A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  So I let Truman fume and said nothing of the sort. And Mordecai was right, I’d have put off opening my mouth to this effect for months, for years, forever. Often as I might have railed that I was born in the middle and it wasn’t fair, much as I might

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  have resented both my brothers for forcing me before I was old enough to understand the choice to pick one of them over the other, the middle was where I was stuck, again. I could not have both pie and ice cream, but instinctively I would take my pie and sneak the ice cream. I had always been like that. I was still like that.

  My inclination with law was to duck it, though this evasion did not consistently translate into a life of crime. I preferred bicycles and scooters over cars, since the cops overlooked lesser transport, whereas an auto, with its attendant registration, insurance and driver’s licence, entangled its owner in jurisprudence. Yet once on a bicycle, I stopped for lights and gave way at zebra crossings. Being an ex-pat had appealed because, while technically subject to British laws, they were not my laws; especially with no National Insurance number I felt out of their reach, a sensation on which I placed high value even with no plans to break them. For several years I paid the IRS more than I needed, having instructed my accountant that at any cost he must fictionalize a filing that wouldn’t be scrutinized. My sole ambition with law was to slip out from under it. Hence I would never, myself, have filed a partition suit, thereby flying into the very web I went out of my way to avoid.

  However, on 24 December Mordecai’s nonchalant slump in the courtroom displayed the plumped lying-in-wait, not of the fly, but of the spider. He had arrived before us with uncharacteristic punctuality.

  Lolling on his bench with arms extended on either side, ignoring the armed bailiff when the man tapped his head to warn my brother to remove his hard-hat, Mordecai clearly saw the law as a weapon to wield or to defy, either of which he would do with zeal and in plain view.

  Mordecai regarded a courtroom as part of his inheritance and therefore as one more thing he might help himself to, like a celadon vase. Or this is the only way I could explain how a hippie anachronism in pigtails who was probably packing at least an ounce of dope at the time could slouch amidst all those uniforms in so relaxed and proprietary a fashion.

  When I trailed into the court after Truman and Averil, Mordecai waved me over to the seat beside him. Refusing toso much as nod, Truman selected a pew two rows behind Mordecai, so I assumed the empty one between them. That my inability to sit in public incontrovert-ibly by either left me sitting by myself I might have taken as cautionary.

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  The case was before a single judge. Our verdict’s dependence on the caprices of one man was all too evocative of my family, and it discouraged me when the larger world was as arbitrary as the small—there was no resort. Judge Harville had an immobile, deadpan face with stiff grey hair that moved like a solid object when he looked down at his files. His languid, congenitally bored manner conveyed that after thousands of picayune disputes paraded before his bench nothing fazed him any more. He kept his voice a level plainsong, except at the end of sentences where they pitched, like Truman’s, in a minor key. Yet while my brother’s voice fell a half step, keening a tune of tragedy and defeat, Harville’s rose a half, lifting with a satiric little jest. From a distance at least, I got the impression Harville saw his job preponderantly as farce.

  ‘Docket number 92-P648,’ announced the clerk. ‘McCrea vs. McCrea.’

  Truman and I made way in the aisle for the blue-maned, blue-faced biddy who had failed to prove her hairdresser’s negligence in placing a standing ashtray in the path between the dryers and the ladies’ loo; when Truman tripped on her outstretched crutch she was elaborately huffy. We sat up at the left side of the court, where we were joined by a striking young man whose dark, drastic features suggested Sephardic parentage, though his surname, murmured hurriedly as he sat beside us, was Anglo enough: Grover. Truman sniffed, and worked his chair another few inches from the larcenous do-gooder. When I whispered that David Grover was pretty sexy, Truman’s face curdled as if I had just confessed to a crush on Radovan Karadzic.

  Mordecai swung behind the table on the right. My older brother was in his usual caked black jeans and lace-up boots, with bits of plaster clotting his eyebrows. He was joined by a lawyer whose attire was proper only in the most technical sense. The attorney’s tie was wrenched aside; his suit jacket arms were shoved up his wrists, while his white shirt showed a tad of tail. Since they couldn’t make a rule against it, he seemed to have bad skin on purpose. The lawyer lounged in his chair, savvy and familiar. As he chuckled with Mordecai, I wondered if he’d taken the case on contingency or just for laughs.

