The Mandibles

by Lionel Shriver

  “I can’t. For an American, anywhere in Europe is physically dangerous. We’re being assaulted. And not only with crème fraîche.”

  “Stay in nights, then. It’s sure to blow over.”

  “Besides, this country’s hardly one big wine-swilling soirée. At any given time, half the population is on strike, and what good is a great train system that never runs? They’re apoplectic that they can’t all retire at fifty-two. They all expect their child benefit, their gold-plated pensions, their token-pittance healthcare charges, their truncated workweek, and two solid years of unemployment at a salary most lawyers don’t earn—all of which is a human right. Along with so many holidays and vacations that the fuckers put their feet up for a third of the year. Oh, and everyone wants to work for the government; most of them do. Your basic all-cart, no-horse. So the whole country plops into the hay wagon and wonders why it doesn’t move.”

  “It’s got to be better than here,” Carter said.

  “Furthermore, the whole Muslim thing is out of control,” Nollie bullied on obliviously. “If I walk down the Champs-Élysées, I’ll get thumped for being a deadbeat. If I walk anywhere less central, I’ll get thumped because I’m not wearing a trash bag. Even in France, they’ve given up on the assimilation shtick, and gone for slavish appeasement instead. Whole tracts of the country are effectively no-go areas for actual French people. It’s the same all over Europe now, so there’s nowhere to go.”

  “I’m getting a feel for how popular you must make yourself over there.”

  “Oh, it’s just like the US. Everyone’s resigned. America is now Greater Mexico, and the Continent is an extension of the Middle East.”

  “Look—do you have any money?”

  “Some,” Nollie said carefully. “Fortunately, in bancors.”

  “You can’t hold bancors in this country.”

  “Boy, land of the free! But officially, you can’t do a lot of things. At least the exchange rate is wildly in my favor—and more wildly every day. What the hell is happening over there? Every time I check, the dollar has sunk again.”

  “I was going to say—I don’t want to speak for her—but if you have resources, it’s possible that Florence could put you up. Her tenant isn’t paying nearly market rent, and he’s turned into another of her charity cases. And you and Florence always seemed to get along.” Which is beyond my understanding, Carter did not add.

  “I like that kid Willing,” Nollie considered. “I don’t like many kids. Funny, he fleXted me a few months ago. Wanted to know how hard it was to immigrate to France. I told him to forget it, but the question, if peculiar, showed pluck. Anyway, it’ll take me a few months to wrap things up here, so there’s time to explore the options.”

  “Think about it. And, you know”—Carter had to push himself—“it’ll be good to see you.”

  Recap: he had failed to tempt his sister into any support of their father and his pet wife, either fiduciary or logistical. Typical. Nollie had done as she pleased her whole life. The concept of duty was foreign to her, and it was only the people who acknowledged duty, and who had regard for duty, who got saddled with it.

  Carter allowed himself a last walk-through of his father’s compound to say good-bye to a host of objects that had furnished his childhood, discreetly taking memorial snapshots with his fleX. Darkened from hours of absorption in all that future landfill in the library, the padded leather four-seater and its companion armchairs displayed a workmanship the world would never see again. Ditto the claw-footed, curly-maple dining table, from which he and Nollie had been exiled during raucous adults-only dinner parties with the wits and scholars of the day; they probably didn’t make wits and scholars of that quality anymore either. Surfaces were dotted with treasures, the overtly useless but pricey detritus that one gave the well-off, like the ornate clock in the shape of an open book whose tiny numbers were too poorly positioned to tell the time, and whose battery had run out in the 1980s. Presumably staff would hold a giant stoop sale once residents of his father’s ilk had cleared off, but they wouldn’t raise much. Carter had contacted a few estate sales agents about liquidating his father’s effects, but they must have been drowning in similar requests; none of his messages was returned.

  Back when imagining Douglas’s overnight impoverishment would simply have been a game of emotional sudoku, Carter would have supposed that the effect of perfectly removing the money from the equation of their relationship would be, say, “considerable.” He’d not have anticipated that it would be more like “earth-shattering.” It turned out that the fortune Douglas had just lost wasn’t merely a large element in their dealings with each other; for all intents and purposes, it had been the only element. Horrifyingly, that lurking lucre had controlled everything that Carter did in his father’s presence, and everything he said.

