Property

by Lionel Shriver

Yet the next morning, their neighbor from across the street, Judy Leavenson, phoned as early as acceptable on a Sunday. “I knew it was getting bad downtown,” she said. “But I’m a little surprised that it’s spread to Morningside. Don’t get me wrong, my heart goes out to the urban poor, but are y’all aware that there’s a homeless person sleeping smack outside your front door?”

  Harriet peeked through the den’s venetian blinds. Sure enough, the plastic containers were stacked in a fort formation, inside of which the tarp was laid over the grass. She recognized the disordered swaddling around the motionless lump in the center as the light-blue sheets and thin-weave yellow blanket they’d provided Liam for his truncated stint in O4W, which he’d topped with the cherry-red, housewares-dotted tablecloth, whose vibrancy called attention to his dilemma. That Liam had ventured no farther than the front yard was dispiriting, but locating the box of linens still stashed beneath the carport displayed more resourcefulness than she’d seen him manifest in thirty-two years.

  “That’s a homeless person, all right,” Harriet said. “It’s Liam. We decided it was time he found alternative accommodation.”

  “Mercy me, Harriet, that’s simply extraordinary!” The proclamation was studiously impartial. “You mean you’ve chucked that boy out?”

  “We’ve suggested that our young man take responsibility for himself, yes.”

  “My dear,” Court said in her ear. “Sorry to interrupt, but he’s going to get hungry.”

  “Isn’t that the point?” Harriet exclaimed, covering the receiver. She was flustered, if only because she’d been thinking the same thing. “Isn’t getting hungry the very essence of your survival instinct kicking in?”

  Yet by the time she finished trying to explain to Judy their tough-love philosophy in terms that didn’t make them seem like animals, a second peek through the blinds revealed a plate beside their stirring petitioner, with a freshly toasted bagel and cream cheese, drizzled with strawberry jam—just the way Liam liked it. Court wasn’t cut out for this stuff.

  Word of Liam’s plight spread rapidly down the lane, and neighbors cleaved down the middle. To a portion of their peers, the pitiless Friel-Garsons lacked any normal nurturing impulse and had no appreciation for the daunting financial obstacles confronting young people today. To others, they were brave crusaders finally laying down the law to a coddled, work-shy generation that adults were obliged to put aside childish things, and that included their old bedrooms.

  Harriet and Court’s supporters were given to high fives and shoulder claps, but Liam’s sympathizers were more proactive. Thus a large purple domed tent with nicely sealed seams, zippered half-moon entrance, and net windows for cross-ventilation was now pitched in their front yard. Other well-wishers obliged with a light sleeping bag and air bed—doubles, the better to allow for conjugal visits. Locally resident backers provided access to convenient bathrooms, so that Liam actually took more showers as a refugee than he had as an overstaying houseguest. Cases of soda and iced coolers of beer appeared, along with a coterie of his fellow spongers, who would linger into the summer evenings as the heat subsided, perching on Liam’s plastic containers while playing catch-and-release with fireflies.

  It took little more than a week for the banner to unfurl. Painted in purple letters to match the tent, parenthood has no statute of limitations stretched from a dowel driven beside the driveway to the trunk of the far magnolia. Chagrined, and anxious that their son might take advantage of an open door to push back inside, both parents took to coming and going by the back entrance, which meant scuttling through the hollow scold of Liam’s old haunt. They skulked shiftily in and out of the car, like squatters keeping their heads down and uneasy about the arrival of police.

  The supplicant on their lawn was unlikely to starve. To the contrary, the Friel-Garsons’ trash cans began to fill up with discarded wax paper from deli sandwiches and Styrofoam containers sticky with barbecue sauce. Liam left emptied Pyrex casserole dishes by the mailbox for retrieval. There he also deposited bags of dirty laundry that vanished and rematerialized fresh and neatly folded, just as his clothes had miraculously rejuvenated themselves his whole life.

