He refused to go to university. I had walked in on several prolix sessions in the parlour—not rows, they were civil—when I visited from Manhat-tan. Truman would be extolling the simple-honest-man and his simple-honest-job, for wasn’t it ordinary hard-working people who built this country…? My father would rub his chin with a smirk until Truman ran out of euphemisms for unskilled labour, then deliver his own monologue about the value of a liberal arts education and what a privilege it was to ‘luxuriate in the fields of the mind’.
For years Truman didn’t give in, and considering that I think of him as the family toady he deserves some credit for holding out so long.
Truman drove deliveries for Ferguson’s Hardware for a decade. Averil’s father owned the store, and it was there they met; she worked the floor weekends while getting an education degree from NC State. Her father paid my brother execrably even after he became an in-law, though Truman received his fifteen-cent-an-hour raises with the same awed, unquestioning acceptance of divine intervention on his behalf as when his allowance went up to thirty cents from a quarter.
‘I understood that job,’ he explained. ‘I got to know the layout of the city the way you did London on your scooter, right? The truck was cosy. It was my truck. I played tapes and sang along and in the winter the heater kept it snug and in the summer I had air conditioning…And I always packed a swell lunch.’
I wanted to say, come on Truman, wasn’t it dull, didn’t you 59
crave something challenging, I mean how can you retain so much affection for a bloody van, for Christ’s sake, but I stopped myself. I do not know why this so rarely occurs to me, but I remembered for once that my brother was not me.
‘I thought you found philosophy stimulating.’
‘It was OK at first. Lately…Well, you’d think that all those books about is there a God and the implications of mortality and do we have free will would be of some help, right, when your mother dies? If they’re not some kind of explanation or resort, what good are they?’
‘Not much.’
‘These airy-fairy philosophers are no use at all!’ He waved his hands.
‘I find Mother downstairs one morning, do you think I was going to look up ‘Mothers: death’ in an index? It’s just, Corlis, all these Great Questions, they don’t seem to have anything to do with my life. I used to feel ashamed of myself. I was afraid I wasn’t smart or serious enough to be edified by all that wordy pondering. But now I wonder if maybe I’m plugged in and it’s these cobwebbed old farts who haven’t a clue.
When Dr Chasson launches into the mind-body problem I sit in the back of the class remembering that tomorrow is Tuesday and it’s time to wheel the trash to the curb. But, you know, maybe garbage disposal is actually more important! For that matter, all this, is there a God?
Corlis—I don’t care!’
‘Huh,’ I considered. ‘I guess I don’t either.’
‘Most people don’t! All they care about,’ he added grimly, ‘is being right.’
Truman had always been given to diatribes, and I found them wonderful.
We had crossed in front of Peace College, passed Krispey Kreme Donuts, and were now ambling down Person Street. Mordecai lived off Person Street, in a basement under the post office to our left, and as if to advertise this fact ‘Mordecai Florist’ (no relation) blinked in neon on this block. Truman sped up; I lingered. I could feel a pulse here, a thrum up through my feet as if my brother’s Rockwell table saw rumbled the whole street; metal shrieked in the distance. Poking off the post office’s far wall, DECIBELLE, INC. swung on the plain black sign, and the back end of the army surplus troop transporter loomed up the slanted drive to the curb. I knew better, however, than to suggest we stop by. On
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the other hand, had Truman not wanted to risk running into his brother at all he could have eliminated Person from a stroll he took every day. An eccentric flirtation.
We reached a parking sign. We about-faced. We turned around here because he always turned here: the usual logic.
‘If you’re so disaffected,’ I said, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘I’m going to be a professor,’ he recited. To me, Truman’s assertion had the same colour as his announcement in third grade: I’m-going-to-be-a-fireman.
‘That would make Father happy,’ I humoured him.
‘Father was always happy,’ said Truman acidly. ‘He didn’t care what I did.’
‘He spent an awful lot of time convincing you to go to college—’
‘He just wanted to win.’
There seethed in both my brothers a resentment I didn’t quite share.
