A Perfectly Good Family

by Lionel Shriver

  My older brother had never let anyone take care of him before, not even my mother, much less his wives, which may have helped explain why three marriages in a row imploded. Finally something has turned in him, and I like to think it is not that he’s given up.

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  Perhaps because the succour comes from so unlikely a source, Mordecai now basks in being tended, and has proved less than eager to learn to dress himself and prepare his own breakfast.

  Likewise Mordecai went through bankruptcy proceedings in the spring with festive relaxation, making obnoxious jokes in court about whether they’d let him keep his wheelchair; then, in failure is reprieve.

  For years Decibelle had been over-extended, taking on bigger jobs than his small workforce and limited equipment could quite manage, and Mordecai took to his retirement from deadlines and payrolls like a hard-earned holiday.

  To protect his interest in Heck-Andrews from creditors, Mordecai sold his share of the house to Truman and me for ‘one dollar and other valuable consideration’, the latter of which would later come down to frequent free babysitting. We drew up a contract giving Mordecai the right to buy back should his ship come in. It was small sacrifice to allow him the hope that through some unlikely entrepreneurial sleight of hand he might once again be flush, throwing around Beluga and salmon and Krug like the old days. That before he buys back his share of Heck-Andrews Mordecai owes Truman and me almost $100,000 for covering his medical bills—for which we did indeed hit up Claude for a mortgage—tends to slip Mordecai’s mind.

  Paraplegia suits my older brother. For years he’d felt sorry for himself, but had I asked Mordecai before the accident what exactly was so terrible about the way life had treated him, I doubt he’d have been able to say. Now he could point to his legs—despite frequent water immer-sion therapy, dead weight. Routinely awash in self-pity, he might have wallowed to the neck in that wheelchair. Instead, Mordecai has a sense of humour about his disability—rueful, like his father—and never once have I heard him blame anyone for the accident but himself.

  Mordecai is not above exploiting his condition, however; he wheedles all of us into running his errands or fetching things he might retrieve himself (‘I’ll time you,’ he promises), and has developed a plaintive, peevish tone I suspect he cadged from Truman. But when he’s alone in a room, I doubt he blubbers, but remembers he’s in the middle of A Brief History of Time and gets down to it. Mordecai was never an anyone-for-tennis type anyway, and claims to find the excuse to read for hours on end luxurious.

  However, a glimpse in the door of the carriage house this 272

  summer sobered me. Mordecai was feeding a sheet of plywood through the Rockwell table saw, which Truman had replaced. Before his accident, I had often seen Mordecai slide boards gracefully under the blade, walking them out the other side. This time, from his wheelchair, Mordecai couldn’t reach over and around; the plywood stalled and began to smoke. He tried again. The wood burned, the saw jammed, and the safety mechanism shut off the motor. As I walked away, leaving him to it, he was still rushing his chair around the machine, and I will never forget his expression, which was of pure, furious concentration; he pursed his lips so that they wouldn’t wobble. Briefly, I appreciated how much he spared us, and how to keep up a really good game-face you have to maintain it for yourself.

  His greatest indulgence is to watch videos about disabled war vets— Coming Home, Cutter’s Way, The Saint of Fort Washington, Article 99—after which he is noticeably more irascible, playing the angry young man betrayed by his country. I think he indulges himself the fancy for a few hours that he did not live through the Vietnam War unscathed only to be felled by a bottle of his own aquavit. When we take Mordecai with us to Harris Teeter, shoppers steal glances at the longhair in the chair with elaborate sympathy. They’ve seen those videos, too, and Mordecai is careful not to disabuse his onlookers of their misapprehen-sion. Later we ride him for these pretensions, but still keep an eye out in video stores for new feisty-vet-cripple releases.

  Truman took a leave of absence from Duke to make Heck-Andrews wheelchair-friendly, but I doubt he’ll ever go back. There seems little point in attending classes to examine why bad things happen to only half-bad people when the conundrum lives with you downstairs. And Truman has never cared for abstractions; like the Moser house, he likes causes you can touch. So together my brothers have launched a new business from Heck-Andrews: renovating old properties in the neighbourhood. They’ve quite a trade going; many of the outlying houses bought by well-heeled professionals are in poor repair. There’s now a sign on our porch, ‘The Mortis and Truman Joint’, and those two have more business than they can handle.

