A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  Even in my mother’s eyes you found a popple of mischief before she married, which by the way completely disappeared. All that church-going and oatmeal-freezing is hard on mischief.

  In that animal way some women have, at twenty-one Eugenia Hamill marked my father as a male destined for the head of the herd. You’d have needed an eye for it, since I couldn’t see anything auspicious about him in their wedding pictures. My father at twenty-five was a geek. He may have been president of the Young Democrats, but he cut his hair barbarously short so his

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  ears stuck out from his head. Acne. He looked gawky and awkward, no chest, and the features in his face had not yet settled; they didn’t seem to know where to be, as if at a reception where they weren’t sure how to mingle and kept wandering off for a glass of Hawaiian punch.

  Were you stuck at cocktail hour with Mr Sincerity here, first of all he wouldn’t drink; and second, he wouldn’t let go, but would corner you to dissect Adlai Stevenson’s strategy for derailing McCarthy while everyone else was swooning about James Dean and tapping their toes to Chubby Checker. He wouldn’t dance, or remember jokes. The fact is, if I met my own father at a party I’d have ditched him in a minute for the guy with a sense of humour and a martini on the other side of the room.

  My father may have been a swat, but even then—this is what my mother spotted—he must have been driven by a ruthless personal ambition that he disguised decorously, and with timely creativity, as burning social conscience. Their first few dates were spent picketing lunch counters, or leafleting for integrated education and then fishing their discarded hand-outs from black cotton Virginian mud. To give Sturges credit, with a woman from the midwest for whom the segreg-ated South was the evil empire, a diner with Whites Only restrooms was a much more inspired locale to get her to clutch his hand than in the back rows of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.

  My father must have had some cachet, a stalwart lefty in the days when it cost you, who had taken two years off after a history degree at Davidson to volunteer for—ever the sacred cow—the ACLU. Meanwhile he threw himself into the election campaign that so broke his heart that Truman Adlai had it to thank for his middle name. Anti-McCarthy, anti-nuclear testing, later to troop after Martin Luther King and help found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Sturges McCrea was in on the ground floor of all the noble sentiments that are now derisively dismissed as ‘politically correct’. My brothers may have resented their father’s staking claim to the big liberal issues not just because these were used to bludgeon the boys into submission, but because so little largesse was left for them. Truman did not champion the black and the poor but porch mouldings; Mordecai had thrown in his lot with high fidelity of only the most technical variety. If Eugenia Hadley Hamill had met either of her own sons at a

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  Young Democrats conference, after politely permitting Truman to regale her about the distinguishing elements of Second Empire architecture, and Mordecai to extol the components of his last recording studio, she’d have politely excused herself for finger sandwiches, leaving them both to goon mournfully after her as had so many young men in her youth.

  I do not question that falling in love with Sturges McCrea was the biggest event in my mother’s life. Before Sturges, she had tolerated countless suitors, gracious and considerate of their feelings, though firmly offended when their hands crept over her knee. But I figure when Sturges so much as grazed her blouse she couldn’t breathe. My mother must have had a libido the size of South Dakota; though virgins when they married, for years after they were so self-congratulatory over their restraint that there must have been a fair fire to contain. They were apart during much of their courtship, hailing from different states, and she lived for his letters—stiff, formal protestations of undying love with a lot of God thrown in that we were still unearthing around the house.

  That his prose was stilted my mother no doubt overlooked, sweeping to her bedroom and throwing herself on the bed to hoard his onionskin as she would later stockpile Vidalias until they were black. The door locked behind her, she would pen a reply in that liquid, Palmer-method script of hers that made even ‘ketchup’ and ‘light bulbs’ look exotic magneted to the refrigerator door when I was young.

  I had bosomed my share of billets doux as well. Yet she never gave me credit for the full-blown passion that enveloped her on her Iowa bedspread, and it was her very insistence that rapture remain foreign to me, her possessiveness over love itself, that first suggested to me that she was nervous of keeping it on her own account.

  She did fall in love with him. I believe that. Their romance was the real McCoy at the start. But I think being happy must be a thoroughly petrifying experience. The first thing that seems to occur to people high as kites is that any time now the wind might die and there they’ll be, torn in a tree. Exhilaration seems to arrive in tandem with the threat of despair; passion arrives hand in hand with the prospect of indifference.

  Maybe when you feel anything strongly the sensation becomes definitive of the state in which you feel otherwise. This dark alternative must have smacked my

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  mother up-side the head. She was in love with my father, and the idea that the honeymoon might one day come to an end was patently intolerable.

  I never met the woman in those early snaps. In all the pictures of our family where I feature even as a baby, her smile is no longer an open window but a shut one with the air conditioner on. Through the years, too, you can see her eyes change; they contract into themselves, shielded, a little blank. I’ve experimented with putting my hand over the cheesecake lower half of her face, and isolated from all those teeth her eyes look pained. The burden of incessant acting when she really hadn’t a knack for it must have gradually taken it out of her. For well before I was born she had abandoned the precariousness of really being in love with my father for the surety of pretending to be.

