A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  Mordecai fell back. ‘That’s all?’

  ‘I know what it’s worth to me,’ said Truman, ‘but on the market, what do you figure Heck-Andrews is worth?’

  ‘Ya’ll’ll have to get it assessed. Off the cuff? House that size in Oakwood right now might list for three-eighty, maybe more. Fact, 33

  right downtown—Blount Street’s commercial zoning—you might get that much for the property alone. Course, they’d level the structure, maybe put up a—’

  ‘NO!’

  Truman would have been heard several offices down. Hugh looked mystified.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Troom added. ‘But you’re telling me that the ACLU owns a quarter of my house. What am I supposed to do, run a bed and breakfast for bleeding-heart lawyers?’ His eyebrows neared his hairline; his jaw clenched, its muscles dimpling in and out. In the pugnacious jutting of that chin, I recognized my father in court. ‘And what about the furniture? All those doo-dahs? Is the ACLU going to want my blender?’

  “Less your mom was collecting antiques—’

  ‘Only the cheese,’ I intruded.

  ‘No art works?’ he asked me.

  ‘If that organization wants my fifth-grade clay elephant, they can have it.’

  ‘Most household contents don’t assess at more than a few thousand bucks,’ Hugh assured us. ‘On this point I bet we could convince the ACLU to ease up. It is, after all, a darned gracious bequest. And I bet a lot of your folks’ what-all has sentimental value.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ said Mordecai.

  ‘But they won’t forget the house?’ Truman pleaded.

  ‘Not a snowball’s chance. Too much do-re-mi. Oh, they’ll be nice about it—at first. But those fundraising boys are hungry. That it’s for a good cause only makes them more aggressive. They’re not ashamed of themselves. Not that shame usually holds anybody back anyways…’

  ‘Is there no way to contest this?’ Truman’s nostrils were flaring.

  ‘Contest it!’ Mordecai cried. ‘Come on, it’s got Mother and Father written all over it! Sanctimonious holier-than-thou liberal bullshit!’

  ‘Father wanted to get to heaven,’ I mumbled.

  ‘Yeah, well,’ said Mordecai, pursing his lips. ‘I’m surprised he didn’t give his place up there to a black handicapped dyke instead.’

  Hugh was leaning back watching the show, and looked weary. Back when we had that beer it had been awkward at first, and I 34

  blurted that being an estate lawyer must be awfully dull. I guess that wasn’t a nice thing to say about someone’s profession, but I’d been thinking about my father’s calling, crusading against racism, in comparison. Hugh had said no you’d be surprised. Estate law’s sometimes more interesting than you’d like. You see a lot of—He’d cut himself short and said, well, it’s hard not to get cynical about people.

  Hugh sighed. ‘With the ACLU, you got two choices,’ he announced when we’d finished bickering. ‘You can all chip in and buy out the organization’s share as a family—’ He scanned us sceptically, as if regarding our trio as a cohesive collective unit were risible—‘or you can sell.’

  ‘We’re not selling,’ Truman declared.

  ‘That may be something you have to decide with your brother and sister.’

  ‘I live there!’

  ‘For the time being, kid.’ Mordecai played with an alligator clip that fixed his braid and worked the jaws up and down.

  ‘Should you retain the property with the non-profit paid off, then you three could decide how or whether to dispense with the real estate at your leisure.’

  ‘The last thing some of us need,’ said Mordecai, cutting his eyes towards Truman, ‘is more leisure.’

  ‘What if two of us have some feeling for the house we grew up in,’

  Truman hypothesized, ‘but all the other guy cares about is his filthy lucre?’

  ‘If you can raise the funds, two of you buying out the third is one option—’

  ‘Hold on here,’ Mordecai railroaded. ‘You’re saying with the bastions of social justice out of the picture our jolly threesome can blather for months if not years about what happens to Mommy and Daddy’s $380,000 ramshackle mansion—?’

  ‘It’s not ramshackle!’ said Truman.

  ‘And meanwhile little True here makes up his bed in my house every morning and waters the petunias and grows old. Isn’t there any way to push this programme?’

  ‘You’re any of you within your rights,’ said Hugh, ‘to file suit for partition.’