Oh, I bore a few grudges—my father never fostered my artistic ambitions, for example. Though once exposed to the caprices of Soho I could see his dissuasions as protective, the charge that I was ‘no Michelangelo’
when I was seventeen still stuck in my craw. He wasn’t an aesthetic troglodyte, either—he adored Rembrandt—but regarded art as a min-isterial calling for which you must be God-chosen, and he hadn’t seen any angel Gabriel descending to my messy room. Wouldn’t I consider, he went on to propose, nursing? ‘Nurses are much in demand in the Peace Corps,’ he commended. For years later I was tortured by visions of being stuck in some African mudhole in a peaked white cap.
After my stint in the Peace Corps I was meant to marry, end of story.
Despite his lauding of the institution, in my father’s mind once I was boxed off to my wedding he planned to give me no more thought than the Christmas ornaments in his attic: I would be taken out once a year for ceremonial purposes, then restored to my carton. Failing his expectations was the best thing that could have happened to me. Never signed, sealed and delivered to some generic husband, I remained a person, one capable of the ‘adult conversation’ my father had dreamed of. He delighted that I alone of his children shared his love of travel, and I don’t think he ever recovered from his incredulity that the girl of that lot was not, it turned out, a total idiot.
Yet both my brothers fumed, as if denied entry to the garden.
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They had tried different routes—Mordecai by beating his own path there, through brambles of his making: he’d no formal education past half of ninth grade, and taught himself to wire a mixing board under a bare bulb with a diagram. Just as furiously as my father had given it away, Mordecai had thrown himself into making pots of money, and spending even more. He would earn my father’s respect by doing everything the hard way and anything he wasn’t supposed to. But my father was an authoritarian by nature, and would never reward misbe-haviour; didn’t, to his grave.
But he wouldn’t reward good behaviour, either. He never took Truman seriously, even when his youngest capitulated and enrolled in Duke, even when Truman gave up on majoring in architecture because my father chided that while a ‘reputable’ calling it was not one in which you’d ‘make a moral difference’. My father must have known his younger son would adopt properly sublime aspirations eventually because Truman was like that. The youngest had wiped the table and done his homework; he made As and when he wanted to have sex on a regular basis he got married. Surely it was as a very consequence of this obedience that my Father dismissed him, leading me to the disconcerting conclusion that parents don’t really want you to do what they say.
My brothers’ ire was not even slightly mitigated by the fact that their father was dead. If anything they were angrier still, for in death there is a way in which you get the last word and I think they regarded the accident as underhanded.
As we once again approached Krispey Kreme, I hung back. ‘CBC?’
Truman drew himself up. ‘It’ll ruin your appetite for dinner!’
I looked back at him dully. So this is how it happened: you yearn for years to be old enough to eat doughnuts when you please, at last you grow up, to find yourself reciting platitudes about din-dins. The liberation of adulthood as we’d conceived it from below was a pipe-dream; with oppressors deposed, we bec
ame our own tyrants. ‘When was the last time you ate a Krispey Kreme?’
‘Five years ago. When you made me.’ He glared.
‘Come on!’ I hooked his arm and dragged him through the double doors. Truman could not have looked more glum if he’d been taken hostage in Lebanon.
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Krispey Kreme was an institution in Raleigh, and one corner of this town that hadn’t updated its decor since I was a kid. Lit with cold neon twenty-four hours a day, the shop had chrome-rimmed stools, counters the colour of surgical gowns, and waitresses in starched nurse-white.
With a few crudely drawn posters about breast exams, it would have doubled as a family planning clinic.
‘How’re ya’ll today?’ The waitress patted down our napkins, and without asking poured us two cups of coffee the colour of rusty tap water.
‘Cheers,’ I said. ‘We’ll have two chocolate bavarian cremes, won’t we?’
‘We will not,’ said Truman hotly.
The waitress looked enquiring, and I shot her the imperious glance of the elder whose baby brother didn’t know what was good for him.
She recognized authority when she saw it, and retrieved two revolting doughnuts hygienically gripped in wax paper.