  No, I am not one more whinging offspring, begotten of two people who reviled one another, and now irremediably scarred. On the contrary, we were instructed from first grade on that my parents had the most wonderful marriage in the whole world, and that ‘we should be so lucky’, my mother would caution, to barely approach in our own tawdry adulthoods the elation of their ethereal communion. We were informed repeatedly that whom you married was the biggest decision of your life and that in the history of the universe never had this choice been more inspired than in our own house. We were the privileged witnesses to Wedded Bliss, whose literal expression was described as so ‘beautiful’ and so involved with Jesus that I always pictured the two of them kneeling in prayer by the bedside before they Did It. At any rate, hats off to my father for being able to get it up in such a sanctuary of a bridal chamber that their windows were stained glass, while beati-fied in rhetoric that urges most people to burst into the doxology.

  Consequently, whenever my mother heard about another of my relationships biting the dust (though I shielded her from most of them), her comfort ran that my ‘problem’ was having ‘such a remarkable father’ and being the issue of ‘such a spectacular union’ that no one I found could measure up. Somehow this explanation regularly failed to console.

  My parents were condescending about Truman’s marriage, as if it were his sweet little boy’s attempt to imitate their Tristan and Isolde, as if upstairs he and Averil were playing Doctor. My 113

  father expressed his contempt by never mentioning Averil, as if to do so would be vulgar; my mother by being too encouraging. Truman maintained at the time that he and Averil opted for a brief civil ceremony with me as their only witness because they were practical, and didn’t like fuss. I think my parents had made them feel ashamed.

  In any family there may be one worm, a single wriggle of corruption from which every other foulness spreads, and in the McCrea case the source-lie was that my parents were happily married. The irony? They were happily married. They just didn’t believe it. They were afraid that, like the brinjal pickl
e, it might not keep, and so they turned a perfectly serviceable relationship into a religion and thereby into a fraud. Imagine how disconcerting this was for small children. We were told their marriage was as good as they come; yet there was something horribly hollow about it and so marriages didn’t come very good. What they offered as promising merely depressed us.

  If the stagy fakery that invaded my mother’s behaviour had been restricted to her ‘telephone voice’—she never answered the phone with anything less than, ‘Hello, Eugenia Hamill McCrea speaking’—and that fossilized smile for strangers, I could have forgiven her as a socially formal woman covering for the fact that she was shy. But it was in private she was at her most false. And mind, she was a woeful actress, so that when she squeezed us for a beat too long and recited, ‘I luv you, kiddo’ we would squirm and refuse to meet her eyes out of the same raging embarrassment of watching Vivien Leigh overdo Scarlett O’Hara.

  And this is the bugbear: she did love us. My mother loved us. But she never, never said so when she was feeling it at the time.

  My mother imitated her own feelings, that is, feelings she did truly stash somewhere. The interesting question is why, if she loved her husband and her children, did she have to pretend to? Why, if she was genuinely attracted to the man, was she moved to contrive loud, giggling recitations of amour with the bedroom door carefully cracked open so we could hear?

  This may be why I get nostalgic for the days Mordecai issued his declarations of independence in our foyer while I secured my balcony view. The word ‘fuck’ was a primitive trigger for my mother’s visceral acrimony, and it was only when she was lashing I could trust her: this was at least Real Mother. Frightening as she

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  may have been while screeching at her eldest below me that his girlfriend was a slut, I cannot exaggerate my relief at hearing her voice both lowered and hitting harmonic squeals like an actual person trying to express an emotion she was undergoing right then.

  As I posited to Truman, Eugenia McCrea was not a contented woman and she never knew it. Father may have been happily married (though obliviously—like a verdict he was not planning to appeal, the merger was simply decided) and Mother told herself she was. She never got around to the genuine article in the exhaustion of manufacturing a plausible mock-up. She was like a woman who lets her yard roses wither because she’s always indoors watering the plastic ones.

  In some ways a wholesomeness entered Heck-Andrews when my father died, a death whose survival had been my mother’s greatest fear: at long last she had permission to be miserable. If anything, the trouble became that she wasn’t as ecstatically miserable as she’d have liked.

  North Carolinian weather remained mercifully clement and the Russell Stover’s Dark Selection insidiously seductive, and how relaxing it must have been to stop hamming it up.

  Again, I don’t mean my mother didn’t love my father, but she was afraid she didn’t—afraid to brave that one terrible moment when she had to entertain the notion that she did not. Then she’d have had to be truly bored with him when he went on about a case she didn’t care about, truly irritated when he glued the coffee cup handles with epoxy glopping down the sides—it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, having real emotions. I know that with the most dazzling men there have been times I’ve been terribly bored and I am sure they’ve been equally bored with me. Then much of life is indeed boring and that’s nobody’s fault.

  The most positive thing I ever heard Truman say about his own marriage is that up in the dovecot he and Averil didn’t always have anything to say to each other, but he refused to fabricate Topics simply to convince himself they were so suited to one another that they never ran out of conversation. Myself, I’d been in the very arms of a beloved and felt absolutely nothing, when the only choice was whether to admit I felt nothing or to lie. The hardest thing about loving someone is those moments when you’re not. And there are inevitably such moments; the amount of trust required to get past them is

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  stupendous. My mother didn’t have it. For all her dogged Presbyterianism, her confidence in the durability of produce, my mother was a woman of quite tenuous faith.