  In attracting a flock of other failed fledglings, Liam had at last located his social milieu, as well as a sizable enough national constituency—highly motivated by fellow feeling and bald self-interest, eternally online, and chronically underoccupied—to keep their young man in short ribs and sides of coleslaw for some time to come. Harriet had never seen him so chatty and at ease around other people, many of whom appeared to revere him as a celebrity icon, though her son had never before evidenced what she’d call leadership qualities. One of his comrades in the cause—a core quintet had labeled itself proudly “The Freeloading Five”—produced a device for a Wi-Fi hotspot, the better to rally support farther afield. Donations from other bedroom barnacles poured into their website from as far away as Oregon and Maine. And who was the inspirational organizer of this fund-raising, as well as the primary publicist, the logistics mastermind, indeed, the chief strategist of the whole campaign? Jocanda.

  Its environs increasingly trashed, like the site of a recently vacated flea market, the split-level on Wildwood Place also became subject to pickets, during which a contingent of millennials shuffled the sidewalk prodding smart phones while shouldering placards: safe space is a human right and peter pan rules! Gawkers from other neighborhoods, along with some motorists with out-of-state plates, began rubbernecking slowly past their address in sufficient numbers that neighbors complained. The whole reason they’d moved to a cul-de-sac was to avoid this kind of traffic.

  “I think we’re losing the hearts and minds war,” Court worried at dinner after they’d endured the notoriety for three weeks. It had hit them both as a particularly low blow that Fluffernutter had defected to the purple tent just that morning. “I wonder if we should install one of those Central Americans after all. Better for our rep than advertising that getting Liam’s room back has made it possible to store bulk purchases from Costco.”

  “Central Americans are old hat this summer,” Harriet said. “It would have to be a Syrian refugee.”

  “Not sure you can get one on Amazon. Maybe I could ask my cousin George to move in. He’s got dark hair, and this time of year he’d have a tan.”

  Whimsy wasn’t much help when the inevitable occurred: news teams descended from WSB-TV and Fox 5. As his parents peered around the carport, Liam held forth for the cameras with more lucidity than he’d ever employed at the dinner table, suggesting that perhaps his eviction would be the making of the man after all. Harriet couldn’t discern the whole interview, but did catch snippets—about “the well-off’s indifference to the plight of the less fortunate” and “the disenfranchised simply seeking a better life,” phrases he had clearly lifted wholesale from the coverage of the European migration crisis, as well as despair of “intergenerational inequality” and “the sacrifice of affordable housing to the scourge of luxury condominiums.”

  Neither parent hungered for the limelight, but Harriet thought it vital that someone put the case for their side. So once a journalist again stalked toward the couple returning from work, she emerged onto the driveway. Having been conferring passionately with their supporters for the last month, she imagined that her arguments about young people only thriving from shouldering responsibility for themselves were in good order. But she hadn’t counted on the pounding terror that hit the moment the furry mic lunged at her face like a rabid stuffed animal. “But I liked living … When I was that age …” she blithered. “Little Five. Plates. They didn’t match, but they still went together.”

  The journalist had that thank-God-this-isn’t-going-outlive look, and turned to Court. “What do you say to the charge some of your neighbors have made that throwing your own child out on the street is brutal and unfeeling?”

  “I wouldn’t call a springy zoysia lawn the same as the street,” Court said defensively. “Besides, our son is always welcome i
n his own home.”

  The man appeared put out. Obviously, if what Court just said was true, this was a nonstory. “So you’re officially inviting Mr. Friel-Garson to move back into the house? And this whole tent in the yard display is a stunt.”

  “My wife wanted to make a point. It wasn’t my idea—all this commotion. Liam’s a good boy. And he’s wise beyond his years. Some young people—they’re too sensitive for this world. Forcing the likes of Liam to work reception at some downtown hotel—well, it would be a terrible waste of human capital.”

  “Our son is always welcome in his own home?” Harriet quoted him back furiously once the news crews had packed up. “I sure don’t call that having my back!”

