seven spacious bedrooms, two with alcoves for handmaids—Heck-Andrews had been built in an era of visitors with hatboxes who came to stay for weeks. In fact, the house so exceeded our needs that my father had threatened to let out extra bedrooms to low income or homeless families. Through our childhoods Truman and I would plot the pratfall of beastly unwashed ruffians who were going to smell up the room next to mine and break all our toys. We should have relaxed. Yes, Sturges McCrea was sheepish about a mansion whose semi-attached carriage house had accommodated not only the original kitchen, but, in a fraction of the area, more servants than the main structure housed masters by half, when he helped found the SCLC. But Father’s guilty magnanimity never put him to personal inconvenience. He paid lip service, for example, to the equality of women, but never encouraged my mother beyond her part-time volunteer work to get a job, lest her distraction delay his supper. There had never been real danger of scruffy truants ransacking our cupboards while we were at school; my father didn’t like children any more than we did.

Rather than board the less fortunate, two bedrooms were converted to studies (my mother’s half the size of her husband’s and doubling as the sewing room). At twenty-one, Truman had deserted his old lair next to mine for his renovated aerie on the third floor. Mordecai’s former bedroom at the front (strategically placed opposite my parents’) had many years ago been shorn of its Jimi Hendrix posters, the nail holes gloppily plastered with my father’s usual ineptitude, the funk of unlaundered jeans and surreptitious fags air-freshened away; by the time he turned fifteen they’d realized he was not coming back. I was disheartened when they cleaned his desk of SDS handouts, because I used to sneak into his vacated hovel and pocket treasures. At twelve, when I scrounged the Peace armband from his closet and blithely displayed it binding my peasant blouse as I waltzed out the back door, my mother had shrieked, her cheeks streaking, that I was becoming “just like my older brother!” This, I was led to believe, was the worst thing that could happen to anyone.

Three halls formed a peg-legged H around the stairwell and master bathroom, down the longest of which I lingered as Truman fetched my carry-on. The hall was narrow with a window at the end, the floor slick enough to play Slippery Slidey in socks, indoor skiing with a running start that my mother discouraged because we reliably embedded splinters into our feet. I noted that Truman had replaced the rotting boards that had skewered us, a neat job. Truman inherited all the physical meticulousness that had skipped a generation with my father.

I peeked into the last left-hand door, slammed in my face enough times. I switched on the overhead light, to find a bland bedspread and stark surfaces: no international gewgaws here. I walked to Mordecai’s desk, where the booze-bottle rings and reefer burns had been lemon-oiled into the past. The drapes were pulled back—replaced, since Mordecai had caught one of his old set on fire—while in his heyday they were always tightly drawn, even on the brightest of summer days. I scanned the blank walls and bare boards, but aside from the painted-over lumps of lousy spackling and the discernible scrapes in the floor from when my brother would shove his desk over to barricade the door, I detected no trace of Mordecai Delano McCrea. In my own room, midis drooped in my wardrobe, plastic horses spilled from its top shelf, my first clumsy attempts at clay sculpture humbled me on my bureau. Yet here was a malicious erasure. Not a single test tube from his chemistry set rolled in a dresser drawer, and all the old Hermann Hesse paperbacks had been bagged and sent off to Goodwill. No stranger would imagine this had ever been anything other than a guest room. As I sometimes fudged to a Londoner that I was born in New York, I wondered if my parents had indulged the pleasant fiction with the odd out-of-towner that they had only two children.

My footfalls rang hollow back down the hall. I had this entire floor to myself: a drastic privacy I had craved as an adolescent, yearning for evenings like this one when my parents would disappear. Now that I had got what I wished I didn’t want it, which goes to show there is no pleasing some people. When my father was alive Mahler and Ives thrummed through this mansion all the way to the tower deck, but with no symphonic bombast tyrannizing the stairwell, no more “Tommy” pounding from down the hall, no lilting alto of “I am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” wending from the kitchen while my mother made pies, this cavernous structure was deathly quiet, and I was grateful for so much as the thump of my case as it fell from Truman’s exhausted hand, and even for the piping of my sister-in-law, whose nasal, peevish voice would ordinarily annoy me.

As Truman lumbered up the next flight to grill chicken thighs, I shouted after him. “Why are you cooking up there? You’ve an enormous kitchen downstairs, and your kitchen is a closet.”

“I always cook in the dovecot.” He kept walking.