  Take family vacations. We were obliged to Have Fun. So we’d be wheeling through the Blue Ridge Mountains and my father would veer into an overlook for more exciting slides of rust-coloured bumps. My mother would exclaim breathily, ‘Sturges! It’s so—exquisite!’ and immediately indicate that the vista of turning leaves was completely lost on her and that she probably needed to pee. A little later, she would chirp,

  ‘Aren’t we having a wonderful time!’ and that was the point we knew she was nervous we were having a rotten time, as—after enough cooing about what a wonderful time we were having—would certainly be the case. She would fill the remainder of our holiday remarking on how we would look back on this time as so ‘special’ when what she was condemning us to remember was her saying over and over how we’d look back on this time as so ‘special’. A vacation’s one shameful redemption was our mean imitations of Mother behind her back.

  Part of this removal in my family was relentless interpretation—no fact got left alone just to be itself—so that my mother’s death by heart attack is left to me to find potent. Surrounded by photographs of my father—she would have liked that, she might have designed it, perhaps she did. But she wouldn’t like my reconstruction one bit.

  I see her sifting though the snapshots, as she’d done many times before. She gazed at my father’s lopsided mug for the camera, and she felt—stricken, her heart attacked by his absence? No. My version? She felt nothing. One of those times. Nicht, nada, zip. Her mind wandered to lunch—yellow squash—though it was only ten. Here she was, smoothing photographs of her dead husband and she was thinking about squash—it must have killed her. My theory? It did kill her. She made herself cry. I know the sound: sobs forced from her lungs as if trying to dislodge a piece of popcorn—bad acting. Though no one else was in the room, most of her performances were for her own benefit.

  And the harder she pushed those sobs, the more she knew that she was faking. Whether she died from the exertions of fraud or the acknowledgement of fraud I couldn’t say, but my mother did not die in a state of grace. Maybe there is no more grotesque a betrayal of yourself 116

  —or of your husband: to parody your own passion. Up to the end she preferred the safety of pure if concocted grief to real loss mixing sordidly with squash.

  On my mother’s wedding day, the one thing she wanted above all was to spend the rest of her life married to my father. Barring two years, that’s what she got. And she muffed it. She was so scared to permit the possibility for an instant that the romance wouldn’t last that she put it in the freezer, and I tried to tell her long ago that even the omnipotent freezer doesn’t keep things forever but gradually turns its charges tasteless, dry, and grey until preservation itself becomes a drawn-out crucifixion instead. Yet between the fickle if blood-warm treacheries of the perishable and the deceitful sureties of Freon she chose to put her heart on ice. And I am truly sorry. I imagine those two might, had they trusted their own ardour, made a reasonable pair.

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  9

  I sighed. ‘So are we doing the whole turkey number?’

  We were in the sitting room, where I was depilating my legs in front of the fire. I’d donned a skirt for the occasion, which I tucked between my thighs as I nibbled the Epilady over my raised knee. Its sleek body purred, while at its mouth a loop of gyrating spring munched hairs.

  ‘We’ve got to have a turkey!’ cried Averil, who was signing Christmas cards. Her handwriting was rounded and neat; her tastes in Hallmark ran to snowmen.

  ‘If we roast a turkey,’ I said grimly, ‘we’ll end up with thousands of fibrous packages in the freezer. That’s hardly festive.’

  ‘With mashed potatoes and peas,’ Averil determined, and I found myself wondering if she dotted her i s with hearts. ‘Pearl onions, gravy and pumpkin pie.’


  I switched off the epilator, incredulous. ‘You are not seriously proposing we make pies?’

  The fact was, we were in a bit of a pickle. We weren’t Christians, pointedly not, but we didn’t have the courage of our lack of conviction.

  We couldn’t quite turn the twenty-fifth into Friday. The fraud of which I accused my mother seemed only to compound; it was our legacy. At least she believed in God.

  ‘Just because we make one pie doesn’t mean we’re all out of control and everything,’ Averil muttered.

  ‘We could have rice and chicken thighs,’ Truman threatened from his armchair. He’d been reading Hegel, but I noticed he kept having to turn back to the last page he’d read and scan it again. ‘Like always.’

  ‘OK, OK,’ I backed down, turning the epilator back on. ‘I’ll make the pie.’

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  Truman resettled his wire-rims on his nose; they gave him a puritan-ical air. I extended my right leg so the shin muscles rippled. He rearranged himself in his chair, and I couldn’t tell if he was trying to improve his view of my calves or block them from his vision altogether.

  ‘What are we going to get Mortadello?’ Averil supposed. As kids, we’d approximated Mordecai Delano to luncheon meat. Grey-pink slabs with squares of white fat had sufficiently evoked his pasty complexion and little rim of belly flab to make the monicker usefully offens-ive; ever since Averil had latched on to it, I’d abandoned the nickname myself.