A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, I think to distract them from his beloved dovecot, by which they seemed altogether too charmed, ‘one day no one had seen her for a while, and a neighbour called the cops. The police had to break in, and they could hardly move, the place was so cram-full of bags. When they cleared a tunnel to the second floor they found Gladys in bed with frostbite. She’d been too stingy to turn on the heat—’

  ‘Mother didn’t keep the thermostat much higher,’ I intruded. I’d always had Gladys Perry in the back of my mind as an image of my mother ageing without Truman to take care of her, getting scattier and cheaper and storing international bric-a-brac in big black bags.

  ‘The state stuck Gladys in a nursing home, and finally she agreed to sell to my father. I was only two at the time, but he says clearing out those bags was a horror show. The whole place was knee-deep in talcum powder. He never forgave this house for that operation. The smell took ages to dissipate,’ he stressed, maybe suggesting that the master bedroom would reek of aquavit and Three Castles for a long time to come.

  ‘We’d have to cut some skylights,’ Magnolia reflected.

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Truman. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that. The architecture—’

  ‘At least four, I think. The way you’ve done this up is quaint, isn’t it?

  But I think we’d knock out these two walls. And the paper is terribly old-fashioned.’

  Truman looked mournfully at the hunting scene whose panels he had painstakingly lined up so the hounds had tails.

  Back downstairs, Magnolia conferred with her husband, but didn’t seem to mind if we could hear. ‘It would have to be gutted and re-vamped from the ground up. But the shell has possibili-186

  ties, George. Nairobi would just adore that little tower deck.’

  Truman watched them climb into their Mercedes and whispered,

  ‘House hunters from hell.’

  None of the other parties were black, so we didn’t have to be nice to them. The novelty of these tourists wore off, and Truman developed a cursory patter, with no more discursions about Colonel Heck and the Carpetbagger. Instead he hurried them through our lives so they had to jog to keep up, barking, ‘Parlour, right? Dining room, right? Kitchen, right?’ until by the end they were panting.

  Yet the Johnsons would not display the only gross insensitivity to our thirty years with this structure, about which we might be expected to harbour some sentiment. House-hunting is an imaginative exercise, and solely about the future; other viewers as well seemed to take a sadistic pleasure in their potential to plaster over our past. Chrome-and-glass furniture imposed alternative groupings in their eyes; I could see my parents’ Indonesian batiks vanish from the walls, slap-dash abstracts popping up over the fireplace. I’d never before considered the fickle nature of property. Heck-Andrews had seemed to cling to us, but no, she would desert for a price and remember us little beyond however much we scarred her. Maybe Mordecai had the ticket after all—by gouging his hand truck down her mahogany panelling, he’d made a more permanent impression than all of Truman’s TLC. If the metaphor were extended to people, the precedent was gruesome.

  That night, I convened with Truman and Averil in the dovecot, and the atmosphere was like a wake. Truman rose to readjust the frames of Appleget, Heck and Andrews as if to reassert himself, treasuring the fact that Magnolia could not yet rip down his hunting scenes and knock out the back wall.

  ‘Too bad Father didn’t live to see this,’ said Truman. ‘Real Negroes wanting to buy his house! He’d have paid them.’

  ‘Don’t worry—one way or another,’ I promised, ‘we’ll keep Heck-Andrews in this family.’

  ‘A public auction is unnecessary and all Mordecai’s fault.’

  ‘At least the auction,’ said Averil, ‘sets a date by which Mordecai has to move out.’

  ‘Maybe we’re going about this all wrong,’ I suggested.

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  ‘Together you, me and Mordecai own three-quarters of this house; why not share it between us? We’re all living here now, aren’t we?’

  ‘You have got to be joking,’ said Truman. ‘This Three Bears routine is impossible.’

  ‘It’s obviously possible, Truman—we grew up together, in case you’ve forgotten. And history is full of awkward divisions of territory that last uncannily. Look at Ireland: a “temporary” partition put together in 1921

  until they sorted out something more intelligent. No one ever got around to it. They got used to the arrangement instead. I know we’ve looked at these three weeks as temporary, but all over the world, the temporary becomes the permanent.’