  Truman does the heavy work; Mordecai can operate their new lathe and hand tools from his wheelchair, and scrolls beautiful porch ornamentation or hand-routers finely detailed baseboards.

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  He can volute the fiddly sawnwork and does the fine sanding, though lately his most vital contribution to the business is to watch over Delano while Truman lugs banisters in their new army surplus troop transporter.

  Delano Adlai McCrea was indeed born on my parents’ anniversary, and though babies generally don’t send me, this one has character. A bit too much, for Averil and Truman, for he was a collicky child like Mordecai, and though he seems to have stopped shrieking on the hour Delano is already attempting to stand in his crib whenever the nursery door cracks open. I’d never have pegged Mordecai for an infant lover either, but since Truman is not the only one in this family who’s been a ‘perfect baby’ into his thirties, I guess it’s not so surprising that Delano and Mordecai get along like a house on fire—not Truman’s favourite expression.

  I’ve tried to be of use, but Truman is possessive about taking care of Mordecai, and in no time I began to feel superfluous. Truman even controls the cooking, having put Mordecai on a strict diet. It’s worked—at least, Mortis (as Truman now calls him) has lost weight, and looks in better trim in his wheelchair than he ever did standing up straight. As for booze, Troom hasn’t disallowed it altogether, but Mordecai is allotted no more than the two glasses of wine and slight finger of Wild Turkey per night that the rest of the household is rationed.

  Aquavit has been banned outright. Mordecai manages to break the rules from time to time—Truman kept the bourbon out of reach, so Mordecai spent days designing an ingenious grasping gizmo with which he could wrestle bottles from high shelves. But Truman caught him after a week, and simply removed contraband to the dovecot, whose stairs his brother can’t climb. Frankly, the difference between babysitting Mordecai and Delano is marginal.

  Through months of living and working with one another, my brothers’

  natures have orbited closer together, like two planets pulled by each others’ gravitational fields. Truman has grown more aggressive, sure and socially adventurous, some nights inviting his hired crew (though Truman refuses to employ ‘waste-products’) to dinner. He’s got funnier, easier, less judgemental—the puffs of reefer he will now indulge make him giggly. Mordecai, on the other hand, is more responsible, and even Averil trusts him with Delano’s care. And I’d say that Mordecai is 274

  kinder; for kindling empathy, a little disadvantage goes a long way.

  My brothers have confirmed my impression that, born or raised as polar opposites, only fused would those two make one whole, decent, daring person.

  Meanwhile, I figured I was getting a bit old for one more minimum wage job, so on a whim I rang up David Grover. He seemed happy enough to hear from me, and ever since then I’ve been working for the NC chapter of the ACLU, mostly doing legal research. Truman was disgusted with my new employment at first—he called it ‘brown-nosing the paternal grave’—though he concedes that pay cheque by pay cheque is one way of earning our inheritance back. I like the work, and several lawyers around the office knew my father. I don’t find that eclipsing; it gratifies me, and eventually Father’s old colleagues will retire and the younger attorneys will r
emember me instead.

  Last spring I started going out with David Grover, and the first time he kissed me I swooned, if only from the shock that so recently I’d been willing to trade that infinite tunnelling for the shoulder-clapping of brothers. Sure, there was an element of courtship and even of flirtation in our threesome’s Virginia Reel around Heck-Andrews. Yet no brotherly love could compensate for that kiss. Siblings aren’t enough. They live beside you; I am glad for them; they are better than nothing. If I had often found myself torn between two men, when you can’t make up your mind between alternatives the odds are they’re both wrong.

  So when Delano was born, David and I started living together in his house near my old junior high school. I’ll never forget the contempt with which Truman first pronounced David Grover!, whose name is still associated in Truman’s mind with nearly losing his house; though a sneer in Truman’s enunciation persists, gradually they’re getting on.

  Of course, Mordecai thinks David’s a ‘spoon-fed candy-ass’.

  I’ve kept my equity in Heck-Andrews, as the one contribution I can make towards alleviating Mordecai’s misfortunes. Besides, having gone on record as condemning inheritance as ‘evil’, I can’t righteously demand $187,000 for signing my name.