  It was Truman’s idea that we needn’t hire counsel, though we had rung Hugh, who said he was too closely connected to the case 137

  and begged off. Truman figured that since we were in the right we might as well speak for ourselves. I suspected our error, but kept my misgivings to myself. In retrospect, I’d advise prospective defendants that sanctimony makes for weak representation at best.

  ‘Mr McCrea,’ Judge Harville began, addressing Mordecai. ‘Remove your hat, please.’

  ‘Sure thing, your honour,’ he underscored, with the same knife-twist he’d used when deploying the address with my father. Mordecai’s release of the chinstrap was leisurely.

  ‘And there is no smoking in this courtroom.’

  ‘Righty ho,’ said Mordecai, tucking his Bambus back in his leather vest pocket and adding convivially, ‘hard times for us retrogrades.’

  ‘This is a courtroom, not a pool hall. Mr Shipley?’ Harville sounded so fatigued I thought he might collapse. ‘Exit the chewing gum.’

  Mordecai’s lawyer snapped a tiny bubble before picking the wad from between his teeth and jamming it under the table.

  ‘Mr McCrea, can you explain to me why you have brought this matter to our court? Could you not resolve what to do with 309 Blount Street between you and your siblings?’

  Mordecai lunged to the podium in front of his table, flipping a pigtail as he rose. He gripped the lectern and weighed on his elbows, tipping the podium on to its forward edge. ‘My brother refuses to put the house up for sale, which ties up over $100,000 of my money. I run my own company, and am currently under financial duress. Meanwhile he claims he lives there, and won’t move out.’

  ‘Can your brother not compensate you for your share in the equity, then?’

  ‘He doesn’t have the cash,’ said Mordecai bluntly.

  ‘We do too,’ Truman whispered fiercely beside me.

  ‘You are Mr Truman McCrea, sir?’

  ‘Uh, yes, yes I am—your honour.’

  ‘Step up to the podium please?’

  Truman stumbled to the lectern. While on the opposite side Mordecai had assumed the planted, squinty-eyed try-and-make-me stance from which he had refused to turn down the volume of Three Dog Night, Truman shoved his hands in his suit pockets and drew his shoulders together just as he would have hunched

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  in our kitchen doorway delaying the inevitable relinquishment of his duplicate key.

  ‘Do you have the financial resources to retain this property by yourself?’

  ‘No, but—’ Truman looked back at me. ‘With my sister—’

  ‘Do the two of you have those resources?’

  ‘No,’ I intervened from the table. ‘I’m afraid we don’t.’

  ‘This is cut and dried then—’

  ‘Your honour!’ Truman pleaded. ‘We were going to take out a mortgage. Sir.’

  ‘You have arranged a mortgage?’

  ‘How could we? He filed this suit the day the will was out of probate!

  The fact is, we made him an offer, and he turned it down!’

  ‘If it may please the court,’ intruded Shipley wryly, though neither he nor his client had gone out of their way so far to please anyone, ‘The offer so made was spurious, sir, the money was not at hand. For
the record, the junior Mr McCrea is an undergraduate at Duke University, with no income aside from a recent inheritance too slight to purchase my client’s share of the property. His wife is a part-time substitute teacher in the Raleigh public school system, with an income, if my research serves me, of $10,000 a year. I would submit that no banker in his right mind would give such an individual a mortgage of fifty cents.’

  ‘They would, too, with a half-million dollar house as security—!’

  Truman’s voice was cracking.

  ‘Which raises another of our contentions,’ Shipley proceeded. ‘The property’s assessor has shared with my client that he substantially un-dervalued the real estate, by perhaps as much as $100,000. We have that in writing, sir.’ He passed a paper to the judge, who refused it with a laboured wave of the hand.

