A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘Leave me out of your—’

  ‘Thirdly,’ I overrode, trying to keep my voice level. ‘I wouldn’t contribute to causes because I don’t have any. I have opinions. I don’t have beliefs. People like us, all we know is what we don’t believe: in God, in country. Mother was right: we are “negative”. We take pot shots. We derided Mother and Father for years, but we’re hardly improvements.

  We don’t stand for anything, just against it. Honestly, I’m relieved there’s not more money coming our way. If the sum were more sizeable, I might feel obliged to donate some, and with a gun to my head I couldn’t think of the first organization or university or even person I’d support. We don’t have convictions, Truman. Just opinions. Just points of view.’

  ‘I have plenty of convictions!’

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  I shook my head. ‘You have allegiances. I don’t even have those.’ For some reason this rigorous self-castigation was making me feel fresh and tingly, like stepping from a hot bath.

  Because meanwhile a memory was tickling the back of my head. I’d been, what, fourteen. I don’t remember the pretence for the quarrel, only that this particular evening, parents out, Mordecai living in a trailer park, I had experimented with a new ploy. Truman yelled at me; I laughed. Truman pummelled me; I laughed harder. He backed me into a corner and started to whip his arms at me like a whirlybird, and I wouldn’t fight back, or not exactly; all I did was laugh, until the tears streamed down my cheeks, and I slid against the wall to the floor. In truth he was doing plenty of damage; he’d turned beet red, and had utterly lost control. I just rag-dolled on the carpet, wheezing when I could get it out, ‘Oh, please. You’re too funny. I’m beginning to feel sick.’ He might have truly injured me if in the end my guffaws hadn’t drained and defeated him, and he blubbered instead.

  I hadn’t been laughing this evening precisely, but the disarmament strategy was identical. The more cheesed off Truman got, the milder I became. I hadn’t reformed.

  ‘You think inheritance is so disgusting—’ Averil began, balled in her chair.

  ‘Evil,’ I corrected.

  ‘Ee-vil. But wouldn’t you want to pass on something to your own children?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Truman. ‘What about your own kids?’

  ‘I’d saddle them with as little as possible,’ I said. ‘Windfall isn’t having a great effect on us—’

  ‘Only an inheritance makes it possible for me to stay in school—’

  ‘ And to stay home.’

  ‘Not that again!’

  ‘And now without Mother to drive you round the twist, you can stay here forever.’

  ‘I’ve always got you,’ he noted sourly. ‘And where are you living yourself?’

  ‘Exactly. I shouldn’t be here, either. We should give the whole bloody house to David Grover.’ I scanned the kitchen. ‘I think places have power. I think Heck-Andrews is dangerous.’

  ‘Are you making a serious proposition?’ Truman clutched either corner of the table. ‘It seems to me you’re not suggesting 77

  anything but that we take the house and our last measly allowance, just so long as we feel bad. Vintage Sturges McCrea, Corrie Lou. Thanks for your important contribution. We’ve got to decide what to do about this letter, and you—’

  ‘There’s nothing to decide,’ I dismissed, taking charge. ‘I’ll call Hugh and get a recommendation on an appraiser. Legally we’re obliged to pay off the ACLU, whether or not you think Father’s bequest is post-mortem posturing, whether or not I think his big mistake was ever letting us have more than twenty-five cents a week.’

  ‘What about Mordecai? He said he was going to file for partition!

  Then we’ll be forced to put it on the market and have weirdos poking in our closets and—’

  ‘I’ll go talk to Mordecai,’ I said. ‘And see if he’ll accept a settlement out of court. If so, you and I will take out a mortgage and buy them both out.’

  ‘There is nothing to decide, then,’ said Truman, relieved. ‘We take out a mortgage.’

  ‘Tell that to Mordecai.’

  ‘What’s the problem, he gets his money—’

  I didn’t try to explain, but I had an unsettled suspicion about our older brother that we didn’t know him as well as we thought. I moved on. ‘Furthermore,’ I announced, ‘Christmas. We have to invite—’

  ‘Oh, no-ooo!’ Averil wailed.