  Averil gripped the couch, her knuckles white. ‘Permanent!’

  ‘Yeah, well in Ireland they’re still fighting about it,’ Truman snarled.

  ‘I never said they didn’t fight about it. That’s one of the things you get used to.’

  ‘Do you like having all of us here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘But what if splitting the house three ways were the only way for you to keep it at all?’

  ‘How could that be? You and I will take out a mortgage and buy—’

  ‘No, what if I refuse to buy the house with you unless Mordecai is in on the deal? What if I said I won’t kick my older brother out of his own house?’

  It was to Truman’s advantage that my kicking brothers out of houses did not come easily.

  ‘I’d say you were out of your tree. Besides, Mordecai said he wanted his money. Are you telling me that now he wants to stay?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I hedged, ‘but he seems to like it here. Don’t you ever stop to think that our handing him a cheque and buying him out of the only family he has left might injure him? Just a little?’

  Truman looked at me as if I had just objected that before scouring the sink with Ajax we should stop to consider the feelings of a stain.

  ‘This is just a game to him, how much bother he can subject us to, and how completely he can take over. So far? The sitting room, Father’s office, my workshop, the spare bedrooms; half your studio—he thinks he’s playing Monopoly. Any day now I expect him to scrap Heck-Andrews and put up a hotel.’

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  ‘Mordecai was a pretty sore loser at board games.’

  ‘He can’t throw the pieces all over the room if he isn’t in the room.

  We’ll bid as high as we have to, and have him evicted. Bring in the cops, if need be.’

  ‘On your own brother?’

  ‘That’s what cops are for, your own brother. As for the happy threesome idea, Corlis, no deal.’

  ‘You’re not in a position to deliver me ultimatums, Truman. Controlling interest you don’t have.’

  ‘Neither do you.’

  Controlling interest was exactly what I had.

  When I tripped downstairs, any giddy burn I might have felt from flexing my muscles in the dovecot was short-lived. The last thing I ever felt around Mordecai was powerful.

  ‘Yo, Core,’ he ordered. ‘Fix me some java, will ya? Make it strong this time. That last pot was like camomile tea. Oh, and I almost forgot—we’ve got an appointment with some mortgage banker. Monday afternoon, at three. You’ll have to wake me up. Bring a hammer.’

  ‘Mordecai, I’ve been thinking, we’ve got to have a talk about all this—’

  ‘Save it. Monday, we’ll do dinner—Karen’s, on me. Now, hurry up with that coffee, girl. Get a move on.’

  My margin had narrowed from thin to microscopic. Rather than panic at the prospect of taking out mortgages with two different brothers on the same house, I was actually grateful that the bank appointments were on successive days and not on the same afternoon.

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  14

  I had always got a child-like buzz out of riding in Mordecai’s army truck, so high above the cars, intimidating traffic with that military roar.

  Commonly surly in what was to him early morning, Mordecai was forcing himself to be matey on my account. Monday was Be Nice to Corlis Day,
as Tuesday would be for Truman, yet Mordecai’s warmth had a cheap feel to it. I had fleeting sympathy for the rich or influential, having to suffer the synthetic, ulterior kindness of people who want something from you. On the other hand, it works. No matter how often I reminded myself that Mordecai merely needed me for the sake of this mortgage, when he effused that in portfolio photos my sculpture looked

  ‘dynamite’ I peered regally out the window and twirled my hair into an impromptu bouffant. If Mordecai ever regarded me as having a life outside full-time sisterhood I was overcome.

  Though Mordecai had worn his slightly less filthy black jeans for the occasion, he’d donned the hard-hat as well, as if in all encounters with authority he expected the powers-that-be to bash him on the head.

  Peacenik that he had once been, Mordecai approached the least rendez-vous as battle.

  He pulled into the Wachovia on Hillsborough, a tiny red-brick Tudor branch that had a doll’s house aspect even when we were children. The green-tinted drive-in window had been replaced with an automated teller, but otherwise this was the same bank where all three of us had started our first savings accounts with the vast five dollars we were each given on our tenth birthdays; the gifts were earmarked for Wachovia and not to be squandered on Raisinettes. The ploy succeeded with Truman and me—I have a packrat side; Truman did what he was told. However, the idea of getting Mordecai to start a savings account made me choke. The first thing he did with his passbook was pull the five dollars out.