  ‘This court cannot weigh the credit-worthiness of prospective mortgage applicants. We are not a savings and loan. To bar partition, I need written proof that the respondent can buy out the petitioner.

  Mr—Grover…’ Harville shuffled paper with weary confusion. ‘You are representing—the American Civil Liberties Union? I fail to see whose first amendment rights have been trampled here.’

  ‘ Mine,’ grumbled Truman.

  ‘If I may explain, your honour,’ said Grover easily. ‘The property 139

  was willed in equal parts to the three heirs and the ACLU; my organization is tenant in common of 309 Blount Street.’

  ‘Who would write a will like that?’ Harville supposed.

  ‘Justice Sturges McCrea, sir.’

  ‘Typical,’ grunted the judge, and added without looking up, ‘Seems to me you nosy parkers stir up enough trouble without being encouraged.’

  ‘I beg your honour’s pardon, what was that?’ enquired Grover. ‘For the record?’

  ‘Never you mind, Mr Grover.’ Harville whinnied, resuming his dreary professionalism. ‘And how is the ACLU disposed in this dispute?’

  ‘It is naturally in our interests that the property be liquidated. The ACLU has no resistance to this suit; in fact, we are eager to disentangle a charitable bequest from domestic politics that are none of our affair.’

  Looking stranded at the podium—no one had told him to sit down—Truman smote David Grover with an evil eye. ‘Why don’t you sit over there?’ he muttered, nodding towards Mordecai. Grover had no choice but to sit on our side of the court, but having him in our dugout was like hunkering down with a teammate whose uniform was the wrong colour.

  ‘Ms McCrea.’ Harville turned to me. ‘What are your wishes in this matter?’

  My heartbeat doubled. ‘I’m neutral, your honour.’

  ‘Would you not prefer to reap the proceeds of a sale?’

  ‘I guess I’d like to see the house stay in the family, sir.’

  ‘So you’re not neutral.’

  ‘I guess not, sir.’

  ‘But you do not have the funds to purchase the house, even with your brother?’

  I was grateful he didn’t say with which brother. ‘Not quite, sir.’

  Harville shook his head in disgust, obviously ready to knock off for Christmas Eve with his own dysfunctional family.

  ‘309 Blount Street,’ he intoned, ‘is to be publicly advertised for auction, proceeds to be divided equally among the four parties. Bids to be due February 5, 1993—that gives you six weeks. Should any one party or combination of parties raise the funds in that time, you are within your rights to participate in the auction yourselves. I might add, Mr Shipley, that a materially identical course

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  of action was available without judicial assistance, and there was no excuse for wasting the state of North Carolina’s time with this case.’

  The gavel fell. We were excused.

  I mumbled to Mordecai as we left the building, ‘I guess you’re not still coming for Christmas Eve dinner, right?’

  ‘Wouldn’t miss it for the world!’ He slammed me on the shoulder to lumber off with his sleazoid lawyer, leaving me slack-jawed.

  I shouldn’t have been incredulous. While I was an avid voyeur—having acquired a taste for watching spit fly by eavesdropping on argy bargy from our landing—I preferred an eye on the storm to the eye of it. Like it or not, I resembled my mother in more than countenance; unless pushed to the wall she, too, would smooth over family cracks with pastry. Outside discrete bouts of hysteria, my mother did not believe in conflict, that there was such a thing. All enmity was misunderstanding; improve communication and everyone eats pie. I did believe in conflict enough to avoid it. Mordecai, by contrast, adored nothing better than a pretext to hurl crockery. I’ve wondered if our difference wasn’t so much appetite for battle, one of us peace-loving, the other a warrior, for I became paralytically bored when stuck among softies who all ploddingly got along. Perhaps what differentiated our eagerness to enter the ring was the degree to which we were convinced we could win. If Mordecai stirred things up because he was sure to do more damage than have damage done, I envied him.

  So, doomed to Momism, Christmas Eve I found myself in the kitchen peeling spuds for potato salad, all of us about to kill each other while I debated mayonnaise versus sour cream.