  ‘Why do we have to?’ Truman objected. ‘Our whole family has been run by have-to for years and where did it get us? On stuffy cross-country car trips with cracker crumbs on plastic seat covers, no-touch rules and you throwing up at Welcome to Montana rest stops. We always did stuff together because we had to and now we’re grown up and if I don’t want to Jingle Bells with my brother who thinks I’m a dork I don’t have to.’

  ‘All right,’ I said coolly. ‘I want to invite him. When Mordecai’s around, things happen.’

  ‘You bet they do. Things like earthquakes and plane crashes and houses burning down.’

  ‘Which would solve all our problems.’

  ‘First it’s dangerous, now you’re burning it up. Leave my house alone!’

  ‘That’s enough.’ I put my palms flat on the walnut. ‘No more 78

  my house. And while we’re at it: the carriage house. I don’t appreciate being told I can’t go into any part of my house. My house, Truman.

  You’ve got the whole top floor. Don’t be greedy.’

  The first floor of the carriage house was Truman’s workshop; the second was a catch-all corner for dead house plants and broken furniture. The day before Truman had instructed me that I was forbidden to enter there. Truman knew me for a snoop; that morning I’d found the upper door freshly padlocked.

  Truman stood abruptly, his chair clattering backwards. ‘Your house?

  Thanks to whom does the roof not leak in your house? Why is your garden still full of kale, what mysterious gremlin replastered the ceiling in your upstairs bath? How did you manage to find some poor bastard to hand-router baseboards they don’t make any more when your house had dry rot? And who did the cleaning and shopping and cooking in your house when all your mother could do was cry? Who stood down here day after day like some kind of absorbent—fencepost—while Mother sobbed with her arms around his neck, and who ate all that pie he didn’t want and put on five pounds? While you were taking the tyoob around London and twittering about art in that pretentious English accent and occasionally ringing up and talking to Mother for five minutes but then complaining it was too expensive and leaving her in my lap for the rest of the night? Damn straight it’s my house, I earned this place slate by slate because you can go on all you want about feeling undeserving since you are. You and Mordecai did nothing but take, and at least I—’

  He reached quickly to squeeze the bridge of his nose, to stanch something, as if pressing hard on a vein there he might keep it from spilling over the floor. His chest swelled, and he turned away. Shoulders sagging from what would have been obscure to anyone who didn’t know him as well as I, he rasped, ‘I’m such a liar.’

  If Truman clung to righteousness himself it was the McCrea collective failing, and in Truman’s case indignation masked remorse. I had tried to console him that he’d been an attentive son long after both Mordecai and I appeared at Heck-Andrews no more than once a year, and that he’d gone beyond the call of duty in tending the dismal crumple of our mother once her husband died. In truth, not I but Truman had become the family flagellant.

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  Barring that unconvincing tirade about routering baseboards, Truman overflowed with stories, like the one of Mother’s spurned apple pie, that only illustrated his neglect. I knew them all by heart.

  The hasp and padlock I’d discovered on the carriage house that morning, for example, was not the first lock Truman installed in Heck-Andrews. At nineteen, he’d decided to move from his old bedroom on the second floor to the third, then a dusty, dilapidated storage area, stacked with cartons of mildewed
curtains and old toy trains. He replaced rotten floorboards, installed a half-kitchen and full bath, and papered the walls in hunting scenes. The dovecot took two years of his life, and it was near the end of the project he bought a Medeco for the door to the third floor stairs.

  He hadn’t mentioned this christening addition to my parents, but mutely went at the frame late one afternoon, chiselling the bolt hole.

  He wasn’t being secretive—as I would have been—but he wasn’t asking permission, either.

  While he was gouging away, Mother ambushed from behind, an arm over each shoulder, and clasped her hands. She was so much shorter than Truman that her wrists pressed his throat.

  ‘What are you up to, kiddo?’ She puled with a pee-wee lisp, since while we were learning to talk my mother was forgetting how.

  It would have been obvious what he was up to. He had stared blithely at the perimeters of the hole, in which he planned to conceal so much more than a bar of metal—Averil and Truman were already shacking up. ‘Just tinkering, as usual.’ His voice was airy—she hadn’t let go, and her wrists had tightened against his windpipe.