  ‘So that what,’ I said hopefully, ‘the house is divided up and we each get a floor?’

  35

  ‘Physical partition is recommended once in a blue moon, but unlikely in your case. I dare say the court would regard awarding one floor each to grown siblings as a re-enactment of the Civil War. No, ordinarily the court demands the property be put up for auction. Any of you current part-owners would be free to bid for the house, though in competition with each other or the buying public, either of whom could jack its price out of reach.’

  This was getting too complicated for me. ‘Mordecai, come over to the house for dinner tonight,’ I suggested. ‘We’ll sort something out.’

  ‘My ass we’ll sort something out,’ said Mordecai. ‘Your kid brother just wants to sit on his hands and keep his little upstairs hideaway intact like a fucking treehouse. And meanwhile my company’s scraping along by the seat of its pants—’

  ‘You’ll get your damned money!’ Truman’s face was violet.

  ‘There’s one more thing,’ Hugh raised reluctantly, ‘before we break up and I let you three amicably confer on what you want to do about the real estate.’ He didn’t look envious; I got the impression that if I invited the attorney to our dinner Hugh would suddenly recollect a previous engagement. ‘Mordecai…You borrowed some money from your parents?’

  ‘A pittance,’ my brother replied guardedly. ‘Why?’

  ‘Say—$14,000?’

  Mordecai sniffed. ‘I doubt it was that much.’

  ‘If you question the amount, we could verify with back records. ‘Cause the loans are to be deducted from your inheritance.’

  I did not think it possible for a man of Mordecai’s colouring to pale.

  True, to my parents $14,000 was a stupendous amount of money. They’d never lost touch with the depression dollar, just as I had never quite debunked the exaggerated value of our twenty-five-cent allowance; a quarter still weighed heavy in my hand. But in terms of 1992, the amount was modest. Forgive your debts? So my parents were second-rate Christians like most, and that was hard to swallow when they had just piously donated a quarter of their estate to a child who was only an abstraction.

  They could be charitable as long as the generosity wasn’t towards a real, obstreperous issue who used the f-word. Strictly, the deduction was fair, but I suspected my brother had interpreted the word ‘loan’

  loosely.

  ‘See for yourself.’ Hugh handed a sheet to Mordecai.

  36

  ‘May 10, 1989,’ he muttered, locating the amendment. He turned to me. ‘What did I do then?’ He handed the paper back the way Truman had held my mother’s stinky sponge.

  ‘Now listen. Mind if I leave you three with a bit of advice?’ Hugh enquired, perhaps having noticed that we hadn’t asked for any. ‘I’ve probated wills like this before; your situation ain’t unusual. The simplest solution is almost always the best. I know a house has memories, but memories you can keep for free. With this many tenants, I strongly suggest that you sell.’

  Trying to keep him from spontaneously combusting in public, I quickly herded Truman to reception.

  37

  4

  As we collected back on Hillsborough, Truman loitered a few feet away, a bullish, belligerant aspect disguising the same lost and stricken countenance he displayed when he was four. It would have been like Mordecai to woo us to one of the pricey eateries that had sprung up in Raleigh while I’d been gone, where he cou
ld stage the profligate de-bauch for which he was renowned around town; glaring from a distance, Truman apparently found his brother’s enthusiasm for meeting up later at Heck-Andrews suspicious. Truman had grown so fiercely protective of our house that he didn’t invite guests of any description, much less his big brother.

  But I rather liked Mordecai’s effect on my former sidekick; once our trio parted ways and the two of us returned to the Volvo, Truman clapped a hand on my shoulder and said, ‘What a mess!’ in a tone that suggested that at least it was our mess, together, and then asked if I wanted to drive; for the first time since my arrival I felt he was glad I was there. In the car, too, we had a feast of things to talk about, starting with that charitable bequest.

  ‘Don’t that beat all!’ said Truman, quoting our childhood favourite, Andy Griffith, who resembled our father.

  ‘Cutting in the ACLU was totally predictable.’ I said. ‘It’s surprising those first amendment flunkies didn’t walk off with the lot.’

  ‘Mordecai embarrassed me. Comes into money from parents he never gave howdya-do and then complains it’s not enough.’