  Truman was slicing Smithfield ham into the translucent slices tradition demanded. His brow was boiling, his lips were compressed. His wide forearm was flecked with the same once-blonde curls of my own hair, glinting with bygone gold. Often I barely recognized this meaty grown man as the fragile four-year-old who had stacked wood-blocks in our carriage house only for me to knock them down. Other times I recognized him more profoundly than any other child in the family. Despite the long string of failed Christmas Eves in this house, he would sliver yet another mound of exactingly thin Virginia ham in the naïve expectation that this time would be different, just as he had erected yet another 141

  playroom folly convinced, like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, that for once I would leave it standing.

  With blocks or Lego, Truman hadn’t constructed phallic towers, but wombish houses, like a girl. There was, if I looked closely, a touch of the feminine about him still, maybe what all that weightlifting in his eyrie was meant to disguise. Truman’s improbable guilelessness, at thirty-one, tempted me to knock it down. Fleetingly, I relished telling him that the future of Heck-Andrews had a Plan B.

  Averil was stuffing holly-cornered napkins into rings carved with Santa’s elves. She was wearing red and green. The kitchen was a disaster, and for what? I wondered how we’d bought into this myth of occasion, my mother’s ‘special times’. All this hustle-bustle, only to wrap the leftovers in cling-film, waiting to spoil so we could put them in the freezer.

  ‘I thought you hated potato salad,’ I mentioned at the sink.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Then why are we having it?’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘…Do you like Smithfield ham?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s all right.’

  ‘Then why are we bothering?’

  ‘Search me.’ He’d decimated a third of the ham. He seemed to enjoy cutting too much.

  ‘Don’t you think that’s enough?’

  ‘Fine.’ He glared with a tight grisly smile, the knife raised point up.

  ‘I guess we should have arranged some financing before showing up at that hearing.’ My eyes met only those of the potatoes; my peeling was meticulous.

  ‘I guess we should have.’

  ‘You’re the one who didn’t want to hire a lawyer. I assume that’s the first thing he’d have advised us, OK?’

  ‘Too late now,’ Truman clipped. ‘Hindsight’s about as useful as looking up your ass.’

  I eased the cork from a cabernet.

  Truman looked askance. ‘At six o’clock?’

  ‘It’s Christmas Eve!’

  ‘There’s always some excuse.’

  ‘For a drink? In this house? You bet.’

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  ‘You’re drinking more than you used to, Corlis.’

 
; ‘We both are, we didn’t used to drink.’ Which staggered me. I’d no idea how I managed my whole childhood without a bracer. ‘What’s biting your bum?’

  ‘Besides the fact that my brother just made me look like a complete twit in public? Maybe I’m reminiscing.’ I was relieved, though we’d more than enough sliced, when he applied the knife back to the ham.

  ‘About last year.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. You said that at the time. You were sorry.’

  By and large, I was prone to the indolent emotions. I’d drop by if I was in the neighbourhood; I’d buy friends a little something, but only if there was a shop on the way. I was comfortably regretful when it was too late to remedy an oversight. I did whatever I wanted on the assumption that I could patch things up after. I was cavalier; I was sorry.

  ‘Troom, how was I to know Mother would have a heart attack? She wasn’t very old. Right, people can always die on you but you can’t twiddle your whole life in the sitting room waiting for some member of the family to expire.’ Well, of course you could; one of us had.

  ‘Uh-huh. But you’re home for Christmas this year. Now that she’s dead.’

  He hadn’t let go of the knife. I whittled too many potatoes, reflecting that my little brother had all the makings of a serial killer.

  ‘Maybe better late than…’

  ‘No,’ he insisted. ‘Maybe not better late.’

  ‘I couldn’t afford—’

  ‘Mother said that she offered to pay for your ticket. And you said no.’

  ‘I finance my own—’

  ‘You’re not too proud to take it now, though. Inheritance may be

  “evil”, but you’ll accept her money when it doesn’t mean you have to put up with her company for a day or two.’

  ‘I visited when I could.’

  ‘You’d be out every night of a five-day stay. You’d apologize, of course. Think she didn’t twig, Corlis?’