A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  ‘You can see we’ve applied for a mortgage of up to $100,000,’ Truman intruded into the silence. ‘I know that seems a lot, so maybe 210

  I should explain. My sister and I have $140,000 each in liquid assets from my parents. We’re willing to contribute most of that to buy the other half of our house, but would like to have a little left over, if that’s all right…To keep from being flat broke, you know, and be able to make the first payments and everything…’

  ‘Yes?’ said Claude, with a maddening absence of response.

  ‘If we get the house for the appraisal, of course, technically we only need $25,000, but there’s a chance other parties—’ Truman darted his eyes to my corner, ‘like those Japanese people, will be bidding against us, and we’d like your permission to go higher…’

  ‘You may well have competition for 309 Blount Street,’ said Claude, looking at me.

  ‘I’m sure $50,000 would be more than enough!’ Truman burst out.

  Claude held the paper before him by the very edge, as if it were smeared with something sticky. ‘I see here that aside from your inheritance you have little—or no income?’

  ‘I’m a student at Duke, with another year and a half before I get my BA. I know I’m kind of old for college, but I went through a long period of trying—’

  ‘To find yourself,’ Claude provided helpfully.

  Truman slumped. ‘You could call it that. Anyway, after I get my degree, I should be applying for academic jobs…’

  ‘And you’re studying—?’

  ‘Philosophy,’ said Truman morosely.

  ‘I see.’

  ‘My wife works. She’s a school teacher.’

  ‘And earns—?’

  ‘Subbing’s not full time, so about $10,000; good years more like twelve…’

  ‘I see. And Ms McCrea?’

  ‘She’s got a job in a framing shop in Crabtree Valley, but that’s temporary,’ said Truman hurriedly.

  ‘But I thought—?’ The banker raised his eyebrows, and stopped. ‘No matter.’

  ‘She’s sure to get something more remunerative soon,’ Truman went on. ‘Besides, she’s an artist. Her stuff is really good, you should see it, and some day she’s certain to be making scads—’

  ‘Once she’s discovered,’ said Claude drolely.

  ‘I realize it doesn’t seem like we have much money coming in, 211

  and I guess we don’t,’ said Truman. ‘But that will turn around, we’re sinking a lot of our own money into the house and not asking for all that much—are we?’

  Claude’s face remained stony, so Truman kept talking.

  ‘Heck-Andrews itself is an astonishing Reconstruction estate, a su-preme example of Second Empire architecture.’

  ‘It is a remarkable house.’ I thought I should be supportive. ‘You should stop by some time.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Claude. ‘I’m beginning to think that could be quite an experience.’

  ‘One of the first things I’d do once we got the title,’ Truman enthused,

  ‘would be to get the house listed as historic on the National Register.’

  ‘You’re aware that such listing actually lowers the value of a property?’ Claude leaned back, tapping his pencil eraser on our forms. ‘By legally restricting what can be done to the structure, you make the real estate unattractive to developers.’

  ‘Of course. That’s the idea.’

  ‘I’m telling you that your intentions make 309 Blount Street less attractive, thereby, to Wachovia as well.’

  Truman craned forward. ‘You wouldn’t want the house to get torn down, would you?’

  ‘My feelings on the matter are neither here nor there.’

  ‘People used to think these old houses were white elephants, but not any more! This state’s beginning to wake up to the value of its heritage.

  You know, strangers stare at our house? Knock on the door and want to walk around?’

  Back hiking Capital City Trail.

  ‘You’re aware we’re in a recession?’ asked Claude.

  ‘I read the papers.’

  ‘The market in North Carolina is depressed. Should you default on your payments—’

  ‘Then you own a half-million dollar house after having paid, what, fifty thousand for it. A steal.’

  ‘Such a holding is only of value to a bank if it is sold. As an historic property in a sluggish market, it could be difficult to unload.’

  ‘“Unload”! A house like that—?’

  ‘The point is, mortgages are only arranged when the bank does not anticipate foreclosure. We accept land holdings as loan 212

  security, but do not actually wish to enter the realty business. I can only approve this application if given sufficient evidence that you and your sister can make the payments according to schedule.’