  ‘Mordecai feels chronically shafted.’

  I had promised to lay in provisions for Mordecai’s ‘secret recipe’ spaghetti sauce. Soothed by the shimmy of our cart in Harris Teeter, my little brother cheered up. While many find shopping tedious, Truman looks forward to Harris Teeter all week.

  38

  ‘I know this sounds crazy,’ he confided by the paper towels, ‘but I love running out of supplies so that I can replace them.’

  I’d seen it: the shine in his cheeks when he lathered a soap splinter, from satisfaction it was his last bar; the flourish of his hand when he vanquished the tarragon so he could buy a new jar. When he collapsed a box of Total into the bin he spanked his palms, as if he’d accomplished something. Truman liked to have needs. At least the illogic wasn’t lost on him, but I wondered if this delight in dispatching products in order to re-acquire them wasn’t a functional definition of the middle class.

  Consequently, as our cart mounded my brother’s chest expanded and his step sprang—shopping, he was concentrated, efficient, author-itative about brands of tinned tomatoes. In a grocery store, Truman was pig in shite.

  We returned having agreed it was time to move operations to the main kitchen. Truman took obvious relish in unpacking. Although I was sometimes frustrated by the close perimeters of his life, within those boundaries he thrived. Maybe to him who celebrates a fresh jar of mayonnaise belongs the kingdom of heaven. Truman shoved the Winn-Dixie ketchup aside for proper Heinz, swept away the broccoli rubber bands, and set about alphabetizing the spice rack. This would be the first time he’d cook here since my mother died, a festive and solemn occasion both. Truman had ambitions to enlarge his world by exactly two floors.

  As he burrowed in the pantry, Truman’s high spirits precipitously dropped when the back door slammed. He turned to confront, among his nutritionally correct carrots and ten-pound bag of Carolina long grain, a litre bottle of aquavit.

  Hee-hee-hee…

  Truman’s face folded down like a garage door. Truman claimed to dislike his brother; I thought his dislike was occluded by terror.

  I suggested we all have a drink before preparing dinner. Brothers beelined for opposite corners of the parlour, Averil taking the love seat behind her husband’s chair so that her view of her brother-in-law was physically blocked. She picked up a copy of The Christian Century and looked rapt.

  When I solicited Truman with a glass of wine, I found him hunched over a piece of stationery. I recognized the sheet with its black border as the bill for our mother’s funeral expenses.

  39

  (Exorbitant—I suspect that out of sheer frugality she’d have preferred we bury her in the backyard, like a beloved dog.) He scribbled additions and divisions, tortoiseshell reading glasses down his nose.

  I brought Mordecai a shot of aquavit, whose single ice cube he fished out and threw in the fireplace. He raised the glass to the lamplight and squinted through his yellow-tinted lenses at the mere finger remaining, knocked it back, and returned the empty glass. I soldiered to the kitchen where the bottle was lodged in the bulging stand-up freezer. I wondered if he really liked caraway schnapps, which smelled like liquor fermented from a ham sandwich, or whether what he liked was the fact it was re-pulsive.

  On a whim I took down my mother’s last grocery list, scrawled on old ‘Bob Scott for Governor’ notepad paper and still magneted to the refrigerator door, and pulled a nubby pencil from a drawer. I had an itch to make my own calculations. The chart I constructed on the back of the list so amazed me that I wondered at having never drawn it up before:

  Mordecai

  Truman

  Corlis

  ACLU

  Mother:

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Father:

  4

  3

  2

  1

  Total:

  5

  5

  5

  5

  By way of explication: every child has sooner or later to face down the farcical liberal fiction that his parents love each child equally well, a myth Sturges and Eugenia enshrined in their will, as if to convince themselves. Bullshit. Parents have favourites. Mine did their best to camouflage these preferences, my father by being indiscriminately aloof, my mother by being indiscriminately clingy. But as Sturges McCrea had himself opined, prejudice will out.

  Hence my chart. If we counted the ACLU as the fourth child and allowed each parent to rank the McCrea kids on a preference scale from 1 to 4, we all four earned exactly five points. I had to admire the symmetry, contrived by two people neither mathematically minded and only egalitarian in an official sense. My father fought for justice his whole life, so naturally my parents would mete out love along with the real estate in equal portions.