He always cooked in the dovecot, and that was reason enough, as he always had the same breakfast, mowed the lawn the same day of the week, and now that he was in college I figured that Duke’s varying his academic schedule must have plunged him into interior disarray for half of every semester. Truman’s disciplines were so strict not because they were solid but because they were shaky. In my little brother’s personal mythology, should he nibble a single biscuit between meals, lift weights on Friday instead of Thursday, or allow himself an extra half-shot of bourbon before bed, he would degenerate into a flabby dissolute overnight. Truman trusted everyone but himself.

As I unpacked, Averil swayed in the doorway, her eyes following each pair of jeans to its drawer. She seemed to be counting them, like Truman and my glasses of wine.

“Whatever happened with your room-mates?” she inquired. “You said one was cute.”

“I said they were both cute.”

“Which one did you like better? The runty guy with glasses, or the drunken thug?”

I laughed. “In Britain, you’d say hooligan. Which he wasn’t, quite. But which did I like better? I guess I never made up my mind.”

“Well, did you ever, you know?” Averil may have found my sexual peripatetics “disgusting”—her favorite word—just as Truman himself lumped everyone I had ever dated into the categories of “lunatic” or “waste product.” Yet like most who married as virgins or nearly so, she displayed a disapproving but keenly prurient curiosity about the love lives of the wayward.

“It’s inadvisable,” I said, “to get romantically involved with flatmates. Even in South Ealing, flats are expensive and hard to come by; you don’t want to complicate matters. The three of us were agreed on that.”

“So you left them alone after all?”

“After all,” I said, “they have left me alone. I will miss them.”

“What’s that?”

I had unwrapped a piece of ceramic from my leggings, and set it on the dresser by the wobbly elephant from my first firing at ten. “A souvenir.”

“Can I see it?”

I shrugged.

My sculptures were distinguished by their hands: oversized in relation to the figure and always finely wrought, attenuated fingers extended from a tendonous metacarpus. The severed hand Averil now rested in her palm was reaching for something, or someone, and without the rest of the figure attached no longer appeared youthfully desirous, but merely grasping.

“It’s beautifully done,” she admired. “I can’t imagine making something so delicate out of clay. But why is it broken off?”

“Because that’s the left hand,” I explained, “and it didn’t know what the right one was doing.”

We trudged up the second flight of stairs where, according to Truman’s lore, we were entering another residence altogether. If I were to assert that my younger brother had never left home by thirty-one, he would object. Ten years before, he’d refurbished the top floor into an independent flat; he liked to regard the fact that his address tags still read “309 Blount Street” and his zip code hadn’t changed since he was two as mere coincidence.

We had designated the third floor “the dovecot,” since the mansard roof was infested with pigeons, though the scampering overhead could sound ominously like rats. The pigeons had nested on the pediments over the dormer windows, whose overhangs didn’t protect the panes from being continually splattered with bird poo. Truman spent a lot of time squeegeeing. Truman lived to squeegee; all the humdrum toil my father deplored as distraction from the Great Questions my little brother regarded as the meat of life.

I did feel a release on rising to the long central room in Truman’s hideaway, with its tall, round-headed window at the end, where the spiral staircase curled to his tower. The rooms adjoining this one all had at least one sloping wall, from the slant of the roof; in the cockeyed tilt lurked a sense of humor, which the ponderous lower floors could well afford. Truman’s aesthetic may have been backward-looking, but in the runaway eclecticism of downstairs there was no coherent aesthetic at all. He had a prejudice against any furniture made in his lifetime, which suggested a self-dislike. I think if Truman could have wished himself back a hundred years he would. He was always pining about the days when hard work was rewarded and a man was a man and you did what you had to do and life was simple. I personally didn’t believe life was ever simple, though I could see fancying the illusion. Truman hated his own time, and expressed his nostalgia in bygone appointments, mostly glommed from the boot sales of other children with dead parents. His offbeat furniture wasn’t restricted to a single era—his couch was Victorian, end-tables Edwardian, and there was one upright armchair in his living room, ridiculously carved, that I do not believe belonged to any era at all. But together the hodgepodge formed a family whose members all got along, which was more than you could say for ours.

Here in the middle room he’d laid their hefty darkwood table, solidly built and lovingly refinished. They don’t make things the way they used to—if you listened to Truman from around a corner you might mistake him for his grandfather, except that my father’s father was not the least bit sentimental about the olden days, was grateful for central heating, and had recently installed his own fax.

We dined on grilled skinned chicken thighs, a mound of rice fluffy with a scant tablespoon of butter and steamed broccoli. I had shared this meal before, and variations followed similar nutritional lines. If I asked my little brother what he believed, leaving aside his convictions about architecture which were equally fanatical, his leading catechism would underscore that carbohydrates must be relied upon for caloric mainstay; in place of deity he would exalt dietary fiber. Amid the malign influences in Truman’s universe, fat ranked first. He might not have gone so far as to call obese people evil themselves, but they were at least the devil’s playground. While my father had got worked up over a black woman dying because she was not admitted to white Rex hospital, his second son only displayed similar choler when a documentary asserted that some people were born fat and couldn’t help it. The worst of determinism, in Truman’s mind.