  ‘We wouldn’t even need you if it weren’t for my father!’ Truman exploded. ‘Without his greasing the stupid ACLU we’d have plenty of cash and we wouldn’t be here!’

  Claude turned pages and indulged himself. ‘I see. Your brother…is co-owner of the property?’

  ‘A profiteer,’ Truman growled. ‘He just wants his money,’

  ‘Oh, does he?’

  ‘Mr Richards,’ I intervened. ‘I don’t mean to press you, but I suspect you’ve already made up your mind about this mortgage. Maybe you should cut to the chase.’

  ‘You’re quite right, Ms McCrea, I’m afraid my feelings are rather conclusive. Without a little more earning power demonstrated here, a loan of $100,000 is really out of the question.’

  ‘Say $50,000, then!’ cried Truman. ‘Or thirty! We might only need twenty-five!’

  ‘Mr McCrea, no bank parts with so much as a half-dollar that it doesn’t expect to get back.’

  ‘Twenty-five grand for a $410,000 house? And you won’t take it? Are you crazy?’

  Claude stood up, ending our meeting. ‘I’m sorry, but I must decline this application. I would advise you to take your custom elsewhere; another bank might feel differently, since the equity you’re offering as security is considerable. Do not give up.’ He directed the advice to me.

  I shook his hand. As Truman shuffled despondently ahead, I hung back and whispered, ‘Truman’s application isn’t that absurd, is it?’

  Claude shrugged. ‘Judgement call. Try Hanover Trust, just down the street. They might not regard your affairs as quite so—complicated.’

  When he saw me off at the waist-high gate by the tellers, Claude couldn’t control himself, and lowered to my ear. ‘What are you doing?’

  I muttered, ‘I wish I knew.’

  Truman rested his forehead on the steering wheel and didn’t start 213

  the car. ‘That was humiliating. I felt like I was asking for a raise on my allowance and got turned down.’

  ‘Maybe that was the problem,’ I said. ‘That you acted as if you were asking for a raise on your allowance.’

  ‘What was I supposed to do, swagger in there and puff out my chest and say I’m the big man and I’m going to make lots of money, gimme yours?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It would never work. You’ve gotta prove stuff. Have things on paper, tax records…I don’t have the income and he has evidence of that.’

  ‘You can always lie.’

  ‘Not with a bank, not without the goods—’

  ‘I don’t know a lot about high finance, Truman, but I sense it’s like every other profession—personal. You have to snow them, put one over. Why, maybe asking for only a hundred grand was a mistake.

  Maybe you’d have had better luck insisting on two—or two-fifty.’

  ‘When he wouldn’t come across with twenty-five?’

  ‘He’d least of all come across with twenty-five. It’s like a lot of things in life—have the gonads to shoot for the moon, and the green cheese lands on your lawn. Ask for dirt, people think that’s what you’re worth; and you don’t get the dirt, either.’

  Plausibl
e sidewalk philosophy, but I took Claude’s wink and nod, that a small mortgage on a valuable house was not unheard-of even with meagre income stats. I rang Hanover Trust that Wednesday from Frames, taxied by for the forms on my lunch hour, and filled them out that evening, in my room with the door shut. I did the photocopying and made yet one more appointment—if my life was degenerating into a series of mortgage negotiations, I might as well take charge. This time I wore my primmest blouse and a skirt of conservative length; since I was assuming the driver’s seat in every other respect I demanded the keys to the car. On the way to the bank, I tutored Truman that he was not to mention his philistine brother, not to rant about the ACLU, and not to apologize for being in college at thirty-one. He was not, in fact, to apologize for a bloody thing, and he would let me do the talking.

  At Hanover, I took the chair closest to the banker, crossing my 214

  legs the way Mother had taught me and not like my father. I dealt with the transaction as if it were a simple, straightforward formality, and that is the way the banker dealt with it in return. In fifteen minutes we had the go-ahead to bid for Heck-Andrews up to $490,000.