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  Mordecai lifted me from my seat by the waist and swirled me to the pavement with a flourish of chivalry; maybe having sway in important matters was not overrated. He clumped ahead and held the door. I’d worn a skirt, a rather short one; as I passed, Mordecai whistled softly and said I had mighty fine legs. Ordinarily I found anything related to finance an ordeal, but I was starting to enjoy this.

  A gangly man who introduced himself as Claude Richards shook hands and led us back to his office. He was one of those scrawny men who’d had a few too many chicken-fried steak specials, but the weight he’d put on had consolidated in a discrete bump above his belt and hadn’t spread an ounce to his thin, indefinite face and underdeveloped limbs. He looked like a boy acting an older part in a school play with the aid of a throw pillow. I noticed a wedding band. Envisioning the woman who had singled out this nondescript from all other men and their ensuing ardour stretched my imagination beyond its capacity.

  ‘Have a seat. You probably don’t remember me, Mordecai, but we were in the same class at Leroy Martin.’

  ‘Sure I do!’ Mordecai geezed. ‘Clyde Richards, what do you know.

  Trig, right?’

  ‘No. Social Studies, with Mrs—’

  ‘Townsend!’

  ‘No, that was the fast-track class,’ he said, with a trace of acid. ‘Seventh grade, before they put the whiz-kids in one group. Mrs Gordon.

  She hated you.’

  ‘That’s because she couldn’t make head or tail of my papers,’ said my brother, putting his feet up on Claude’s desk. ‘She circled all the ten-dollar words and wrote I was using vocabulary “beyond my years”

  that I didn’t understand. So I looked them all up in Webster’s and wrote out the definitions. Took the essay to Mr Hawkins, and he made her change the grade from a C to an A. That put a chip on her shoulder the size of a pine tree.’

  ‘Can you blame her? I remember that story—you told everyone, and made her look like a dolt to all her students.’

  Mordecai was unmoved. ‘She was a dolt. A dolt adult—hah-hah.’

  I was rolling my interior eyes. If Mordecai wanted to ruin his chances of getting a mortgage by boasting over seventh-grade conquests, fair enough, that would simplify my life enormously.

  191

  ‘I don’t remember seeing you at Broughton, though,’ Claude noted.

  ‘Did you go to Sanderson?’

  Mordecai grinned. ‘I took early retirement from the public school system. Wasn’t sixteen yet, so had some shrink verify that I was nuts.

  Sent that poor meathead to the dictionary a few times, too. Personally helped him fill out the diagnosis: delusions of grandeur, narcissistic personality disorder, with a little paranoia thrown in for salt. It was a scream. Sort of sad when our sessions ended—I was working up my psycho deferment for the draft.’

  I kissed our mortgage goodbye.

  But Claude seemed intrigued to have snagged this specimen from the past in the middle of another drab banking day; he handled Mordecai with care, like an antique. ‘You were the one printed that underground newspaper, weren’t you? The Butt End. Signed, The ‘Shroom.’

  Mordecai raised his hands. ‘You found me out, bro. So did Jesse Helms.’

  An overweight, tiny-eyed J. Edgar, Helms had gone straight to the Senate from being the regular Channel 5 commentator for WRAL.

  Though we McCreas had our differences, Jesse Helms had long been the family scourge, on whom even Truman’s antipathy would converge.

  Mordecai had savalged a mimeo machine from Leroy Martin’s dumpster, tinkered it into working order in his basement, and used the school’s own purple drum to roll out The Butt End: a hodgepodge of teacher-baiting, editorials on dress codes, erotic cartoons and the usual anti-war, workers-unite rant that Helms singled out in one of his TV

  editorials as pinko propaganda. How a grown-up television commentator came into possession of Mordecai’s stapled lavender handouts, or how the man could spend five minutes of the public’s time on a junior high school newspaper and still go on to assume the chairmanship of the Senate foreign relations committee, I’ll never know; all I do know is that that broadcast was the highlight of Mordecai’s life.

