A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  Meanwhile, Truman had vaulted to the dovecot. Protected by that extra, troublesome flight of stairs, it was unmolested. The boot sale Victorian couch nestled in its throw-rug depressions; the portraits of Heck, Andrews and Appleget peered tranquilly from their frames.

  Truman slumped in his baroque armchair. For a man who had so recently discovered his nascent powers of indignation, his reticence struck me as queer.

  ‘I may have said you don’t call the cops on your own brother,’ I said, too restless to sit myself. ‘But I’m coming round to your view. You don’t remember his licence plate number?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There can’t be that many privately owned troop transporters on the road in North Carolina. We could still have him stopped.’ I 254

  paused, puzzled. ‘How do you figure he got all our furniture into that truck? It’s big, but not that big.’

  ‘Search me,’ said Truman lamely.

  We heard a car pull in the drive, and Truman bolted upright. ‘I’d better catch her—’ He scrambled out the door. ‘Shock—the baby…’

  I followed him downstairs, at which point Averil was already wandering the foyer, looking dazed. She insisted on touring the denuded mansion as well, since some things you have to see for yourself.

  We reconvened in the dovecot, the only area remaining with chairs.

  ‘If he took two loads,’ I supposed, ‘then the stuff can’t have been carted very far, right? The Basement!’

  Truman groped for the phone. His colouring was a touch orange, as if he’d swallowed something that disagreed with him.

  ‘Howdy!’ Dix’s voice carried beyond the earpiece.

  ‘Dix, this is Truman McCrea.’

  ‘If you’re wanting to talk to Mort—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, that’s good, ‘cause he ain’t here, and if he do poke his head in my door he ain’t gonna have one more than thirty seconds longer.’

  ‘Listen, nobody’s brought any—furniture over there, have they? Office equipment? A four-poster bed…?’

  ‘Honey, nobody’s brought so much as a six-pack by here in weeks, much less a four-poster. You offering? Though between the two, I’d go for the Miller, personally.’

  Truman said, ‘Never mind,’ and clunked the receiver from an inch above its cradle, that’s-that.

  Experimentally, I ambled downstairs to take in the atmosphere.

  Switching on overhead lights as I went, I kept waiting to feel incensed.

  Yet my step was deft, my fingers extended from my hips like Ginger Rogers about to tap dance. My eyebrows arched, and as I threaded through the desolated bedrooms the corners of my mouth kept tugging upwards. When I tripped down to the parlour, so vast and austere un-fettered, I could only feel refreshed. Their drapes away, the bays had widened, as if the house had opened its eyes after a heavy sleep. The room seemed to breathe more deeply, and to stare out at the lights of the capital city rather than squint in dark self-absorption. I’d never thought

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  this so bluntly before, but this room’s jarring mix of Danish Modern and newlywed bargains had always rankled. I hadn’t really liked, I submitted briskly to myself, nearly everything my parents owned.

  I trod pensively back up the stairs. If by clearing out this house Mordecai had evened our score, I was thankful; I wanted the score even.

  More, if in some unknown hovel on the other side of town my brother was unloading his booty—couches stained with chewy ten-year-old cacciatore from the freezer, end-tables adrip with my father’s ghastly epoxy repairs—he was welcome to it. For this cleanly wiped slate was a dream come true. Though I wouldn’t have wished to assume the onus of discarding the accumulated chattel of their lives, my parents’ belong-ings had not been a record of my own sprees or my own penny-pinching. Now that my brother had obliged, I was free to inhale the bright release of oak fumes from the slightly lighter patches of uncloaked flooring, to saunter uncluttered rooms which, for the first time since my mother’s death, seemed to have a future. He could assume the burden of all that imperfection and making do, for almost every object my parents had ever bought was their second choice because it was cheaper. In fact, this looted mansion had the appeal of a recycled canvas, fresh gesso whited over a failed painting. I had transient second thoughts about boycotting the auction fourteen hours hence. For perhaps the first time in thirty-five years, I liked it here.