  The surprise of sudden penury wasn’t only the scale of the change, but its character. In retrospect, wealth had contorted Douglas Mandible’s very nature. It made him suspicious, cynical, and aloof; it made him secretive, manipulative, and superior. It exaggerated a father-son hierarchy that in Pop’s advanced age should have been breaking down. These days, Douglas was staggeringly expressive, needy, and direct.

  As for Carter: before the elephant left the room, he had no idea how much he resented it. Dancing around the money for decades, being exaggeratedly deferential, dithering about whether to ever allude to the money or to elaborately avoid its mention, questioning himself over why he really made these obeisant pilgrimages to New Milford, however fleetingly looking forward to his own father’s death—the whole package had made him feel venal. Vulgar. Unworthy, scabrous, and morally bankrupt. And he’d resented his father personally—for the man’s complicity in making Carter feel like a weak, dissembling worm, and for his crude abuse of power (take that sadistic delay before the Renunciation Address, when Douglas had toyed with him, dragging out the verdict on what was left of the investments, so clearly enjoying himself: the scene returned to Carter in a rush of revulsion). So while he might have expected to be consumed with fury that Pop hadn’t better protected the family piggy bank, Carter’s far more dominant sensation was relief.

  For it was impossible to be angry at the poor guy. Deprived of his mighty financial cudgel, Douglas Mandible was just a very old man with a host of heartbreaking vanities, no influence, and scads of dead friends. Carter felt he could see his father clearly for the first time. There was no colossal edifice to rage against—just a half-broken man who needed his help. Obviously, Douglas could still be exasperating, and the practical consequences of Pop’s insolvency were cataclysmic. But in the main, to his son’s astonishment, on every visit here this year Carter had been flushed with tenderness, sometimes to the point of tears. (Cleansed of ulterior motives, he had continued to visit, had he not? Perversely, the divestiture bestowed a gift: he’d woken one morning to discover that he was not a monster. He hadn’t even realized that he’d felt like a monster. That’s how monstrous he’d become.) In the face of Pop’s blubbering apologies about having mishandled the estate, he’d repeatedly intoned that the events of last fall were unforeseeable, most other Americans of means had suffered the same fate, and the fortune’s annihilation was not his father’s fault. Whether or not Carter quite bought into the lyrics of this lullaby, he was finally able to like his father, and to like himself, too. Freed to be genuinely kind—kindness to a purpose was not called kindness—he was also newly at liberty to act brusque, testy, bored, cross, impatient, and inattentive if not oblivious, like a real person. Only now could he appreciate how much a desire to please imposed distance, created falsity even when a putatively pleasing assertion was perfectly true, and ruined your sense of humor.

  Affectionately, Carter remembered to slip the mahogany box of silver into a battered canvas book bag from long-defunct Barnes & Noble. He carried it nonchalantly to his backseat, making sure to lock the car again before returning for the luggage.

  To Carter’s consternation, Dougl
as had hung on to an enormous 1940s leather suitcase plastered with decals from exotic destinations and designed for ocean voyages with swarms of porters. No wheels! No porters, either, since Wellcome’s staff had grown sullen with residents whose accounts were in arrears. At seventy, Carter shouldn’t be hauling awkward loads this heavy, not with the arthritis in his knees and an iffy disc in his lower back. But muscular Lat orderlies observed his difficulties from the reception steps with contemptuous detachment.

  Lugged at last to the BeEtle, the cursed case wouldn’t fit in the trunk. Under the merciless gaze of those orderlies, it was humiliating to deconstruct his father’s packing job and stuff the white suits, ascots, monogrammed boxers, and finely stitched cordovans into the canvas shopping hold-alls stuffed under the front passenger seat for trips to Fairway. Jammed between stashes of adult diapers, which Carter had prudently pilfered from the compound’s cupboards, the appurtenances looked like thrift-shop donations. He could not picture Jayne ironing all that linen.

