The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “Not much. Not since the eviction notice. Forget asparagus and béarnaise. It’s a few hard rolls they all but throw at you, and some sort of dog-foody ham. Which I might have tolerated, had the staff not raided my bar. All they left is a liqueur—some dreadful benefaction, orange peel macerated in gasoline.”

  “Since when do the orderlies help themselves to your property?”

  “I’ve overheard grumbling about their wages not keeping up, so they’ve started to steal. Speaking of which, the one thing you must find room for in that midget car of yours is the Mandible silver service.” Douglas tapped a rectangular mahogany box on the long central table. Carter was familiar with its contents; the curlicue M on each heavy piece of cutlery was distinctive. “It could come in useful, for the metal alone—unless the feds confiscate silver next. For weeks, I’ve not let it out of my sight. I sleep with that box under my pillow, and I can’t tell you how uncomfortable it’s been.”

  “If you’d told me this joint was going to the dogs, I’d have rescued you sooner.”

  “Best to put this off as long as possible for your sake, son. I fear the novelty of caring for Luella is apt to wear off quickly.”

  “You’re seeing Mimi again. Mimi, see me. Don’t think I don’t know it!”

  Speak of the devil. Luella had wandered in wearing what might once have been a stylish frock, but the hem was shredded from her having torn at it, and the sky-blue fabric was encrusted with food. The bloop of her stomach echoed the bulge of an adult diaper at the rear. Carter had grown accustomed to this decayed incarnation of his father’s second wife, but fifteen years earlier the shock had been profound. Sure, he’d resented the way the younger woman moved in on her employer in 1992, making herself oh, so indispensable in every department. He’d suspected at the time, too, that his father’s financial situation had made the twenty-two-year age difference easier for Luella to excuse. But when Douglas first remarried, Carter had conceded that the woman was a looker: an unapologetic five ten, slender and stately, with plumb posture, impeccable nails, and a sharp eye for clothes. He could hardly blame his father (though of course he had). Even at seventy-something she hadn’t entirely lost her figure—just everything else.

  “That woman has airs,” Luella added, with the occasional cogency grown more disconcerting than the nonsense. “But I descend from the Warrior Queen of the Ivory Coast, Nana Abena Pokuaa! Who ruled the Baoule Kingdom of the Akans for thirty years! Dirty fears! I am royalty, and Mimi is common. Lemon ramen! From traders and shopkeepers. Raiders and peepers!” She leaned accusingly into Douglas’s face. “Don’t think I don’t know it.”

  “She’s intermittently convinced I’m seeing your mother again,” Douglas explained. “Which is thrilling, because in that event she seems to know who I am. Otherwise, whatever greeting-card part of the brain that conjures up rhymes remains intact.”

  “Hi, Luella,” Carter said pointlessly. “Today, we’re going on a trip.”

  “Trip, flip, conniption fit. Today, hooray!” She giggled girlishly, placing a shy hand to her cheek, then tonguing the air as if trying to catch a fly. This rapid flicking and licking motion was one of Carter’s least favorite of Luella’s ticks.

  “Is it going to be hard to get her in the car?”

  “She can throw tantrums with no warning,” Douglas said. “But maybe we’ll get lucky. I’m sorry about the state of her, but after we missed the first payment the orderlies went on strike. I don’t have the strength to change her dress more than once a day. Are you certain Jayne is up for this?”

  “Oh, Jayne’s a trouper,” Carter said reflexively. But what he’d wanted to say was, “Does it matter if Jayne is ‘up for this’? What’s the alternative—leave your wife in a basket on somebody’s doorstep?”

  Because in truth Jayne was beside herself. Getting it all over with at once, Carter had delivered a one-two punch: that inheritance they’d been counting on for their retirement? There wasn’t one. His father hadn’t fled the market fast enough to save his shirt. The bonds could have been claims on the Brooklyn Bridge. The gold and gold stocks were confiscated. Most of the cash was absorbed by debt, since years before some idiot had talked Douglas into investing on margin. The Wellcome Arms sucked up the tiny remaining liquidity to the tune of $27,500 per month. Surprise number two: guess who’s coming to dinner.