  Back in the dovecot, Truman was brooding. We started at the distinctive churn of another motor from below.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ I wondered. ‘Why would he come back?’

  We tumbled downstairs again, though Truman lagged behind. Alone of us, perhaps preferring the dramatic entrance, Mordecai often came in through the front door. When we reached the landing, there he was, slumping on the knob in the foyer, still wearing the same stained clothes from that morning. His left hand noosed a paper bag, and he was waving it aimlessly, unable to locate a table to set it down.

  ‘You’re going to explain—’

  ‘Where did you take—’

  Averil and I spoke at once. We shut up at once. Mordecai peered blearily up at our trio, his thick eyebrows tangled. He 256

  glanced beside the door, and toed the stamps and Chinese menus on the floor. When his eyes grazed the blonde square where the oriental carpet had lain, the sunny rim around his pupils sulphured to a more troubled hue.

  ‘What now?’ Mordecai scanned our formation. ‘Mother didn’t want me, Father didn’t want me, you don’t want me, I already know my wife doesn’t want me, who’s left?’

  I stepped down the last few stairs. ‘I can see how you’d be angry, and I’m sympathetic, to a point,’ I began evenly. ‘It’s the presumption that gets up my nose, and the spite. The sheer spite! You know if you wanted a table or a mattress we’d have given it to you gladly.’

  ‘Say what?’ said Mordecai.

  I held out my palm. ‘I’m afraid you’ve used the key to this house for the last time and once too many.’

  Mordecai stared at my hand, as if struck by the sheer emptiness of it, how little I had ever offered.

  ‘If that’s the way you feel about it, sis. Blood is sicker than water.’ He tossed his whole keyring at my feet.

  As Truman grabbed my arm to keep me from picking it up, I was visited with the unsettling recollection that Mordecai didn’t shop for broccoli. Though he may have ‘borrowed’ Truman’s electric drill, he’d never abscond with our food processor.

  Mordecai trooped to the kitchen; I followed. He walked through where the table had been without flinching, but when he returned from the cabinet with a glass he started to put it down on a surface that was no longer there. ‘What the fuck.’

  ‘You mean, you didn’t—?’

  He wouldn’t answer, but left his bottle on the stairs and crossed to the parlour, where even an indifferent bohemian would notice something had changed. At which point he rushed to the sitting room, to be confronted with the lone bashed-in TV and hungover stuffed animals.

  ‘Where’s my IBM? Where’s my Design Jet? Where’s my Compaq Prolinea?’

  Double-time, boots pounding, Mordecai clumped out the back to what was once Truman’s workshop: the tablesaw was gone. The hand tools were gone. The lathe, the welding torch…

  Rapidly losing energy, Mordecai dragged himself up to Father’s office and shuffled through the spilled stationery. I think by this time he hardly expected his fax, laptop and printer to be 257

  plugged in and purring; his kicking at scattered Law Weeklies was perfunctory.

  Mordecai trudged down the first flight again and sank on a bottom stair. ‘Dix.’

  ‘Your own wife?’

  ‘My floppies are lifted. Software, including the back-ups—Lotus, Autocad, AC; all my designs, client records. Know any common thieves who’d steal a Blaupunkt catalogue?’

  ‘Or the Britannicas,’ I remembered. ‘But why?’

  ‘She badgered me just this last week that I never bough
t her so much as a Coca-Cola and then I’d go and invest in this Blount Street clunker that ought, she claimed, to be filled with nothing but foul memories.

  You gotta admit, she had a point.’

  ‘But Dix couldn’t have dragged all this crap out by herself.’

  ‘She got help, sweetheart. I was at Meredith this afternoon. We were supposed to start installing the new sound system today. My whole crew went awol.’

  ‘Your own employees would rip off your furniture?’

  He rose up, splashing shnapps. ‘Furniture? Furniture? That Compaq package cost thirty thousand bucks! I’ve got net assets of over two hundred grand. Don’t you understand what’s happened here, you nit-wit? You’re in a lather about throw pillows, and I’ve lost Decibelle!’