  All of this felt right. I was the Big Sister. Truman did what I said.

  But why did I go to such trouble? Why didn’t I leap at the chance for circumstances to make an odious decision for me—tough nuggies, Truman, the bank won’t lend us money but will to Mordecai, so to keep the house in the family I’ll purchase the place with him? Wasn’t I letting a golden opportunity to weasel out from under slip by?

  There was a purity to my Hobson’s Choice that I wanted restored. If both brothers secured financial backing, I had evened the odds. It seemed more fair, or more perfectly unfair, for whomever I bid with on 5 February to depend wholly on the whim of my devotion. So I rein-stated the allegorical starkness to my dilemma that with no little perversity I enjoyed. I would retrace the points of my triangulated childhood like a victim leading policemen step by step through her trauma at the scene of the crime.

  215

  16

  Truman returned from Hanover Trust ebullient, a welcome relief from the twelve days previous, during which he had been unremittingly frantic, especially when we had three more prospective buyers tour the house. His idea of celebration was to cut his required pre-dinner reading of Heidegger from fifty to thirty-five pages, open our bottle of wine in fifteen-minute violation of the Eight O’Clock Rule, and merrily rip the skin off chicken thighs.

  ‘You wouldn’t consider,’ I proposed, ‘going out?’

  Truman dismissed, ‘Restaurants are a scam.’

  I was familiar with this reasoning. It was the same irrefutable practicality that had ostensibly kept Truman living with his parents: it didn’t

  ‘make sense’ to rent a separate flat when he had a ‘perfectly good’

  apartment upstairs. Truman never went out to dinner, for commercial establishments cooked with too much grease, and it was just as easy to cook up a more nutritious meal at home. Granted, for pouring calories down the gullet restaurants were a gyp, but surely my brother was missing something. Restaurants were decorative, having your own flat was decorative, but Truman, so much of life is frou-frou.

  Yet I had learned, within the rigidity of his routine, to multiply modest diversions from it into the extravagant. When Truman offered to buy me a beer at Player’s Retreat after dinner, willing to spring for a $3 draft when we could as well have uncapped a Molson in the dovecot for 60¢, I knew this to be roughly the equivalent of Mordecai’s $300 tab at Karen’s two weeks before. It was merely a matter of moving the decimal point.

  Truman made a more considerable gesture still when we drew on our coats and he mentioned Averil was staying behind. I hadn’t been on a single social venture with Truman without his 216

  wife along since the stroll we took through Oakwood in December; subsequent ambles were taken as a threesome. I wasn’t sure what I’d done in the past to require a chaperone, nor how I had reformed to earn a single evening of Averil’s trust, but my gratitude was reminiscent of birthdays, when I’d get a whole hour alone with my father.

  We strode down North Street across Wilmington to the Mall, where the great white hulks of floodlit governmental granite had more the look of sheer Dover cliffs than urban build-up. The air was sharp, the stars refreshingly oblivious—all that tension over who got the house when what I wanted more than anything was to get out of it.

  My sudden sense of freedom was spurred by the absence of Averil, with whom I tended to be ickily well-behaved. Out of consideration, I avoided clubby references to our childhood; hence we three would prefer flat, neutral subjects like the merits of homosexuals teaching primary school. When we traded impressions of others, I made sure to say something kind even about people I despised, since I feared that in Averil’s more extreme moments she regarded me as a scathing, bossy, impossible-to-please elitist. She thought I was snooty about having lived abroad, and that I wanted both to help myself to my younger brother, imperiously, when he was in my reach, and to disavow him, along with the rest of the McCreas and North Carolina into the bargain, when it suited my convenience: I wanted to have my cake and lose it too. She considered her sister-in-law arrogant, glib, domineer-ing—everything Averil perceived had a truth to it except, I wanted to object, you could describe anyone, accurately, and make them seem odious. That she was driven to reduce me in order to enlarge her husband was, I begrudged, to her credit.