  However, as for accepting what I don’t deserve I’ve learned to become less exacting. My whole life is something-for-nothing. I owe my mother for almond eyes and olive skin, my father for a better than scathing attitude towards black people. After my

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  afternoon drives to buy The Raleigh Times for the crossword, I’m in debt to strangers for internal combustion, the ballpoint, a three-letter word for ‘lament’. Most of what I use or regard as technically mine is rightfully claimed by centuries of industrious predecessors; purchase is more like renting or theft. I would never have invented plastic—much less electric kettles, or the concept of ‘reckless endangerment’. There seems little point to feeling sheepish about what amounts to massive inherited wealth, so I’ll take it all with a handshake and try to make my own contribution on however meagre a scale.

  Therefore I’ve moved my studio to David’s, and still do sculpture avocationally on weekends. The waxwork is sweeter without the pressure to please galleries, and I’ve used the little of my cash inheritance remaining to cast a series of six-inch figures in bronze. I’d completed enough of these light, lissome pieces by this Christmas to give Mordecai, Averil, and Truman each a gift of one, and now instead of international gewgaws my tiny bronzes will decorate the still spare furnishings of that house.

  In fact, yesterday’s Christmas Eve of 1993 went far more warmly than

  ’92’s. When David and I arrived for dinner, Mordecai had already sliced the ham, Truman had whipped up a potato salad he could stand, Averil’s holly napkins blossomed around the table; there was nothing left for me to do. Truman had granted an extra wine allowance for the holiday, and the three of them were polishing off a cabernet. Though Averil is often touchy about Mordecai’s assessment of her intelligence, last evening she was braving a few good-natured potshots of her own.

  In fact, the banter in that kitchen flew so fast and loose that I couldn’t get a quip in edgewise, and so I lingered on the sidelines with David while Truman explained to me why drains clear in opposite directions on either side of the equator.

  David and I were spending Christmas proper with his family, so at Heck-Andrews we exchanged gifts last night. This time Mordecai had fashioned a present for everyone, each hand-crafted. Not once did he goad Truman for being ‘good’ or too obliging; he could hardly ridicule his brother for a tenderness that for Mordecai himself has proved a windfall. I gave Truman grown-up presents and he seemed thankful, but it was all very civilized between us. Yet with Mordecai, Truman would wisecrack, and they’d cackle. Those two have developed a whole vocabulary

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  grown from renovation fiascos and eccentric clients; last night I felt like Truman listening to his siblings speak pig-Latin before he broke the code. The exclusion was fair, but smarted. All my life I’d been fought over; I’d never felt left out.

  Before we left, I broke the news that David and I had decided to move to London, where we’ll both work for Amnesty International at its world headquarters—David as director of legal affairs, I as regional information officer for North America. I may no longer consider Raleigh nowheresville, but I’m restless, and inevitably in a hometown one feels stuck. I’m rapidly losing every trace of my English accent, which I miss, and the other day caught myself saying ya’ll. That was the limit. Truman seemed a bit sad, but I wouldn’t call him broken-hearted. He wished us the best of luck in Britain, and then he wheeled Mordecai to the middle of the kitchen, slipped out his comb, and unclasped the alligator clips. As Averil, Truman and Mordecai sang ‘Day is Done’ in three-part harmony, my little brother began reweaving Mordecai’s hair.

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  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  Meet Lionel Shriver

  About the book

  Return to Raleigh: Writing A Perfectly Good Family

  Read on

  Read an Excerpt from The Post-Birthday World

  Author’s Picks

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  About the author

  Meet Lionel Shriver

  AH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since, Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.

  I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann”—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.

  “I wanted out of the United States. ”

  In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in

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  1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that addictively commands equal parts love and loathing. As We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.

  Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wander-lust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

  At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair ( The Female of the Species), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy ( Checker and the Derailleurs), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men ( Ordinary Decent Criminals), demography and AIDS in Africa ( Game Control), inheritance ( A Perfectly Good Family), professional tennis and career competition in marriage ( Double Fault), terrorism and cults of personality ( The New Republic, my real seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood ( We Need to Talk About Kevin). My latest, The Post-Birthday World, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and snooker, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.

  For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every da
mned year.

  Lesser known facts:

  I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor.

  Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for dark roast coffee, dark sesame oil, dark chocolate, dark meat chicken, even dark chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.

  Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this 281

  perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.

  I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid” flak-sid, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying flassid anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean

  “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.” Or,