  Jayne wasn’t an ungenerous person, but she was private, and since her breakdown found the company of other people stressful beyond measure. She seemed to have lost the simple facility of concocting spontaneous topics of conversation, while at once suffering an unholy terror of social silence. Before friends arrived for a drink, she would grill Carter for an hour on what on earth they might talk about—a waste of preparation, since socializing didn’t work that way, and none of these premeditated topics would ever arise naturally. In a panic, she would insert them arbitrarily and bring any small, successful interchange in its infancy to a halt. For Jayne, the prospect of having to interact with live-in guests in perpetuity was horrendous.

  Besides, for any woman of sixty-nine to adopt Luella, barely older than Jayne herself, meant confronting daily her greatest fears for her own future. As for Douglas, he’d never really noticed Jayne, who was a sensitive, intelligent, intuitive person but even in her less phobic days never especially loud. Her character was built on too small a scale for Douglas, who’d therefore blithely accepted her hospitality for decades, and blithely dispatched it in return, while paying little heed to who exactly was filling his glass or whose glass he might be filling. Penniless at ninety-eight, her father-in-law might never have seemed less intimidating, but neither in-law could draw on a long shared history of mutual warmth.

  In short, they were looking at disaster, of the worst sort: not a single cataclysm like 2024 from which assorted parties might recover, but an ongoing, borderless nightmare ended only by death. Within the week, Carter could be clamoring to go first.

  What about Medicaid?” Jayne had raised immediately, groping for any way out of this. “If Douglas is destitute, he qualifies for state nursing home care.”

  “Six months ago, you’d be right,” Carter said. “But I told you: they’ve changed the rules. If you have immediate living relatives with assets, Medicaid won’t pick up the tab. Our 401(k)s and pensions have been slaughtered, but we do own this house.”

  “How about Nollie? Why are your father and his deranged wife all our problem?”

  “You know my sister’s in France.”

  “Make her come back from France. You’re the one who’s been visiting New Milford for years.”

  “That’s right, because it’s the decent people who always get fucked. Nollie didn’t only end up in Europe out of pretension. That ocean between her and the family is a firewall. It’s got her out of weddings, funerals, birthdays, and Christmases for decades—not to mention slogs to the Wellcome Arms.”

  “But she must have some resources squirreled away. From that supposed ‘international bestseller’? Even from afar, she could cover the bill for a nursing home. Maybe not one as opulent. But with so many seniors insolvent, cheaper facilities must have places going begging all over the country.”

  “Nollie and my father have both been cagey about the scale of her royalties. Though she can’t be pulling in much now. With fiction a free-for-all, everybody writing it and nobody reading it—and absolutely nobody buying it—what do you want to bet she’ll cry poverty? Whatever her real finances, it’s a plausible line.”

  Jayne started unloading the dishwasher so she could have plates to slam. “I’ve never forgiven her for completely shutting down the discussion when you finally brought yourself to hazard that maybe, just maybe, a childless, solipsistic old woman and a younger brother with three children and four grandchildren shouldn’t split an enormous inheritance fifty-fifty. I mean, what was she going to do with that money, buy an island and install it with another toy boy to service her dried-up loins? When poor Florence has to take in a tenant—”

>   “That doesn’t matter now,” Carter cut her off. In truth, the depth of that sibling rift was now a source of chagrin. The acid argument over whether he was morally entitled to substantially more than his sister when Pop died, because after all he had issue and she did not, now seemed like an evil version of “The Gift of the Magi.”

  “Douglas should have changed his will as soon as it became obvious that Nollie was a barren spinster—”

  “That terminology is beneath you. And I did bring it up with Pop, only because you insisted, and you remember—it was very awkward. He shut me down. He said we got college funds for the kids and grandkids, and help with our down payment, none of which Nollie got, and that was enough; he didn’t want to ‘play favorites.’ But we’ve talked about this ad nauseam, and it’s a moot point now.”