  ‘He accused me of “fostering the festering red corpuscles of commun-ism in the blood of the Southern young”. From the nattering-nabobs-of-negativism school, but I never thought Helms had Agnew’s flair.

  Never could figure how a clown with a room-temperature IQ got elected to the Senate even in North Carolina.’

  ‘I voted for him,’ said Claude.

  192

  Mordecai shrugged. ‘Guess that’s the way it happened then. Son of a bitch must be desolate without the Cold War. Thank God for school prayer.’

  ‘Well, all those beads and bangles seem a long time ago now,’ Claude submitted equably.

  ‘No,’ said Mordecai. ‘They don’t.’

  Mordecai was right. It didn’t seem long ago at all. If we had grown up in a country that was divided, it was still divided. However shifting or elusive the line between two tribes in this culture, Mordecai and Claude lived on either side of it. I hadn’t a clue how we were going to get money out of the geek at this rate.

  ‘Maybe it seems like yesterday to you—’ Claude eyed Mordecai’s pigtails. ‘But you have to admit that at a distance all that peace and love, drugs and group sex seem pretty silly.’

  Mordecai tilted his head at Claude’s fuzzy short red hair and tortoiseshell spectacles. ‘You don’t look like you got in on much of that group sex.’

  Claude laughed, and for the first time I liked him. ‘Even if I did, you’d better not tell my wife. Now, let’s get down to business.’

  As he loaded our file on-screen, Claude was easy to picture as a teenager. In film and fiction, his era was portrayed as wall-to-wall radicals, but in truth Nixon’s ‘silent majority’ had persisted in force—most of the girls wore saddle shoes and shaved their underarms and dabbed nail polish remover on nylon ladders; most boys never came to school without a belt and wore noxious deodorant. North Carolina’s hell-no-we-won’t-go brigade formed a tiny, persecuted, if sanctimonious corner in otherwise straight-laced, docile student bodies, of which Claude would have been an inconspicuous member. He made B-minuses. He believed smoking marijuana led to heroine addiction; at pep rallies, he knew all the words to the school song and nudged recalcitrants next to him who refused to stand for the national anthem.

  No one sent him valentines. Reminiscence
about the Sixties with Claude was almost wicked; retrospective versions of his generation left him out altogether, and he was left out enough at the time.

  ‘There’s one thing that bothers me here, Mordecai,’ said Claude. ‘Your books and your tax filings don’t square.’

  ‘Of course they don’t,’ said Mordecai. ‘I’m an American.’ My brother had come to patriotism late in life.

  ‘Which am I to believe?’

  193

  ‘I’m a businessman. You figure it out.’

  ‘That does leave us with a rather unorthodox—’

  ‘You’re going to tell me,’ said Mordecai, lighting a roll-up under the no-smoking sign, ‘this is the first time you’ve come across discrepancies of this kind?’

  Claude smiled. ‘Hardly. If these books are correct, you’ve got quite a net turnover. Pretty impressive.’

  ‘Damn straight,’ Mordecai puffed. ‘Fuck the peace armband shit, Clyde, I’m a company man now. A productive member of society.

  Which is more than I can say,’ he added, ‘for my brother.’

  ‘Who is also a co-owner of this house, I see?’

  ‘For now,’ said Mordecai coolly. ‘He plans to move out.’

  ‘Mordecai, I—’

  ‘He just doesn’t know it yet,’ Mordecai cut me off.

  ‘So the house is up for auction in—’

  ‘Just over two weeks. Chance we can get it for less than the appraisal, if the public competition’s not too stiff.’ Mordecai cocked his hard-hat, no longer The ‘Shroom, but a hard-nosed good-old-boy capitalist—which is, underneath those pigtails, what he was.

  ‘And your inventory is worth—’

  ‘Two hundred grand. At least. But I’d like to expand. Use Blount Street for my offices, and you’ve a picture of the house there, it’s presentable. Good location, right downtown. Plenty of those Reconstruction shells converted to commercial premises already; zoning’s no problem. There’s some machinery I’d like to invest in, which is why I’m asking for such a sizeable mortgage.’