  “I’m sorry,” Court said. “But I need to show you something.” He pulled out the family tablet and brought up supportthefreeloadingfive.com (whose fund-raising counter now read $21,347.50), albeit only to locate a link. “See? There was this guy Brian Haw in London, who camped out on Parliament Square to protest British foreign policy or something. Iraq and stuff. Everybody brought him food. Know how long he lived in that tent, which was covered in artwork and buttons, banners and placards—a massive eyesore in the center of London, for thousands of Chinese tourists to trip over? The whole time, constantly shouting down a megaphone at members of Parliament trying to work across the street and driving them nuts? Ten years.”

  “I can’t imagine Liam having that kind of stamina.”

  “I think stamina is exactly what he’s got,” Court said, with a rare contrariness. “And if their site is linking to Brian Haw, we may not have awakened his survival instinct so much as his competitive one. I bet he’d like to set a record.”

  Harriet slumped at the kitchen table. She considered the indefinite plunking in their bedroom doorway, the inert keeping watch through the curtains when they first changed the locks, that improbable patience with cups filled, emptied, and filled again that went back to Liam’s toddlerhood. Inadvertently, in ejecting the boy from downstairs, they had converted their son from deadbeat to dissenter. They’d allowed him to find his calling. “So you want us to cave.”

  “This Haw guy. They made documentaries about him. He ran for municipal office. He didn’t win, but he did win in the big picture. He won every day he stayed camped on that square. Meanwhile, Parliament tried passing all kinds of laws to get rid of him, and they didn’t work.”

  “What did work, then? Finally, after ten years?”

  “He died of cancer.”

  “If we’re going head-to-head on mortality,” Harriet conceded, “I guess Liam’s got the edge.”

  “Meanwhile, as far as most of the public is concerned, we look like jerks. We have a two-salary income and a full fridge and a four-bedroom empty nest that we don’t want him to keep living in on principle. But what’s the principle? That it’s better for him, and the country at large, for young people to bootstrap themselves the way we did. But when we came of age, housing and education were cheaper. Adjusted for inflation, wages were higher. So the ‘principle’ really comes down to we don’t want him here. Because it’s our house, and we’ve done our bit, and our hospitality has been exhausted. Because, you know, enough is enough already. We can make that case all right, but it sounds mean spirited.”

  “Like, we don’t have to take care of him, so we won’t,” Harriet recapitulated. “But does it matter, what other people think?”

  “Theoretically, maybe not. Realistically—yeah, it probably does. And this is an impasse. Even if we stand firm and take the flak, what’s the endgame? We don’t have one.”

  The bundles of paper towels and cases of tuna fish from Costco got stacked in the corner of the master bedroom. To reclaim the space, Harriet stopped abjuring her son not to waste whole rolls of Bounty on swabbing kitchen spills. Alicia found the O4W furniture under the carport a godsend when she established her own apartment. The round of dead grass from the tent never did grow back, and marked the front lawn forever after like a giant manhole cover. Jocanda got pregnant. If softened on the cracker boyfriend, her mother still had much less room in a luxury condo, so Jocanda moved into Wildwood Place once the little girl, Pebbles, was born; Germany had absorbed over a million migrants the previous year, in comparison with which taking in one mother and child couldn’t even count as bighearted. It made sense for Harriet and Court to shift downstairs, allowing Liam and Jocanda to assume the master bedroom—right across from the erstwhile home gym, now redecorated as a nursery. They lugged the StairMaster to the utility room. In the fullness of time, naturally the couple retired, and into their seventies displayed early-warning forgetfulness. According to their lawyer, the protocol was standard. Medicaid’s “look-back period” in Georgia was five years, so in order to keep from being penalized for transferring assets at under fair market value, advance planning was of the essence.

  The Royal Male

  The first time was occasioned by his bad knee. After onerously following the rise and fall of the coast, Gordon Bosky’s postal route in Newquay veered inland and passed right by his own semidetached. The ache had been sharpish, so he pulled the trolley into his vestibule, fixed a cup of tea, and fell asleep. When he awoke it was too late to finish the delivery without drawing a torrent of complaints, and the following morning there would be yet more mail—too much to fit in the trolley without removing the undelivered tranche. So he loaded the orphaned post into a bin liner, which remained at the foot of the stairs for some time. Nobody noticed; the sun still rose in the sky.