‘Lovely,’ I said.
‘You don’t sound like you’re from around here, missy,’ she drawled.
Oh, joy, I thought. ‘No, I’m from London.’ I straightened my shoulders and set my tiny serviette in my lap, as our waitress started nattering about the Royals, and was it true that Princess Di made herself upchuck.
‘Bloody hell,’ I muttered when she retreated. ‘I thought she’d never stop whittering.’
‘Since when,’ Truman charged loudly enough for the waitress to hear,
‘were you not born in Raleigh, North Carolina?’
I hunched over my pastry and muttered, ‘From. I came from London, I didn’t say I was born there. Now eat your doughnut.’
He wouldn’t. He arched back from it stolidly, as I had from cold pot-roast on Sunday afternoons.
My own snack was unexpectedly melancholic. Sure, it was shite—the custard filling hadn’t been within miles of an egg, all corn-starch and yellow colouring, but the dough itself was motherly, and the chocolate icing formed a nice crinkly skin over the top. I made a right mess of it, and was enjoying myself until I looked at Truman, arms folded in disgust, doughnut untouched.
‘Something wrong with this here creme-fill?’
‘Aside from having about six hundred empty calories—’
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‘There is only something wrong,’ I interrupted, ‘with my kill-joy brother. Can we have that take-away, please?
‘You needn’t have been rude,’ I whispered out the door.
‘And you needn’t have lied,’ said Truman. ‘If you’ve really come back to Raleigh for good, you’re going to have to can that Cheerio! la-di-da.’
‘Just cause Ah come home don’t mean Ah have to sayound lahk a moh-ron.’
‘Keep practising,’ he said as we loped down Bloodworth. He grabbed my waxed paper bag and dropped the bavarian creme summarily in a passing bin. My brother was getting uppity.
‘So have you?’ asked Truman. ‘Come back for good?’
‘For a while, I guess. For years I was driven to get away—from this town, from our family. Why do you think I wanted to hit Krispey Kreme? At least it hasn’t changed. Because lately, the past is getting away from me.’
I had long regarded my history as a ball and chain, so had spent every spare minute trying to file it off. Raleigh itself had seemed a purgatory of the obscure whose most malevolent power was to suck me back. In two short years I realized that the past was instead terrifyingly evanes-cent. Increasingly, the town where I grew up did not exist.
‘I mean, now Mordecai’s going to force our house on the market,’ I went on. ‘Maybe that’s the limit. No house, no parents—I’m not sure I want to be that free.’
We were on the outer edges of Oakwood, where the Colonial Revivals were smaller and closer together, painted in original Reconstruction colours that approached garish—magentas, lavenders, and corals glared on window sashes, which must have suited the onslaught of posh homosexuals that had recently moved in en masse. We turned on Polk Street to enter Oakwood Cemetery, where the setting sun lemoned gravestones on hillocks.
We hiked up to the Confederate burial ground, a grid of modest identical slabs a foot high, engraved with nameless dates. After the Civil War, Union troops still occupied Raleigh. They refused to allow Confederate dead to remain in the federal cemetery on Tarboro Road, insisting that the corpses—grey in every sense now—be exhumed to make room for Union graves: one more Southern grudge to bear, and this town thrived on them. In 1867 the Wake County Memorial Association dug up some five
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hundred bodies and lugged them over here. Later, the same association hauled corpses down from the heathen North, and now there were 3000
Confederate graves on this hill. We used to play here as children, upsetting the caretakers with our shrill irreverence, and swiping plastic stars and bars from headstones to bring home and deliberately appal my father.
The official halfway point in Truman’s walk was a small memorial house erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, with cold cement benches and flagstone floor. The damp, still air was sweet with unraked leaves. From one of many bronze plaques to fallen rebels inset in granite, Truman read out:
Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently it is holy—
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not—unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people’s hopes are dead.
‘The American South,’ I observed, pretentiously like my father, ‘it’s the only place I know that revels in defeat. Most countries, after suffering ignominy, try to put it behind them.’