  “I don’t care if the money’s gone,” Jayne continued obliviously, crashing silverware into a drawer. “Your sister’s greedy, take-no-prisoners position still means something. That huffy, ‘But it’s my half to do with what I want!’ All that righteous indignation over how it was your choice to have children and she ‘shouldn’t have to pay for it’ just because she was too self-absorbed to become a mother herself—”

  “Enough!” Carter cried.

  It was staggering how the enmity over who-would-get-what could survive beyond the point at which there was nothing to get. Perplexingly, Jayne’s feelings about his inheritance had always run higher than his own—as if avarice once removed grew the sharper for the prize lying a few more tantalizing inches out of reach. Yet in no other context had Carter known his wife to be grasping. The ferocity with which she’d coveted the legacy may have derived from her father-in-law’s disregard: she might as well get something out of a relationship that otherwise made her feel inadequate and uninteresting. Or perhaps the rapacity was a product of her powerful partisanship in respect to the ongoing tensions between her husband and sister-in-law. Alas, spousal bias has a blunt, crude quality, and misses all the nuance. Jayne took sides in a subtle, conflicted rivalry—Carter’s simultaneous resentment and admiration of his sister combined into a unique emotion he couldn’t name—and reduced it to plain antagonism. Thus she often forced him to defend his sister when he’d have preferred to carp.

  He did take exception to Jayne’s implication that in not fighting Nollie harder for a fairer share of his inheritance, he had failed to support his family. Jayne was left an only child after her younger sister committed suicide in adolescence (a tragedy, yes, but one whose psychic statute of limitations might have run out by now—not that you’d get his wife to relinquish the trauma, which seemed to confer the special-protection status of landmark architecture). According to Jayne, only assurance that their one remaining offspring would be well provided for by Mandible Engine Corp. had made her parents feel free to spend down their savings in retirement. It would have been unseemly to object to the couple’s availing themselves of their own earnings, so he and Jayne had held their tongues as the two went on vacations in Bali and took out a reverse mortgage. When the pair died in a ballooning accident in Morocco a few years ago, his in-laws left nothing behind but debt. Somehow this, too, was all Carter’s fault.

  He and Jayne had been married for forty-three years; they had grandchildren. Be that as it may, he’d let slip about the Mandible estate while they were still dating. Subconsciously, he may have dangled the money as a lure. Their union had stood the test of time, but sometimes he sympathized with his father—having to live with that worm of a question mark over what about your companionship was really so entrancing.

  “She’s a vain, selfish woman,” Jayne said summarily, banging a final sauté pan home, “who for once in her life should be forced to pitch in.”

  While Carter was still debating how to coerce his older sister into behaving like the member of a family, that very evening his fleX tringed. Behold, Nollie proposed not so much to help solve a problem as to become another one.

  “You would not believe the anti-Americanism in this country,” his big sister began. “And I thought it was bad before. I no sooner open my mouth—”

  “I thought your French was so perfect that no one could tell,” Carter said dryly.

  Once fine and silky, now listless, his sister’s dyed butterscotch hair had thinned further, exposing glimmers of scalp. At seventy-three, she still pulled off an imperious manner and youthful boisterousness. From a lifetime of sarcasm, the left-hand crease around her mouth was slightly deeper than the right. Yet her slight, wiry build hadn’t prevented the inexorable jowling that befell their mother. Nollie’s neck—the one part of the human body that never lies—had striated, with an incipient puffiness under the chin. No doubt his sister was conducting a similar assessment of her brother’s image, with the same bittersweet mingling of triumph and sorrow. Carter had been passably handsome in his day; Nollie was once a stunner. Funny, he had dully accommodated himself to the sagging of his own cheeks, the weediness of his own locks. He found any disintegration of his domineering older sister’s appearance a shock. You always imagine you’ll savor these icon-cum-nemeses’ undoing. You’re always wrong.