  Though Mordecai’s glass was beginning to sweat, I paused to 40

  study my handiwork. Unquestionably, the ACLU came first in my father’s affections; it did not wet the bed or require a ride to the school play when he planned to take the car. There was equally no question—and I say this in my mother’s defence—that however faithfully she parroted his views and encouraged his cheques out the door, for my mother the ACLU straggled in a far fourth. She was incapable of getting exercised over progeny she couldn’t treat to a Popsicle, a ward who would never arrive at the back door trying to hide his report card or waving the winning essay on the school cafeteria. She was a real mother.

  As for Truman, that of the warm-blooded kids he was the runner-up with both parents explained a doggedness in him, a we-try-harder, like Avis. If he could merely succeed in besting one sibling with each parent he could walk away with first prize. To this effect he had repaired their hot water heater, retacked their stair carpet, and rolled their wheely-bin to the bottom of the drive every Tuesday morning.

  Yet my father’s choice of Truman over Mordecai betrayed his weaker side. Sturges McCrea vilified his eldest son for being an arrogant, ob-stinate, pushy, demanding chancer—ergo, for being just like his father.

  How much easier to manage, that docile, introverted boy who would never dare the f-word in front of his mother; a ‘late bloomer’ with a queer fancy for architecture that my father found cute; a man (though I doubt my father ever thought of Truman as a man) too practical, or too cowardly, to move out of his parents’ house, and married to a wallflower who was inarticulate about politics and therefore failed to impress. Truman didn’t give my father competition.

  My mother, too, eschewed competition, which is why in her books I came in third. With the wicked timing of the heedless teenager, I began to mature, or ‘grow curves’, as she would say, right around the time my mother started to sneak a second piece of pie. I always hated that expression, grow curves, which implied putting on weight. Instead I was whippet-thin in my teens, and my mother never forgave me.

&n
bsp; It would be absurd for me to take her low rating personally; and I still kept an edge on the ACLU. Yet that among his burpy-poopy-screechy children I was my father’s favourite was also impersonal. My father adored me and my mother wished I would put a bag over my head from the same neutral ontology: I was the girl.

  41

  Perhaps the single surprise on my chart, then, was Mordecai, who would himself have been taken aback that he’d remained, after so many shouting matches, his mother’s pet. Maybe all women prefer their first-born sons. She always stuck up for him, though her advocacy often took the form of despair. I was glad for Mordecai that he’d retained a stalwart ally—he needed one.

  Still, her partiality had its exasperating aspect. Had Mother’s devotion to number-one son been less fierce, she might have dismissed his foul language as puerile defiance best undermined by refusing to take issue.

  (My mother was one of the last late twentieth-century Americans for whom the f-word still had punch. It truly shocked her, like a physical slap, and left a brilliant red imprint on both cheeks. Since her heart attack, I had reached for an expletive and could not find a word sufficiently crude for my purposes. In the absence of offended audience, there is no obscenity; with my mother dead, it was impossible to be horrid.) But no—she had to dote on Mordecai, and so he could destroy her. She’d coronated the ingrate, which was like crowning the son most likely to chop off your head.

  I turned the chart back over, and re-magneted the grocery list to the fridge, savouring that an entire family calculus rested underneath our continuing need for toilet paper.

  Having delivered the aquavit, I stood in the parlour doorway, survey-ing the results of nearly forty years’ worth of primary school arithmetic.

  ‘See, no measurement can be perfect,’ Mordecai was expostulating.

  ‘But traditional science has always operated on the assumption that niggling influences, small mis-estimations, can be overlooked. Chaos theory trashed that. That one rounding off, the one pesky speck you failed to take into account, can overturn your results completely.’

  ‘Like The Fly,’ I said, but Truman wasn’t listening. Averil wasn’t listening. I felt like my mother, who kept up the naïve conviction to the last that all you need do for a ‘special time’ is put enough blood relations in the same room. And for God’s sake, it wasn’t as if we had nothing to talk about. Far from wanting for subject matter, we were sitting in it.