  Luella had wandered off. The two men spent half an hour finding her, snagged and whimpering on the perimeter’s barbed wire. Troublingly, rather than help disentangle his wife’s dress, Douglas shuffled back to the car. Thrashing, she re-ensnared herself almost as fast as Carter could release the fabric, crying, “Phasers on stun, Captain!”

  Carter clapped his hands once she was free. “Let’s go, Luella! Here, girl, get a move on!” As she heeled, he could see how his father had fallen into the pet thing.

  Yet at the car she balked, less like a dog than cattle with a whiff of the abattoir. “Never, won’t, can’t, not!” she screamed, whipping her arms back and forth. Like toddlers, Luella commonly located her sole sense of agency in the negative.

  “Best let her exhaust herself,” Douglas advised from the passenger seat. Sure enough, after a few minutes’ flailing, Luella plopped in a heap on the gravel, and Carter was able to lift her into the backseat, eyes rolling back, limbs flopped.

  “Are her immunizations up to date?” Carter asked, starting the car. “Because she scratched herself on that rusty wire. There might be a danger of tetanus.”

  “We can always hope,” Douglas said.

  On the gloomy drive to the city, Carter inquired, “Do you have any income streams right now? Pensions, annuities, corporate bonds?” Now that there was no money, they could talk about money.

  Douglas’s chuckle lapsed to a cough. “There’s always Social Security!”

  “Don’t mock. Plenty of people are barely hanging on because of Social Security.”

  “But where does the Social Security come from? Payroll intake must have plummeted.”

  “They have to come across with those checks, or there’d be a nationwide insurrection.”

  “At my age, I wouldn’t frighten many bureaucrats on a picket line.”

  “You can still vote.”

  “For now,” Douglas said. “I know we relics tend to see things bleakly. But I wouldn’t count on anything anymore, and that includes the right to kick the bums out.”

  Handwringing about the end of American democracy seemed silly, and Carter didn’t pursue it.

  After a journey grown circuitous since the partial closing of the BQE, they drew into Carroll Gardens. “I thought this borough had become a shining citadel of the professional class,” Douglas remarked. “Not as smart as I remembered.”

  Every block was blighted with closed commercial properties. Elite restaurants that nine months ago kept long waiting lists had dirty windows plastered with FOR RENT signs. Shops selling upscale trinkets like wind chimes for cribs were boarded shut. The city had cut back on street cleaning, and curbsides fluttered with trash. Panhandlers were not only more numerous, but older and better dressed. Begging always picked up during downturns, but their placards were distinctive to this one: RUINED BY MY OWN GOVERNMENT. ALVARADO CLEANED ME OUT—PLEASE GIVE. MY DAUGHTER AND MEDICAID!! REFUSE TO TAKE ME IN. I COULD BE YOUR GRANDMOTHER.

  Carter hadn’t renewed his garage membership, and street parking was encumbered by abandoned cars the cops were sluggish about towing away. Finding a space would take a while, so he dropped off his passengers and their bags in front. Alerted to their arrival by fleXt, Jayne was waiting on the stoop to greet them, her frozen rictus of welcome straight from a horror-movie reaction shot. She was flapping in one of the dark, ankle-length dresses in which she’d huddled since her breakdown—the masses of fabric with which aging women often concealed weight gain, though Jayne was a picky, neurotic eater and disturbingly thin. That tortured expression—what she surely imagined was a look of gladness, openness, and joy—would appear to anyone else like pain. The fact that she dyed her hair a severe jet-black intensified the suggestion of fraudulence. A pity. Jayne Darkly had been a beautiful woman, a truthful woman, and the snapshot was unfair.

  But talk about giving the wrong impression: with an elegance that recalled what had originally attracted his father, Luella held the shredded hem of her dress daintily above her knee and stepped regally to the sidewalk. “What a pleasure,” she said, touching her hands lightly to Jayne’s shoulders and kissing her hostess airily on each cheek. “Why, I’m sorry to trouble you, but I could simply murder a cup of tea.”

  Jayne glanced at Carter in surprise, and he shrugged. “Don’t get used to it.”

  • CHAPTER 8 •

  THE JOYS OF BEING INDISPENSABLE

  When Lowell scheduled a “family meeting,” the kids didn’t know what it was.