  ‘Tinkering at what?’ She was still palatalizing like a three-year-old, but there’d be a sharpness now, like a razor blade in a stuffed bunny.

  Now, if I were installing that lock, I’d have slipped the cylinder in my pocket, kept my back to the job, and decoyed her into fervid concern over Mordecai’s drinking.

  But no; Truman had this stalwart forthright side that was ruinous with my mother. ‘Just a lock.’ He chipped on.

  ‘ What on earth!’ She’d have dropped the toddler routine for shock-horror; at least she let go of his throat.

  He’d been prepared, having rehearsed his excuse upstairs for 80

  days, mumbling alternative versions in the hardware truck. But I knew these set pieces always worked better in the mirror.

  ‘I keep some pretty valuable tools up there,’ he recited. ‘If we’re ever broken into, having the top floor sealed off with an extra lock discourages—intruders.’ He fitted the female cover plate and screwed it in place.

  She waited for my father. By the time she came to fetch her youngest the bright brass cylinder winked at her, its centre jag a miniature light-ning bolt of filial defiance. From the dovecot Truman could hear her trying the knob. He was hanging wallpaper, but would have been lining the panels up crooked because his hands were shaking.

  ‘Trooo-maannnn! Could you come down, please? Your father and I would like to talk to you.’ Treacly sweet: a sticky trap.

  ‘Just a minute!’ He washed his hands, thoroughly.

  At the kitchen table, Truman was arraigned, just as he had been when caught peeing in the azaleas aged eight. He was twenty-one, but nothing changes; his stomach congealed. Never done: he refused the proffered cup of coffee.

  ‘Your mother tells me you’ve installed a lock to the attic. Don’t you think you might have asked us first?’

  Truman must have attempted to sound gruff through his burglary patter, but I’m sure his voice squeaked like a PA with feedback.

  ‘Are you planning to give us a key?’ I am driven to use the word rueful with my father. His tone would have been patient with repressed amusement, as if Truman had done something naughty but adorable.

  ‘Well…’ I could see my brother hunched in the doorway, affecting relaxation; with his hands shoved in his pockets, the denim would have scored his wrists. ‘I don’t see why you need one.’

  ‘You mean no,’ said Mother hotly.

  ‘It’s my attic! Before I started working on it, the place was all mouldy plaster and boxes of old towels!’

  ‘All right, and we’re proud of you,’ my father emphasized. ‘You’re doing a very good job of renovation up there. But that doesn’t explain why you need a lock, or why we don’t get a key to an entire floor of our own house.’

  ‘What if there’s a fire?’

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  ‘I won’t start a fire.’ Once more, that exhausted minor key.

  ‘How do you know?’ pursued my mother. ‘You’re putting a kitchen up there—as if ours isn’t good enough—what if you leave a pot on the stove?’

  ‘I won’t leave a pot on the stove.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Father, something he never did himself but which a courtroom lawyer comfortably demanded of other people. ‘Maybe you’ve got a point about burglars—’

  ‘What I want to know is what he wants to hide from us up there!’

  ‘Eugenia,’ Father had stilled her, then turned to Truman, no longer wry. ‘You might have asked, but it’s too late for that. Your mother’s right, it’s not safe. Now give your mother the key.’

  However briefly, Truman must have paused to imagine what Mordecai would do in his place: abjectly refuse. Strafe her kitchen cabinets with the f-word like a healthy American lunatic with an AK in a shopping mall. Paralyse my mother with the stun-gun under his zipper and describe in hard-nippled detail just exactly what he would lock her from upstairs. My father would chase him around the house. Mordecai would break a window.

  Except that Mordecai would never have been digging boltholes to secure the fiction that he didn’t really live at home. He’d leave. He did.

  Disdaining my mother’s waiting hand, Truman had flipped the spare on to the table, where it skidded to the floor. ‘You’d think at twenty-one I could have a little privacy.’ He stomped out.

  The Medeco scheme backfired entirely. My mother so relished her prize of the key to Truman’s lair that she concocted excuses to stick her thorn in his side. Later she took to leaving her spare in the lock all the time, making a farce of his ‘break-in’ protection, but he left it there. The key had remained in his door since her death, after which she was free to haunt every floor of Heck-Andrews and no Medeco could stop her.