  “I said nothing of the kind,” she said. “You’re always imputing all manner of posturing to me merely because I live in Paris. My accent is slightly better than the average American’s, meaning it’s short of ghastly. I never said my nationality was undetectable. I wish. They’ve always hated us for being crass, and for ruling the world. Now they hate us for not ruling the world. Now we’re two-faced thieves who brought the entire international monetary system to the brink of collapse, and only Putin and Co., with his brave bancor, rode to the rescue. It’s become weirdly personal. The French are taking it out on expats because there aren’t any American tourists now that a baguette costs the equivalent of fifty bucks. Last night a woman in the supermarché dumped a pot of crème fraîche on my hair.”

  Nollie had always been wildly opinionated, and Carter wouldn’t be surprised if she was assaulted by crème fraîche because she wouldn’t keep her views to herself even in a supermarket. In her time, Enola Mandible had been quite the performer, speaking to countless literary festivals in the wake of her sole big success. He’d seen her speak once at the Ninety-Second Street Y, addressing that kind of soft crowd that you didn’t have to win over—that was already pleased as punch with the main attraction and yearned only to grow more so. So she could toss out perceptions that for any halfway intelligent person constituted run-of-the-mill dinner-party fare, but that scanned to her band of pumped fans as life-altering revelations. Likewise she could crack the odd lame joke, and because writers had a well-earned reputation as stuffy and tedious, these pre-delighted folks thought she was hilarious.

  “That’s all very interesting,” Carter said. “But we have to talk about Pop—”

  “Sure we do, but we can talk face-to-face. That’s the point, Carter. I’m coming home.” Nollie hadn’t referred to the United States as home for decades.

  “Coming home where?” Carter asked warily.

  “Well, with all your extra bedrooms … I thought, you know, as usual, I could stay at your place.”

  “No can do. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Pop and his batty sidekick are moving in here. He can’t pay for that larcenous feedlot anymore. I sure hope you weren’t counting on it, because the Mandible ‘fortune’ is finished.”

  “Jesus fuck! I hope you mean—it’s depleted?”

  “I mean it’s gone.”

  The silence, hardly Nollie’s preferred form of communication, spoke volumes: she had been counting on it. Of course she had. They all had. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said glumly at last. “Why should our family be any different.” It wasn’t a question. “Christ, are there any rich Americans left?”

  “If so, they’re keeping their heads down. So if you do come back here, don’t complain and keep your mouth shut. Which doesn’t come naturally to you, so you’re going to have to be mindful. The whole country is conv
inced that the ‘über-rich’ have walked off with the store. The truth of the matter is that to be robbed, you have to have something to steal. So the folks who’ve been really burned are necessarily the people whom nobody feels sorry for.”

  “Maybe we shouldn’t expect sympathy,” Nollie said, rousing, “when we never deserved the money anyway—”

  “Can the pious poppycock with me, sister. Jayne and I had been thinking about decamping to a ranch in Montana once the Mandible ship came in. Now we’re crammed into the same old shit box in Carroll Gardens, looking at second careers as full-time geriatric nurses.”

  “Well, you do have those two other bedrooms—”

  “Pop can’t sleep with Luella, who needs her own room, because she apparently suffers from ‘nighttime agitation.’ So Jayne will need her Quiet Room more than ever.”

  “Oh, right, I forgot. Jayne’s Quiet Room.”

  “Don’t be snide. You take up a lot of space yourself, friend. If you need a place to crash, why not make up with Momma? That apartment’s the size of a football field.”

  In the divorce settlement, Douglas was awarded the appointments that hailed from Bountiful House, but their mother retained the couple’s four-bedroom on West End and West Eighty-Eighth Street. Alas, Mimi’s fury that Nollie applauded their father’s “rediscovery of desire” in 1992 proved to have the shelf life of radioactive waste. Nollie had hardened in response, and wouldn’t care to admit it even now, but being disowned by her mother and banished from the home where she grew up had been deeply wounding. The feud helped to explain her flouncing off to Europe a few years later—on the proceeds of a scarcely fictionalized novel that recapitulated the Mimi-Luella-Douglas triangle in terms sure to keep their mother’s grievance fresh.

  “We’re not getting into that,” Nollie said. “Besides, she’d see right through any rapprochement contrived to secure me a free bed. She’s old, she’s not an idiot.”

  “Maybe you should stay in France.”