I shouldn’t complain; if the food was plain it was impeccably prepared—six and a half minutes per thigh side on the second notch down on the grill, one cup rice to one-and-a-third cups water less one tablespoon. Truman was precise, and, in spite of his highfalutin’ and ham-handed father, my brother’s worldview was essentially mechanical.

“Before we meet with the lawyer tomorrow,” Truman mentioned, and swallowed, “I thought you and I might talk about—” when he dabbed his mouth casually, his hand trembled “—the house.”

“What about it?”

“Mordecai’s going to want his share in cash.”

“Probably.”

“He’s a philistine. But what about you?”

We would not hear the details of the will until the following afternoon, but my parents had prepared us for their estate being evenly divided among the three heirs. They must have been sorely tempted to disinherit the eldest altogether, but their idea of themselves as fair liberal parents who did not have preferences among their children won the day.

“Have you a clue how much dosh is left—”

“Dosh?” Truman’s eyes narrowed.

“Money. On top of the house?”

“Nope. With the dosh I saw Father mailing off to every Negro-something charity he could find I bet we’re not coming into a windfall. Still, Father’s salary from the Supreme Court must have accumulated to something. If my share of the cash is enough, I’d be willing to buy both you and Mordecai out.”

“Uh-huh.” I picked a tendon from my teeth. “Since Oakwood has gentrified, this place has appreciated by a factor of several times. I doubt you’ll have the resources.” I found myself hoping that he would not. “What’s Plan B?”

“Well, you and I could buy Mordecai out together,” said Truman promptly.

“Uh-huh.”

“And then, little by little, after I finish my degree and get a job, I could pay you off and eventually you’d get your money, I promise. We could even draw up a contract, with some moderate interest …”

“Uh-huh.” I folded my arms. “In any case, you want to be the one who owns Heck-Andrews. At the end of the day.”

“Well.” He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“But it’s my house, too.”

“In a way.”

“Not in a way. Legally, emotionally, historically—I grew up here, they were my parents as well, and it is partly my house.”

“Okay!” He backed off, but he still didn’t appear to accept that I had, much less Mordecai had, any legitimate claim on what he had already, our mother two weeks dead, assumed as his own property. “The main thing is, we should try and keep it in the family. The last thing we want is to have to sell. Right?”

I didn’t answer.

“Right, Corlis?” He was panicking.

It’s chilling how clinical one can be in the midst of grief, but I had given this matter some thought. I did figure Mordecai would want the money, that Truman wouldn’t come into enough liquid assets to buy us both out, and I could conceivably force the house on to the market. Just as Truman’s impulse with Mordecai and the Britannicas was to deny him the prize, I was tempted to take Heck-Andrews from Truman precisely because it was the one possession he most desired.

“I might go in with you.” I tapped my fork on the table. “But not with the understanding that you eventually buy my share. If I’m going to have a half-interest in this property, I’m going to stay interested.”

Truman looked mystified, and paused in his hoovering of rice. “Why? You live in London.”

Averil mumbled, “Ask her why she brought six pairs of jeans.”

“Don’t you?” he pressed.

“And why she packed shorts. And summer dresses. In November.” Averil was talking to her plate.

I tossed my balled napkin at my chicken bones. “As of today I live in Raleigh.”

I’d fled this town with such desperation that the statement wallowed in my ears with sickening fatalism. The Myth of the Eternal Return: there was no getting away, was there? I felt like one of those paddle balls on an elastic string; the further I bounced away, the harder I would land smack back on my staple.

“Where in Raleigh?”

I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been evicted. For now, this is the only place I have to go.”

My brother’s jaw jutted forward, like my father’s. “Don’t you think you might have asked?”

“Asked? Unless Hugh appoints us otherwise tomorrow, I just inherited a third of this place. Why would I need your permission to live in my own house?”

Averil had started clearing the table, pitching silverware on to stacked plates from inches above, crash-crash; then she made quite a project out of bunching all the napkins into a single, furiously tight wad.

“Because other people live in it,” said Truman.

“If this place is so massive,” I reminded him, “that Father wanted to donate half of it to the homeless, it’s obviously big enough for you and me.”