  To Truman, the tale was metaphor—this supposedly exemplary son had spent $35 and most of his adulthood trying to lock his mother out of his life. How short-sighted and hateful, when he knew the day would come when he called and got no answer and tapped with trepidation on the parlour door, to spy her curded thighs spread over scattered photographs of my father: behold, she grants his wish, and maybe he regarded her early death as

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  proper reprisal. I’d tried to explain that nothing could have kept him from thrashing to escape when she lassoed his throat, just as nothing could have convinced Eugenia Hadley Hamill McCrea to indulge Truman his dovecot hideaway and let him keep both keys. The workings of families are as fated as they are futile. Truman tortured himself, claiming he had pointlessly, pettily fought with my mother up to the very day before her heart attack. I’d assured him that had we taken him aside and said, ‘Truman, tomorrow morning your mother will be dead,’

  he would still have argued brutally against buying more rickety aluminium lawn furniture on sale off-season. He’d have still called her a muckworm and slept that night never having apologized, with every certainty that on waking he would find her mouth open and her panties showing and he would have to decide whether to call first for a doctor or the police. Because that’s the real thing, Truman, the real raw stuff of a family and it’s good.

  Yet in his candid moments Truman regarded himself as the cruellest of us three. At least Mordecai and I had had the consideration to be oblivious out of view, and Mother could kid herself we were simply busy. Truman had turned his back to her face. He had replaced the slates because Mother was afraid of heights and the roof was one place he could be free of her. So he had a lot of nerve trying to trump his sister with his beneficent repairs, and that’s why my brother was in tears.

  I’m afraid that by recoiling from my mother’s smothering embraces, in moments of emotion I imitate my father instead: awkward, gruff, abashed, I forced my hand to Truman’s shoulder and pressed as if the fingers were operated by remote controls. I have never been sure how to touch my brother as an adult. I kept my hand on his shoulder a stolid beat, looked at it like an object out of place to be tidied, and too
k it away.

  Truman honked into a paper towel. We had a drink. When we arranged our schedule for the week, I forced myself to use a hard ch, since apparently my Britishisms got up Truman’s nose. We stayed up late, the air cleared, discussing approaches to Mordecai, and how much simpler this situation would become when he was no longer ‘tenant in common’ of our house. Even Truman said it: our house.

  I made an appointment with a realty appraiser for Monday, 7

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  December. As the prospective buyers of our own house, we needed the valuation as low as possible. We didn’t hoover.

  No, the Sunday before we filthied dishes and chucked them about the kitchen, and carted crusted cereal bowls to guest rooms. We unmade the beds, strewed the spreads, and pulled the fitted bottom sheets to expose mottled mattress covers. As Truman slumped curtain hooks off their rail, I dusted flour on carpets and walked it in; Averil flung socks down the halls. We pulled out dresser drawers to cough jumpers. While Truman sowed cans collected for recycling across our lawn, I unscrewed the bulbs in table lamps so that sickly overheads would defile the interior with a queasy glare. We kicked over our own rubbish bin, and neighbourhood dogs obligingly dragged chicken bones around the back.

  Yet there was little chance of returning the house for an afternoon to the astonishing $29,000 price tag my parents had met in cash. Behind wadded newspaper gleamed fine mahogany baseboard; under wet washcloths on doorknobs lurked antique brass; cold grey soapy water couldn’t hide the grand claw-footed tub itself. In the dead pall of overheads, delicate dentil cornice nibbled the perimeters of every room. If you drew a finger through the rusty Carolina clay I had painstakingly dribbled across the mantle, there was no mistaking that underneath was solid rose marble.

  At lunch before our appointment, Truman saved the crusts from his ham sandwich to mash underfoot. We raced about gaping closets and cabinets open. It was my idea to leave the toilets unflushed, but Truman’s horror prevailed.

  As the crowning touch we dressed for the occasion ourselves, scrounging nasty dust-balled shirts from under beds. Averil and I teased our hair, while Truman donned an old BASH THE BELTWAY cap backwards. We looked like white trash.