  Of course, his neighbors might have objected had their post ceased to arrive altogether. Thus with impressive psychological acuity and mathematical cunning, Gordon learned to calculate just how often a trolley full of envelopes and packets could go missing with no one the wiser. As for why? He was overworked and underpaid. The Royal Mail demanded that routes be completed far too double-quick for a man with a dodgy knee. From his own discerning perusals, the post these days was chock-full of such rubbish that his customers were well spared: a catalog flogging motorized salt cellars, or rebukes from the Revenue in brown envelopes so cheap and grim that you’d think it was still World War II.

  But perhaps most of all because nary a soul ever posted an envelope to Gordon Bosky himself. It was hardly fair for the means by which a man earned his crust to rub it in on a daily basis that he was alone in this world. He’d originally shifted to Cornwall on the assumption that a holiday destination would be teeming with sex-starved widows and rich American divorcées. Instead, Newquay was overrun with lean, cliquish surfers who looked right through a fifty-five-year-old postman as if he were a jellyfish.

  Thus as the bin liners burgeoned, Gordon came to look on his stash as his own sort of tax, or more kindly, a tithe. Since no more did beholden customers hand their postman a discreetly folded tenner or even a sodding fruitcake at Christmas, he was therefore obliged to extract an additional gratuity around the holidays, when the pickings were more choice. Or they once were. Enragingly, indolent shoppers were now purchasing the tastier gear through Amazon, which shunned the Royal for couriers. Really. As if postmen weren’t to be trusted.

  Combing through his booty was hard work, and the council might have commended his diligent recycling—the blue boxes out front forever bulging with circulars, bank statements, blood-test reports, and Tesco coupons that regrettably he couldn’t use because their bar codes didn’t match his Club Card. Accordingly, Gordon felt he’d earned the few usable bits of kit he salvaged, like fleece-lined slippers only a size too small. Alas, rare personal correspondence merely confirmed that his neighbors were a tedious lot: cranky complaints about a tube of toothpaste full of air, or handwritten hate mail for some poor journalist on Jubilee Street—scrawled in green ink, dripping exclamation marks, all in capital letters, every other word underscored three times.

  But one elegant envelope caught his attention in September. The handwriting of the address was fluid but firm, and what’s more it was legible (for the bane of a postman’s life
of late was tosspots raised on computers whose cursive rendition of Newquay was indistinguishable from Moscow). Inside, on quality stationery:

  Dear Erskine,

  Forgive my impertinence, but my daughter located you for me on Facebook (an enigma quite beyond my ken, I’m afraid). You may not remember me, but we attended school together at Bergen Grammar in Peterborough. After thirty-nine years, I can finally admit that I fancied you then. I admired not only the confidence with which you managed your difficulties, but also the shrewdness with which you used hardship to your advantage.

  My daughter claims that you’re single, and describes your photograph as “roughly handsome”. My husband died some years ago. Would you care to meet up? I’m attending a film festival in Newquay the first week in November.

  If I don’t hear from you, perhaps your life is too full to accommodate a virtual stranger, and no offence taken.

  Best regards,

  Deirdre St James (the girl in the little red hat)

  Poncey name. Still, Gordon and Deirdre must have been about the same age, and after four decades you could have turned into anybody. He surely qualified as “roughly handsome,” if with a tad too much emphasis on the adverb. A shut-in who’d never so much as peered through his letter box, the real Erskine Espadrille (very poncey name) had recently vacated his dwelling without taking the judicious precaution of purchasing redirection services. A skinflint whom Deirdre (about whom he already felt proprietary) was better off without. Gordon wrote back.

  Pleasantly, his letter did not land in the hands of a postman like himself, and achieved its mission. When she rang the number “Erskine” had enclosed, Deirdre’s voice engendered the same clarity and firmness of her handwriting. A mischief in her laugh was consonant with a little girl who had sported a quirky red hat. They arranged to meet at a café not far from the Lighthouse Cinema, between screenings she was keen to catch; a proper film buff, was Deirdre.

  A well-kept, stylish woman with neat, short gray hair entered the café right on time, per their agreed signal wrapped in a bright red scarf, a token of her girlhood trademark.