  While Averil might have kept absolute condemnation in abeyance, she was ever vigilant for my slips of unwitting candour that might confirm her most damning intuitions—for example, that I didn’t like her. In fact I neither liked nor disliked her. She didn’t pertain to me, and maybe that was the insult she was waiting for. Personally, I would rather be loathed than overlooked. Then, when you are always watching what you say for some incriminating remark, every time you open your mouth the sensation is of digging your own grave. My conversation around her was so circumspect that it became suspect for sounding sanitized.

  217

  Overly edited discourse draws attention to what’s been left out.

  My staunch refusal to give her a reason to hate me was exhausting.

  Should I buy the house with Mordecai, one of the dividends would be to throw this fight. Averil would never forgive me, and simple enmity would be so much more relaxing than tiptoeing down the Mall on eggshells night after night.

  Truman sighed. ‘Averil’s going insane.’

  ‘Why more so than the rest of us?’

  ‘She’s furious with me. Or rather, “disappointed in me”, as Mother would say. I’m sleeping on the couch.’

  I confess this information cheered me, though I didn’t know why.

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘She thinks I’m a wuss. She thinks Mordecai’s moving in is all my fault. That if I were a real man I’d have kicked him out.’

  ‘Doesn’t she understand, legally—’

  ‘No, she doesn’t understand anything except that our home has turned into a frat house and we can’t sleep and we can’t keep cheese and she’s sick of hearing Nirvana until six a.m.’ He balanced along the rim of the Legislature fountain, which splatted like far-off applause. ‘I wish he would just go away.’

  ‘Your own family,’ I said, ‘is the very definition of what doesn’t just go away.’

  ‘Mother and Father did.’

  ‘No they haven’t. That’s our problem, isn’t it? They peer through every board of your bedroom. No wonder you’re sleeping on the couch.’

  He lunged down the wide white steps two at a time, and meandered down the pedestrian mall, hands in pockets. ‘I just wanted to thank you for helping to arrange that mortgage. The last few days, Averil’s barely spoken to me, Corlis. When we thought we might lose Heck-Andrews…Because Averil likes that house. Really likes it. This last week she hinted that if she couldn’t live there she wouldn’t want to live with me at all.’

  ‘That’s daft, Truman. Venal.�
�

  ‘It isn’t,’ he insisted. ‘Places—they’re part of life. And when you marry someone you marry lots of things about them outside their personality and stuff. A three-storey Reconstruction mansion is part of what I have to offer her, Corlis. It’s part of who I am.’

  ‘You give a few scraps of pine and mortar an awful lot of weight, Truman.’

  218

  ‘That’s all our house means to you?’

  ‘No, but I’m not going to let it ruin my life. Have you ever considered,’

  I suggested, ‘rather than buying, moving out instead?’

  ‘Not for a split second!’

  ‘But this operation is turning into such a pain in the arse, Troom—mortgages, auctions. You and I don’t have much money, and there will be upkeep, property taxes…’

  ‘Are you backing out now? When the auction’s in four days?’

  Tentatively, I tested Mordecai’s theory: ‘Maybe it would be good for you to leave. To make a fresh start.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as a fresh start! Part of what you are is what you have been. That’s what’s wrong with this country: start over, bulldoze the last generation, and put up identical lobotomized squares with no memory like individual amnesia units, as if to deliberately make yourself stupid—look around you!’ He gestured to the Legislature behind us, sleek but too slick, at the thick, chunky new History Museum, with no suggestion in its dumb polished beige slabs that it knew what it was for. ‘No wisdom, no style—nothing aggregates, it just gets uglier.’

  ‘But our own past wasn’t that great, Truman, if you’d be honest—’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘To keep something simply because it’s old is just as witless as promoting any innovation because it’s new. You have to pick your spots, Truman. What’s worth saving about our parents isn’t what they dragged with them by accident—like Mother’s sexual hysteria, which she caught from her own mother like a disease. Father did make some progress on how you should treat blacks when Grandfather was a card-carrying Kluxer. Keep that. Forget the house. It’s not that important.’