‘Did you ever notice,’ said Truman, ‘that Father’s attitude towards the Civil War was a little weird?’
‘Weird? It made him mad.’
‘But he wouldn’t work himself into an abolitionist lather. He was mad at Sherman. Like everyone else.’
True, and I treasured the inconsistency.
We tripped out the south cemetery gate and threaded through the margins of Oakwood, where big black mamas still darned socks on splintered porches. The central part of the neighbourhood had gentrified, and now contained the highest concentration of Ph.Ds in the city limits.
It was thanks to the Eighties boom that Heck-Andrews had multiplied into a staggeringly far-sighted investment, for this had not always been an upscale locale.
Oh, it started that way, though these tattier homes we strolled past now had been built for the Negro cooks and housekeepers who toiled in the Big Houses, like ours. Yet little by little the help didn’t remember their place and encroached on Oakwood proper, and in their wake many white owners fled.
Besides, by the 1950s it wasn’t fashionable for whites to live 65
downtown, and these creaky anachronisms were considered fusty. As remaining whites upgraded to suburban duplexes and bungalows, the real estate market in Oakwood crashed completely. Many houses were boarded, some condemned, all were in wretched disrepair. (Truman can tell this story with far more pathos than I.) By the time my parents were shopping for a house in 1963, this neighbourhood was considered a dangerous jungle-bunny slum.
Which explains why they bought here. My mother couldn’t resist a bargain—an entire mansion and outbuildings for $29,000. My father was taken by the concept of inverse integration—in those days, progress-ive whites would move into areas on the cusp of turning all-black in order to rescue the investments of Negro home-owners. For once architecture was imbued with moral qualities, though my father’s high-minded romance with his new house was short-lived.
Because if Truman is to be believed, Heck-Andrews took an immediate dislike to Sturges McCrea. I grant there was something alm
ost deliberate about the way roof slates would slide off right when her owner was leaving the porch. When my father shut a window, putty showered over his new worsted. When my father closed a door, the knob fell off.
When my father tightened a spigot, the washer crumbled and cold water spat straight in his eye.
Truman and I took our usual detour past the Moser house, in front of which we remained for a moment in an attitude of prayerful respect.
Though not nearly as grand as ours, the Moser house had been designed by the same architect, G. S. H. Appleget, in 1872.
‘So is the beltway dead for keeps?’ I asked.
‘I think so,’ Truman said warily. ‘But it doesn’t hurt to stay vigilant.
If they ever shoot Son of Beltway, I’ll be on hand for the lead.’
In 1972, when Truman was twelve and I sixteen, the city of Raleigh proposed to put a highway right through the middle of Oakwood. The capital was already growing fast, without any major artery to shift workers in and out of downtown. I’ll never forget Truman’s panic when he collected the Raleigh Times from our postbox. He ran to the kitchen and spread the scandalous headline on the table in angry tears. My father read over his shoulder with ill-disguised optimism that maybe the city would
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tar four lanes through our foyer and spare him those odious DIY
weekends.
Though Mordecai and I were politicized early, coming of age in the Sixties, in 1972 Truman’s enthusiasms ran to Sting-Ray bikes and Ugly Stickers; Banana Splits Club membership cards were taped to his bedroom door. The beltway changed that. Down came the Banana Splits Club, up went BAN THE BELTWAY bumper stickers and SAVE OUR OAK-WOOD posters. The campaign to stop the highway’s construction was Truman’s first and may have remained his only cause. Though when the city council’s plans were made public it became apparent that Heck-Andrews herself was safe, other houses of her ilk were not. Besides, as Truman would readily fume, any major thoroughfare with its attendant Kwik Piks and Sinclair stations would destroy what antebellum ambi-ence Oakwood had left. These were Truman’s first halting diatribes, during which he’d turn fuchsia, thrash his hands, and sputter, ‘They don’t build these houses any more!’ I was nasty. Whoosh! I’d whisper trucks in his ear. Bee-beep! He’d hit me, and he was big enough that the punches were beginning to bruise.
A Perfectly Good Family Page 8