  I had never heard him nearly as distraught when a marriage collapsed. Both my brothers were given to ulterior affections, as if they’d been rewired and all the current that might logically have been channeled to Mother or Wife got rerouted to House or Company instead.

  ‘But why would they—’

  The one outburst was all Mordecai could manage. He sat back down, his face gone slack, and it seemed to take effort to reach for his bottle.

  ‘My payroll was a little behind.’ He smiled, an ugly smile, and slugged his aquavit.

  ‘How behind?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  I bet it did to them.

  ‘Shouldn’t we call the police?’ said Averil.

  ‘And tell them what?’ said Mordecai flippantly. ‘To look for which truck? I bet they’ve crossed the state line by now. Dix is smart.’

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  ‘But Dix is at the Basement,’ I objected.

  ‘You’re insured, aren’t you?’ Truman intervened.

  ‘Couldn’t afford the payments,’ Mordecai reported almost cheerfully, draining the tumbler. ‘Decided to risk it for a few months, save some dough. Dix knew we weren’t insured, of course; the whole crew did.

  That standing drill is heavy. Wouldn’t want to go to all that trouble to reward me with a cheque.’

  ‘Dix is home!’ I insisted. ‘We called her, and she didn’t seem to know anything about it—’ No one was listening to me, but I wanted my sassy sister-in-law, whom I quite liked, exonerated.

  ‘But the house is insured,’ said Truman.

  ‘Won’t cover commercial property,’ said Mordecai with a trace of his old authority. ‘Most valuables worth over a couple hundred bucks have to be listed on the policy, and I bet the last time you checked Mother didn’t remember to itemize her Rockwell table saw.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ asked Averil.

  ‘No tools, no crew, no work.’ His tone had that soprano whimsicality of total apathy.

  ‘Mordecai, I’m sorry,’ said Truman.

  There are two kinds of ‘sorry’: isn’t-that-a-shame and it’s-all-my-fault.

  Truman’s sounded curiously like the second sort.

  I ignored him; this was no time for Truman to indulge another bout of his compulsive flagellation—if-only-we’d-stayed-home-today or whatever. ‘Mordecai, when the house is sold tomorrow, you’ll have at least $100,000 disposable. Surely that much cash could get Decibelle on its feet?’

  ‘Truman and I could help you out,’ Averil volunteered, to my surprise.

  ‘Huh.’ Mordecai’s laugh was halfway between a hiccough and a gag.

  ‘I’m in debt, children.’

  ‘But a hundred—’

  ‘Drop in the bucket. You poor bastards all still think owing money means you have to give Daddy back the twenty he lent you for a secondhand bike. No, we’re talking bankruptcy, the Big B. Sell the house tomorrow, some companies in this town gonna be very, very happy.

  As I recall—’ He looked at his wrist. ‘They let you keep your watch.’

  ‘Mordecai, I’m really sorry.’

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  This time even Mordecai seemed to notice Truman’s peculiarly culpable tone.

  ‘It was your workmen, Mordecai, but Corlis is right, I doubt Dix had anything to do with it. I did, though.’

  ‘How’s that?’

  We all three swivelled our attentions to Truman. This was the notori-ety that he’d long envied Mordecai, and now, I sensed, could have lived without.

  ‘This morning,’ Troom went on heavily, ‘I gave MK enough cash to rent a truck, and a fee for his trouble. I even suggested he get Big Dave and Wilcox to help. I guaranteed that no one would be home until at least eight—’

  I interrupted, ‘You hired that sleaze-bucket to gut your own house?’

  But Truman disciplined his gaze at Mordecai. ‘He was supposed to cart your what-all—tools, files, clothes—back to the Basement where it came from. I had it planned from way back. I thought Corlis and I would buy the house tomorrow, and I wanted you out. I was afraid if we didn’t remove you by force you’d never go.’

  Mordecai nodded appreciatively. ‘Touché. You’re on the money there, kid.’

  A propos nothing, I asked, ‘Why would those pinheads take the Britannicas?’