“But I thought you had this great career going. That you had a gallery and you were going to be famous and you’d made your real life in Britain. All that about applying to British immigration for ‘settlement’ … How you liked your new flatmates … And a sidewalk seems like a pavement now.”

“You mean you thought you’d got rid of me.”

“I didn’t—”

It happened again, up-side of the head: I was starting to cry. Averil shot me a quick dirty look, as if tears were cheating. As punishment, she cleared my wine glass.

“What did you mean,” Truman prodded, “you’ve been ‘evicted’?”

When I found the spacious flat in South Ealing I was patching together a living from bootlegging films off the BBC for third-world black-market videos, and part-time messengering in town on a gasping second-hand scooter. At thirty-four, I was wearying of odd jobs and empty pockets for the sake of “my work,” and my attitude toward my higher calling had grown sardonic. However, I’d had just enough encouragement from selling the odd piece privately that I hadn’t, incredibly, given up. The pretension of being an Artist may have made me cringe, and at low-rent parties I never introduced myself as anything but a bohemian ex-pat scavenger. Still, alone with mud, refining a plane or tapering those delicate fingers, I did not want a drink, a fag, a nap, or a chat; sculpting was the single thing I did that was all I wanted to be doing while I was doing it.

What’s more, I savored that my income was illegal. From girlhood I had been a sneak. For four years I’d limped by on tourist or student visas and wasn’t officially allowed to work; I was in my element under the table.

So after I’d made a hash of one more live-in relationship, I may have wished myself beyond the stage of communitarian arrangements with names on milk cartons, but I could not afford a flat on my own, full stop. I posted for flatmates at universities. I knew it was safer—and wouldn’t it have been—to advertise for females, but girls bored me and I grew up flanked by boys.

I had several takers, so I must have selected the winning couple with some care. I don’t know what system I applied—the two men were not in the least alike.

Andrew Finlay was a grad student in political science at the London School of Economics, a scrawny bookish-looking boy with sharp shoulders and tapered wrists. His body was knobby and perverse, with a prominent Adam’s apple and double joints—his elbows bent backwards. Though twenty-four, he looked twelve, an effect he encouraged by wearing outsized overalls bibbing harlequin jumpers, trouser cuffs rolled high to expose rumpled socks and chunky shoes. His facial features were narrow and weaselly, dwarfed by wide National Health horn-rims. Though his grin was sly and he laughed knowingly from the side of his mouth, it didn’t take long to ferret out that Andrew had had meager experience with women.

Peter Larson was a broader man, still well my junior but older than Andrew by six years. He was a Glaswegian, and it took me weeks of deciphering his accent to understand that his ostensible ambitions were in journalism. Such a future was hard to picture, save the bit about boozing up sources at late-license pubs. Peter was on the hapless side, as he cheerfully admitted. He subbed for the Daily Mail and the Evening Standard for a month at a time, but often lost the job for mitching his morning slot, hung over. He was frequently late with his rent, but it was hard to get angry with him; that Peter was unreliable was at the heart of his appeal. While Andrew’s jokes were contrived around esoteric puns or the latest cabinet scandal, Peter’s humor was bawdy, his laughter salacious and inclusive. Besides, he was handsome, a footballer only recently gone to seed, with a square jaw and strong stomach muscles that would bear up under years’ more abuse. I knew how he’d end up: a potbellied, pasty would-have-been blustering through tall tales to avoid paying his round, but foresight inspired me to make the most of his company before he declined to welcher and nuisance.

Since Peter would vanish for days on end, on benders or fast-burn romances he’d never say, I spent a lot more time with Andrew. The younger man was light enough to share my scooter, on which the two of us would top-heavily weave to Stop ’n’ Shop for provisions, to return flapping with plastic bags. His hands resting deftly on my hips sent a warm glow up the back of my neck. Though I might have dismounted grateful to have made it home without capsizing, I’d feel doleful when our mission was accomplished, already chafing to run out of Marmite—his favorite late snack with cold, burnt toast.

An atavistic socialist and paid-up member of Greenpeace, Andrew would wag his slender double-jointed fingers by the hour, lecturing on the betrayals of the Labour Party; I only half-listened. Our more frolicsome times were spent hunched over sticky oilcloth at the kitchen table, where he taught me the conventions of British crossword puzzles. The Independent’s clues were oblique in comparison with the Herald Tribune’s, a distinction which would tempt Andrew to extemporize on how Americans had no sense of irony. I’d retort that the British were self-regarding and coy. Andrew hailed from Bath; his ls converted to ws, his ths to fs and vs. I’d mimic his reading of clues—“Boat of bwuverwy wuv”; he’d caricature my inattentive lapses into a southern accent—“Keeyun-sheeyup.”