  “It means you all show up in the living room, at the same time, with no excuses, and shut up.” The last few months, Lowell’s sensitive parenting skills had frayed.

  “But my debate team is strategizing on Thursday night,” Goog objected.

  “I don’t give a hoot about your debate team, and pretty soon”—Lowell feared he was letting the agenda out of the bag—“you won’t, either.”

  Since the stilted practice was never a part of the Stackhouse routine, the convocation was resentful. Goog scowled on the sofa with his arms crossed. Bing kicked at the footstool repeatedly. Savannah curled sulkily on the floor and buffed her nails, her body oriented toward the dark picture window as if no one else were present.

  Lowell and Avery had discussed which parent would take the lead. To her credit, Avery had volunteered, conceding, “Whoever delivers the blow-by-blow they’re going to hate.” Lowell countered, “They’ll hate both of us soon enough. Might as well act like a man. I get little enough opportunity.” So Lowell remained standing, while Avery perched on the arm of a recliner, as if poised to tackle children who tried to bolt.

  “When I was a boy,” he started in—not the most propitious introduction, since when he was a boy any speech that began When I was a boy he immediately tuned out—“I had only the haziest notion of what my parents did for a living, and I didn’t really care. I didn’t care how they made sure there were always groceries in the fridge. All that mattered was when I wanted one, I could make a sandwich. I wasn’t given carte blanche permission to do or buy whatever I wanted, but within reason I was privileged—although not nearly as privileged as you three. But all you kids must be aware of some big changes in this country since last fall, because we’ve raised you to pay attention. I’m afraid that means big changes for our family, too. Mom and I want you to know that we’re not doing this because we’re big meanies. We don’t have any choice.”

  “What’s with the drum roll?” Goog said. “In public-speaking class, they warn you against excessive build-up. With too much da da-da dahh! no matter what you say later, the audience is disappointed.”

  “You will be disappointed,” Lowell snapped. “Starting next term, you and Bing will be enrolled in public school. We can’t pay tuition at Gates and Sidwell anymore. Goog, you’ll be going to Theodore Roosevelt High School in Petworth.”

  “But Petworth is—” Goog objected.

  “Petworth is what?” Lowell would make him say it.

  “Lat,” Goog muttered, at least sounding asha
med of himself.

  “And what’s wrong with that?” Lowell’s question dangled. “Bing, we tried to get you into Deal Middle School, which is closer and might have a more … like-minded student body. But they don’t have any places for the fall. Too many parents like us are in the same situation. So for next year it’s Tubman Elementary in Columbia Heights.”

  “Does Tubman have an orchestra?” Bing asked in a small voice.

  “Come on, all my friends are at Gates, and Roosevelt is roachbar!” Goog exclaimed. “A lot of public schools don’t participate in the interschool debate circuit at all! I bet Roosevelt doesn’t even have a lacrosse team.”

  “No, Goog, no lacrosse, and no, Bing, I wouldn’t take an instrument worth a nickel into that neighborhood these days, even if they do have an orchestra.”

  “I’m going to have to drive you to and from school, honey,” Avery told Bing, who had been walking the four blocks to Sidwell Friends School. “Just for safety.”

  “How are you going to do that?” Savannah asked coolly, still facing away from the rest of the family and concentrating on her hands. “I thought you worked.”

  “Mom’s practice,” Avery said, curiously driven to the third person, “is part of the problem. Mom’s patients can’t afford their appointments anymore. Which means Mom can’t afford the rent on her office.”

  The complete lack of involvement in the work world of parents that Lowell had initially addressed was already palpable in this living room. The particulars of what led them to withdraw their sons from private education were clearly the source of perfect indifference. Kids must universally be like this: all that matters is what happens to them.

  “Maybe if you gave the kind of therapy that’s actually useful,” Savannah said, “that wasn’t half-mystical hokum—people would still pay for it.”

  “What’s useful to people,” Avery said with admirable control, “changes.”

  “As for you”—Lowell pivoted to his daughter—“we’re all very proud of you for getting into Risdee. It’s a big achievement. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to take delayed acceptance, and I can’t make any promises about next year, either.”