  ‘I might have mentioned they were worth a lot of money,’ said Truman, eyes stumbling to his feet. ‘Anyway. He was only supposed to lug Mordecai’s junk home. He wasn’t supposed to take everything.

  And he wasn’t supposed to keep anything that—didn’t belong to him.’

  ‘Perish the thought,’ I quipped.

  ‘Just because you’re so cynical about people!’ Averil snapped at me.

  ‘It’s not Truman’s fault if he doesn’t assume everyone’s a jerk!’

  ‘Congrats, kid,’ Mordecai commended his brother. ‘Direct hit. You delivered my business to a douche-bag, who will fence my entire inventory in Florida for about fifteen per cent of net worth. I couldn’t have customized payback better myself. Too bad I can’t remember what I did to deserve it.’

  I suppose we might have invited Mordecai to the dovecot, with a table for his glass and cushion for his head, but we had never 260

  asked him up there before and it seemed late in the day to construct a happy threesome we hadn’t even managed as children. Just because he was hurting and intimacy would be handy, we couldn’t pull it out of a hat. If he felt alone, he was.

  Then, what did we expect Mordecai to do, curl up on the bare floorboards of his parents’ bedroom? So he hauled himself up by the banister and steadied before grunting, ‘I need some air.’ He scooped up his keyring from under the lip of the last stair.

  Truman, Averil and I measured his bottle in unison. It was two-thirds empty.

  These were sensitive times about Driving Under the Influence, but in our family the issue was more than usually charged. On the subject of booze my mother had always been reproachful, summarily corking our unfinished wine to the back of the fridge, but for her final two years she’d been fanatic, smelling our breaths before we drove. Truman submitted to the humiliating sniff-test without complaint, because she had her reasons. In the winter of 1990 my father had attended a meeting in Durham about integrated public housing that ran late. It lasted, in fact, for ever.

  His was a common enough death; too common, we all agreed, for a man who adulated Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. My father was killed by a drunk driver—by a man who was just about as poleaxed as his first-born son was now.

  Truman and I locked eyes for one long beat, until I broke it by raising my palms in a gesture of helplessness for which I could feel no admiration. Yes, he was our big brother, and we had never told him what to do, but if there was any point at which we should have tried to it was at that moment. I think we were exhausted. We both wanted Mordecai to go away. Not out of dislike, or from any of the old resentment that he was a despot or that he got to be the genius while we cretins did our spelling homework. But because if his intelligence had always seemed more towering than ours, so had his troubles as well. Now those troubles were more monumental than ever, and we simply couldn’t afford him any more that night. As soon as he heaved into his truck
we could tell ourselves he was no longer our problem.

  Mordecai took the bottle with him, and his boots clunking down the bare oak for ten paces put me in mind of game shows where the clock is ticking and you have ten seconds to punch

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  your bell and stop the host and say I’ve got it!, but when we let him cross the transom the buzzer sounded: as if from a sudden blankness or failure of nerve we had just lost the jackpot.

  ‘But what should we do tomorrow,’ Truman called after him. ‘About the house?’

  Mordecai paused in the porch light, glancing backwards with distaste.

  ‘Torch it.’ He slammed the door.

  While the truck revved and lurched out of earshot Truman and I couldn’t look each other in the eye.

  Then we lied. ‘We shouldn’t have let him drive,’ said Truman.

  ‘I guess you’re right,’ I agreed, colluding in the conceit that gosh, that just occurred to me too, and now, darn it, it’s too late to stop the guy.

  When we lumbered up to the dovecot, conversation was halting. I remarked, ‘That was pretty gormless, Truman,’ and ‘MK was a dirt bird, the smallest little child could see that,’ but otherwise let Truman off the hook. As the minutes ticked arduously on, I found myself straining for the grind of an engine, but caught only the odd whoosh from Wilmington Street, and once in a while the wow-wow of a police siren which I could not peremptorily dismiss as a stranger’s disaster.

  We agreed to call it a night, set an alarm, and deal with the issue of the auction at breakfast. Truman made up the sofa for my bed.